Tag Archive for: Content Marketing

Lead Liaison

Should You Be Creating Infographics For Your Company?

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Should You Be Creating Infographics For Your Company?Creating infographics is one great way to share information with your audience base. For many small businesses, one of the main challenges in creating infographics is finding the time or the talent. It’s also important for small business to integrate graphic creation into an already-existing content strategy, rather than making them chief in the strategy.

Network dissemination is also important to consider – if you’re only using Twitter and you’re posting mostly infographics, chances are your audience will never see this content. Finding network-appropriate content should be part of your overall marketing strategy.

Is Creating Infographics Difficult?

Pretty much anyone can use a free graphics editor and slap together an infographic, but keep in mind that your audience wants to see streamlined content. The difference between a low-quality and high-quality infographic is something your audience doesn’t have to be graphics experts to pick up. Other businesses have set the bar with high-quality graphics and content, so it’s important to ensure that a graphics and design expert is looking over or even making your creations.

So is creating infographics difficult? Not necessarily – but creating high quality infographics is something you might need some help with. If nothing else, high quality templates are available for purchase from stock photo sites. You can always use a simple photo editor and modify these to suit your needs.

Diversifying Content

We’ve talked about how creating a content strategy that fits what your audience wants to see is the most important thing you can do. Once a small business gets a good method going for creating and disseminating infographics, these graphics often overtake a business’s social media stream.

Treat the infographics created by your company as you would any other type of content. Make sure that you’re measuring responsiveness – do more people comment, like or share infographics than they do text or image content you release? Do you find your numbers dropping when you use more or less graphics? As with any other social media content, the way you use graphics in your social media feed is an experiment at first. If you find tons of people responding and engaging when you post infographics, you’ll want to make sure. Opposite results should yield less infographics in your social media streams.

Brand Your Company

Don’t forget to include your company’s branding – including company name and logo – in your infographics. You don’t want another company sharing your images and taking credit for them! Branding ensures people will know the useful and beautiful data they’re seeing comes from you.

Your infographics should contain great data as well as beautiful imagery. Let us help with the data! Our content writers can put compelling stats together for your images. Talk to the Lead Liaison team about getting social media and content help for your company ASAP!

Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison Announces New Breakthrough in Content Management

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Allen, TX (PRWEB) January 23, 2014

Lead Liaison takes the lead in innovation once again. The marketing automation company announced today the launch of their new Automatic Publishing feature, which enables users to automatically publish content through the automated marketing platform. The new feature allows access to over 2,000 content developers, so marketers can request content and manage distribution with ease.

Recent studies show that companies using a marketing automation platform have a 53% higher conversion rate than non-users (Aberdeen Group). Also, the use of marketing automation technology is expected to grow 50% by 2015 (SiriusDecisions). That’s why Lead Liaison goes a step further, and integrates content creation with marketing automation, to reduce the marketer’s stress of having to create content in-house.

“The growth of automated marketing platforms is inevitable,” said Alva Cardona, VP of Corporate Communications for Lead Liaison. “And, because we know that the use of marketing automation platforms will increase, we decided to add content creation and automatic publishing features, which provides the marketer with more resources to nurture leads,” added.

Research shows that, when leads are nurtured, a 20% increase in sales is reported, compared to non-nurtured leads (DemandGen Report). With this new feature, users can create more than ten types of marketing content to nurture leads, such as tweets, Facebook posts, blog posts, press releases, articles, video scripts, and more, which can be requested to a team of writers, who work to satisfy your specific content needs. Also, feedback (and edits) can be provided as the content is being developed.

When requesting content through Lead Liaison’s automated marketing platform, users can designate specific topics, industries, keywords, and references. In addition, users can track progress of content requests using multiple filters as well. After content is ready, it can be published automatically using the Lead Liaison Social Post feature, pushed to the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) on the web, such as WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal or it can be saved to your company’s cloud drive, such as Google Drive or DropBox.

It is a fact that 71% of marketers already use content marketing for lead generation, and it is expected that the marketing automation market will grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $4.8 billion in 2015 (International Data Corporation). That’s why ¼ of all B2B Fortune 500 companies are already using automared marketing platforms. Marketers will discover Lead Liaison’s Content Creation and Automatic Publishing feature will immensely help their content (and marketing) strategies.

To learn more about Lead Liaison’s innovative automatic publishing feature, request a 10-minute demo of this content creation solution.

Lead Liaison provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation solutions that help businesses worldwide attract, convert and close leads. The company markets to businesses of all sizes and focuses on creating the broadest and most user-friendly Revenue Generation Software® platform. Our innovative and robust software combines lead capture, real-time lead tracking, lead qualification, lead distribution, database segmentation, lead nurturing, content creation, social media engagement and ROI reporting into a single platform.

For more information:
Alva Cardona
VP, Corporate Communications
alvacar(at)leadliaison(dot)com
888.895.3237 (888 89 LEADS)
KEYWORD: Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison

Should I Be Video Marketing for My Business?

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Should I be Video Marketing for My Business?Video marketing is a great way to create new and interactive content for your site, leverage your existing audience with a new medium, create new click-through opportunities in a multimedia context and to better rank for SEO. Many small businesses swear off video marketing because they assume there will be extravagant cost to shooting and editing video. With modern tools, you can take advantage of great ways to create your own video marketing content without the hassle or spend.

Creating Great Content

Creating videos is easy with some software your PC or Mac comes with. For the Mac, check out iMovie and play around with it. For the PC, Windows Movie Maker is a great alternative. You can add music or voice to a slideshow or pictures, or use a smartphone or webcam to video yourself introducing folks to your company.

Your video marketing efforts should follow certain guidelines. You don’t just want to put random videos of cute puppies out there – you’ll want to generate and share content that engages your users and shows them how your product offers value.  Failure to do so could get a quick bounce from your video or even bad PR for your company over time.

Be prepared to show your customers how you can provide value in your videos. Given them resources that don’t just sell your company, but that provide interesting, useful data they can use in their own business decisions. Doing so over time will make you a ‘thought leader’ – a company that creates content your clients rely on to add value to their own services.

Best Practices for Video Marketing

It’s not always easy to host videos on your own site. You’ll need to know how to convert them to a quick-load format. You’ll have to make sure you have the bandwidth in case a lot of people watch them. Rather than dealing with the hassle of hosting a video on your own site, try Youtube.

There are many advantages to Youtube above and beyond having a place to host your videos. Google owns Youtube, so ensuring that your video titles, tags and descriptions contain relevant keywords and your business name could help your videos rank quickly, as well as create a valuable backlink to your website. Sites like Youtube take the hassle out of video hosting while helping you to get the backlink and the shareable quality video marketing requires.

Lead Liaison is proud to announce a new in-dashboard video marketing distribution service! Talk to us today to find out how we will make video marketing a breeze for your company.

Lead Liaison

Content Marketing in 2014

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Content Marketing in 20142013 saw one of history’s most major shifts in SEO and content marketing, affecting brands around the globe. Google’s secure search shift led to a lack of keyword data readily available to the monitoring end user, leaving businesses in the dark about what keywords are being typed in to find their websites.

The “death of SEO” naturally isn’t really an ending, but the beginning of a need for more content-conscious strategies, necessitating sites that are as user friendly and engaging as before with a new stream of fresh content and marketing tactics that don’t adhere to the old paradigm.

Content Marketing in 2014

To break all this down into simpler terms, you really need to make sure you’re putting stuff on your site. That ‘stuff’ shouldn’t be just anything – but well-researched, well-planned blogs that add to the value you present your readers, – content that generates traffic and that focuses on keywords that can elevate your brand. If you don’t have a content strategy in place or understand what your readers want to see, that can be hard to do.

If your historical data doesn’t show you what kind of content interests readers, take a look at the type of content being released by popular blogs and news sites relevant to your industry. Don’t copy the topics exactly – focus on writing posts that discuss the same stories from a different angle. Also consider adding content that fulfills a need. If you would love to see a news story on a particular topic but can’t find anything out there to fit your needs, your company should be the one writing that story.

Planning Ahead

No one likes to do it – particularly a busy decision maker –but your good intentions about writing weekly blogs may not be something you have time to do. It’s important to makes sure you plan on picking up only the slack you can, and hiring content writers to pad out your pages where appropriate. If you’re concerned this will render your voice in authentic, then make sure to suggest topical guidelines and a keyword focus for each page so your content team will have some direction.

Lack of good content writers isn’t a unique problem – this is why Lead Liaison developed the content marketing dashboard for our customers. We’d love for you to take a look at what we have to offer and let us help develop content for your business!

Lead Liaison

Content Marketing Don’t-Do’s for 2014

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Content Marketing Don’t-Do’s for 2014The New Year is almost upon us, and content marketing isn’t a concept that will leave us anytime soon. Even seasoned marketers and business professionals have bad content habits. Since 2014 is just around the corner, there’s no better time (aside from say, right now) to re-engage your audience and leave some bad content habits behind. Hey, this goes for us, too! We could all use a big dose of efficiency for the New Year.

With this in mind, we’ve created a list of content don’t-do’s for 2014. Let’s get started.

When Content Marketing, let your audience determine your direction. 

If your social media accounts and blogs are new, you may not really have an idea of what your audience responds well to. If you’re using marketing automation services like Lead Liaison to keep track of content marketing, it’s time to take a look at the data.

Discover from Facebook Insights which of your posts gets the most interaction and the most clicks back over to your website. Take a look at what blogs inspire comments. Figure out which emails have the highest open rate and click through numbers. Don’t give up on letting the data show you what your audience is responding to.

Create Content That Works 

It’s difficult to create content when you know no one’s responding. Take a look at content that doesn’t have high engagement and see if you can effectively stay away from those topics.

Actually Write the Stuff

If you don’t have time to do content marketing, it’s time to stop lying to yourself about getting it done. Writing blogs, emails and social media status updates don’t necessarily have to be your forte. In case you haven’t noticed yet, Lead Liaison has a great content marketing solution that can help you get content up and running.

Spellcheck

Is it a pain? It is. But these days, most of us have Word or some similar software. Rather than writing directly into your Facebook posts, your automation dashboard, or your blog, use Microsoft Word and then paste your spellchecked copy over. It seems simple, but you’d be amazed at the amount of folks who still don’t do this.

Write What You Enjoy

Copywriting of any sort becomes a tedious task if you hate it. If you can tolerate it, write about the parts of your business and industry that you actually enjoy. If not, maybe it’s time to bring in some help! Talk to the friendly Lead Liaison team about our reliable content marketing solutions today.

Lead Liaison

Why Social Media Content Should Include Text

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Why Social Media Content Should Include TextSocial media content is what drives engagement for your brand. Whether you’re posting just a few times a week or interacting daily with your customers, it’s important to create and maintain a social media presence over time.

Part of creating a social media content strategy is knowing what your customers want to see. For many businesses, the only way to truly find this out is to test various forms of content over time. Many people respond better to images, some to news stories, some to blogs from your own site. And of course, there are infographics.

The Power of the Infographic

Infographics are awesome, but splitting up your content into different types will really determine how your audience wishes to engage with you. You can never really be sure what will go over best. It’s a good idea not to make the assumption that every person in your audience is a visual person and enjoys seeing their social media content in picture form. Images don’t appeal to everyone – in part because they don’t always load quickly on certain connections.

Facebook is Not Instagram

Instagram is a great way to share image content. You can even use that content to showcase your products or services. As long as you’re interacting with other Instagram users, they’ll follow you and you’ll have an opportunity to put what you’re selling right in front of them. It can truly be a powerful platform.

Because Facebook is capable of hosting various types of multimedia content, why not set up your company Instagram to send images straight to your Facebook? That way you can save your Facebook postings for social media content relevant to information from your site, news posts, blogs or other text-ready updates.

Social Media Content is Necessary

If you’re posting a few times a week, you may not have enough content out there to drive engagement. This is particularly the case if you’re only posting images and not sharing multiple forms of content. It’s a good rule of thumb to mix up your content and test it using all the capabilities Instagram has to offer.

Some folks stick to images because they simply don’t have the wordsmithing abilities to create blogs and content for their site, much less social media content updates. We can help! Lead Liaison offers social media content services right within your dashboard. Simply send out your request and our writers will take care of your needs within a specific timeframe – whether you’re looking for social media content updates, blogs or other pieces of writing. Let’s talk about your content needs today!

Lead Liaison

SEO is Dead, Content Lives

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SEO is Dead, Content LivesSEO is Dead, Content LivesIt’s possible you’ve heard the headlines throughout 2013: “Is SEO Dead?” Search engine marketing experts are still working to figure out how Google’s algorithm changes this year affect websites on the whole. Out of all the research that’s been done and the rankings that were tallied, the truth is emerging: content is king and SEO is dead.

It’s Time To Beef Up Your Content

The “Is SEO Dead” question has little to do with whether or not people will still use search engines to find what they need. They absolutely will. It’s evident that with sites tanking, more and more small businesses will rely on PPC to get their websites and products out there to users. Traditional SEO isn’t dead – but the “tricks” advertisers have used over the years to game the search engines aren’t going to apply anymore. Old-fashioned, keyword optimized onsite content is going to be the only true way to rank up through the search engines and make your site indexable.

The more content and the more relevance to your audience, the better. It’s not just about putting as much content out there as possible – it’s about making sure your content is engaging and your audience wants to see it. The more eyes on your content, the more comments and the more general engagement from social media, the more you will find yourself ranking.

Is SEO Dead?

As long as it’s possible to be on the search engines, and as long as people are typing in their chosen keywords, SEO isn’t dead. It’s very much alive and kicking – and not just because our advertising partners are still doing well for their clients, but because people are still using Google – and because it’s still possible to get your site to the top of the search engines.

If you’re not creating good content for your site right now, there’s no better time. Websites who have been upset or penalized by Hummingbird are trying to rebuild their sites to catch up with the latest updates, so you have just as much of a window to create content as they do. Don’t wait – get started creating keyword-rich content that your audience will love today and watch your website excel.

If you’re looking for content resources to help SEO your website, we have what you need! Our Lead Liaison dashboard provides an opt-in content resource that allows you to receive the postings you need. Our writers are a trusted, proven resource for clients who can provide content that comes right in through your Lead Liaison marketing automation dashboard. Talk to us about our content resources today!

Lead Liaison

Hiring a Content Writer: Do’s and Don’ts

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Dos and donts of hiring a content writerHiring a content writer seems pretty easy, right? You put an ad out there or consult a hiring service. You go through work samples and resumes, and then make your selection. After you hire the right person, you’ll never have to worry about your content again. In fact, hiring a content writer will ensure years of awesome content you never even have to proof read.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. We’ve heard all the horror stories – from important deadlines not met to work farmed out overseas to writing so terrible you can’t believe the person you hired wrote those writing samples you were so excited about. It happens all too often.

If you’re thinking of hiring a content writer, there are some simple do’s and don’ts to keep in mind throughout the process. Here are a few to think about:

Don’t Assume the Samples Are For Real

Many people hiring a content writer ask the writer to pen a paragraph as a ‘sample’ without offering compensation. This immediately breaks the trust bond between you and your worker. Look over any past writing samples they send you – and always ask for samples –but also consider contacting references rather than asking for a personalized sample. Reputable, seasoned contractors are not going to do any work for free.

Cheaper is Not Always Better

If you’re thinking of paying $1 an hour, you can’t always rely on high quality content resulting. Rather than paying hourly or by word count/page, you might consider striking up a deal with your copywriter. For long-term work, he or she might be willing to take $5-20 an article depending on the length and complexity. Consider what makes sense for you financially, and then be upfront about what you expect and what you can afford.

You’re Hiring a Content Writer, Not Buying Software

Automated article spinning software exists, but if you’re looking to give users an authentic experience and avoid search engine penalties, make sure your content writers create unique content every time they write for you. During the interview process, ask upfront if your potential writer is using automated software or farming article writing overseas. It happens more often than you think.

Lead Liaison’s content marketing system is tied directly into our marketing automation dashboard. We work with real, experienced writers. Rather than hiring a content writer on your own, let us provide you with the quality content you’re looking for right away. Let’s talk about how our writers can benefit your business!

Lead Liaison

Facing the Challenge of Content Creation

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Content Creation is KingThe demand for intriguing and informative content is constantly rising and it is challenging for most businesses to consistently fill their website, blogs, newsletters, social media networks, and other lead nurturing campaigns with new and exciting content. They need to generate multiple pieces of content per day and every piece must be relevant, informative, and original.

Challenge of Content Creation

Thanks to the current Panda update from Google, content has to be more than just compelling words in an article. Search engine rankings now take into consideration images, videos, and the amount of responses you receive on social media sites. To keep up with the demand of visitors and search-bots, content must come in a variety of different mediums, be interesting enough to inspire Facebook users to “like” and “share” the information with others, educational enough to brand your business as an industry leader, and unique enough to pass copyscape. This is a tall order and incredibly challenging for most businesses.

Here are four effective ways to face the challenge of content creation:

1.      Hire a Content Specialist

There are many different ways to hire someone specifically to handle your content creation. There are online freelance writers who will work from home on a per-basis assignment. You can hire a social media strategist or community manager as a part-time or full-time employee. You can also re-assign existing personnel in your marketing department to focus solely on writing content.

2.      Invest in Marketing Automation

Most professional marketing automation experts will include high-quality content creation in their extensive list of services. A marketing automation company can provide your business with a complete online marketing strategy. It strategically guides leads throughout their entire buying process. Marketing automation software generates leads, captures leads, profiles leads, nurtures leads, and then converts them into customers. Please click here to learn more about how marketing automation can benefit your business.

3.      Reference the Competition

You are not the only one facing the challenge of content creation. All of your competitors are scrambling to post enough content to attract and retain online followers. Check out what other leaders in your industry are posting and see if you can improve on their articles.

4.      Offline Research

Not every great content idea will come from the internet. Newspapers, magazines, and television are all great resources for content creation. You can also ask friends and family that suit your target demographic what type of content they would appreciate.

Content is a necessity of doing business online. If you are facing the challenge of content creation, start by either hiring a content specialist or by investing in marketing automation. If you prefer to face the challenge on your own, you can research content ideas by reviewing your competitor’s content, offline sources like newspapers and television, and by asking people you know personally. Better yet, use Lead Liaison’s content creation solution to help automate your content creation needs.

Lead Liaison

Is Your Website Conversion Optimized?

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Is Your Website Conversion Optimized?We all want a conversion optimized website. Solidifying your sales pathway allows clients to not only buy from you, but to become repeat customers. A good experience starts should start the first time a customer visits your website and continue throughout the life of your relationship with the customer. Many small business owners don’t truly realize how much they’re getting in their own way when it comes to a giving customers a conversion optimized experience. Scrimping money by designing a site yourself or using a designer who isn’t familiar with the conversion optimization process is a common problem. For some business owners, an outdated website creates navigation and sales problems. Let’s talk about how to make your website conversion optimized for better sales and overall client engagement.

Tell Them What to Do

Your customer should be able to know exactly what you want them to do within 10 seconds of visiting your website. Identify the first step in your funnel and don’t mince words. If you’d like your potential customer to fill out a lead form, make sure that form is front and center on your website. If you’re selling products, make sure the path to those products is clear. In the case of a web cart, customers should be able to easily sign in, view the items in their cart and check out. A 10-step checkout process that over collects your customers’ personal information does nothing to keep the trust you’ve already built with your customer. Take a look at your sales process – can you simplify it in any way to make buying time shorter and more convenient?  Focusing on making everything simple is part of having a conversion optimized website.

Conversion Optimized Site Tracking

Navigation exists to help your clients figure out where to go on your site if they want more information. If you’re not getting an idea of how clients are using navigation to get what they need – and at what points they’re exiting your site – you could be missing valuable data that would lead to results-generating modifications on your pages. If you don’t have tracking on your site, now is a good time to think about looking closely at what your users are doing on your site.  Having a conversion optimized site isn’t going to do too much for you if you have no way of interpreting the data that’s coming in. Are you getting more sales after a conversion optimization? If so, why is this happening – or if it’s not happening, what can be changed to ensure there’s a difference in the future? If you’re looking for an information dashboard that’s easy to use and tracks data at a granular level, Lead Liaison is for you. Talk to use about tracking for your conversion optimized website today – or let us help you find out how to start your optimization.