Product data plays a crucial role in your business’s sales process. Without product data, your customers would have no way of knowing exactly what your products have to offer. And if your existing data isn’t effective, there’s a good chance that prospects will instead choose a company that clearly exhibits their ability to get the job done.
Continue reading “Using A Product Data Management Strategy For A Better Buyer’s Journey”
Marketing messaging sometimes misses the mark. A perfect example of an advertisement that should have never gone beyond the initial pitch session is the highly controversial Pepsi commercial starring Kendall Jenner.
Continue reading “Why The Best Content Writing Services Use Negative Buyer Personas”
63% of marketers create content by buyer persona, according to the 2016 Content Marketing Staffing & Tactics Study conducted by Curata. But if you’re not targeting your core audience, your consumer profiles will be ineffective at converting visitors to leads and ultimately, to buyers. When constructing buyer personas, you first need to uncover your ideal customer.
Continue reading “What To Know About B2B Buyer Personas Before You Buy Blog Content”
In the world of digital marketing, the term buyer persona carries great weight. Buyer personas are (or should be) a major driving force behind virtually every action your business takes across every stage of the sales funnel, from the digital marketing content it creates to the advertising channels it employs. But if you’re still a marketing beginner, you may not fully understand the benefits of buyer personas or how to create effective buyer personas. Keep reading, and we’ll guide you through the basics, from the definition of buyer persona to the plethora of details required to create one that gets the job done.
Continue reading “Content Writers’ Complete 2018 Guide To Buyer Personas”
If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
Rudyard Kipling, The Collected Works
Writers have long understood the value of storytelling. And today, studies in neuroscience back up exactly what makes stories so powerful. Stories are how we remember the important stuff. We tell each other cautionary tales to remind us not to do things that will get us into trouble. We tell each other gripping stories about hardship and triumph not only to entertain, but to connect with our own humanity, to gain perspective and to remember who we really are.
Rudyard Kipling was right – stories help us remember.
Why does this matter to you, a business owner or digital marketer trying to produce content for your company?
It’s simple – today’s consumers are inundated with so much information that it’s impossible for them to truly remember much of what they’ve seen in any given day. If you want them to remember your brand, you have to make your content memorable.
By understanding a few basic storytelling elements, you can infuse all of your content writing with the magic ingredient that keeps readers engaged and makes them want to share your content. The format doesn’t matter because storytelling can be anywhere – a blog post, an ebook, a podcast, a video clip – even a Tweet. In this 8-part series, we’ll cover the building blocks of storytelling, how they relate to content marketing and what you need to know to start amping up your content with stories. Each section below will become available on this page as we publish.
Character, conflict and resolution are the three basic elements in every story. A master class on effective storytelling might delve into a host of other things that make up a good story, including dialogue, pacing and voice, but character, conflict and resolution are the legs of your storytelling stool. Take away one of the legs, and you no longer have a working stool. A story is not a story without character, conflict and resolution. The first three parts of this guide address these pillar concepts.
Unforgettable Characters Breathe Life Into Your Content Marketing Campaigns
Crafting characters for your campaigns doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Keeping in mind your audience, your product and the points of view that are available can spark an idea for a character that your audience will fall in love with.
Address Your Customers’ Pain Points By Writing Content With Conflict
In storytelling, conflict is how we relate to the character – we empathize with them because of troubles they are facing. We can often see ourselves having the same problem or struggling in the same way. That’s why conflict is one of the most important pieces of making your content marketing campaigns memorable – you get to speak directly to your customer’s pain points.
Great Content Ends With Great Solutions And A Call-To-Action
Maybe you love a happy ending, or maybe you prefer a finale that makes you fill in the blanks about the rest of the character’s life. Either way, you intuitively know that a good story has some sort of resolution – a solution to the conflict faced by the character. Likewise, your content marketing campaigns won’t be complete without the solution to the problem at hand and a place for your audience to go, whether that’s to take a specific action or to learn more.
Knowing your audience is critical to an effective content marketing campaign, and so is understanding the role that emotion plays in helping your audience visualize themselves in the story you’re telling.
Great Content Only Works On The Right Audience
If a content marketing campaign is like shooting darts, then publishing content that speaks to the wrong audience is like throwing your dart and hitting the target of the teams playing on the next board over. You don’t score any points that way. You have to know your audience to win the game.
Use Content Writers Who Understand The Power Of Emotions For Best Results
Our emotions drive our decision-making process far more than most of us like to admit. Tapping into your audience’s fears, longings, loves, anger and other emotions through storytelling is the quickest way to motivate them to action. Just a glimpse of the powerful connection between storytelling, emotions and how people process information will convince you it’s time to start telling a good story in all of your content.
Why You Should Add Visual Storytelling To Your Content Marketing Campaigns
In today’s fast-paced, information-overloaded world, the quicker and longer you can capture someone’s attention, the better. Sometimes, what you need is an image that tells the whole story without a single word.
How To Make Sure Your Content Marketing Campaign Is Authentic
Effective content marketing creates a relationship between your brand and your potential customers. As with any relationship, it takes time and authenticity to build up trust – and trust is the key ingredient for making and keeping your customers happy.
5 Great Content Marketing Campaigns You Won’t Forget
Real examples of great storytelling – so you can see for yourself how it’s done.
Consistent business blogging yields results – more clicks, more subscribers and – ultimately – more conversions. Whether you’re writing an automotive blog, an accounting blog, a healthcare blog or a home renovation blog, blogging for business and content development are useful for any industry. Follow the content writers at the Virtucom Group blog as they share digital marketing tips and discuss website content writing services that can optimize your business blog.
From Criminal Minds and Quantico to Mindhunter and Silence of the Lambs, TV shows and movies about FBI profilers leave us on the edge of our seats – and frequently lead to guilt-laden binge-watching sessions. But beyond keeping us couch-bound, media that depicts the criminal profiling methodology can also teach us how to be better content marketers.
Continue reading “Think Like An FBI Agent If You Want Great Customer Profiles”
A chipped ceramic teapot. A scratched mahogany dining table. Our eyes are immediately drawn to these blemishes. No matter how beautiful the teapot’s hand-painted floral design is or how impressive the table’s woodworking, once a flaw has been detected, the piece’s overall value greatly diminishes.
Continue reading “For Great Content, Show Your Content Editor This Proofreading Checklist”
Thinking about outsourcing your company’s content? If you still have some reservations about switching over, this post should help clear things up. According to the LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community, “Only 25% of marketers don’t outsource any content creation” (Fronetics). If you’re part of that statistic and are still on the fence, here are three of the top concerns that decision makers have about outsourced content, and responses to those concerns.
Continue reading “3 Answers To Your CMO’s Most Common Content Outsourcing Objections”
The average online shopper has a shorter attention span than ever before. A recent study shows that most visitors to websites spent less than 15 seconds before leaving. So what does this mean for you? It means that your product pages have just a few moments to draw in your visitors and persuade them to spend more time reading about your merchandise or services before they decide that their attention is best spent somewhere else.
Continue reading “Turn Visitors Into Customers: A Checklist For Great Product Pages”
An increasing number of companies are deciding to hire freelance bloggers instead of bringing part- or full-time employees onto their team or outsourcing content creation to marketing agencies. This should be no surprise, since an estimated 53 million individuals do freelance work in the U.S., making up 34% of the workforce.
But exactly what is a freelance blogger, and what do they do? Continue reading to learn more about freelance blogging and the pros and cons of hiring a freelancer to supplement your inbound marketing content strategy.
Continue reading “Don’t Hire A Freelance Blogger Until You Read This”
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