If you’ve ever written a blog for your business or personal website, you know how important it is to curate the content in such a way that it pleases your customer base – at least enough so that they are willing to come back for more. Unfortunately, while most serious bloggers understand the necessity of the sub-editing process, time-strapped small business owners rarely have enough minutes in the day to punch out a few hundred words on their blog let alone revise and rewrite.

Time spent sub-editing is time well spent

If you’re one of the countless folk managing a blog on your business website, it’s important to understand that unless you post the best content possible, you are at serious risk of losing customers or even seeing your Google rankings slide.

The most obvious example of this is misspelling words, particularly keywords that can land you at the top of SERPs. Say you run your own dental clinic and rely on the search term “Sydney local dentist” for unique hits – something as simple as “Sydney local detnist” can wreak havoc on your blog, so it pays to give your copy a proper draft. You’ll thank yourself later for the extra effort, and those customers who are fond of showing off their grammatical prowess won’t have any reason to correct you on your embarrassing typos.

Focus on SEO

But sub-editing isn’t just about fixing spelling mistakes. How your content flows, proper use of headlines and sub-headers, as well as intelligent linking and rewrites are all essential for turning a drab blog into an exciting article that your readers will want to share among their friends.

Perhaps even more importantly, however, is getting your head around the basics of SEO. If you aren’t familiar with what you can do to start building a great digital strategy, check out our article for a few tips.

Basically, you want your blogs to not only entertain your current customers, you want them to be able to expand your client base. To do this, you need to be writing content that is relevant to your business but also isn’t simply repeating what 10,000 other bloggers have written about. Take a unique approach to your blogs and seek out topics and interviews that haven’t been covered before.

Do your research, get the right keywords and then revise, revise, revise. During the editing process, you can add appropriate keywords and links and then revise again to ensure it all makes sense and doesn’t look too spammy. But whatever you do, always check for those pesky typos!

Simon Jones – Sub-Editor

The post Why the perfect blog requires editing appeared first on King Content.

The post A guide to content strategy appeared first on King Content.

The numerous benefits of a social media presence are trumpeted across every B2B blog under the sun but let’s face it, you’re only there because consumers have changed the way they engage with brands online. They crave information about products and services, they expect 24/7 customer service and they want to be rewarded for their loyalty to your brand. They’re accessible on social media and they expect your brand to be too.

Marketers have embraced this new frontier, migrating en masse to social media over the past few years. However, while they may be on social, they’re not being social. It sounds harsh but if your brand’s social media profile has poor engagement levels then it’s time to get back to basics.

Here are two important tips for becoming a truly social brand:

Stop the boring ‘PR speak’

People like engaging with other people, not corporate machines. Don’t be afraid to have some personality or inject some humour into your posts.

It can be tricky to step outside your traditional ‘branded message’ comfort zone, but take the risk and communicate with your audience as peers – that’s what social media is all about.

Compare the pair:

Be relevant

Your followers have invited you into their newsfeeds alongside their friends and family. If you fail to stay relevant, this connection will stagnate and eventually end.

But how do you maintain relevance? By consistently providing value through content that piques their interest, helps or entertains them.

Hilton Worldwide is a great example of a truly social brand that actively cultivates its relevance by delivering help, not hype. Its @HiltonSuggests Twitter handle uses hotel staff to monitor Twitter conversations and answer any question they possibly can, whether the person is a Hilton guest or not. And it’s working. By allocating staff time and resources to helping, the brand is connecting and engaging with hundreds of people on a daily basis and actively building brand reputation through social engagement. Check out @HiltonSuggests and see for yourself.

Another effective way to maintain brand relevance on social media is by being prepared to post and respond to events in real time.

Oreo’s famous ‘Dunk in the Dark’ tweet during this year’s Super Bowl absolutely nailed this. By seizing the moment, Oreo was able to thrust their brand into the spotlight on one of the world’s biggest advertising stages.

The lesson? Tapping into everyday moments fosters a sense of cultural relevance for your brand as it reinforces a shared experience with your audience.

However, it’s worth noting that Oreo’s bold move wouldn’t have been possible without a cohesive and agile marketing team. Those responsible at Oreo weren’t afraid to take risks and didn’t have to wade through multiple levels of bureaucracy to get their content approved.

Not many brands are quite at that level yet, but it’s still important to move beyond your content calendar every now and then and post something timely and fun to remind your followers that you share their world.

 Elizabeth Penning- Community Manager

The post Why isn’t your brand connecting on social media? appeared first on King Content.

Coming back to today, and one of the aspects of content marketing we discuss a lot is how it can change a business as you start to focus on owned assets rather than paid media. We’ve started to act and think like a media business and also practise what we preach. The reason we do this wasn’t some sort of blind faith; we believe that if we provide great content and information on our sites, the people who visit them will deem us worthwhile to do the same for them. We believe that the best way to attract quality brands to our business is to first show them we can execute on what we promise, and add value rather than simply asking for money.

In his new book Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help Not Hype, Jay Baer provides some really interesting thoughts about why providing your prospects with something of real value means they will come back to you when they need to spend. As he explains, “Youtility is marketing so useful, people would pay for it”.

But what does that mean to my pipeline? I can hear the sales director asking. In our experience, Youtility grows the pipeline… and it grows it with the right sort of prospects because we have already established a bond with them. Because they’ve engaged with our content, they understand our business and because we’ve given away free something they’d be happy to pay for, they already have a positive opinion of us before they ever contact us directly.

Don’t get me wrong, when I start this business we knocked on a helluva lot of doors. It was a time when content marketing was still something of an unknown so we needed to educate. But we did that through content marketing and we did it regularly. We wanted prospects to keep coming back to our site to get better educated about what we did and how it could help them do the same. It was content marketing for content marketing!

So almost three years on we haven’t increased our sales team at all, but we’ve managed to grow nicely off the back of a plan we implemented right from the start and continue to drive on a daily basis.

Maybe that ABC should be ABCM – always be content marketing.

Craig Hodges- CEO

The post Content marketing and your sales team appeared first on King Content.

Other marketing channels – let’s say print advertising – use selling points such as circulation figures, readership and demographics to justify client ad spend. However, having worked in that industry previously, I know how inflated those figures can sometimes be. And really, where is the tangible return in that other than a rough estimate of how many readers saw the advertisement or acted on a specific call to action? The lack of tangible data, I believe, is what keeps advertisers going back for more – they believe they are getting pretty good bang for their buck. On the other hand, data from analytics packages such as those offered by Google and Omniture are hard to argue with.

This brings me to my point about many marketing professionals still being unclear about what actual ROI looks like. They are unsure of what data to include/not to include and they don’t know how to measure return, let alone when to measure it. When it comes to content marketing, I get asked about this all the time. This is where I believe we need to go one step back – before we work out what the KPIs are – and ask what tools and processes are in place to measure the data in the first place. If they are there, are they set up in such a way so that it gives you a true reflection on long-term return?

Whether you’re an e-commerce site looking for clicks, conversions and ultimately purchases, or whether you’re looking to grow a community and raise awareness to be seen as a thought leader, having the right tools for the job is imperative. There are so many great analytic packages and marketing automation tools out there (Eloqua and Marketo come to mind) that can help marketers, but it means nothing if they are not used correctly. The same goes when setting up a process to measure and report on your content marketing activities. Remember, content marketing is not a campaign. It is ongoing, and that’s where a lot of businesses go wrong from the very start. Be rid of that dangerous mindset.

So before you start to think about traffic numbers, levels of engagement and purchases, ask yourself if you have truly covered all ROI areas. Put the proper tracking and measurement procedures in place before you start reporting on the true success of your content.

Elmo Stoop – Key Account Manager

The post Content marketing ROI: It’s a two-way street appeared first on King Content.

However, what we’re now seeing is the development of mobile app technology into something that aims to engage with users to the point that personal interaction actually takes place in real time, in real situations.

In fact, there are so many companies experimenting with ‘indoor location’ technologies that a quasi trade group known as the The In-Location Alliance was recently developed by Nokia – and only last month Apple paid $20 million for a company called WifiSLAM, who profess to be building the “‘next generation’ of location-based mobile applications”.

 But what does this actually mean? And how does this relate to content marketing?

Let’s start at the beginning…

If you’ve ever had the experience of instinctively walking to a particular aisle of your local supermarket because you know what you’re looking for, only to be greeted by a completely unrelated and undesired product, you’ll relate to this well.

The redesigning and shuffling of supermarket layout is a now considered an ancient marketing technique aimed at confusing consumers into impulse buying whatever they lay their eyes on. Personally, I refuse to believe this ever worked well in the first place – it’s annoying and does nothing to help the consumer or create a positive brand experience. And how likely is it that you would buy toilet cleaner when all you really needed was bread?

Anyway, what location-based mobile application companies are now discovering is the same thing that content marketers have been bleating on about for years: If you give your customers the most seamless and helpful experience you possibly can, they will thank you, they will feel positive about your brand and they will ultimately spend more with you.

Companies like Aisle411 are now providing services such as location-based mapping of supermarkets, so customers no longer feel lost or confused in store. As a result, their experience is quick and easy. They get their shopping completed faster and feel like they have more time to spare, ultimately resulting in them spending this spare time ‘shopping for pleasure’ (and spending more money!).

So while the old-fashioned supermarkets rely on trying to steer consumers into a frenzied state of bewildered impulse buying, the forward-thinking among them are helping the consumer by freeing up their time and making the grocery shop a pleasant and quick experience.

This is the absolute essence of content marketing – helping the consumer by providing them with content that enhances their experience and is delivered to them right when they need it. And by the looks of it, if location-based mobile application marketing is anything to go by, the trend for real-time, relevant and helpful content will remain the focal point of future digital marketing developments.

Tracy Fitzgerald- Senior Content Strategist 

The post What on earth is location-based mobile application marketing? appeared first on King Content.

In a 2010 study it was found that 71 per cent of all tweets are ignored. And in 2012, it was found that 73 per cent of customer tweets went unanswered by businesses – not the best way to foster good client relationships.

Where engagement has become the web’s currency, a mass of unresponsive followers (or businesses) does little for your social media presence and certainly does not drive the value of your brand.

How do you talk to, and not at, your Twitter following? Nestivity offers a platform that can cultivate conversation.

What is it?

Nestivity aims to create a community where your Twitter follows can ‘nest’. Steering the focus away from a dependence on hashtags, conversations are instead categorised by threads. The dashboard, which is used concurrently with Twitter, gives you total control in managing threads by topic, ensuring your engagement is focused completely on one conversation at one time. The categorisation of threads also grants the user easy manoeuvrability between multiple conversations.

How does this benefit your brand?

Drives engagement: Threaded conversations act as an anchor for conversations. The dashboard function, and a movement away from hashtags, increases the likelihood that your question or comment will be seen. Rather than using Twitter as a broadcast service, Nestivity gives your brand an opportunity to not only stir interest, but to capitalise on it.

Creates relationships: Housing a topic and conversation in one place allows followers and brands to truly forge a relationship. A tighter topic focus and an eye-pleasing, easily navigated dashboard both heighten your response times and encourage a higher number of responses. Frequent brand-to-consumer interactions create an intimacy and familiarity that cannot be achieved through one off interactions.

Opportunity: Nestivity gives you the chance to promote your discussions and attract a larger following.

Followers can join a discussion at any time. Think one client will enjoy a topic? The invite function offers your brand the opportunity to invite as many followers as you please at any time.

Nestivity will be rolled out to the general public throughout April.  So keep your eyes peeled for updates on the King Content nest- we would love you to join us!

Abbey Ford – Community Manager 

The post Nestivity can help manage your Twitter community appeared first on King Content.

 Chalk it up

In response to the decision, Surry Hills local James Brechney, his sister Kelly and friend Wladi Dirksen took to the laneway at the back of their house and chalked up a commemorative chalk rainbow, snapped a pic and created a Facebook page called DIY Rainbow Crossings.

They encouraged others to join them: “In farewell of the premature removal of Sydney’s Rainbow Crossing we made our own DIY Rainbow Crossing from chalk! Love to see more DIY rainbow crossings popping up in Australia and beyond. Don’t get angry, get chalking!”

 From little things, big things grow

And people did. A week later their Facebook page has over 18,000 likes and their message has gone viral. They somehow managed to spark a social movement tagged #DIYrainbow with over 1000 colourful chalk crossings popping up across Australia and around the world, including the US, France, UK, Germany, Kenya and beyond. As well as national and international press, including Buzzfeed, Reuters US and the International Business Times reporting the story.

 Chase the rainbow

It’s amazing how fast and far-reaching social media can be in communicating a message. But it’s not just that – the idea was simple but incredibly clever. Instead of taking an angry or political approach to the removal of the crossing, they took a positive one that encouraged action and involvement.

The end result being a community-focused effort that allowed people from all walks of society to show their support in a colourful, creative and legal way. The feel-good factor was upped by the fact that images were then shared – and endorsed by like-minded fans – across social media platforms.

While DIY Rainbow Crossings isn’t defined by the same constraints as a business or brand in communicating its message, their campaign does prove the power of creativity, community and positivity when it comes to ‘selling’ a message (or in this case a cause) through channels such as social media – considerations all brands should explore in their content and social media.

Lisa Cugnetto – Content Strategist 

The post Social media lessons from the DIY Rainbow Movement appeared first on King Content.

In a three-day whirlwind of workshops, keynotes and networking events, Content Marketing World Sydney took the city by storm.

As CMI’s official media partner there wasn’t much we didn’t manage to get involved with. We attended every talk, followed every hashtag and made it our duty to speak to as many content marketing professionals as we possibly could.

The post Content Marketing World Sydney eBook appeared first on King Content.

Content marketing was the business buzzword of 2012. More and more brands – both large and small – began embracing the power of content as a more effective alternative to PR and PPC in the face of an increasingly savvy online audience. They were essentially becoming online publishers themselves, producing and curating more and more branded content.

But in the process of jumping on the content marketing bandwagon, much of this content was being produced without any thought as to why. Fortunately, 2013 already seems to be the year these brands start to recognise the importance of a solid editorial strategy, rather than merely publishing volumes of content for the sake of it (“filling the buckets”, according to Joe). And solid editorial strategy requires journalists. Even at this early stage of the year, we’re already seeing the importance of journalism in content marketing as it distinguishes itself from the traditional marketing model.

The smart brands are no longer engaging the services of copywriters to produce their content; they’re spending more money hiring journalists and editors who can plan an editorial strategy, who can ‘find’ the story in a company/brand/product and who understand that objective content that’s of a higher quality is more effective in driving engagement with customers than a hard sell.

GE’s environmental innovation forum ecoimagination.com is a fantastic example of this. The website publishes high quality, objective editorial content about environmental challenges, innovation and the economy – positioning GE as a thought leader, improving the reputation of the brand and starting conversations with current and potential customers about issues that are important to them.

AFL Media is another. Run by Walkley Award-winning journalist Matthew Pinkney and employing a team of journalists, editors and producers, www.afl.com.au covers every aspect of the AFL – from match results to drug scandals and anything in between. This warts-and-all strategy has resulted in an impressive 3.2 millions UVs in 18 months, as well as 1.9 million UVs to the club pages and 35 million video streams.

In order to keep up, it’s time for agencies to follow in the footsteps of these brands and start recruiting more editorial staff with backgrounds in journalism and publishing.

“[In 2013] the smart agencies are going to focus their efforts on providing strategy, not tactics,” says Jay Baer in The convergence of earned, owned and paid media. So take note, and don’t get left behind. The time for filling buckets is over.

Edwina Lawry – Senior Content Strategist

The post Get a content strategy or get left behind appeared first on King Content.