How To Dominate Content Marketing With Machine Learning Tools

The internet is loaded with too much content.

Whether you’re blogging, publishing a video, or sharing an image, you are contributing to the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data that is made everyday!

The old method of publishing tons of content isn’t as effective as it used to be. Many more are publishing great content nowadays to the point that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to be heard over all that digital noise.

It’s time to blow off that dust and apply a shiny new coat of machine learning polish to your content strategy.

What is Machine Learning?

As a sub-set of artificial intelligence, machine learning occurs when computer algorithms are programmed to learn from the data and information it inputs. The outputs of these machines differ each time because they are able to change their resulting actions from studying patterns, trends, and data-points.

The more information that is fed in, the more accurate and personalized the results are.

You can see machine learning in technologies that might surprise you. Pre-populating search engines, self-driving cars, spam filtering, optical character recognition, and even in a game of Super Mario.

Video by: Seth Bling

Creating a new and refocused content marketing strategy

We’re all drowning in content. There is too much to read, scroll through, and find out what’s really useful. The consequence of this is decreasing engagement, as seen in TrackMaven’s survey.

In your role as a content marketer, you track your blog and social media analytics to understand trends. These trends then help you figure out the direction of your blog and social media efforts.

With so much information do you often find yourself asking these questions with your marketing tools?

• Is all this information necessary? Which metrics actually matter?
• What’s the scale of data that is actually being studied?
• Will this tool tell me exactly what I need to do without too much hassle?
• How will this information contribute to the future success of my content marketing efforts?
• How long do I have to wait for the results to show?

By using machine learning tools, you will be able to easily shift your content marketing strategy to be more effective and useful for your audience.

How to create personalized content for your audience using machine learning tools

To increase job efficiency, machine learning tools are able to reduce the time it takes to manually track and decipher your data into effective actionable tasks that will lead to predicted success.

Refreshing your content strategy now entails creating personalized content that is predicted to give you engagement well-before you trial-and-error blog topics.

It’s time to break out that polish.

Here are some intelligent marketing tools that will save you time, and provide you with an even more accurate and adaptive way to create and share content that connects:

Making and sharing blog content

The machine learning aspect to the Atomic Reach platform lies within its ability to forecast when you should share articles, and which aspects of your blog actually matter to your reader, even if your audience’s engagement patterns start to shift.

Breaking it down to it’s components:

• Insights shows you which audience level gives you the most engagement and how much more you could be getting using predictive analytics.
• Writer is an intelligent content editor that highlights specific parts of your blog that is achieving your standard for optimal engagement as well as the areas that are not.
• Scheduler takes out the guesswork of manually scheduling out articles to social, by automatically placing them in the best time for engagement unique to every user based on their social engagement behaviour.

Think of the Atomic Reach platform like the strongman game you see at a carnival.

In this case the puck is your topic, the participants are your writers, and the bell is your goal for engagement.

Without using this tool your content could be missing the mark. Not every writer will be able to get that puck to the bell, because each of your writers’ have different styles and skill levels in writing.

To make sure you hear that ding with every article you publish, you’ll want to consistently create high-scoring content even if the conditions change.

As a marketer, Atomic Reach helps you maintain a high level of content that is backed by blog and social media engagement data.

Intelligently-driven email marketing

Ever wonder how an email from your favorite brand knew which products to recommend to you?

Email marketing has continued to be one of the most successful ways to reach and interact with audiences. In many Inbound.org threads, the topic of email marketing increasingly revolves around ensuring that your messages are personalized to each recipient.

Personalization in the form of sending your prospects truly relevant information is Rare.io’s specialty. Catering specifically to online retailers, Rare.io uses predictive email marketing to increase click-through rates and repeat business.

From analyzing e-commerce transactions and customer buying behaviour, those in your email list are sent product recommendations at the times that have proven to generate more clicks.

Just like this J.Crew email that I received, it shows me what items I clicked on when I was last on their site, and other promotions/products I might be interested in. Without these smart systems identifying products I’m interested in, I might be sent products that aren’t relevant to me, like menswear or children’s apparel.

With Rare.io, email subscribers are sent products they’ll most likely love at the times when they’re more likely to buy thanks to intelligent algorithms.

Finding the perfect content creators for your marketing strategy

Many companies hire content writers to generate content for their blogs. If you’re familiar with the process, then you know that finding top tier writers that work within your budget can be extremely time consuming and challenging.

Textio helps you create “optimized job listings”. The method behind their smart word processor focuses on predicting how successful your job listing will be, or if your candidate will want to respond to your request.

Their rating system gives you a percentage of success, which is compared to other related documents. 100% being the highest and most difficult to achieve.

In real-time Textio highlights key phrases and gives you word-to-word recommendations, and the pros and cons of that phrase, which includes tone and gender appeal.

You will be able to better pinpoint and nab candidates that match the team’s personality and work ethic. Textio will save you time writing a job listing that might not attract the right talent, and will help you acquire your new content writer or marketing employee.

All together now

Throughout each step of the content creation and marketing process, machine learning tools help marketers do their job with more efficiency without compromising quality. By adding intelligence to your marketing strategy you will be able to make more effective decisions with less time, stress, and confusion.

With machine learning marketing tools, you will:

• Find the right writers that will add to your team’s work environment
• Generate emails your customers will want to click on
• Create and market the most relevant and engaging content for your audience

From these tools and tips, what new methods will you be implementing into your content marketing plan, and what do you hope to see? Let us know in the comments and don’t forget to share this article.

Guest Author: Amanda Chiu is the Marketing Coordinator at Atomic Reach, writing posts, sharing news, and connecting with the community on the daily. Her attempts at clearing her ever-growing reading list continues to be unsuccessful, and she really does believe that sharing is caring.

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7 Key Signals You Can’t Ignore With Your Content Marketing Metrics

Despite living in a digital age where we’re practically swimming in a sea of big data, there are lots of marketers who think a data-driven approach to marketing is for the nerds. For whatever reason, they can’t be bothered with it.

But not monitoring data and ignoring metric signals is a good way to leave money on the table.

Actually, I’d say you’re burning money, but you have to have it first in order to burn it.

If you’re not responding to key signals that something is up with your content marketing, then you’re going to find it nearly impossible to hit your goals (if you’ve even established any).

I know that a lot of marketers aren’t tuning into metrics, because only about 30% of content marketers see their efforts as effective, and 65% of B2B marketers struggle with understanding which content is effective and which isn’t.

Stay on top of your content marketing and keep the growth on an upward trend by watching these 7 key metrics signals.

1. Changes to time on page

One of the strongest indicators that people are digesting your content is the amount of time they spend on individual pages.

If you’re producing long-form content on a consistent basis, and you know the average read time is 3-4 minutes+ for the 10x content you create, but your time on page is far lower than that, then you’ve got a problem to address.

Avoid spending time looking at your average time on site when you’re reviewing analytics. Look at the individual content metrics.

This can show you if you’re seeing a trend stretching across a lot of content, or if there are specific pieces or topics that are cause for concern.

Pay close attention to the key content pieces in your funnel that are intended to drive your audience deeper into your funnel.

When time on page is down, compare those pages to others that do well to determine if it’s a topic issue.

You can also look at other post elements, including reputable links backing data, visual content (or lack thereof), formatting, or if the call to action needs attention.

On the flip side, if you find that people are spending a lot more time with certain pieces of content, try to uncover the reason, and work to replicate that across a few other posts.

2. Percent of returning visitors

According to Chartbeat, “Visitors who read an article for three minutes returned 2x as often as those who read for only a minute.”

When you produce long-form content, you’re likely putting significant value out there for the reader. This is going to naturally improve the rate of returning visitors to your content.

Most business models rely on repeat business. In the case of your content marketing strategy, the purpose of your funnel is to maintain that connection and nurture the relationship.

When you see a drop in returning visitors, you need to find out why they’re not coming back.

This can be caused by a number of issues:

• Poor drip/nurture campaigns that don’t effectively engage the audience
• Weak CTAs that don’t move the audience further into the funnel
• Low content value or “me too” content that’s not saying anything unique
• An audience disconnect where you’re not feeding the right content/topics to an audience or audience segment

3. Bounce rates

A bounce usually means one of two things: either the content the visitor landed on wasn’t a match to their search intent so they split, or they found what they were looking for and left completely satisfied.

Either way, they likely left without further engaging your site or taking other action.

Bounce is one of those vanity metrics and it can be difficult to gain actionable insight from it, but when you stack it with other metrics like opt-ins from a specific piece of content, you can start to diagnose where there might be an issue.

Monitor your bounce rates on a per-page basis, again, avoiding site-wide data. If bounce rates are exceptionally high with some of your content, then look to your CTAs to ensure that the content is mapped to the appropriate part of the funnel.

Likewise, make sure the piece is optimized appropriately for audience intent. Pay particular attention to the headline, since that’s the first conversion point when your audience finds the content organically.

4. Lead generation

Most of the content you produce and publish on the web is top-of-the-funnel stuff. It’s designed to capture the attention of various audience segments and drive them to the middle of the funnel, usually through an opt-in of some kind.

A big signal that you need to watch is how the traffic to your content converts into leads as they opt-in. Your content isn’t going to perform consistently across the board; some posts will naturally do better than others.

Never let content sit that is generating traffic with minimal conversion. Find a way to optimize it to improve the conversion and opt-in.

For content that’s converting that top-of-the-funnel traffic exceptionally well, immediately find ways to repurpose it and create more conversion-heavy points for your funnel.

5. Referral source tracking

Referral sources are a key signal to watch when monitoring your content marketing and promotion. It’s always great to get outside citations and see your content curated by other authoritative sites – especially if they’re influencers within your industry.

Don’t just celebrate the referrals, though. You can’t afford to settle.

Get in touch with the top traffic referral sites and offer to provide custom content for their audience with the occasional guest post.

This signal can point out terrific ways to generate a lot more referral traffic as well as authoritative links for your site. This kind of guest blogging and outreach should be a part of your content marketing strategy.

Remember, your email/drip campaigns are also a referral source back to deeper segments of your funnel.

Watch the open and click-through rates, along with UTM parameters you tie to any internal links placed within your email marketing. If segments of your drip campaigns are underperforming, find ways to optimize that content to replicate the success of other content.

 6. Social media metrics

We continue to move in a direction where social signals tie back to organic visibility (arguable point, but that’s a whole separate post on its own). You should be closely watching social metrics, because content promotion is a huge part of any content strategy.

Content engagement, reach, shares, and UTM parameters can be clear indicators of how well your content is being shared. Those UTM parameters can also give you some terrific insights into which social platforms you should be targeting.

Hootsuite and Social Inbox from Hubspot are both terrific tools for tracking content signals in social media and monitoring your ROI.

7. Qualitative signals

Sometimes you don’t have to go far to know how well your content is performing. Qualitative data is right there within your content.

What do readers have to say about your content? Are people regularly engaging with you and with one another in the comments, or are some of your articles a ghost town?

Your goal should be to turn your website and content (on-site and off) into a collective and vibrant community. Heidi Cohen is just one example among countless influencers and brands who do a great job of keeping engagement high in the comments.

Don’t focus too heavily on positive or negative comments. The world’s best influencers and writers catch disgruntled comments from time to time. Don’t use negativity as a signal. Instead, focus on the substance and increasing the quantity of feedback.

What metrics signals do you pay the most attention to with your content marketing? Share your thoughts with me in the comments.

Guest Author: Aaron Agius is an experienced search, content and social marketer. He has worked with some of the world’s largest and most recognized brands, including Salesforce, Coca-Cola, Target and others, to build their online presence. See more from Aaron at Louder Online, his blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+and LinkedIn.

Images Sources: Shoutmeloud, Chartbeat, Kissmetrics, HingeMarketing, SocialMediaExaminer, CrazyEgg, Visually, HeidiCohen

 

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The 4 Crucial Steps Needed To Actually Drive Sales From Facebook

Have you marketed on Facebook but haven’t seen any significant improvement in your sales?

Sometimes it may seem easier to focus your energy elsewhere in your business rather than pursue a medium that is constantly evolving and changing.

However there is a simple 4-step process which is achieving amazing results for businesses world-wide and it can help to bring your Facebook strategy back into focus.

It follows the funnel strategy that you have probably heard about before but may not know how to effectively implement on Facebook.

It looks like this:

Step 1: The top of the funnel

Here, the strategy is simple. You are merely trying to get on our prospects radar.

It doesn’t matter what you are selling, the important action in this step is to provide value to the prospect. This is done by providing content that relates to them and strengthens their belief that we share a common interest and values.

It’s too early to be pitching a sale to this prospect as they haven’t had a chance to develop confidence in the brand or service.

A simple video of a ring can create a perfect initial engagement with a prospect and begin to offer them value.

An example of this is Charles Rose Jewellery:

A quality video, boosted to the right audience is a great first way of connecting with potential prospects.

Another way is simply a “Like” ad. With this new group you can begin filtering through to find the ones that actually are interested in your offering. They make themselves known by liking your page, which is invaluable as we move through to step 2.

(an example of how a Facebook like ad appears in the news feed) 

Step 2: The Middle of the Funnel

In the middle of the funnel we have now isolated an audience group that have indicated some interest in our offering and are primed for further engagement.

Some examples of audiences we can target are:

• Our Facebook fans
• A custom audience of our video views on Facebook (Typically we want to do at least 10 seconds of video viewed)
• Website custom audience (those that have viewed your website in the past 90 days)

It’s important to think of the amount of trust and engagement that is needed to make a purchase, and to vary the engagement strategies accordingly. For example someone looking to choose an accountant may need months of nurturing with good content. This is because people don’t select an accountant very often and a lot of trust may be needed for a prospect to come to a decision.

Conversely a product like a $100 watch may be bought on impulse. You may just need to show a few images of some influencers wearing the watch and some text on the watch features to prepare them to make a purchase.

Often, the less common a decision is made, the more expensive the purchase and the more research a customer will need to do before deciding they are ready to purchase. Which means the longer duration in the step 2 phase.

Step 3: The middle of the funnel…again

Ok, we have built an audience, we have engaged the audience, now what?

Well, remember that we don’t own the audience. Facebook can change their algorithm at any time (although they are aligned with the best interests of the advertisers). Now is the perfect time to start building your email list. It’s also great to have touch points with your audience on multiple platforms and email performs as well.

Facebook is an amazing platform to build your email list. It’s very scalable & extremely effective.

There are usually two main strategies implemented here to make the email acquisition strategy as effective as possible:

1. The Viral Promotion
2. The Opt-In Offer

The Viral Promotion – This is a strategy that involves a significant giveaway that ensures those that enter are potential customers. If you are a bike store, you can give away a helmet or bike gear. It can get a little trickier if you are in a services business like an accountant so you may have to get creative, perhaps giving away a business book pack or seminar tickets.

The “viral” secret – It’s always better to have a way to encourage those that enter to share, which is why you build a viral thank you page where the entrants can invite friends to win either more entries or more prizes. We find that this viral element on average increases the number of entries by 40%!

The Opt-in Offer – This is simply a free “giveaway” in exchange for an email and it can come in many forms. Webinars, e-books, free samples, audio clips, video series, content extensions, seminars & more.

Find something that is providing value to the audience and also suggests that they could be a potential buyer of your product. For example a scarf company may giveaway a book on 25 different ways to wear your scarf this summer and an accountant may giveaway 5 tips to minimize your tax leading up to the end of the financial year.

Step 4: The bottom of the funnel

You’ve selected an audience, isolated them, engaged them and even added them to your email list. Now it’s time to convert this investment into revenue.

By stage 4 your audience should have a connection to your product and they definitely have shown interest in it. There are many strategies you can implement during stage 4 but the most important to focus on are:

• Emails asking for the sale
• Retargeting from your website browsers but not buyers
• Carousel/Direct ads from Facebook

Let’s take a deeper look at each.

Emails – Once a user signs up for a promotion it’s great to email them after the promotion to let them know the results. Then you can follow up with some emails introducing them to your company, what you stand for, why you started, what problem you solve & then ask for the sale. Emails are perfect for increasing customer lifetime and creating a foundation to build upon.

Retargeting – These are those ads that follow you around after you have visited a website. All the biggest ecommerce websites use this because it works. You can set it up on Facebook to follow around your website visitors that haven’t purchased for 14 days with product shots to get people back and ready to buy.

Direct – This is a perfect chance to showcase your products to start cheaply bringing people to your website.  A carousel ad can show up to 10 images for the cost of 1 impression and can be great to showcase many different benefits or a range of different products.

Wrap

By undertaking the 4 step funnel strategy you have developed a clear and concise path to Facebook marketing success that will continue to build meaningful relationships with your customers and create significant financial gains for your digital marketing strategy.

Happy marketing!

Guest Author: Helping businesses grow is what drives Maxwell Hertan. As the Founder and Director of Megaphone Marketing, his focus is on delivering data driven results, ensuring every client has the highest return possible.

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6 SEO Copywriting Mistakes That Are Destroying Your Credibility

These days everyone wants to become a freelancer and work for themselves.

The problem is that everyone who doesn’t really have a marketable skill, but DOES have a computer and access to the internet, decides that they are going to be a copywriter.

All you have to do is string some words together to make a sentence, string sentences together to make a paragraph and string paragraphs together to make one whole page of words that kind of make sense.

That’s easy enough and any idiot could do it right?

WRONG!!

SEO copywriting is not just about stringing words together, it is about finding the RIGHT words that do what you need them to.

So if you REALLY want to become a copywriter, here are some simple mistakes you should avoid at all costs!

1. Not doing your research

Before you put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, it is crucial that you have done as much research as possible and that you know as much as you can about whatever you’re planning on writing about.

Now this does not mean that you need to be an industry expert before you can write an article about something. But it does mean you need to UNDERSTAND what you are going to say – because if you don’t understand yourself, how is anyone else going to understand you?

This is ESPECIALLY important if you’re writing anything that uses technical jargon of any kind, because an expert will know that you had NO IDEA what you were talking about.

The consequence? You’re going to lose a client if you’re freelancing, and lose potential customers/visitors if you’re writing for your own site!

What you should do:

• Research everything before you’ve even started writing
• Don’t rely on a single source for all your research
• Don’t stop researching until you understand what you’re writing about, who you’re writing for and every fact you’re using for your piece

2. Believing your spellcheck is all powerful

Many inexperienced copywriters believe in the power of their spellcheck, but as this poem shows, just because your spellcheck hasn’t marked a word as incorrect – it doesn’t mean the spelling is right!

Most word processing programs also have a grammar check, but they use an algorithm to find and mark those errors. And when a computer is determining what is wrong and what is right – it is wrong A LOT of the time!

People like to make fun of the ‘grammar Nazis’, but ¾ of web users pay attention to spelling and grammar on a website, and over 50% of them will avoid doing business with a company that makes obvious spelling and grammar mistakes!

What you should do:

• Never assume your spellchecker will catch every spelling and grammar mistake, or that it is always right
• If you’re unsure about the spelling of a word, then check it
• Proofread what you’ve written, then take a break and read it again – and then another time! 

3. Overcomplicating everything you write

Another thing that exasperates me? The propensity of alleged wordsmiths to employ grandiose or ostentatious verbiage, despite the fact that they could leverage unembellished and breviloquent phraseology.

Translation: Another thing that drives me crazy? The habit of so called writers to use big or fancy words, even when they could use plain and simple language!

So many writers who are not actually writers like to use big, fancy words and find over complicated ways to say anything and everything. The main reason? They’re trying to convince everyone that they ARE writers and that they’re really, really smart!

But at the end of the day all you do is confuse people and ironically, the more big words you use – the less intelligent the average person thinks you are!

What you should do:

• If you wouldn’t say a word when you’re talking to a friend, then don’t write it
• Apply the KISS principle and Keep It Simple Stupid
• Avoid using words that other people might not understand, even if you do

4. Forcing your opinions as facts

I don’t care how much of an expert you are on the subject you’re writing about, unless you can back up what you’re saying with verifiable facts then it is just an opinion. And even then, people can have the exact same facts and still have different opinions!

So avoid presenting your opinions as cold hard facts, because people might see that as you trying to force your opinion on them – even when you DO have facts to back up what you have to say. And I don’t know about you, but I avoid anyone who shoves their opinion down my throat!

Your facts had also better be accurate, because I can guarantee that some, if not all of your readers, will check them! If they’re wrong, there are people who will point this out and it won’t be long before your credibility is destroyed.

What you should do:

• Make sure you have facts to back up your opinions
• Be clear about when something is an opinion, and when something is a fact
• List your sources when you do use facts

5. Using your keywords like punctuation

When you’re writing content that is going to be used online, you would do anything to find that ideal formula that will guarantee whatever you’ve written ALWAYS ends up on the first page of Google – or any other search engines your readers may use!

And while using keywords is an important part of helping your piece rank well in organic search results, trying to manipulate your position by stuffing your copy full of unnecessary and unnatural keywords is NOT going to work, and will actually harm your rankings!

You want to attract visitors to your site, but you want anyone who arrives on your site to stay there. But using keyword stuffing as an SEO tactic often results in whatever you’ve written sounding like a load of gibberish – which will just make any visitors hightail it out of there! If you want to get better at search engine optimization, it might help you to do some research on the topic, for example by looking for professional literature at Kohl’s.

What you should do:

• The quality of your content is more important than how many times you use a keyword
• Make sure your keywords flow naturally with the rest of your piece by focussing on the topic
• Check how effective your keyword use is by using an SEO plugin or third party software 

6. Not being clear about what you’re saying

I can’t tell you how many times I have read or heard something and then spent several minutes trying to figure out what exactly that one sentence is supposed to mean, before finally giving up in frustration and finding what I need elsewhere.

Sometimes this is because the copywriter didn’t actually understand the word they used, or because they’ve accidently put the right word in the wrong place – thus changing the meaning of the entire sentence!

Other times, this is because someone is not writing in their native language. They know what they want to say and maybe they’re brilliant wordsmiths in their native language, but they are not as bilingual as they like to believe they are!

What you should do:

• Make sure you know exactly what every word that you use means
• Avoid confusion by making sure your grammar is perfect
• If you’re unsure whether your meaning is clear, then change the word or the sentence until it is 

Closing thoughts

If you’ve done copywriting for more than a week then you know that it is not as easy as you thought it would be, and that it is a lot easier to get it wrong than it is to get it right. In fact, there are loads of OTHER copywriting mistakes I haven’t even mentioned!

But if you’re determined to turn copywriting into a full time career, and you’re serious about being the very best copywriter that you could possibly be – then don’t stop writing and don’t stop asking for feedback on your writing!

One last question – what embarrassing copywriting mistakes have you seen lately?

Guest Author: Megan Govender is a born and bred South African with a passion for the written word who is happy to be earning a living while doing something she loves. She has been a copywriter for quite some years now and is always glad to help others discover more about the art of writing.

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