4 smart strategies for creating the perfect content marketing schedule

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When individuals and brands first begin blogging, they often start out with a grand plan for scheduling well-researched content with clearly established goals and deadlines for each piece. Then — of course — life gets in the way and the idea of maintaining and updating an editorial calendar seems like a huge chore, one that eventually falls by the wayside in favor of a more spontaneous approach to content creation and curation.

Even if you still follow an editorial calendar to some extent, there are likely areas in your content strategy that could use improvement when it comes to your scheduling practices. Here are some strategies the most successful content marketers use to optimize their editorial calendars:

Create Daily or Weekly Themes

Do you write and publish whatever feels relevant to your brand in a given moment, or are there clear themes you’re covering each day or week? For example, you could conduct weekly interviews with industry experts that are published once per week on the same day (preferably in written and audio formats, if possible).

Alternatively, you could announce a theme at the beginning of each week and incorporate that theme into your blog posts, social media posts, and other content published throughout the week. Even with content themes, however, you’ll still want to mix up specialized content with evergreen content to ensure at least some of your blog retains a bit of longevity 3, 6 or 12+ months from now.

Stick to a Content Marketing Editorial Calendar

Do you currently have a content marketing editorial calendar? If so, is it in an Excel spreadsheet, Google form, content scheduling platform, or elsewhere? To maximize the likelihood of following your editorial calendar — and maintain your team’s motivation to stick to the calendar — you should consolidate all of your editorial notes, deadlines and other information in one easy to access location (bonus points if you can schedule upcoming blog and social posts from the same platform).

Write Content 2+ Weeks in Advance

Some people work better under the pressure of an impending deadline, but this is not an ideal strategy to rely on for the long-haul. Instead, your content writing team should be producing content at least two weeks in advance, which gives your design and editorial teams plenty of time to optimize the content for audience engagement and catch any mistakes before publication.

Even if new information comes out within that 2+ week timeframe that necessitates changes to the content, you’ll still be in a much better position if all you have to do is add or erase a sentence here and there, as opposed to writing, editing, and designing an entire blog post within a couple days.

Get Everyone Onboard

A final must-have in any successful content marketing strategy is team cohesion. In other words, you want everyone to be on the same page about each step of the content production and publication process. Even if you’re working with a remote content team, you should still schedule weekly or monthly team meetings to give everyone the chance to vocalize any issues or concerns they’re experiencing, which other team members could potentially help resolve.

This also requires consistent attention to your brand’s content guidelines, so that you’re always maintaining the same “voice” for your brand across channels (even if you have multiple content writers) and you can readily adapt to changes (e.g., SEO practices) whenever necessary with minimal disruption to your team.

4 innovative ways to reach Gen Z on social media

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Whether you’re in your 20s or 50s, crafting social media posts and other marketing messages for a Generation Z audience can be pretty complicated. As the first generation born and raised during the height of the Internet’s popularity (whereas many Millennials didn’t start regularly using the Internet until middle or high school), Gen Z is truly a puzzle for many marketers.

If you want to boost authentic engagement with younger audiences on your brand’s social pages, then you can’t afford to ignore these four innovative ways for connecting with the tweens, teens and young adults of Gen Z:

Learn the Lingo

Are you living your best life? Yeet! Are your social captions on fleek? Does your product model look like a snack?

To help you stay woke (aware, informed), learning the latest meme-ified phrases concocted by Gen Z’s Internet sensations is an absolute must for any brand that wants to stay relevant. Of course, you’ll want to actually talk to Gen Z’ers to know what these words/phrases mean to ensure you use them correctly in any branded communications with your audience. Why? Because nothing is more sus (shady or questionable) to teens and young adults than brands trying too hard to market to them without actually understanding what the lingo means.

Teen-Fluencers

If learning the Gen Z lingo is too complicated or just does not make sense, no matter how many times you consult Urban Dictionary, then you could always hire a teenage influencer to speak to your audience in a language they’ll understand. Teen-fluencers, as they’re informally called, are teenagers between the ages of 12-17 who get paid $5 to $20 per post (on average) by brands that want to reach younger demographics without the usual advertising approach (paid ads or contracts with influencers).

Teen-fluencers aren’t old enough to get “real” jobs yet, so they’re eager to find opportunities to partner with brands and hawk their products to their 1,000 to 6,000+ followers in exchange for per-post payments via PayPal or Venmo.

Voting on Insta Stories

Even if you’re regularly posting new content to your brand’s Instagram account, this might not be enough to engage your Gen Z audience. This younger generation represents one of the biggest demographics of short story users on social media (Instagram and SnapChat mostly – Facebook isn’t too popular among Gen Z). This means that you must be posting content to your Insta Story on a near-daily basis to keep followers engaged beyond their overcrowded Instagram feeds.

But you can’t just post random photos or marketing messages to your Story — one popular way to get Gen Z’ers actively clicking on your content is through voting. All you need to do is post a photo with a question (you get 2 options for answers) and let your followers vote away! It’s a great way to not only get your followers to interact with your brand but also a way to gain valuable insight into their consumer habits, likes/dislikes, and more.

Meme Creation Contests

Many brands try — and fail — to cater to Millennials and Gen Z’ers by incorporating viral Internet memes into their social media marketing campaigns. Rather than running the risk of using a meme incorrectly, you can host a user-generated content contest emphasizing memes instead. This allows your audience members to signal what memes are popular among their age demographics and encourage them to interact with your brand on social media by incentivizing them with a contest. It’s a win-win for everyone!

Which Facebook campaign objective should you chose?

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When it comes to advertising on Facebook, diversifying your campaign strategies and objectives will typically produce better outcomes than running the same campaign over and over again with minimal tweaks. While it might seem intuitive to aim for more page likes with each campaign in order to bring in more followers who will then view your future posts in their feeds, you might find that other campaign objectives are more useful for your brand’s unique marketing goals.

To help you decide which central objective you should chose for your next Facebook advertising campaign, here’s the run-down on some major objectives that you should consider:

Page Likes

This is one of the most frequently chosen campaign objectives because many marketers assume that more people liking your page will translate into more engagement in future posts. However, now that Facebook allows users to unfollow people and pages, you’re not guaranteed to show up in people’s newsfeeds (especially if your post isn’t a paid promotion, as recent changes to Facebook policies indicated the company will prioritize posts from family and friends more than brands).

This objective is ideal for anyone who is new to advertising and Facebook and wants to grow their page. It’s general enough that you don’t need to put in a ton of time developing content for this campaign, and it’s an effective form of social proof when you have a solid base of Facebook followers to demonstrate you are actively increasing your brand’s presence on the social media platform.

Post Engagement

Sponsored or boosted posts are ideal for marketers who want to promote a specific product, service or event. You’re not overly concerned with attracting new members from your target audience as much as you want to drive awareness or sales around a specific thing, such as a new product release, revamped package pricing structures for your services, or an upcoming event.

With post engagement, you’ll likely get multiple people liking, commenting or sharing your post, even if they don’t like your page! This is a useful tool for reaching younger, tech-savvier audiences that are wary about liking pages after they were spammed by different pages in the 2010-2015 era (before Facebook started really adjusting its algorithm to prioritize content from friends over random pages people forget they had ever liked on Facebook).

Traffic

This campaign objective is ideal for advertising something you can’t fit into a single Facebook post. For instance, you may have a landing page with long-form content, video and multiple photos – something that would never work for a simple Facebook post. The traffic objective is designed to get people to click on your ad, which will then lead them off-site. You can direct traffic to a landing page, online store, donation page, or many other options.

Facebook even lets you choose from a variety of calls-to-action, such as “Learn More,” “Book Now,” “Download Now” and so on.

Video Views

Video content is increasing in popularity year after year. As Facebook’s own website claims, 100 million hours of video are viewed on Facebook each day, but many brands remain uncertain as to how they can promote their videos more effectively. This is where the Facebook video views campaign objective comes in: audience members can watch your branded videos directly on the platform (preferably with captions and no sound, as autoplay videos with sound are typically unpopular with Facebook users).

Event Responses

Are you hosting an event in your area soon? Do you offer free monthly webinars for anyone who signs up at your registration link? If so, then the event response campaign objective would be a much better option than a simple post engagement campaign because your call-to-action will specifically ask target audience members who view your ad to sign up for the event.

Why aren’t your Facebook followers engaging with you?

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Do you have a decent chunk of followers on Facebook, yet your posts continue to experience little to no engagement? If you’re wondering why you have hundreds or thousands of followers but only get a couple likes and maybe one comment on each post you publish, then here are three possible reasons for low engagement figures:

Your Facebook Page and Posts Are Boring

Many Facebook users don’t think twice when liking a page that seems interesting (based on an ad they saw) or that their friends recommended to them. Since many users have hundreds, if not thousands of friends whose posts are already clogging their feeds, the last thing you need is a boring or irrelevant post that will get lost in the masses.

Worse yet: what if you create a brilliant ad that entices followers to flock to your page…. only to discover a relatively empty page with a dull or low-quality cover photo, minimal information about your brand, few recent posts, and few images? The old adage of “don’t judge a book by its cover” rings true for Facebook advertising as well: you don’t want your ads to be more exciting than your page itself. Otherwise, people may unfollow your page or abandon your page altogether in hopes of finding another brand with more valuable information to offer.

You’re Limiting Your Advertising Strategy

A common problem many companies and organizations run into is deciding on an ideal campaign strategy. For new and experienced marketers alike, the option to grow your follower base seems like the best option because who doesn’t want more followers? However, this singular strategy can be pretty limiting when it comes to long-lasting results. It’s easy to click “like” on a sponsored post – it takes someone significantly more effort to scroll through the brand’s page, comment on posts, and share content with their own friends.

Rather than limiting yourself to paid advertising campaigns that solely emphasize racking up followers, consider adding campaigns that seek to increase engagement among your existing base. In other words, you can create a group of ads that invites followers to respond to thought-provoking questions, share their own experiences, or even tantalizes them with a contest open exclusively to followers of your page.

You’re Not Engaging with Them

Why should people comment on your page, like your photos, and share your posts if you don’t give them any incentives to do so? One of the biggest reasons why you might rack up a huge but silent following on Facebook is because you and your marketing team aren’t actively reaching out to those followers once they’ve liked your page.

Sure, you may put out great content, but that’s not sufficient enough to engage your audience. Unless you’re asking them personally relevant questions, requesting specific feedback about your products/services, and giving them other incentives to like or comment on your posts/page, you won’t be able to increase your follower engagement levels. It certainly requires more time and effort to respond, but the long-term benefits of personalizing your customers’ experiences with your brand on social media will be worth it.

Short vs. long-form content: Which is best for your blog?

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Have you ever considered how the word length of your blog posts can affect everything from your website’s search engine rankings to the number of leads generated by your content marketing strategy? If you’ve ever wondered whether you should be writing shorter or longer content to maximize your blog’s ROI, then here’s what you need to know about short versus long-form content:

Short-Form Content is More Feasible

How long does it take you (or your hired writers) to research, write, proofread and publish a blog post? Generally speaking, the longer the content is, the more time it’ll take, which equates to higher costs as well. Meanwhile, short-form content ensures you can regularly publish new, high-quality content on your blog without having to worry about sporadic gaps in your publishing schedule or going over budget when it comes to your content marketing strategy.

Short-form content should be at least 250 words to be effective and no more than 750 words to maintain your audience’s attention throughout the article. Another advantage to short-form content is that it avoids repetitiveness (repeating the same information, just with different words), which is a common problem experienced by long-form content writers who may run out of fresh ideas once they get past the 1,200 word mark.

Long-Form Content is Ideal for SEO

According to the top blogging statistics for 2019, the average blog post is 1,050 words long and the average length of top-performing blog content in Google searches ranges between 1,140-1,285 words. Although further research shows that long-form content can generate as much as 9x more leads than short-form content, just 18% of companies regularly publish blog posts that are longer than 750 words.

Additionally, there are many search engine optimization benefits to publishing long-form content, including: more backlinks, more social shares, better rankings on Google search, and so much more. If you want to increase your website’s ranking in the search engines, then producing high-quality, well-researched content in the 1,500-2,000 word range would be ideal for your SEO strategy.

Best Solution: Variety of Content Lengths?

Unless your marketing budget is exceptionally generous, you likely won’t be able produce long-form content often enough to satisfy your audience. However, this doesn’t mean you should solely focus on producing short-form content, either. For best results, you should experiment with a variety of content lengths and analyze your most valuable metrics (leads generated, backlinks acquired, social shares, etc.) to determine what the ideal length of your blog posts should be.

Supercharge your brand’s online visibility with LinkedIn in 3 easy steps

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There are millions of company pages on LinkedIn, so if your brand isn’t already active on LinkedIn, now is the time to get started. It costs nothing to start a company page and there are countless benefits to doing so: greater digital footprint (and thus, more eyes viewing your branded content and people clicking on your links), increased opportunities to connect with potential business partners, high-quality recruitment channels, and so much more.

Even if you already have a company page on LinkedIn, there is likely room for improvement when it comes to optimizing your page and getting your content in front of new audiences. Since LinkedIn’s popularity is unlikely to fade any time soon, here’s how your brand can amplify its online visibility with LinkedIn:

Create/Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page

Creating a company page on LinkedIn is as easy as creating a LinkedIn profile for yourself. The trickier part is optimizing it so that you rank higher in LinkedIn searches. To accomplish this, you can’t go wrong with taking notes on the best LinkedIn company pages (over 13,000 nominations in 2018 – resulting in LinkedIn’s hand-picked list of the top 10 company pages of the year).

Additional ways you can optimize your LinkedIn company page include:

  • Including branded visual content (profile photo, cover photo, and posts)
  • Publishing authoritative content in a variety of formats (video, podcasts, blog posts, infographics)
  • Personalizing your brand with just-for-fun posts (every once in a while) and interviews with company leadership and/or happy client testimonials

Boost Your SEO with Company Specialties

Did you know that the “Company Specialties” (in the About section) are SEO-indexed? This means that the keywords you select as your brand’s specialties could drive in more traffic from LinkedIn searches. For instance, if you’re a pet sitting business, then you should include a variety of specialties like “dog sitting,” “cat sitting,” “pet care,” “dog walking,” “animal care,” and so on.

These are the key words and phrases people use when searching for businesses both on LinkedIn and in general search engines like Google, so don’t miss this opportunity to get a free SEO-boost for your brand!

Post Regular Company Updates

Oftentimes, brands create a company page on LinkedIn and proceed to do absolutely nothing with it. Simply having a company page is a good start, but to really see some results from your LinkedIn presence, you should treat it like any other social platform and create/schedule/publish regular updates.

These may include exciting company announcements, occasional product/service launches, information-packed blog posts, and even quotes or stats overlaying a relevant, eye-catching image (these tend to acquire particularly high engagement rates on LinkedIn).

Are you guilty of these Instagram caption mistakes?

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In spite of the popular belief that Instagram is purely a visual platform for marketers, influencers and consumers, the caption you create for a post can have a tremendous impact on your engagement rates. Here are some of the most common captioning mistakes you might have made in the past with your brand’s Instagram posts and ads — along with some helpful solutions to improve engagement in the future:

No Caption at All

Some brands rely heavily on paid Instagram campaigns and follower growth from website traffic, but these alone are not sufficient to get your posts in front of enough viewers. Even if you’re in a hurry to churn out posts on a near-daily basis, it’s always preferable to include a caption rather than throwing an image on your brand’s page and hoping enough followers see and like it.

Hashtag Overload

You may have noticed other brands doing this before: #everything #seems #to #be #hashtagged #even #if #it #doesn’t #need #a #hashtag #!!!

Rather than hurting your audience’s eyes with a caption drowning in hashtags, be sure to start out your caption with an engaging message written in plain English (then follow up with a couple well-chosen hashtags so you can at least increase your post’s viewership rates).

Boring Captions

Even the highest quality, relevant images can’t make up for a terrible caption in an Instagram ad campaign. If your photo or video is spectacular, then why settle for a dull, everyday caption (or blatantly salesy message) when you can take some extra time to come up with a witty or engaging caption to accompany your post?

Long Captions

Did you know that Instagram users and business profiles tend to use longer captions – even when studies show that shorter captions are more effective when it comes to boosting engagement rates? A 2018 study from Quintly found that posts with 1-50 characters (out of the 2,000 character limit) receive the highest engagement rates, though a majority of posts use at least 300 characters in their captions. For best results, try incorporating a variety of lengths in your captions to figure out which length is best for your target audience.

3 futuristic technologies that will transform social media marketing

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As if lightning-fast internet access, voice activated smart home technologies, and AI-run customer service weren’t enough, there are several technological developments going on these days that could transform marketing and social media as we know it.

To stay ahead of the curve, it’s important for marketers to not only be aware of these latest advancements but also be willing and able to implement these technologies into their marketing strategies. To give you an idea of what you can expect to explode in popularity within the next few years, here are the top 3 tech developments you should start looking into:

Virtual Reality

Virtual and augmented reality are already popular among gamers, but this tech is becoming more and more mainstream every year. From Facebook buying the VR developer Oculus to the latest immersive shopping experiences developed by Sixense, you might be surprised to learn just how popular VR already is among consumers.

Within the next few years, consumers might be able touch and try out holographic versions of products before deciding whether or not to buy – all from the comfort of their own homes. If your brand isn’t actively considering the possibility of implementing augmented reality and immersive, virtual shopping experiences into your marketing strategy, then now is the time to get onboard with the future of online shopping!

Voice Shopping

Thanks to smart devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, shopping with our voices has never been easier. We can already ask Alexa to re-order more dog food from Amazon or ask Google to find the lowest prices on gaming consoles in our local shopping area. How much further will this technology take us?

By some estimates, 50% of online shopping by 2020 will be conducted by voice. This is extremely valuable information for marketers who have not yet rewritten their product descriptions and blog posts to be optimized for voice search.

Since there doesn’t appear to be any slowdown in voice searches in the foreseeable future, it’s crucial that marketers optimize their content for voice searchers, which may include audible product descriptions for anyone searching without a screen in front of them.

Blockchain-Based Social Media Platforms

Do you know what blockchain is? Many social media startups are increasingly reliant on blockchain to support their websites.

In a nutshell, blockchain social media websites are also known as “decentralized social networks,” which refers to the fact that there’s no central database where all users’ information is stored. Instead, the information is highly protected and private because it’s spread out across an encrypted network (the blockchain). Websites such as Steemit, Minds and Mithril are good examples of early adopters of the blockchain technologies for social platforms.

On these websites, social mining – or content creation and engagement with other users – is key to earning money (in the form of cryptocurrency) and/or digital tokens that you can exchange for more views on your posts. This is the future of content marketing right here: publishing high-quality content that attracts a wide base of people upvoting, commenting and sharing that content, which can then earn you digital tokens to exchange for even more visibility among your target audience members.

3 useful strategies for getting to know your target audience better

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Most brands conduct thorough target audience research when they’re first starting out, but not as many brands regularly check in with their target audience to see if consumer preferences and motivations have changed.

Even if you’re a smaller company with fewer resources to dedicate to routine audience research, there are still plenty of easy ways to gain valuable feedback from your audience, which can then be used to fine-tune your marketing strategy, messaging and general interactions with potential followers and paying customers alike. Here are a few things you could implement within 24 hours:

Brief Feedback Surveys

Survey programs like Google Forms and Survey Monkey are incredibly useful for marketers who want to customize their own questions and acquire deeper insights about their target audience. Survey Monkey has free and paid versions available, but you shouldn’t need more than the basic free version to get the information you need from followers.

When creating a survey, keep it as short as possible. Include only the most essential questions, and use mostly multiple choice questions to minimize survey-taking fatigue among audience members who don’t want to type lengthy responses.

To encourage people to take your survey, post links to it on your social media pages and set a deadline so people feel a sense of urgency to complete it now rather than later. If you’re not getting the number of responses you’d like to see, consider giving away a gift card to one lucky survey participant as a fun incentive to rake in more responses.

Social Media Polls

You can create polls on Facebook, Instagram (through the Stories feature) and Twitter. These polls can be treasure troves of information for brands because intrigued, social-savvy and engaged followers will likely participate. Even if you get some negative responses from brand detractors, this information will help you discover problem areas you might not have known about otherwise.

One downside to these polls is that you can only ask one question at a time. You may get dozens of responses for one poll and only a handful of responses for another poll. This disparity can lead to skewed results, so be mindful of potential limitations of this audience research strategy.

Fill-in-the-Blank Social Media Contests

A final way to engage your audience members and learn more about them is giving them opportunities to be creative and express their thoughts and opinions. For instance, you could run a seasonal contest on Instagram with a post that encourages followers to finish the sentence, “My favorite part about the winter holidays is________.”

This type of contest offers the additional benefit of raking in user-generated content and word-of-mouth awareness for your brand. Offer a prize for followers who respond to your sentence with their own pictures and your branded hashtag in the caption.

Do social media posts with images always perform better?

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When it comes to data analyses of posts with and without images, results appear to be mixed on whether or not an image truly increases engagement on social media. There are obviously multiple factors involved – the relevancy of your copy, the quantity and relevancy of your hashtags, timing of posts, etc. – but deciding whether or not to use an image in a promoted post is not as easy as some marketers might believe.

While some social media studies suggest the use of images isn’t always the best idea, a majority of studies lean in favor of using images in social media posts to increase engagement. Let’s unpack this further to see which route is the best path for your brand’s social strategy:

Twitter

Research conducted by Buffer on its Twitter account found that tweets with images performed 150% better in terms of retweets than tweets without images. The same study also found that tweets with images received 18x more clicks than tweets without images. Additional studies have found similar results, which suggests you should definitely use images in your tweets if you want to increase engagement.

Of course, it’s worth noting what works for Buffer and other marketing companies may not work for every other brand’s Twitter account. For best results, consider testing out different types of ads with the same copy to see for yourself if tweets with images drive up your follower engagement rates.

Facebook

Although research from Buffer and BuzzSumo suggest Facebook engagement rates are generally declining, posts with images are still more likely to get clicks and engagement in comparison to posts with just text. Posts with video also tend to perform significantly better than text-only posts, perhaps due to heightened user interest in viewing dynamic video content as opposed to plain text in a post.

Further research has confirmed that Facebook posts with images consistently outperform text-only ads, so the best way to prevent your followers and potential followers from scrolling past your content in their newsfeeds is by including a high-quality, relevant image in each of your posts.

Can Using an Image Decrease Engagement Rates?

Some of the few times an image might decrease your engagement rates on social media is when the image is low-quality resolution, completely irrelevant to what you’re describing in the text of the post, and/or the image is just…. boring. You can’t simply slap an image onto a post and expect stellar results; you need to carefully curate your images from high-quality photo databases if you want to maximize engagement!