Is it Time to Update Your Content Marketing Game?

We are starting to believe that content marketing as part of executing a growth strategy is reaching a point of saturation and diminishing returns.

Quantity over quality. Poor writing. Lack of strategic focus. Advertorial. One and done efforts with little to no promotion. Hiring cheap and getting cheap results.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Part of a content strategy any company should be doing is blogging. Blogging not only creates fresh content for search engines to crawl, but it also can help you and your employees position themselves as thought leaders. But since you need to publish new content several times throughout the month in order to stay relevant and increase subscribers, it can become really hard to come up with new topics or fresh insights to write about without sounding repetitive.    

This is when we turned to our sales team and simply asked, “What are the top five questions you get asked most during a proposal or sales call?” Surprisingly, this flushed out several topics for us to brainstorm around and create really awesome blog articles that were highly read and shared. By finding out the most common issues/pain points from some of our top prospects, we were able to assume that the probability of others out there having the same problems was very likely.  

The Time May be Right to Move (Way, Way, Way) Beyond Telemarketing and Cold Calling

Traditionally, when the term “account based marketing” was being discussed as a new business tactic by staffing agencies, it referred to cold calling or telemarketing to 50 or a hundred companies that the agency wanted as customers because the prospect fit a profile that ranged from size to the types of staff that they might use.

If you happen to be at the right place at the right time when that ideal prospect has a need you can fill, then this can be a pretty effective tactic.

But it’s “old school.”

It requires you to pound the phones or flood the prospect with emails or mailed sales collateral, and frankly, it’s not a particularly customer friendly way to build a long term relationship. 

Today, account based marketing is built on new approaches, thinking, and technology that are designed to build friendly, long term relationships that produce a win-win for both the staffing agency and the customer.

If you work in Marketing, you're probably consumed with generating leads. If you work in Sales, you're probably concerned with closing deals. Because the two departments are usually siloed, it can be challenging to get them working together seamlessly. These three free resources will help you.

We recently had a client do a complete overhaul of their website. New templates, new copy, new CTA buttons, new sitemap—a complete redesign. As anyone who has been through one of these major re-designs knows, it takes a lot of prepping, planning and time to execute a brand new website. When it was all over the client said to me, “I feel like I just gave birth.” She was so proud of all of the months of hard work and the constant emails and edits and approvals that she was gleaming as if looking at a new baby. Now, anyone who has given actual birth would probably laugh in her face (maybe even throw a punch), but we did see the correlation between putting all of your energy into something and getting a really great result.

And as many mothers in the past have said after giving birth, “I’m never doing that again!”… you would be surprised as to how many go on to have a second, third, fourth, and maybe even a fifth child. The same thing will happen with your website—you are most likely going to redesign that website many more times over the years.

This brings us to our own personal experience, as we have done many website redesigns for clients. She was right! Website redesigns are exhausting and take a lot of energy to complete, but they are well worth it. We also realized, just like raising a child and teaching them to grow, we also need to help our websites grow!

Here are 5 ways to keep your website growing and working for your business: 

1. Give each page of your website the attention it deserves.

You’ve created a piece of premium content that you’re proud of. You’ve designed a landing page with all the best practices represented. Your call-to-action (CTA) even makes you want to click on it. You’ve written a series of SEO-optimized blog posts on the same topic, and your content offer is appearing on each of the posts. You’re sharing the posts via social media. Everything is running smoothly.

But is your inbound effort successful, and what could make it more successful?

David Ogilvy, called The Father of Advertising, said, “If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.” 

How many times have you landed on a website that made your eyes glaze over and your brain turn to mush because the writing was full of jargon or just felt like it wasn't directed toward you? How long did you spend on that site?

To make your prospect stick around long enough to hear what you have to say, you’ve got to speak their language. Here’s how to learn the language your prospects speak.

You built your website so that prospects would find you, get convinced they need your products and/or services, and call for a consultation, sign up for your marketing, or make a purchase, right? The goal of your website is to generate leads. What if you could optimize your site so that it was more effective at cranking out leads for you? That’s what conversion rate optimization (CRO) is all about.

People believe all kinds of crazy things. And just because people believe something, doesn’t mean it's true. SEO has more than its share of untrue beliefs, and these myths keep good sites from ranking well because the owners of the sites don’t know better.

Good journalism can teach us a thing or two about creating blog posts. Journalists and inbound marketers who are dedicated to their craft have something in common: they commit to doing the things that engage their readers. 

Here are five lessons from journalism that companies can apply to their blog writing to increase engagement—and get better results.