Good Content to Increase Engagement for Covert Business

Good Content to Increase Engagement for Covert Business

   June 11, 2014       prabhakardalvi

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Good Content to Increase Engagement for Covert Business

Engagement is the end game for content marketing. Getting people interested in and involved with your product is half the battle in making a sale. When your customers know that they can look to you for stellar insights and advice about the industry, you’ve succeeded. But achieving this goal is not easy. It takes a lot of time investment to create the high-quality content you’ll need.

Below are Some tips on how to use content to increase your audience’s engagement.

• Create Gated Content 
• Run a Live Q&A Based On of a Controversial Piece of Content  
• Include Calls to Action at the Bottom of Content 
• Ask Questions at the End of Blog Posts to Increase Comments
• Be Consistent at Something

Create Gated Content for SE ( Search engine )

“Gated content” refers to information or whole sections of your web site that are only available to people who agree to provide something in return. Gated content creation can be tricky to execute, but when used well, it’s a great way to not only pump up engagement but also to generate leads. For marketing purposes, that “something” is usually contact information, such as:

1. Geographic location
2. Name
3. Email address
4. Phone number
5. Company information

Gated content may also require payment for information, such as whitepapers or exclusive video, but generally speaking it’s just another rung on the sales funnel.

Not every company is comfortable with using gated content. Some are wary of alienating potential customers who are not ready to establish contact, or sending them to competitors who do not have gates. It’s best to reserve gated content for premium information; be sure to leave product descriptions and blogs free to navigate for any visitor.

For instance, a site such as Gate to Garage, which sells a wide variety of furnishings and décor, would not benefit from walling off its product listings to visitors. But it might consider requiring potential customers to submit an email address for future contact if they want to see a how-to video or white paper.

One thing to keep in mind, don’t gate all your content. Leave blog posts and info graphics as free material for everyone. That free material will drive traffic to your site and then special gated content can be used to increase engagement and build an email database.

Run a Live Q&A Based On of a Controversial Piece of Content  

Live chats have a colorful history on the internet. They’re one of the earliest ways that companies engaged with their customers, dating back well before the age of social media. Though they’ve evolved over time, they still remain a great way for businesses to gauge opinions about not only their products but also their industry. The smartest way to draw people in is to play off a piece of content that’s gotten a lot of attention.

This type of content will inspire strong opinions on both sides, which will draw people into the conversation. Be sure to promote the Q&A beforehand, but don’t just rely on live questions to fuel the discussion. Solicit questions and topics beforehand via social media, and keep things open-ended so that you can engage as many people on as many aspects of the issue as possible. If you’re doing the chat on Twitter or Facebook, look over your analytic beforehand to decide what the best time is to hold the conversation.

Last year Paper.li, an online content curation service, sponsored a live Twitter chat to promote awareness for bloggers, who make up the hottest area of its community. The success of the Q&A surprised even the company’s community manager, who personally heard from more than 200 people after the chat via email and on Twitter asking for help and offering their input. The chat also reached people in other countries, a bonus Paper.li hadn't expected.

Include Calls to Action at the Bottom of Content 

Sometimes when you become engaged in a great piece of content, whether it’s a whitepaper, a blog post or a podcast, you’ll forget how you stumbled upon it and your true purpose for looking into the subject. Don’t let that happen to your potential customers. While you don’t need to hammer them over and over with sales pitches, you do need to gently remind them as they reach the end of their time with your content that there’s something they need to do. That may mean registering for something, buying a product or filling out a form.

Whatever it is, make sure your call to action is clear and concise so that you don’t lose your fish from the hook. On the blog for Writers Relief, an author submission service, posts end with reminders that the site can help make writing dreams come true and a link to their submission page, a succinct but effective call to action.

Ask Questions at the End of Blog Posts to Increase Comments

This sounds like an obvious way to increase engagement, but a surprising number of sites do not try to interact with their readers this way. They’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Once you've finished discussing the topic at hand, ask your readers what they think. Many blogs put a daily question at the bottom of a blog post in bold, training readers to look for these queries and answer them, thereby increasing engagement.

Don’t just get people to comment, though. Interact with them in the comments section and see how you can further engage them. For instance, the Gawker network of web sites have perfected this approach. Writers interact with readers, exchanging ideas — okay, and often insults — in such a way that the comments sections themselves have become must-reads.

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How to Convert Visitor of website in Sales Marketing Leads

How to Convert Visitor of website in Sales Marketing Leads

   May 21, 2014       prabhakardalvi

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How to Convert Visitor of website in Sales Marketing Leads

Once you've got visitors to your site, the next step is to convert those visitors into leads by gathering their contact information. At the very least, you’ll need their email addresses. Contact information is the most valuable currency there is to the online marketer. In order for your visitors to offer up that currency willingly, you need to offer them something in return. That “payment” comes in the form of content, like eBooks, whitepapers, or tip sheets -- whatever information would be interesting and valuable to each of your personas.

Calls-to-Action

Calls-to-action are buttons or links that encourage your visitors to take action, like “Download a Whitepaper” or “Attend a Webinar.” If you don’t have enough calls-to-action or your calls-to-action aren’t enticing enough, you won’t generate any leads.

Landing Pages

When a website visitor clicks on a call-to-action, they should then be sent to a landing page. A landing page is where the offer in the call-to-action is fulfilled, and where the prospect submits information that your sales team can use to begin a conversation with them. When website visitors fill out forms on landing pages, they typically become leads.

Forms

In order for visitors to become leads, they must fill out a form and submit their information. Optimize your form to make this step of the conversion process as easy as possible.

Contacts

Keep track of the leads you're converting in a centralized marketing database. Having all your data in one place helps you make sense out of every interaction you’ve had with your contacts -- be it through email, a landing page, social media, or otherwise -- and how to optimize your future interactions to more effectively attract, convert, close, and delight your buyer personas.

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The Most Important Component of B2B SEO is Content

The Most Important Component of B2B SEO is Content

   May 06, 2014       prabhakardalvi

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With all of the SEO rules changing as often as they do, and SEO tactics that were once beneficial now on the “bad” list, website owners that want to improve their search engine presence are now left wondering, “what can we do?” What we always tell our clients is that the most important thing that they can do to help improve their B2B SEO efforts is to produce quality content on a regular basis. This can be in the form of blog posts, guest blog posts, articles, white papers, press releases, webinars, etc.

Here are 2 key reasons why content is a necessary part of a B2B SEO campaign:

Content generates inbound links

In the early days of SEO there were plenty of ways to get inbound links back to your site and the focus was on getting as many inbound links as possible. Quantity was the goal, not quality. Link exchanges were common as part of a “you link to me, I’ll link to you” agreement. As the search engines cracked down on this sort of practice that was meant to manipulate the search results, it became much more difficult to generate inbound links. 

The best types of inbound links are the ones that occur naturally when a third party website owner thinks that you are worth linking to. Think about what kind of link this would be. Are they going to be linking to your service pages? Maybe, but not all that often. Third party sites are going to link to informational content that their audience will find beneficial. By consistently creating quality content you will be viewed as an authority in your industry and links to your content will serve as reference points that can supplement the content of others.

Content fuels a social media campaign

A social media campaign is a necessary component of online marketing today. After all, social media is where people spend lots of time online. It’s important to have a brand presence there and to keep your social media accounts active. There is no point in having a social media page for your business or brand if you never update it. One of the issues that businesses have is trying to figure out what they should be sharing in social media. If you are creating quality content on a regular basis, you will always have a steady stream of social media posts to coincide with when the content is published. If it’s possible, try and publish evergreen content as often as you can. 

This kind of content can be published in social media multiple times, since it will continue to be relevant for months or even years in the future and it’s doubtful that all social followers saw it the first time around. For SEO purposes, it’s necessary to get links shared in social media in order to improve your social signals, which indicates to the search engines that a page of web content is beneficial.

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