For our businesses, you and I have been busy creating, publishing and distributing various formats of content. And it is only normal to go crazy thinking about killer content ideas, that will attract readers attention and generate potential leads. Read this article for an effective way to deal with such situations.
We invited Ian Cleary, an internationally recognised thought leader on content marketing and social media to our 3XE Social & Content Conference. Ian Cleary is the founder of RazorSocial. Through his agency, Ian helps in creating amazing content that drives relevant traffic. He also helps to promote content, build relationships and sales.
Here, are a few of the conferences he addressed as a keynote speaker –
Content Marketing World (5 years in a row) – Ohio, Social Media Marketing World (5 years in a row) – San Diego, Martech – London, Boom Social – Florida, TBEX – Stockholm, Cancun and Toronto, SEO Zone – Istanbul, Content Marketing Day – Oslo and the next stop was 3XE Social & Content Conference on 11th May 2018 in Dublin.
At the 3XE Social Media & Content Marketing Conference, Ian Cleary shared the strategy that resulted in millions of visitors and thousands of shares for his website. He provided a framework that you can implement within your business, to drive more traffic to your website and increase the number of shares.
“Your customers want you to provide value before you pitch, and content marketing is a great way of providing that value.” – Ian Cleary, RazorSocial.
Ian Cleary is founder of the content marketing agency RazorSocial where he provides consultancy and training. He is also founder of the email outreach tool OutreachPlus which helps businesses to automate and simplify the sending of highly personalised emails to generate leads, traffic and PR. He’s an inbound and outbound marketer!
Majority of the trainings by RazorSocial, are done online to an international audience. They have recently worked with companies such as British Council, Black and Decker, Social Media Examiner and their work has been featured on New York Times, Fox News, Entrepreneur.com, Forbes, VentureBeat and Inc.
Through OutreachPlus, they provide a tool specifically designed to help companies to drive more traffic and sales to their business using personalised email. Ian tells, “You use an email marketing tool to send the same email to everyone. You use OutreachPlus to send highly personalised emails to a targeted audience to build links to your website, generate leads, get press mentions and to build your authority.”
Here are the excerpts from our chat with Ian Cleary about social media and content marketing:
What are the benefits of Social Media and Content Marketing for a business?
Talking about Content Marketing for a business, I’ll say – great content targeted at the right audience drives relevant traffic to your website and some of this can be converted to customers. Great content builds valuable links to your website which increases your authority which, in turn, drives more traffic.
And then, Social Media is a great place to get your message out to a large audience and put a face to your brand. Social media is a distribution channel for your great content which can drive traffic back to your website for more potential sales. It is also an effective tool for building awareness of who you are and what you do. If people don’t know of you they can’t buy from you.
Would you consider Social Media as a revenue generating tool in the marketing mix?
It depends on how you approach social media. If you create valuable content to a very targeted audience you can drive relevant visitors to your website and convert some of them to customers over time. You will typically have a very low conversion rate for this approach. But, if you build a community of highly engaged people that are your ideal customers you can generate a lot of revenue from social media. For example, create a community through a Facebook group. Increasingly it’s becoming harder to generate traffic/sales from Facebook pages, Twitter accounts etc so we need to rethink how we do social.
What will be your suggestion on budgeting for social media?
Set aside a budget for ads and build high converting funnels. Both go hand in hand.
How important is content for paid campaigns?
People want you to provide value first before a sales pitch. Content for a business is crucial to provide that value.
What website and people influence you on a day to day basis?
Mark Schaefer is a really smart Marketer that I like to follow.
I always like to keep top of what’s happening in the content marketing industry with Content Marketing Institute.
Social Media Examiner always great for the latest in social media.
Jon Loomer keeps me up to speed on Facebook Ads
Socially Sorted is for all things imagery and video related to social media
With Convince and Convert, Jay Baer and his team do a great job at demonstrating how larger business use social/content marketing to their advantage
Your thoughts on the future of social media and content marketing for businesses
Social media will all be pay to play unless we build real communities.
Broadcasting messages through Facebook or Twitter will continuously get less and less reach, but building highly engaging communities will be a more cost effective and profitable way to handle social.
For content marketing the goals posts are moving because so many brands are doing content marketing now. You need to think of bigger and better pieces of content but publish less often. The 500 word blog posts are typically a waste of time.
Here is the presentation video that Ian Cleary delivered at 3XE Digital Conference. He explains exactly what we need to be doing.
Take the opportunity to learn from him, the effective practices of content marketing for businesses.
