5 Tips for Successful Content Marketing in 2015

The secrets to successful content marketing in 2015 are simple really. Know what makes you different, know your customers THEN engage with your customers in an honest, authentic, clever and original way.

Here's 5 tips to make your content marketing efforts work smarter for you in 2015:

1. People are becoming immune to content so make your content stand out

With so much content freely available these days it's hugely important that your own content stands out from the average, the ordinary and the dull.

During 2014 content marketing grew by over 200% and I estimate that it will continue to grow at the same rate during 2015. With this in mind, brands that create engaging and authentic content with their target audience in mind will benefit from the continued growth of content marketing.

Tip: Make your content stand out with better, more targeted and clever content.

2. Know your customers through customer profiling

If you don’t know who you’re talking to, you won’t know what to say. Who are your customers, where do they hang out, what are their needs, desires and fears? What motivates them to buy?

Tip: Get to know your customers BEFORE you try to market to them.

3. Don't ignore the power of social media

Social media is here to stay so get used to it. Not only will social media give you brand exposure, it will also helps a brand to connect and engage with it's target audience and is essential to support search engine optimisation. Twitter has been putting more emphasis on its indexation and SEO efforts and as a result more tweets are being found on page one of Google. Plus producing well written content is essential to encourage social sharing so brands reach a wider audience.

Tip: Develop content for social media that's brand supportive, targeted & shareable.

4. Content, social media and seo: a marriage made in heaven

Brands must realise that content marketing, social media AND seo are all needed if they want to succeed online. It's no longer one or the other. Great content (written, video, infographics, images) will be 'liked' and 'shared' more on social media and more social media engagement will indicate to Google that the content is deemed to be valuable. Therefore Google will rank valuable content higher in the search results to benefit it's users.

Tip: Integrate SEO, social media and content marketing into your online strategy.

5. Content marketing is more than just writing a few blog articles

Add variety to your content marketing strategy. Written content is great but tweets with images get 150% more re-tweets than those without, by 2017 video will make up almost 70% of consumer internet traffic due to the increase in mobile and tablet use, and around 65% of us respond better to infographics than textual content.

Tip: Mix content types for successful content marketing.

Thanks for reading.

Lisa

Merry Christmas from angelfysh

We'd like to wish all of our past and present clients a very Merry Christmas and all the best for 2015.

Best wishes from Lisa, Henrietta and Debbie.

Over 20 email marketing tips to increase your open rate

On average, subscribers only spend 3-4 seconds deciding whether they’re going to open your email. You’ve got to get in there quick! Here are over 20 easy-to-implement tips to get more email opens and keep readers engaged.

Short and sweet subject line

Subject line space is precious. The most successful subject lines are straightforward, to the point and non-salesly.

Research by MailChimp of 200 million emails found that subject lines longer than 50 characters had lower open rates.

Short. Stands out.

Seven tips for a better subject line:

1) Keep it under 50 characters.

2) Be specific.

3) Be informative.

4) Give location and / or date information.

5) Avoid salesy, promotional language.

6) Use amounts instead of percentages.

7) Words to avoid: free, reminder, CAPITALS!!!, help, special, and any promotional phrases.

Make best use of pre-header space

The pre-header space is the snippet of text pulled in from the message of the email to next to the subject line. On an ISO mobile (an iPhone for example), the subject gets one line of space and the pre-header gets two! So it’s a great opportunity to give subscribers another reason to open your email.

Four tips for a better pre-header:

1) Continue the conversation on from the subject line.

2) Be personal. Emails from personal contacts get the highest open rates and they usually start off something like this: ‘Hey Henrietta, how are you doing?’.

3) Include a call-to-action. This sets the expectation for the email.

4) Above all make sure your pre-header doesn’t include default text like: ‘view email as webpage’ or ‘If you’re having trouble…’ This is wasting the opportunity.

Mobile friendly design

Nearly half of all email content is read on mobile devices and 80% of consumers say they delete emails immediately if they are not optimised for mobile.

The most successful email marketing uses responsive templates which resizes the content to fit the device screen size, but even without a responsive template you can make your emails work better on mobiles.

Here are six tips for mobile friendly emails:

1) Minimum font size of 13 pixels.

2) Buttons should be large enough to read and click on a mobile.

3) Use a single column.

4) Make sure links aren’t too close together.

5) Check that the call-to-action is above the fold.

6) Use bullet pointed lists rather than paragraphs.

Keep content fresh

Newsletter subscriptions start off with high open rates, then as time goes by, email opens drop off. The challenge is to keep your content fresh. A big part of this is personality.

Here are four tips to keep your email content fresh and interesting:

1) Have a voice. Say things in a particular way. Your voice should be recognisable and fit in with your brand.

2) Sign emails from a staff member. Your emails will be far more memorable if readers think they’re coming from a real person.

3) Offer opinions in your writing, and anecdotes too. This will set you apart from the boring marketing spiel that so many promotional emails are filled with.

4) Start with a friendly hello and message, just as you would if you were emailing a friend.

Personality is really important to maintain engagement and it’s what will keep each email fresh and different to the last one.

Include alt text in your images

When your images don’t show up in an email, alt text will describe the image that can’t be seen. Alt text is really important to encourage people to download images and not just click delete on your email. If images aren’t downloaded your email will not be classed as an ‘open’ and any activity or links clicked won’t be tracked.

Focus your emails on a single topic

Then you can craft the subject line, message and images to that topic.  The subject line must set up the expectation, the content must be informative and to the point, and the call-to-action obvious but not salesy.

Emails covering multiple topics with multiple call-to-actions will often see better success when split up into shorter, more focused emails. Lower down in the email, you can of course include some relevant offers or promotions but make sure it’s clear what your email is about.

Perform A/B testing

A/B email testing involves comparing the performance of two variations of the same email, where there’s one difference between the two emails. You can test which subjects, call-to-actions, styles of writing, length of content, format etc… get the best responses from your readers.


Summing this all up, I would say, think as if you were the reader. Think about your own experiences with promotional emails and full inboxes and ask: Would you open your emails? Would you stay subscribed?

Please let us know in the comments below if you’ve got any great email marketing tips, we’d love to hear from you!

5 tips for mobile friendly email marketing

This week we have 5 tips to help make sure that your marketing emails are mobile friendly.

Nearly half of all email content is read on mobile devices and 80% of consumers say they delete emails immediately if they are not optimised for mobile.

The most successful email marketing for mobile uses responsive templates which resizes the content to fit the device screen size, but even without a responsive template you can make your emails work better on mobiles.

Here are five tips for mobile friendly emails:

1) Use a minimum font size of 13 pixels.

2) Make sure your buttons are large enough to read and click on a mobile.

3) Use a single column.

4) Make sure links aren’t too close together.

5) Check that the call-to-action is above the fold.

Thank you for reading.

5 Tips for Ecommerce Websites

With more and more ecommerce websites popping up every day it can be difficult for businesses (old and new) to keep up with best practices when it comes to selling online.

So this week we have 5 tips to share with you.

1) Add attention grabbing deals and bestsellers to your homepage

Give your visitors (and Google) something new to look at each time they visit your website. Keep it fresh. This can include displaying special offers, best sellers, sale items and what’s new etc on your homepage.

2) Display delivery and returns information prominently

It's important to clearly display delivery costs and any free delivery threshold on every page of your ecommerce website. Information on how to return items must also be easily accessible as this will instil confidence and encourage people to purchase knowing they can easily return easily if they need to.

3) Make use of onsite product reviews

Displaying star ratings for products (like Amazon does) will allow your visitors to see which products have been voted the best by other customers. Products that have reviews that customers have written are an excellent way of making use of user generated content (Google will love you for this too).

4) Let visitors know your website is secure

It's important to show your customers that it’s safe to buy from your website, especially when they're adding debit or credit card information. This must be clearly displayed for any visitor (repeat customer or new prospects) to see.

5) Optimise your Thank You page

Make your Thank You page work hard for you. Here's a few examples of what you can include...  social sharing buttons to encourage customers to share what they've just ordered, also include social follow buttons. Ask for feedback about whether the order process was easy. And you can provide examples of similar items to those they've just purchased.

Thank you for reading.

5 Easy to Implement Blogging Tips

Hello everyone and welcome to December!

Today we have 5 easy-to-implement tips to help you when blogging.

1)    Make time to blog.

We know how difficult it can be to fit regular blogging into your busy schedule so here's an article containing 6 easy steps to fit blogging into your working week.

2)   Keep in mind what's proven to work.

There are tried and tested best practices when it comes to blog writing. Everything from the article length, blog title, content type and media used should be considered. With that in mind, here's an article we wrote containing 18 statistics to help you write the perfect blog post.

3)    Proof, proof, proof. 

It's really important to check your work for typos etc before you pop it live. Not only from the 'back-end' in the CMS but preview your article at the 'front-end' to make sure it looks good and there are no double spaces etc between words. Ask someone to cast another pair of eyes over it too.

4)    Promote your blog content. 

Probably more important than the blog article itself is making sure that you promote it effectively. We have a total of 169 tips on how to do this in another article here.

5)    Measure.

It's all very well creating the best blog post you've ever written and actively promoting it but you also need to define measurable goals too. Who do you want reading your content, what do you want them to do and how do you know whether they've done what you want? Metrics can include page views, social shares, comments, newsletter signups, media downloads etc.

Thank you for reading.

Lisa

7 online marketing trends you can't ignore in 2015

As you plan for your 2015 online marketing strategy, here are 7 trends that we expect to see and 7 actionable tips to benefit your strategy.

1) Mobile will continue to grow

During 2014 the amount of time we spend on our mobile has overtaken PCs. In a survey of US adults it was found that on average we spend 2 hours and 51 minutes on our phones vs 2 hours and 12 minutes on computers. Many companies have now moved to responsive websites which resize according to the screen the visitor is using but as we go forward into 2015 further optimisations for mobile will be necessary to maintain a share of mobile traffic.

One huge factor is load time. The average load time for a top 10 Google ranking website is 0.99 seconds. Search Engine Land recently reported that Google is experimenting with ways to favour in search results websites that are mobile friendly. Already Google takes into account user behaviour, penalising websites which visitors don’t stay on for long or look at many pages on – two behaviours which are directly affected by load time. Not only are there ranking benefits from a fast loading website, Amazon reported that for every 100 millisecond improvement in website load time, they see a 1% increase in revenue.

Tip 1: Make sure your website is mobile friendly, that it loads in under a second and that your content is easy to read and looks good on all devices.

2) Local SEO will become increasingly important

 

Research has shown that 50% of customers who performed a local search on their mobile visited a bick-and-mortar store within 24 hours of their search and 18% of these queries led to a sale. The fact remains that many people still prefer physical shopping to online shopping; there’s something about holding a product in your hands. A report by Accenture revealed that 82% of customers say they prefer shopping on the high street than online. Google understands the importance of providing the best local results to users and they’re fine tuning their algorithm to this end.

Tip 2: Local businesses with physical shops must make use of Google+ and local search so that they’re listed in search results for mobile users. (Oh and make sure you apply tip 1: to having a mobile friendly website!)

3) Specific targeting will be needed for success

 

The days of scatter gun marketing approaches are numbered. Best marketing results will be seen when businesses break down their customer base into segments and market specifically to those segments with the correct voice and tactics to reach that group. It also means more repurposing of content to promote it in a relevant way to each segment. A targeted approach is essential to make sure ROI of time spent creating and money spent advertising content is maximised.

Tip 3: Speak to your customers; find out their wants, needs, lifestyles and habits then tailor your approach to each group. Make sure that whatever you say fits in with the audience you’re saying it to.

4) Content will be expected to entertain

 

As more and more companies have embraced content marketing our lives have become even more flooded with content. To stand out from the noise content will need to become more than informative, it’ll need to be entertaining. Investment in video is becoming a must for brands that want to stay relevant and cutting edge.

Content is and will remain the driving force behind inbound marketing – especially since over 50% of 19 to 34 year olds will look at 4 or more sources before making a purchase. Now that the effectiveness of content marketing has been demonstrated, distribution will become just as important.

In 2015 we will see more of a focus on re-purposing and distributing to get maximum value from the content we create. Great content marketers will create different thumbnails according to platform, format restrictions and audience preferences so that campaigns consistently look good across all platforms. We’ll also see the same content being promoted in different ways, for example a topic might start out as an article, then an infographic, and then thumbnails and also as a Slideshare. This really follows on from Tip 3: knowing your audience and being specific with how you target different groups.

Tip 4: When you’ve created a great piece of content promote it across several platforms multiple times. Pull out nuggets of information and create interesting, engaging social posts about your content. Use images and video to create something that will stand out.

5) We’ll see more paid advertising

 

We’ve seen the rise and growth of social media success with many businesses adopting social for customer service and to reach out to new prospects. Now however there is increasing need to advertise on social platforms. With Facebook’s algorithm update it’s become increasingly hard to get content in front of consumers without advertising. This algorithm change lead to a 44% decline in brand content in users’ new feeds. LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest have followed Facebook and have all launched sponsored ads to put content in front of a specified group.

Tip 5: Budget for sponsored ads on social platforms, even £5 a day can dramatically increase your reach on Facebook. Once you invest, use analytics to measure your success and fine tune your strategy.

6) And more user reviews

 

Consumer reviews are certainly not a new trend but what we will see increasingly is companies asking customers to share their experiences become brand advocates. User generated content is invaluable. In the words of Jeff Bullas: “Reviews are a source of truth that will live on the web indefinitely”. It’s one thing saying you provide a great product or service, how much more valuable is it if your customers sing your praises for you? According to Neil Patel, customers are ready and willing to talk about great buying experiences: “50% will write about positive experiences, and 39% will write about negative”. Customers want you to wow them, and when you do they want to tell people about it.

There are various ways that you can collect reviews; on Google+, Trustpilot or with onsite review functionality. Collect reviews on Google+ one of the results when customers type your brand into Google will be your Google+ page with your shinning reviews. Companies that grasp this in 2015 will benefit from higher levels of trust and, consequently, better conversion rates.

Tip 6: Start asking customers to leave reviews on your Google+ page. We’ve written a couple of articles on the topic: 11 ways to encourage customer reviews and User Reviews: why they’re essential for e-commerce SEO.

7) We’ll expect increased personalisation

Another trend is increasing personalisation. More than ever customers are expecting companies to reach out to them personally. This is especially true of millennials who have grown up in the digital age and now have money to spend. They expect companies to court them for their business, they want to feel valued and personalisation is one way to do this.

Tip 7: Start sending out personalised follow up emails after cart abandonment. It shows that you do really value their purchase.

Thank you for reading.