Content Marketing Articles Quad Digital London

Brands as Publishers: Understanding your audience

July 29, 2013 in Content Creation , Content Marketing , Social

Some of the most successful brands today – think Innocent, ASOS and L’Oreal – recognise that the best way to attract customers is to produce high-quality engaging content and build lasting and valuable online communities.

The shift towards social media and online communities and away from faceless advertising strategies is undeniable. Brands are acknowledging the need to grow organic followers, and what better way to do so than by creating a ‘brand personality’ by utilising the social channels and networks available to them.

This has been proven to be one of the most effective ways of distributing content and gaining engagement – therefore building a community of loyal customers that will return time-and-time-again.

Social media

Food and drink aficionado, Innocent, was last year named the most ‘social’ brand in the Social Brands 100 ranking of consumer brands and their use of social media.

It was measured by different markers, including but not limited to brand post engagement on Facebook, a comment to post ratio on the brand blog, all brand mentions on Twitter and average views per video on YouTube.

Innocent’s desire to engage with their community rather than broadcast marketing messages has shown that by focusing on both community and content – and utilising all social media channels – you can achieve immense success.

Great content

The rise of ASOS, the online clothing shop, is in part down to the great content created around the brand. With a customer glossy print magazine and a Facebook page with over 2.2 million ‘likes’, the brand embraced the publisher role with gusto.

The decision to mail magazines to the homes of ASOS’s customers made the brand an essential part of their lives – and also added much-needed fashion credibility to a relatively new fashion brand.

Collaboration

Over the past two years, L’Oreal’s Garnier Fructis brand has partnered with music magazine Rolling Stone to create content around the discovery of new, emerging musicians.

In 2011 they made history by searching new unsigned artists and asking consumers to vote and decide who would be the first ever unsigned artist to grace the cover of Rolling Stone.

This is another example of great content being produced by brands who are acting also as publishers.

If you’re looking for a London based digital Content Marketing agency to help with your marketing needs, then why not get in touch with Quad!

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by Quad Digital

How you can profit from Content Marketing

July 17, 2013 in Content , Content Marketing

The point of marketing – any kind – is to inspire action. What that action is depends on your business. But, for most, this usually involves buying your product or service. Effectively, marketing should get people to take notice of you. The content is meant to grab someone’s attention, make them listen and then encourage them to act. Simple, right?

Well, not always. The internet is an entirely different medium from television, radio and print. Thus, the traditional tactics used to market brands on these platforms, don’t always transpire to success online. The web works in a completely different way. Online, content is the most valuable thing.

On the internet, people go in search of interesting and valuable content, and understanding this is the key to drawing profit from Content Marketing. Read the rest of this entry →

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by Quad Digital

Understanding Your Audience

June 13, 2013 in Blogging , Content , Content Creation , Content Marketing , PR

It’s important to know and understand your audience for a number of reasons.

Knowing your audience means that you can make decisions about what content you should be producing in order to reach the most people. You want them to engage and connect with you. People tune out or click through information that they’re not interested in. It’s your job to create content that people want to know.

Your content is good – you know your stuff. But it doesn’t matter how good your content is or how strong a writer you are, you won’t build a community or grow your audience until you fully understand who you’re writing for.

There are a number of questions you must ask about your audience in order to be able to create content that is valuable and worthwhile.

Who is your audience?

Who are you talking to? Where do they work? What do they do for fun? What types of conversations are they having? These, and more, are all important factors you should consider when you’re creating your content – whether for a business or for a personal blog.

What do you have to offer them?

What content do you have that will benefit your reader? What problems does it solve in their day-to-day lives? What are you providing of value for your reader?

Pam Moore says “Content that connects with an audience is the key to inspiring an audience to listen, to engage and to take action. Content is the foundation of conversation. Conversation is the fuel that will ignite your success.”

To create sharable and engaging content, the first step is to get to know your audience. It is with this knowledge that you can create inspirational content that truly connects with a community. Your audience wants to learn something – it’s your responsibility to deliver on that. Focus on providing content with value.

If you’d like to learn more about making the most out of your content from the Content Marketing Agency who know it all, then drop us a line or come down to Quad HQ aboard the HMS President for a chat!

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by Matt Read

Why You Should Be Guest Blogging

June 13, 2013 in Blogging , Content , Content Marketing , SEO

The benefits of guest blogging are two-fold: firstly, by guest blogging you can build links to your blog, which will organically increase your organic search rankings; secondly, guest blogging leads to exposure for you and your blog, which will naturally brand you as a thought leader in your field and help you discover more business opportunities through a solid digital Content Marketing strategy.

Building backlinks

By having a post on a reputable website you will get a link back to your website. You want to receive back links from more established websites than your own.

You can check this using PageRank – PageRank is an algorithm that factors in all the links to a site and the weight of those links. Each website, when ranked by Google, is assigned a number between 0 and 10. You should aim to guest blog on a website that has a higher PageRank than you.

When people are impressed with your content, they will want to share your links in as many locations as they can. These back links reflect positively on your search results and mean you rank higher in Google.

Gain more publicity

Publicity and exposure are two things that can come with guest blogging. By providing high-quality content and posting it on a high authority site, you’re creating a positive image of yourself and your blog. People will start to think of you as an influencer in your own right and your content becomes infinitely more sharable.

It’s free advertising. What could be better?

How to find a blog to guest post

Research: choose a blog that specialises in similar topics to you.

Outreach: connect with bloggers or websites on Twitter, retweet content.

Write well: make sure content is your absolutely best work.

Follow up: share guest posts all over your social networks. Track comments and reply to every reader who comments or asks for more info. It’s all about engagement.

Give as you receive: have guest bloggers on your own site. http://unbounce.com/content-marketing/how-and-why-you-should-be-guest-blogging-with-case-study-kinda/

If you’re looking for a London based digital Content Marketing agency to help boost your brand, why not get in touch with Quad!

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by Katy Latta

How To Attract User Generated Content

June 13, 2013 in Content , Content Creation , Content Marketing , PR

You want user generated content (UGC) on your site. You know why? Because it gets people interested in, engaging with and sharing your brands name.

But, not all UGC is the same and every company requires a different variety. UGC can fall into various categories, including product reviews, blog posts, forum entries and social media sharing. Most importantly, not always is it beneficial.

Content created by your users does a lot to influence your brand. It stands as a representation of your company and has a lot of sway in recruiting potential customers to your site.

So, before you start plastering your UGC all over the web, consider which type of audience you want to attract.

Once you know this, you can start seeding your site or social media stream with comments and content that is going to get your desired audience communicating with your brand.

Here are a few ways to inspire people to generate content for your brand:

Run a competition

This year, Tourism Australia has re-launched their ‘Best Job in the World’ competition, which gives people the chance to win one of six amazing jobs in Australia, while also subsequently promotes tourism in the country.

After huge success last year, YouTube, Canon and Ron Howard have teamed up again for Project Imagin8ion. The competition asks photographers to submit their most imaginative photographs under categories including setting, character and time, with a winner being selected in each. This will form the fodder for a 30-minute movie to be directed by Howard. While the entrants get the opportunity to contribute to a movie directed by a Hollywood star, the brands also get their names shared and publicised.

Make a platform for people to contribute to

Websites like TripAdvisor and Allrecipes do this very well. In fact, much of their business plan depends on UGC. For these brands, having their users providing the content for their site creates a website for people who want advise from a community of likeminded and knowledgeable people. It’s the relatable factor that makes this approach work. On these sites, users contribute travel advice and recipes respectively. Millions of users log on daily for advice from people like them, not a travel writer being paid to review a hotel, or a top chef expecting every household to have a pasta maker and a bamboo sushi rolling mat.

The Guardian has also just implemented this approach. Their new platform – GuardianWitness – invites anybody who’s in the right place at the right time to contribute live news content to the site, whether video, photographs or audio material.

Make UGC your product

Chicago-based printing company Threadless sells designer t-shirts. But, it’s not what you might expect. The company invites artists to submit their creative designs to their site for ranking. Over a week, the Threadless community rates the designs from 1 to 5 and leaves feedback that helps the company decide which piece to print on a t-shirt. The chosen artists receive upfront cash and royalties from the sales. Effectively, the users are doing all of the work; all Threadless has to do is print the t-shirts.

Trust your users

After all, they’re the ones who will buy your product. Burberry launched the site, Art of the Trench, in 2009 and in true high-end designer fashion, paved the way for many other brands to follow. The website shows photographs of real, fashionable people wearing the iconic Burberry trench coat. Utilising your users photographs is a great way to get people sharing your brand on social streams.

Yogawear brand Lululemon has also done this effectively by incorporating Instagram into their marketing plan. Using a specific hashtag, users were asked to tweet or Instagram photos of themselves living #TheSweatLife and wearing Lululemon clothing.

If you’re looking for a London based digital Content Marketing agency to help boost your brand, why not get in touch with Quad!

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by Katy Latta

Creating Content Is Easy, But Gaining Readership Is Hard

June 12, 2013 in Content Creation , Content Marketing

In today’s digital age, creating content has never been easier, but getting it seen, read and paid for is a whole different ball game.

Pre-internet era content creation used to be simple. It was created and distributed by select publishers and newspapers, and they would fund the creation process through advertisements and paid subscriptions. These publications would have a relatively stable readership base that would gobble up their content like daily bread. However, a variety of players have entered the content creation market since then.

Brands now give away free content in an effort to engage with their target market as a way to maintain and grow their consumer base. Bloggers write on their own platforms to make their opinions freely accessible to the public. And normal people share their own titbits of content via social networks as an efficient way to ‘socialise’ and ‘share’. A good piece of content nowadays needs only a topic, opinion and an angle, written with no grammatical errors and posted in a timely manner.

As the quality of these free branded and blogger content continues to improve, readers are left feeling reluctant to pay for content since a plethora of free options exist, forcing traditional publishers to rethink their monetisation strategy.

Furthermore, the abundance of free content also makes gaining readership harder than ever for brands and bloggers, as readers can now pick and choose free content as they please, resulting in a huge SEO and social media investment by both brands and bloggers.

The biggest issue that content providers face is no longer the content creation process, but a distribution and readership issue. This is why modern day content creation involves SEO, social media, guest blogging, free access and web versions of print articles.

The problem lies in the fact that there is so much content on the web, meaning a single piece of content will inevitably struggle to be seen. Creating content is dead easy, but gaining readers requires a whole lot more work.

If you’re looking for a London based digital Content Marketing agency to help with your marketing needs, then why not get in touch with Quad!

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by Quad Digital

How to Respond to Negative Brand Content

June 12, 2013 in Content , Content Marketing , Social

Negative brand content can be hard to swallow. But at some point every brand and business will have a negative content experience, you just need to know how to deal with it. With the rise of brands using social media as a platform to engage with their customers, it has become easier for people to spread negative comments about brands online. But do not fear, there are ways that you can manage this negativity and even use it to your advantage.

Social media is a very easy platform for complaints. If a negative comment is made by the wrong person it can spread like wild fire. This could result in serious damage to your reputation and a consequent effect on sales. Here’s a few tips on how to tackle negative brand content:

Don’t panic! This might lead you to tweet or comment defensively without thinking about the effect on the reputation of your brand.
Who are they? The type of person who is sending out negativity regarding your brand is important to how you form your response. There are trolls on twitter that are just trying to get your attention, but industry experts or genuine customers making a negative comment or writing a bad review need to be addressed.
Timely Engagement Nip it in the bud with a strategic response. Use the negativity as feedback and opportunity to engage with your customer. It’s not a good idea to ignore a genuine complaint as it will be perceived that you simply don’t care about your customers. Use this opportunity to show that you do value your customer’s feedback and that you are willing to provide a solution to the complaint.
Don’t be a robot When you respond to a complaint or review, make sure you sound like a human being. It won’t work in your favour if your customer feels that they are communicating with an automated service, so give everyone a unique and genuine response. Be honest and apologetic and make sure you’re using real words and not corporate jargon.
Be Honest Don’t try to avoid or hide negative comments. If you respond professionally and appropriately it can actually to your brand a favour.
Get Ahead It is safe to expect that you will experience some kind of negativity online somewhere along the line, so be proactive. Establish an online presence for your company or brand via Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In, blogs and shareable creative content. This way search engines will always be populated with content you’ve created when you are searched for and not negative press.

If you’re looking for a London based digital Content Marketing agency to help with your marketing needs, then why not get in touch with Quad!

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by Matt Read

What’s the difference between content and paid advertising?

May 31, 2013 in Content Marketing

When most people think of advertising they picture a billboard, a double page spread in a magazine or a TV commercial. This is an easily understandable business model. A brand pays an advertising agency to promote their product: a beautifully shot picture of a car with a witty strapline or a model who we aspire to be like can make a designer brand desirable. An advert is clearly selling us a product.

Online content can differ immensely from this model. This is not always easy for people to understand. The best content marketing does not appear to be advertising at all, as there is often no mention of a product.

A car company might commission a blogger to write about ‘Road trips in the UK’ or ‘Breathtaking highways in Scotland’ with no mention of the brand at all.

This can be hard for both consumers and companies to get their heads around.

Some brands do still have the urge to publish content online about their products. When this is the case, there is little difference between content and paid advertising. Not that there is anything wrong with this. Giving a customer access to as much information about a product or service can be useful. The trouble is there is only so much that can be said. Put yourself in the consumer’s shoes: would you read an article that was little more than a sales pitch?

For example, would you rather read an article that told you about the benefits of taking out insurance on a bike or see an interactive map of hotspots in your area that bikes have been stolen from?

The fact the internet allows anything to be published virtually for free means brands have the opportunity to create an abundance of media that their audience can choose to consume rather than adverts they are forced to look at.

innocentarticle

When a brand creates content to entertain rather than to sell, it builds a relationship with the customer and becomes viewed as an interesting friend.

How a brand benefits from publishing content

If content doesn’t advertise the product or brand, how does the company profit from it?

Well, there are numerous ways this can work. Take the Innocent Drinks example. This simple piece of content was shared over 1,000 times as it was clearly a statement that resonated with its audience. This resonance builds a relationship with the audience as they interact with the brand and develop positive associations through engagement.

If the content is published by the brand on their own site, it should make the website more discoverable through additional search terms.

Google runs on links, so offsite articles that link back to the brand’s main site will boost the search ranking. As with most advertising, it is about visibility. The beauty of digital is that this can be measured and sales conversions can be identified.

If you’re looking for a London based Content Marketing agency to help boost your brand then why not get in touch with Quad!

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by Matt Read

Mix it up: How to find the perfect integrated marketing strategy

May 31, 2013 in Content Creation , Content Marketing , Editor's Picks

No single billboard is going to be as successful as an integrated marketing plan. Simple.

But, here’s the hard part: how do you decide what best possible mix of marketing approaches to integrate?

In a study conducted last year by Pointroll in conjunction with Kelton Research, more than half of the American marketing professionals asked said they used five or more tools on a single campaign . Of these, 15% said they use seven to nine different tools and 13% claimed to use an average of 10 or more per marketing campaign.

Despite the wide array of tools being used, it’s safe to say there is no magic formula. It’s impossible to pick an integrated approach that’s going to work time in time out. Instead, each mix needs to be personalised to the brand and their message.

When it comes to marketing tools for a digital campaign, think along the lines of social, content, tablets, apps, website development and search. Any number of these can be used in any digital marketing campaign, but you don’t necessarily need all of them.

The success of a marketing campaign is all about getting your brand’s message known to as many people in your target market as possible. This doesn’t mean sticking up a billboard on the side of the road for everyone driving on the M25 to see. In the digital world, it means spreading your brand’s message between a particular mix of online streams which work to complement each other, thus providing an holistic solution to communicating your brand’s message.

The trick is to think outside the box. The digital world is always changing and new marketing opportunities are always popping up. Take Vine, the social app, which lets you capture and share a continually looping 6-second video, for example. This has huge potential for marketers looking to create branded content, which was demonstrated at our latest Content Creation Collective event.

As an example of an integrated approach, let’s say you’re a budding travel company wanting to get yourself known. You might choose to run a competition to get people interested in and engaging with your brand. But, for it to work, you need people to know about it.

And how can you achieve this?

How about getting a great article or comical video made surrounding the competition? But that’s not all. From there, get this fabulous piece of content published on a variety of high profile and targeted sites which implore the audience to visit the website you’ve had specifically made for the competition. Then, inspire people to share and engage with your brand via the hashtag or Twitter handle you’ve created for the occasion. Heck, why not a Facebook page too?

In this example, you’ve used content, website development, social sharing and all-round exposure to gain engagement and, most importantly, business from your target market. Audiences are given more than a simple banner ad to look at. They’re given a whole brand experience to interact with.

If you’re looking for a London based digital Content Marketing agency to help with your marketing needs, then why not get in touch with Quad!

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