All Stories
With a seemingly infinite number of options available to consumers at all times, the best way to capture people’s attention is to stand out from the crowd.
One of the biggest challenges any content marketer faces is coming up with a way to determine whether their content is actually working. Indeed, even if your brand has produced a series of excellent stories, you’ll need to prove that they are helping your company generate sales if someone is going to give you the budget to create more content in the future. And since consumers usually do not make a purchase immediately after watching or reading a piece of content, content marketers have a much more difficult time showing the impact of their work than, say, a direct-response marketer who can just point to their sales conversions. With that in mind, here are four other metrics you can use to gauge whether your content marketing is having the desired effect on your target audience. An expanded definition of “conversions” Typically, we think of a “conversion” in online marketing as […]
There’s no exact formula for publishing the perfect piece of branded content. As is the case with any creative work, you’re going to go through a period of trial and error before you find the process that works best for you, and there are going to be some hits and misses along the way. Even now, five years into my career as a professional writer, I am still tinkering with how I do things, learning from my peers, and searching for ways to get better. With that said, I’ve looked at thousands of branded content items over the past two years — first as an advertising reporter and later as a content marketing writer — and I’ve noticed that the best stories always have a few things in common. Here are the four elements I’ve found to make up an amazing piece of branded content. An enticing headline that lives […]
When I worked as a business journalist, I used to have an editor who wouldn’t let me begin working on a story idea until I had first pitched an eye-catching headline to accompany the finished piece. Initially, I found this idea counter-productive, and quite frankly, infuriating. After all, how could I know what the headline of a story was going to be before I had done the interviews and the research necessary to write my piece? Over time, though, I began to see the error of my ways. If the body of a story is the product you offer to the masses, the headline — along with the thumbnail image you use — is the packaging that tells people what’s inside and gets them excited to open it. Today, the headline is an integral part of my process for developing story ideas, as I know that I can’t serve readers […]