content Archives

Recession: 3 ways to tweak your marketing message in a poor economy

Considering that the economy moves in cycles, a recession is likely to hit your business at some point. You have to consider how to tweak your marketing message when you find yourself in a difficult economy.

Notice that we’re talking about adjusting your messaging and not cutting your ad spend from your marketing budget. Of course, you’ll likely have to evaluate your overall expenses, but businesses that want to succeed in the long run would not cut their entire advertising budget. Be smart with your spending during a recession.

Companies that continued to advertise during a two-year recession in the 1980s saw 256 percent higher sales than their counterparts post-recession.

Beyond smart spending, your marketing message is critical during uncertain times. The following are three ways you should tweak your marketing message in a difficult economy.

Be human as a brand (and funny)

In a recession, stress is higher than ever for your consumers. It’s easier than ever to alienate your target audience with an out-of-touch message.

Stay human by finding ways of conveying that purchasing your products or services will not break the bank. You can even cite current economic conditions to underscore that you understand what your customers are going through.

And, of course, whenever you can lighten the mood with a bit of humor, all the better. Just make sure that your humor is both appropriate and actually funny.

Embrace a purpose beyond just selling

A difficult economy shifts a lot of consumers’ focus to seeking meaning beyond just buying more stuff.

In fact, about 42 percent of Gen Z consumers are more loyal to brands that address social inequalities.

Of course, purpose-driven content appeals to economically stressed consumers of any age.

During the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a rise in mission-based and cause-related marketing, 42 percent and 41 percent respectively.

As a brand, what do you stand for? Is there a cause you can start to embrace and support now? Success in mission-based messaging requires authenticity and consistency.

Leverage social listening during a recession

Tuning into the concerns of your target audience and addressing them in your recession marketing message can help you be far more engaging.

In other words, lean on your social listening tactics. Social listening is essentially audience research. You monitor your brand’s social media channels for any customer feedback, mentions of your brand and discussions surrounding specific keywords, topics, competitors or industries that are relevant to your brand.

Social listening is a two-part process. You have the monitoring on the front end, but then you dive deeper with analysis and actionable responses. There’s an engagement there, but also the goal to implement long-term strategy changes based on what you’re learning.

When navigating a difficult economy, social listening is that much more important. The behaviors and concerns of your target audience are constantly evolving, but even more so during a recession. Your job then is to understand that and address that with your content.

How is the economic downturn affecting your customers’ families, jobs and personal lives? How can your brand help?

Check out nine of the best social listening tools for brand marketing.

In conclusion

Remember that during an economic recession, it’s easy to panic. But instead of slashing all your marketing spending, be bold with your content and spend in a smart way to reach your audience. Keep in mind that content can be much more affordable and effective than billboards and TV commercials.

Content marketing works during a strong economy, but it especially works during a struggling economy.

Check out our seven tips to level up your content marketing.

As you explore how to better connect with your audience during a recession, consider optimizing your digital marketing process, such as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

Evergreen: What is it and how important is it?

If you’re a marketer, you know the importance of content through your marketing strategy.

Content can be used to bring new website visitors and convert them into paying customers. The better your content, the better their results.

Evergreen content is a type of website content you create for your digital marketing that remains interesting and relevant over time. People will be interested in this type of content for many years to come. This helps you take advantage of content and use it to continuously attract new website visitors.

Anyone running a content marketing campaign should plan content that will always generate interest from their target audience. In most cases, evergreen content refers to blog content. However, it can be used throughout your marketing strategy to attract more customers.

What is evergreen content?

Evergreen content is any content, whether a blog, infographic, or video, that retains its relevancy over time. This type of content discusses topics that are always interesting to the audience.

For example, anyone who wants to learn how to build a website might read evergreen content in 2022 or 2025 since the same tips will still apply.

The same is true for many different topics, including pet care, child care, and other topics that allow you to create informational and valuable content for readers to digest. Evergreen content stays fresh no matter the year or season. It can help readers answer a question or learn about a topic.

Evergreen content does not discuss seasonal topics tied to a time of year or trendy events in the news. For example, an article about consumer trends in 2022 is not evergreen content because it discusses a particular year, and consumer trends are subject to change over time.

Importance of evergreen content

Evergreen content stays relevant long after it’s created, and because it’s not tied to a specific time period or trends, it continues to attract traffic to your business website. A few benefits of evergreen content include:

Future-proofing your website and blog: Evergreen content is always interesting to your audience, allowing your blog to stay relevant no matter what’s going on in the world. This can have a growing impact over time, continuing to attract new visitors.
SEO Improvements: Evergreen topics are searched for more often than seasonal or trendy topics. With other types of content, the search volume for keywords and clicks on articles typically dies down after a few months or when the topic is no longer trendy. However, evergreen topics can help you improve your SEO efforts to rank higher on search engines and promote growing traffic to your site.
Increases website traffic: We’ve already mentioned this a few times, but one of the main reasons you produce content is to increase your website traffic. Evergreen content is better at increasing traffic than other types of content because it’s always reluctant.
Provides value: Evergreen content is always valuable and addresses a common question your visitors have. You can position yourself as a trusted resource and thought leader in your industry by providing customers with continuously valuable content.
Generating leads: Evergreen content can improve your lead generation efforts by helping you demonstrate your expertise and build customer trust. The more you educate and provide valuable content, the more your audience will trust you, encouraging them to take action on your site and convert into leads.
Easier promotion: Evergreen content can be promoted over and over again on social media and through other digital channels. With minimal changes to the original content, you can continue to push content every so often to generate more interest. This can be especially beneficial after updating old content.

What types of content can be evergreen?

Any content can be evergreen; remember, it’s not the type of content that matters. Instead, you should focus on the content topic to ensure that it’ll stay relevant over time. The best types of evergreen content include:

How-to guides: Guides are a great way to generate leads because it allows you to offer something in exchange for potential customers’ personal information. E-guides and how-to guides can always be relevant depending on the topic. For example, you can write a guide for feeding your pet, and new pet parents will continue to read it. However, if you write a how-to article for something that’s seasonal or trendy, you won’t get regular visitors or leads from it. For example, a guide on how to make Christmas ornaments will likely only get visits during the holiday season.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs): The FAQ section of a website or web page is essential if you want to improve user experience (UX). However, it can also be used as evergreen content. Asking the most asked questions about your brand, business, or industry can make for good evergreen content, especially if you can help customers easily answer common questions without leaving your website.
Videos: Videos can also be evergreen, depending on the topic. Of course, you should have a good mix of different types of content on your website to attract all types of visitors. Video topics can include everything from how to use your product to general topics about your industry.

Start creating evergreen content

Evergreen content relies on your topic’s ability to stay relevant over time. So, you should always start by brainstorming different topics.

Think about your audience and niche to determine what types of topics they might be most interested in learning about. You can also consult search engines and look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section for similar topics. For example, if you’re a pet company, someone might be interested in how often they should walk their dogs. In this case, you could write an article about how often to walk a dog based on several factors. You can even use experts to help you create more valuable and trustworthy content.

Of course, remember to check the performance of your content regularly. You can use various tools to learn more about top-performing content. This will help you determine which topics your audience is most interested in.

Level up your overall content marketing with our seven tips.

While you’re evaluating your evergreen content marketing strategy, consider leveling up your digital marketing strategy. DailyStory specializes in automation, email marketing, audience segmentation and more. Level up your process, and schedule a free demo with us today.

8+ content marketing metrics you should track

Content marketing plays a key role in many digital marketing strategies, but what metrics should you be following to ensure that what you’re doing is working?

Content marketing is essentially described as the creation and publication of content in order to build an audience and generate sales leads. In other words, you’re leveraging content that you’re creating to create brand awareness and educate audiences.

While 80 percent of content marketers use metrics to measure performance, only 65 percent have KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure performance, and only 43 percent measure their content marketing ROI (return on investment).

So, while many brands may be using content marketing, plenty are still figuring out how to measure success.

Of course, your metrics matter. Content production, strategy, distribution, promotion and any related software all cost time and resources. Are you getting your money’s worth from your content?

If you’re new to Google Analytics, check out our nine tips to get the most out of the analytics platform.

The following are eight-plus content marketing metrics you should track to ensure that the content you’re sharing is working the way you want it to.

Website referral traffic

A common content marketing metric is website traffic, but go beyond just the total numbers of visitors. Take a look at how these visitors are finding your content.

To see where your traffic is coming from in Google Analytics, use the Channel report. You’ll be able to see how users are finding your content, whether that’s organically or through social media, search engines, etc.

This will give you insight into whether your social media promotion is working, if your SEO needs a boost or if a popular email newsletter is linking to you.

In other words, website referral traffic can help inform your content marketing strategy overall.

User behavior

User behavior is actually a collection of metrics that can give you insight into reader engagement and content performance, especially when paired with other metrics, such as website traffic.

You can find the following user behavior metrics in Google Analytics:

Time On Page
Bounce Rate
Pages/Session
New/Returning Visitors

The power of user behavior metrics does come from the pairing up with other larger metrics, but they can help you better understand the performance of your content.

For example, you have a blog post that is receiving a lot of traffic from search engines, and visitors are spending significant time on the web page. From that you can infer that your post is matching the search intent of these users, which is a win.

Shares and backlinks

When it comes to any brand awareness goals, it’s important to understand how far your content is reaching (beyond traffic on your website). You can get an understanding of this by tracking social media shares and backlinks (which are hyperlinks that point from one website to another).

These metrics show whether users are willing to share your content with their personal audiences and networks.

You can measure social media shares on such tools as BuzzSumo, and you can measure backlinks on such tools as SEMRush, BuzzSumo and more.

Check out our seven tips to grow quality backlinks and boost your SEO.

Google Search impressions and click-through rate

In Google Search Console, you can (and should) track impressions and click-through-rates of your content in organic searches.

These metrics can help you understand whether the keywords your content is ranking for actually lead to how many users saw your search result and how many clicks resulted from that.

You can find these metrics in Google Search Console by filtering by a specific landing page and then looking through the queries linked to that page. Click on Performance, then Search Results and then Queries.

Check out our four tips to boost your click-through rate in Google Search.

Keyword rankings

Speaking of keyword rankings, this is another content marketing metric you should be tracking. You’ll want to monitor your core keywords and their rankings at least monthly.

Ranking improvements can reflect positively on your content marketing performance. You can use Google Search Console to find this metric.

If you’re not sure what keywords should be on your priority list, start with keyword research. Check out these 11 free SEO keyword research tools you should consider.

Lead generation

Lead generation is all about your content bringing in new sales leads to your business. In other words, it is the process of getting people interested in your business and gradually nuturing them into becoming paying customers.

To measure lead generation in Google Analytics, you’ll want to set up your goals in the platform. This allows you to follow such things as demo requests, Contact Us submissions and more. This can then be used to help determine how many conversions come through a blog or other piece of content.

Premium content is not only a key part of any content marketing strategy, but it can directly increase lead generation. Learn more about what it is and how you can leverage premium content in your marketing.

Customer retention

New visitors are great, but don’t forget about your loyal, returning visitors. These are the consumers whom you’re building a relationship with that can lead to purchases in the future.

These are warm leads that you can’t ignore. What content is appealing to them? To find out in Google Analytics, click on Audience, then Behavior, and then New vs Returning.

Speaking of returning visitors, check out our six tips to create brand loyalty for your business.

Email opt-in rates

Email subscriptions might not be the first content marketing metric you’d think of, but it matters because your subscriber number reflects how many consumers found enough value in your content to want more of it delivered to them directly.

DailyStory is just one email marketing tool that can help you track your subscribers, their engagement with your emails and more.

In conclusion

Remember that the power of your content marketing metrics is only as strong as the goals you’re setting around your content.

Don’t have specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound goals? Check out our seven expert tips to set achievable marketing goals for your small business.

As you’re getting serious about tracking your content marketing metrics, think about your digital marketing process. Is it everything you want it to be? DailyStory features automation, audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

11 ideas to inspire your holiday marketing strategy

The holiday season is a great opportunity to get creative so that your brand can stand out among the countless images of seasonal fun.

But since the holidays come back around every year, you might be struggling to break out of a holiday marketing rut.

Do you find yourself running the same sales in the same way? Then, it’s definitely time to try something new.

And the effort is worth it. Holiday spending in 2021 surpassed $1 trillion in the U.S. for the first time ever.

Boost your brand’s visibility during this hectic time with the following 11 ideas to inspire your holiday marketing strategy.

Host a social media contest or giveaway

Organizing a contest or giveaway on social media is a great way to get people talking and involved with your brand.

There is a difference between contests and giveaways. In a giveaway, participants are simply entering to potentially win a prize of some kind based on the entry rules you set. In a contest, participants are doing more than just entering, but what that action is depends on your contest. For example, you could have a holiday photo contest that incorporates your brand’s products in some way, so participants would be taking and submitting a photo according to your entry rules in hopes of winning a prize.

Contests and giveaways can also help grow your social media following as well. It often can come down to the appeal of the prize and ease of entry. Just make sure you’re keeping everything on the legal up-and-up.

Leverage paid ads to promote a product or event

The days of relying solely on organic social media posts are long gone, so you’re likely already at least dabbling in paid advertising on one or more social media channels.

During the holiday season, consider getting specific with your paid ads that directs consumers to your upcoming holiday event, discounts or seasonal products. Paid ads are particularly helpful at reaching people outside of your social media following who are the demographics of the target audience you’re looking to reach.

Aim for memorable, shareable content

Easier said than done, right? When it comes to creating and publishing memorable content that’s easy for followers to want to share, start by thinking of your target audience.

What are their interests? What are their hopes, fears, challenges when it comes to the holiday season. By using your content to address topics that matter to them, you’ll better resonate with them. And that’s where you’re content becomes more shareable because users will want to share that with their own networks.

You’ll also want to keep your visuals in mind. Are they eye-catching and memorable?

Check out our 10 tips to create engaging content.

Create product bundles

Consumers like saving money, especially during the holidays. If you can offer multiple products or services together into a bundled discount, you’ll likely see an overall increase in sales during the holiday season.

If you’re not sure what to bundle, think about what items are often purchased together anyway.

Once you’ve created at least one bundle, you can include its promotion as part of your holiday marketing strategy.

Offer gift suggestions

The holidays can be stressful, especially when consumers are trying to think of the perfect gift for everyone on their list.

You can help with this stress by sharing gift suggestions featuring your products or services and the type of person it would be perfect for, such as:

Mother
Father
Wife
Husband
Sister
Brother
Son
Daughter

Just think about what you can match with some of those recipients and then promote accordingly. Just make sure you include a call to action, like “Buy Now.”

Partner with a local nonprofit

Cause-related promotions are particularly effective during the holidays. Consumers are becoming increasingly thoughtful about the businesses they support and what they’re doing beyond striving to make a profit.

By showing your support for the community, you can grow your brand awareness and potentially attract new customers.

Of course, these partnerships can work in any number of ways. For example, you could announce that a percentage of every product or service sold will be donated to a particular nonprofit.

Remember (and reward) your loyal customers

In the push to acquire new customers during the holidays, don’t forget about your existing (and loyal) ones. You can easily offer unique discounts or bonus gifts (with purchase) targeted to your established customers.

In fact, you can even send them a “thank you” message or card before the holiday season even begins so that they feel appreciated and have your brand top of mind as the season begins.

Be sure to seize the opportunity to leverage your customer loyalty program over the holidays as well.

Check out our five tips to successfully promote your customer rewards loyalty program.

Embrace nostalgia

The holidays are all about memories of childhood and magic. You can tap into this with your holiday marketing strategy.

To do this, consider using black-and-white images and old-style fonts. Then, use these to convey a sense of nostalgia that complements your brand and connects with your target audience.

Offer free shipping to convert abandoned carts

Free shipping can be a great way to not only convert leads into purchases up front. But if you hesitate to offer free shipping up front, consider offering it as a follow-up to any abandoned shopping carts on your website.

You can frame it as a holiday gift as you encouraged fallen-off customers to come back and complete their purchases.

No limit on holiday spirit

Beyond the posts that will reflect holiday imagery in some way, what else can you do to convey that your brand is all about the holidays?

Think about embedding warm holiday scenes and sparkle in your physical store locations (if applicable), across the home page of your website, the cover photos of your social media accounts and any relevant landing pages.

You also can go beyond the imagery by sharing any charity work your company is doing during the holiday season and any special services or products you might be offering (free or not) during the holidays only.

There’s truly no limit to the holiday spirit you can convey to consumers through your brand.

Take advantage of Small Business Saturday

In addition to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, don’t forget about Small Business Saturday, which happens the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

If your brand is a small business, it’s an opportunity to connect with your audience in a different way. What’s the story behind your business? What drives you? Who are your employees? What are their stories?

About a third of U.S. adults who do holiday shopping say they plan to shop locally or buy from small businesses to support local communities.

Embrace that for your own brand and promote around that.

In conclusion

Of course, when it comes to your holiday marketing strategy, it’s never too early to start planning and publishing. It takes potential customers to see your messaging several times before taking action. And the sky’s the limit on creativity. Evaluate what your competition is doing or has done in the past.

Dive deeper with our seven holiday marketing tips to optimize sales.

As you begin to plan and prepare your holiday marketing, consider optimizing your digital marketing process. This includes such features as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

17 LinkedIn content ideas that you can post

If reaching professionals is a goal of your digital marketing efforts, offering diverse content on LinkedIn is a crucial tactic to explore.

LinkedIn now has more than 830 million users in more than 200 countries and territories, calling itself “the world’s largest professional network.”

But the type of content that a LinkedIn audience of professionals would best engage with is not necessarily the same as what’s popular on other social media platforms. The most popular content types on LinkedIn are:

Long-form content (such as native articles and blog posts)
Third-party content
Native video
Text only
Photos and illustrations

But these are just content types. If you’re hitting a wall while brainstorming content ideas for LinkedIn, you’re in the right place. The following are 17 LinkedIn content ideas (categorized by content type) to help you mix up your content and connect with your target audience.

Long-form content ideas for LinkedIn

One of the best ways you can hit your goals with your content on LinkedIn is to offer value. Creating native articles on LinkedIn itself and/or sharing blog posts is a great opportunity to dive deeper into topics that relate to your industry, showcase your expertise and matter to your audience. Here are four ideas that you can run with:

Detailed whitepapers
How-to guides
Research reports
Case studies

The goal isn’t the length of the content. Make sure that every word engages your audience.

Third-party content ideas for LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an excellent platform to share relevant content from other sources. In other words, you don’t have to create everything yourself. With curated content, the sky is the limit. Just make sure you’re pulling from trustworthy sources. Here are three ideas for you to seek out and share:

Adjacent-industry content, where the topic isn’t directly related to your industry but is still relevant. For example, you could be in the retail industry, but news articles about supply chains and shipping logistics still make sense and matter to your audience in the realm of retail.
Expert opinions, where you’re sharing the thoughts and opinions of experts in your industry.
Tips, tricks and life hacks, where you’re helping your audience with everyday problems that they encounter.

Check out our four tips for finding what to share on social media, as well as 12 tools that can help.

Native video content ideas for LinkedIn

Video content must be part of your digital marketing strategy, not just on LinkedIn but in general. About 54 percent of marketers say that video is the most valuable content type for achieving social media marketing goals, and about 85 percent of social media users want more videos from brands. Fortunately, LinkedIn now has the ability for you to upload videos natively into the platform. Here are four video content ideas that you can play with:

Short clips from webinars to show your expertise first-hand.
Spotlight your team. The more you can share their professional journeys and expertise, the more your audience can relate to your brand and the people behind your brand.
Spotlight your customers in testimonials where they share their experience with your product and/or company.
Behind-the-scenes videos that showcase your company culture.

Just make sure to include subtitles on your videos whenever relevant since a majority of users watch videos on mute.

Text-only content ideas for LinkedIn

Just because long-form content gives you the opportunity to dive deeper into topics that can provide value to your followers doesn’t mean that you should ignore the opportunity of short text-only posts. Here are three ideas to help you be as engaging as possible without the “icing” of other types of content:

Tips and how-to’s are great for this content type if you can keep them short and sweet.
Quick company updates
Product and other announcements

The key is to be as short and impactful as possible. Every word counts.

Photo and illustration content ideas for LinkedIn

Getting visual on LinkedIn is just as important as visuals on any other social media platform. A photo (or graphic illustration) is worth a thousand words. And possibly even more than that because it can help catch the eye of your target audience as they’re scrolling. Here are three ideas that you can try:

Data illustrations because everyone loves data, but everyone loves a visual representation of data (so that they can understand it) even more.
Celebrate achievements, such as industry awards, company growth, anniversaries and more. A simple graphic illustration of these milestones can be very eye-catching.
User-generated content, where you can leverage the photos shared by customers and employees (with proper credit, of course).

You don’t have to be a graphic designer to create compelling illustrations. Check out these 11 free graphic design tools for the non-designer.

In conclusion

Don’t overthink your LinkedIn content. Keep your target audience in mind and keep experimenting. Engage wherever it makes sense on the platform. And remember, you can always repurpose your evergreen content so that it’s new again in the eyes of your followers.

Check out our six tips to be more effective on LinkedIn, as well as six mistakes businesses make on LinkedIn that you want to avoid.

As you’re exploring how to mix up your LinkedIn content, consider leveling up your digital marketing with DailyStory. Features include automating various marketing tasks, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

11 fitness content ideas you can use today

If you’re responsible for marketing a fitness brand in any way, it might be challenging at times to think of creative fitness content that not only tells your brand story but also attracts and retains clients.

The goal is to produce high-quality fitness content that’s consistent.

The COVID-19 pandemic reduced the fitness industry’s market size by about 16 percent, so it’s more important than ever to invest at least more time and effort into the effectiveness of your fitness content.

Of course, you’re always going to want to keep your target audience in mind with all content that you produce and publish.

Keep in mind that about 81 percent of Millennials exercise or would like to, compared with only 61 percent of Boomers. So, if you’re not considering Millennials as a group you should target with your fitness content, think again.

The following are 11 fitness content ideas that you can start using today to engage with your audience and grow your fitness business.

Offer tips and advice

You are an expert in your field, so what bits of advice can you highlight in your fitness content? For example, three ways to get more steps in per day or explaining when to stretch (before or after a workout).

You can easily brainstorm ideas by starting with the topics that you get asked most about.

Then, it’s all about considering where you want specific pieces of content to go. For example, you can dive into a topic with a blog article, but a vibrant infographic would do well on Instagram and so on.

Share your story

Whether you’re representing an entire gym or acting as an individual fitness trainer, it’s important to share who you are and what drives you.

Perhaps you have a fitness journey to share, or maybe it’s more about you as a gym owner. You could create a video interview diving into your story as a whole and/or post little snippets on different platforms.

The key is that clients and potential clients have an opportunity to relate to you and form a bond with you.

Of course, if you’re more than a team of one, you’ll want to share the stories of your gym employees as well.

Share client stories

Client testimonials are a powerful form of social proof. Essentially, you’re highlighting different people who are happy with your brand for whatever reason (their results, your customer service, etc.) so that others can see the value of your fitness brand firsthand.

A simple way to go about this is sharing a photo of the client with a quote, either on the image or in the caption (or both). This could even include before-and-after photo collages. But you could also expand this into short video clips across platforms.

Check out these five reasons why your business should be creating more videos.

Create workout videos

Now, we’re not referring to a full-on Jane Fonda-style workout video. But you have the built-in opportunity to create and share video clips from before, during or after a workout that be used to inspire viewers and show them a tiny piece of what your fitness brand is about.

There can be a lot of apprehension for a newcomer when arriving at a gym for the first time. Giving them a peek at what they can expect can be helpful and reassuring.

You also can focus on breaking down a single exercise and talking through good form and modification options. This also adds to your credibility as a brand.

Offer healthy recipes

Nutrition is a big piece of anyone’s fitness journey, and there is no shortage of healthy recipes that you can highlight and share with your target audience.

Consider making the recipe a graphic image on social media platforms. You can even take it a step further and do a cooking video on YouTube.

Share fitness articles

All content does not have to come directly and uniquely from you. Lean on curated content and share relevant fitness and industry-related articles that you think your audience would appreciate.

The fitness industry is full of evolving trends and research that can be very engaging fitness content. Leveraging it also shows you to be an industry leader.

Just make sure that whatever articles you’re sharing are from a credible source.

Check out our four tips for finding curated content to share on social media.

Show your personality

Consumers don’t just want to connect to a business. They want to connect with the human behind the business. While you want to ensure that your branding offers its own sense of personality, you shouldn’t be afraid to share your own as well.

Clients want to trust you. They’re putting very important personal goals in your hands, so your authenticity is important.

But a “great personality” can be subjective. Focus on being you, and check out these seven traits of online fitness personalities.

Dive deeper with our five steps to determine your brand personality.

Post inspiring quotes

When thinking about creating engaging fitness content, was inspiring quotes your first thought?

It’s a popular go-to because it really can work. Just make sure that you are:

Picking relevant quotes for your audience.
Designing the quotes in a graphic illustration so that they’re shareable on social media.
Not over-posting quotes. Mix them in but don’t let a majority of your fitness content ride on quotes. Your engagement can trail off without a good mix of content.

Lead a Q&A

Q&As are popular with many audiences, and they give you the opportunity to be the expert in an engaging way.

There are a number of different ways to structure your Q&A based on the platform you decide to use, but just keep in mind that you want to promote your Q&A in advance, accept questions in advance (to fill any gaps or holes during the Q&A itself) and set an engaging topic that drills into what many of your target clients must deal with or face.

In case you’re interested, check out these seven tips for marketing on Quora and other Q&A websites.

Explore promotions

First things first, you should aim to have a majority of your fitness content be organic and non-promotional. But promotions are key to moving the needle toward your goals, especially when done in an engaging way.

Promotions include:

Discounts and coupons
Contests and giveaways
Freebies (otherwise known as premium content), such as workout guide, healthy eating plans and more

Check out our tips for keeping your giveaways legal.

Collaborate with other brands or influencers

Brand or influencer collaboration is a great way to not only reach a new audience but to develop creative content inspired by your partnership.

Of course, you don’t want to dive in with just any brand or influencer. It’s important to do your research on their:

Company mission (if it’s a brand)
Branding
Audience

Then, you can decide if everything that they are and have to offer meshes with your fitness brand. From there, you decide what your partnership will look like and commit to a plan.

Check out our seven tips to know before starting your first influencer marketing campaign.

In conclusion

Ideally, you’re planning regular brainstorms to generate as many fitness content ideas as possible that you can pull from along the way. To stay organized and ensure a great content mix, consider using a content calendar.

While you’re working on creating and sharing the most engaging fitness content, consider DailyStory. Our digital marketing platform integrates with MindBody and Rhinofit to better serve fitness studios and gyms and offers such features as SMS text message marketing, email marketing, automation, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

10 tips for creating engaging content

While anyone can create content, the key is creating engaging content that helps your brand achieve your goals on social media and beyond.

Engaging content is all about getting results, such as:

Click-throughs to your website
Overall increase in website traffic
Social media mentions, likes, comments and/or shares
Opt-ins
Conversions
Sales

Ask yourself what you want your target audience to do when they consume your content. The extra effort to put out great (rather than just good) content is worth it.

About 69 percent of Twitter users have bought something because of a tweet, but about 65 percent of marketers find it difficult to produce engaging content.

The following are 10 tips for creating engaging content that will drive results for your brand.

Strive for originality

Easier said than done, right? Keep in mind that even though someone else could be talking about the same thing or using a similar image, but it’s all about your unique voice and spin.

Consider leveraging your personal experiences or even customer experiences, depending on what makes sense for your brand. Those are truly unique to you and your brand.

And lean on what makes your brand itself original. Not sure what that is? Check out our nine tips that can be considered a branding walk-through.

Think actionable

When engaging content translates into results, what action do you want your audience to take?

Consider your goals.

For example, let’s say that you want to promote a new product you’re launching. A salesy blog about the product probably won’t do the trick. Instead, think about creating an “unboxing” video, formatted differently for each social media platform, that can generate interest with a call to action directing consumers to your website to find out more (or offering a discount code to save on purchasing) is a more engaging way to go.

Of course, there is not a one-size-fits-all single piece of content (no matter how engaging) that will work. Think of every piece of content as simply a drop in the bucket that you can keep adding to in different ways with different angles.

But always keep the point of your content in mind. Draw their attention in and show them the next step that you want them to take. Just keep it simple.

Use (accurate) data

Numbers and statistics can be incredibly engaging in your content. An interesting fact (whether stataed or visually displayed) can catch internet users’ attention. But make sure that whatever data you’re using is accurate and up to date.

Anyone can post anything on the internet essentially. So, double check that you’re pulling your data from a trustworthy source.

Then, use relevant statistics wherever it makes sense to do so. What you use can easily inspire an infographic or a topic for a Facebook or Instagram Live conversation.

Explore storytelling opportunities

While numbers are great, stories are even more compelling.

Storytelling can help you connect with your target audience and boost your authority on a topic, depending.

Be sure to speak or write in a way that’s relatable to your audience, maintaining a conversational tone. Depending on the nature of the story, you want to spur emotions, such as joy or sadness.

Consider a fitness blog. Would you as a consumer want to know the fitness trainer’s list of certifications, or the backstory that inspired that person to get certified in the first place? The two are not exclusive. It’s just about the angle that the content creator takes to engage you. The list of certifications is not going to engage you, but that story might (and you can still see the list, too).

Think about real-time engaging content

The more you know and understand your target audience, the easier it is to identify their interests and plan your content accordingly. Consider asking:

What events are they interested in?
Which television shows or movies are they watching?
What holidays are significant?
Are there any special times of year for them (such as summer vacations, tax season or school exam periods)?

Creating content around and related to these real-time events and interests will be that much more engaging for your audience.

Provoke thought

Simply put, you want to make your audience think. Many topics that are related to your industry and brand might fall into a gray zone, where opinions reighn supreme. The idea is to ask the right open-ended questions in your engaging content to spark discussion.

For example, a baby supplies brand could ask its audience what the top tip is that every new mom should know. This can be presented a simple graphically designed image post on a social media platform with the goal of a robust comment thread.

Explore humor

Humor is an excellent way to engage with your audience. Making people laugh forms a stronger bond with your brand.

This can involve sharing a meme, celebrating an unusual holiday or just asking silly questions. Just make sure that what you think is funny is actually funny and not inappropriate, confusing or even offensive.

Humor can definitely go wrong, so tread carefully and stay true to your brand. Check out whether humor is right for your digital marketing.

Involve your followers

About 85 percent of consumers think that visual user-generated content (UGC) is more persuasive than branded photos or videos.

UGC is unpaid or unsponsored social media posts that consumers share about a product or service. Essentially, it’s content created by your audience that you then are resharing with that audience. Not only is it engaging, but it takes some of the burden off of you to create every piece of content from scratch.

Check out our 10 tips to encourage more user-generated content.

Visuals are a must

In this era of digital marketing, your visuals are everything. Images and especially videos are the most engaging types of content online.

Half of social media users prefer video over other types of content, and users share video content with others twice as much as any other type of content.

Take and use original photos as much as you can, and embrace video. Just keep in mind that a vast majority of videos (particularly on Facebook) are watched without sound.

Consider the 10 types of videos you can use in your digital marketing, and check out these 18 video-editing apps that you should know about.

And when photos or videos aren’t an option, consider infographics and other graphic images that you can use. We found these 11 free graphic design tools for the non-designer.

Plus, the right visuals can even increase your email conversions.

Mix up your content

Hold yourself accountable for keeping a fresh mix of content publishing from your brand. The same thing over and over is going to lose your audience’s interest and lose engagement.

Mix in videos with blog shares, polls with photo galleries, whatever makes sense for your brand.

A content calendar can help you stay organized with all your planning and ensure that you’re not overlooking the overall mix of your content. Check out our eight tips to create an effective content calendar.

In conclusion

Creating engaging content takes work, but that work is worth it. Remember your goals every time you plan and execute a new piece of content. Make sure that you’re not just sticking with “good” content but that you’re striving for “great” content.

See our seven tips to level up your content marketing.

As you create more and more engaging content, consider optimizing your digital marketing process, such as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

10 tips to encourage more user-generated content

User-generated content should be part of your overall digital marketing strategy.

Why? About 85 percent of consumers think that visual user-generated content (UGC) is more persuasive than branded photos or videos.

UGC is unpaid or unsponsored social media posts that consumers share about a product or service.

Of course, the amount of user-generated content out there is almost limitless. Smartphone owners take an average of 150 new photos per month (or about five photos per day).

Because social media thrives on authenticity, UGC is a great way to connect with your audience and build brand loyalty.

The following are 10 tips to help you encourage more user-generated content related to your own brand.

See what’s already out there

Whether you have an official UGC strategy or not, it’s entirely possible that user content about your brand (or showing your product) is already being posted on various social networks.

You can search by location, hashtag and/or keyword depending on the social media platform.

Doing so can help shed light on what’s already out there and what you can start with as you shape your UGC strategy and related campaigns.

Understand current consumer trends

This is somewhat related to seeing what UGC already exists for your brand but on a larger scale. The key is to focus on the habits and behaviors of your target audience.

See our seven tips for determining your target audience.

Ask yourself:

What types of photos and videos are my target audience posting?
Is there a particular style or product dominating the conversation?
When is your target audience typically posting?
Are they geotagging their photos and videos?

Once you have a better understanding of how your target audience shares content on social media, you can use that to help develop your own UGC-related campaigns.

Adopt a selfless, community-driven hashtag

Even if you already have a branded hashtag that you use on your branded content (and some customers might or might not also use), it’s a good idea to create and adopt a customer-focused hashtag that’s about them, not so much about you.

One example is Urban Outfitters promoting #UOonyou that’s related to apparel and beauty posts from their customers and #UOaroundyou that’s related to their music and apartment departments. These are actionable hashtags that put the focus on your fans and customers.

Remember, user-generated content might be related to you, but it’s not about you. The more you can put the spotlight on your online community, the better.

Include call-to-actions across your online presence

Just because you create a community-driven hashtag doesn’t mean that it will go viral (or even be used) immediately.

Beyond regular promotional posts talking about your community hashtag and how to share content, be sure to include wherever you can across platforms, whether that’s in your bio, cover image, website or elsewhere.

The more it appears across channels in different ways, the more fans you’ll reach. Just be specific about what the hashtag means and what type of content you’re looking for.

Display signage in your physical locations

While an analog method, displaying signage in your physical location(s) can be very effective.

Think about where you interact with your customers. Displaying signage about how they can share on social media and be part of your online community of fans can be very effective at checkout, for example.

Be clear about the type of content that’s relevant to your community hashtag and even which social media platform you prefer (if applicable).

Host an event

By hosting an event, you can create your own buzz for your fans and customers to post about.

Of course, the type of event you host depends on your brand. But in general, your event enables you to control the environment, the lighting, the availability of your products (perhaps in a goodie bag, for example) and more that can make a splash online.

No matter the event, promote your hashtag to attendees so that they can all see each other’s posts.

Embrace influencers

Working with influencers can help spread awareness about your brand across social media and the internet at large (depending on the influencer, course).

In a nutshell, an influencer is viewed as a leader among his or her networks, with large and engaged followings.

Obviously, working with an influencer can lead to a great kickstart to any user-generated content campaign.

But influencer marketing can take many different forms, depending on your goal and who you choose to work with.

See our seven tips before diving into influencer marketing. We also break down how to determine which social media platform is best for your brand’s influencer marketing.

Plan a giveaway tied to user-generated content

UGC is organic and authentic, but one way to spur more of it is through a giveaway where entries are tied to posting user-generated content.

Granted, no brand should just launch a giveaway without a confirmed plan of execution and legal considerations. But in general, by asking your following to submit images to be entered into your giveaway, you’re offering an incentive to share more great content.

Just be sure the theme of your giveaway aligns with what your fans already enjoy doing and that your prize encourages enough engagement to be worthwhile.

Consider alternative incentives for user-generated content

Beyond hosting an official giveaway, some brands have experimented with giving other types of incentives for UGC, such as discounts, free samples and so on.

Of course, you’ll want to plan accordingly, but anything you can incentivize for your following to share will naturally help them do so.

Feature user content elsewhere online

A popular choice here is your website. The idea that a fan’s photo could appear on your brand’s website or re-shared on other branded social accounts could be enough to keep sharing.

While this acts as a free type of incentive, it’s also just a great way to celebrate your fans and share your growing online community with others.

Many brands have a hashtag feed that populates on their website to show the latest related UGC being published.

In conclusion

Ultimately, your goals around user-generated content will naturally direct your path with this digital marketing tactic. Take the time to determine what it is that you want to accomplish, whether that’s increasing engagement, saving time on creating your own branded content or something else entirely.

Also, keep in mind that it’s always important to not only engage with the users sharing content about your brand but to ask permission if you plan on using his or her content in any way beyond an in-platform share.

Check out our seven tips to help improve your overall content marketing.

While you’re evaluating how to increase UGC around your brand, consider leveling up your digital marketing process. Is it everything you want it to be? DailyStory features automation, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

Premium content: What it is and how you can leverage it in your marketing

If content is king, then what would premium content be?

Content marketing itself is increasingly important for businesses to embrace in a digital world. Think of your website (or even your social media accounts) as a planet. Your content being the gravitational pull that generates traffic and engagement.

Then, of course, we leverage that traffic and engagement to fuel conversions, which equates to sales and boosting our bottom line.

The most common types of content include:

Blog articles
Graphic illustrations
Videos
GIFs

What is premium content?

Premium content then is original information that is valuable enough for website visitors (or social media users) to provide their contact information to get it.

To be more specific, premium content:

Answers common questions you encounter in your industry
Dives deeper into a topic to deliver knowledge
Offers tips and advice that can be acted on
Addresses challenges that your customers and potential customers face
Is relevant to the needs and wants of your customers and potential customers

How you package your premium content can vary. Some common types include:

Webinar, which is a video web presentation typically hosted by an expert in the industry sharing a presentation slide deck. It can be presented live and/or recorded and available long after the webinar is over.
eBook, which is a PDF that’s usually about a few dozen pages long. It’s very visual with professionally designed pages (including a cover). It’s ideal to include your pitch and contact information at the end of an ebook.
White paper, which is an in-depth evaluation of a topic in PDF format that includes expert research and is usually six to 12 pages in length.
Template, which gives customers or potential customers frameworks for creating something (like a content calendar, for example). This is usually offered in PDF format.
Interactive tools, which help measure or assess something (like a special calculator, for example). You might need to do some programming for this type of premium content.

Of course, to access premium content, visitors should fill out a web form with their name and email address at the very least. But it’s up to you if you’d like to collect more information up front, such as company name, profession, phone number, zip code, etc.

Just keep in mind that the more information you require, the lower the conversion rate of your premium content (no matter how appealing it might be).

After submitting the web form, users should immediately receive the premium content through a link or email.

5 ways to leverage premium content in your marketing

Beyond the tips below that are specific to marketing your premium content, check out our seven tips to level up your content marketing as well.

On your website

The homepage of your website is prime real estate to promote your premium content and is often the most trafficked page of many websites.

You also can use pop-up or slide-in ads on your website. The advantage of these is that they can appear on any of your web pages after a set amount of time.

Plus, very simple in-line links within other content can also be helpful. You can highlight and feature selected portions of your premium content in blogs, for example.

No matter how you promote on your website, make sure that your call-to-action button is bold and attention-grabbing.

Email promotion

Depending on your goals, email promotion may or may not make sense. If lead generation is the goal, then you would be promoting your premium content to contacts you already have.

But if it makes sense to do so, you can share teasers of your premium content in your regular email newsletter and other marketing emails.

Social media

Organic social media posts are a great way to promote your content to potential leads you’ve never come into contact with before. You can even encourage your staff to share the premium content link on their social media channels. And paid social media campaigns can help you target your ads even further to those who are most likely to engage with you.

Google

You can use Google AdWords to target the promotion of your content to internet users based on their search intent.

In addition, you can try Google Display Ads, which allow you to target websites, apps and videos that are part of the Google Display Network.

Print advertising

It may sound archaic, but there might be some print advertising opportunities to explore, depending on your target audience.

We recommend including a QR code in your print ad so that those interested can easily give you their contact information and download your content.

While you’re exploring how to best promote your premium content, consider leveling up your digital marketing process. DailyStory features automation, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

8 tips to create an effective content calendar

Content marketing has many moving parts.

From what to write to where to post, how to post and what else can be brought back (and when), you then have to ensure that everything you’re doing is engaging and relevant.

Organization is critical.

A content calendar can help you plan and maintain your content marketing strategy across platforms. Specifically, a content calendar is a written schedule of when and where you plan to publish your upcoming content. It can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be, with the option to include:

Upcoming content pieces
Status updates
Planned promotions
Partnerships
Updates to your existing content

About 40 percent of marketers say content marketing is a very important part of their overall marketing strategy. And effective content marketing comes down to great planning.

The following are eight tips to create an effective content calendar that works for your business and your content marketing goals.

Determine your goals

Your goals typically revolve around what you hope to achieve with your content marketing in general.

Are you hoping to generate new leads? Grow your social media following? Increase your website traffic?

Your goals impact not only who you’re targeting but also where and how often you should publish content, which then will guide what needs you have for your content calendar.

Check out our seven tips to level up your content marketing (which includes more than just goal-setting).

Create your content calendar template

A simple search will yield many content calendar templates that you can use. Whether you’re looking to adopt a new software application, download a pre-made template or create your own, remember that again, this can be as simple or complex as you want it to be.

Truly, a basic spreadsheet would do the trick.

Just make sure that it’s easy to update and share with other team members.

Some information that would be helpful to include:

Topic of the content
Type of content
Date and time for publishing
Channels (social media and otherwise) where the content will be published and/or shared
Point person for the content
Link to the published content
Confirmation that the content has, in fact, published according to the schedule
Any relevant notes

Look ahead to the calendar year

To start the planning process, it’s helpful to lay out the year ahead and make note of all the important events that your content can reflect and/or promote.

This can include:

Holidays
Product releases
Anniversaries
Seminars
Seasonal promotions

Doing so will not ensure that you can seize these opportunities with your content marketing.

Choose your publishing frequency

The frequency of your new content as well as the sharing of existing content is typically a balance between what’s ideal for your audience and what you have the resources (including time) to do.

It’s important to not overcommit yourself or your team. Success is more tied to quality than quantity. If you’re stretching yourself so thin just to publish something new, it’s not going to be as engaging or relevant as it could be otherwise.

On the flip side, overstuffing your content calendar just because you can also is not recommended.

Visualizing your frequency on a content calendar can help you find the best balance for your brand and your team. It can help you anticipate traditionally busier times and how your content can expand and contract accordingly.

Of course, keep in mind that your content calendar does not have to be set in stone. The beauty of planning your content further out in advance is that you can easily adjust well before you even begin working on impacted campaigns or content pieces.

Approach your content calendar with that flexibility in mind. You want to hold yourself accountable, of course, but you also want to adapt to whatever might pop up.

As far as sharing your content on social media platforms, consider these seven opportunities for social media automation that can save you time.

Consider your content workflow

If you’re a team of one, this is simple. However, as soon as you have more than just you involved in the content planning, you must consider:

Who needs to approve content and/or posts
How approval is communicated
The process for brainstorming new content
How to assign roles and what that should look like

Streamlining a workflow that works for your team will only benefit the overall effectiveness of your content calendar.

Evergreen content is just as important as new content

When developing a content calendar, the tendency is to populate it with content ideas that are new.

But don’t shortchange your existing, evergreen content, which is the content that (while it might seem old to you) is continually relevant and fresh for users.

Whether you’re updating, bringing back “as is” or repurposing your evergreen content entirely, this is a treasure trove of content opportunities that you can’t ignore. Be sure to make a point to sprinkle this existing content throughout your content calendar.

See our 13 tips to repurpose your content like a marketing rockstar.

Consistently update and review your content calendar

A content calendar, no matter how much information is on it, is only as good as how active you are using it.

Commit to checking in on your calendar regularly. Schedule at least monthly brainstorming planning sessions where you flush out the next month’s content calendar in greater detail and sketch out ideas for months further in advance that can be revisited as needed.

Struggling with marketing writer’s block? See our seven tips to beat it.

Ideally, you’ll want the flow of your brand’s content to stay uninterrupted no matter what the frequency is.

Monitor the performance of your content

The upside of content marketing is that everything is measurable. Take advantage.

Be sure to track how your content is performing across platforms.

What’s working, and what’s not?

Take those insights and apply them to future planning in your content calendar. It is through those performance insights that you can continually improve your content strategy.

While you’re embracing a new content calendar, consider leveling up your digital marketing strategy. DailyStory specializes in automation, email marketing, audience segmentation and more. Level up your process, and schedule a free demo with us today.

7 tips to level up your content marketing

You likely know by now that content is king.

But when it comes to content marketing, it’s almost too easy to find yourself spinning your wheels.

Creating content to simply create content, without a direction, plan or strategy can end up being a waste of resources. This is your opportunity to not only grow your audience reach but also show people what your brand is about and why they should both like and trust you (at least over time).

Of course, that type of traction ultimately contributes to your bottom line and boosts your ROI (return on investment).

Content marketing is essentially described as the creation and publication of content in order to build an audience and generate sales leads.

About 63 percent of businesses do not have a documented content marketing strategy.

Don’t be one of them. You’ve got to determine your strategy. The following are seven tips to help you level up your content marketing.

Define your target audience

Before you get to strategizing your content marketing, it’s imperative to identify the ideal customer you would like to target.

You may already know the demographics, interests and habits of who you most likely would sell your products or services to, but if not, a quick audit of your customer database should help.

Think about:

Age
Gender
Income
Profession
Hobbies
Interests
Challenges or needs

See our seven tips to determine your target audience.

Once you’re set on the characteristics of your ideal customer, you can approach your overall content marketing plan with that persona in mind. Truly, the “who” you’re writing for should have a huge impact on not only the content itself but the type of content you create and where/how you publish it.

Familiarize yourself with the sales funnel

Essentially, the simplest way to understand a sales funnel is to see it as the series of steps a consumer takes to become your customer.

There truly are many things that must happen between a prospect becoming aware of your business to the moment they take action and purchase from you.

However, keeping the idea of a sales funnel in mind will help keep your content marketing strategy (and even overall digital marketing strategy) on track. In addition, that focus can help prevent missed opportunities for customer conversion.

Think of it like this: Your potential customer has a problem, and you’re creating content to help them solve that problem, which brings awareness to your brand and kicks off a relationship of trust that you can nurture consistently through the conversion of a sale and beyond.

The four stages of a sales funnel are:

Awareness
Interest
Decision
Action

Learn more about the four stages of a sales funnel.

Map out your content marketing strategy

A great strategy begins with you placing yourself in your target audience’s shoes, so to speak. (Remember that every piece of content you create should be intended to help address that person’s needs.)

As you begin to outline your content marketing strategy, ask yourself:

Who are you trying to reach and engage?
What does your target audience need?
What type of content does your target audience prefer (blog article, video, ebook, etc.)?
Can any user-generated content be incorporated?
What do you want to achieve with your content in the next three months, six months and 12 months? How will you measure that success?
What is your budget?
How does your content marketing strategy fit into your overall business plan?

If you or your company has already been creating content (with or without a strategy), now is a good time to perform a content audit. Evaluate what has performed well and what hasn’t. Take note of what might have contributed to those successes and failures. These takeaways will help inform your new content marketing strategy.

In your plan, you’ll want to identify and map out:

Your content marketing goals
Any branding guidelines required to maintain a consistent voice across content and content promotion
A content plan (what types of content you’ll be creating)
At least a rough editorial calendar
A promotion checklist (where you’ll be consistently sharing your content)

Use a content calendar

As you get further and further into your content marketing plan, using a content calendar is a great way to keep yourself organized and focus, without getting overwhelmed.

We recommend including the following information in whatever content calendar you end up using:

Project timelines
Due dates
Names of the team member(s) in charge of production
Content details, such as keywords
Any other information that applies to your content

Online tools, such as Asana and Trello, can help you set up an accessible calendar for your entire team.

This organization will help you publish content consistently.

See our eight tips to create an effective content calendar.

Promote your content across channels

For successful content marketing, more is needed than simply hitting the publish button on your website’s blog. You must get your content to your intended target audience.

There are three types of distribution channels:

Owned: Channels that your company owns, such as your website, social media platforms and email list(s).
Earned: Third-party channels that you don’t have to pay for but have “earned” promotion through, such as social media shares and guest blogging.
Paid: Paying to promote your content on other channels, such as pay-per-click ads on Google or social media ads.

Just as you would have noted in your content marketing strategy plan, you should have a checklist of everywhere you plan on promoting your content.

Be sure that you’re not missing any platforms or channels that could potentially reach your audience.

Set up a system to evaluate and repurpose existing content

Never assume that you have to constantly publish new content in order to be successful in your content marketing.

In fact, any existing content can be repurposed into different, new pieces, which will not only further engage your target audience but also save you time.

The key is that you set a regular system and/or schedule for evaluating and identifying potential past content to repurpose.

Check out our tips for effectively repurposing your content.

Measure the performance of your content

About 65 percent of B2B marketers don’t measure the ROI of their content marketing.

Don’t be one of them (whether your business is B2B or B2C).

It’s imperative that you regularly measure the performance of all content and content promotion so that you have a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not with the goal of understanding the “why” behind those metrics.

That understanding will help you continue to improve your content marketing over time as you see what your target audience engages with and what they don’t.

Keep an eye on:

Page views
Time spent on page
Bounce rate
Social media engagement actions and rates

Trends should become apparent after the first few months.

As you level up your content marketing, consider optimizing your digital marketing process, such as automation, audience segmentation and enhanced email marketing capabilities, to name a few. DailyStory can help. Schedule your free demo with us today.

13 tips to repurpose content like a rockstar marketer

We can all agree that “content is king,” but not all of us have the time to constantly create increasingly more content.

This is where repurposing your existing content can come into play.

Repurposed content involves adding to or heavily revising your existing content to add more value. It gives you the option of potentially targeting a different audience than originally intended as well. However, repurposed content could also simply be a way of reaching whomever you missed the first time around.

Repurposing your original content:

Saves you time
Improves your search engine optimization (SEO)
Helps you reach a larger audience
Boosts your authority on the topic
Makes the most of your past effort

The following are 13 tips to repurpose content like a rockstar marketer.

Identify your best content

Ideally, you’re starting with quality, evergreen content (typically blog articles), looking for the timeless gems that have multiple angles that can be broken up and repurposed in different ways.

Take some time to review your website analytics. Depending on how far your data goes back, look at your top content by month for both page views and time spent on page.

The key is that you identify all your best pieces of content and compile them in an easy-to-manage format where you can spin-off and repurpose content easily.

To stay organized, consider these eight tips for creating an effective content calendar.

Create new blog posts based on what you’ve already done

Without grasping at straws for what to publish next, remember that great content can spinoff more great content.

For example, you can break up a past listicle into individual pieces of content. On the flip side, you can take a group of similar posts and compile them into more of a summary post.

Refresh and republish out-of-date content

Similar to spinning off your original content, you also can update and republish any out-of-date content you already have.

The hard work is already done for you in the core of the blog article, but things can change after a few years or even a few months, depending on the topic.

Depending on your blog article publisher, you might want to either update the existing article and include a note up top. Or, you can publish an all-new article and simply reference and/or link back to the original article.

Convert into a presentation slide deck

Any blog article with statistics, quotes and advice can easily be converted into slides, which can offer a more visual way to engage audiences with your original content.

There are a number of tools that can help with the slide deck creation, including Canva, PowerPoint and Google Slides. Once created, you could share on websites like SlideShare.

Summarize key points in an infographic

Infographics are essentially a visual outline summarizing some or all of your content.

If your content typically includes a lot of data, infographics are a great way to go. They can make that data much easier to understand and fill in as visual posts on your social media channels to capture the attention of your followers.

Of course, infographics aren’t just great with specific data points. Truly, you can represent any summary or key points of your content visually in an infographic.

When designing, keep your branding in mind (colors, fonts, so on) and maintain a consistent look throughout as much as possible. That will only strengthen your branding.

Some tools that make creating infographics a breeze include Piktochart and Visually.

Teach through an instructographic

Similar to infographics, instructographics are graphics that represent how-to content. In essence, you’re using the visual format to show your audience how to do something.

These are a great option to convert your content into, especially if you have a lot of how-to articles.

Instructographics are particularly popular on Pinterest, but don’t stress if you don’t have a business profile on Pinterest. These visuals can be engaging almost anywhere.

Don’t be afraid to repost on social media

There are a couple of facts about social media that many brands can forget:

Not everyone sees everything you post.
Even people who have seen something in the past likely won’t remember now.

This leaves your social media publishing efforts ripe for the resharing of your best (i.e. timeless) evergreen content.

For example, a tire shop could easily repost its winter driving tips before every major storm in its region.

However, you can always mix things up by changing up your chatter on the post and/or the visuals used.

At a loss? Consider leveling up your social media skills with any of these 17 free online courses.

Develop an email series for new subscribers

A well-developed blog article can easily be converted into an automated email series.

For example, you could leverage a tips article into one tip per email. Be sure to flush out each email with additional visuals to make it more engaging. Then, you can offer this email series to new subscribers. The pace can be up to you (daily, every three days, etc.), but be sure to communicate this in your initial email so that email recipients know what to expect from you.

This not only repurposes your existing content but acts as a lead generation tool for new email subscribers.

Not sure how to make an automated email series happen? You’ll want to check out DailyStory.

In other words, you’ll want to dive deeper into these 14 best practices for email drip campaigns.

Create an ebook

Often referred to as premium content, many ebooks actually began as blog posts once upon a time.

Identifying a blog article where you can dig a little deeper is perfect for developing an ebook. Guides are a common approach for many ebooks out there: “The Complete Guide to…” Another popular approach is compiling a series of interviews with industry thought leaders into an expert advice ebook.

But it all just depends on what you’re an expert in and what you believe your target audience will most value.

Remember that you’ll likely want to include an introduction, table of contents and conclusion, which is a bit different than the typical blog format you might be used to. High-quality visuals also are imperative.

You’ll also want to keep your branding present on every page in some consistent way.

Canva or Papyrus are great options for designing an ebook, even if you don’t have a lot of design skills.

This too can be used as a lead generation opportunity on your website. (Consider checking out our 12 strategies to capture leads without annoying everyone.)

Learn more about premium content and how you can leverage it in your marketing.

Consider a presence on Quora

Quora is essentially a question-and-answer platform that can be an easy opportunity to repost your existing content.

You can either use it in your replies to questions or as posts to existing user blogs.

If you’re not familiar with the free platform, create an account and start following “spaces” that are related to your brand and expertise.

(Of course, Quora is also a great place to see what people are asking about that can help you brainstorm new content topics for yourself.)

Speaking of Quora, check out our 18 low-cost marketing ideas for small businesses.

Consider guest blogging

At first, guest blogging might sound like a requirement to develop a lot of new material. This doesn’t have to be the case.

You can easily break out an angle of an existing blog article you already have for your guest blog, for example, and then link back to your bigger piece of content for anyone intrigued to find out more.

See our 10 tips to build up your personal brand and grow your business for more.

Think multimedia

Videos or podcasts are a great way to repurpose content. Not everyone has the time or wants to read.

Adapting some of your written content pieces into a video or podcast series is a great way to reach new audiences. You can use this existing content as a jumping off point for larger conversations that make sense in a podcast format.

Of course, we have more reasons why businesses should be creating more videos as part of their marketing strategy. But you don’t have to be a video-editing whiz to get started. Check out these 18 video-editing apps.

And if you’re stumped about where to go with your videos (even when basing them on existing content you already have), check out these 10 types of marketing videos to inspire you.

Host a webinar

This is a bit of a combination of our presentation and video suggestions, but webinars can be a very effective way to engage your audience on a topic that matters to them that you’re an expert in.

You’ll likely want to make your first one or few free to test the waters, practice before going live (even if it’s on a platform like Zoom that you’re familiar with) and plan a promotion campaign around each webinar.

However, it’s important to know that it’s okay if no one shows up. Why? Because you can still record it and then reuse that recording in different ways moving forward, such as a video tutorial on YouTube.

Check out our 12 expert tips for hosting your first webinar.

In conclusion

Your effort to repurpose content should be a regular part of your normal publishing process. Sometimes, we get so locked into creating new content, we forget the value of what we’ve already done.

If you can commit to reviewing past content for new repurposing opportunities, you’ll benefit from the saved time and the new audiences you can reach.

Want to save even more time with your digital marketing process? DailyStory specializes in automation, email marketing, audience segmentation and more. Level up your process, and schedule a free demo with us today.

Curated content: 4 tips on finding what to share on social media

Curated content is like the “get out of jail free” card that helps you grow and engage your social media audience.

Unlike the constant hamster wheel of creating organic content, curated content saves you time while also positioning you as an expert and serving your audience what they want.

It’s a win-win.

Curated content is “content gathered from trusted sources relevant to your industry,” according to Hootsuite.

See our five reasons why you should include curated content in your social media strategy.

But how is (good, relevant) curated content found?

Here are four tips to help you find the best curated content for your social media publishing.

Determine your ratio

Before anything else, it’s important to decide exactly how much curated content you want to mix in with your organic, unique content. How much is created by you, and how much is created by someone else?

A good mix to start with, according to Hootsuite, is 40 percent organic and 60 percent curated content.

Of course, always keep an eye on the performance of your posts and adjust as necessary. But this mix is a good place to start.

Consider the topics you want to cover

This depends on your brand. Do you want to be hyper-focused on the topics you’ll share with your audience, or should you be broader?

A custom closet company, for example, could focus on closet organization as a topic. Or, it can expand into the broader topic of interior design.

Take a moment to brainstorm the topics that are relevant to both your brand and your audience. What helps make you appear to be an expert in your industry?

Identify your sources of curated content

It’s time to make a list! The key to finding great curated content is to have your go-to trusted sources.

This can be as simple as taking your list of topics and begin Googling.

But you should feel confident that your selected sources are both trustworthy and in sync with your brand.

When you find a source, look through the entire website to see if the totality of the content produced is in line with your company’s goals and purpose. Also, examine the About section of the website to confirm the mission behind that publisher.

Remember that while content can be shared to your social media directly from a website, you can also share from another brand’s account on any social media platform.

So, while you want to compile a list of trusted websites, be sure to perform similar searches on the social media platforms you plan on sharing curated content. Your main list from Google might differ from who you find specifically on Twitter or Facebook, for example.

Consider yourself in a constant state of discovery

Now that you have your list of topics and sources, it’s time to commit to monitoring your channels so that you can find and share the specific pieces of curated content for your audience.

While curated content is a time-saver, you cannot slack on discovering what would work best. However, you can set a scheduled amount of time daily or weekly to stay on top of it.

Curated content is an excellent way to diversify your social media offerings, and it will naturally evolve over time. Keep an eye on how what you’re sharing is performing and pivot accordingly.

Need help finding the best tool to make curated content discovery easier? Check out our list.

And if improving your digital marketing process is on your mind, consider DailyStory, which features automation, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.

Curated content: 5 reasons why social media shouldn’t be all about you

It’s easy to assume that any social media presence you build for your brand has to be all about you: your company, your product, your voice.

This just isn’t true.

Curated content plays a huge role in many brands’ social media strategy.

What is curated content? It’s content that’s gathered from a variety of sources that you publish and share with your following. Of course, the key is that this content is relevant to both your brand and your audience.

This can include links to blogs, user photos (with the right attribution), native shares of other posts, and so on.

View several examples of curated content compiled by Brafton (scroll towards the bottom).

Here are five reasons why you should consider incorporating curated content into your marketing strategy.

Curated content is a time-saver (and easier, too)

The best path forward does not have to be the hardest path.

Because curated content already exists, you don’t have to create it. Huge time-saver!

Original content (like blogs, videos, photos, infographics, you name it) requires both time and resources. When you have the ability to create content, definitely do so, but curated content can help fill in the gaps and keep your creation workload more manageable.

It’s engaging

When you’re sharing content that’s relevant to your audience, you’re seizing that opportunity to have conversations with your followers about topics that are relevant to them.

Plus, it mixes up your content on any social media platform that is more appealing to followers.

Be viewed as an expert

Done right, curated content backs you up and shows your relevancy as a brand.

Whether you’re sharing relevant resources or a thought-provoking blog that sparks a discussion, your brand appears that much more tuned in to what is happening.

You slowly become the go-to over time.

Curated content grows your network

Sharing others’ content gives them more of a reason to consider sharing your content.

Of course, this doesn’t usually just happen.

The best way to turn the use of curated content into a network booster is to go beyond just sharing.

You can tag the creator in your post, of course. But why not take it one step further?

Contact the creator (whether on social media or via email) and let them know how you appreciate the content they’ve been creating. If you’re already sharing it and getting great engagement, you should mention that, too.

Content creation online can very easily feel like an echo chamber. Getting that sort of feedback as a creator is a great way to start a collaboration or a simple reciprocal relationship.

Stay informed

This is less about your audience and more about you.

Yes, the point of curated content is to inform and engage your audience without having to do the heavy lifting of creating the content yourself.

However, by making curated content a regular piece of your social publishing strategy, you’re staying in the mix on topics that are relevant to your brand. You get out of any self-imposed bubbles.

You won’t just look like the expert. You’ll actually be the expert.

If you’re not already using curated content, it can play a beneficial role in any larger marketing strategy. Just be sure to not lean too heavily on it. A healthy mix of original and curated is always best.

Dive deeper with our four tips for finding curated content.

Plus, see our list of 12 tools that can help you discover and share more on social media.

And if improving your digital marketing process is on your mind, consider DailyStory, which features automation, dynamic audience segmentation and more. Schedule your free demo with us today.