5 Ways to Make Your Blog Post Interactive

Static marketing content is as outdated as print-only newspapers. Just as day-old newspapers become litter in the streets, static digital content is useless to the average reader. With such an inundation of static marketing content, one piece hardly stands out from others, meaning brands blend and ideas fade.

Readers crave the dynamic nature of interactive digital content. An ion Interactive study measured the success and general feeling from marketers regarding interactive content. In terms of effectiveness, 93% of marketers say interactive media is great at educating buyers; 88% say it’s effective at differentiating brands, whereas static was found to be only 55% effective. Not convinced yet? Did you know that interactive content also drives 2X more conversions than static content?

Despite these numbers, many marketers shy away from interactive content. It might be because it has a reputation for being expensive and labor-intensive. But that is an unfair reputation. Creating interactive elements is, in fact, easy, fast and even free.

These five tools allow you to start immediately interacting with customers, which draws them in, converts at higher rates and gives feedback to improve your business.

1) PlayBuzz

The original PlayBuzz site is for the average Internet user interested in which Hogwarts house she belongs to or wants to test her knowledge about 1990s TV shows, but PlayBuzz’s business site is tailored to empowering companies to generate an interactive feature, embed it in their marketing content and watch user engagement rise and their network grow.

With PlayBuzz you can create free countdowns, polls, personality quizzes, flip cards, trivia, rankable lists, general lists, gallery quizzes and a swipe voting feature made popular by dating apps. Each element has an appealing quality that catches readers’ attention and can communicate information quickly in a visual manner. It also keeps visitors on your page longer and is designed for social sharing.

When choosing from so many options, remember highly interactive features like quizzes and swiping are good for social platforms and visually driven posts, while flip cards and polls are good for text-heavy content.

When you are designing these embeddable features, keep in mind your company’s brand and voice, this will ensure consistency while adding that added bonus customers appreciate. The best way to track the success of PlayBuzz content is to monitor its social performance in shares, engagement and views.

PlayBuzz is so user-friendly, you will forget you are marketing while playing with the design tools and fun features. Check out these flip cards we made with it.

2) SlideShare

Slide presentations are something nearly every professional has seen or used, whether it’s from business trainings, college lectures or group projects. Putting information in a condensed, easily-digestible format is one of the most popular marketing, sales and proposal tactics because of its familiarity and logic.

SlideShare can be embedded into any blog post and breaks down a topic for readers in a much more visual and attractive manner than static paragraphs of text. Try it with an existing post that needs more visits but provides valuable content.

Take text from the blog, simplify it for each slide, keeping word count at a minimum, include a CTA on the last slide, and embed the feature somewhere in the post. If you put the slides near the top, you can include a friendly disclaimer such as, “Don’t have time to read the rest? We summed it up for you here.”

Readers appreciate options for taking in information and really appreciate when you understand their limits. SlideShare transforms already written content into powerful snippets of data.

Don’t think of SlideShare as a place to put all the information in bullet points; think of it as a place to present an idea in a visual and condensed manner. It might be a good challenge to fit a hefty amount of information into a slide show. This exercise will help you write succinctly and think about content in an out-of-the-box way.

Give the most important points priority instead of cramming an entire blog post into a slide show. Graphs, statistics and quick thoughts are especially effective on SlideShare.

3) Make a GIF

Regardless of how you pronounce it (“JIF” or “GIF”), these little graphics excel at entertaining and inserting some fun into your digital content. It shows you have a sense of humor and don’t take yourself too seriously. That said, make sure to use GIFs sparingly and only for appropriate topics.

Many websites have tools for creating your own animated GIF or have a domain of popular ones for every emotion and situation. This imagery also warrants the use of BuzzFeed-worthy titles and descriptions to accompany your chosen GIFs.

This type of interactive content performs excellently on social platforms because of the flashy element and viral qualities. These qualities lend themselves well to tracking social success easily by monitoring shares, likes and engagement.

When choosing or creating a GIF, make sure it is a reference your audience will understand. You wouldn’t want to use a GIF from a popular TV show if it’s not likely your customers are familiar with it. However, if pop culture references are common in your content, feel free to use GIFs as freely as you'd like.

Websites such as GIPHY make the art of finding the right GIF quick and entertaining, while at the same time providing you with everythin you need to share with your audience. Take the GIF below - I typed "content marketing' into the search box, found this gem from Mad Men, and simply copied the embed code into the blog. Easy!

4) Qzzr

If the products or services you are marketing lend well to quizzing your prospects, Qzzr is the right tool for engaging them further. This free quiz-making platform allows you to create a quiz in minutes, embed it into any post and track the results. It also comes with a WordPress plugin for easy integration.

Customers love to test their knowledge, if only to prove how much they know. They also love to reveal pieces of their personality and discover new sides of themselves. Giving your customers these opportunities through quizzes is the perfect gateway for interaction and connection.

Keep quizzes as short as possible so as not to fatigue your readers. Make sure the answers are pointed and don’t allow quiz takers to avoid questions. There is nothing worse than a vague answer and worthless results. And there is nothing better than seeing interactions with customers and the fruitful rewards of getting specific.

You might use a quiz if you are trying to target specific products or services to your customers as they begin their buying journey. The fashion-delivery company Stitch Fix requires all first-time users to take a fashion quiz to determine which products will please them most.

You can emulate this model or use a quiz for testing your customer’s knowledge about your industry, current events or other relevant topics. Readers especially love quizzes that tell them which [car, building, time period, scientist, politician, 1980s pop star, etc. they are most like.

The great thing about Qzzr is the ability to integrate with CRM systems. This feature allows you to track the success of each quiz, pull data from the results and target customers more accurately and personally.

5) Podcasts

Podcasts aren’t just for Serial fans or listeners of public radio. The audio format is a gold mine for the busy professional. It gives multi-taskers a chance to consume your content on their terms. There might not be enough time in the day to read all the content circulating within certain industries or interact with specific companies.

But if marketers give professionals a way to gain all the benefits of static content during their daily commute without burying their faces in a screen, they might see a rise in interest and customer conversation. It’s also great for audio learners and is a much more casual and open environment for bringing guests and commentators to foster a fruitful discussion.

Before creating a podcast, study up. Listen to all different kinds of podcasts to figure out what works. It’s also good to pay attention to which length is appropriate. If you are getting more downloads and listens for shorter episodes, your customers might want quick conversation. But if you see a demand for longer form podcasts, your customers probably appreciate deep dives into certain topics.

Bring in guests for fresh perspective. Try implementing different segments to break up the monotony of a single episode. But make sure to get into the groove of podcasting before you give up or count your early success.

As you develop your podcast and find what works, you will find you can adjust and evolve episode to episode based on listener feedback or performance statistics. The key is keeping your eyes and ears open. Podcasting is just as much about listening as it is about talking.

Boost Your Personal Brand with These 4 Content Marketing Tips

Content marketing -- in the form of sharing useful content such as blogs or videos with web viewers who relate to your brand -- can be one of the most successful digital marketing methods for your personal brand, but only with a solid strategy in place. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 B2C Content Marketing Report, 47 percent of the most effective content marketers have a documented strategy in place, while only 5 percent of the least effective content marketers have devised strategy.

With the abundance of types of content and channels to distribute content on, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Use these four simple techniques to positively use content marketing to boost your personal brand and extend your reach and visibility in the global online space.

1. Produce meaningful content on your website 

First, determine your target audience and what passions you have that relate to your professional objectives. You might want to create written posts or videos where you share your expertise by teaching the audience a new skill. This helps cultivate an image of you as an authority in your field.

Don’t just promote yourself in your content. Think about the content consumer first, and how you can best help them. To brainstorm ideas for your content, ask yourself:

• What topics am I an expert on?
• What is the best way to convey my knowledge—through writing, a podcast, a photo slideshow, an infographic, a video, or something different?
• Would I be more helpful I interviewed another expert and weaved their testimonial into my content, or if I made their interview the primary content focus?
• How can I make my content more accessible to more types of users, such as by adding a transcript to a video for hearing impaired visitors, or by adding photography to a blog post for people more likely to want to consume images?

Regarding frequency for posting on your own site, a 2015 study by HubSpot found for companies with 10 employees or less, blogging at least 11 times per month is ideal. The study also found companies that published at least 16 blogs per month received three-and-a-half times more traffic than companies that published four posts or less per month. Start out slowly in the beginning if you’re trying to find your content marketing rhythm, but aim for continual higher frequency.

While your content should not focus on you, it should help you generate positive sentiment and exposure for your personal brand. Achieve this by linking back to an About Me page through your author bio link so people can learn more about you—and do business with you—if they like your content, or add a call to action to get in touch with you at the bottom of the post.

2. Offer to guest blog

Now that you’re an exemplary content-producing machine on your own website, search for other stars in your industry you can network with and whose audiences you can also share your professional prowess with. Choose influencers you admire, reach out to them and tell them why they interest you, and explain how you relate and how you can help their audiences.

Offer to create a post for their website, and ask for a link back to your website in return for your useful content. This generates a positive backlink that benefits your personal brand’s search engine optimization, while exposing you to a new audience that might lead to new business. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to do guest posting effectively. Also, let them know you’ll promote the post through your own network via a promotion on your website, through an email newsletter, or via social media. By offering to help other influencers, they’ll be more likely to help you promote your content, as well.

3. Host guest content on your site

Like guest blogging on other sites exposes your personal brand to new potential contacts, letting an authority create quality content for your site is also beneficial. Your site becomes more well-rounded and a better source for insightful information that will help drive traffic up, while the guest poster is likely to share their post through their own networks, bringing new visitors to your website.

You can also use guest content to promote your own related content. Keep in mind, promoting your personal brand is not the goal with hosting guest content. Rather, make your sure any promotion of your content is relevant and non-invasive to the post. A simple way to ensure this is to use a widget on your site that automatically displays related posts on the bottom of the article or video. You can also include “Read more related to this topic” links on the bottom, and customize what you share.

Content marketing is a waste of time if no one is seeing your content. Entrepreneur recommends using paid outlets, such as sponsored LinkedIn updates, to increase your reach, but amplifying your content doesn’t have to be costly. Save time and money by using free social networks and digital connections to get your content to more targeted consumers.

4. Set up profiles on all applicable social networks where your target audience is.

Content related to personal branding will most likely be useful on professional networking sites such as LinkedIn, while journalists and media pros are also likely to have Twitter accounts. When promoting your content, write posts with search engine keywords in mind, and include a call to action to entice those who see the post to click.

On the content post, encourage discussions to keep readers engaged and coming back to posts by asking questions on the bottoms of posts, or by promoting a discussion via the post you share the content through. Don’t just copy and paste links into social networks or on message boards—experiment by sharing photos or videos from your content to better adapt to the network’s algorithm, and constantly test posting times and types of posts to optimize your reach.

Once you’ve built relationships with other influencers, share your content with them when you feel it’s relevant to their audiences. A successful content marketing strategy is based on how much value you provide for both an audience and those who help you share your content. Create and share with a philosophy focused on helping, and you’re on your way to strengthening your personal brand through content marketing.

10 Ways to Learn About Your Target Audience

Unless you’re intimately familiar with the psychology of your target market, any demographics you claim are mere semantics. If you want your messaging to be effective and your brand to be enticing, you need to go a step further and get to know your customers better. How do you do that? Here are 10 ways to know your target audience:

1. Challenge your assumptions.

The first step is the most important, since it may even help you redefine your target audience. Don’t assume anything. Let’s say you’ve decided your target market is middle-aged women. Why? You may have gone even further, assuming certain styles or directions of messaging appeal to them.

But don’t take any of this for granted. Unless you have more than anecdotal evidence backing up your claim, ditch it.

2. Learn from what others have found.

This is entry-level market research at its finest. Read up on some case studies, examples and psychological analyses by marketers who have come before you. Sources include industry reporters, general market researchers and, in some cases, sociologists. Filter your data to ensure the research is as relevant and as recent as possible.

3. Create a customer persona.

Once you’ve collected enough objective data to start forming solid conclusions, you can start crafting a customer persona. This persona is basically a fictional character who exhibits all the traits an “average” member of your target audience is expected to have.

Include hard factors like age, sex, education level and income, as well as disposition factors like temperament, sensitivity or curiosity.

4. Conduct large-scale quantitative surveys.

Now it’s time to back up your assumptions and conduct some primary research (rather than the secondary research described above). Start with large-scale quantitative surveys, covering the widest cross-section of your audience possible. Your questions should be multiple-choice, giving you hard statistics that can teach you about your audience’s habits.

Ask questions relevant to your brand and product, such as, “How important is X to you?” or “What is your biggest consideration for purchasing a X?”

5. Conduct small-scale qualitative surveys.

Complement your quantitative research with qualitative research -- the data won’t be as objective, but you’ll learn more detailed insights on your audience’s psychological makeup. Target a small sample of audience members, and use open-ended questions to get long responses you can interpret.

Again, ask questions relevant to your brand and product like, “What does the following phrase mean to you?” or “What do you feel when you see this image?”

6. Look to your competitors.

Your competitors may have already done such market research and put it into action. If they target the same audience you do, observe and learn from the way they write and advertise to their potential customers.

If they don’t, look for ways that you can distinguish yourself.

7. Look to other popular products and services.

Look for products and services that your target audience is already using -- unrelated to your industry. How do these brands position themselves? What kinds of messaging do they use?

8. Listen to social conversations.

Use social listening software in combination with targeted social lists to zero in on what your customers are saying online. What trending topics are they following most closely? Whom do they usually interact with, and why?

Again, you can look for other brands that may emerge as successful messengers.

9. Examine interactions with your brand.

You can use social listening software again, and tap into Google Analytics to examine user behavior on your site. Evaluate how your target demographics are interacting with your brand: Do you get lots of blog comments and social shares? Use this data to fine-tune your approach.

10. Allow some room to grow.

You’ll never have a perfect understanding of your target audience. Even if at some point you did, your audience members would evolve and change as soon as you figured them out. Allow some breathing room in your strategy, and always strive to understand your audience a little bit better.

None of these methods can, by themselves, give you a perfect portrait of the “average” customer in your target demographics; populations are too diverse and too unpredictable for any one set of assumptions to hold true.

Instead, you need to collect your findings from multiple sources and merge them into one comprehensive, multifaceted vision. From there, you’ll be able to better shape everything you create for your audience, from blogs to headlines to calls to action. 

What can a blog do to your business?

Till recently, Influencer Marketing as a term was used in the context of movie and sports stars who endorsed various products and services in the mass media. Enterprises earmark a sizable portion of their marketing budget to engage these offline celebrities as a part of their Influencer Marketing strategy.

However, with Internet penetration growing exponentially and social media becoming ubiquitous, Influencer Marketing has touched the next generation of celebrities – bloggers, video bloggers and micro-bloggers.

Bloggers, who are a source of inspiration for hundreds and thousands of loyal followers, have become important influencers because they are seen as authentic and trustworthy people. In a recent report by McKinsey marketing-inspired word-of-mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising, and these customers have a 37 per cent higher retention rate.

Another key aspect going in the favour of bloggers as influencers is the big connect they have with the new age social and mobile first consumers. Brands, both big and small, are increasingly engaging in blogging as an Influencer Marketing tool for the following reasons:

1. COST-EFFECTIVENESS: In comparison to engaging movie and sport celebs, collaborating with bloggers as a part of Influencer Marketing is much more cost-effective.

2. HUMANISATION OF BUSINESS: Since blogging is a conversational style of writing where every blogger has his/her own tonality, it results in greater connect with audiences and in a native fashion.

3. ENHANCEMENT OF CREDIBILITY: When bloggers, being a third party, talk about a brand or a product, it creates an objective-based impression among readers and enhances the credibility of the brand.

4. EFFECTIVE CONNECT WITH TARGETED AUDIENCE: Every blogger has their own area of expertise for writing and hence a niche set of followers. Therefore, collaborating with bloggers with right set of followers helps brands hit the bull’s eye in terms of audiences.

5. DRIVING MORE TRAFFIC ON BRAND’S WEBSITE: Since bloggers generally integrate the images and links of the products and services they are writing on, it results in driving higher and relevant traffic back to the brands website.

6. ENHANCING SCALABILITY: The availability of Influencer Marketing platforms empowers brands to scale up the collaboration with bloggers from 10’s to 100’s based on budget and campaign requirements.

The key challenge a brand faces is to find and connect with right set of bloggers. Below are few points a marketer should consider whileengaging with social influencers:

Relevance of the blog and blogger: Marketers must check what the blogger writes about and if the blog followers fall under the brand’s TG. Quality/tonality of the blog and background of the blogger are equally necessary to determine before engaging.

Audience engagement: A good blogger is the one who knows how to get audience hooked. One way to see the audience engagement is to check if a blog is receiving any comments from its visitors. Apart from that, social media connections to the blog can be a sound parameter to measure the audience engagement.

Reach of the blog: Reach is an essential metric to attain the popularity of a blog. One can ask for the monthly traffic analytics of the blog to get the insights into its reach. The higher the numbers, the better!

Influencer Marketing, powered by blogging, is the fastest growing channel for digital customer acquisition and integrating it as an integral part of marketing mix is the best way to turbo-charge your social sales.

How to Optimize Your Website for International Search

Most websites are only optimized for the country that the business lives in, but for companies to expand, they should also optimize for international search. Search engine optimization continues to be the most effective way to drive traffic to a website. Focusing on one market may limit traffic and revenue if you aren’t thinking about international customers.
To expand to an international focus, keep these guidelines in mind:

Consider keywords in other languages

Make sure that you have considered keywords in other languages. Even if your site is English only, people will often search in their native language. If your site is optimized for keywords in other languages, you will show up in search. From there, chances are that the person looking will still be able to use your site. If the person does not speak English, he or she will be able to use tools like Google to translate the page and get an understanding of the products and services you sell.

Provide domains that are country-specific

Most countries have their own domain extension. German websites, for example, most commonly end in “.de” rather than “.com”. In order to make your website friendly for international search, it is beneficial to create landing pages with different domains for different countries. Search engines in-country will pick up the site that is most relevant for their market. For example, www.website.de would rank higher in Germany than www.website.com.

Translate content when possible

It is not essential to translate entire websites for international search since English is so commonly read and spoken. However, it is important to have at least some content translated and localized for international markets so that the site is relevant for search engines. Some websites have sections of the website that are translated with a disclaimer that only some of the content could be translated for local languages.

Focus on on-page SEO

Make sure to consider the following on-page SEO guidelines for international search engines:

• Alt Attributes and Imagery – Alt attributes and images need to have keywords and those keywords should be in all relevant languages.
• Consistent Mapping – If you do use the local domain, e.g. “.de”, make sure that that all navigation links on that domain also lead to a “.de” page. This tells Google that this page is in German and that the site is relevant for the German market. Also, make it easy for the user to be able to switch languages if you are not able to translate the entire website. Then he or she can get full content on the main site.
• Keywords – It is important to do keyword research for each region that you are selling to. Doing translation of your English keywords alone is not the most effective way to find the appropriate keywords for your target country. Think of how many ways we say different words in English. If there was just one translation, you might miss the most commonly searched terms.

International Social Media

Social media sites are not the same for all countries. For example, while professionals in the US use LinkedIn as their professional networking site, people in Germany use Xing. To further optimize for international search, set up social media pages for each market and populate them with rich content that contains keywords.
By considering the above, your international SEO strategy can be as smooth and effective as your domestic one.

How to Boost Your YouTube Ranking (Infographic)

Of all the pieces of content you create to promote your brand, none are more labor-intensive, perhaps, than videos.

With all that work, you want to make sure your video is seen. But that depends on how YouTube indexes it. So, how do you make sure you’re correctly boosting your YouTube rankings?
It's simple...sort of.

Take a look at this infographic below from TollFreeForwarding.com and Gryffin Media about boosting your YouTube ranking.