Customers overwhelmingly rely on a company’s content for purchasing decisions. One survey found that most people prefer content over social media, reviews or contact with a sales rep.

So, how can you ensure your content marketing makes the right impact? 

Dig into the following information to discover the benefit of promoting engagement over pushing sales in your written content. Plus, learn how to combine the two strategies successfully.

Key takeaways:

• Promoting customer engagement is a better long-term content marketing strategy but requires patience and consistency.
• Pushing sales can be good for quick wins but has a lower return on investment.
• Companies often need good data and an outside perspective to create content marketing strategies that strike the right balance of encouraging engagement and asking directly for sales.

1. Realize that good content marketing is like diet and exercising

Staying healthy as a business is similar to taking care of physical health. Most of us recognize that getting healthy (whether losing weight, gaining muscle or something else) requires patience and long-term commitment for lasting success.

Your content marketing is similar. Pushing sales is good for short wins that are rarely sustainable on their own (like a crash diet).

Pushing can be effective when you need a rapid boost or want quick data. However, engagement through “pull marketing” is the way to go if you want enduring success.

You must provide consistent long-form content that educates, informs and entertains your target audience to draw them in and convert them to loyal followers. At the same time, you need intelligent SEO strategies that keep you visible on search engines.

In other words, good content marketing that promotes engagement is a “healthy lifestyle” for your business. Your business needs a steady program of valuable content to attract high-value customers that engage with your brand.

Dig deeper: The art of natural funneling: How to lead your readers without forced CTAs

2. Understand what consumer engagement looks like

Customers have more influence in the modern market. As a result, you have to establish a mutually beneficial relationship with inbound marketing. 

Compelling content that provides real value through actionable information builds trust and loyalty. Real engagement is more than a vote with a customer’s dollars. A client becomes a champion of your brand and increases their customer lifetime value.

Boosting engagement is more valuable than simply getting a brief uptick in sales. When your company receives a notable sales spike, don’t just congratulate yourself for a job well done.

Take time to figure out what worked, why and how to maintain that response with continuous content highlighting your brand’s value to your audience. Determine engagement by tracking how your audience interacts with you through comments, likes, clicks and subscriptions.

Discover how to match your brand strategy with your customer goals. Use content marketing and SEO practices to position yourself as an expert and thought leader that helps clients succeed. 

3. Recognize when you’re pushing sales too much

As a marketing professional, it’s surprising how often experienced business people think they’re providing value in content when they’re really still pushing sales. Anyone can get so deep in the weeds of their own industry that they lose sight of building customer relationships. 

Avoid having “sales breath” in your content by only promoting products. Desperation and self-interest push good leads away. Instead, sincerely look to help people, whether they use your service or not.

Creating the right blend of engagement and pushing sales is difficult and often requires an outside perspective to see where you’re missing the boat. You can do this through surveys or with the help of an experienced consultant or agency.

4. Discover how to push sales correctly

The need to push sales at the right time will never die. Your business requires methods to reach customers who know they need your solution and are ready to buy.

The trick to not wasting your advertising budget on low-return campaigns is constant measurement and good tactics, just like with your engagement strategy. Monitor and figure out who comes in your door (physically or virtually) in response to those campaigns. 

Now, study your ideal customers to find out what they like. Then provide excellent written content that they can respond to and keeps them coming back for more.

5. Use proven strategies for building engagement

Time-tested content marketing strategies continue to get results. Your biggest needs are quality and consistency. What makes that difficult is staying in tune with what your audience wants.

As you create content, ask yourself and your team:

• Do these pieces have an honest and relevant tone?
• Does the subject matter to our intended readers?
• Are we bringing a unique perspective?
• Are we supporting our information with good data?
• Are we giving readers something specific they can use?

To get engagement, always wrap up your content with a clear call to action that tells your readers how to apply what they’ve learned or maximize results with your help. As you build credibility and provide value, clients will take you up on that offer more and more.

Keep working on your content marketing

Devising the right blend of engagement and pushing sales takes time and smart strategizing, just like improving your physical health. 

Create a solid marketing plan that addresses customer concerns and continually refine your methods to create written content that leads to loyal customers.

The post 5 tips for balancing ‘push’ and ‘pull’ in content marketing appeared first on MarTech.

That was the focus of a panel at The MarTech Conference, here are some of the takeaways from that discussion.

AI requires human supervision

As AI evolves, capabilities will expand. Can AI take over a specific business function and run it unaided? Not yet, according to Ricky Ray Butler, CEO of BENlabs, which uses AI to place brands’ products in entertainment and influencer content.

Artificial general intelligence or AGI is the kind of technology that is completely automated, and that’s simply not available yet.

“There is still human supervision [required] when it comes to data inputs or [telling the AI] what the purpose is to have successful outcomes,” said Butler.

“What AI really brings to the table is when it comes to the feedback loop,” he said. “It can structure data and a massive amount of data in a way that the human mind can’t even comprehend or compute. And it can do that at a scale where it can look at millions and millions of videos and monitor, prioritize and then also…make predictions with successful outcomes or or potentially unsuccessful outcomes. We are literally building a brain when we’re leveraging this type of technology to do what the human mind does, but to be able to do it even better and even more accurately.”

Dig deeper: A beginner’s guide to artificial intelligence

Generative AI writing tools need writers

Generative AI writing tools position themselves as writing assistants, not writers, said Anita Brearton, CEO of marketing technology management platform CabinetM.

“[These tools] describe their value prop as productivity,” she said. “They can help you write faster, they can improve SEO in fact.”

They can also help writers get started when all they’re staring at is a blank page. “They’re good for refining texts and creating some A/B versions of texts,” Brearton said.

Generative AI continues to improve in order to help creatives make text-based and visual content.

“I think we’re entering a very disruptive phase for creativity for designers, illustrators, video producers and writers,” said Paul Roetzer, CEO of the Marketing AI Institute 

A marketer’s point of view is more important than ever

As AI gets adopted for more marketing functions, marketers using these tools are needed to guide the technology and point it toward specific marketing objectives.

“The issue right now is the AI doesn’t have your knowledge of your product, it doesn’t have a knowledge of your customers, it doesn’t have knowledge about the internal politics of your company,” said Pam Didner, VP of marketing for consultancy Relentless Pursuit. “[AI doesn’t] have knowledge about even the road map that you are going to produce for your company. So AI can write very well, but you still need to add your own point of view. That’s where a human comes into play.”

Leaders need to know about AI when hiring

When AI is adopted by organizations, leadership needs to know how work has changed so they make the right hires.

“ChatGPT woke everyone up to AI, so we’re all testing the tools,” said Roetzer. “There’s pressure on CMOs and CEOs from boards and investors to figure out AI. Everybody needs to have a plan, and you have a whole bunch of leaders who don’t understand the underlying technology that now have to make decisions around staffing.”

He added, “We need to rapidly accelerate the comprehension of what AI is and what it’s capable of doing, what its limitations are. But, also [we need] to come to grips with where it’s going.”

Register and watch The MarTech Conference here.

The post What marketers should keep in mind when adopting AI appeared first on MarTech.

Not holding out for long. Thirty-one percent of those not using it expect to do so within a year and 46% within two years, according to the report from Botco.AI.

Why we care. Artificial intelligence is not new to marketing technology. It’s been part of it for at least a decade. However, since OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT last December, generative AI/chatbots are everywhere in martech. So many AI-powered products, features and platforms are being released now that we started a weekly roundup.

Ford’s Model T transformed transportation by making cars affordable to an enormous part of the population. AI has reached its Model T moment and reached it in less than six months.

What it’s being used for. Two-thirds of those surveyed say they use it for brainstorming sessions, first drafts and outlines. Nearly half (49%) say they rely on AI to produce final content. More specifically:

• Image creation 69%
• Text creation 58%
• Audio/voice 50%
• Chatbots 37%
• Coding 36%

B2B leads the way in using AI, with 78% having adopted it, compared to 65% of B2C companies.

Dig deeper: 3 ways B2B marketers can use generative AI

Why it’s not being used. Exactly half of those not using generative AI yet say its because of the team training required to use it effectively. Meanwhile, 45% cited the cost and 45% cited privacy and security concerns as obstacles.

What are they using. The most commonly used tools are:

• ChatGPT 55%
• Copy.ai 42%
• Jasper.AI 36%
• Peppertype.ai 29%
• Lensa 28%
• DALL-E 25%
• Midjourney 24%

Methodology. Botco.AI surveyed 1,000 B2B and B2C marketing professionals in March. Three-quarters of them were from companies with 100 or more employees.

The post 73% of marketers now using generative AI tools appeared first on MarTech.

You walk into Home Depot to buy a rake because you need to do some yard work and then decide to browse the aisles to get ideas for your dream kitchen (that you just started dreaming about and don’t have the time or budget for yet). You glance through the pre-built setups to get a sense of your style and learn what options are available.

As you’re walking away, rake in hand, a sales associate stops you and asks you to sign up today for a free home consultation to start your dream kitchen immediately and the option to sign up for a payment plan. 

You’re immediately struck with anxiety and fear because you didn’t intend to do this today. You were simply browsing and finding out the information available to you so you can decide down the road.

You leave the store feeling rushed and like you’re just a number. You do get your dream kitchen two years later but from Lowe’s.

That sounds like a rough experience, right? Your customers feel this way when you put a demo CTA (call to action) at the end of every content you distribute.

They may have landed on your site to learn more about marketing automation software and are nowhere near the final stretch to the demo request. And when they are ready, they’ll remember that experience and search for other options (aka your competition).

This article explores the importance of a smooth customer journey for readers and explains how a more personalized marketing approach can help you achieve it. 

Key takeaways: 

• Understanding the three marketing funnel stages is crucial for creating a smooth user journey.
• Incorporating both hard and soft CTAs into your content is essential.
• Email marketing is a powerful tool for nurturing leads. 
• Leading readers down the marketing funnel naturally is crucial for creating a seamless user journey and boosting conversions.

Understanding the marketing funnel

Let’s talk about the marketing funnel. It’s the journey that potential customers take from first hearing about your brand to purchasing. There are three stages to this funnel: 

• Awareness.
• Consideration.
• Decision.

Awareness

At the awareness stage, you want to create content, like blogs that educate your audience on the benefits of your product or service without being too salesy. An active blog is one of the most favored ways to share content, with 79% of companies using it reporting a positive ROI ROI. Within your blog, you can add CTAs to things like newsletters, social media channels and other engagement-focused CTAs.

Lavender.AI does this throughout their blog, guiding readers to more relevant content after reading the article, naturally moving them through the funnel. No demo. No hard pitch.

Consideration

In the consideration stage, potential customers are weighing up their options, so you must provide detailed information to help them make an informed decision. This is the perfect time to offer additional resources like white papers and case studies to help build trust and showcase your expertise.

In the example below, Demandbase ends their article with social proof — inspiring readers to read a case study about the topic from the article, giving context and value to the information. 

Decision

Finally, in the decision stage, you want to make it easy for potential customers to convert without being too pushy or aggressive. A clear and compelling CTA is crucial, but creating a seamless user experience that doesn’t feel forced is important.

ClickUp uses a free demo CTA in an article on the best ClickUp templates. The placement feels relative and fitting because the reader would likely want to use the templates they just read about.

More than 40% of the evaluated B2B SaaS websites had a “Get a demo” CTA, according to the State of the Interactive Product Demo 2023 report. So while these CTAs are often used, their placement can make or break a conversion.

Your CTAs should speak to where customers are and what they are looking for and should never feel pushy or forced. The key to conversions is creating a nurturing flow that gives buyers the valuable information they need to make a purchasing decision. 

Dig deeper: How to optimize your content for each step of the buyer’s journey

Incorporating CTAs into content

Just like tacos, there are two types of CTAs: hard and soft.

A hard CTA is a more aggressive call-to-action, like asking potential customers to schedule a demo or sign up for a free trial. These types of CTAs are often used in the decision stage of the funnel when the customer is ready to take action.

On the other hand, a soft CTA is a more subtle approach, like asking readers to download a free resource or learn more about your product. Soft CTAs are often used earlier in the funnel, during the awareness or consideration stages, to build trust and credibility with potential customers.

But here’s the thing: not every article needs a hard CTA. Sometimes a soft CTA can be just as effective, if not more so. By offering valuable resources or information, you can build relationships with potential customers and guide them naturally down the funnel without being too pushy.

For example, if you’re writing an article about the benefits of project management software, a soft CTA could be to offer a free guide on how to improve team productivity. This type of CTA provides value to the reader and helps establish your brand as a thought leader in the space.

Another effective soft CTA is to invite readers to engage with your brand on social media. By asking them to follow your company page or join a relevant group, you can build a community around your brand and keep potential customers engaged with your content.

Ultimately, the key to incorporating CTAs into your content is to provide value to the reader and guide them naturally down the funnel. So, don’t be afraid to mix it up and experiment with different types of CTAs to see what works best for your audience.

Nurturing leads with email marketing

Now that we’ve discussed CTAs, let’s dive into email marketing and how it can help nurture leads.

Email marketing is a powerful tool for guiding potential customers down the funnel and building strong relationships. By sending personalized and relevant content to your audience, you can keep them engaged with your brand and encourage them to take action. Some marketers refer to this as one-to-one content marketing.

So, how can you create effective email campaigns that naturally lead readers down the funnel? Here are a few tips:

Segment your audience

Instead of sending the same email to everyone on your list, segment your audience based on their interests, behaviors and where they are in the funnel. This allows you to send more personalized and relevant content that resonates with your audience and encourages them to take action.

Provide value

Just like with CTAs, it’s important to provide value to your readers in your email campaigns. This could be through offering exclusive content, discounts, or helpful tips and advice. By providing value, you establish yourself as a trusted source and keep potential customers engaged with your brand.

Use engaging subject lines

Your subject line is the first thing your reader sees, so it’s important to make it engaging and relevant. A good subject line should be clear, concise and encourage the reader to open the email.

Include clear CTAs

Just like with your content, your emails should include clear and relevant CTAs that guide the reader down the funnel. Whether it’s inviting them to download a resource or sign up for a free trial, make sure your CTAs are easy to find and align with your overall marketing strategy.

Measure success

To know if your email campaigns are effective at driving sales, you need to measure their success. Track metrics like open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates to see what’s working and what’s not. Use this information to refine your campaigns and improve their effectiveness over time.

Dig deeper: 6 tactics to create recession-proof email marketing

Meet your buyers where they are

Leading readers down the marketing funnel naturally is crucial for creating a smooth and enjoyable user journey while boosting conversions. With a solid understanding of the marketing funnel, effective use of CTAs and well-crafted email campaigns, you can guide readers through each stage without being too aggressive. 

Remember, hard CTAs aren’t always necessary — soft CTAs can be just as powerful in nurturing leads. By tracking and analyzing the success of your efforts, you can continuously improve your strategy and achieve even better results. So, put these tips into action and watch your marketing efforts thrive.

The post The art of natural funneling: How to lead your readers without forced CTAs appeared first on MarTech.

Since it’s not as fresh as some peers, marketers may wonder whether LinkedIn can still bring a worthwhile ROI. However, like other marketing tools, what you get from the site greatly depends on what you put into it.

Consider the following questions to determine whether you’re taking full advantage of how LinkedIn content can boost your B2B marketing.

Key takeaways:

• Though LinkedIn is business-focused, your content on the medium needs to have personality and help you build a community.
• LinkedIn is ideal for establishing credibility and linking to your content and website.
• Remember to appeal visually with scroll-stopping images and attention-grabbing videos.
• You can also use LinkedIn to test and refine your ideas and gain audience feedback.

Dig deeper: SEO guide to optimizing your LinkedIn profile for more connections, better leads

Are you focusing on community?

Though the site is for professionals, your LinkedIn page shouldn’t be all business. Like your other marketing efforts, infuse your personal and company pages with personality. 

No one wants to partner with a faceless, bland company. As one marketing expert said, you should create “high-five content.” 

Ask yourself before you post a comment, article or video: Will this put a smile on someone’s face or get an emphatic head nod? 

Concern for community and social responsibility is at the forefront of purchasing, partnering and investing decisions. Don’t be afraid to warm hearts or show where you stand on social issues. 

Above all, people are looking to solve problems. Discuss them in a way that shows you empathize with your core audience’s challenges. 

Even a simple meme or GIF can communicate, “Hey, I know what you’re going through.” When your target audience starts thinking about who can help them solve that problem, you’ll be one of the first names that come to mind.

Is your content consistent and visual?

You’re not the only one out there trying to capture attention on LinkedIn. Our own research on how often you should post shows that consistent effort is necessary to attract eyes and ears.

Use scroll-stopping visuals that make readers pause an extra second on your posts. A picture is still worth a thousand words, so embrace visualizations and infographics. 

You can also start to build a connection with ideal prospects by making your company come to life with images and videos of your team. Show what they do for similar clients in your target market. 

Testimonials and brief case studies are other power tools. These endorsements make your company feel like a teammate that others want in their corner, too.

Most importantly, use tech tools to maintain a consistent schedule for posting. Sporadic messaging does little to establish your professionalism, while regular posts position you as an authority and an active organization that gets things done.

Are you targeting the right audience?

Other social media platforms may have a more extensive reach overall, but LinkedIn is uniquely positioned to help you tailor your message to better-qualified leads. 

Master using the Campaign Manager to understand how your content performs with different groups. You may learn that you’re focusing on the wrong audience or lack a genuine focus on the right groups.

As you study your results, determine why you’re getting your current level of engagement and how to concentrate on high-quality leads.

Are you establishing credibility with thought leadership?

Content marketing has better long-term results than straight advertising because it builds credibility. As companies look for more suitable ways of solving challenges, valuable content makes you a name they trust and a thought leader.

Those likes and comments on LinkedIn offer an easy way to show that other people approve of you. Such responses are public social proof that’s harder to demonstrate on your own website. 

Design information that teaches your prospects and motivates engagement, whether a like, comment or click. Of course, you want to get people to your site, so always link back to the content on your web pages to boost your SEO.

You become even more trustworthy when your team members post valuable articles and make insightful comments. Your ideal prospects will see you as an organization of skilled professionals that they can trust.

Are you experimenting with and improving your content?

Remember, your goal shouldn’t be to go viral. You should laser-focus on your niche to build an engaged fanbase.

When you experiment, expect to make a few missteps. Social media provides the optimal method for testing smaller posts and ideas to finding out what hits.

The key point is to be active on the platform. Set specific goals, create an actionable plan, implement your ideas, measure the ROI, refine your strategy and repeat.

Are you taking steps to use Linkedin as a catalyst for your B2B marketing?

LinkedIn shouldn’t be the only aspect of your B2B marketing, but you shouldn’t neglect it either. As you devise or refine your LinkedIn marketing strategy, determine how you can incorporate these suggestions into your plan of attack.

The post 6 tips for optimizing LinkedIn content for B2B marketing appeared first on MarTech.

“I think we’re entering a very disruptive phase for creativity for designers, illustrators, video producers and writers,” said Paul Roetzer, CEO of Marketing AI Institute, at the recent MarTech Conference. “I think AI came for knowledge work and creative work way faster than we were prepared for as an industry, and I think that 2023 is going to be a very hard year for a lot of people to grasp what is really possible now and what that means to organizations and writers and content teams.” 

Why we care. Advances in generative AI will likely affect content creation across the marketing profession, at brands and agencies alike. This means smaller organizations can in-house tasks they might have previously depended on agencies to execute. However, new generative AI technology will also be helpful to agencies, making content production more efficient and allowing them to better serve their clients.

Creative work at agencies. “In-house and on the agency side, marketers are already leveraging AI to help them do what they’re good at,” said Stephen Marcinuk, co-founder and head of operations for Intelligent Relations, a low-cost tool that uses AI to help companies craft news pitches and carry out other public relations functions.

“For creative content — ads, blocks of text on a website, sales emails, things of that nature — AI is good at getting from zero to something 80-to-90 percent there,” said Marcinuk. “A real pain point for creative marketers is to stare at a blank piece of paper.”

Generative AI chatbots can produce a number of creative options in short order that humans can then choose from, edit and finalize. For instance, it could provide five different versions of copy for a specific ad, or a number of potential headlines for a blog post.

Upskilling. “Some people say AI will just help get rid of the tedium and so creatives can do interesting work,” said Marcinuk. “I think that’s naïve, personally. Some real jobs will be lost in the next two-to-three years. There will need to be upskilling across the marketing industry to learn how to use this technology and do jobs better.”

At agencies, this means having more marketers focused on strategic thinking and client relations management, as well as brand positioning, testing and analytics.

Augmented intelligence. Adding AI to graphics and other creative tools, as Adobe has done with its new Firefly offering, helps people complete work with tools they weren’t trained to use.

“The tool itself has the intelligence to help you,” said Marcinuk. “That’s what you’re seeing with Firefly and different ad tools. You don’t know how to write great ad copy? Well, what do you want to say? It will help you say it in the right way.”

Generative AI models connect users with outside data sets that can bring a higher level of competence to writing and other creative tasks. This way, agencies can pitch new clients quicker without having to research an entirely new industry.

The AI can also improve language proficiency for non-native speakers. Therefore, it can be a leveler for non-native English speakers who want to break into English-language advertising, Marcinuk said.

In-housing. As generative AI tools evolve, smaller organizations might be able to manage tasks they’d traditionally outsource to agencies.

The Intelligent Relations platform does this by using AI models that generate appropriate news pitches while also finding news organizations and reporters likely to be interested in the pitch. And it offers these tools as a subscription, starting at $95 per month.

Managing your AI. Organizations of all sizes will be forced to take another look at their budget and staffing. While AI capabilities improve, it will be important for marketers at all levels to manage their AI tool much like employees.

“It will still be important to have humans in the loop for approval [of content],” said Marcinuk. “It’s the same as managing a person — communicate the standard and help employees hit the standard. Same with ChatGPT. You’ll have to say ‘no that’s not good enough, make it less verbose.’ You’ll still have to manage your AI for the foreseeable future.”

Dig deeper: New AI-powered product releases

The post Why ChatGPT may be a blessing and a curse for agencies appeared first on MarTech.

Here’s how to develop the best recommendation strategy for your site, content and audience. Most off-the-shelf content recommendation engines will not have all the capabilities discussed here, but knowing what’s possible will help you find the best solution for your business. 

What is content recommendation? 

Content recommendation systems suggest additional content to visitors based on what they will likely be interested in. For example:

• YouTube and Netflix use content recommendations to suggest additional videos and TV shows to their users based on their viewing history.
• Spotify finds patterns in musical tastes and recommends similar songs.
• My daughter says TikTok is amazingly good at finding relevant content for her. 

The goal in all these cases is to keep the visitor engaged with yet another compelling piece of content on your platform. But this raises two critical questions: 

• How does the system know what to recommend? 
• What is the context of the recommendation? 

How content recommendation works

Content recommendation relies on data analysis to accurately predict what content a user is likely to engage with. In general, it collects data on user behavior, such as what pages they’ve visited, what they’ve clicked on and how much time they’ve spent on each page. It can then generate different kinds of recommendations, including: 

• Popular articles on the site right now. 
• Popular articles in a specific category.
• Popular articles by a specific author.
• Articles read by visitors who read the current article. 
• Articles that visitors with similar browsing histories have read.
• Popular articles for people with a specific job title. 
• Articles read by people who are like the reader. 
• Articles read by people in a specific geographic area.  

Each option might have a different use for various content or on distinct areas of your website. You’ll notice that some of them (like “most popular on the site right now”) rely on simple analytics, while others (“people like you like these articles”) are based on look-a-like modeling. 

Drive-bys vs. regulars 

If your site is like most, a lot of visitors read one article and then leave. Getting some of those “drive-bys” to stay for one more page view can make a huge difference in your site traffic. Good content recommendation is one way to address that issue. 

The trouble is that you don’t know as much about the drive-bys. They have no history on your site, so it’s harder to do look-a-like modeling. But there are some options. 

• You can use third-party cookie/audience data for however long that is still available. 
• You can use data from the HTTP header, such as geolocation or referrer. 
• You can rely on general site statistics from your other readers. 

You have many more options with your regular visitors. In addition to everything you can do with the drive-bys, you can make predictions based on their unique browsing history, for example: 

• Show content similar to the content they have already viewed (in the same category, by the same author, with the same tags or keywords, etc.) 
• Compare their browsing history with those with similar browsing history and show the most popular articles among that larger group. 
• If you have demographic data on your regulars (i.e., job title), you can show the most popular articles for people with that job title. 

Multiple audiences

Many sites have two or more distinct audiences: free users vs. paid users, or B2B vs. B2C prospects. If that’s the case for your site, keeping them separate ensures you make the most relevant content recommendations. 

Here’s why. Consider a site about medications with content for consumers and doctors. You want to segregate those stats to recommend doctor content for doctors and consumer content for consumers. 

How to classify content 

The magic behind content recommendation relies on classifying content to match your and the reader’s goals. Content can be classified in several different ways, such as: 

• Words in the title. 
• Keywords or tags. 
• Word density in the article. 
• Categories. 
• Author. 
• Long vs. short articles. 

How the content is classified might affect your use case. For example, if your site has long articles and excerpts, you might not want to recommend long articles to people who prefer to read excerpts. 

Types of content recommendation algorithms 

There are various types of AI-based content recommendation algorithms that you can use to improve your website. Here are some of the most common ones. 

Collaborative filtering recommends content based on the behavior and preferences of similar users. It analyzes the historical behavior of users and recommends content that users with similar preferences have interacted with.

Content-based filtering recommends content similar to the user’s previously consumed content. It analyzes the content of the page the user is currently viewing and recommends similar content based on keywords, tags and other relevant information.

Hybrid recommendation combines collaborative filtering and content-based filtering to provide more accurate and diverse recommendations. It considers both user preferences and the characteristics of the content being viewed to make better recommendations.

Popularity-based filtering recommends content based on the popularity of the content. It recommends the most popular content viewed, shared or interacted with by many users. Combining popularity-based filtering with other types – for example, this content is most popular among people with this job title – is a very powerful tool. 

Knowledge-based filtering recommends content based on user profiles and preferences. It relies on user data and feedback to provide recommendations that match the user’s interests, such as previous purchases, ratings and reviews. 

Reinforcement learning recommends content based on the user’s actions and feedback. It learns from user interactions and feedback to improve its recommendations over time. 

Dig deeper: The ROI of recommendation engines for marketing

Choosing a content recommendation engine

As mentioned above, it’s unlikely that any given vendor can provide all of these options. Think about how you want to deploy content recommendations on your site, given your audience, your content and the range of possible options and decide which methods are most likely to work for your unique situation. Take that list to potential vendors and try to find the best match. 

Be sure to put the reader first 

One of the challenges in creating a successful content recommendation strategy is to ensure you’re putting the reader’s goals first. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking about what you want the reader to do to promote your business model.

Instead, put yourself in the reader’s shoes and design your content recommendation strategy around what will help the reader find the content they want to find. That will be the best for your business in the long run. Addressing the reader’s needs will increase engagement, which is the primary goal. 

The post How to increase website engagement with content recommendations appeared first on MarTech.

The challenge in writing about content marketing experts is they’ve likely already written it and written it better. The people in this group have authored enough important and influential business books to stock a library. They write and produce content, they talk about it at conferences and they know where it’s going and why.

If you want your content to connect, these are the people who can tell you how. Without further adieu, we present in alphabetical order, MarTech’s content marketing experts to follow.

Scott Abel 

Scott is content strategy evangelist for Heretto and his nickname is “The Content Wrangler.” That’s also the name of his LinkedIn networking group for content professionals, which has more than 15,000 members. He’s co-author of “Intelligent Content: A Primer” and “The Language of Content Strategy” and creator of the Content Strategy Series of books from XML Press. Brand Quarterly Magazine ranked Scott as one of the 50 most influential marketing thought leaders.

• Website: The Content Wrangler 
• LinkedIn: ScottAbel (19K followers)
• Twitter: @scottabel (19K followers)

Michael Brenner 

Michael is CEO and founder of Marketing Insider Group. He’s author of two bestselling books,  “The Content Formula” and “Mean People Suck,” named one of the Best Inspirational Books of 2019 by by Inc Magazine. The MarTech contributor has been recognized as a Top Business Speaker by Huffington Post and a Top CMO Influencer by Forbes.

• Website: Marketing Insider Group
• LinkedIn: MichaelBrenner (32K followers)
• Twitter: @BrennerMichael (110K followers)

Ann Handley 

Ann may be biggest voice and influencer in content marketing. She’s chief content officer for Marketing Profs, the marketing training and education company with more than 600,000 subscribers. She is author of the best-selling books “Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content” and “Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business” (co-authored with C.C. Chapman).

• Website: AnnHandley
• LinkedIn: AnnHandley (460K followers)
• Twitter: @AnnHandley (458K followers)
• Instagram: @AnnHandley (27.6K followers)

A. Lee Judge 

Lee is the co-founder and CMO of Content Monsta, a content marketing agency focusing on creating multimedia business content such as videos, podcasts and virtual events. He has more than 25 years B2B marketing experience and is a leading LinkedIn video creator, Forbes Agency Council member and am in-demand event speaker. 

• Website: ALeeJudge
• LinkedIn: ALeeJudge (20K followers)
• Twitter: @ALeeJudge (11.6K followers)

Julia McCoy 

Julia is president of Content at Scale, as well as business content strategist at Content Hacker. She is the author of “The Content Writer’s Handbook,” “Practical Content Strategy and Marketing” and “Create Content Without Burnout: How Entrepreneurs Can Position Their Voice and Brand in the World Without Overload, Frustration or Burnout.” She hosts The Content Transformation Podcast and is a frequent contributor to Search Engine Land.

• Website: ContentHacker
• LinkedIn: JuliaEMcCoy 20K followers
• Twitter: @JuliaEMcCoy 20.5K followers

Aaron Orendorff 

Aaron is the head of marketing at Recart and founder of IconiContent. Previously, he was VP of marketing at Common Thread Collective, editor in chief of Shopify Plus and global deputy editor at Intuit QuickBooks. A member of the Forbes Communication Council, his work has appeared in  The New York Times, Mashable, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, Lifehacker, Inc., Success Magazine and the Content Marketing Institute.

• Website: IconiContent
• LinkedIn: AaronOrendorff (25K followers)
• Twitter: @AaronOrendorff (34K followers)

Joe Pulizzi 

A serial entrepreneur, Joe’s startups include the content entrepreneur event Creator Economy Expo (CEX) and the Content Marketing Institute. He’s the author of seven books including “Content Inc.” and “Epic Content Marketing,” which was named a Must-Read Business Book by Fortune Magazine. As if that wasn’t enough, Joe hosts two weekly podcasts, Content Inc. and This Old Marketing with Robert Rose. His foundation, The Orange Effect, delivers speech therapy and technology services to over 350 children in 35 states.

• Website: JoePulizzi.com
• LinkedIn: JoePulizzi (251K followers)
• Twitter: @JoePulizzi (152K followers)

Robert Rose 

Robert is founder and chief troublemaker for The Content Advisory, and the chief strategy advisor with the Content Marketing Institute. He’s the author of several books, including “Killing Marketing,” “Experiences: The Seventh Era of Marketing” and “Managing Content Marketing”. He’s a regular speaker at major conferences and co-hosts the podcast This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi.

• Website: RobertRose.net
• LinkedIn: RobRose (28K followers)
• Twitter: @Robert_Rose (52K followers)

Mark Schaefer 

Mark studied under Peter Drucker and has advanced degrees in marketing and organizational development. He is a faculty member of the graduate studies program at Rutgers University. He has written 10 books including “The Content Code,” “Marketing Rebellion,” “Belonging to the Brand” and “Return on Influence,” the first book ever written on influence marketing. Host of the podcast The Marketing Companion, Mark is also a columnist for The Harvard Business Review, and Entrepreneur Magazine.

• LinkedIn: MarkWSchaefer (30K followers)
• Twitter: @MarkWSchaefer (170K followers)
• Blog: BusinessesGrow

More MarTech experts to follow:

• Marketing operations
• AI and marketing
• Email marketing
• B2B marketing
• Content marketing
• Customer experience

The post MarTech’s content marketing experts to follow appeared first on MarTech.

At the core of all good marketing is a great conversation. Yet, too much of the marketing we see today talks at people. That’s not a conversation.

Marketing is not advertising. Advertising can be a part of a marketing strategy, but it is just that, a part. And too many ads talk at people. Marketing today is about engagement. It’s about generating great content and offering solutions that start a conversation and keep it going. 

The most important element of the marketing equation is not the tool or the channel. It is the audience and how that audience engages with the messaging. The tools are just what you use to facilitate that engagement. Let’s go over the fundamentals in this article.

Who are you talking to?

Too many marketers fail to accurately answer this question before engaging in any marketing endeavor. 

Starting your marketing campaign without sufficiently defining the target audience is a recipe for wasted time and money. It happens less today than in the past, thanks to the readily available data we can pull from platforms like Google Analytics. 

Marketing data paints a picture

Most marketing efforts generate a lot of actionable data. But even before an organization engages in those efforts, relevant and useful data can still be found if they know where to look. 

Platforms like Semrush and Ahrefs, for example, will show you the following:

• What keywords are users entering to find your website and the sites of your competitors?
• How are they accessing information from those sites in terms of device and platform used?
• Where are they in the world?
• What are the demographics?

Google Analytics also offers a wealth of data that can tell you a lot about how your audience interacts with content, from acquisition channels to time on page and bounce rate. All these metrics are useful when getting familiar with your audience’s needs and behavioral patterns, but is it enough to really know your audience? My answer is no.

Nothing compares to real human data, and it is available if you look for it. One thing that drives Adele Revella, founder of the Buyer Persona Institute, completely nuts is when people develop so-called buyer personas, having never spoken to an actual buyer.

While tools like Semrush, Ahrefs and others can offer a mountain of useful data, as our CEO always says, “don’t trust the tools!” Check your data. More than that, Revella says, “check your customers.”

Buyer personas are who you’re talking to

Whether you side with Revella and believe that buyer personas should be real people or you believe, as others do, that they can be fictional representations of actual customers, you need to build them based on as much truth as possible.

Revella describes this process using what she calls the “5 rings of buying insight,” which are:

• Priority initiative insight: Hearing real buyers describe the “trigger moment” when your buyers knew they needed to spend money on a problem.
• Success factors insight: These are not the benefits you offer but the prioritized benefits they share with you.
• Perceived barriers: This is where the buyers tell you why they did not select certain products or vendors, including yours. 
• Decision criteria: These are the reasons they decided to buy or the value they saw in the product or service features. 
• Buyer’s journey: This is the process they use to make a buying decision. Where did they gather information? Who helped them? How long did it take? 

Revella recommends a series of phone, online video or in-person interviews with a select group of customers to gather these five insights. Interviews are preferred over surveys because they are conversational and give access to the more nuanced elements of their buying behaviors. Make sure you can record these for future reference. 

You would essentially use those five insights as your questions in those interviews. All that data is gold for developing your editorial calendar, understanding what your potential clients are looking for and supporting your sales team.

These are also prime topics of your marketing conversation. Let me explain.

The connected consumer

Today’s customers prefer to feel like they know the company they’re buying from. Especially the younger generations. They want to feel a connection to the companies they give money to. 

For example, in my interview with Sarah Weise, author of “Instabrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z,” she talks about how Gen Z expects personalization in marketing. They rely more on influencers, people they know and the creators of the content they like to find the information they need when making a purchase. 

This generation is also incredibly loyal once they feel they have a meaningful connection with a brand. I think this is also starting to be true for other generations, but not quite as pronounced. Either way, building that connection is critical to the marketing conversation. 

Dig deeper: Why we care about loyalty marketing

Marketing: Become human

“Content is king.” You’ve surely heard this a few thousand times. Still, it is true, probably more so than ever. Of course, anyone can create content. Machines can create content, sometimes not half-bad content.

A vast ocean of content is out there, and more is coming every day. So, how can you create content that allows you to stand out while creating more opportunities to connect with your buyers? 

Study your audience, learn their needs and create content that meets those needs. This is your secret weapon and will give you a competitive edge. 

No matter which marketing channel you use, your content must resonate with potential customers — otherwise, they won’t notice it. And each piece of your content, whether an ad, a newsletter or a social media post, must provide real value and be genuinely interesting for your audience. 

I would argue that you simply cannot create this kind of content with only a fictional persona based on dry numbers from a marketing dashboard. You must speak to humans. Moreover, you must speak to them in a human voice in your marketing efforts.

Good marketing requires truth and authenticity

Don’t confuse this approach with the fake friendliness many brands embrace today. Those fake marketing efforts take on a new level of cringe-worthiness. And today’s consumers are not buying it anymore. They are aware that brands are out there for their money. 

Today’s savvy buyers will part with their money if they feel they’ll get something valuable in return. And this is the point of a marketing conversation: convincing your customers that buying from you is a good thing… for them. How do you do this? 

Be honest. Be aware of their needs and provide them with the information they need. Do it in a respectful and meaningful way. Be useful. Be real. Create a community around your brand and be a part of this community.

It might sound simple, but doing this well is quite difficult. It may require you to review your priorities and processes completely. And some parts I mentioned above are almost impossible to translate into the language of dashboards and ROI charts. People buy from people.

Once you start to communicate directly with your customers and better understand them, you may find that your messaging will evolve into something better. Of course, the tools can help. One of which, surprisingly, is…

AI and the future of marketing

Many marketers are discussing the impact of generative AI on content marketing, SEO and more. It’s already happening. AI is being used for marketing by two-thirds of B2B organizations, according to Forrester. 

Everyone is talking about ChatGPT. If you’ve used it, you know that it is very much a chat feature. You ask it a question or give it a command, and it answers you. 

This is already impacting how search works, and that impact will continue to grow in the near future. Googling something is already a matter of “ask and answer.” You are having a conversation with a machine. 

With AI and other marketing technology, this will get easier and easier. To prepare for that, you need to know what questions your buyers will ask. For example:

• Your buyers will use AI-powered chat features on your website and others to get the information they need to lead them to a purchase. You can gain a mountain of useful data from your buyers’ questions. 
• AI will power advertising efforts to serve the buyers’ needs better. But be careful with this and ensure you don’t rely blindly on automated ad features. 
• AI will generate content based on your buyers’ exact questions.

Of course, AI is a tool. Remember, “don’t trust the tools!” Use your brain, insert your culture and personality. Double-check your information and cite trusted sources. And focus on being a go-to resource for your buyers. 

If you treat marketing as an active conversation with give and take and focus on your buyer’s needs, you will see success and develop a devoted fan and customer base who need you just as much as you need them. 

Don’t just take my word for it. Listen to our friend, ChatGPT…

Now, get those conversations started!

The post Going back to basics: Marketing as a conversation appeared first on MarTech.

If you had undeniable evidence that Domain Authority is irrelevant when it comes to the rankability of your organic content, what would you do differently as a marketer? If you could stop focusing on metrics that don’t matter for SEO, imagine how much more of your effort could be put into the one thing that matters: Developing content that ranks.

In this bold presentation DemandJump’s Chief Solution Officer, Ryan Brock, will dare you to evaluate how much stock you put into your website’s Domain Authority and why. 

Register today for “Domain Authority is Dead: Focus on SEO Content That Ranks,” presented by DemandJump.

Click here to view more MarTech webinars.

The post Domain Authority is dead: Focus on SEO content that ranks appeared first on MarTech.