How Small Business Can Turn the Table with Social Media

Content – The Backbone of Social Media Marketing for Small Business

Social Media is NOTHING without the content that makes it interesting for its users.

Content truly is the backbone for ALL of the other activities that make up your social media plan.

icon marketing content king

And having great content can make all the difference when it comes sot having the best reach and engagement for your brand.

This helps you to build MORE loyalty and thus drive MORE sales.

If you have been marketing for a while, chances are you have content strategies in place ALREADY that includes things.

For examples, like your email newsletter, blog posts, your website, and downloadable content like eBooks.

Social content is different. It usually serves as the vehicle to GET people to those more extended pieces of content.

Or you can provide smaller, digestible bits of information that help expose your brand and your values to customer and prospects.

The Basics of Social Media Marketing Companies for Small Business

The most significant difference between social content and traditional form of content is that social content can be read and watched in the places and times that people CHOOSE.

There are three main reasons why people use social media.

Fundamentally, they want to be INFORMED, ENTERTAINED and CONNECTED.

icon marketing connect

Social media helps people to feel INFORMED by assisting them to learn new things, stay up-to-date on topics that matter to them, and discover new ideas and trends.

In fact, two-thirds of the people worldwide are getting news from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and even Snapchat.

Social media helps people to feel entertained by assisting them to find and keep up with the entertainers, shows and performance-and share and consume fascinating articles and videos.

It is no wondering there such an emphasis on video content on social: entertainment and video is the key to keeping users engaged.

Social media helps people to feel CONNECTED by removing many of the typical barriers to communication.

This allowing people to contact anyone in their persona; or professional networks whenever, and from wherever.

According to the Pew Research Centre, there 67% of social media users say that staying in touch with current friends and family members.

This is a primary reason they use social media to reconnect with OLD friends.

Social media helps people share, comment, and take part in a global conversation that goes BEYOND just the people they are friends with.

It is up to you to determine which type of interaction your audience is looking for, and how you will provide it to them through the content you create.

Social Media Strategies – The Best Social Media Marketing Plan for Small Business

Indeed, creating a promotional plan that takes advantage of social and digital technologies will help you to shape the conversation, build loyalty, and attract new customers and partners.

Social media should not replace other inbound promotional methods like email, events or public relations.

But instead, should augment them, offering another set of marketing channel for you to explore.

Besides, there are many advantages to having a social media strategy for the small business.

It will help you expand your other marketing efforts.

So, your content had the chance to be seen by a wide audience and hopefully, the right audience.

It is also will help you to build brand awareness.

icon marketing brand awarness

Now, gone are the days when your only way to build that same awareness was through billboards or magazine and television ads.

This is why social media is the best platform for the small business to sprout in this rat-race business world.

The Best Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Business

With social media, you can bring your brand content directly to your customers, partners, and prospects.

Now, you can be where your audience already is.

Social media is the crucial driver for word of mouth, one of the most powerful ways to connect with your audience.

In a matter of fact, Nielsen reports that 71% of consumers who have a great social media service experience with the brand that is likely to recommend it to others.

Additionally, social media helps you to attract buyers to your products and services.

And it gives you the ability to directly have conversations with those individuals at the time and place of their choosing.

It sounds like a lot of opportunities, doesn’t it?

Inbound Marketing: The Alternative of Social Media Marketing Ideas for Small Business

Social media is, in many ways, the ultimate way to do inbound marketing.

That’s because it’s a one-to-one medium, which gives you and your company the chance to market in a direct but in a very human way.

That brings us to one of the most critical parts of your social media strategy to the small business.

It’s also the same thing that sits at the heart of your inbound marketing strategy: the buyer persona.

icon marketing strategy buyer persona

The buyer persona helps you determine who your ideal customer is.

By understanding who you want to reach will guide you in a variety of ways.

From choosing the right social media platforms to use, to creating the best mix of content to share, to be able to target advertising to the right audience.

It is a part of strategies and maps to grow your small business in the digital platform.

Make sure you understand all the basic demographics of your buyer persona like age, gender, income, occupation, interests, motivations and objections.

But if you can, also go a few steps further and dig into their psychographics- which websites they visit, which online shops they frequent, and which social sites they like best.

In shorts, social media gives you the ability to be more personal and home in on the right type of persona for your products and services.

So, the more you know, the better you could target social audience.

There is one other crucial piece of the social media promotion puzzle: Aligning your social strategy to your business objectives,

Having business goals and objectives in place will make it easier for you to create social media goals for the small business that will transform viewers and readers into buyers.

To know more information about marketing always visit us, Icon Marketing Strategy

The Importance of Social Media Software for Business

What is All about Social Media Software?

That goes without saying, social media is all about being quick and responsive these days.

With the progressively explosive and sustained popularity of social media, social media marketing has emerged as one of the core components of small business marketing strategies.

For your information, there are 61% of small business use social media as a part of their overall marketing strategy.

To stay relevant and competitive in the field, small business needs to invest in social media marketing software.

However, most of the small business only jump to the gun and purchase a full suite of social media management software out of the gate.

icon marketing strategy social media

Ultimately, it only ends up using just about half of the features.

That is such a waste of resources.

And that is a big no in the business world!

What You Can Do with Automated Social Media Marketing Software

There is a common misconception about automation tools which to make social media marketing a completely hands-off process.

But, this is not the case.

While some social media automation tolls did save you the time and effort, it is not going to replace what needs to be done by a human.

Here is what actually can be done with automation tool:

  • Schedule and optimise the posts for the most engagement.
  • Curate content form blogs you love.
  • View reports for valuable insights across multiple networks.
  • Create custom responses to common customer queries with chatbots.

 

Why You Need the Best Social Media Marketing Software

1. Maintain Consistent Content

Consistency is the key to building a storing following on social media.

Business often creates accounts on the popular social media platforms namely Facebook or Twitter, yet have the trouble to achieve the consistency.

Thus, consistency is one of the most important factors in determining whether people will continue to follow the brand or not.

icon marketing consistency

Likewise, the business that is strapped for time or have insufficient manpower to assign a dedicated team for social media management, and that will lead to the drop off the social media radar.

As a result, they will only reap a little or no benefit at all from the marketing on social media.

In other words, social media automation holds the solution to this problem.

2. Get Control over Your Strategy

Automation tool gives you more control over your social accounts and helps to post more content.

It depends on how you choose to use the tool.

You can control the kind of content that is shared, the time at which it is posted as well as the frequency of the posting.

Plus, you could monitor the level of engagement that you receiving and modify your strategy to get more likes, shares or retweets on social media.

Social media automation tools also help you to develop insight into the nature and extent of readership.

And that you will be able to share content in a more targeted manner.

More importantly, the automation helps you to deal with the volume.

It allows you to post more and more content on multiple accounts, more frequently with more ease.

3. Save Your Time

The biggest incentive of using social media automation is the amount of time that could help you to free up.

Rather than spending hours and hours on trying to find the content that might just get shared and brings few visitors, use tools to identify the trending topics and discover relevant content.

Utilising a centralised dashboard to schedule content advance also saves you the trouble of having to log into each account individually and post the content manually.

But note that saving the time does not mean spending any time at all on your social media accounts.

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That would only be counter-productive.

While you automated some of the tasks that associated with the social media management, you will still have to keep a tab on all your accounts and respond to comments and mentions.

Top 4 Social Media Marketing Software FREE

1. Buffer

Buffer is one of the most recognised tools in the social media industry.

With it, you could schedule any types of posts across any platforms that you desire.

It even can specify patterns of posts, such as “every day or weekdays”.

Also, you can use Buffer to follow up on your posts, evaluating which ones were most effective, and why they were effective.

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media marketing tool that helps the manager to have better control of their efforts.

It features the multi-level access, allowing directorial control, and access form lower-level team members to better coordinate and delegate tasks.

It comes with full posting scheduling capabilities and a detailed analytic platform

It has the social listening platform to have a better understanding of how your demographic use your platform of choice.

3. Hootsuite

Moreover, Hootsuite is one of the simple yet powerful tools for the average social media marketer.

With the free version and relatively inexpensive paid options, you could use Hootsuite to schedule posts in advance on a number of different social platforms.

It also measures analytic to understand how your content is performing.

4. BuzzSumo

Other than that, BuzzSumo also is one of the best tools that excel in discovering new, fresh or popular content on the web.

With BuzzSumo, you could plug in a topic or a selection of keywords and find a breakdown of some of the most popular trending post in those categories.

It also helps you to show a list of influencers who are sharing that content as well.

Thus, it is an excellent way to learn and discover new ideas for your content marketing and social media campaigns.

You even could use this opportunity to identify the influencers in your industry who could help you to grow your following, visibility as well as reputation.

If you like to know more information about marketing please always visit us, Icon Marketing Strategy

Why You Need to Create a Winning Social Media Strategy in 2019?

What is a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Fundamentally, social media marketing strategy is a summary of everything that you plan to do and hope to achieve in social media.

It guides your actions and let you know whether you are succeeding or failing.

Every post, like, reply and comment should serve with a purpose.

In a simple word, the more specific your strategy is, the more effective the execution will be.

You have to keep it specific and concise.

Don’t make your plan too lofty and broad that makes it unattainable or impossible to be measured.

Why Do You Need to Create Best Strategies for Social Media Marketing?

According to the research done, there is 97% of small businesses use social media to attract new customers.

But, there is 85% of business owners are not sure what social media tools to use.

Besides, the result also may reveal that there is 63% of consumers who seek businesses online are more likely to become the consumers of brands.

This demonstrated a massive potential for social media marketing to increase sales!

Social media marketing helps you to validate your brand, and it is no longer optional.

It is an essential way for companies to reach its consumers.

And when it is done correctly, tells those consumers that their brand is active and focused on the communication.

Hence, having a social media presence without an active social media marketing strategy could be just catastrophic for your business as having no plan at all.

How to Create the Best Social Media Marketing Strategies

Let’s walk you through the 5 step plan to create a winning social media strategy of your own.

Step 1: Align the Business Objectives with Social Media Marketing Goals

That’s right.

This is your first step which is creating a social media marketing strategy to establish your objectives and goals.

Without these goals, you have no way to gauge the success of your social media.

Thus, set the S.M.A.R.T Goals.

icon marketing smart

Each of your goals should include:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound

By setting the SMART framework, it helps to ensure your goals could lead to real business results, rather than just lofty ideas.

Thus, start by developing your social media marketing plan now by writing down at least three social media goals.

Make sure to regulate your social media goals as well along with your overall marketing strategy.

Step 2: Learn Everything about Your Audience

So, how are you going to learn about your audience?

It is quite easy.

You need to create audience personas.

icon mrketing audience persona

By apprehending who your audience is and what they want to see on social is the crucial key in creating content that they will like, comment on or share.

It is also critical for planning how to convert your social media followers into customers for your business.

Creating your audience personas will allow you to think of your prospects, followers, and customers as real people with real wants and needs.

This definitely will help you think more clearly about what to offer them.

Step 3: Conduct the Research

The odds are, your competitors are already using social media – and that means you could learn from what they are already doing.

This is why you need to conduct the competitive analysis.

It allows you to understand who the competition is and what they are doing well and not so well.

Also, you will get a good sense of what to expect in your industry, which will help you to set social media targets on your own.

The analysis will also help you to find opportunities.

You might want to concentrate on the networks where your audience is underserved, rather than attempting to win the followers away from the dominant player.

Step 4: Set up Accounts & Improve Existing Profiles

As you select which social channels to use, you will also need to outline your strategy for each network.

icon marketing social

If you can’t formulate a solid mission statement for a particular social network, you want to reconsider whether that network is worth it.

Once you have decided which networks to focus on, it is time for you to create profiles or to improve existing profile so they could align with your strategic plan.

In general, you have to make sure that you fill out all the profile fields and use keywords that people will use to search for your business.

Step 5: Test, Evaluate & Adjust Strategy

Indeed, your social media strategy is the vital document for your business, and you can’t assume you will get it right on the first try.

As you start to execute your plan and track your results, you may discover that some strategies would not work as you did anticipate.

While some are working even better than you might be expected.

Hence, re-evaluate, test and do it all again is the crucial step that you should do to gain the data.

Once the data start coming in, use it to re-evaluate your strategy frequently.

Constantly testing will allow grasping what works and what does not.

So, you could refine your strategy in no time.

 

The Checklist of Effective Social Media Marketing

This is the checklist of 8 steps social media marketing strategy to help you creating and auditing the best strategies for your social media marketing.

  • What are your social media goals in 2019?
  • Where will you reach your social media?
  • What is your cores demographic?
  • What is your core social media metrics?
  • Who are your most prominent social media competitors & its’ top posts?
  • What type of content will you produce?
  • What are your best times to post on social?
  • How will you track & analyse your efforts?

To know more information about marketing, please always visit us, Icon Marketing Strategy

Definitive Guide to Email Marketing Service Singapore

icon marketing strategy definition

How to Build an Effective Email Marketing Strategy

Building an effective email marketing strategy means adding three important pillars to your email marketing tool belt.

And as you implement your email strategy, keep these top of mind, as they are the context and lens through which you should view all the information you learn about email.

The three pillars you need to build an effective email marketing strategy are the significance of segmentation, the power of personalization, and the impact of data-driven analysis.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these. Email remains at the heart of successful marketing, sales, and customer efforts, but competing for attention in the inbox has never been more challenging.

Segmentation is seemingly simple but important. Segmentation is what helps you send the right person the right message at the right time.

Creating an inbound email experience and conversation means focusing just as much on the context of your message as the content you deliver.

The DMA, a Data & Marketing Association, found that 77% of email marketing ROI came from segmented, targeted, and triggered campaigns, bringing context and content together.

This helps you to write the greatest emails in the email in the world and make sure they connect with your audience and don’t waste their time yours.

Segmentation, at its core, brings together two key inbound concepts: buyer personas and the buyer’s journey.

icon strategy buyer

Sending the right email at the right time to the right person means knowing who that person is and where they are in their buying journey.

Buyer personas are the semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, and goals.

And the buyer’ journey is the active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase.

The buyer’s journey is made up by three stages: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. Each stage represents and experiences your potential customers go through.

By using the information, you have on your contacts in these categories; you will be able to create segments of people who want similar content.

Segmentation is the act of thinking in groups and creating these segments to send the most contextual messages.

Segmentation shows context is just as valuable as content in your email marketing strategy.

A second way you can add context to your emails is with personalization. Here is what Alex William, the director of Trendline Interactive states on personalization.

New machine learning and data science-based features and platforms will give email marketers the ability to harness their content and data to prophesize relevant information to mass audiences in a personal way”. – Alex William

You have the information needed to have a highly personalized conversation with your contact.

To effectively build trust with the people on the other side of your emails, you have to create a personalized conversation that engages them with content they are interested in.

Personalization is so much more than adding the first name of the recipient to your email. It is about creating a contextualized and individual experience.

While there are many channels that will allow you to do this – and more are created each day – email is the channel that continues to offer so much room for creativity and experimentation in developing that highly personalized experience.

And if you are connecting your emails with a contact database, you can continue to learn about your contacts and personalize even more. This type of email is called behavioural email.

What is Behavioural Email?

Behavioural email is defined as the practice of sending automated, targeted emails to your contacts based on the historical interactions they have had with your company across channels.

And when you send behavioural emails, you are creating a highly personal experience for your contacts.

This brings us to our last pillar: the impact of data-driven analysis. The analysis is one of the most important pillars you have as an inbound professional.

In a world that is always changing, where your customers consistently change the way they live and work, analysis helps you evolve with them and not be left behind.

Your customers continue to want a frictionless experience.

By analysing your emails consistently and having email as one of the core parts of your inbound strategy, you will give your customer s what they need to continue the conversation with you.

With all the information you have at your fingertips, with the behaviours of your contacts are from previous interactions with them, you are leaving money on the table if you are not consistently analysing the data.

To implement data-driven analysis into your email marketing, you will want to keep in mind this framework.

Firstly, track the metric that matter – this will be different for you and your business than other people business.

Secondly, understand what those metrics indicate the success of your emails – what is moving and improving versus what is slowing down.

Thirdly, apply what you have learned to optimize and improve each email you send.

These are the three pillars to drive your emails marketing strategy: the significance of segmentation, the power of personalization, and the impact of data-driven analysis.

Remember to keep these in mind as you develop your email marketing strategy.

What Are The Email Marketing Software Mostly Used in Singapore?

1. Constant Contact

icon marketing constant

Consistent Contact is one of the biggest and quickest developing email promoting administration on the planet. It is additionally the most simple to utilize and learner inviting email showcasing administration.

You can without much of a stretch deal with your email records, contacts, email formats, and then some.

Each record gives you access to simple following and detailing, working in web-based life sharing instruments, a picture library and 1GB of capacity for your very own documents.

Consistent Contact offers unmatched help with the live visit, email, network bolster, and an immense library of assets.

They offer internet preparing and additionally live classes in your neighbourhood. This enables a private company to rapidly take in the essentials of email showcasing and begin utilizing it like an expert.

2. Drip

icon marketing drip

Drip is an incredible email advertising stage for eCommerce, bloggers, and advertisers. They offer an extensive variety of instruments with their shrewd email promoting stage.

It is additionally a standout amongst the most amateur well dispose of email showcasing administration. They have incorporation add-ons accessible for all prominent web designers including WooCommerce and WordPress. This enables you to effectively add join structures to your site and catch more leads.

What separates Drip from the opposition is their savvy showcasing robotization devices, more brilliant email dividing, list gatherings, and huge amounts of cool highlights that enable you to contact explicit groups of onlookers in your email list.

3. ConvertKit

icon marketing convertkit

ConvertKit is a strong email showcasing stage for expert bloggers, creators, and advertisers. It is to a great degree simple to utilize and extraordinarily incredible.

ConvertKit enables you to effortlessly offer substance updates and motivations with email information exchange shapes. It additionally accompanies simple to oversee automated assistants enabling you to send dribble messages.

With ConvertKit, you can without much of a stretch portion contacts into the individuals who are intrigued and the individuals who have just acquired. This is extraordinary for promoting robotization.

ConvertKit offers email-based help and has a broad information base with incredible learning material.

4. AWeber

icon marketing aweber

AWeber is a standout amongst the most mainstream email showcasing specialist organizations on the planet. They offer an extensive variety of devices for little and medium measured organizations to deal with their email advertising.

Beginning with AWeber is simple. It interfaces seemlessly to most stages including WordPress. For point by point directions, see our definitive guide on the best way to associate AWeber to WordPress.

You gain admittance to prepared to utilize email formats, list the executives, autoresponders, and email following definite experiences.

Bolster choices incorporate live visit, telephone bolster, email bolster, live online classes, and an immense library of how-tos and instructional exercises.

How Effective Email Marketing Database Singapore Look Like?

Let’s take a second and think about this question. Do you have goals around your email strategy? What do you use to send out email? How do you measure your success?

Go ahead and find a pen and paper or open a note on your computer and jot down what you think the important aspects of your email strategy are.

Now that might have been difficult, or you may have a whole list describing what your email marketing strategy looks like.

Your email marketing strategy may look a little different than mine or another company’s.

But when it comes to implementing, there are three things that every successful email marketing strategy should have in common: software to implement and track your emails, an understanding of your full-funnel conversations, and clearly defined goals.

These aspects are what will help you implement a sustainable strategy that yields growth and success for you and your business.

It might seem obvious that having software is a part of your email marketing strategy, but understanding what you want that software to do for you and how it can help you to be successful is a very important piece of your overall strategy.

You will need as ESP, which is an Email Service Provider. You can use to send one-to-one to many emails.

There are a ton of companies out there using the best email marketing software to do this. And you will have your pick of the combination of features you need.

Here are some of the recommendations of what your ESP should be able to do for you.

The most important thing your software should do is being connected to a contact database.

This does not just mean a place where your contacts are housed but also one that tracks both the qualities and behaviours of your contacts.

If these two are connected, you will have all the information at your fingertips for personalization and segmentation, which are two pillars in the foundation of your email marketing strategy.

In addition, your software should be able to analyse your email sends, giving you deep information into what went well and what can be optimized.

The software you use should be able to track deliverability and send the right email at the right time to the right person.

Your software should make your day-to-day easier and help you do everything from email to the other parts of your inbound strategy all in one place.

Great software will be able to drive and sustain your email marketing strategy and help you collect the right information to continually optimize your strategy.

Understanding your full-funnel conversation strategy is another important element in developing a successful email marketing strategy.

Your contacts are not interacting with your emails in a bubble. They are also reading your blogs, engaging with you on social media, and even connecting with you via a chat box.

Understanding all the ways you are having conversations with your contacts will guide your email strategy.

While all of us could agree that email is great, it can’t do everything. You have to understand where email works and where other channels might work better.

This is because there isn’t anything more frustrating than having a great conversation but on the wrong channel.

As inbound professional, you want to be conversational with all types of interactions you have with your prospects and customers.

How to Improve The Effectiveness of Email Marketing Service in Singapore?

Form emails you send to messaging over live chat.

Delivering the right information at the right time on the right channel is where you are providing the most human and helpful experience.

In turn, it is creating the most value for your prospects. This brings us to goals.

Without goals behind your emails, you will not know if your email marketing strategy and then for each individual email you send will help you understand how successful your emails are.

If you do not know the goal of your email send, then the person on the other end will not understand why they are getting the email either, which could lead to unsubscribes.

icon marketing goal

Setting goals in all parts of your inbound strategy are important – define WHY you are doing something.

“People don’t buy what you do but why you do it.”

Setting the goals will help your contacts understand why you are sending the email and why you do what you do.

Your email marketing success relies on being human and helpful every time you hit send.

While your email marketing strategy might look a little different than mine, applying these three things will help you implement your email marketing strategy.

Those are software to implement and track your emails, an understanding of your full-funnel conversations, and clearly defined goals.

Email continues to grow and evolve in our changing world. It might not be the new and shiny thing.

But it’s what works for having highly personalized and contextual conversations with your contacts.

Reaching the inbox isn’t your goal – engaging people is

Creating these conversations and engaging with your contacts is how you will create a successful email marketing strategy.

This absolutely will help your contacts grow and in turn help you grow your business.

Icon Marketing Strategy can always provide the most useful and relevant tips of marketing!

Understanding the Fundamental of Email Marketing Singapore

icon email marketing

Icon Marketing Strategy can always provide the most useful and relevant tips of marketing!

Why Email Marketing Services Singapore Has Become Business Needs?

In today’s world, there are endless ways to communicate, but email marketing is still an important inbound tool for having conversations with your contacts.

Email marketing is rooted in every part of an inbound strategy, and a great strategy will help you keep your marketing on target and show your company a return on investment.

When was your last time you sent an email? It could have been a few minutes ago or even right now. Now ask yourself what type of email did you send?

The email could have been a quick note to your co-worker, maybe a longer one to your boss, a personal email, or even sending out a marketing email to a segmented list of contacts.

The first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson in the 1970’s. Since then, everyone has been sending so many different types of email.

All of these types of email are important to not only your professional life but to your personal life as well.

They are important because you are engaging in conversation, and email is one of the main ways we have conversations and communicate in all the different sectors of our lives.

And by 2020 email use worldwide will top 3 billion users.

While you’re personal emails are important that we are going to focus on building effective your email marketing strategy.

This will help your audience, continue to nurture a relationship with them, and have conversations that help you and your customers to grow.

But doing email marketing is not as easy as it may seem. It is not as simple as quickly drafting a message and hitting the “send” button.

You have to build a healthy email list, make sure you are complying with email regulations, and segment your contacts so you are delivering the right messages to the right people, at the right time and so much more.

How to Build an Effective Email Marketing Strategy for Growth

Email marketing is now more than ever rooted in every part of our inbound strategy.

Focusing more and more on data and segmentation your email marketing is fuelling your inbound strategy with syncing closely to your CRM and contact database as well as the information on your website.

icon marketing inbound

You are collecting more data and to send great emails you are segmenting them to create a highly personalized experience for your contacts.

This is why having an inbound email marketing strategy will help you to keep your email on target and show your company a return on investment.

Whether you are a company of one or 5000, your email marketing strategy needs to be clearly defined to help you reach your goals.

So, how do email and inbound come together to fuel your inbound strategy and generate ROI for your business?

Your email marketing strategy is one part of your overall inbound strategy.

You will develop this strategy to market your products and services and nurture relationships in a human and helpful way through the use if the email channel.

For a lot of people, email marketing is an interesting part of inbound marketing. To some, it still is one of the prime examples of outbound marketing.

The word spam is enough to scare us away from hitting send. And to those who rely on the purchased list and emailing people who have never opted in the hearing from them, it should be scary.

By using “outbound” tactics of sending email, marketers are not having conversations with the people on the receiving end of their email.

This is why it’s so important to remember that there is a human on the other end if your emails send who will be reading that message.

List of Email Marketing Company Singapore

iMailCampaign

icon marketing imailcampaign

iFoundries has been an advanced office that engages developing organizations with expertly-created computerized methodologies since 2005, with its central command in Singapore.

Besides that, there are few services that they provided for email marketing such as fully customizable templates, email automation and optimize and iterate. If you want to know more details please click here to visit their website.

XIRLYNX

icon marketing xirlynx

Xirlynx is Singapore’s premier Email Marketing Company. Since 2001, we have successfully executed and managed thousands of email marketing campaigns for Fortune 500 companies, MNCs and small enterprises worldwide email advertising arrangements enable organizations to interface with their clients, customers, and individuals, furnishing them with a simple and reasonable approach to construct fruitful, enduring associations with their clients. With access to the most recent experiences on email advertising patterns and email promoting best practices, today, in excess of 1,000 clients overall trust Xirlynx to enable them to interface with their gathering of people.

Xirlynx gives you the email advertising methodologies that can enable you to connect with your gathering of people, advance your items or benefits and develop your business. Moreover, they have professional designers to monitor and enhance your EDM production, campaign managers to manage all your email blasts and reports.

iFoundrise

icon marketing ifoundries

iFoundrise established in January 2005, iFoundries has its headquarters in Singapore with regional teams in Malaysia and Vietnam.

Nevertheless, iFoundries can get a lot of positive review from different websites. As it can helps a lot of company to improve their reputation and their sales,

Learn Why Email Marketing is an Important Part of Inbound

Creating an inbound email marketing strategy means you are creating a human, helpful and customer-driven conversation and experience, and this is what will lead to impactful results for your business.

So where do email and the inbound methodologies intersect?

Firstly, let’s review the inbound methodology. Let’s talk about what it is now, how it can help your business grow, and how email fits into the process.

The inbound methodology is made up of the four stages of inbound. These stages are attracting, convert, close and delight.

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The first stage is “attract”, where you will attract strangers and turn them into visitors. This can mean many things for you – using blogging and social media and optimizing your website.

These are all mediums for publishing and distributing content that people can choose to consume on their own terms, not channels for forcing people to engage with your message.

As technology continues to evolve and develop, there will be more and more mediums for you to use to attract strangers and convert them into visitors.

And once you have attracted your new visitors, the next step is to convert them into leads by gathering their contact information.

Again, it is their choice as to whether they are willing to share their contact information in exchange for access to your content.

And after you have attracted the right visitors and converted them into leads, it is time to turn those leads into customers.

And this is where we see email primarily live, in the close stage of the inbound methodology.

This is where you will use email to nurture your leads by sending them the right message, at the right time, every single time.

The email will then continue to support your inbound efforts after someone is already your customer.

You will use email to engage with and delight your customers and turn them into happy promoters of the products and service they love.

In our world today, trust is more important than ever. Word of mouth is how people develop trust with a brand.

icon marketing strategy email

Your customers are the ones who will help you continue the buying process for others by sharing their experiences with their friends, family, and colleagues.

And once this occurs then the whole inbound methodology will begin again.

While our world today continues to evolve and new products and service appear daily, there are many ways to have conversations with your visitors, leads and customers.

Email marketing continues to be one of the practices that consistently fuels and deliver ROI for your business.

And when it is used properly, in collaboration with all of the other conventional tools, you can build trust.

By creating a great email marketing strategy, you are creating a sustainable, helpful and human experience to develop relationships with the customers and help them grow.

Thus, this is why by having complete understanding fundamentals of email marketing enable your business to grow tremendously and to compete with other giant business in the industry.

How to Create Content Marketing Strategy For 2019

Content Marketing: Define Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing fits in a broader integrated marketing strategy and it requires a strategy of its own.

Content marketing is much more than about creating, distributing and sharing content in order to engage with the audience, generate leads or improving branding.

icon marketing content is king

For whatever reasons marketing goals you want to serve, you can do it with content marketing.

To begin with, content marketing is taking in any type of content, whether digitally or physically, and purposefully sending it your audience.

By adding a strategy to this, means that you have thought about your goals, audiences and distribution channels.

Common Question on Creating the Best Content Marketing Strategies

The typical question about content marketing strategy plan will answer the below questions:

  • Who is your audience? There are usually based on market segments and certain types of content will target specific segments.
  • What channels will you use?
  • What metrics will you use to measure the success and ROI?
  • What resources do you have?
  • What pain point you want to solve?

Why Do You Need To Building Content Marketing Strategy?

Yes!  You need to build your own content marketing strategy.

You not only need a proper strategy, but you also need to document it as well.

Those with a documented content marketing strategy:

  • Are far more likely to consider more effective at content marketing.
  • Feel significantly less challenged with every aspect of content marketing.
  • Generally, consider themselves more effective in their use of all content marketing tactics and social media channels.
  • Were able to justify spending a higher percentage of their marketing budget on content marketing.

icon marketing content strategy

Content Marketing Strategy Framework

For the basic requirement for successful, scalable content marketing operations can be divided into the five core elements.

Here are the 5 core elements in Content Framework:

1. Your Goals and Purpose

The ‘why’- you need to understand the ‘why’ or purpose in reaching your final goal.

Why you are creating such content and what value you expect it to provide.

2. Your target audience.

The ‘who’ – the one category of consumers your content can benefit most and what is in it for them.

3. Your brand story.

The ‘what’ – what specific, unique and valuable idea you will build your content assets around.

This also includes your overarching content mission, as well as the topical areas you will focus on in pursuit of that mission.

4. Your Process.

The ‘how’ – how will you structure and manage your operations, as well as how you will enable, activate and apply specific content tactics in pursuit of your goals.

5. Your Measurement.

The “how much” – how you will gauge your content’s performance, evaluate its business impacts and identify opportunities for improvement.

Types of Content Marketing Strategies

Definitely, there are a variety of options out there for content you can create.

Here are some of the most popular content formats marketers are creating, tools and templates to get you started.

1. Blog Posts

Whether you are noticing or not, you are currently perusing a blog post.

Blog posts on a website should be published regularly in order to attract new visitors.

Your blog posts should be able to provide valuable content for your audience that makes them inclined to share the posts on the social media and across other websites.

The ideal words length for the blog posts would be between 1,000 to 2,000 words.

You could try to experiment to see whether your audience prefers longer or shorter reads, and cater to the major preference.

2. EBooks

EBooks are lead-generation tools which potential customers can download after submitting a lead form about their contact information.

EBook is usually longer, more in-depth, and published less frequently than blog posts, which are written to attract more visitors to the website.

Basically, EBooks are the next step in the inbound marketing process.

For instance, after reading this blog post, you might want more information about it.

This is where calls-to-action (CTA) play its part, by directing the people to a landing page.

Then, you are required to submit the contact information before downloading the EBook to learn more valuable information for the business.

In turn, the business that producing EBook has new leads for the sales team to contact.

It is basically killing two birds with one stone!

3. Social Media

Once you have been regularly publishing content on your own site for a while, you might start thinking about distributing your content on other sites.

This could mean repurposing content into new formats and publishing them on your blog.

You can create original specifically for external sites such as Medium, or publishing website content various social networks.

content marketing social icon

However, posting on social media is pivotal to amplify your brand’s awareness and delivering your content to your customers where you know where they spend their leisure time.

Here are the most popular social networks the businesses often post include:

  • Facebook
  • YouTube
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn

4. Videos

For your information, videos are one of the most effective and highly engaging mediums that are shareable across social media platforms and websites alike.

However, the possible drawback of videos is required a huge investment of time and resources then written content, as visual marketing increases in popularity.

Nevertheless, the greatest advantages for videos are it is 40 times likely to get shared on social media than other types of content.

Many research revealed that video is the most preferred form of content.

This is because the video has the ability to capture people’s attention more than any other content format.

5. Infographics

Infographic could organize and visualise data in a more compelling way than the words alone.

As they said, “A picture is worth a thousand words”.

These are the great content formats to use if you are trying to share countless data in a way that is clear and easy to understand.

Others Content Marketing Examples

Here are some content marketing examples from the business for you.

•    Coco-Cola

Coke used personalization to get everybody talking about their brand.

They kicked off their “Share a Coke” campaign in Australia by putting the 150 most common names on bottles.

icon marketing coke

Fundamentally, they are encouraging people to share a Coke with people with those names.

The campaign went viral which resulting in sales of 250 million bottles and cans.

•    Burberry

One of the Burberry’s most outstanding content marketing campaigns was Burberry Kisses.

It is a campaign that blending technology with the human wish to connect with others.

Via an app, the users now could press their lips to the screen and send a digital kiss to anyone.

The campaign also allowed people to use Google Maps and Google Street View to see the journey those digital kisses took.

With this content marketing examples, hope that you are all set to wow your visitors with new, creative and fresh ideas.

Want to know more information about marketing please always visit us, Icon Marketing Strategy

Why Content Marketing Is Much Important More Than You Think

What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy is referred to the management of pretty much tangible media that you create and own.

Whether it is in – written, visual or downloadable, you name it.

icon marketing content strategy

It is the piece of your marketing plan that continuously demonstrates who you are and the expertise that you bring to your industry.

You might have heard how content creation plays a significant role in the growth of the business.

However, as you will see throughout this post, it needs more than this.

It needs to have a well-planned purpose.

What Do Content Marketing Strategies Do?

First of all, let’s outline what content strategist actually does.

So, there won’t any confusion about it.

A content marketing strategist is a person that responsible for planning, developing delivering and finally promoting relevant content based on the user needs and business goals.

However, the exact role of content marketing strategist might vary from company to company.

Some duties of content marketing strategists still remain consistent across every role.

Typically, a content marketing strategist does the following:

  • Develops the content strategy.
  • Determine what kind of content to use, based on the target audience.
  • Promotes the content.
  • Set tone, style and voice for the content.
  • Developing and improving the brand of the content development process.
  • Measures and analyses the key content marketing metrics.

Key Considerations in Developing a Content Marketing Strategy

Before you develop the content strategy, there are several key things to consider:

1. Define your target audience

Who is the target audience for this content?

For how many audiences you are creating the content?

And of course, you might have more than one type of customer.

Thus, your content strategy should be able to cater to more than one type of reader or viewer that suit to their needs.

You could use various types of content and channels to deliver different content to each type of audience you have in mind and engage everyone your company does business with.

2. Educational and problem-solving content

Ideally, you should know what are the problems faced by your audience, and help them to solve with your products or services.

By the same token, your content should be educational for the audience to learn about it.

Educate your audience through the content as they will begin to identify and address it.

A sound content strategy should support the people on both sides of your product.

The content should support the people who are still figuring out what their main challenges.

And for those who already are using your product to overcome these challenges.

Reinforce the solutions that you are offering in the content and makes your audiences more qualified users of your products.

3. What Makes You Special and Unique

Obviously, there are possibilities that your competitors are likely to have similar products as yours.

Thus, you need to differentiate your products about your products with your competitors.

icon marketing special

In another word, you potential need customers need to know what makes yours better, or at least, different.

Here you go; this is where the content comes in!

To prove why you are worth buying for, you need to ascertain why you are worth listening to in the first place.

4. Content Formats

What kind of content format you will focus on?

Whether is it an infographic?

Perhaps, it could be videos or blog posts?

As you need to identify the topics that you want to take the position on, you will need to define which formats are best to express that position.

5. Identify Which Channels to Publish

Just as you can create content in different formats, you also need to have different channels that you could publish to.

The channels are including owned properties, such as your website and blog, or maybe social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Why You Need The Best Content Marketing Strategy Framework?

Absolutely, content marketing can help your business to prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads.

Let’s take a moment and think about it.

Just imagine that you could create just one blog post that can get a steady amount of organic traffic.

Then, an embedded link to an eBook or free tool will help you to continue generating leads for you as time goes on.

The reliable source of traffic and leads from your evergreen content will provide you with the flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue.

For example, you could generate revenue through social media advertising, sponsored content and distributed content.

This will help you to educate your target prospects and generate more awareness for your brand.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Now, let’s dive in more detail to learn the specifics of how to create a well-planned content marketing strategy.

1. Define Your Goal.

Defining and Understand your original goal is important in setting the roadmap to a successful content marketing strategy.

What is your aim for developing a content marketing plan in future?

Why do you want to develop content and create a content marketing plan?

icon marketing goal

These are questions that you should be questioning about your content marketing strategy plan.

Know your goals before you begin planning.

And then you will have an easier time in determining what the best for your strategy is.

2. Conduct Persona Research.

To develop a successful content marketing plan, you need to clearly define the target audience of your content.

In another word, know your buyer persona.

icon marketing persona

This is especially crucial for those who just starting out or still new to the marketing.

By knowing your target audience, you could produce more relevant and more valuable content that they want to read and convert on.

You have to know that your target may have changed.

Do you want to target a brand new group of people or expand your current target market?

Or do you want to keep the same target audience?

Thus, you have to revisit your audience parameters.

You ought to conduct market research each year as it is a vital factor in growing your audience.

3. Run a Content Audit

Almost all the people will start out with the blog posts.

But, if you want to venture out and try creating other content pieces, you need to consider which ones you want to make.

For instance, if you are doing the weekly blog posts for the past year, creating an eBook that distils all your blog posts into one ultimate guide would be a great way to offer information in a different format.

If you are an experienced marketer, you need to review your content marketing efforts and results from the previous years.

Figuring out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals to reach.

4. Choose a Content Management System.

Have a system in place where you could be managing your content easily.

Some of the few vital parts of content management are including content creation, content publication and content analytics.

The WordPress website hosted on WO Engine will be the example for the content management system that you could use for your business.

 5. Brainstorm the Ideas

Now, it is the time for you to brainstorming some ideas for your next content project.

Here are some tools to get the wheels turning.

HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator

You could save your time and energy in thinking on how to generate some attractive topic with HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator.

All you need to do is enter general topics or keywords that you want to write about.

And this content idea generator will do all the work for you.

BuzzSumo

With BuzzSumo, you can discover a ton of popular content and content ideas.

icon marketing buzzsumo

This company offers numerous market research tools, which using social media’s shares to determine whether the piece of content is popular and well-liked.

In addition, this information also can help you to see which content ideas would do well if you were to create content something similar to them.

Want to know more marketing tips? Always visit us, Icon Marketing Strategy 

The Power of Storytelling – How to Do Content Marketing Right?

Why does your business need a story?

Everyone loves a great story.

People want to feel connected to a group, to belong.

Stories give you a reason to communicate and relate.

Stories are stimulating and give you something to believe in.

Stories make you feel better, smarter, safer or even loved.

Business storytelling is similar.

It is about creating alignment between your business and prospects and customers.

But telling your brand’s story is more than what you write on your website, your blog, or even social media.

It is your value and your mission, and how you communicate that consistently to your audience – wherever they are.

icon marketing story tell

Thanks to smartphones and tablets, the average adult spends over 20 hours per week with digital media.

Additionally, Google receives over 4 million search queries per minute per 4 minutes.

4 million search queries per minute? Wow!

That is a lot of people looking for the answers.

But, capturing their attention can be difficult.

In just 1 minute…

1388 blog posts are published.

Facebook users share 2.5 million pieces of content.

YouTube users upload 72 hours of new video content.

Twitter users tweet nearly 300,000 times.

Instagram users post nearly 220.000 new photos.

All in this can be done in 1 minute.

Content marketers are constantly battling for the attention of their prospects and customers.

To help ensure that you are heard, you need to be genuine and tell a story that appeals to your audience.

Your goal is to make a human connection.

It is about resonating with people, people that you need your help or guidance.

In the world of business, a story helps you create a contrast between choices.

Stories will help your prospects make sense of the decision that they are about to make.

Whatever it is deciding in a needed product or service or making the purchase,

Chances are you are not the only business that does what you do.

Why Stories Matter For Today’s Business?

To survive in today’s crowded informational marketplace, you need to stand out.

This is where your business story comes in.

Stories can make your prospects the main characters, and even change the way they think and feel.

And storytelling is used in all formats of content.

It is not just used in a lengthy eBook.

You can use storytelling in blogs, email, videos, case studies, guides.

The list goes on and on.

So, what is NOT a story?

A story is not just your history.

A story is why you are doing what you are doing, and telling it in a way that appeals to your audience.

It is also not cliché; it is not what everyone else is saying.

Sure you may think you provide the best customer service within your industry, but that is not your story.

Storytelling is about standing out, not blending in.

Many companies play it safe and use data and ROI to attract customers, which is important.

But logic is rarely is appealing and remembered.

On the other hand, emotion gets remembered.

Emotion gets shared.

And it is not by saying we are the best.

It is more about appealing to the emotional side of your prospects and customers than the logic of what you do.

Stories are how audiences remember.

And to help make your audience remember, you need to stand out by telling a story with the right context.

icon marketing story

Create a contrast by being consistent and authentic and being conversational to elicit emotion from a specific audience.

As a content marketer, use stories to better engage.

The most importantly, teach your audience.

Content Sharing and Storytelling: Why People do Online Content Marketing?

Content sharing is often – the holy grail of many content marketing, social media and online marketing practitioners in general.

Although content sharing is just a part of the whole content marketing process and social media marketing reality.

All marketers would love to see their content shared as far as wide as possible.

It is a topic that had been living in all forms of marketing.

So, here is the question – why do people share the content?

Why do they tell stories? Why do they bother at all?

The answer is – this is because they want to feel emotionally compelled to.

The Psychology of Sharing: How to Use Content Marketing?

Content sharing – it involves emotions, psychology and quite some chemical process that go hand in hand with the act of sharing.

“The sharing of stories or information may be driven in part by arousal” – Psychologist Jonah Berger.

That seems like pretty self-oriented, don’t you think?

People have tried to define all the emotions and motivations of why content and stories get shared for ages.

Each of the emotion got its own label.

So, there are literally hundreds of ways to look at emotions and motivations.

Similarly, we as humans like to label things and people which are to make sense of the world around us.

Thus, we like to label emotions and connect them with the way on how we act, feel, behave and share.

Content, Social, Content Curation and Storytelling

Without all of the content and stories, the world would be a lot less populated and boring.

Everyone needs to have something to talk about, don’t we?

In the end, that also part of what content marketing is all about.

Storytelling is essential for content marketing.

And one of the characteristics of stories is that they tend to get shared.

Yet, storytelling is about much more than content marketing.

Content marketing is closely related and being integrated with nowadays social media marketing.

icon marketing social media

It is also depending on the business goals and context that you want to be delivered.

However, it is clear that the combination of content and social is a strong one.

Sharing is not anything new as humans have always shared the content in one way or another.

We just digest the content, share it and discuss it.

It is a fundamental fuel of communities offline and online.

Why You Need Content Marketing?

Besides, you also could use the storytelling to strengthen your brand.

Without a doubt, storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to breathe life into your brand.

It is often being called as one of the main components of a content marketing approach.

Just by giving your products and services an identity by capturing and sharing the stories, you could take your target audience to a journey that they yearn to experience.

icon marketing branding

In order to establish a personal connection for consumers with your brand, the story should be authentic, creative and inspirational.

Emotional branding is a progressive marketing strategy that has the potential to drive revenue and increase customer retention.

How a person feels about your brand typically determines whether they want to buy your product.

A brand is a matter of perception.

When you try to tell a story that embodies human challenges, you are indirectly creating an experience that resonates with your customers.

To know more information about marketing please always visit us, Icon Marketing Strategy

Why Content Marketing Can Become Your Business Conversion Machine

Content Marketing Strategy Definition

Of course, content marketing has been a popular buzzword for a few years now.

But, what does it really mean?

The best fit to define about content marketing is it describes the creation of relevant, rich and extremely targeted communications with the commercial purpose.

Now, let’s dive deeper about some of the leading trends in content marketing.

The Power of Content Marketing

Content Marketing is Getting Popular than Ever

Yes, it is quite hot about this thing called content marketing.

It is so much more than a medium used for the communication industry to create some buzzword.

For your information, there is 89 per cent of business-to-business (B2B) companies and nearly as many pitching to consumers.

And, yes. Most of them are using content marketing as a tool to advance their brand presence and engage with their audience.

Of course, sometimes when writing a lot could cause a brain drain for you.

Obviously, when you have a tired brain, you are not as mentally sharp.

Thus, many of the companies or businesses try to overcome it by outsourcing their content marketing to the third party.

So, the question is, if everyone is doing it, will be a room there left for you?

The answer is, yes.

As long as you are putting out the content that your targeted audience will be interested in.

Content is about telling, not selling!

To be specific is it more about storytelling.

icon marketing story telling

You must build a story that the other will want to see, hear or read about it.

You don’t want to scare away your target audience with some meaningless story that they don’t interest in.

In another word, avoid creating the content that meets your needs to sell.

Focus on what your targeted audience wants to respond to.

Go Beyond Social Media.

Don’t ever underestimate the influence from the social media.

Therefore, you should never ever give up on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and the rest.

Don’t just stop there.

You have to go more up-close and be more personal with your audience and go where not everyone else is going.

You must get your audience to opt-in to your email marketing campaign, where you can control the message.

That means by giving something of perceived value so that that could hang around.

It is not an easy task.

But the reward for successful content marketing could be enormous.

What is Organic Content Marketing?

According to the Marketing Institute, there were approximately 5000 of people advertisement every day.

When faced with this kind of competition for an audience’s attention, actually there are two approaches – Paid Marketing and Organic Marketing.

icon marketing piad vs organic

Paid marketing involves allocating a budget to your advertising campaign and paying countless platforms for the promotion.

On the other hand, organic content marketing is more finding ways on how to make customers look for you naturally.

In other words, you will be using any type of marketing method that does not require a direct payment.

But, there still will be incurred cost there.

This also includes paying for content creation and the time spent by monitoring the campaigns as well as responding to customers.

Thus, this type of inbound marketing involves giving valuable content that customers really desired.

Why Content Marketing?

In a simple word, an organic content marketing system is customer-centric, by focusing on giving your customers a seamless online experience.

icon marketing targeted

Therefore, a quality and valuable content are needed to provide the ideal answer to questions and highlight why you have the best solution.

By establishing yourself as a good source of essential content, you will able to build an effective engagement with the customers.

In turn, you are building your brand.

Then again, this type of marketing requires time and tremendous effort, along with a good system which is essential to reap the rewards.

How to Content Marketing?

1. Know Your Platforms

Developing the content marketing system means putting the content in the right places.

It is crucial to have an understanding of the core demographics that your content will reach.

In facts, social media platforms do provide vibrant and instantly high-engaging audiences.

These audiences did comprise a staggering 42 per cent of the world population.

But, not all platforms are equal in terms of their marketing potential.

Just look at Instagram and Snapchat.

These social media platforms are where the younger audience usually is.

The statistic had revealed that there is 59 per cent of 18 to 29-year-old use Instagram.

2. Emphasis on Quality Content

Content is the key to everything in content marketing.

icon marketing golden key

It all about how you are trying to build and engage with the audience.

That’s mean you need to make content that is easy for people to find, solve their problems, able to share with their friends.

And that is how you can establish the source of information that people would want to return again and again.

Furthermore, keywords play as an integral part of any strategy, as they help you to drive your content up to the search rankings.

So, start by establishing the keywords that are relevant to your business, and that you expect customers to search for.

Besides, the keywords may get eyes on your content.

But they probably won’t hold much about viewer’s interest.

You need something that could keep them engaged, but keyword stuffing won’t help you to achieve that.

This is why quality content is essential.

A well-written, well-researched content keeps people reading, as it resonates with them.

There are many ways to enhance the content.

For example, you can arrange or break down the materials into digestible sections.

The using of visually appealing infographics is strongly recommendable as a picture is worth a thousand words.

You also could create the content or videos that express ideas instantly and easy to share across the social media.

And don’t forget the links as well.

By creating a network of related content is important in keeping the viewers engaged with the constant stream of relevant information.

Thus increase the chance they can make the purchase.

Final Thoughts: Why is Content Marketing so important?

By now, you should know why content marketing plays an important role in today’s business.

Content marketing is a potential boon for your business, as it provides the material of info that the online user is searching for,

It may be a slow process that involves a long-term commitment to create or produce high-quality content while constantly interacting with customers through various online platforms.

A few articles for a month definitely are not enough!

If you really want to benefit from potentially over three times as much traffic, you will need to publish at least 16 articles per month.

In addition, if you are handling the campaign in the right manner, there is a chance for you to see sustainable growth in your brand and a deeper level of engagement with your customers.

Nevertheless, this resource-intensive approach may require you to outsource work in order to stay relevant and get the result that needs.

If you want to know more information about marketing please always visit us, Icon Marketing Strategy

Why Long-Term Plan is Crucial for Content Marketing Companies?

Why long-term plan work best for the top content marketing companies?

Why long-term content planning is important to your business?

To start, planning provided a roadmap for your content.

You would not get into a car and drive without an end destination; you did be wasting petrol.

This is probably why 86% of highly effective organizations have someone to steering the direction of their content strategy.

At this point, you should know how important content is to your inbound marketing strategy.

But as a reminder, content has the very important job of pulling people from one stage of the inbound methodology to another.

It plays an integral part in each and every stage of the buyer’s journey.

When it comes to creating content, you want to remain as reactive and agile as you can to do your best to make the most of your time.

Having a plan will give you and your team the ability to remain reactive to upcoming initiatives.

It helps you to stay organised and proactively manage the content required for your marketing tasks.

Think of your long-term content plan like a saving account.

icon marketing investment

If your goal is to retire someday, then you need a plan, and you need to be consistent with the contributions.

The more consistent you are and the better you are with the contributions, the more you will get on your return on investment.

But in order to retire, you need to be consistent month-after-month.

Otherwise, you will miss your goals and the ability to retire.

The same can be said about your content.

If you make a plan and a consistent approach, then you are giving yourself the best chance at achieving ROI from your content efforts.

You will have the opportunity to grow an expansive library of content, making you and your business-content wealthy.

It is important to note that obstacles and roadblocks will come up along the way, but at least you have your goals and direction set.

Having a plan will make it that much easier to regain alignment, as well as understand bandwidth and priorities for what needs to get done and when.

Another reason why you should have a long-term content plan is it helps you to stay organised.

Most often, marketing teams place a focus on more than one initiative at any given time.

A long-term plan accounts for all upcoming initiatives and provides the ability to be agile in your content creation process.

Being organised will also allow you to align with the overall goals of the business.

In essence, it gets the marketing team in-line with the current initiatives of the entire organization,

Content is not just about supporting the marketing team.

It should be about supporting the sales team, customer service team, products and services team and so on.

By aligning your content marketing goals to the overall goals of the organization, you can rest assured that your focus will provide an immediate impact to where it matters most.

For example, attracting and attaining of your audience.

Lastly, the long-term planning allows the ability to tell a story by taking your audience down their buyer’s journey.

Remember, content is the fuel that keeps the inbound methodology running.

Having a relevant approach like this gives you the opportunity to answer your prospects’ questions and meet them at their point of need.

How Do The Best Content Marketing Company Build a Long-Term Content Plan?

Okay, now you know why it is important to have a long-term content plan.

Let’s actually learn how to do it.

Let’s take a moment to revisit the buyer‘s journey, as it has a similar corresponding marketing funnel, which also known as “marketing machine”.

The marketing machine relates each buyer’s journey stage to a corresponding marketing funnel stage – Awareness, Consideration and Decision stage.

icon marketing buyer journey

Firstly, the awareness stage that related to visit and lead.

Secondly, the consideration stage that relates to the marketing qualified lead (MQL) and sales qualifies lead (SQL).

Lastly, the decision stage relates to opportunity and customer.

These funnels are designed to help you visualize and guide a prospect through the stages of the buyer’s journey.

So, you can effectively measure your funnel and provide a tailored message to that prospect at their particular stage during the buyer’s journey.

It is important to understand the relationship between both funnels as they are working towards the same goals.

The goals are attracting your prospects, converting them into leads and closing them into customers.

A marketing machine is not developed overnight.

It takes a lot of time and planning to build it.

This is where long-term content planning comes in.

The Importance of Long-Term Content Plan for Content Marketing Companies

So, what is involved in developing a long-term content plan?

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There are 3 steps you must take to create a long-term content plan.

Step 1: Setting marketing goals.

Step 2: Auditing or assessing your organization’s initiatives and assets.

Step 3: Identifying the buyer’s journey for your buyer personas.

The ultimate objective here is to have a unifying document you can use to keep track of your long-term content marketing initiatives.

First, let’s talk about setting your marketing goals.

Setting marketing goals provides you with a long-term vision and short-term motivation.

It helps you to organize your time and resources so you can make the most of your content creation efforts.

Each piece of content created for marketing initiatives should be tied to a goal that is also directly related to the overarching goals of the organization.

This will help you stay laser-focused with the content creation process.

Let’s take a second to think about this.

If your company’s quarterly customer foal is 15 new customers and you know the number of leads needed to generate 15 customers is 50 leads.

If you know the number of website visits needed to generate 50 leads is 1000 visits, then you need to take into consideration the content you needed to hit your visit goal.

Include SMART Goal in Your Plan

Each of the goals you set should be a SMART goal.

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That is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.

A potential SMART goal example could be increased quarterly site visit by 30%.

That’s 5000 per quarter to 6000 per quarter by the end of the year.

The second step in creating a long-term content plan is auditing or assessing your organization’s initiatives and assets.

Your audit is going to consist of two parts.

First, auditing your content assets, and second, auditing your event-based priorities.

Let’s begin with the content audit.

Your goal with the content audit is to help you identify all of the marketing assets that you have at your disposal.

And potentially identify gaps or opportunities in your content strategy.

There comes a point for every marketer who has been generating content for a while when they realize they have no idea where all of their content is or how much they actually have.

Content has likely been created by you, your predecessors, or other individuals in the marketing department.

This including subject matter experts from other departments and is scattered just about everywhere.

By doing your content audit, you will be able to identify resources that you already have, which could save your hours of content creation time in the future.

When it comes to documenting a content audit, there should be a place for you to insert all of your assets.

Properly organize them based on the content title, buyer’s journey stage, marketing funnel stage.

You also should include the format or type of content, which buyer persona is targeting, and additional notes that provide value or content.

Now it is time to do some digging for content assets such as guides, worksheets, or sales collateral.

You are recommended to systematically combing through the following dark corners where content can typically be hiding.

It is like that old file manager or marketing folder on your computer.

You can ask your sales team what type of collateral do they use.

Check in with the more tenured employees, you will be surprised at the wealth of knowledge here.

Pore through your customer relationship management system (CRM) and your content management system (CMS) as well.

Now, you might already get the picture here.

Thus, you are a step closer to be more efficient in creating a plan for your company.

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