Modern Consumer’s Buying Behavior Has Changed: Has Your Marketing?

5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … Skip Ad > >

I so hate this drill, especially when I hop on to YouTube to watch a Tom Cruise video. I literally despise these pre-roll ads. These ads are so annoyingly right in my face.

I didn’t log in to YouTube to watch a father scolding his son for losing his laptop and then the son buying a refurbished laptop from a popular ecommerce website (Ad Name: “As Good as New”). Though I’m an online shopaholic but at my own convenience and desired time. I mean I don’t love that shopping portal enough to come in between Tom Cruise (virtually) and me and hamper my video-watching experience like that.

I hate such brands that do NOT seek my permission and expose me to their marketing messages hundred times a day. This triggers a barrage of questions in my mind about their marketing strategy (and their marketers in particular!).

I feel so fortunate as a marketer in my career to have seen traditional marketing getting redundant and less effective in the last decade and subsequently wiped out by permission-based marketing in last 2-3 years. According to an Adobe study, marketing has changed more in the last 2 years than in the last 50 years.

As marketers, we need to acknowledge and respect the fact that with technology adoption gaining pace with each passing day, people are are getting better at blocking out these interruptions.

• TV ads…We’ve TiVO/DVRs to skip advertisements. I so love Netflix’s House of Cards, free of advertising.
• Radio ads…Users have XM/Sirius Radio/Pandora/Spotify to cut their advertising reach
• Unsolicited (cold calls)…Fortunately, we’ve national Do Not Call Registry.
• Spammy emails ….I routinely employ spam filters.

As a matter of fact, a large number of organizations are still not convinced about the merits of permission-based marketing for two reasons:

• Their otherwise expensive outbound methods have fetched results for them so far. So new approach means new risk to revenues. And, not many are risk takers.
• Permission-based marketing requires investment in terms of resources, effort, time and money. And, most of all, PATIENCE for long-term rewards.

So, such brands resort to “spray and pray approach” and thus still do “batch and blast” email campaigns and pray for leads online. And when the results do not pour in, it feels like as depicted in the picture below.

I love this brilliant quote from Dharmesh Shah, cofounder HubSpot

“Market unto others as they would market unto you” –@dharmesh#INBOUND15

— HubSpot (@HubSpot) September 9, 2015

The bottom line is that people are now wary of traditional outbound marketing messages and adept at blocking outbound marketers out. Netizens now learn about and shop from brands in a new way – through search engines, blogosphere and social media sites.

To be successful in today’s times, we need to match our marketing mannerisms to the way our prospects gather information and shop for our products.

How?

Generate leads through #Inbound marketing and target customers with relevance marketing.

Options for marketers:

Marketers either need to adapt to the changing shopping behavior of customers or risk extinction. Only mantra for success: GO #inbound

— Raina (@rainamtrivedi) October 24, 2015

Top 3 Personalization Strategies for Non-Retail Applications

2014 was an incredibly exciting year for mobile apps. With a huge advantage of personalization that mobile apps offer over mobile websites, even the most well-known  brick-and-mortar stores have geared their attention to developing more mobile applications in 2015. Using these apps, these stores successfully leverage proximity functions like geolocation, push notifications, etc.  to deliver mesmerising personalized experiences to shoppers, who so obsessively clutch their smartphones these days.

Many personalization platforms today emphasize primarily on retail mobile apps. But non-retail mobile apps can also keep their user community engaged. Read this post further to explore the different personalization strategies that work greatly for non-retail apps.

Many developers feel reluctant to dive into creating apps for non-retail businesses fearing from the exercise of collecting humongous customer data and developing big algorithms. Nevertheless, it’s a myth that we will debunk in this post.

Here are the top 3 personalization strategies for non-retail content.

1. Geolocation content

This is one of the great ways to personalize content. As majority of smartphones have in-built geolocation features, you can easily target users with newsfeed and even connect them with other users in proximity with same interests. One of the brilliant examples to quote here is that of iBeacon that enables mobile apps with its Bluetooth Low Energy technology to understand the location well and deliver relevant and contextual content to user based on location.

2. Recommendations

The better you understand a customer, the better and more educated recommendations, you can offer to your customers/online store visitors. You can extract useful information from your customers during the sign up process or even later interactions with your website. You can use this information for effective customer profiling when they start downloading and using your mobile app. You can track your customers across:

• User sign up process
• Browsing history
• User generated content like tweets, comments, favorites, likes, etc.
• User preferences
• Ratings and reviews

Once you’ve these data points, you can design a better user experience for your customers. Using the user feedback when they browse through your mobile app, you can refine your app further.

3. UGC

Often, etailers commit the blooper of looking upon personalization as a duty to deliver user experience. Personalization also entails the content and contribution of users to shopping environment. While you take all the necessary steps to offer personalization such as collecting customer data, monitoring their interactions with your ecommerce website and accordingly offer relevant and contextual product recommendations to them. You can let users contribute to your personalization strategy through a mobile application. Your private labelled application can serve as a powerful platform for users to connect and engage with your brand, pitch their opinion and experience. This will empower your users to generate their own personalized content and experience.

Let’s take the example of Gaana.com app, a beautifully designed mobile application that makes it easy for users to discover music from the best collection of national and international playlists. Here users take the music listening experience to a new level by creating/modifying playlists depending on their genres/moods.

Such mobile apps enable users to feel valued and ask for their contribution to make it more interesting a platform to visit and revisit to generate more user generated content and get their varied needs addresses on the online platform. It offers them highly personalized experiences.

A/B Testing: Changing the Rules of the Marketing Game

What is it? A/B testing (also known as split testing) is a simple market testing technique using which you can test two or more versions of your communication (email programs, landing pages, etc.) for a metric to determine as to which version performs better. You can then use the better-performing version for the real-world use. It, thus, weeds out any guesswork and empowers marketers to take data-backed marketing decisions.

A/B testing: A great testing mechanism for positive marketing results,

What can it do? If done right, A/B testing can result in increased traffic, leads and consequent sales. Marketers can perform A/B testing for many variables like subject line, timing, calls-to action, copy lengths, frequency, content/marketing offer, design, color, etc. The more variables a campaign is tested for, the better marketing decision and results are enabled. Highlighting the power of A/B testing, Matt Cutt (the head of Google’s Webspam team) says that running A/B tests improves the functionality of the website.

When should it be used? If you want quick results from your marketing initiatives, embracing A/B testing is a great idea. As the variables are so clearly defined for each version, it’s easier to assess as to which version has performed better than the other. However, it fails too often if you do not define clear goals for each test and if your theory is too vague.

How frequently should you do it? The answer varies. You can always do A/B testing across the complete marketing spectrum; however, each A/B test that you run must have a definite goal. If you run multiple tests that fetch unclear outcomes, it’s time to rethink your testing approach.

What are the common A/B testing tools? A wide array of tools are available in the market for A/B testing such as – Google Website Optimizer, Visual Website Optimizer, Webtrends Optimize, Omniture’s Test&Target, Unbounce, etc.

 

Why Inbound Marketing? Why Now?

Having spent good 8 years in online marketing domain and worked with multinational companies of high repute and also dozens remote service buyers, I can say with authority that Inbound Marketing Methodology is here to stay.

With all the digital noise around and benefits of embracing inbound marketing being thrown in the faces of marketers day-in and day-out, companies seem to be inclined towards adopting it but largely suffer from the lack of patience required to let inbound do its magic and yield results. Without team, budget and other resources required to build a good inbound marketing team and cultivating content culture within the company, most CMOs seem to be in a rush to see skyrocketing figures on metrics charts from the word “GO”. I know, I know, there’s lots of pressure from the top but believe it or not, inbound does take time, indeed lots of time. Why? Simply, because it does not treat Customers as entries in the CRM or marketing contacts databases. It focuses on talking to customers as HUMANS and triggering interactions not between brands and customers, but HUMANS and HUMANS across both the sides of the conversation. And, you know good HUMAN relationships do take time to get built and nurtured.

Back to the blog title – Why Inbound, why now?

Gone are the days when as a marketer, you could be inconsiderate to interrupt your audiences anytime, anywhere with your cold calls, cold emails (better to call them SPAMS), annoying ads, etc. This was the outbound or tradition way of marketing, which has now gotten replaced with new-age marketing or INBOUND MARKETING, which is customer centric and that uses content as a beacon to attract audiences and help them find your brand on their own. That’s why we call it “inbound” after all. 

Customers or buyers are more connected and informed than ever. Most of them have already researched well before they find your brand to connect with. So they will make their purchase decisions, whether you reach them or not. So, it’s best to adopt a marketing strategy that acts like a magnet and help them find you while they are aggressively researching for solutions to their problems/needs.

Here it’s important to know that to formulate a successful inbound marketing strategy, you got to know your target audiences, really really well before you empower them with information or means to find your brand and engage with your products/services.

1. Create Buyer persona
2. Study Buyer Journey
3. Create remarkable, helpful content
4. Leverage that content

It’s not enough to create great content. It’s equally important to get that content out in the world. Content distribution adds context to your content. And, content + context = successful inbound marketing. Right?

More about Inbound Marketing in my next blog…….Stay tuned!

Decoding the Secrets of Successful Content Writers

I love to strut around poofy-chested, when my work wins me plaudits. All inbound marketers do. Content creation and marketing go hand in hand. Content forms the core of inbound marketing methodology today.

Though many content creators buckle under the pressure of hammering out content real fast, and produce boring, mediocre quality content, there are some, who’re real good content creators. So what are those habits that help these content builders produce top-notch, relevant and remarkable content?

So before you run your fingers on the keyboard next time, take a glance at few habits, which only successful content creators have. Those you’re not going to cultivate these overnight, still if you start realizing their importance, you’ll be starting your journey to become a rockstar content creator.

1)    Read, Read and Read

Creating valuable content calls for extensive reading. Reading what? Industry-related news, insights, reports, case studies, competitors’ content and lots more.  A good content creator skims the entire web for the most relevant industry news and squeezes the same to craft a stellar copy, back with cues and facts. Such content is most likely to resonate with your target audiences.

Start bookmarking and using saving all the data on cloud. Set Google alerts of industry-specific keywords to receive relevant content in your Inbox daily. Figure out where your target audience spends most time online, and monitor those online destinations daily.

2)    A Copy a Day Keeps the Writer’s Block away

Losing the knack of writing is quite easy. If you don’t write for long, next time when you sit up to write, you might end up gazing at your computer’s screen without the cursor moving by even an inch. It’s vital to flex your writing muscles every day. This keeps up the constant inflow of ideas, and your fingers churning out good content regularly. If in the humdrum of corporate marathon, you don’t get the time to write a well-structured blog post every day, you can at least set apart half an hour every day, when you can pen down your thoughts, ideas or something of your choice. Grab a coffee and do some free style writing every day so that you don’t have to face that most dreaded, big monster anytime – Writer’s block.

3)    Network

It’s useless to highlight the profound significance of networking in this digital marketing era. A good content creator is one, who’s open to connect with seniors, peers, thought leaders and industry experts to listen to their ideas and observe their work methodologies. Seize the zillion opportunities of networking on different professional networks and forums. Keep an eye on the posts shared by them and skim these to filter out useful information to enrich your knowledge, and use the same while you produce content in the future.

4)    Curate Only Good Content

Today, anyone and everyone is curating content . What distinguishes successful content creators from millions of self-proclaimed content wizards is their zeal to cement their stature as experts, who love to interact with their target community effectively on the Internet. Add a layer of value, when you curate content, and give your community remarkable, engaging and useful information. They are going to love it, and you’ll see your content sparking debates and discussion thereby making your content curation turn into an interactive session (Bonus!)

5)    Be Curious

Great content creators crave for more and more information to quench their curiosity. It’s their  solid analytical abilities that help them to decrypt the gained knowledge and draw inferences and valuable insights to craft useful content. Curiosity, deeply embedded in their nature, is something that makes them stand out from the crowd as they dare to question the status quo of anything and everything that’s happening around them. Critical thinking stems from their curious nature and makes them great content contributors.

Post your opinion in the comment box below if you want to add some more habits of successful content creators. Your suggestions are precious to me and would help me hone my content writing skills.

 

Online Surveys – A Great Feedback Mechanism to Improve your Marketing

You might be a celebrated marketing champion but sometimes even the best ones fail. You may find yourself on the wrong side of a tongue lashing every time your CMO views the marketing results and ROIs.

Icy pause.

Sitting in stony silence – What strategy to adopt next? How to keep retention numbers high? How to create new opportunities for growth?

Well, it’s time to resurrect your marketing arsenal with only the relevant digital channels that focus on building relationships with your target audiences. Online survey is one such strong marketing tool. 

Online Surveys – Great Feedback Mechanism

Now the question pops up – What marketing challenges are addressed by online surveys? To begin with, online surveys are strong feedback mechanisms that help you get better insights from your community. Besides, these help you in:

• Market Research
• Marketing Optimization
• Internal Communications
• Thought leadership
• And most importantly, aligning the two arch enemies – sales and marketing teams within your organization.

A market research survey helps you in building your brand awareness and positioning your brand on the competitive landscape. Also, it helps you in creating your buyer personas and understanding the attitude and preferences of your customers w.r.t  to your competitors. However, only relying on survey results to draw inferences would be incorrect. These results need to be backed up with behavior-based analytics as this reflects the true data about your audience.

Marketing Research Survey – Analyze and position your brand better!

You can improve your marketing efforts by using online surveys. The survey details can help you improve your email marketing manifold as you can then focus on sending out the relevant emails to a particular buyer segment of your target audiences. Further, you can also leverage online surveys for improving the quality of your marketing messages. You evaluate your content strategy by directly asking your audiences about their preferences for your content pieces. Based on the feedback and subsequent analysis, you can tweak or overhaul your content strategy and devise a new road map for better inbound marketing results (since content creation forms the core of it!).

Event planning and success rate is another aspect, where online surveys can play a miraculous role. You can pass on the volley of questions head on to your target audiences about their preferences for the arrangement. The survey results would be a mirror to the aspirations of your event attendees. You can plan your event accordingly without much fuss. Surveys do play a crucial role even after the event is over. You can send out feedback surveys to all, who dropped by your event. This would help you analyze the success rate of your event and also help you filter the quality leads to follow up with.

Like blogs, online surveys can also help you tremendously in establishing your thought leadership in the industry. And, eventually generate more inbound leads and better marketing results. Based on the survey results and actionable steps, you can publish your data-driven report and establish your credibility as a thought influencer. This helps you drive more PR exposure and also tremendous business opportunities.

Next is the aspect of internal communications. Trust me on this one – an online survey is a terrific organizational tool that can help you get an early product feedback, plan company meetings and calculate Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Let me wrap up the post at this point! I will be talking more about the methodology and approach to launching online survey in the next post of this series. Until then, happy marketing!!!!

Set your Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate Register Ringing with Targeted Landing Pages

No marketing fads. Realign your marketing stars your way.

Yeah, I’m talking about one of the most critical marketing aspects. Your Landing pages. Many of the marketers and business owners buckle under the pressure of sky high marketing objectives. Good enough for biggest marketing gaffes. Let’s search for a marketing medication.

Springboard of your new landing page design

An intelligently done landing page targets a particular audience, not anyone and everyone. It’s vital to build landing pages especially tailored to each of your marketing offers. Jump start your marketing bandwagon and begin offering them valuable content offers – ebooks, webinars, whitepapers, case studies, etc.

Increase ROI! – an acerbic sword hanging over the head of every inbound marketer including me. Don’t throw away your leads by sending over all the hard earned web traffic to your home page. Also, don’t use your ‘Contact Us’ page for lead capture. You’ll only end up enticing spams.

Spread your marketing bait for capturing your leads with uniquely targeted landing pages for a particular target audience. Let us learn the golden tips to craft an effective landing page.

As users’ online attention spans are fairly short, your marketing offer should be catchy yet easy to understand. Actually, it should pass the blink test. What’s that? Your visitor should be able to understand your marketing offer as s/he blinks his/her eye. It all starts with a GREAT Headline! A punchy yet simple and succinct headline is good enough to warm the cockles of your visitor’s heart. Done! Congrats! You’re off to an awesome start.

Kick your visitor-to-lead conversions a notch up!

Next is Landing page content. It should deliver value and clearly explain your visitor why s/he needs to complete the lead form to be able to download your content offer. It should be plain, keyword inclusive and well optimized.  Bold or italicize to stress on the key points of your offer. Include bullet lists. Proof read the content carefully as an error –laden page would undermine your credibility.

It’s time to make a GREAT Landing page!

Include Social Sharing buttons. The more visitors your page attracts, the more is the possibility of visitor-to-lead conversions!

Now that you’ve created a stimulating marketing offer and a targeted landing page for the same, you’d not wish to let your marketing efforts go to vain. Hidden navigation would do just that for you! Once your visitor is on your landing page, keep him/her hooked on by eliminating all navigation and landing pages of your website. Leave your visitor with the only option of filling up your lead form.

Let us now talk about another important component of an effective landing page – the lead form. What’s your goal here? That your visitor fills it up. Make sure that it appears above the fold and has a reasonable length. Don’t bug your visitor with too long a form. A short form with thoughtfully laid out fields fetches you high-quality leads.

Always, do A/B testing. Now you might be thinking – What on Earth does that mean? It implies that you must make two versions of the same landing page and keep testing different elements to find out which one works for you better.

Hope these suggestions would help you all my fellow marketers. I’d love to see you guys adding your tips to the same in the comment box.

Master Business Blogging Fundamentals for Improved Marketing Score

2013 is here. It’s time to think BIG. My flag of New Year resolution is furling high. This year, I aim to be the best inbound marketing talent around. Well, that’s not going to happen in a nick of time. It’s a tough cookie. But I will try.

Business Blogging: Let us master the basics together

I’ve put all my marketing ducks together in a row. And, I start with one of the most critical pieces of inbound marketing methodology- Business Blogging. Tapping and prodding the concept from all corners possible, I hereby present to you some quick tips to master business blogging fundamentals. So if you’re angling for a role of a business blogger at your organization, read on.

Business blog is a long-term marketing asset. Relevant and engaging content is one of the core components of a business blog. Corporate blogging directly correlates to better marketing results. Trust me on this one!

A good business blog is one that is rich in content, well optimized and well promoted. If you happen to get the remarkable content for your blog written frequently  half of the battle is already won. Now comes forth the seemingly challenging task of blog optimization.

Blog Optimization. How do you do it? Simple! To provide your business blog with extended reach beyond your normal readership, follow these simple steps.

Social Media Sharing: Add social media sharing buttons either on the top, bottom or left of your blog post thereby making it more shareable.

Visually enticing images: Add captivating image, graphics or infographics to your blog. Remembers, visual content charms readers more than sheer text chunks.

Well-optimized Blog titles: Master the art of crafting stellar, optimized blog titles (8-9 words or fewer). The post title should be simple, direct, intriguing or even newsworthy. Support your content with numbers, cues and facts.

Formatting: Format your blog adequately to make it more readable and engaging.

Contextual CTAs: Treat your blog like a real estate platform for the placement of contextual call-to-action tabs, in-text or sidebars.

Actionable: Write a succinct blog post with actionable steps and clear takeaways.

Entertainment: Make your story interesting and entertaining by adding metaphors to it.

If you have proved yourself a rock star in blog optimization, you’ll find blog promotion way easier. What do you need to do?

Hunt for guest bloggers: Find guest bloggers, influencers or experts in your network and explain them the benefits of co-marketing partnership as they would get exposure beyond their base subscriber count and also inbound links.

Social Media Sharing: Make your blog more shareable by getting some prominent social media sharing buttons added to your story.

Website Banners: Treat your blog like a platform to place some top-performing marketing offers as banners. You can also place your blog link as banner on different pages of the website such as “Home” page or “About Us” page.

Cut a video: You can also make an entertaining video covering your whole objective behind your blog and some funny moments while putting it up there.
Business Events: Don’t miss out on an opportunity to turn the heads of your audiences to your blog, if you are out there on a podium for a corporate presentation at any business event. This can surprisingly drive in a huge amount of traffic to your blog.

Email Signatures: Go for digital branding and include your blog link to your email signature in all external and internal communications. Encourage all your colleagues also to do the same.

Blog Directories: Submit your blog to top 50 blog directories on the Web and sit back to enjoy all inbound links flowing in and fetching authority for your blog.

Happy Blogging in 2013!!!

So…these were a few business blogging fundamentals from me. That’s all from me as of now. Have some more business blogging techniques in tool chest? I’d love to hear them all. After all, I’ve to live up to my New Year’s resolution.

Happy Blogging!!!!

Top Tips for Effective Content Curation

Flurry of excitement about content curation in the online industry. Many B2B and B2C companies have queued up for spreading their reach through this digital channel. Only a few ones are able to hit the nail?

If you wish to play long innings on the online marketing landscape, you need to brush off your old marketing concepts. Throw away the thought that you’d publish some content on the Web, and there’d be a natural in-flow of trackbacks, social shares, inbound links, page views and all of that. Don’t give that amazed look if you observe some silent returns on your publishing exercise.

Content Curation: Spread your Story Naturally

For a swashbuckling digital marketing reach, remember the golden rule – Create fresh, remarkable and relevant content. With all social media marketing platforms at your disposal, it’s all the more an easy task now, provided you know the way to do it right.

Here are some tips for you that can help you cut through the entire hullabaloo and make sure your content spreads naturally and effectively on the World Wide Web.

Avoid being overly experimental.

What’s that? Don’t tax yourself by fiddling too much with the approach every time you pen down your content. Analyze your past content trends and figure out some sweet content spots. Evaluate which types of content have fetched you the maximum number of likes, shares, comments and links. Now go for some serious, smart work. Try to replicate this success and create a fresh editorial calendar based on content analytics.

Ignite emotions. Shock your people (I mean your target audiences). Shoot content that delights, frightens or even annoys them. Do you know what content goes viral? That ignites strong emotional reactions in your readers. Why? It kindles some key emotions like sadness, happiness, wrath or even disgust in them. This steers social sharing and hence increases reach of your content on the Web. So, now is the time for you to consider creating some emotion-evoking content.

Hammer a captivating headline. Though a bit startling, social media referrals generate the most traffic for a website now. It’s the new SEO on board. The more is the social sharing of your content, more is the opportunity generated for you to get found online. How can you arrest the attention of your readers in the first place? An engaging headline would do the magic and lure your readers to click and spread your content in their networks. Now, what constitutes a good headline? A title that’s unique, relevant, thought-provoking, and contains some surprise value for your readers.

Love social media. In this inbound marketing age, you can’t overlook social media platforms and form a content strategy, devoid of these key elements. Marry your content with social media. Do remember to embellish your content with multi-media ingredients as these are rewarded greatly on such platforms in the form of shares and engagement.

Content Curation: Get your Story the potent SEO juice

Turn your blog into a social media marketing machine. Use your blog’s real estate to showcase your content and ask for feedback from your readers, which will eventually help you refine your product further. A fine-tuned product, tailored to target audiences’ expectations, has multiplied scope of recommendations and henceforth, virality.  Don’t forget to incorporate social media sharing and blog subscription widgets on to your blog. Publish relevant and engaging posts and see the charm of social media sharing.

So let your target audience give a rousing reception to your content on the Web. Get started with spreading your great content naturally.

Are You a Victim to Common Blogging Mistakes?

Have you been nursing the silent ambition of donning the hat of a successful blogger?  Whoa. To position yourself in the blogging space, it’s important to know the golden tips to blogging. Think you’re done? Oh boy!  Knowing the tricks to ward off the danger of falling victim to most common blogging bloopers is even more important.

I wore the blogging jacket a few years ago. Today after half a decade, I make a shameless confession that I committed some big blogging mistakes. Fortunately, some real accomplished gentlemen, rather some paragons of generosity, flocked to my rescue and handed over those much needed blogging band-aids to me on time. Again, a big ‘Thank you’ to Mr. Pawan Aggarwal, my mentor in Online Blogging!

Don’t be guilty, if you are prone to blogging mistakes. There’s a whole blogging first-aid kit available, full of easy fixes. Here are a few tips. Follow them. Go, cross swords with millions of bloggers out there and rule the roost.

So, you’re your company’s blogger. All eyes are riveted on you that you’ll swirl your magic blogging wand. More website traffic, more leads in-flow, more conversions down the sales funnel. Whoops. Nothing happening? Are you doing one of these?

Are you publishing the blog on a free domain, different from your company’s main website? Eeek…Serious damning move! It hurts your search engine optimization and branding efforts. Search engines are hungry for fresh content. Every blog that your write creates a fresh web page for search spiders to crawl and index, and make get you the most coveted space on search engine results. So if you run a blog on a separate domain, then you’re actually depriving your corporate website of the SEO juice that you squeeze from your blog.

Quick fix: Bring your blog home. Integrate it with your corporate website, either on a subdomain or in the website’s folder. And, feed your website with the fresh SEO juice of your blog.

Are you lost in the humdrums of other inbound marketing initiatives and publishing your blogs infrequently? Trust me on this one – Frequency does matter! If you’re inconsistent in your blogging spree, you’re not moving a needle.

Easy Fix: Online blogging demands boatloads of resources, time and commitment. Deep research throws light on the fact that businesses that blog frequently benefit most in terms of generating leads. So here’s one trick pony to help you generate more traffic and leads – Upkeep your blog with utmost dedication. Publish frequently and consistently. Churn out as much fresh content as possible through your blogs. Charm your target audience with thought-provoking and unique blogs. More traffic, more leads, more sales!

Boy, you can’t afford to miss out on the next one!

Blogging Mistakes: Are you a victim or victor?

Are you blowing the trumpet about your product all the time? A big turn off for your readers! Company bloggers get deterred by criticism too often (even I used to be). Deadly targets, time running out, performance appraisals nearing. And next, you start vomiting out too much product-centric content on your blog in an attempt to spread maximum possible awareness about your brand in the market and resultant heavy web traffic and leads. Seriously, no thought leadership.

Quick fix:Remember, your target audience is hungry for relevant and remarkable content. If there exists a yawning gap between the desired content and fed content, then you will fail to accomplish your avowed blogging goals. Modify your editorial calendar and slate varied content topics to be published on the chosen days. Your readers wish to see you as a thought leader and  you keep feeding them with only your product-focused content. Abandon the blinkered approach of bragging about your product. This is a recipe to disaster. There should be no rumbles of discontentment for content in your readers. Seduce them with though-provoking content and drive them crazy until they feel hungry for your content.Write about your relevant industry’s best practices, trends, statistics, general topics of interest to your readers. Focus on educational content, non-product focused case studies. And lots more!

Are you only writing and not promoting your blog? Shhhhhhhhh..approach. You publish but don’t promote your content. By doing this, you’re actually deflating your readership and subscriber base. Social networks are the real home of your content.  If you do not curate or publish your content on social media sites, you are not letting your content shake hands with the other family members i.e., millions of registered users there. If they do not come to know about the existence of your content on the web, you’re robbing your blog of its potential.

Easy fix:Create your presence on major social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest etc. Build your community there. Expand your reach. Finally, share your blog with them and make this social media sharing exercise an easy one. Convert your fans into powerful evangelists of your brand on these sites.

Are you overlooking your blog metrics? Don’t care to see if your blogging effort is paying you at all? Well, you’re ignoring some real valuable insights then. How are you going to convince your conniving BOSS about your blogging success? Apart from playing a key role in determining the next hike in the salary of a company blogger, blog analytics do matter when it comes to analyzing the topics that work and filtering them from the ones that don’t. More so, these insights help you to chalk out an effective blog content road map for the next quarter.

Quick fix: Keep a close watch on the performance of your blog. Monitor and measure the success of your blogging effort across different parameters. Key insights such as number of subscribers and comments, popular keywords, page views, social media shares, number of trackbacks and inbound links, number of leads tickling down the sales funnel and finally conversions – all these metrics do create waves.

Overfed with blogging mistakes and fixes? Well, it’s time for this blabbering tongue to stop. Hope these tips would help you sharpen your blogging razor and scale your effort to new heights of effectiveness.

Happy Blogging!!!