Category: Digital Marketing

Everybody likes stories. Right from a toddler who likes to pore through picture books to adults who like to read novels, we all like stories. Narration and forming stories have been the basis of much of our imaginative and real lives. When the prehistoric men hunted and brought food to their families, they created stories to keep themselves entertained in an otherwise scary and dangerous world. As our civilizations grew, our stories grew more complex. No matter what, the art and science of storytelling never left us. Instead, it has now become even more embedded in our culture and psyche. Importance of storytelling in running businesses When it comes to promoting businesses, stories can not only make but also break the very business they are supposed to support. You might have noticed that a number of websites often use a story of how the founders met, how the business grew and other details in the “About Us” page. You may also notice the art of storytelling in blogs, web copy and sometimes, even on product packaging. The power of storytelling in online world is so important that the very success of your online existence depends on how well you tell your story. In this article, we shall take a look at the power of storytelling in an online world, in the context of making explainer videos. Psychology and the art & science of storytelling Because there is a natural storytelling urge and ability in all human beings, even just a little nurturing of this impulse can bring about astonishing and delightful results. — Nancy Mellon, The Art of Storytelling The field of psychology has devoted a large part of its research activities to the importance of storytelling. Postmodernists like Ludwig Wittgenstein often stressed on the importance of narration in therapy. Psychological healing occurs when we narrate our stories and restructure, reform and redefine our stories, which are often clouded and distorted by our thoughts and feelings. Thus, stories can change the way we think, and the people that we are. Similarly, the story you tell of your business and of your products and services will decide whether you will be successful or not. In an ideal world, we can narrate our stories, impress our target audience and rake in all the profits. Unfortunately, real life and real business are both tough. In order to conquer these real problems, we need to start weaving stories not only into the About Us page or into blogs and web copy, but also into explainer videos that we make. Weaving stories into explainer videos Explainer videos may seem like a pretty straight forward method where you instruct your viewers about your business, products and services. However, when you narrate a story within an explainer video, use metaphors and allegories, you will be able to connect with your audience better. As explainer videos are all about connecting with your audience, the importance of storytelling cannot be stressed enough. When you write the script for an explainer video, ensure that there is some sort of story involved in it. If that story involves your own story of how your company came to be, or a form of narration that subliminally communicates to the viewer about “story story”, half of your job is done. Stories need not be explicit. Often, novelists use a number of techniques to narrate their stories. Likewise, when you write the script for an explainer video, your storytelling needs to be varied: sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit and sometimes, just plain adventurous. Final thoughts At the end of the day, the most important thing for you to do as a business is to make sure that your explainer video ticks. And for that, the narration has to be strong. And for that to happen, the storytelling needs to be powerful. With all this in mind, you could be pretty sure that you will get the attention of the audience you want, and that you will be able to touch their hearts and souls without looking like you are being too pushy. Often, stories indicate that there are humans behind a logo and behind a company. And that always works in the favor of businesses. If you want to make this work in favor of your business, talk to the animation specialists at Oomphbox.

Content marketing is the foremost step taken by digital marketers to woo their target audience. The idea behind this is to offer relevant, valuable and quality content to your visitors so that your message does not go unheard. An intrigued visitor will make repeated visits to your website and will not shy away from becoming your customer in future. What is content marketing? Content marketing is a way to get closer to your potential customers to gain their interest and become valuable for them. A content marketer will never provide excessive information to its customers but only what is necessary and that too in phases. To say the least, if your content is effective, there is no power in this world that can stop you from getting higher ranking on search engines. As a marketer you must understand the paucity of time with your consumer. If you share usual boring and preachy content, your audience is very likely to reject you. You can market your content through various online mediums like website, blog, email, video, newsletter, eBooks, discussion portals and social media. In this article, we are going to discuss how social media can be used to market your content. Social media – a powerful medium for content marketing Social media is an epicenter for sharing information with friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Consumers believe that the content shared on social media is rich, genuine and testified by their friends. Which is why, the sharing chain grows larger and becomes viral at the spur of the moment. Moreover, it is a place to relax, serving as a casual platform to engage with your target audience through communities and one-on-one interaction. Social media helps you to gather data and find out interests of your target audience through tools like Buffer. This ultimately facilitates you in designing a targeted campaign. Let us discuss the potential of different social networking platforms used by marketers today. Facebook  Facebook still remains the top networking platform in the world. Invite your target customer to like your Facebook fan page but with a promise to share something useful with them. Every brand is running towards Facebook and get liked. But these likes turn unlikes if your profile stays stagnant. How to use Facebook for content marketing Use Google Chrome built-in Power Editor to create lookalike audience list from your existing Facebook followers. Lookalike audience is the one which is similar to your existing customer base with similar interests, likings and demographic characteristics. Share content like an eBook or a case study which you do with your existing customers and you’ll see magical results. You can promote your content through Facebook Ad with limited time availability. Facebook Ads targeted at your lookalike audience also let you generate a significant list of subscribers. So, if your content is good, people targeted will subscribe and subscription will give you an opportunity for personal interaction with your audience. Another advantage of Facebook Ads is that you can retarget your lost visitors. Many a times, visitors browse your site but do not visit it again. To target them again, tools like Adroll let you place a pixel on the landing page of your website and Facebook Ads of your content is displayed when they sign in next time. Thus, it increases the exposure of your content among lost visitors. Marketers are progressively using hashtags to listen to their followers and admirers on Facebook. Following the brand hashtags gives them the consumers perspective about their brand. They can interact and answer to the queries of their admirers. People are easily attracted towards emotions, jokes and thought-provoking content. And images are the best bet to increase engagement. Use personal, interesting and stimulating images to grab the attention of your fans. Audience Insights feature helps you to know your consumer behavior, interests and their location that assists you in making a customized content for them. A Facebook marketer is enabled to go through the profiles of his followers to understand their likings and design a relevant campaign. Twitter Twitter is a remarkable platform for marketers as it is the fastest way to communicate with the followers. The content posted instantly goes viral. Marketers quite often using action hashtags to engage their followers like #subscribe, #vote, #like etc. Hashtags are engaging and fun. It helps marketers to increase their brand popularity, generate leads and increase traffic to their website. How to use Twitter for content marketing? Many marketers use a time-bound content sharing strategy triggered by retweets by interested consumers. You can also use targeted tweets to send to a specific audience based on their geographical location. What’s more, sharing images on Twitter leads to increased click-through-rate and significant increase in retweets. To ensure that your content is seen by your followers, you can share the same content a number of times in small intervals. It can significantly increase traffic and fan following. Tools like Twitter Counter help you to track follower growth so that you know when the time is just right to repost the same engaging content. Marketers also use A/B testing to know what content pulls the visitors more to their website or blog. Such experiments help you to reframe your content to suit more to the target audience. Followerwonk is an interesting tool used by many businesses to schedule a set number of tweets at desired intervals in a day. It also analyzes the time when most of your followers are active. Pinterest Image pinning is what leads you to winning on Pinterest. Marketers are using innovative ways to engage with their fans on this fairly new social networking site. How to use Pinterest for content marketing? Different pinboards can be created for segregating your content. Pinboards use interesting imagery and infographics to increase click-through-rate. Fans can be asked to opine on new content pinned with the associated image on your board. Visitors have the option to repin your content to increase exposure of your content. Images can be embedded with call

Explainer videos are one of the best marketing tools used by businesses to increase conversion rate and seek their customers’ attention by creating awareness about their product. Start-up companies desperately look for customer acquisition as they are new to the market and YouTube serves as the world’s leading platform to market your explainer videos. YouTube is a great video-hosting site owned by Google. It gets a prominent listing on Google if you carefully optimize your content. Moreover, you can track various statistics on YouTube like the number of views, rating, number of likes and dislikes, audience demographics, viewer drop-off while watching video, source of traffic and a lot more. Traffic source is extremely helpful for you to discover the resource used to view your video. You can use these insights to optimize your metadata, tags and keywords to appeal more to the respective target audience. Following are the 10 tips for start-up companies to promote their video on YouTube: Rich file name People often forget to change the raw file name in their computer while uploading video on YouTube. This sharply affects their ranking on search engines. YouTube gives a lot of importance to the raw file name used in your video while uploading. Though a rich title has its own role in ranking; a keyword rich raw file name will give more visibility to your video. For instance, it is better to have to file name as YouTube-Marketing-Tips.mov rather than a default file name like vid-20-06-2014.mov Integrate it with social media Videos have the quality of being highly sharable. All YouTube videos can be easily posted on leading social media networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. Moreover, the name YouTube itself adds a lot of credibility to your video. When people read the link associated with your video and find it linked to YouTube, they assume that the content would be authentic. People love to share new, informative and quality video content with their friends. Post your video on all your social media profiles so that your target audience can engage with it on the platform of their choice. Furthermore, social media is an avenue for people where they can express freely and interact with you. They add value to your video by leaving critical feedback. Brand your video It is fairly easy to download a YouTube video. Many marketers with dubious intentions use your video for their benefit. To avoid being in such a situation, it is highly advisable that you brand your video with the logo and name of your company. Preferably use a watermark that claims your ownership over the video. Additionally, it enhances your brand image. People love to associate with the brand when they like the video and it helps in improving your brand recall value. While creating a brand on YouTube, you must focus on the content. It should relate to your brand. The style and look of your videos should be consistent across the channel. Insert call to action links  You must decide what action you want your target audience to take after they finish watching your video. One thing for sure they can do is to like and share your video on YouTube but that does not give you direct benefit. You can rather ask them for subscription to your videos, newsletter, link to visit your website, blog and social media profile for further information. It is a great way to generate powerful leads as people who subscribe to your videos, sign up for newsletters and like your social media page are genuinely interested in your product. Else you can direct them to your e-store for purchase. Use fan videos Small gestures matter the most. People love to see themselves on YouTube. It is an exciting way to win their trust and build brand loyalty. Request your existing customers to send videos to you showing their experience with your product and how they use your product. This way, they’ll get popularity through your video channel and they will feel glad and take pride to be a part of your company. And most importantly, it will inspire others to become your customer. You can post these fan videos to your blog, website and other marketing channels. Tell a story Story-telling is an art and people love to hear interesting stories on a video channel like YouTube. A gripping story will garner a large number of views and your product will get popular than ever. You can follow a PAS approach (problem-agitate-solve) wherein you show a problem generally faced by your target audience. Show how this problem is creating hurdles for their business. Introduce your product and show how it is an answer to their problem. But you must remember, people are not interested to hear about your product features. They rather want to know how your product adds value to their work. Use a case study A case study is a real life story of your customers and their experience while using your product. Interview your existing customers and ask them how they feel about your product. Good or bad, every opinion counts as it looks real and valid. As a start-up company, you need genuine support from your customers to testify your claims. And there is no better place than YouTube to market your brand. Moreover, case studies help you to understand your customers better and resolve their issues in future. Use an attractive thumbnail Thumbnail is a cover image of your video that reflects what your video is about. It is very important to have an attractive thumbnail as it can persuade or dissuade viewers to click on it. Thumbnails are visible in search results so make sure they match with the title of the videos. By default, YouTube gives you three choices for selecting your video thumbnail. Select the thumbnail that best represents your video. If you use Windows Movie Maker to upload the video then you can create a thumbnail image of your choice. Optimize your YouTube

With the growth of smartphones, tablets and other personal digital equipment users, marketers are devising innovative ways to reach their target audiences. The trends in digital marketing change with technological advancement and consumer behavior. Marketing through explainer video with a street level interaction with target customers for enhanced engagement is going to be the leading way of digital marketing. Marketers will increasingly engage in cross-screen marketing to cater to the audience present on multiple screens like smartphones, tablet, game consoles, wearable technology, laptops and PCs. Brands with retail stores are pushing location-based marketing to target their customers through GPS technology integrated with demographic characteristics. Furthermore, tightly focused content aka content marketing is going to be fine-tuned further to deliver content relevant to the individual customer. There are many websites that are offering the latest development in the world of digital marketing for consumption by entrepreneurs, businesses and marketers. Following are the top 10 reference sites trending in the latest updates in digital marketing: EConsultancy.com It is one of the leading websites that guides you through the nuances of digital marketing and e-commerce. With award-winning market research reports and statistics in market data, best practices, supplier selection and support services like e-learning, case studies and expert guide, E-consultancy has a lot to offer you as a small business entrepreneur or an enterprise. Over 250,000 subscribers of E-consultancy also include giants like Microsoft, BBC, IBM, Dell and Sony. Their best practices guide includes topics like SEO, online retail, email marketing, social media etc.  Besides that, E-consultancy takes pride in its market-tested template files for online brand analysis and request for proposal. Social events and analyst-led roundtable conferences feeding you the emerging digital trends are added benefits offered through its subscription. TechCrunch.com TechCrunch is an amazing platform for news updates from start-ups, mobile, gadgets, enterprise and social media networks. TechCrunch has made its presence felt across the world by organizing worldwide symposiums conducted by eminent speakers from the industry.  TCTV is an exciting video section of this technology driven website with sub-segments like TCTV News, Fly or Die and Foundation. TCTV news includes breaking news from start ups, interviews and product demonstration videos. Fly or Die section reviews latest gadgets and products. On the other hand, Foundation segment includes in-depth interviews of entrepreneurs. Another thrilling section of the website is Crunchbase. Crunchbase is one of the world’s most comprehensive dataset of start-up companies with thousands of contributors giving you the latest information about what’s making the news. Entrepreneur.com As the name says, this website has it all what an entrepreneur seeks for. The most prolific thing about it is that there is detailed classification of content catering to different subjects like leadership, growth and strategy, marketing, technology, social media, finance, entrepreneurs, franchise, starting a business and so on. For instance, in the social media section, you can selectively get the news from a particular social network like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter etc. Similarly, the marketing section contains updates from the advertising world, branding, customer service, market research, online marketing and SEO tactics. This website shares content from eminent contributors to the likes of managers and web designers. Mashable.com This New York headquartered website providing news and information from a variety of subjects has become very popular over the years. Its 34 million unique monthly visitors testify the fact. It covers essential updates from leading social media platforms, technological updates including software, mobile applications, website development and design to latest gadgets and mobiles. Besides that, it covers news from business world including advertising, hiring workers, marketing, small businesses and start-ups. Adding to it is the entertainment and world news section that makes it a versatile site for its visitors. Another good thing about this website is its quick display interface like Google search. As soon as you point your cursor to a section, the latest articles from the section are displayed. Social Media Examiner This website is dedicated to help the businesses to gain insights into social media marketing. It feeds the visitors with comprehensive articles from experts, case studies, interviews and industry research. It is also famous for its podcast show on social media marketing that ranks in the top 10 marketing podcast on iTunes. Apart from that, the website hosts both offline and online conference on social media. Its Social Media Marketing Networking Club on LinkedIn is renowned for the level of interaction its garners. Another distinguishing aspect of social media examiner is its online magazine called My Kids’ Adventure that publishes content guiding the busy parents to plan various adventurous activities for their children. Content Marketing Institute Content marketing institute focuses on the various aspects of content marketing strategies to help small businesses and start-ups. It is great for marketers who are looking for a content strategy. Loaded with multiple examples of content marketing, this website helps you out for getting better results in your campaign. It emphasizes on the use of visual content to attract target consumers. What’s more, it conducts online training sessions, webinars and events and provides consulting services through its expert panel.  Its flagship quarterly print and digital magazine is dedicated to the latest from content marketing world that helps the global content marketers with new publishing skills that can be applied to their own organization. CopyBlogger The CopyBlogger homepage is uploaded with an explainer video that fully explains the potential of this website to help its subscribers. CopyBlogger is the leading website that educates the people for valuable content writing. Though CopyBlogger posts 5-6 articles a week but they are powerful and high in quality. Besides that, it has published 16 high-impact ebooks on content marketing, SEO, email marketing, keyword research, landing pages and a lot more. A 20-part marketing course fully guides you through the process of online content strategy. It also conducts seminars and webinars that help the marketers to improve traffic to their blogs and increase conversion rates. Their online forum is an active place for discussion on real-time issues faced by

Not one to remain stagnant or predictable, Twitter again rolled out new changes to its design last month. It makes the profile look much more Facebook-like but it keeps all the goodness that Twitter is famous for. What are the changes? There are two major changes to the Twitter design. It asks you for a cover photo, which is basically your background shot. It should be around 1500 x 500 pixels. The profile picture too has moved to the left side of the screen and it needs to be around 400 x 400 pixels for optimum results. The third option is to pin a tweet of yours that you really like so that it appears at the top. It could be anything that you like or anything that has been written by you. You can pin that tweet to the top so that everyone sees it. Whoever visits your profile will now see the pinned tweet at the top, along with your extra-large background image and a new profile image (if you wish to change it). The re-design makes Twitter look very Facebookish but that is where the similarities end. Twitter is now more personalized and you can sort your photos and videos the way you want to. Another big change that has come to Twitter is you can choose to view people’s tweets in two ways: just their tweets or the tweets that they have sent to others and their replies. A lot of people are using Twitter now Though minor changes, these can create a lot of buzz around Twitter. In the last one month, we have seen more Facebook users using Twitter now than ever. It has got something to do with the design probably. Twitter looks more user-friendly now and it is more approachable to people who are used to Facebook-like interfaces. The fact that in the last one month a lot of people have changed to the new Twitter design says a lot about how cool the new design really is. While it might look like Twitter is imitating Facebook, it clearly is not. It has just taken the good qualities of Facebook and made it its own. This will ensure that those who are not comfortable using Twitter will begin to use it the way they want to. Twitter is no more the difficult social networking site it used to be. Two impressive changes that we vouch for What we really like about the new design are the best tweets that can be pinned and also the large background image. Twitter was always ephemeral and never held anything for a long time. This made it difficult for marketing professionals to keep a message constant. They had to repeatedly tweet the same thing much to the annoyance of their followers. Now, an important tweet can be chosen and pinned to the top of the profile so that your followers always see that. This ensures that you do not add to the noise that already exists and will, instead, come across as someone who is interested in communicating the right kind of messages. Secondly, the background image is super-impressive too. With almost 1500 pixels to showcase, you can use it for a number of marketing purposes. Whether you want to use the background image to market your logo or as an infographic that showcases all the good work you have done, the new background image certainly is a great way to make sure that people take notice of what you are trying to communicate. Start using Twitter now All said and done, it is important to learn how to use Twitter properly. It is the second-most important social networking site today and is also used by some of the most influential people. The new changes to the profile also gives indication that Twitter will begin to focus more on advertising, which is what we all are most interested in. If you want to remain in touch with those influential people, you had better start using Twitter right now. It is an easy platform that is not difficult to learn. It is also fun and entertaining to use Twitter once you get the hang of it; and of course, it is a very powerful marketing tool.

If you have run a Google Scholar search, you would know what a great tool it is to those who look for scholarly document. No matter which topic you are looking for, all the published papers and abstracts of those papers (when entire papers are not available for viewing) is brought in the search results. What is Google Scholar and what does it do? Google Scholar has helped people to write blogs, to conduct literature reviews and to write review articles themselves, using material available online. Google Scholar has grown to become on the largest databases of academic material, whether they are journals, papers or even books. This has made it to be one of the most important and formidable technical databases where one could look for information that is peer-reviewed. What are its advantages and disadvantages? While Google Scholar certainly has a number of advantages, it still lacks the kind of professionalism that PubMed and other databases have. Google Scholar is also not given the kind of attention it deserves by Google, for obvious reasons. There isn’t much money to make from Google Scholar. From regular Google search results, it makes a lot of money. In order to gauge the advantages and disadvantages, Péter Jacsó at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, Hawaii, USA conducted a general review of the recent history of the Google Scholar search engine. He started to dig data right from its inception in November 2004. He feels that there are massive omissions in the content that is displayed in the search results and that future changes are required to make Google Scholar more amenable to being a research database. The study, methodology and results Titled “Google Scholar: the pros and the cons”, Péter Jacsó’s paper clearly presents the status of Google Scholar. He goes on to say that Google Scholar has received a lot of attention and praise but Google has not lived up to the expectations. Though it is free to search and look for information on Google Search, it does not bring all the results that a scholar might be looking for. Moreover, in spite of trying to push scholarly articles to Google Scholar, Google has not made the efforts to index them; and we are talking about papers published by eminent journals from eminent universities. This paucity needs to be addressed by Google in order to fill the gaps. Peter feels that highly relevant information has been left out and that has caused a lot of disappointment among those who believed this would be a great tool. Still, it is one of the better tools to discover papers and articles that you probably couldn’t find anywhere else. Google Scholar is, indeed, one of the best methods to conduct a quick literature review. Google needs to pay more attention to Google Scholar Whether you are looking at writing an academic blog or you are fascinated by scientific literature, having access to peer-reviewed scientific papers is very important. In order to ensure that you get what you need, you need to use Google Scholar and other databases. However, according to this researcher, Google Scholar is far from perfect. It is unfortunate that Google has not paid attention to this much valuable resource, which could be beneficial to businesses as well. Whether you are making a presentation or writing a report, having access to published papers is very important. What Google Scholar does is, it gives you a number of research articles and also lets you subscribe to them so that you continue to receive updates on your favorite topic. All this published data can be converted into infographics, blogs and even presentations. We sincerely hope that Google pays more attention to Google Scholar and fix all the kinks within the search engine. This is a formidable tool that will help everyone, right from school students to business owners. Certainly, a little more interest in Google Scholar from the corporate world will put a little pressure on Google to make the necessary changes to the algorithm. You can read Péter Jacsó’s paper here. Reference Péter Jacsó, 2005. Google Scholar: the pros and the cons, Online Information Review, 29(2), 208-14.

As businesses constantly strive to make their web content more accessible, they increasingly find themselves seeking the help of SEO professionals. However, the SEO arena has changed in recent years and what used to be the norm a few years ago has no place at work today. One of the newest trends in the realm of SEO is web mining. This rapidly growing research area consists of web usage mining, web structure mining and web content mining. Web usage mining refers to the analysis of user access patterns on usage logs. The structure of hyperlinks, which is crucial to SEO is studied under web structure mining. Finally, web content mining helps SEO professionals to analyze information and trends using web page content. What is web content mining and why do we need to understand it? Though web content mining is related to data and text mining, it is fundamentally different from the two. Web data is either semi-structured or not structured at all. Data mining analyses structured data, whereas, text mining analyses unstructured data. Web content mining, on the other hand, analyses the semi-structured quality of the web. By using creative applications to mine semi-structured data on the web, SEO professionals can easily understand where they need to focus, which keywords they must target and why certain pages are not receiving enough traffic, in spite of having great content. What are the different kinds of web content mining? Web content mining can be differentiated under two broad categories: Database View and Information Retrieval View. Database View helps analysts to arrive at better information management. It also helps them with querying on the web by trying to analyze the structure of the website and transforming it entirely into a database itself. On the other hand, Information Retrieval View analyses both unstructured and semi-structured data. Studies reveal that most searches consist of a bag of words or a key phrase. These key phrases help people at arriving on pages that are distinctly textual in nature. For semi-structured data, HTML structures inside the documents are used. Some of the most important techniques in web content mining are: Data/information extraction: The first step towards understanding SEO is to understand the nature of the web itself. As web is made of information, web content mining involves understanding this huge database of information. Firstly, one needs to understand structured data, which includes products and search results. Machine learning and automatic extraction techniques are used to tackle information extraction. Schema matching and information matching: The next technique is to understand how data is represented. Though Internet has a lot of information, it is displayed differently on each of the websites. Consistency of content is not possible as different people write different things on the same topic. In this technique, semantic matching of similar data is done in order to categorize websites that offer similar content. Opinion extraction: Thanks to social media, extracting opinions and beliefs has never been so easy. This process also includes analyzing content from blogs, editorials and other content that offer varied opinions. Knowledge synthesis: This process includes generating concept hierarchies so that we can get a coherent picture about what is important and what is less important. If manually done, it takes a very long time and it might not even be possible to engage in ontology with all the information that is available on the internet. Restructuring SEO strategies: Last but not the least, web content mining needs to lead to responsible restructuring of SEO strategies. It includes re-structuring of key phrases and keywords that needs to be targeted. It is important for SEO professionals to know that web content mining can yield very important information. It tells them what topics need to be given attention to and how clients can build their web copy to make sure that they are reaching the right target audience. Modern software makes it much easier to engage in web content mining than it used to be, a few years ago. If SEO consultants spend a little time trying to understand the various web content mining software programs available today, it will not only help them to gain knowledge but will also help in growing their businesses.

Web writing is not the same as writing offline. It requires a specific strategy, which includes a set of rules that are unique to the Internet. These principles of web writing are practiced knowingly or unknowingly by good writers but it is important to list them down so that those who are new to web content writing know what is important and what is not. We have made a list of 10 principles that will help you optimize your web writing and help you reach your target audience better. Some of these tips and tricks might already be familiar to you but by making sure that you follow all the 10 principles listed here, you are almost ensuring your success when it comes to online marketing. We say ‘almost’ because in spite of adhering to these tips and tricks, you still need to write professional & research your topics well. That is something that cannot be stressed enough. No matter how well an article is formatted and optimized for the web, if it does not provide useful information or if it does not engage or entertain the reader, then it is not of much use. Thus, make sure you are writing awesome content and also following these 10 tips & tricks. Post consistently Writing great content is awesome. However, if you are not posting it in a consistent manner, then it is awful for your content marketing strategy. It is recommended that you follow a routine and post a certain number of posts at the same time. Whether you are posting half a dozen articles everyday or you are posting one blog post every week, make sure that there is a certain rhythm to it and stick to that rhythm. This helps readers to expect new content and when they do visit the web page, they will not be unpleasantly surprised to see nothing new or several more than what they expected. Do not leave certain pages blank We have noticed that many websites often have empty pages. A link might lead to a page that only has a few sentences whereas another link can have a detailed page of well-written content. A website is not only about consistency in design. It also needs to have consistent quantity and quality of content on all its pages. Make sure that you do not leave any pages blank. Also ensure that pages do not have insufficient content as that is going to turn readers off as well. Use images and videos effectively While writing great articles is always important, it is also equally important to attach an image and sometimes, a video as well. Images and videos add to a website’s SEO & are central to making sure that your website appears in search results. You need to ensure that the images are not arbitrarily chosen and that they are there for a very compelling reason. Also, before publishing, make sure that you resize the image to fit the theme of your website. We have noticed many blogs that carry images, which look either stretched or go beyond the ‘margins’. Small paragraphs Whenever an article or a blog post is written, it should be easy to read. Readability depends not only on the content but also the way it is structured. Make sure that each paragraph does not contain more than a few sentences and that the sentences themselves are short & simple. Long and complex sentences are tiresome & no one wants to read through them, especially, while browsing online. It is important to keep the paragraphs short enough not only to make it easy to read but also to make it easy to see. When a published article looks attractive because of small paragraphs, people will take the time to read or scan through it. Keep it short Do not write very lengthy articles. Anything more than 2,000 words is very tiresome for most people that, usually, browse the web. A good blog post is, usually, around 500-700 words, whereas, a column could range around 1,400-1,500 words. Anything that is unnecessarily lengthy is, usually, ignored by readers. Even if you wrote excellent content, people probably will not want to read through the entire article. It is always better to keep the article as short and simple as possible so that you do not alienate your readers. Use simple and understandable words There is a tendency among writers, either offline or online, to use jargon and complex words that sound fanciful. It not only looks awkward and pretentious but also puts people off, when you use words that are complex, instead of an easily understandable word. You cannot impress your readers by writing in jargon. It comes across as cold at best and ridiculous at worst. Unless you are writing a highly technical document, avoid using jargons of any kind. Keep your language simple, friendly and modest. Web writing is not the place to experiment with vocabulary, with an intention to stroke one’s own vanity. Keep references ready Each time you research online and each time you are picking up data & statistics from some website, keep these references handy. At the bottom of the post, you can list all the references from where you picked up the numbers. Do not create statistics like many writers do. It is very easy to find out that you have been making up numbers. It not only affects your reputation but your entire website will lose credibility. It is important to list all the websites and links from where you picked up your numbers & information from. Scannability Articles and content need to be scanable by visitors. What we mean by this is that it needs to be readable and content should be formatted in an easy to understand manner. There has to be small paragraphs, utilization of bold and italics when necessary, usage of bullets & numbers etc. It is also equally important to use headers and sub-heads so that people find

The importance of Business Intelligence (BI) cannot be highlighted enough. It helps companies to convert huge amounts of raw data into meaningful and useful information. That information can help companies to identify new opportunities which can be further developed. If anything could make the huge amounts of data user-friendly, it is probably only business intelligence. Customer insight, on the other hand, analyzes the interests of the consumer with respect to a brand. It helps to understand people’s desires, aspirations, moods, mindsets, culture etc. that can drive them to take action. Connecting Business Intelligence with Customer Insight Merlin David Stone (The Customer Framework, Ascot, UK) and Neil David Woodcock (The Customer Framework, Ascot, UK) published a paper in the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, which helps us to understand how customer insight and business intelligence can complement each other & help a company to enhance its interactive marketing. With big data becoming increasingly available to companies and with their own software programs collecting more information about customers than they ever did in the past, it is high time that both business intelligence & customer insight are brought together. In this article, we briefly describe the paper published by M. D. David and N. D. Woodstock (2014). The study, its methodology and its findings Titled “Interactive, direct and digital marketing: A future that depends on better use of business intelligence”, the study aimed to explain the importance of bringing business intelligence and customer insight together, in order to support interactive marketing campaigns. It was based on the researchers’ own experience in assessing customer management capabilities of companies and also, a review of literature that helped them to learn more about business intelligence and customer insight. The most important finding of the study was that companies need to pay more attention to the governance of business intelligence. The authors found that customer insight teams, usually, employ a self-service approach when it comes to business intelligence and that is not always a good thing. By bringing business intelligence and customer insight together, interactive marketing can be enhanced. They also found that the interface between CI and BI is not researched well & if more research and development takes place in that domain, all of us would benefit a lot. The authors believe that the interface between BI and CI is very new & more research needs to be undertaken to reap the benefits. Analysis of their findings IT governance often takes a backseat when companies need to take care of marketing, generating leads and doing the actual work. In our opinion, corporate governance of Information Technology, including business intelligence is extremely important for the success of companies. If departments that engage in customer insights also engage in using business intelligence without being governed under certain policies, it might result in haphazard analysis. Moreover, the above study explores the importance of bringing both business intelligence and customer insight together, in order to enhance interactive marketing. The need of the day is to have certain policies in place and also make changes to existing framework so that both business intelligence & customer insight are complementary to each other, instead of using either in a haphazard manner. Interface between CI and BI needs to be studied together, so that executives involved in either can make better decisions. Further research is required to explore ways in which both of them can be brought together. When marketing has begun to stress on the importance of interactive communication, novel methods to use business intelligence and customer insight together will help companies to reach the target audience better. Final thoughts If you already have both BI and CI in place, try to restructure your IT governance to ensure that data is analyzed in a useful manner. If the interface between CI and BI are brought together & governed appropriately, resulting analysis can be valuable to interactive marketing and to understand our customers better. References Merlin David Stone, Neil David Woodcock, (2014) “Interactive, direct and digital marketing: A future that depends on better use of business intelligence”, Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, Vol. 8 Iss: 1, pp.4 – 17

Corporate blogs are no longer the bugaboos that most CEOs tried to avoid, when it came to content marketing. Even smaller companies have begun to embrace blogging and regular posting of articles (or was that a blog? an essay? a column even?) on blogs. However, blogging being an almost-informal method of writing, most companies and content managers wonder what really they need to be writing & what they have already written and published anyway. Most content writers, even the ones who claim to have years of experience, use terms like blog posts, articles, analysis, essays and articles interchangeably. Only, these words are not interchangeable. Each of these names is literally different content formats that you and I need to take very seriously. Whether you are a CEO or have been writing for a company’s blog, understanding the nuances and differences between each of the major content formats will help you to achieve what you really want – a good readership that values what you write or probably spend a small fortune on getting written. In this article, let us take a look at the major content formats and try to understand a few basic principles about them before you start writing a piece of content. Blog post Ideally, we need to be calling them blog posts, which are published on a ‘blog’. However, people tend to use the words “blogs” and “blog posts” interchangeably & I will not argue against that. A blog is typically an informal piece of content, for which, academic level of research is not necessary. An opinionated and well-thought piece of content, which tells the reader how you feel about a certain topic or issue, can be called a blog. A blog can be informative too but only it is not an authoritative piece of content. It works well for SEO and also for people who do not want to invest time in reading lengthier & more difficult kinds of content pieces. Usually, we recommend that blog posts need to have somewhere between 400 and 700 words so that people are not bored & that your opinionated piece does not sound like a lengthy monologue. Blogs need to be funny, attention grabbing, honest and opinionated. If you have something to say and if that does not need a lot of references & citations, you need to be blogging about it. Column A column is a slightly longer and a little more structured blog. Columns are often found in newspapers and magazines & they range between 700 to 1,400 words. It is a good idea to pay more attention to grammar, style and punctuation when it comes to writing columns. The very fact that it is lengthier ensures that more people arrive at your page to read it. You need to make sure that a column at least tries to use AP Style guide. Columns, usually, tell a story or discuss something of importance. They might also be lengthier blogs that are just as opinionated. They might argue against or for an idea and ask the reader to take an action. In fact, they can be a lot of other things except they are not very academic or really well-researched. They are subjective in nature though objectivity is always welcomed in any kind of writing. An introduction, a body and conclusion are central to the idea of a column. This is a well-respected format and companies need to employ this more often than they, usually, do. While blogs are easier to read and shorter in length, columns attract the more serious type of readers who might also be the ones who are more interested in your products and services. Articles Loosely used, blogs, columns, features and just about anything that is published for consumption on websites in the form of an ‘article’ is an article. However, it is nice to specify what an article could be. Though there are no hard and fast rules, it is good to think of a article as a well-researched piece of content that cites sources & mentions other specific data that supports an argument or a piece of information. With that in mind, an article is significantly more difficult to write. We speak about articles in the same breath as an article that would be published by an academic journal. Yet, online articles published on company websites can be well-researched pieces of content that are not very opinionated and are instead, informative. They could be anywhere between 1,000 to 4,000 words. The shorter the better, as people simply do not have the patience to read very lengthy articles online. People ask us if a blog can be an article and an article a column. The answer to that question is it depends. If you wrote a blog post that cites a number of references and is more informative than entertaining, yes, a blog post can be an article. Essay An essay, on the other hand, is similar to articles and columns in length but they do not have stipulated rules of citing, though it is preferable to do so. It is uncommon to publish essays on company websites though not necessarily a bad idea. Essays, like articles, require considerable thought and there has to be a profound reason to write one. Whether it is an argumentative essay or a persuasive essay, a writer will need to spend more time in structuring it and adding style. An essay often is a piece of literature and thus, has to consider rules that are related to non-fiction writing. For example, an essay needs to be stylish and informative at the same time. It needs to be a work of literature that is looked up to and not just referred to for the sake of information, like one would refer to a well-referenced article. That way, we believe writing an essay is even more difficult than writing an article. Nevertheless, it will earn you more respect from readers, if you occasionally publish well-written and