How to Build a Smart Yet Simple Social Media Marketing Plan [Template]

One of the core tasks involved in documenting your content marketing strategy is to develop your social media marketing plan, also known as your channel plan. This plan details where you will distribute your content and what you can expect to achieve by doing so.

Many brands mistakenly assume that they need to post their content anywhere and everywhere. But plastering your brand’s content across every social network, trendy news site, and video platform that comes along is not a channel plan — it’s more like a channel pipe bomb: It might spray content shrapnel as far as possible, but it has no regard for whom it strikes, how they might be impacted, or how that impact might reflect on the business. 

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Plastering your brand's content across every network is not a channel plan, says @Joderama. #socialmedia
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Remember: Your content marketing strategy should define your social media marketing strategy — not the other way around. It’s best to evaluate each social channel before you start distributing content there. And when you turn this evaluation into an actionable plan, everybody on your team will know where, when, and what they should be posting on each channel, as well as what their efforts are meant to achieve.

Here’s how to create and implement a basic social media marketing plan that will help you do just that.

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Make informed decisions

There are two core steps to the channel-planning process — understanding the value proposition of the platform and creating the use case for your brand to engage there. Let’s take a closer look at each one:

Social media channel choices: The nature of each channel and the engagement preferences of its core community will play a major role in whether your content will be a good fit. For example, your audience might be open to following a brand on Twitter, but prefers to reserve Snapchat for conversations with personal friends. Long-form content might play well on LinkedIn or SlideShare, while memes and captioned photos on these platforms would be inappropriate. It’s important to familiarize yourself with the characteristics of each channel and its corresponding community before joining the conversation.

Use case: With a short list of potential channels in hand, you will want to map your existing content assets to the most appropriate channels for their distribution.

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Map existing #content assets to the most appropriate channels for distribution, says @joderama. #socialmedia
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Answering the following questions (adapted from our Social Media Survival Guide) will help you decide whether a channel is a good fit, and may provide some clues as to how to position your content to compel the audience to take action:

Who uses this channel, and what are they using it for?

• Is it an important channel for our personas?
• What are conversations like here?

Will it help us meet our objectives?

• Why does it make sense for our business to use this channel?
• What specific goals will we pursue through our actions here? 

Does it fit in with our editorial mission?

• Will our content be viewed as unique and valuable here, or will the community find it intrusive/irrelevant?
• Have our competitors established a strong presence, or is there a chance for us to lead the conversation?

What results do we want to achieve?

• What should we be asking fans and followers to do after engaging with our content? Share it? Comment? Visit our site? Subscribe to our newsletter?
• Is this an action this community is likely to take?

What kinds of content will work best on this platform?

• Are our topics relevant to this audience?
• Have we created enough content in the appropriate formats to communicate consistently?

What’s the right tone of voice for this platform?

• Would a friendly, fun approach work best, or will the audience be expecting a more serious, professional demeanor?
• Does the conversation style match our brand’s voice and values?

What’s the ideal posting frequency?

• Should we publish once a week? Multiple times a day?
• What days and times of day work best?
• Do we have the ability to sustain our efforts over the long term?

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If your responses don’t reveal a compelling opportunity to engage on that channel or if the platform’s environment isn’t well-suited to your brand’s content vision and mission, it may be best to step away and reserve your team’s resources for channels that are a better fit.

Additional considerations: The primary purpose of content distribution is to build a trusted connection with your audience. While your company’s goals are important, you also need to find the right tone, voice, and topics to interest people in what you have to say.

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The primary purpose of content distribution is to build a trusted connection w/ your audience. @Joderama
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Scott Aughtmon outlines some of the most enduring principles of creating “crave-worthy” content, but it’s also worth considering these variable factors:

Consumption preferences and audience trends
Are there particular industry events, media innovations, or consumer behaviors on which your content distribution can capitalize (e.g., live-streaming video, new search-engine algorithms, popular memes)? How might these impact the tone/velocity you should adopt for distribution?

Current events
As trendy topics come into the spotlight, they can present timely distribution opportunities for your business. For example: Women’s issues are earning some (long overdue, ahem) extra love in the U.S. media right now. This means brands with content promoting female-fronted initiatives (like GE’s video pledge to increase its ranks of women in STEM roles) might earn a high-profile spot in social media circles they normally wouldn’t pursue.

Team resources
If you only have an editor or two managing the content marketing process, their bandwidth for consistent distribution and conversation monitoring may be limited to a few outlets; however, if you have a full team of writers, editors, and other distribution partners at your disposal, the extra manpower (or womanpower, see above) affords you the increased flexibility and control to manage content across many more channels.

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Build your plan

Now that you have all the information to determine where, when, and how to distribute your content, building the actual plan is pretty simple. Create a matrix of the channels that make the most sense for your brand, and make a note of all the specifics of engagement your team should follow for each one. When all the fields are filled out, you have a template that can be referenced easily, updated as necessary, and shared throughout your organization.

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Create a matrix of the channels that make the most sense for your brand, says @joderama. #socialmedia
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In my experience, it can be useful to outline as much information as possible in your initial plan, so your team can refer to it when new opportunities emerge and decisions need to be made. But it’s perfectly OK to start simple and then build on/refine your data fields as you start to learn what’s working and what isn’t.

The following is a snapshot of the information I recommend accounting for in your initial channel plan, but you can also download a copy of the template I built (shared below), and customize it for your own needs:

• Who we will reach: The persona(s) most active/engaged on this channel
• Target goals/benefits: What this channel will help accomplish; any unique opportunities that we can’t achieve elsewhere
• Featured topics: Specific subject areas/conversations likely to resonate with this community
• Target velocity: How often/what time of day to post on this channel; how much time to spend monitoring/contributing to other relevant conversations
• Formats: Content types to share here; formats that could give a competitive advantage in this space
• Tone and rules of engagement: Conversation style and voice that works best here; special criteria or considerations we need to follow (e.g., write a maximum of 140 characters, avoid enabling videos to play automatically, emphasize visuals over text)
• Team resources: Team member in charge of communication on this channel; other personnel authorized to post on company’s behalf; whom to notify if questions arise or issues escalate
• Call to action: Owned media/conversion point to drive traffic to
• Key performance indicators: Metrics to gauge content performance against goals

Click to download

Editor’s note: While I used CMI as a reference when creating this template, the sample data shown here does not represent our real channel plan.

You may also want to consider including the following data:

• Target keywords/hashtags: Listing the keywords you are likely to target will make you more effective at including them in the content you post on that channel.
• Potential distribution partners: Any influencers, industry experts, or network connections you may have at your disposal can help manage and amplify your outreach on the channel.
• Promotion opportunities: Tools, paid campaigns, and other opportunities you can leverage can help support the content you post on that channel.

Conclusion

No matter how far and wide your business intends to extend its reach, successful content marketing distribution often comes down to having a strategic, systematic, and scalable approach. Our model is one way to ensure that everyone involved with your content is working from the same blueprint, but it’s not the only way to get the job done. Let us know what processes you use to determine where, when, and how you share your content and spread your brand influence.

Improving your planning usually improves your content marketing results. Get daily insight (or a weekly digest) on tips, tools, and trends in content marketing. Subscribe today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Build a Smart Yet Simple Social Media Marketing Plan [Template] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

This Week in Content Marketing: MarTech Industry Needs to Team Up Against FANG

PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose can be found on both iTunes and Stitcher.

In this episode, Robert and I look at the ridiculous valuation of the Snap Inc. IPO — can it be sustained? And will advertisers buy in? We wonder whether media companies truly have a problem with trust, and debate whether their next big opportunity will lie in the hands of brands. Then, we discuss the MarTech industry and why its leaders need to unite to conquer Facebook, Amazon, and Google. We share rants and raves on BuzzFeed’s Tasty brand and McKinsey; then we wrap up with a spicy example of the week on Chili Klaus.

This week’s show

(Recorded live on March 6, 2017; Length: 1:04:44)

Download this week’s PNR This Old Marketing podcast.

If you enjoy our PNR podcasts, we would love if you would rate it, or post a review, on iTunes. 

1.    Notable news and upcoming trends

• Snap Inc. shares begin trading (10:35): The Wall Street Journal reports on Snap’s trading debut last week, which valued the company’s IPO at $24 billion — 93 times its revenues. We both agree that its stock prices will have to come back down to earth, eventually; but will Snap turn out to be a successful long-term play? Robert is cautiously optimistic, but says they will need to evolve the “camera company” idea into a viable business model fairly quickly, as they won’t be given the same leeway Facebook had during its IPO.

• Media companies may no longer control distribution, but they do control trust (21:17): A new post on MediaShift uses the decline in consumer trust to support an argument that media companies should be trying to compete with social media at the business-model level, not the content-model level. The article contends that producing content solely supported by online advertising is no longer sustainable for media companies; however, traditional media does have one advantage worth exploiting: trust. The big takeaway I see here is that every piece of content either side produces needs to be truly valuable — a position that Robert and I are certainly no strangers to championing.

• Why MarTech companies should be terrified of Facebook, Google, and Amazon (32:21): An article on Contently ponders whether the MarTech industry will soon face the same growing pains that have impacted online advertising, where revenue rose by 21%, year-over-year, but 90% of those gains were attributed to the industry’s “duopoly” of Facebook and Google (according to the IAB). Robert agrees with the majority of Scott Brinker’s assertions that MarTech vendors will be battling industry behemoths like Amazon and Google rather than competing amongst themselves, though he sees it happening for an altogether different reason.

2.    Sponsor (41:08)

• Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 Events: Whether you are just getting started with content marketing or are looking to take your expertise to the next level, CMI’s portfolio of events has you covered. Enrollment is now open for the new semester of Content Marketing University. We’ve launched an all-new program for 2017, but the spring session is limited to 500 learners, so don’t wait to secure your slot. Use the code PNR100 to get a $100 discount on registration. Time is also running out to sign up for our strategy-focused Intelligent Content Conference ­taking place on March 28–30 in Las Vegas. And don’t forget to send in your submissions for the Content Marketing Awards. The entry period runs from now until April 21, so don’t delay.

 3.    Rants and raves (45:35)

• Joe’s rave: This month, Fast Company magazine released its annual issue focused on the year’s most innovative companies. This is one of my favorite issues of all time; it’s a must-read for anyone who cares about content marketing and content strategy, since many of the examples relate to the business model of content. For example, BuzzFeed, which came in at No. 18, was recognized for launching Tasty: The Cookbook — a hard-copy collection of recipes that are completely customizable — which sold 100,000 copies in just a few weeks.

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• Robert’s rave: Robert has become a self-proclaimed “geeky fanboy” of McKinsey of late, in part due to articles like this one, which talks about just how important marketing at the top of the funnel is becoming. According to McKinsey’s ongoing research, even the most ardent of brand fans are increasingly shopping around, which means marketers need to place more emphasis on engaging consumers who are forming an initial consideration set and providing them with distinctive value through content and media-driven experiences.

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4.    This Old Marketing example of the week (55:24)

• As part of my research for Content Inc. in early 2015, I interviewed Chili Klaus — one of the best-known celebrities in Denmark who rose to fame, in part, because of his love of chili peppers. Klaus parlayed his pepper passion, plus his prowess at performance art, into a booming business opportunity. Klaus once likened eating chili peppers to the experience of wine tasting; however, it is his humorous involuntary reactions to the heat factor in his favorite pepper varieties that have proven to be the intoxicating ingredient in his recipe for a YouTube channel. Based on the tremendous popularity of these videos, Klaus has been able to launch dozens of chili-related products under his personal brand. By finding a unique content niche and using it as the basis of his business, Chili Klaus serves as a This Old Marketing example of the week that has plenty of kick.

For a full list of PNR archives, go to the main This Old Marketing page.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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The post This Week in Content Marketing: MarTech Industry Needs to Team Up Against FANG appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

How to Give Your Best Blog Posts New Life (Even When Your URLs Don’t Cooperate)

Are you looking for ways to get your content out there while saving time? If so, have you considered republishing your best-performing posts?

This past year, we experimented with republishing our best posts on CMI. Thus far, the results are impressive. The republished posts perform well in terms of traffic, social shares, and email conversions. Additionally, they save our editorial team time. 

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Our republished posts perform well in terms of traffic, social shares, & email conversions. @MicheleLinn
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Of course, republishing posts is not a new idea. Many sites use this approach.

However, we have had a specific challenge at CMI: Our URLs contain the year and month of publication. This means we can’t simply update posts and republish them with the same URL as many sites do. (If we were to build the site from scratch today, this date-specific URL is not the approach we would take, but this is what we have to work with.)

We need to decide if we want to do a redirect so we have one version of the post or have multiple versions. Yes, our parameters are a bit more complicated, but we have found that documenting the guidelines has been super useful. We hope that sharing our republishing guidelines will be helpful to those of you who are dealing with a similar issue.

TIP: Include your republishing guidelines as part of your editorial calendar so the entire team has easy access.

Republishing basics

Before we dig into the “how,” let’s quickly look at why this is something you may want to do.

Republishing your best content simply makes sense. Not only does it save your team time, but you’re publishing content you know your audience wants.

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Republishing your best #content simply makes sense, says @michelelinn.
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You may worry that people will be upset if they see the same article twice, but let’s be honest: Most readers are not reading everything, and even regular readers may like a reminder of good ideas.

We have never received a complaint about republishing an article. On the contrary, these posts, which we label “Back by Popular Demand,” are often top performers of the month.

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Find the best posts to republish

Start your process by finding the posts you want to republish. This is typically easy to do if you are tracking your email conversions. I also look at traffic and social shares to see which posts are exceeding expectations, but “conversions to email” is my top metric. I look at this information from the past six months to one year.

Additionally, we have (slowly) been auditing all of our blog posts. This has brought a treasure trove of information, and I have found older posts no longer getting traffic that are still useful.

My list of posts to republish is part of my annual editorial plan, but you can keep a running list in your editorial calendar. For each post, I track the following info:

• Name: I use the headline from the original post.
• Author: I always ask the author for permission to republish the post.
• Date of publication: I typically wait a year between the original and republished post.
• Other notes: I note how extensive the changes may need to be.

This last component begs the question — do republished posts always need to be updated? The short answer: no. We have tried it multiple ways, from making few updates to doing a bigger overhaul, and the results have been similar.

You also want to consider how you want to schedule your republished posts on your editorial calendar. Do you want to run them intermittently as part of your regular editorial, or do you want to run them during a specified period such as a holiday, the summer, or a big event when your company may be offsite? (We ran a week of Back by Popular Demand posts during Content Marketing World.)

To redirect or not to redirect

If you have dates in your URLs, this next section is for you. It’s slightly complicated, but I guarantee it will help you work through the details of how to deal with your pesky URL issue.

In short, you have two options:

1. Redirect the URL from the original post to the URL of the new post. This is the option if the original post is getting little traffic from search.
2. Keep the original URL and run an updated post with a new URL: In some cases, the original posts are getting substantial traffic from organic search. If we redirected the URL of the original post to the new post, we would risk losing the search traffic that post is bringing in.

Here is how to use Google Analytics to see how much search traffic a post is getting.

Set the date for a specified period. I typically look at search volume from the past six months.

Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels

You will see a list of the channels driving traffic to your web pages.

Select Organic Search and then Landing Page (under Primary Dimension).

From there, you can search for the original post’s URL by pasting into the search box the text that comes after your primary URL. You will see how much search traffic that post has earned as an absolute number of sessions as well as a percentage of your search traffic.

Your bar or threshold to not redirect a post based on search traffic will depend on your needs and scope.

Let’s look at how to handle some specific scenarios.

Scenario: The post gets little search traffic

While many of our popular posts are search magnets, that isn’t always the case. Some of our Back by Popular Demand posts were rediscovered during our audit and others received traffic from social and internal links.

This is the simplest scenario because we can do a redirect from the old post to the new post. Here are the actions we take for these types of posts:

• Create a new title: No
• 301 redirect of original post: Yes
• What to do with the original post: Redirect this URL to the new post.
• What to do with the new post: Add an editor’s note to say this post has been republished. (An example is in the image below.)
• Include “Back by Popular Demand” in the cover image: Yes

We recently republished this popular post from Joe Pulizzi. Because it was widely shared on social but didn’t have much traction in organic search, we simply redirected the older URL to this post; added “Back by Popular Demand” to the image, and included an editor’s note.

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An old post widely shared on social but w/ little search can be redirected to new post, says @MicheleLinn.
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Example: One Thing is Killing Content Marketing and Everyone is Ignoring It

Scenario: The post gets a lot of search traffic

Another category of Back by Popular Demand posts includes those that get a lot of search traffic. We don’t want to negatively impact our search traffic by redirecting the original URL, so we need to create a new post, even if the post requires minimal updates or none at all.

Here are the actions we take for this type of post.

• Create a new title: Yes
• 301 redirect of original post: No
• What to do with the original post: Add an editor’s note to say this post has been republished and include a link to the updated (new) post. (See example below.)
• Include “Back by Popular Demand” in the new cover image: Yes

This popular post from Jodi Harris didn’t need much updating, but we wanted to resurface it because the information was so appreciated the first time it was published. This original post is a search magnet, so we didn’t want to lose its search value. Here is a screenshot of the original post with an editor’s note that points to the updated post.

Example: A Content Marketer’s Checklist: Editorial Calendar Essentials

The updated post is below. As you can see, the new post includes “Back by Popular Demand,” in the cover image and has a new title.

Example: Editorial Calendar Tips, Tools, and Templates

Scenario: New posts on the same theme

Another type of post we run are new ones that have the same theme and construct as the original popular post. We update these year after year.

Because each post is new content, it’s not technically a Back by Popular Demand post. We proactively plan for these posts in our editorial calendar — and we update the earlier posts to point to the newer versions.

Here are the actions we take with this kind of post:

• Create a new title: Yes (but stick with the same construct)
• 301 redirect of original post: No
• What to do with the original post: Add an editor’s note at the top or add text in the post to point to the newest version.
• What to do with the new post: Incorporate into the text (not an editor’s note) that this is an update on a theme and point to the previous version(s).
• Include “Back by Popular Demand” in the cover image: No

For instance, we have run versions of our stolen marketing ideas post in 2013, 2015, and 2016.

Example: Original 2013 post from Joe Pulizzi: Stolen Content Marketing Ideas

I rediscovered his post during the site audit and decided to re-use the construct for a holiday post in 2015. As you can see, the title is similar, and I reference Joe’s original post in the text. Since these posts are variations on a theme, not updated or revised posts, we decided not to include “Back by Popular Demand” in the cover images.

As the 2015 post performed well, I used the construct again in 2016, but this time I “stole” my ideas from our Content Marketer of the Year finalists. As you can see, we referenced the previous posts in the text.

I’d love to hear from you. Are you republishing blog posts as part of your strategy? What have your results been — and what lessons have you learned along the way?

Now that you know how we do our Back by Popular Demand posts, why not make sure you get them? Subscribe to the daily or weekly digest CMI newsletter.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Give Your Best Blog Posts New Life (Even When Your URLs Don’t Cooperate) appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers

In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis recounts how the management of the Oakland Athletics revolutionized baseball by relying on statistical analyses rather than intuition to choose new players. Before General Manager Billy Beane turned a single metric — on-base plus slugging (OPS) — into his North Star for every decision, team managers preferred strategies that were unlikely to fail rather than those that seemed most efficient. “The pain of looking bad,” Lewis writes, “is worse than the gain of making the best move.”

As a content marketing manager tasked with delivering my quota of MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) and hitting publication dates, I get it. Picking an approach that seems unlikely to fail is safe. Proposing a radical new management system seems not only bad, but foolhardy. “Why,” managers the world over ask every day, “should we try to fix something that isn’t broken?”

Unfortunately for status-quo fans everywhere, visionaries and innovators understand that what counts as “broken” is constantly in flux. In 2001, before Beane began his quiet revolution inside Major League Baseball, no other team’s decision-making style appeared broken. Yet Beane would soon overtake them because his success depended on breaking things.

Likewise, in the increasingly noisy and densely populated online world, the success of our content relies on its ability to break things. We have to break through to audiences underwhelmed by mediocre marketing. We have to break the habits of consumers who have always used a competing product or read a competitor’s newsletter. And, most importantly, we have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams.

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We have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams, says @andreafryrear.
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Although, really, it’s just the last part, the management part, that we have to break — and by break, I mean teams must decide on their own structure without heavy-handed interference from management. Before the accusations of marketing communism begin to fly, let me be clear: I’m not advocating the dissolution of management altogether. I’m proposing that on a modern content marketing team (whose goals, obstacles, and workloads are typically so huge that it’s a wonder they don’t all sleep under their desks), a manager’s job is to hire amazing people, empower them using Agile principles and processes, and then work like hell to keep anyone else from interfering.

That’s a lot to do, so let’s start from the top.

Agile marketing team – what is it?

Some teams are naturally adaptive and data-driven, and could technically be considered agile (lowercase “a”). To qualify as Agile (capital “A”), a marketing team needs a structure that enables it to adapt and iterate.

This structure could take various forms, including Scrum (the classic Agile process based around sprints), Kanban (a pull-based system that uses work-in-progress limits), or a hybrid of the team’s invention. Most Agile teams work in sprints — set periods during which team members aim to complete a set amount of work that’s connected to a long-term plan. Each sprint lasts between one week and one month, with two weeks being the most common duration.

A mainstay of the Agile approach is the stand-up — a 15-minute meeting, usually held at the beginning of every work day, during which team members stay on their feet. They take turns updating everyone on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what obstacles they need help to overcome.

Whatever form the structure takes, some kind of systematic foundation is needed to keep an Agile team from descending into frenetic reactions disconnected from a long-term plan.

Changing your mind all the time does not make you Agile.

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Step 1 – Hire amazing people

Much has been written (some of it on this blog and in CCO magazine) about the growing talent crunch plaguing content marketing, so we don’t need to go into a lot of depth on this topic. The harsh truth is, it’s hard to find good content help these days. But the interviews, networking, and early-morning coffee meetings more than pay off when you consider the impact that truly passionate and skilled content creators have on your organization.

In an interconnected, digital world, great marketing can spread at the speed of a click. It doesn’t matter if it came from a team with a multimillion-dollar budget or a solopreneur doing it all on her own. The internet is nothing if not democratic.

That means finding — and retaining — creators who can consistently produce legitimately awesome work that gives you a regular shot at hitting the digital jackpot. There is no greater source of competitive advantage in content marketing than a talented team.

But those teams need the space and freedom to create or the legitimately awesome will rapidly devolve into lethargic and yawn-inducing.

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#Content teams need space to create or the legitimately awesome will devolve into lethargy. @AndreaFryrear
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Step 2 – Empower teams with agility

Whether it’s through an Agile iteration or sprint (set length of time during which a team commits to producing a set amount of content) or work-in-progress limits (inflexible limit on how much content can be in any given state such as research, writing, editing, review at one time), Agile teams are governed by limitations on their workflow. This isn’t because they’re lazy or can’t handle the workload. It’s because when people have a split focus, they do terrible work (and it takes them longer to do it).

For example, let’s imagine that your current content plans include creating a new webinar, whose launch you will support with an e-book and a series of blog posts. You plan each piece, make assignments, and send the team off to work. A week passes and you check on progress. It turns out that one person got derailed when sales asked for lead-generation collateral, another lost a day to responding to angry customer tweets, and your CEO wanted a home-page rewrite that took precedence over the blog posts.

Now you’ve got three half-finished content items, which is like having none at all.

You can’t give a webinar that ends abruptly halfway through. Nobody wants to download an e-book that’s just an outline. And blog posts just don’t work if they’re composed entirely of headlines, header tags, and target keywords.

An Agile content team, on the other hand, would have focused on finishing one piece before starting something else. Its members could have told sales and the CEO that their requests would be added to content’s Agile backlog (a prioritized to-do list that serves as the source of all work done by the team), not to the top of the list of immediate to-do’s.

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An #Agile content team focuses on finishing one piece before starting something else, says @AndreaFryrear.
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As a bonus, not only do Agile teams produce more content in less time, they also make team members happier and more engaged. And that means team members stick around longer, are easier to recruit, and help solve that thorny talent problem we talked about earlier.

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Step 3 – Get in other people’s way

You might have expected me to close by telling you to get out of the way so your team can work their Agile magic, but that’s not the final step. On our hypothetical content team, we had external requests being thrown in from all sides and derailing our content creators. Even on an Agile team, not everybody will happily chirp, “Nope,” when an executive tries to interrupt their work. Agile teams are empowered, but that doesn’t mean they have super powers.

Managers need to act like an offensive line, getting in the way of people who are trying to disrupt their team while they’re executing a beautiful play. They attend daily stand-up meetings, listening attentively and volunteering to help remove roadblocks (and then doing it). They genuinely value the creative force that their team can wield, and they actively work to create a situation where it can do its thing.

Respect tradition … or profit from it

Marketing, like baseball, has ways it’s always been done. We can choose to adhere to traditional ways of managing and creating content, or we can look outside our own typical way of thinking to gain the upper hand. Someone in your niche will be using an Agile approach to start breaking things very soon. Imagine what would happen if it was you.

Hear Andrea Fryrear explain user-story mapping at the Intelligent Content Conference March 28-30 in Las Vegas. Register today and use BLOG100 to save $100.

This article originally appeared in the February issue of CCO magazine. Subscribe for your free print copy today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Guide on The Best Web Hosting for Small Businesses

There are many types of web hosting designed for webmasters with different budgets and website needs. Understanding the differences of each type of web hosting allows you to make the right choice when you are shopping for a web hosting service. The best type of web hosting for your business will depend on your purpose and website needs. There are four main types of web hosting for small businesses including shared, VPS, dedicated and reseller hosting.

1. Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the lowest level of web hosting and it is also the cheapest type of hosting you can sign up. It is called shared hosting because thousands of webmasters will be hosting their sites on the same server. The resources are being divided equally among the thousands of webmasters to reduce the operation cost. Shared hosting is the best web hosting for small businesses who have just started out and not yet receive any significant traffic.

All the sites hosted on the shared server shares the same type of resources including CPU and RAM. With the resources being shared, your website can quickly exceed the resources limit when it starts to get a lot of traffic. Shared hosting does not give you root access to the server so that you won’t be able to customize the settings of the server for your website needs. Root access may not be important for small sites but it can definitely mean a big deal if it is a large business site. Shared hosting is available in both Linux and Windows version.

2. Virtual Private Server (VPS)

Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a higher level of web hosting plan compared to shared hosting. Like shared hosting, it hosts multiple accounts but only a few people are sharing the same server. The server is partitioned with the use of a special software. Each partition is operated completely independent of one another. If a webmaster reaches the limit of the resources on his partition, other websites hosted on other partitions won’t be affected.

VPS gives you root access so you will be able to carry out administrative tasks on the server including add/delete files, install/uninstall apps. You must have a team of staff that is knowledgeable in managing a VPS server otherwise you should choose a managed VPS where all the maintenance tasks are being taken care by the web hosting company’s technical team.

VPS is relatively affordable and costs only twice the price of a shared hosting plan. When you are shopping for a VPS plan, you should check features like CPU, RAM, disk space and bandwidth. You should also find out what type of control panel you will be provided if you choose the managed VPS plan. The control panel can be a proprietary dashboard created by the web hosting company or cPanel.

3. Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated hosting gives you the highest level of resources because you get to use the resources of the entire server for your websites. Dedicated hosting is the best because you are not sharing the server with anyone else. Because of the dedicated allocation of resources, your website will be able to run fast even during the peak time when you are getting a huge incoming of visitors. Dedicated hosting is ideal for a business site where you cannot afford your site to experience downtime as this could mean a difference in the loss of profit. Dedicated hosting usually maintain the uptime at a level that is higher than 99.94%.

High traffic will not cause problems for the websites. Since you have root access, you will be able to strengthen the security of your server by installing security software. Your site performance will no longer be affected by other sites since only your site occupies the server. The staff at the web hosting company will take care of the hardware of the dedicated server. However, it is the customer who will have control of the server for example installing any software they want. You will need to have a team of professionals who have experience in managing the dedicated server.

4. Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting is for people who want to sell web hosting services without having to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in buying their own data center and servers. Reseller hosting is also ideal for web designers who want to host the clients’ sites that they design. Many reseller hosting plans include a free WHMCS for you to manage the billing and ticket requests submitted by your customers. It will also include a free cPanel for you to manage the websites.

With the reseller hosting, you can run a web hosting business under your own brand. Reseller hosting features anonymous name servers, site builder, free website themes, and site builders. Some reseller web hosting plans will take a percentage of the commission you earn from reselling the web hosting services while others don’t charge any fee at all. You can set up the hosting account for your customers and your customers will have access to Softaculous one click installer to install the scripts.

Original post: Guide on The Best Web Hosting for Small Businesses

This post is courtesy of: http://www.dailyblogtips.com

9 Brilliant Tactics to Promote Your Blog Content on Facebook

There are countless ways to promote your blog content, but most of them are incredibly time-consuming. While reaching out to influencers or earning backlinks are both superior tactics, marketers rarely have the time to complete these tasks.

With Facebook Audience Network now reaching over 1 billion people every month, the social media platform is increasingly popular among marketers. And there’s a good reason for it: Facebook’s highly specific audience-targeting allows you to reach just the right people at the right time.

Here’s why you should promote your content on Facebook:

• Cost-per-click prices are low compared to other paid channels.
• Targeting options let you reach many potential buyers.
• Paid promotion expands the post’s organic reach.
• Promotions are easy to set up and manage.

As you explore the value of Facebook content paid promotion, learn about nine best practices that help your content get more clicks at a lower cost.

1. Share your post on Facebook

The best way to start promoting your content on Facebook is free. Post a link to the article on your brand’s Facebook page. You can easily do it by copying your article’s URL to Facebook’s sharing box.

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The best way to start content promotion on @Facebook is free. Post the article link, says @KarolaKarlson.
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The post will organically reach about 2% of the people who “like” your page. But that 2% isn’t the main reason that makes sharing posts on Facebook worthwhile.

The success of your paid Facebook campaigns depends on its credibility – do people believe that the content is good enough to click on?

One of the best ways to prep your Facebook post for a promotional-boosted campaign is to get some “likes” and shares to prove its worth. When your target audience notices that others have “liked” and shared your post, they’ll be curious to find out more, and maybe even share it.

To get the first “likes” and shares under the post that you’re going to boost, ask your team members for help.

Right after publishing the post, send the link to your team, and ask everyone to “like” & share it with their friends. This way, your post will get its first “likes” needed to improve the Facebook ad’s click-through rate.

More “likes” = more credibility = more clicks

After you’ve collected five to 10 “likes” for your article’s Facebook post, move on to step two – boosting your Facebook post.

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2. Boost your Facebook post

Boosted posts are the easiest way on Facebook to promote your content. All you need to do is set up a budget, choose the audience, and click “Boost Post.”

In my experience, the best time to boost a Facebook post is about an hour after publishing the original article.

Set the paid campaign duration for one day and use a low budget. You’ll first want to see how the campaign performs before considering an increase in budget or time frame.

The best way to conduct a quick Facebook campaign checkup is to use the Facebook Ads Manager. You’ll be able to see three important campaign metrics:

• Cost per click: See how expensive it is to have a person click on your promoted post.
• Click-through rate: Evaluate how well your promoted post generates interest from your targeted audience.
• Cost per mil: Understand how much it costs for your boosted post to be seen 1,000 times.

If you’re happy with your campaign results, you can extend its budget and reach. If you’re not, take a step back to evaluate the post itself.

3. Use captivating headlines

According to Copyblogger, 80% of readers never make it past an article’s headline. The same rule applies on Facebook: If your headline fails to catch people’s attention, they won’t click on your ad.

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If your headline fails to catch people’s attention, they won’t click on your ad, says @KarolaKarlson.
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Don’t be afraid to use a Facebook ad headline different from the one on your article. To craft a good Facebook headline:

• Clearly show the benefit to the reader.
• Include numbers and facts to increase credibility.
• Keep your headlines short (40-70 characters).
• Use action verbs such as get, learn, or do.

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To craft a good @Facebook headline, keep them short (40-70 characters), says @KarolaKarlson.
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4. Use well-designed images

Another crucial aspect people consider when looking at your Facebook ads is the image.

Of course you should avoid stock photos, especially the free stuff, as people tire of seeing ads with the same visuals over and over.

Use your in-house designer, hire one, or create your images through Facebook-focused ad-tool companies.

Tip: To get your ad noticed in an overcrowded news feed, use images with high-color contrast.

5. Write irresistible copy

Let’s imagine that you’ve written a magnetic Facebook post headline and found an awesome ad image. However, there’s still a high likelihood that people won’t click on your ad.

Now that you’ve caught your audience’s attention with a fascinating image, they’ll read your ad copy before clicking to go to your article. It is extremely important to nail the Facebook ad copy, or your boosted post description. Some of the best tactics for writing captivating promotional copy include:

• Use testimonials and facts to increase credibility.
• Ask questions to captivate people’s attention.
• Offer solutions to common problems.
• Use clear calls to action to show the next step.
• Play on people’s emotions and ignite curiosity.

This Facebook post by KlientBoost follows all the best practices: It just makes you want to click and read the article.

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6.  Create A/B tests

If you’re unsure which type of headline, image, or ad copy works best, there’s an easy way to find out. By creating a Facebook ad A/B test, you can compare the results of multiple ad versions and optimize your campaign accordingly.

When promoting your articles on Facebook, it makes sense to test:

• Multiple ad headlines
• Different ad images
• Two or more main description texts
• Link descriptions
• Target audiences
• Ad placement

A study of 37,259 Facebook ads found that most companies only have a single ad in their galleries. Using a single ad doesn’t allow you to customize for your audience, discover what headlines work better, what ad images you should use more, etc. The more A/B testing you do, the less you spend on ads with little or no potential.

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Using a single ad on @Facebook doesn’t allow you to customize for your audience, says @KarolaKarlson.
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To set up a split test in a few minutes, use Facebook Ads Manager or a tool like AdEspresso. You’ll be surprised what you’re able to discover after running a few successful tests.

TIP: To ensure that the A/B results are statistically relevant, you need at least 200 clicks (500 clicks are even more helpful) before deciding which ad variation performs the best.

7. Target the right people

Define your audience to target only people who are likely interested in the article you’re promoting. Audience selection also can affect the cost per click.

To develop a long-term campaign or to ensure that you target the same audience for other campaigns, use the Saved Audience feature. You can target people based on:

• Interests
• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Relationship status
• Purchase behaviors
• Education level

TIP: When promoting articles on Facebook, I like to keep the target audiences narrowed to less than 20,000 people to have more control over the ad delivery.

8. Use Custom Audience feature

Facebook’s Custom Audience feature allows you to target people who have visited your website or engaged with your Facebook page. They’re often the most valuable audience to target.

If you create a custom audience in Facebook and wish to target people who have visited your blog or other web pages, you’ll need to install Facebook Pixel first. Then you select “web traffic” in the Custom Audience feature. Your options include targeting:

• Everyone who visited your domain
• People who visited specific web pages
• People who visited specific web pages but not others
• People who haven’t visited your website for a certain amount of time

For example, if you want to target all the people who’ve visited your blog, you can target the URLs for your blog’s domain.

TIP: Create custom audiences of people who have read specific topics on your blog to easily advertise your new content on that topic to them.

9. Use emojis

We recently ran a small test with Scoro to see whether emojis have any effect on Facebook posts’ click-through and engagement rates.

Full disclosure: We didn’t have 10,000-plus impressions or a sufficient amount of clicks to say this A/B test is 100% statistically significant. Consider it a fun test to replicate.

We discovered that the ad with the red-flag emoji in the headline had the click-through rate of 0.846%, while the ad with no emoji had the CTR of 0.351%.

TIP: If you aren’t up on the latest emjois, use Emojipedia to help find the right one for your headline. You can copy and paste from its text-editing box.

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Add emojis to your @Facebook ad copy, says @KarolaKarlson.
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Here’s an emoji-headline example by Buffer in the main text section of its Facebook post:

Conclusion

Promoting articles on Facebook is simple and can have a high return on investment. Don’t worry if it seems confusing at first. After you’ve set up a few campaigns, it’ll be like child’s play.

The next time you publish content and are looking for a way to promote it, create a Facebook promotion campaign by following these nine practices:

• Share the post first on your Facebook Page.
• Create a boosted Facebook post.
• Use captivating headlines.
• Include well-designed images.
• Write irresistible ad copy.
• Create A/B tests to see what works.
• Target your audience.
• Use the Custom Audience feature.
• Add emojis to your Facebook ad copy.

Have any questions about Facebook ads and blog promotions? Leave a comment and let’s find the answer.

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Want to grow your social media skills and much more? Make plans today to attend Content Marketing World Sept. 5-8 in Cleveland, Ohio. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Custom cover by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 9 Brilliant Tactics to Promote Your Blog Content on Facebook appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

7 Apps and Tools Obsessed by Content Marketers

We all have those go-to apps or tools. You know, those icons you instinctively tap and that frustrate you when they’re switched to a different position on the page. Or those sites you don’t even need to bookmark because they pop up when you type the first letter in the address bar.

I appreciate learning what others consider their most-loved sites or apps so I can consider adding them to my repertoire. This month, I asked seven people connected to CCO magazine to share with you a manageable list of a diverse group of must-have tools to help improve your work life.

Headspace

Taking 10 minutes out of a busy afternoon for the Headspace app clears my cluttered mind and lets me be present in my writing or at a client meeting. In the midst of work chaos, meditation helps shift my focus and improve my productivity.
Monina Wagner, social media community manager, Content Marketing Institute

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Tettra

Here’s the deal: I host and write a highly produced, narrative-style podcast called Unthinkable about the creative side of content marketing. Making a single episode requires more moving pieces than can fit on this page, so if I don’t document how to produce our episodes, we’d derail pretty quickly.

Tettra is this really beautiful wiki software that integrates with Slack. I use it to document the show’s rundown — the minute-by-minute structure of the podcast that’s invisible to the audience (similar to what TV show writers use). I’m a huge fan, and huge believer that documented knowledge is the only way to grow and improve creative projects.
Jay Acunzo, founder and host, Unthinkable

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Documented knowledge is the only way to grow & improve creative projects, says @JayAcunzo.
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Hemingway Editor

On so many projects, I recommend the free Hemingway Editor tool. Way too many websites have complex and long text. This increases cognitive load and decreases readability. I love the simple way this tool guides you to smarter and tighter copy. The internet would be a much better place to read if everyone used Hemingway.
Melissa Eggleston, content strategist, UX specialist

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Flipboard

I have found Flipboard to be one of the most valuable tools in my curator’s cupboard. The intuitive interface makes it a breeze to find relevant, authoritative news, and thought-leadership content. I can save source materials, categorize my clippings by client or subject area, and call everything up in a snap — no matter what platform I’m working on. Not to mention the end result feels like I’m flipping through an attractively designed magazine of all the stories I’ve been meaning to read, which helps me spend more time immersed in content and less time searching for it.
Jodi Harris, consulting director, editorial and curation, Content Marketing Institute

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.@Flipboard’s intuitive interface makes it a breeze to find relevant news & leadership content. @Joderama
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Adobe Premiere Pro

I’m obsessed with Adobe’s Premiere Pro software tools for video editing. It has incredible 360-video plugins that allow us to edit wearing a headset so we can see what the audience is seeing. Before, we had to edit the video flat, then render it out to a headset so we could see whether our edits matched the areas of attention correctly.
Sarah Hill, CEO and chief storyteller, StoryUP

CoSchedule

The tool I adore (and still regrettably don’t use all of its potential) is CoSchedule. It’s my editorial calendar, blog, and social media planner … and because it plugs straight into WordPress as well as integrates with Evernote, the workflow from initial idea to published blog post to social media distribution is so much easier. My only regret is that it makes these tasks so easy that I can only blame myself now for not posting on my own blog more regularly.
Jonathan Crossfield, writer, blogger and journalist

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Trello

I have tried many systems to keep myself organized, and nothing quite clicked until I found Trello. I use it for everything from managing my extensive to-do list to collaborating with other editors at CMI. I love that I can add items with ease from any device as well as easily organize tasks. Trello is also the place where I centralize all of the random notes and processes I may need in the future. It’s ideal to have one place to store everything I need instead of searching in multiple locations.

For instance, I’ll cull through my to-do’s each day and pull out five things I want to accomplish. Or, I’ll use it for a shared project such as an editorial calendar (see below). I can use it to track everything from the items I reference often to blog categories, article ideas, posts in progress, and what has been published.
Michele Linn, senior director of content, Content Marketing Institute

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Pull out five things you want to accomplish each day, says @michelelinn. #productivity
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If you were on a deserted island with a solar-powered tablet and great Wi-Fi (and still needed to work), what’s the one app you wouldn’t want to work without?

This article originally appeared in the February issue of CCO magazine. Subscribe for your free print copy today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 7 Apps and Tools Obsessed by Content Marketers appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.