By Jorie Henrickson

Content marketing has become the                      
sweetheart of Fortune 500 ad execs.

Just last month, 100% of advertisers for American Eagle, General Mills and other major players surveyed by Outbrain reported using content marketing in their overall campaign strategies.

What is content marketing?

Basically it’s online content that’s more useful or entertaining than salesy. It’s rich with photos, reviews and other media that your target audience seeks out on its own. Especially when combined with social media, it can significantly expand brand awareness and help drive sales both online and offline.

Get an excellent ROI.

Content marketing in the hands of experts provides a high return on investment. Unlike traditional means of promotion – radio spots, TV commercials and newspaper ads – it isn’t the ephemeral mentioning of a weekend sale or highlighted product. Many investments made in content marketing have the potential to last indefinitely on the Internet. YouTube videos and product review blogs are just two examples of content marketing that endures.

Examples of Content Marketing

Content marketing involves creating (or simply passing along) informative or entertaining material that appeals to your product’s target audience. This material might be a blog post, an online game, a video or a free download. Here are some examples.

Blogs

Here at Vab Media we write a lot of blogs for content marketing. For example, imagine that a client wants to populate an online dating website in San Francisco. Our marketing strategy might include posting blogs with titles like:

•  The Best Singles Bars in San Francisco
• How to Write a Dating Profile
• The Many Dates of Jerry Seinfeld

These blogs would be optimized to rank prominently in Google, Bing and other search engines without the need to pay for keywords. People seeking “singles bars in San Francisco” would naturally stumble upon the client’s blogs and online dating service. Exponential growth in brand awareness could come with the integration of Facebook “Like” buttons and other social media.

As the graphic below illustrates,blogging combined with social networking can help maintain your current following and attract new traffic.

Vlogs or Video Blogs

Content marketing also takes the form of video blogs. In the dating website example, a video blogger might:

• Provide relationship advice
• Share an amusing dating disaster
• Show how to prepare a romantic dinner
• Review dating websites

For a great example of effective humor in this genre, see Jenna Marbles on YouTube. Her video How to Avoid Talking to People You Don’t Want to Talk To has garnered more than 21 million hits:

Professionals with a more formal style are also using Internet video as cost-effective advertising. Ideally they post a combination of video and text to help with search engine optimization and appeal to different visitors’ preferences. For example, Vab Media worked with Reverend Gail Swain to advertise her Monterey Bay wedding services with video and a written statement of her philosophy:

Another example of using mixed media in content marketing comes from HBO. They used video blogging to support the hit drama Big Love. Although blogging wasn’t mentioned during the episodes, Internet fans became engrossed in the character Margene Henrickson’s video blog and her written commentary.

Posting video blogs on a regular basis is an excellent way to attract and maintain a following. How can you get the most payback for your efforts? See this article for the latest tips about optimizing your video for YouTube and other search engines.

Infographics

Infographics are the hottest form of content marketing for 2012.

What are infographics?
They’re basically traditional charts on steroids. They pack plenty of information into easy-to- understand pictures or charts. Ideally, infographics are engaging and are shared through social media.

Working with our dating website client, we might create an infographic like this one posted at Visual.Ly:   

An unexpected company – Timberland – also created a dating infographic. As Timberland’s efforts show, with content marketing it’s possible to boost brand awareness without selling your products or services in the usual way.

Producing this infographic gave Timberland a reason to venture beyond its traditional territory and raise brand awareness in new settings. Posted in blogs about dating or the environment, the image can engage Internet users who aren’t actively searching for Timberland’s product (outdoor wear). Subtle selling, indeed.

It’s easy to make your own infographics. Check out Visual.Ly for useful tools and one of the Internet’s best infographics collections.

More Forms of Content Marketing

Content marketing takes many forms. At Vab Media we provide clients with blogs, vlogs, Twitter content, Facebook pages and content marketing media in additional formats. Bookmark us and check back for new tips about content marketing, SEO and web development.

Want to learn more about how Vab Media can help you?

Jorie Henrickson is among our top copywriters. She writes and rewrites creative content to help websites draw traffic organically and keep visitors engaged. A highly adaptable writer, Jorie has extensive experience with traditional and SEO writing for academic, corporate, and non-profit organizations. Connect with Jorie on linkedin: Jorie Henrickson – SEO Writer on LinkedIn.

What is Search Plus Your World showing you?

Personal Results

The new “Personal Results” view that appears in your search results now personalizes the search result listings you get based on both your social connections and your own search behavior.  In addition, content that’s been shared with you through your Google+ social network connections now also appears in results.  According to Google “The social search algorithm and the personalized search algorithm are actually one algorithm now, and we are merging it in a way that is very pleasant and useful.”   They are featuring Google + content as well as photos that have been shared on it.  If you look at the image below of a search result for Vab Media, it shows the first result is our Google+ business page and then it shows links and images we have shared on the G+ plus network. This is a nice personal search feature.

Google profiles are featured more now

Another important algorithm change is how people with Google+ accounts are going to be featured more in Google search results.  The search results themselves are devoting much larger emphasis to displaying material from a Google+ person or Google+ Business Page. The results individuals see are now catered toward people in their own social networks, quite similar to how Facebook’s algorithm works when you search for people on FB.

People & Pages Suggestions

The final algorithm roll out is Google’s suggestions for people and pages on Google+ to follow. These will appear on the right-hand side of your search results, when Google decides they are relevant.   Perform a search for movies or music and you will see many suggestions.  You might see well known or famous people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. Google is allowing you to be able follow them and connect with them on their Google+ social network.

Our conclusions

Overall, we find the integration that allows for searching through private and public material interesting.  We think many people will find some value in it.   If you don’t want these personal and private search results you can search in google chrome incognito mode or log out of your google account to get just public search results.

This opens up a whole world of possibilities for entrepreneurs, bloggers, and business owners. Now, you can promote your services to your colleagues and friends.  You’re in their circles, so now you just need to put your most popular links on Google + Social Network. Contact us for more marketing ideas and questions.  Read the actual article from Google below.

“Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.

Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started.”  -Amit Singhal, Google     

Contact us for a consultation & quote

*A disclaimer from Vab Media:  There’s been a lot of controversy in the web world and SEO community that the Giant, “Google” is promoting its own products in search results.  Whether this is true or not is not for us to decide.  We just want to let small business owners know about certain changes and how they can take advantage of Google’s Search Algorithms, even in the case that they may change in the future.

Both Foursquare and Facebook allows users to check into their place. Create a Foursquare brand page for your business.

 We recommend using both, but in this post, we’ll talk more about foursquare because it has a lot of cool features that not all businesses may know about.Why use both?  Different perks for different customers- not all your customers will check in through Facebook, and foursquare users are accustomed to receiving the badges earned on Foursquare; Foursquare embraces the gamification of social media.

What are badges?

Foursquare gives out special badges depending on the type of check-in:

If you check into a movie theatre, you get the popcorn badge, If you check into somewhere for the first time you get the newbie badge. If someone checks into a business many times, they can eventually get the mayor badge.

If a person becomes a mayor, business owners should respond to that appropriately.  Not only is that person a loyal customer, but they are publicizing they are at your location.  So if you aren’t taking advantage of that free publicity, you should.  In order to take advantage of this free publicity, you should set up a campaign that gives your customers special treatment for checking into your place often, for the first time, when they bring a friend or two.

Whether your customer checks in with Facebook places or Foursquare, either one allows users share their status update to Facebook, but only Foursquare allows users to share their status update to twitter and facebook.  If they have their twitter account connected to Linkedin, their Linkedin contacts will also see their location.  Either way, each one has its advantages, but setting up both could help you grab a higher percentage of market share.

Foursquare, however, has a few more things that would give you even more visibility.  Here’s a little more about how you can use foursquare to invite repeat customers:

In addition to offering a special deal to clients that check in to your location for the first time, you may also write a tip, that will allow customers that check in to a nearby location to see your “tip.”  This tip could go like this, “Since you are at….(nearby location)….Check out (your Location).”  You should especially do this if you know there is a nearby location that gets more foot traffic than you normally do.

Likewise, share the love and place tips about businesses around town.  It will not only show that your business is happy to live in that area and promote local businesses, but may also get you some exposure.  You may do this with your own profile, your business profile, or your business brand page.

Business brand pages are new on Foursquare.  Foursquare has been an app that local businesses use to get clients., but now brands can put up brand pages.  What does this do? It allows brand pages to place tips about places around town and tips that you feel are relevant to help promote your company from the Website or on a iPhone.

It allows you to showcase your brand to locals and those visiting your local town, so that they recognize your brand.  See the check-in snapshot of Vania’s iPhone after she checked in to Cruzio.  It shows Vab Media placed a tip! Cool.  To get started, you can go to foursquare.com/create_page and put in your companies information.  A Foursquare brand page has the potential to become an essential social platform in a world where businesses are using social media tools to get their name in front of as many people as possible.

Contact us for quote on social media marketing campaigns and tutorial prices and visit our blog for more info.

The integration of videos is by far the most important of Googles Universal Search integrations with at least one video included in nearly 50% of search queries. This presents an awesome opportunity to quickly get on 1st page for your keyword phrase search results with just a few videos. Nevertheless, not enough businesses have  been capitalizing– only a small percentage of websites are actually optimizing their existing video content.                                                                                                      

Choose keywords for video. Just like the Google adwords key word tool, their product Youtube also has a keyword tool. https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool provides the opportunity to examine search volumes for individual keywords. With this you quickly get an idea of which keywords are relevant for video optimization. Keywords that have a high search volume here are also often displayed right at the top of the Universal Search integrations in the normal Google SERPs and therefore have a higher click through rate.

video appropriate keywords are keywords where a user will often click on videos in the search results or where the search query is made up of their [existing search] + video. With this kind of keyword, videos provided with prominent video integrations will feature prominently in SERPs.   YouTube is the most important video platform and has just recently surpassed yahoo as the second largest search engine in the world and, with a large online community, powerful marketing tool for companies.

Here are the some tips that will help your video get more views and rank higher in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs):

• Content: As with your website’s content, your video content should also be relevant, clear and crisp. It should be able to convey the message in an interesting or different way.
• Title: should contain the most important keywords, arranged with the most important keywords first. keep the title around 60 characters, any more will not be displayed.
• Description: video’s description should contain the keyword more than once and should use additional, semantically related keywords to avoid keyword stuffing. Which means you can simply use alternative terms that describe the same concept and thus strengthen your foothold for all of the related terms of that subject.
• Keywords: Add your keywords in the content or description of your video. Even your video transcript should be keyword-rich. Adding a relevant transcript serves more than one purpose- your video becomes accessible to people with hearing disabilities as well as it becomes relevant for search engine spiders.  The filename of the video should also contain the keywords.
• Tags: Add up to 10 or 15 tags – using the most important keywords.
• Comments: Allow viewer comments and feedback on your video. The more people talk about your video, the higher will be your ranking on search result page.
• Linking: Link your video to relevant content on your site. While linking ensure that appropriate keywords are used. Also make your content relevant so that others link to your video too. More the number of inbound links, higher will be your ranking.
• Sitemap: Add a video sitemap, submit video sitemap to search engines. This will help web spiders to index your video more easily.

Contact Us For A Quote On Video SEO

Video SEO Ranking Factors to Consider

• Keywords in title
• Number of views
• Number of comments
• Category & Tags
• +1/Shares/Tweets/Embeds
• Favorites
• Ratings
• Sentiment (Like/Dislike ratio)
• Channel views
• Number of subscribers
• Links
• Embeds
• Video Sitemap
• Channel login activity
• Speed & consistency of interest
• Quality description (click-thru factor)
• Flags (negative)

Check out our Portfolio of Search optimized Videos we have produced and Marketed for clients.

Vab Media and Muse Cinemedia will be speaking on August 2nd, at Santa Cruz Business Connect about conceptualizing and marketing videos for business.

The other two workshops have already passed, but the upcoming workshop is highlighted below and if you want to know how you can use Facebook to improve your bottom line, you should check out Workshop #3.
Build and catapult your website to success with:
1. MANAGE YOUR WEBSITE WITH EASE using WordPress
2. GET FOUND with Search Engine Optimization
3. SPREAD THE WORD with Social Media!

Workshop 3

SPREAD THE WORD with Social Media

Social Media
Facebook for Business – Thursday May 19, 2011 6-9pm
$250 per person

Learn how to use Facebook to put your business out where the masses are and attract attention for your products and services.

Social media is not just a social past time. Come learn how to harness the power of Facebook Business pages with this hands on course we walk you through understanding your business social presence and determining your goal. Is it about fans, more activity on your blog, increased sales or awareness?

The basics will be covered for uploading images, videos, links, questions and there always popular status update. Learn how to use your Facebook fan page to interact with your customers, listen to what they want and deliver it to them. The second internet is upon us and it will be known as the Social Internet.

Mobile platforms will be discussed on how to engage your fan as well. Conflict on your Facebook wall? We can teach you how to deal with that head on.

Understand the practice of blog integration and how to complete the circle driving customers back to your message and eventually create a sale.

You will learn how to use the analytics for Facebook to determine how your posts are received, how many fans you add or lose and where they live. You want to expose your business only to the people that are interested in hearing about it? Facebook targeted advertising can facilitate that, learn how to target geographical areas, interests, age and more when running ad campaigns.

Social applications to be discussed: Facebook’s personal profile, Facebook business pages, Twitter, as well as applications that will tie them – AND your website –  together!
Workshop Instructor:
Danny Keith – Social Entrepreneur - Jack Wagon Agency
Assistant Instructor:
Our Own -Vania Benavides- Social Media Strategist & Web Developer

How to use facebook for business:

Developing a facebook page for business is a great way to share your website’s links with others and your customers.  Let your customers know they can contact you through facebook by adding a link to your email signatures. Having a custom landing page with a link back to your site, promotions, an action item, or an email form is a great way to get likers to engage with your brand more.

Once everyone has joined you on facebook, don’t abandon them, update them at least once per day with articles, questions, promotions, news, and more.  Have fun with your followers, don’t leave them hanging.

Facebook Advertising – the largest network now has sponsored ads showing up according to people’s likes and interests.  Gain visibility by setting up facebook advertising.  Facebook already has all its user data collected, all you have to do is tailor your ads to them.  Don’t forget to a tag line an image that captures their attention!

If your business is located somewhere they can check in to using facebook places, claim the location after searching for it and customize it with information!

Do you provide a service?  How can you take a picture of the services you provide?

If you have happy customers, you can take a picture of them.

If all you have is documents show a before and after of numbers, or anything that shows you can improve your customer’s lives.

What about video?

How about a video of you explaining your service? Or a video of your customers and you?

Even amateurs can get featured on youtube if you market your video correctly.

Why not start now?

We want to start out with a few notes about what twitter is and what it’s not:

What twitter is:

• A social network that gives you the ease to network with other businesses or with consumers, or if you’re a non-profit, it’s a place to raise awareness of your issues.
• A place you can use to engage in conversations and share your expertise.
• A site that allows you to share your links with others and allows you to share interesting links you find.
• A real time solution for real time world events, like community events, natural disasters/occurrences, the latest news, traffic, and more.

What twitter is not:

• Twitter is not a place for you to only shamelessly promote your products.  How can you expect to gain interest from someone if you just talk to yourself, about your products all the time?
• People network on twitter, just as they would at a networking event, by finding out about the other person before talking about what you have to offer.  Follow the – “how can I help you” convention, as opposed to the “how can you help me” assumption.

How can you use Twitter for your business or non-profit?

You can take advantage of community events by including it in your tweet and posting your own short message along with it, tricky, but powerful.
You can meet others on twitter who are in your field. You can also find your customers.
How do you find these? Twitter now has an excellent way to either search for people and tweets.  Just put your search term at the top on the new twitter layout, and find out if other people are talking about it.  Then see if the people talking about a topic relating to your products or services are worthy of following.  Finally, just click the follow button, engage them by sending a personalized tweet. You can do this by hitting the reply button on their tweet or by clicking on twitter’s “send a message” icon located on the top right, next to your user name to send a message.  Use the recipient’s username: i.e.: @twitterusername, and presto! You’re now part of the twitter community.

So, here’s what I’ve been up to:

Santa Cruz Film Festival Website. Along with Awake Media, Mike Xu and I developed this site using the Drupal Content Management System, which organizes data better than wordpress. Originally, we were supposed to connect the original HTML based site to the program descriptions and film schedule portion of the site that we were going to make, but ultimately that was not going to be a good idea. So we re-constructed the whole site, because the content that was on the old site was static anyway, so no loss to that. We actually improved the look, navigation, and anyone can update the content now, whereas before they couldn’t, and the layout was also poor, but I made it look clean with my CSS theming skills
Anyway, check out the site: Santa Cruz Film Festival. There was no designer, so really I just did the best I could by using a color guide they gave us. We also got in free to every film and all the “happy hours” and parties.

Freelance Camp. Based on the BarCamp style; an unconference, this “un-conference” is designed for freelancers to connect, collaborate, share information, and share success stories with other freelancers. I’m so glad I was called in to volunteer for this! The San Francisco Freelance Camp PRO is this Saturday and within a month the volunteers and organizers were able to sell all 100 tickets as well as bring together excellent sponsors and free schwag for the event. The next one is October 2 in Santa Cruz, so the project continues. I’ve blogged a couple of times on the site, mostly about the brown bag lunches that occur every Tuesday at Santa Cruz’ NextSpace Headquarters: How to Make the RIGHT Decision and “Don’t Let It Fester: How to Keep Disputes with Customers, Suppliers, and employees from sidetracking your business.”

Johnson Education Solutions. I had already been working with Jessica Johnson, the founder of the non-profit: Empowerment Today tweeting and updating the facebook profile page, so Jessica hired me on to do social media for the for-profit part of her business as well. I was able to develop a good strategy based on targeting key decision makers in businesses, which we are targeting via the use of various social networks. I’ve also added some content to the site in the form of informational blogs: Families and Money, Corporate Responsibility as a measure of success, and Unmotivated employees may be financially stressed.

IP Society. Patrick Reilly, the Intellectual Property Lawyer that started the business hired me on briefly to promote the monthly events related to Intellectual Property for businesses. The beginning strategy is to use social media to promote the events, but Patrick is busy himself interviewing all kinds of entrepreneurs to share information about startups, law, and more.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. Hate to put it all on one post, but as always, my site will come after all the projects. Stay tuned for a remodel.

People don’t want to listen to commercials; social media is not shameless self promotion. People want information, they want your opinions, they crave transparency.  They want to know that you are honest with them, and they want what they want, not what you want them to want.  If you want people to want your product, give them information, a peek inside your business.  Give them something fun, give them something informative, give them facts, give them tips, give them quotes to live by (not too many though). Talk to them, join in on their conversations, contradict or share their opinions, let them know you are paying attention to them.  Do all of these, not just one.

This is one of the reasons why social media has not only been a challenge for entrepreneurs, but also to large companies and marketers used to delivering messages via advertisements to the consumer, not for the consumer.  Even with today’s ads, you can still be sure that marketers are still trying to sell you a product through visual aids, but the conversation continues to be uni-directional.  Hence the need for the type of marketing that gives your supporters what they crave: Attention.

1st key ingredient: YOU

You, your company, your brand.  Consumers cannot have a conversation without you.  If you don’t respond, they will move on to the next person who can.

Key Ingredient: Strategy

What do you want your social media strategy to accomplish?

• If you want to use social media for social entrepreneurships you discuss issues, invite others to join the conversation.  Invite them to events or ask them to set up fundraisers, etc.

• If you’re a profit based business, you will use social media to increase your sales, site hits, ad clicks, etc.

• For Engaging: Are you posting cool blog posts? Interesting facebook facts? Do your readers know you’re on facebook? How can they follow you? They won’t do a search unless you make it clearly visible.  Add sharing tools on your site, on places where you guest blog, on your bags…
• To gain a Loyal following:Who is loyal? Why do they care about you? How can you get to those who aren’t?

But remember:

• minimum spamming
• maximum sharing

Key ingredient: TIME

Social media takes up a lot of time, but people are on the internet alot, and they’re everywhere. How much time are you spending on Twitter? Are you posting frequently on facebook? How much time can you afford to spend?

The more time you spend, the more you will find others.  The less you spend, the longer it will take you to reach larger audiences.

Either way you can make it work, the trick is to engage key people that will help you spread your message for you.

Key Ingredient: Social Media Networks and Tools:

Two biggest ones: Twitter and Facebook

What is twitter? Why do you care to use it for business?
Twitter is a microblogging service, where you share information or news stories, ask questions,  join in on a popular discussion, etc. Though you’re limited to 140 characters, you’re not limited to the number of times you can post. Although, posting too often will probably annoy some of your followers.

Twitter

Now you’re on twitter, now what?

Join in on the discussions:

• Hashtags “#” mark these discussions and you can get in on one or create one yourself, they’re used in events and they can get you some key followers – i.e.: customers or supporters.   To check out hashtags that are already set up, which people constantly tag (add to their tweets; i.e.: always recycle #ecomonday), go to twubs.com.

• Connecting:  Are you connecting with your audience? How are you doing it?
  • Are you re-tweeting what your followers post?
  • Are you replying to them?
  • How can you monitor whether they re-tweet you or mention you?
• What is a re-tweet?
  • A re-tweet is when someone likes what you “tweet” and credits you by pairing the ‘@’ next to your name, same goes with mentions.
  • If you use a third party tool, like tweetdeck, this will take the work out of always checking on your twitter page whether someone has mentioned or re-tweeted you.

This is HOW the conversation begins.

Facebook:

If you’ve never set up a page for your business or non-profit, Here’s a short guide:

• Create a page on facebook.

• Once you set up a page for your non-profit or business or both:
  • Link to other pages on your facebook fan page:  (i.e.: other fan pages)
  • Under the other fan page’s icon – you will see a link that says: Add to my page’s favorites
  • Add the causes tool if you are a non-profit.
  • Also add: Tools, links, photos, video, ask your followers questions, post issues, information, latest trend in your company, latest news article, tell them what your business is doing.
  • Post often, otherwise they won’t see your status updates.

• Finally, customize your facebook landing page.

Other tools:

Blogs

How to make your blog interesting:

• Write posts that tell a story, highlight a person, write down some quotes, make sure the story flows.
• Post things on your blog that aren’t on your twitter or facebook page, that’s how you’ll get people to come back to your site.
• Add social sharing tools, the tweetmeme, facebook share, and digg buttons.

YouTube:
If you can, do it! Or Vimeo! Whatever you have that adds a visual aspect to your site and facebook updates.

Search Engine Optimization
Keywords, keywords, keywords!!!

However, the new way to getting noticed on search engines will be by the number of people talking about you on social networks.

Add yourself to StumbleUpon, or get someone to add you.

Basically there are many businesses out there, and many are your competitors, what are you going to do to stand out? You have to put yourself out there – EVERYWHERE!