We’re shining a light on what makes bad content … we’re naming and shaming a few sinners.

BAD CONTENT SIN #1 – PLAGIARISM: SAME SAME BUT SAME

Your content should set yourself apart from your competitors. There are many platforms for you to check your content for plagiarism: a couple of good ones are Grammarly.com and https://www.copyscape.com/. Sometimes plagiarism is a genuine accident. Our advice, get in front of the situation as soon as you are made aware of it and apologise to owner of the content. And then sometimes it’s blatant:

via Just Creative

BAD CONTENT SIN #2 – KEY WORD CURSE

How many ways can I mention Sydney, Plumbing and CBD in a paragraph? This shouldn’t be anyone’s aim when writing … the answer, by the way, is 5. According to another plumbing website I was on, they had the gall to have anchor text “plumber in Sydney” and “Sydney Plumbing” on the same line, both linking to the URL I was already on … bravo!

BAD CONTENT SIN #3 – JARGON – MY PERSPICACITY KNOWS NO SATIETY*

Part and parcel of the above is speak in a language your readers understand. If you are writing for the average punter, steer clear of theoretical physics but if your business is Nat’s Aeronautic and Space Agency, by all means, go right ahead.

“…The large mass of Wand Z particles is the reason why weak forces are called that way: the mass of these vector bosons is a hindrance to their ability to mediate long-range interactions…” (from Science 2.0 a fascinating read for the eggheads among us)

People are likely to misinterpret or just get bored quickly

Jargon also leads into technical or difficult language like using $10 words for no reason. There are many readability tools out there. Flesh Kincaid Reading Ease score is a determination of how easy your content is to read based on school grade level. There’s a reason why the “Dummies” books are successful.

BAD CONTENT SIN #4 – UNINTERESTING: MONOTONE DRIVEL

Email copy that makes you reach for the delete button before the first sentence is fin…

It’s time for a game – open your junk folder, click an email at random. Here is mine: first sentence first paragraph:

On the occasion of festive season currently I am running with following offer for you if you are looking for developing a e-commerce website for selling your products online.

Apart from the fact that I already work for a digital agency and not in need of help with our digital, I doubt the copy would be compelling even in their native tongue. The subject was equally bamboozling: “want to achieve..”. No question mark, two fullstops, no capital letters just want to achieve.. – it’s impressive when you think about.

BAD CONTENT SIN #5 – POOR TIMING

We often think of ways to include content around a current theme whether it’s an automated Birthday discount or Xmas special. But it works the other way around as well.

I probably don’t even need to mention it, but don’t run a bucket list competition telling us the places you want to visit before you die if you’re an airline that has had two plane disasters in recent memory. No one would be that silly would they?

via Digiday

BAD CONTENT SIN #6 – UNFOCUSED

Always remember who you are creating content for. Whether you are writing for a broad audience, or a specific audience, make sure you are putting yourself in their shoes.  If you’re not focussing your content on the reader and their needs, then they won’t read it!

Also, trying to link or associate your brand with a cause needs to be done in a focussed way. Being audience focussed when creating content is also not treating them like a idiot, lest we forget this doozy from Woolworths a couple of years ago:

BAD CONTENT SIN #7 – MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONCE

OR READ TWICE, PRESS SEND ONCE

For the love of god – Just reread once before you press send 🙂 See if you can spot the error in the below post from influencer Scott Disick.

via Refinery29

Make sure you fact check your sources and that any facts are sound.

via Business2Community

This is not just confined to content writing, it can be your design as well. Starbucks is a master at many things but this one wasn’t well thought out.

via buzzfeed

And, of course, sometimes there’s nothing you can do but laugh.

via bored panda

 

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE

We know Seven Sins was enough for the bible, but how ’bout a couple of bonus ones. #8 can lose you new business and #9, well, it can lose you a whole lot more.

BAD CONTENT SIN #8 – DID YOU GET THEIR DIGITS? CALL TO ACTION

I don’t think I need to say this to you fine folk, but I would advise having a call to action in anything you create.

I saw this ↓ on the street a few weeks ago.

Wow, I really need an engraver let me just give this person a call… umm no phone number… I’ll email them… nup, not that either… hmmm I guess I could just wait next to their car until they come back.

 

BAD CONTENT SIN #9 – WALK THE LINE, DON’T CROSS IT

Feel free to be a bit cheeky, risk is often worth the reward. But then again sometimes take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror, and ask “Is this risky or inciting criminal activity?” Bloomingdales we’re looking at you …

via Washington Post

*Gotta love a good Simpsons quote

via GIPHY

CONTENT MARKETING: THE KEY TO SEO AND SMM?

Content Marketing, SEO, SMM

 

People think these terms are mutually exclusive …

 

“Content is king”

“SEO is critical to your website’s success”

“How many followers do you have”

 

Every one has a mantra around these efforts but they really are intertwined.

Without being an equal triumvirate as content is the glue that sticks them all together.

 

If you are creating content and putting it on your site you are effectively practising SEO. If you then share the post on social media, you are practising SMM. I mean it’s all fairly elementary.

 

SEO is proving to Google/Bing etc. that your page is what their users are looking for when they search for something.

SMM is proving to Facebook/Twitter et al. and their users that your stream is something that they’re interested in and what other people will be interested in.

Content Marketing is creating something that is interesting to the types of people that you want to engage with.

 

OK, analogy time. Remember when we used books … those thin rectangular things … y’know the good ole days …

A lifeline in times of need, you would get this yellow book that had yellow pages and look for a specialist in the area you needed help. And then you would pick up the telephone and dial the number of someone that you had found in the list on the subject.

 

This is Google, Bing.

 

In times of Yellow Pages, the only way to differentiate yourself from the pack was  through money. You could buy more space in Yellow Pages or trickily you could name yourself A1 Furntiture, AAA Marketing, A+ Travel Consultant… you see Yellow Pages were sorted alphabetically so some geniuses were smart enough to specifically choose business names just for the fact that they started with an A and nothing to do with a grading system. People are always trying to game the system… people are always trying to game google as well.

 

Just like the Yellow Pages, Google can be bought although, rather than getting a shinier bigger ad than everyone else, you can be the first ad a user sees just by paying the most with PPC. Google clearly states that those are ads and they spend the rest of their space on trying to give you a page that relates to your search as much as possible. Rather than just giving you a list in alphabetical order – it analyses every page that wants to be followed by it and judges it. Google will give you brownie points for your content being laid out nicely and documented correctly, just one facet of SEO, but it’s main aim is to rank content based on the usefulness of a particular search term ie. keeps people on a page and refer to that page as a source.

 

Speaking of Yellow Pages and using phones (the ones that had a cord in them that wasn’t for charging), people used to use them to ask other others what they thought on a subject, who they used to fix up their car, to organise a get together or even just to find out how they were (insane, right?).

Apart from being weird back then it also helped them feel connected. Now we have social media to keep in contact with everyone … seeing as everyone is connecting there why wouldn’t a brand take the time to say “Hey, are you interested in what I do? Let’s be friends”

If venting on the phone to your friends wasn’t enough, you would write a letter either in the form of an op-ed or to the cause of the bereavement. That’s when you really wanted to let a company or a friend have it. Nowadays where do you go? Social media!

When you got something new, you had to tell all your friends in person, then came the phone, and now … you guessed it … social media. People are living their lives on social media, so it would be remiss of any company not to be there as well.

 

At the end of the day, search engines and social media are platforms that take their cues from numbers, it’s a popularity game.

 

They’re where people go to spend time and find solutions – we create content to keep them engaged and show that the solutions you provide are just what they need.

So that takes up most of our time online, but we also have favourite websites and emails that we read – so content marketing comes in again through your owned audience, in your database and website users. Your content is keeping your customers enthused about your brand – this content is the engine that runs your current audience, referrals from them to other people (among other things on social media) and your ability to be featured in Yellow Pages AKA search engines.

Content marketing touches and informs everything you will do online and offline; and will even help direct sales endeavours. SMM and SEO need content to thrive so if you’re thinking about ongoing SEO or SMM, make sure your strategy is centred firmly around content that is engaging, informative and valuable to your ideal customers.

If you’re struggling with figuring out who your ideal customer is, how to build a strategy or creating great content that will see your enquiry rate skyrocket, drop us a line.

FIND OUT HOW WE INCREASED A COMPANY’S FACEBOOK FOLLOWING BY 100% WITH ONE POST.

SHOULD YOU REALLY BE SPENDING ON FACEBOOK.

You have to spend money to make money, right? In it’s truest sense, we should probably remove the first “money” from that sentence: You have to spend to make money. Because you can quite easily spend time and make money. And of course the reverse is also true. You sell to make money whether it’s the goods and services you sell to make money and, if you’re a government that doesn’t truly understand (or perhaps care) you can sell some of your infrastructure which is vital to your ongoing revenue, for short lived but immediate gain.

Marketing is spending three things to make money.

• We spend money to make money via advertising.
• We spend our mental energy on creativity and ideas.
• We spend our time on pulling it all together in a strategy.

Today we are focussing on advertising and in particular, Facebook advertising.

The main reason why you should spend money on Facebook is simple … it works.

We have all seen the organic reach of our Facebook posts being throttled in recent years. Me, being the petty person that I am, immediately thought why should I reward Facebook with more ad spend if they are hurting my organic reach? It’s a reasonable question, why should I? If you’ve already forgotten – it works.

Facebook doesn’t need to apologise for monetising its platform, in fact it’s a testament to Facebook that they have been able to do so seamlessly and at a time when many other social platforms are struggling. Did you know that Twitter has never made a profit (a statement I may no longer be able to say in 2 months time)?

The reason why it works is no real secret. It’s audience segmentation. Traditional media outlets had demographics and those demos were bible. You could be assured that the typical audience of a TV show, say, a day time soap would be mums wanting to buy groceries and perfume for the longest time. This was done by surveying a select group of people and extrapolating that over the entire TV watching public.

Audience segmentation has grown a lot since the days of broad age brackets and gender. Take a cursory glance at Facebook and you’ll notice that you have many segments to choose from: age, sex, location, education, religion, interests and other page likes (perhaps even target your competitors followers). You can determine political beliefs, job titles, marital status and not only that, Facebook will tell you exactly how many people your ad was served to.

And to top it all off, it’s still cheaper than traditional forms of media. Time will tell whether social media advertising remains cheaper – supply and demand will dictate the trend especially as internet advertising was to surpass TV advertising this year.

If you want to tackle the minefield of creating great Facebook ads, Pia Silva has some good tips for what not to do. Just like governments selling off infrastructure to save a bob, we often see is businesses looking to save in social. Thinking they can do it themselves or skimp on content but in the end if you want Social to work you have to invest in your audience and give them what they want to see.

As this Buffer post suggests:
if you can’t design, find a designer…
if you can’t write, find a writer…
if you can’t be a social media manager, find a social media manager…
well, what do you know, we do all three 😉 Let’s grab a drink and have a chat.