Content becomes the link connecting businesses to customers. Storytelling sets the tone for their engagement. Blogs, social networks and video-sharing sites inform, entertain and empower your best prospects and clients. – Trond Lyngbø

Content Marketing can address every stage of the sale funnel.

Well planned Content Strategies should have a piece of content for everyone at every stage of the sales cycle. This includes everyone from the general public all the way to yesterdays customers.

First, by creating easily shareable content for the general public or even people just beyond the upper limits of your sales funnel, you can actually help your entire site gain domain authority by attracting more monthly visits, acquiring more backlinks, and increasing activity on social media channels.

Secondly, by raising awareness, answering questions, and addressing concerns Content Marketing can aid prospects through each and every phase of the sales cycle.

Lastly, just because a person has already purchased your product or service doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be addressed in your marketing plans. Content can be produced to keep people coming back again and again. Pieces centered around continuing education, product updates, or even company updates, can help ensure customers will recommend your business to their friends and family.

Content Marketing not only informs people, it can convert prospects.

In reference to my previous point, Content Marketing can help prospects build so much trust and confidence in your business’ product or service, they will be ready to purchase by the time they call in or visit a location.

The idea behind this concept is that your high quality content will qualify a prospect by clearly explaining every reason someone should buy your product or service. The content you’ve produced will in turn, nurture the prospect by addressing all of their concerns and answering their questions. Lastly, prospects will be ready to purchase because they will be well informed, know what they want, know why they want it, and now trust your brand.

Content Marketing helps you find out what is important to your market.

I know it’s a passive approach, but it still has value. Pieces of content can be used to gauge market interest. The more activity an article generates – the more your audience is concerned with that topic.

Be sure to remember, content can always be repurposed. Meaning, if you write an article that sparks a large amount of activity, host a webinar on that topic, create an infographic, or create a video blog. The main goal is to keep the ball rolling, generate even more exposure, and dig deeper into the market.

Content Marketing lets you tell your story.

This is something that Joe Corporate needs to understand. The internet has made finding and sharing sensitive information with the world incredibly easy. Using Content Marketing to inform people about your business, its morals, its agendas, and even its hiring practices can help everyone – including the general public – build trust, create understanding, and develop confidence in your company.

The post Why You Should Be Using Content Marketing appeared first on Clix.

This year the candidates are all on social media and they all have a lot of followers, so does that mean everyone is even?  Is social media not going to play a big part in this election, because everyone is doing it and there is nothing new or innovative this time around?  It looks like the Obama campaign might have another trick up their sleeve when it comes to engaging people with their campaign online.

The Obama campaign has recently released a 17-minute video on his own YouTube page.  The video is narrated by Tom Hanks and called “The Road We’ve Traveled”.  This video is going to appear on a new YouTube platform that enables the Obama campaign to turn the passive experience of watching a video into a great organizing and fund-raising tool.  This technology is going to allow viewers of this video to post campaign content to their Facebook pages, volunteer, and donate to the campaign.  They are going to be able to do this all from President Obama’s YouTube page.

This is a step above simply putting out a video, as the YouTube platform will give the Obama campaign the ability to get visitors to share the content, or pledge their support.  This is the one-click approach that campaigns see as an integral part of their online strategy.  This type of video being released shows the importance that political campaigns are starting to put on web-video.  The online video is now being seen as a valid tool for proactive electioneering.

The Obama campaign is thinking that video will be the primary way they communicate with undecided voters, because it offers them a way to spread their messages into online communities, where friends and family members will discuss and debate.  This helps the video look more like dialogue and a constructive discussion, rather than political propaganda.  This provides a level of interaction that a TV advertisement cannot provide.

The idea is to get these videos into the hands of trusted people in the different networks.  If people start to share the videos, it will add a degree of credibility because a friend or family member is endorsing it.  This is taken more serious than a traditional TV commercial.  The major change with the videos being released is that they give people something to act on.  The Obama campaign wants to bring their engagement tools to their supporters.

The Obama campaign already has a head start with that, since his Facebook page has over 25 million likes.  Do you think it’s possible for social media to change minds or convince an undecided voter one way or another?

The post Obama Using Videos and Social Media in Campaign. appeared first on Clix.

So why has the most shared video of 2012 completely gone against conventional wisdom?  KONY 2012 is 29 minutes long and isn’t funny at all, yet it has been seen more than any other video so far this year, at last count it was viewed 73,999,551 times since being uploaded on March 5^th.  It has also been shared more than 7.6 million times on Facebook and embedded in more than 6,200 blogs.  There have been nearly 5,000 news sources that have written about “KONY 2012”.

There is a recent study that was done by the University of South Australia.  The study identified the emotions that are most likely to be shared across the social web.  They found that most videos are amusing or boring, and most of them don’t go viral.  They found that videos, which evoke marked physiological responses, such as laughter, anger, crying, or shock are most likely to be shared.  So if you laugh or cry, you are more likely to share than if you smile or frown.  Videos that evoke positive emotions such as exhilaration, hilarity, astonishment, happiness, and inspiration are more likely to be shared than negative emotions such as anger, disgust, sadness, shock or frustration.

What does this mean for video marketers?  Knowing the emotions that people respond to and are most likely to share is a great indicator of how to make content in the future.  One lesson learned is that laughter is not the only way to get people to share your video, although hilarity is easily the most likely emotion to get your video shared.

The “KONY 2012” video shows us that the stronger the emotion, the more likely a video will get shared.  This says pick the emotion you are aiming for and then crank it up.  Being positive is a much safer bet when doing this as anger can lead to users becoming irritated and cause a backlash.

Of course this data doesn’t tell the full story, there can be things happening offline, the possibility of you having used the product before, and if the video is being promoted in one way or another.  Also you might find a video hilarious that I find disgusting or vice versa.  The main takeaway is we never know which video will catch on, however the stronger the emotion that video evokes, the more likely it will be shared.  Humor is no longer the only factor when making a viral video.

Here is the “KONY 2012” video in case you haven’t seen it and a funny marketing video about shaving.

KONY 2012

DollarShaveClub.com

Which one do you like more, is one more effective than the other?  Tell us what you think, how can this affect SEO, or Social Media?

The post Viral videos are changing marketing tactics. appeared first on Clix.