Monthly Archives: April 2018

Developing Content for Your Mobile Audience

Developing Content for Your Mobile Audience written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Have you ever seen content on a mobile device that you’re excited to read and click through to view it only to realize you need to squint or zoom in to read it? It’s frustrating, not only because it’s inconvenient, but because it’s so easily avoidable.

We live in the age of mobile, and if you’re not taking it into consideration as part of your content efforts, you’re missing out on some serious opportunities.

Make sure you’re keeping best practices in mind when developing content for your mobile audience. I’ve written about a few below to help you get started.

Know your audience

Our attention spans are dwindling as is, but with mobile devices, it’s even shorter because your audience is more likely to be on the go. You need to be able to get to the point quickly and to do this effectively, you need to truly understand your audience to make sure that point resonates. The more you know about them, the more you can succinctly speak to them and get your point across in a timely fashion.

Make your content more readable

Keep your headlines short

In the online marketing world these days, keyword research is important for a number of reasons, but it can really be useful with headline development with mobile devices. You want your headlines to be short, but descriptive and impactful, and using keywords that you know will get your audience’s attention will help you develop them.

Your headline must be engaging enough to get people to click through and read the rest of your article (no pressure). I heard somewhere that to do this as effectively as you can, you should keep your title around 6 words.

Condense your paragraphs

I’ve already addressed the importance of brevity on mobile content, and the way you write your paragraphs is no exception. Mobile users are more likely to scan content than dive deep into it.

For this reason, it’s important to make paragraphs short (I’m talking 1-2 lines) and ensure your subheaders stand out. Be sure to include the most important information you’re trying to get across in your first couple of sentences.

Negative space is a good thing

People always seem to get so nervous when there’s blank space on a page, or between text, CTAs, and images, but it’s actually a good thing. Not only is it easier to follow for users, it’s easier for Google to follow as well when they are trying to gather information for search engine results pages. The easier the page is for them to crawl, the more likely you’ll get a higher rank for a given topic.

Keep styling in mind

To make it as easy as possible for a person to read your content, consider using at least 14 pt font. Additionally, keep contrast in mind. A lot of mobile users are looking at their phones outside or in brighter spaces, so having a high contrast between the text and space on the page will make it easier for them to consume.

Use visuals

Visuals are a great way to capture a user’s attention and get your message across quickly. An image is worth a thousand words, right? It’s amazing how much you can communicate using them, especially for the mobile audience who have such short attention spans. In fact, this audience is far more likely to look at a picture then they are text on their phones.

While images are undeniably useful, you still have to be smart with how you use them to ensure they look good on a mobile device.

I always recommend using smaller header images for mobile users so that you can still get to the content quickly.

Don’t go overboard with them either. As mentioned in the section, you want to use space wisely. Too many images can make your content look cluttered and it can impact load time, which Google frowns upon.

To use images effectively, make sure they’re relevant, spaced sporadically throughout your content, and support the message you’re trying to convey.

Forget about mobile pop-ups

In a recent article that I wrote, I discussed Google’s plan to penalize websites where content wasn’t easy to access, and this includes being hidden behind a pop-up on a page.

Your audience, and Google, want to get to the content they had a desire to see. Don’t make it difficult for them to do that.

If you must use pop-ups, they shouldn’t cover the entire screen and should be simple to exit out of.

Optimize video

We, as a society, love video, and why wouldn’t we? It’s entertaining and engaging.

What this means is that companies should be taking advantage of this and including video as part of their mobile content.

As with other forms of content we’ve discussed in this post, keep the use of video simple and try to avoid a bunch of animations across your site.

If you’re embedding videos in your content, be sure to code it with HTML5 as Flash doesn’t work on mobile devices.

Make it easy to share

You want your content to get in front of as many people as possible. To do this on a mobile device, make it as easy as possible for your users. Be sure to include large CTA buttons (that your thumb could easily tap) to help them see what actions to take next to share it with friends (in fact, use these larger CTA buttons for any action across your site).

While the information I mention above isn’t terribly difficult to implement, it’s not uncommon for people to forget about some of these tips. Be sure to take note and try to put them into practice in order to give your customers the best experience possible.

If you found this post helpful, take a look at some of the other content I’ve written this month that covers mobile optimization, including mobile website development, mobile campaigns, and social media on mobile. Stay tuned for more to come!

Weekend Favs April 14

Weekend Favs April 14 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

  • Firesub – Build simple reusable checklists for your team.
  • Unsplash for iOS – All the freely usable, high-resolution photography on Unsplash is now available on iPad and iPhone.
  • CreativeGuild – CreativeGuild is like LinkedIn for the creative world. It is the largest global directory of creative companies, professionals, and jobs.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

The Value of Discoverable, Shareable, and Useful Content

The Value of Discoverable, Shareable, and Useful Content written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch About Creating Useful Content

There’s no way around it, there are a lot of marketing channels today. I’m counting eighteen as of now (which can obviously change very quickly).

When I started my business we had six or seven ways to reach our prospects and customers. A lot has changed.

One of the things that I think is important to understand, first off, is that you don’t have to play in every channel. That’s one of the things that causes a lot of stress with a lot of business owners and marketers today.

What you do have to do is get very good at playing in the right channels, and additionally getting very good at integrating those channels (or at least understanding how they support each other).

That’s a challenge for a lot of people. We look at social media, content, SEO, and PR, and we think that they’re all separate tactics out there doing separate jobs.

When you look at them together, and actually intentionally think about how they can support each other, you amplify the effect, or the impact, of each.

In this post, we’re going to focus on three of these channels: content, social media, and SEO.

While those are separate channels, content is air for marketing today. It really powers every step in the customer journey and is one of the most essential marketing channels out there.

In fact, it probably is not really even fair to consider it a channel anymore, because it’s like the gasoline that goes in the car. You really have to have it no matter what kind of car you have.

I want you to think these channels, and make sure the content you produce in each is discoverable, shareable and ultimately useful.

Discoverability

Discoverability is often seen as an SEO play, and frankly, that’s what it is, but content drives SEO today. There are many search terms that are competitive, so everybody is out there competing for the search terms that they want.

People try to rank by doing effective keyword research, using targeted messaging, and knowing a lot about their users. It’s a good idea to develop a sense of intent as well in order to implement on-page SEO best practices.

While this all helps to make your content discoverable, you have to start with a content strategy that says “yes, we want people to find that, but that’s not where we want them to stop.”

Shareability

Once the content is discovered, the degree that it is shared will determine how widely it is distributed. By thinking about shareability of content, you’re multiplying the impact of search engine results because shares are going to draw links and other important SEO signals. They are going to increase your audience, which is going to draw more people. 

If we build our content with the idea that we can get a higher share rate, one of the benefits to that is that you actually don’t have to produce a ton of content.

If you produce content that is focused on:

  • How to do something
  • Why to do something
  • Lists
  • Great headlines
  • Great calls to action in the content
  • Using impactful images
  • Mobile usage

Then you can build your SEO-optimized content and make it much more shareable.

Shareable content is going to evolve your social media. This is one of the best ways to think about your content in the social media space. Making your content shareable will help expand the reach of people outside of your immediate network.  

Useful content

As I said in the beginning, I think the ultimate measure of success of any SEO plan is the degree to which people who discover and share your content, also find that content useful enough to quote, bookmark, link to, and consume deeply.

This idea of linking your content together to make it even more useful is an important part of trust building in the journey. If people have a problem, they go out and search for a problem, not for your solution.

They may not associate what you offer with their problem, but they’re trying to get a problem solved.

If they go to your website make sure you address their problem and give them an entire guide for how to solve it. Link together eight or ten pages, or at least associate all of your related content to a topic in a way that you’ve packaged it to make it easy to consume.

That’s the content that people not only love to share, but they love to link and bring other people to it as well.

It’s the kind of content that is going to make your SEO more effective, and make your content more discoverable because Google sees the signals that are being sent to that content.

It’s the kind of content that is ultimately going to lead people to buy your products and services, because you’ve addressed their problem, and made it easy for them to consume the content. You built trust signals, which is going to help you show up on page one of Google, which is huge. 

You’re giving somebody a reason to dig in on their own, and discover that what you sell is going to actually solve their problem.

That’s how you have to think about content.

There are a couple of metrics that I love to look at when I’m trying to analyze somebody’s content. I use tools, like Ahrefs, to see the number of keyword phrases driving traffic to page one.

I also like to use a tool called BuzzSumo. One of the things that it will do is dive into your content from a social media standpoint and will answer questions like:

  • How much sharing is going on?
  • What kind of content gets shared the most?
  • Who’s linking to it?
  • Who’s Tweeting it?
  • What is the length and format of the content?

It really breaks down all the sharing activity that goes on in your content.

I love to look at that kind of shared data because in many cases it will clearly point to your best content that’s being shared. Most of the time, that’s longer content that is more in depth, and that people find very useful. 

The value of your organic traffic is also a tremendous metric to really allow you to see how you’re stacking up.

Typically, what happens is your content becomes more discoverable because it was useful. It’s more shareable because it was useful. So it’s like this vicious, positive cycle that ends up making your traffic and visits worth so much more.

What Goes Into Creating An Effective Mobile Marketing Campaign?

What Goes Into Creating An Effective Mobile Marketing Campaign? written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

I recently wrote a post about the importance of mobile optimization and today I want to expand further on the topic of mobile and discuss mobile marketing and advertising.

I can’t reiterate this enough: When it comes to your business, if mobile isn’t currently on your mind, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity, especially when it comes to advertising. In fact, experts are saying that by 2019, mobile advertising will represent 72% of all U.S. digital ad spending (MarketingLand).

Given the amount of time people spend on their phones, it always amazes me how low mobile ad spend is in comparison. There are so many benefits of using your ad dollars to target mobile users (we’ll get into a few of those below) and when used correctly, these campaigns can drive significantly more traffic and conversions.

If you’re in charge of marketing for your business, ensure that mobile is part of your strategy to give your audience the best experience possible. Below are a few tips to get started.

Device targeting with advertising

When it comes to mobile campaigns, it’s not uncommon for people to simply copy and paste the same messaging that is being used for their desktop campaigns. If it’s working there, it must be working on mobile too, right? Wrong.

When it comes to searching on your desktop and mobile devices, the needs and uses aren’t always the same. People use the two devices in different ways and with different contexts.

While keywords that are entered may be the same, the user’s intentions may be vastly different. You must understand your audience’s habits and behaviors when they’re on the go and take the time to develop a full mobile advertising strategy around it.

The terms you use can have drastically different response rates depending on the device a person is using.

Keep in mind, your bids will vary on the various devices as well, so from a tracking perspective, it’s smart to measure desktop and mobile separately.

Your mobile ads may be outperforming your desktop ads, or vice versa. Given the separate data, you can more accurately put a revised plan together for either device moving forward.

For marketers, this may go without saying, but you’ll want to be as detailed as possible with tracking and measurement so that you can continue to optimize the campaigns for each device.

Mobile only ads to mobile only pages

As I alluded to in the last section, marketers often try to use existing content from desktop formats and convert it to mobile. Why not, instead, create a mobile-only ad that drives to a mobile-only landing page to help increase conversions?

Keep in mind, the more a landing page resonates with the ad, the more likely people will be to move forward.

This idea can work really well, especially when it comes to location-based campaigns.

Let’s dive into this a bit more.

Location-based advertising campaigns

Consumers are on the go and as a business, it’s your job to reach them at the most relevant time to give them the most personalized and custom experience possible with your company. In the age of personalization, consumers now expect mobile ads to be tailored to them, and location-based campaigns is one of the ways to do just that.

In fact, 78% of consumers say they would be happy to receive mobile advertising if the ads relate to their interests.

There are numerous benefits of location-based advertising that you should consider:

  • Can be used to compete with larger brands
  • Personalization – If a customer truly feels like you know them, it can help you deepen your relationship and establish an emotional connection.
  • Measurable – Through technology like WiFi and beacons, you have the ability to measure offline activity, which is often difficult to do.

With location-based marketing, you must put a lot of thought into how it’s going to work ahead of time. How will you track results? What kind of CTA will you use to attract your audience? What technology will you use?

Timing is everything. You must be relevant and think of the context of your ad delivery. You can get very specific with your targeting with this type of marketing, but please, refrain from coming across as creepy, as that can actually be very easy to do with this tactic. People don’t want to feel like you know information about them. At the end of the day, just provide value to them.

Keep in mind, this should not be used as a standalone tactic. When used, it should be a part of a comprehensive marketing approach for when they leave the area of your location-based campaign.

Like all marketing, this really only works if you truly understand who your audience is so that you don’t risk wasting your ad dollars. Spend the time to get a good grasp on that before you begin your campaigns.

SMS Campaigns

A few years back, SMS campaigns seemed like they would be the next big thing with mobile marketing, and then the buzz started to fade, which begged the question, “is SMS marketing dead?”

To that, I answer “no,” provided it is implemented correctly.

There are still a plethora of benefits to SMS, or text, marketing, including:

  • Instant
  • Direct to consumer
  • High open rate – Over 95% of SMS messages received are opened and read.

A major downside with this tactic is the ability to easily come off spammy. To avoid this, be sure you get permission from recipients before you begin marketing to them via text message.

When it come to SMS, be clever and unique in your messaging and offer true value. As easy as it is to market to your audience, it’s just as easy for them to opt out, so be sure to keep them engaged.

With mobile campaigns, always keep in mind that you are putting these together for real people. Strategy must be at the root of all of these tactics. You must understand your goals and audience first and foremost, and create an authentic, genuine, and valuable campaign around them.

As already mentioned, measure, measure, and measure. Kee modifying and testing your tactics until you find a method that gets the results you’re looking for.

Are you currently implementing mobile campaigns as part of your overall marketing strategy? What have you found successful? What are you struggling with?

Weekend Favs April 7

Weekend Favs April 7 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

  • Never Lose a Customer Again – Joey Coleman’s new book offers a step-by-step guide to help you turn your customers into lifelong fans, including what to do and what to say for all 8 phases of the customer journey.
  • Flowmagic – The simple way for freelancers to track & manage their work and payments in a single page.
  • 1Password Business – The most secure password manager for your business.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

How to Attract Customers and Keep Them Forever

How to Attract Customers and Keep Them Forever written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Joey Coleman
Podcast Transcript

Joey Coleman

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Joey Coleman. He is Chief Experience Composer at Design Symphony. He and I discuss his new book, Never Lose a Customer Again, which discusses the 8 phases your customer has the potential to travel through as part of their customer journey and the 6 tools you can use during that journey to create remarkable experiences for your customers.

Coleman helps companies keep their customers. As a keynote speaker, workshop leader, and consultant, he helps businesses design creative ways to engage customers – especially in the crucial First 100 Days® of the customer lifecycle.

He has an eclectic background that has seen him defend “alleged” criminals, sell custom research to Fortune 500 executives, race along the Great Wall, juggle in front of the Taj Mahal, emcee charity auctions, work in the White House, sing a solo at the Kennedy Center, and travel to 48 countries (and counting).

Questions I ask Joey Coleman:

  • What is the difference between customer service and customer experience?
  • Where does the customer experience role fit into an organization?
  • What can a bad customer experience cost a company?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

  • Why the first 100 days of the customer relationship are so important
  • How to approach the customer experience if you’re just getting started
  • Where automation and optimization fit into the customer experience

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Joey Coleman:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!