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12 Infographic Tips to Rock Your Content Marketing Strategy
Posted on September 25, 2014
I don’t know about you, but I love infographics. I’m not talking about hastily put together images with some random stats to ride the infographic craze. I mean infographics that are heavy on the info, with some real meat to them.
Recently, I’ve been trawling the interwebs for additional information on content marketing. Here’s what I found.
Success Tips and the Content Marketing Landscape
1) Hubspot and Smart Insights have teamed up to create Seven Steps to Success Competing with Content Marketing. The infographic looks at how what brands need to communicate meshes with what customers want to find out. It outlines steps content marketers need to take including benchmarking, strategy development, identifying customer needs, working out where to invest, selecting resources, choosing formats and measuring ROI.
Key takeaway: Don’t let your blog lose out to social media updates; blog posts and articles remain the most cost-effective content marketing method.
2) A LinkedIn infographic published on Inc.com shows the traits that the smartest content marketers share. Unsurprisingly, the ones who enjoy real success dedicate people to content marketing and spend a lot of their marketing budget on it too. The top content marketers use social media more, seeing it as an important tool for raising brand awareness, generating leads and getting customers. Check out the infographic for the 13 content marketing tactics that B2B marketers are using most.
Key takeaway: Content marketing doesn’t stand alone as a marketing tactic; 70% of content marketers back this up by appearing at in-person networking events.
3) Scripted has taken an in-depth look at the content marketing landscape, identifying five different types of content marketing companies. According to Scripted, 78% of B2B marketers are creating more content than they did just a year ago, which is just as well, since business decision-makers would rather get company information from articles than ads. The infographic finishes up with an assessment of the types of content produced by companies engaged in content creation, content curation, workflow management, content distribution and content analytics.
Key takeaway: There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to content marketing; it’s all about the goals. If your strategy is aimed at thought leadership, it requires different content types and volumes than if your goal is SEO.
Art, Science and Blogging in Content Marketing
4) Kapost covers the art and science of content marketing, as it says you need both for content marketing success. The art is creating content that taps into emotions and experiences while the science is about creating processes and measuring performance so you can adapt your strategy. The infographic also shows where creative and data driven approaches intersect.
Key takeaway: Fine tune your content strategy with Kapost’s 8-question assessment.
5) OneSpot highlights the great divide in content marketing, presenting a range of fascinating statistics (did you know that only 20% of people read past the headline?) It shows that while two-thirds of marketers plan to do more blogging, measuring ROI is a big concern. The infographic gives advice on focusing content marketing efforts.
Key takeaway: Only .1% of content can go viral unless you already have an engaged community.
6) Where would we be without an assessment of the current state of content marketing? LinkSmart has collected an amazing array of statistics on the spend on content marketing, key forms of content marketing and new jobs created in the content marketing space. It points out that content marketing costs 62% less than other marketing but gets three times the number of leads.
Key takeaway: By 2017 87% of the sales of web connected devices will be smartphones and tablets so if you haven’t focused your strategy on these devices, it’s time to start.
SEO, Ecommerce and Visual Marketing
7) You can’t ignore SEO when talking about content marketing. That’s where this infographic from QuickSprout comes in. Many marketers are spending more than a quarter of their budgets on content marketing, with 27 million pieces of content shared daily. Blogging is a key tactic, with 97% of companies that blog actively getting more leads – and it’s great for the search index too.
Key takeaway: Content is definitely getting longer with a lot of the top ranked search results having content over 2000 words long. That means if you haven’t started creating long form content, now’s the time!
8) Referral Candy has a huge infographic providing tips on e-commerce content marketing. One difference from other infographics is the inclusion of quotes from top content marketers to help your strategy. The infographic outlines five principles of content promotion and highlights the need to integrate content marketing into the user experience which is important for 86% of customers.
Key takeaway: While graphics attract attention, they can also distract your audience, so use visuals with care.
9) In direct contrast, Hubspot illustrates the importance of visual marketing for generating views and inbound links. Video is popular with 85% of web users and with 26% of smart phone users. The infographic shows how visual content can get attention and illustrates how that plays into the psychology of the brain with 93% of human communication described as “practically non-verbal”.
Key takeaway: Visual marketing is no longer a fad but a powerful online marketing tool.
ROI and Content Marketing Enlightenment
10) Getting the biggest bang for your buck is the subject of an infographic fromColumn Five and Captora. It presents statistics on the main goals of content marketing, which tactics have the best return on investment and the key metrics that marketers are measuring. It also shows the uptick in conversions for marketers using content and shows the most opened content by web users.
Key takeaway: Blog titles with question marks get 46.3% more social shares than those with no punctuation.
11) Curata’s infographic outlines four steps to content marketing enlightenment, presenting these in a grid so marketers can assess their position and make their marketing more effective.
Key takeaway: Aim for enlightenment with a holistic approach to marketing, linking it with goals such as curation, highlighting innovation and producing quality content in an ethical way.
12) Finally, WhoIsHostingThis shows five reasons why content may not go viral. These include lack of emotional appeal, no incentive to share, poor timing and poor design. For each it suggests tactics to improve the virality of your content.
Key takeaway: A mini chart shows how color affects content perception so you can choose the right colors when marketing. Check out the infographics for yourself and come back and tell us what most stood out for you. How will you adapt your content marketing strategy as a result?