Content Marketing

WordPress is the best content management system for most website owners these days. It has a huge community with great plugins and themes. There are also tons of WordPress migration services on the market for those who are eager to move to the well-known CMS. So, you can use them to move to WordPress and then proceed to build an effective site. In this article, we will show you the step-by-step guide on how to optimize your WordPress website, which includes choosing a theme, creating a site map, structuring your pages for optimal search engine visibility, and more.  

1. Simple design

  Optimizing a website is about a lot more than just picking a theme and a few plugins. If you're going to be building a website for yourself or a client, it's imperative that the site loads quickly and that there are no barriers to accessing it. 

In this next installment of our series on major trends in communications for 2022, we're talking about interactive content as part of a strategy that works in tandem with emotional marketing and ephemeral content. As we discussed in our piece on ephemeral content, one of the top tips to ensuring your content has impact is to involve the viewer's input in some way. Whether it's taking a quiz or a survey, or playing a game that supports what you're sharing, allowing your audience to interact with your content creates an immersive and memorable experience. Interactive content is the next level in content consumption and engagement that lets viewers interact with the content instead of passively view it. Previously the engagement tactic for most social media, e-mail marketing, blog posts and multimedia content was to encourage viewers to like, reply or share to engage and spread the word. Interactive content is a more rewarding, real-time way for your audience to feel engaged and connected to your brand.

Continuing our series on major trends in communications in 2022, in this installment we're discussing ephemeral content and how to harness it for effective marketing.

What is Ephemeral Content?

Traditionally in marketing and communications emphasis has been on evergreen content - something that will stay visible and relevant for years. Evergreen content is still important and forms the backbone of many websites, including blog posts, white papers or case studies, and complementary media like videos or podcasts. However, over the past few years there have been more and more opportunities to experiment with ephemeral content, which is any content that disappears quickly - usually after 24 hours - and can't be found again. Ephemeral content is mostly based on video and social media platforms. Snapchat introduced the world to the concept, but virtually all major social media platforms now have ways of posting something that is designed to be seen for only a short time.

How Is It Used?

Celebrities frequently use this kind of content to showcase personal videos, and in general ephemeral content is very popular as a way to share something personal people don't necessarily want on the internet forever. In some ways, it could be considered the evolution of "felt cute, might delete later" culture, but with a mechanic in place to make it easy and acceptable.

Welcome to the first in a four-part series in which we'll be exploring major trends in communications for 2022. In this initial installment, we're examining the concept of emotional marketing, its traditional definition,  and its current state. People have been appealing to emotions to motivate others for millennia. Aristotle himself established techniques for emotional appeals that were quite persuasive. While appealing to emotions may seem manipulative, it's usually not nefarious. Emotional marketing connects people with the things they want and need on a deeply personal level. True, some marketing and advertising campaigns play on negative feelings of fear or greed.  Here, however, we're looking at how emotional marketing can elicit positive results, and why it's a major trend in communications with tremendous staying power.

What is emotional marketing?

Emotional marketing identifies and builds on an audience's emotions to market to them more successfully. Rooted in current best practices in research and behavioral psychology,  today's emotional marketing requires a deep understanding of the feelings a specific audience has toward a product or service and its competitors.  To work, emotional marketing has to get a good handle on an audience's vibe, and how it affects their view of the entire product genre. A very simple example is marketing campaigns for online talk therapy providers where emotional marketing is essential to conversion. The target audience naturally includes anyone who's experiencing distressing emotions and could benefit from online mental health counseling. You don't have to look far on Twitter to see people tweeting about their struggles with mental wellbeing - and you also don't have to look far to see ads for these therapy providers in the same places.

Is it ethical?

In today’s martech landscape, there are just over 5000 marketing technology companies, dubbed the ‘Martech 5000.’ The categories of martech revolve around five major themes:
  • Advertising & Promotions
  • Content & User Experience
  • Social & Relationships
  • Commerce & Sales
  • Data & Management
Industry professionals often refer to the programs used to perform daily business activities as a “stack.” This buzzword was first coined by tech companies to indicate a group of programs used to create a single web or mobile application, and the term “stack” is now used more broadly to indicate a group of programs or services that help a business unit achieve its goals. With the seemingly daunting number of options available, it can be difficult for businesses to decide which stacks are right for their business needs, especially now with teams working remotely. If your distributed teams are having a hard time collaborating effectively, it might mean that your business needs to take a look at its current marketing technology. The first step toward finding a solution may be to take inventory of what tech is working and not working for your teams, and try to categorize them into one of the five buckets. If you’re not quite sure where to begin, keep reading for some starter points on what key areas your teams can review and optimize.

Advertising & Promotions

Technology is growing and advancing at a rapid rate. Things that we never thought would exist are now part of our daily lives. From the invention of the home computer, the smart phone, and now the rise of AI machines, technology is evolving exponentially. One of the areas of tech that is growing the fastest is mobile technology. Over 80% of Americans own a smartphone as of February 2019 and the world of technology has improved with the growth in the number of users. Companies large and small are catering to the mobile platform with new developments. The customer experience is being vastly improved to be quick, easy, and painless. This is adding to the already existing convenience mobile technology offers. As the platform of choice shifts towards mobile in a big way, new trends will emerge. Over the next two years, the mobile industry will roll out many new improvements. Here are a few that we expect to see by 2020.

More Proactive Apps

Artificial intelligence might sound like a far-fetched idea, but the technology is already in use throughout mobile apps. AI is helping customers get what they want within a matter of seconds, all thanks to intelligent machines. From the minute most apps are opened, an AI is working to make the customer experience as smooth as possible. A good example of AI in action is when you are sent a message on an app like LinkedIn. Once the message comes through, the user is offered a number of ways to click and read the message. When the user goes to type a reply, an AI suggests things to write based on the context of the first message. These suggested sentences are designed so the user could conceivably click an auto generated response without needing to type anything. These generated responses are normally well written and related to the initial message; this is entirely possible due to AI. This proactive feature only adds to the amount of assistance we receive from apps everyday. More productive AI assisted apps will run faster, smoother, and offer more features than ever before. Your phone is getting to know you better and will use that to make your experience better.

Mobile First Indexing

mobile first indexing For a while now Google has been working on mobile first indexing to make websites more mobile friendly. Since much of the market has shifted away from home desktops and towards mobile phones, Google is taking steps to ensure mobile friendly websites rank higher in its eyes. Google will monitor websites and determine how they rank based on Google’s criteria, which is now prioritizing mobile friendly websites. This means features like easy to use buttons, quick loading, proper formatting for ease of use on mobile, and other aspects will result in websites ranking higher. In order to boost your website’s ranking on mobile, you will need to have a quality mobile site that is different than your desktop site.  

Personalized Mobile Experiences

Customers are human. They are complex and changeable and yearn to feel valued and understood. As marketers, we tend to focus exclusively on demographic characteristics to lump them into groups to target. But the wants, needs, interests and values of a customer cannot be determined...