You’ve been doing content marketing for years, and your business has produced a lot of content. When was the last time you took a step back to analyze all that you’ve created so far?

The pressures of content marketing mean businesses tend to get caught up in the work of consistently churning out new content. You may feel like you’ll never have time to pause content creation long enough to perform an analysis of your past work. But with content marketing, it’s important to take time to look back as it can help you find more success as you move forward.

That’s why many businesses make a point of performing a content audit once every year or two. If it’s not a practice your business is familiar with, you may wonder if you even really need to do a content audit. If you’re on the fence, here’s what you need to know.

Over one billion people are using Facebook Messenger, the second-largest messenger tool behind WhatsApp. You can make your business more approachable and increase your sales all by having a Facebook Messenger strategy and implementing it within your digital marketing strategy. Your customers are most likely already using Facebook Messenger, and now is the time to start using it for your business.

The marketing mavericks at Kuno Creative spend a lot of time looking at content strategies to determine what works and what doesn’t. Every so often, our self-critique reveals a content marketing strategy so powerful, it outperforms them all. To our surprise, the reigning champion of 2019 also happened to be one of our most cost- and time-efficient practices, the likes of which you can implement right away! Ready for the big reveal?

Google’s January 2020 core update has rolled out. If you were lulled to sleep by some of the previously confirmed updates it may be time to wake back up. Some industry experts have said this update feels big so far. If you haven’t seen an impact from the latest algorithm update yet, you certainly could in the coming weeks.

Facebook may be steeped in controversy these days, but no matter how many people talk about abandoning it, few actually do. Usage of the platform still outpaces that of all the other social media sites except YouTube. For now, the social media behemoth still plays a big role in the lives of most consumers — which means paid media on Facebook still has a big role to play in a strong digital marketing strategy.

If you’re trying to find the right marketing mix for your business and you’re not currently investing in paid media and using Facebook ads, there’s a whole list of reasons to start.

Sometimes, making something easy is more challenging than doing it the hard way because it requires us to shift our mindset. “I didn’t have time to write a short letter,” goes the quote often attributed to Mark Twain, “So I wrote a long one instead.”

For marketers, distilling complicated concepts down to straightforward messages for our audiences is a significant part of our role. Yet, when it comes to simplifying things internally, we struggle — often developing complex, multi-layered strategies because we assume the amount of mental labor we invest in something is directly proportional to the results we’ll generate.

So, we shirk simple marketing practices in favor of campaigns that require a ton of time, energy, specialized skills and technology. But while it’s certainly valuable to leverage your hard-won experience and cutting-edge tech to fuel your strategies, we tend to miss the forest for the trees.

Here’s a secret: It doesn’t always have to be so hard.

Here are a few super simple tactics that can drive significant results, too.

As a chief marketing officer, VP of marketing or marketing manager, you understand the necessity of pursuing digital marketing in today’s business arena. But sometimes, it can be difficult to convince other executive members of this need, especially if they do not completely understand the nuances of digital initiatives, such as inbound marketing, content marketing and demand generation.

One of the biggest obstacles many companies face when it comes to video marketing is measuring return on investment (ROI). It can be tough to determine if your video marketing initiatives are worth the time and money you’re investing. That’s why finding a way to track results is critical.

Ready to develop strategy-driven video marketing campaigns?

There are a variety of ways to measure the success of a specific video — from total views to how much time someone spends watching the video, and engagement (likes and shares). It all counts, but it may not be reflective of your ROI unless you determine specific goals for your video.

If you’re trying to make the most out of video marketing, here are some ways to determine your return on investment for any video you put out there.

In B2B emails, send doesn’t mean end. Once an email is delivered to the inboxes of relevant contacts, you need to assess how well the email performs — and use this data to fuel insights for future communications.

As with other inbound marketing efforts, the success of a B2B email is not built on a single metric, but rather multiple metrics. To get the biggest ROI on email marketing campaigns, you need to first know which metrics to track, and how to assess their performance.

Video marketing is popular because it works. Most businesses wish they had more videos to maximize their marketing advantage in a world hungry for compelling video content. Chances are you do too. There’s just one catch: You don’t have the time or expertise to produce your own videos. Enter: An agency with the full video production skill set.

There is no shortage of companies willing to create videos for you. But how do you choose the right one? The following list of seven essential considerations can guide you through the process of choosing the right agency to be your video production right arm — including vital qualities to consider. Hint: You’ll want video production professionals who are experienced, passionate and who come highly recommended.

Are you ready to start incorporating award-winning videos into your marketing?

When it comes to creating the next marketing strategy, the vast majority of companies err on the side of being “safe.” Few want to rock the boat a little and walk to the edge of being innovative. However, those marketers that take the risk of going “outside the box” and the “tried and true” to try something unique reap all kinds of rewards. These six award-winning B2B marketing campaigns provide a clear lesson in the power of innovation — and they provide inspiration to let the inner marketing innovator in you break free in 2020.

They say big things come in small packages, and the same could be said for video. In this microwave society we’re living in, less is more, so you may be amazed by the power a 6-second video can offer.

Want to see some award-winning videos that engage and delight?

A recent survey finds that the 6-second video ad is not only becoming more popular, but it’s also becoming more powerful. More and more companies are adding them to their campaigns. Why? They’re a great way to get a hyper-focused message to potential customers.

Let’s take a look at some of the survey results, examples of 6-second video ads, talk about why they’re so powerful and discuss how you can get started making them.

Accessibility is a hot topic today — as it should be.

At least 1 in 4 adults are living with some type of disability, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And thanks to growth in awareness and legal guidelines from the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), many businesses are finally making an effort to consider people with disabilities when creating their products and services.

But while many organizations are familiar with the accommodations required at their brick-and-mortar locations, few recognize that accessibility guidelines extend to website content and digital marketing efforts, too.

There’s plenty of buzz around what businesses can achieve with successful account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns. ABM programs increase the number of created opportunities by 70%. Companies that leverage account-based marketing reported a 171% increase in annual contract value.

While these statistics are certainly inspiring on their own, it’s natural to want to pull back the curtain and see how these results are achieved. After all, the success of an ABM campaign is only as powerful as the strategy behind it.

Here are three account-based marketing examples backed by a well-thought-out plan and proven results.

What does it take to successfully reach your target market?

Let’s face it: some blog topics are more exciting than others. This happens across all industries and all topics within each line of work. It depends on different interests and how relevant the topic is to an individual’s professional life.

Some topics inherently generate more interest, while others you could go your whole career and never care to hear about. Yet there are those topics that need to be discussed, and the level of importance exists even when there isn’t an audience eagerly awaiting this information.

Luckily, there are some ways to infuse excitement into any topic and make it more engaging. When you have important information that may not be the most captivating, keep in mind that your audience’s ability to engage with your topic isn’t only dependent on the topic itself, but how it’s presented. So how can you make your blog topics more engaging? Here are some ideas that will get your readers excited about your blog topics, and even get them looking forward to future posts.

Are you ready to build a digital marketing strategy that will help you generate positive results?

While searching for new ways to improve your SEO, it’s important not to overlook the high-volume keyword optimization opportunities that may currently exist throughout your website. It’s possible that some higher-volume keywords have started to rank well for different pages without full implementation of SEO best practices. This is especially true for sites that you’ve recently taken over or for older pages that may not have ranked well in the past. But by consistently monitoring your keyword rankings, you could find some of your most effective chances for increasing relevant organic traffic right in front of you.

Start developing your SEO strategy and give your traffic a boost.

Your brand embodies everything your company stands for and is the basis for every experience your company delivers to customers. Communicating your brand to your target audiences through digital branding campaigns forges and strengthens brand relationships, helping you develop meaningful long-term customer connections.

But to get there, you have to first create something worth connecting with. In digital branding, that could be everything from videos to social media to influencer communications.

Here are three B2B companies that have created successful digital branding campaigns to achieve specific goals.

Maintaining effective websites means not only making them look good but also ensuring they function in ways that support a brand’s marketing and sales goal. That goal is often achieved by incorporating new web design and development technologies as they are developed to boost website capabilities.

Four leading-edge technologies are impacting the present and future of web design and development — virtual and augmented reality, cybersecurity, blockchain and motion UI. Here’s a brief overview of each, including why they are relevant, best practices and future predictions.

Start creating digital designs that engage.

If you’re considering dipping your toe in video marketing, you might think about hiring a digital marketing agency to get it done. As you vet your candidates, there are some things to consider. Many times, companies will turn to a video production house to create their content, but there is a difference between working with a video production company and a digital marketing agency that provides video marketing.

Are you elevating your brand with these 8 video marketing strategies?

You’re a firm believer in inbound marketing. You’ve fully bought into the value of reaching your audience where they are at the moment they need you, rather than interrupting them when they’re doing something else. But you’ve hit a snag. You’re putting amazing content out there that you know can help your audience, but they’re not finding it.

While creating content that’s genuinely helpful is a necessary part of inbound marketing, it’s not enough on its own. It’s just as important to include content promotion in your strategy. After all, people can only benefit from your content if they can find it first.

New research from the Content Marketing Institute found that 91% of top-performing content marketers use paid distribution channels to promote content. To get your content in front of the right audience, paid advertising is a powerful tactic to add to your inbound strategy.

How do you use paid advertising to deliver content to the right people at the right time?

When you begin working with a marketing agency, it may seem like there is a lot to the onboarding process. If it seems like there are loads of papers to fill out or meetings to attend, it’s only to strengthen the success of your working relationship.

Most client/agency relationships begin after the sales process is complete and some initial information has been provided to the team involved in the project (comprised of writers, designers, strategists and maybe more depending on your needs). You’ll then have what’s commonly known as a kickoff call — the first meeting that includes everyone on your team and the marketing agency’s team working on the project.

You will make introductions between team members, review the project agreement and continue discussion about understanding your company, the industry, competitors, what you’ve been doing for marketing and where you see your company in the future. Plan to spend a decent amount of time in this meeting, giving both sides a chance to provide information on what to expect going forward so there is a shared understanding of expectations.

Here are ways you can prepare to make your project kickoff meeting — and the...

Digital branding can be a powerful competitive advantage that enables businesses to grow in size, influence and profitability. In fact, consistent brand presentation across all platforms increases revenue by up to 23%, according to a Lucidpress report.

As the number of companies competing for brand attention rapidly expands, the power of digital branding is more important than ever. As we move toward 2020, it’s a good time to ensure your organization has considered every critical aspect of creating, launching and maintaining a powerful digital brand.

These 20 points provide a comprehensive overview of all of the elements worth considering when assessing your digital brand strategy. Use it as a checklist to ensure you’re hitting all of the critical aspects of digital branding in your marketing strategy.

You’ve got the attention of your ideal prospects and most valued clients. Now what?

Account-based marketing (or ABM) can be as nerve-wracking as it is exciting for companies — and the solar industry is no exception. To achieve high conversion rates, solar manufacturers and other industry organizations need to combine powerful messaging with relevant offers that appeal to the interests and needs of targeted accounts.

But when it works, it really works. With ABM in use for at least a year, 60% of marketers reported a 10% increase in revenue, while 19% reported an increase of 30% or more.

Whether you’re just starting out with ABM or are looking to enhance your efforts, these three account-based marketing ideas are valuable additions to your strategic conversations.

In 2017, HubSpot published a popular article explaining the magic of pillar pages. Since then, brands have been clamoring to fit this content type into their strategies — even if they don’t always understand what they are or how they work.

After all, in a time when algorithms change by the nanosecond and search engines are more saturated than ever, any chance to stand out and earn more traffic seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

But why are pillar pages so effective? And how can you make sure your pillar content yields the results you want (instead of putting time and effort into a bunch of resources that go nowhere)?

To help, here’s a quick breakdown of the concept, how to drive success and three pillar page examples to get you inspired.

As a marketer, you determined your target audience when you created your marketing strategy and created buyer personas (also called marketing personas) that reflect their priorities and pain points. Then you crafted content and marketing messages that will resonate with their professional and/or personal needs. But as it goes, nothing can stay the same: business models change, companies merge or shift direction, and even your audience can evolve. The personas that were once your marketing strategy’s main focus are now outdated.

It’s the holiday season, which means my inbox is filled with emails on emails all brimming with special offers. In the last two days, I’ve received close to 80 promotional emails and maybe five personal ones.

How many promotional emails have I opened? Maybe 5. Why? Because I’m just not interested. If I’m a marketer and I’m not checking my emails, then who is? It’s a question we should all be asking this holiday season.

Retailers send an estimated 95 million emails on Thanksgiving, 116.5 million on Black Friday and 106 million on Cyber Monday. These numbers don’t even include the millions of other emails that go out before Hanukkah or Christmas.

The big question here is how the heck do you stand out in all that noise?

One of the great benefits of inbound marketing is how much more cost effective it is than traditional advertising. Earning your audience’s attention by providing what they need when they need it has a larger cost benefit than paying for large platforms like billboards or TV commercials where you’re targeting an audience that you hope includes some of your intended demographic.

But as inbound marketing has grown more popular, most industries have been flooded with content. Your blog posts, eBooks and videos may be packed full of crucial information your audience needs, but they won’t get any benefit from your content if they can’t find it to begin with. You need a way to get your content where your audience already is.

Today, that means Google and Facebook. Both platforms offer advertising options that can play a valuable role in an inbound marketing strategy, but they’re each different. To figure out how to best incorporate them into your strategy, you need to understand how Google Ads and Facebook advertising stack up.

Major acquisitions, competitive trends and new consumer preferences and priorities continue to dominate the healthcare industry. While the business model shifts from a fee-for-service model (FFS) to a value-based model, your healthcare marketing plan should reflect the same.

Healthcare providers today are transitioning from curing illness to ensuring wellness, in hopes of encouraging patients to not take healthcare as a once-in-a-blue-moon checkup, but a continuous process that connects them to a doctor or healthcare administrator any time they need it, without even being physically present for it.

The right healthcare marketing strategy means not only staying at the top of your audience’s mind when it comes to opting for a healthcare service but also building the trust that keeps them engaged with you. The following trends allow healthcare marketers to restrategize their take on effectively moving two steps ahead of the competition.

Google announced the BERT update to its search rankings algorithm last week. BERT, which is a network-based technique for natural language processing, stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. The goal of this Google algorithm update is to better understand what is important in natural language queries. According to Google, this update will impact 1 in 10 queries, which represents one of the largest changes to search results in recent years.

Google My Business is an increasingly powerful, free tool that directly impacts local SEO. If you want your company information to be accurately and prominently displayed on Google Maps, for example, then your business listing must be fully optimized. By learning how to update your Google My Business page properly, you can help increase visibility for your company and generate new customers.

There are six key steps you must follow in order to optimize your Google My Business page and help your company be found more often through local search results. Those steps include accurately completing your profile, managing Google Reviews, regularly uploading quality photos, leveraging the Q&A feature, maximizing your business description and publishing posts on Google My Business. These steps for successfully optimizing your Google My Business page are further described below.

Have you ever read a book so good you couldn’t put it down? If so, you’re not alone. Many people have come across compelling stories that connect with our emotions, make us think and encourage action.

As a business, you crave that same result. In an ideal world, your brand story would attract the interest of your target audience, help them see the value of your products/services and turn prospects into long-term customers.

Like a book though, that first blank page of your brand story can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. With the right approach in place — let’s call them chapters in telling your brand story — you’ll have the foundation to create your own compelling narrative.

In a brick and mortar store, it’s easy enough to find an associate or walk up to the customer service desk if you have a question. Online, you may stumble across a chatbot or two. But more often than not, visitors will turn to your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for answers.

Before we get into more detail, it’s important to note that your FAQ page is not the same as your About Us page. The About Us page is a place to introduce your company to potential customers, not answer questions about your product. Your FAQ page should answer common questions and concerns. It should help reduce any anxieties your visitors have about purchasing your product or service and any follow-up details after the purchase is complete.

When done properly, it can also help you convert leads.

Consider the fact that solar installations have experienced an annual growth rate of 50% over the last decade. Or that more than 242,000 Americans work in the solar industry.

With statistics like these, it’s safe to say the solar business is booming. While this is great for the bottom line of solar manufacturers (among other industry organizations), it also makes the digital space more competitive. B2B solar companies strive to serve up content that connects with their target audience — and all the while, many of their competitors are doing the same.

So how do I ensure my solar marketing stands out? It’s a question that many solar businesses ask themselves, and one that we are eager to help answer.

Energizing your B2B marketing efforts begins with an investment in inbound marketing. Through a combination of methods and platforms, inbound marketing funnels qualify leads into the pipeline and provides them with resources that correlate with their interests and needs. With trust and credibility established over time, these prospects become valued customers.

When properly executed, inbound marketing efforts are 10 times more effective in converting leads than...

Digital marketers face two significant content challenges: standing out among the ever-growing quantity of digital content and engaging with prospects who have increasingly shorter attention spans. One type of content helps overcome both issues: interactive content.

Unlike passive content, interactive content requires active participation from consumers. In return, they receive real-time, hyper-relevant information they care about in ways that are interesting, fun and memorable. Organizations gain higher engagement rates, increased data capture, improved brand loyalty and more.

A growing body of research speaks to the impact of interactive content, including:

• 81% agree interactive content grabs attention more effectively than static content
• Instagram contests grow organizations’ followers 70% faster than other methods
• Quizzes get shared 1,900 times on average

At Kuno, we take pride in our ability to help clients in a wide variety of industries. Whether it’s one of our core verticals or a niche area, we find creative ways to deliver successful outcomes by using best practices.

Is your healthcare SEO strategy failing to drive the traffic you expect?

Over the past decade, healthcare companies of all sizes have worked hard to adopt and implement more modernized inbound marketing strategies. Yet, despite their dedication to creating quality content and fostering authentic engagement across digital channels, many healthcare brands still struggle to increase organic traffic.

With all the time and energy you invest in your efforts, this can be demoralizing.

If you aren’t getting enough eyes on your content, you may be missing a few key ingredients in your search engine optimization strategy, and making a handful of simple tweaks could help transform your results.

Influencer marketing is becoming an integral part of many digital marketing campaigns. Think of it as a new way to do word of mouth marketing. You find the right influencers to create content on your social media sites, then people share it, like it and engage with it in the comments. 

Short-form films. Free certification courses. Daily motivational emails. These aren’t just examples of content marketing, they are examples of content experiences — a new form of marketing that focuses on creating a well-planned flow of relevant content that engages prospects over a sustained period of time. According to MarTech Advisor, which coined the term, content experience is defined as the overall experience of accessing, consuming, engaging with and responding to a stream of branded content — across diverse devices, platforms and channels, and throughout the buyer’s journey, from prospect to customer.

Chitra Iyer, editor-in-chief of MarTech Advisor said: “Prospects and customers don’t look to consume an individual piece of content, but rather are on a journey where they need ongoing resources to help move purposefully forward in their buying decision.”

B2B buying journeys can be long. An abundance of the right resources at each stage of the journey can keep prospects moving toward purchase. This helps companies overcome two key content marketing challenges: (1) grabbing a prospect’s attention regularly over a period of time versus just now and then, and (2)...

For today's colleges and universities seeking to recruit new students, a strong online presence is just as important as an attractive campus.

Many traditional colleges are competing against online learning institutions that have multimillion-dollar marketing budgets and a lot less overhead. For students researching their options, advanced SEO can make the difference between a college appearing at the top of search results—and making it to their short list—or not showing up at all. 

Here's how advanced SEO increased visibility for one Florida university by nearly 40% and increased new contacts by nearly 200%.  

Commitment can be scary both in your personal and professional lives. Once you choose a digital marketing agency, you may find yourself wondering what could have been. What if another agency knows the secret to get better results faster and you’re missing out?

The grass-is-greener syndrome — the worry that another path could be better than the one you took — can hit in all areas of life, whether rational or not. And you may especially be susceptible to it if you get an email from another agency promising No. 1 spots in Google or hundreds of new Twitter followers.

But a good digital marketing agency is well worth sticking with. Here’s how to tell if the agency you have now is worth committing to for the long term.

On Tuesday, Google announced the release of a new feature impacting video search results. The search engine giant is calling this new roll-out “key moments” and it is designed to help searchers quickly find content within a video. Google said this video search feature will work for English videos hosted on YouTube where the creators have provided timestamp information in the video description. At the moment, this feature is only available for YouTube videos.

When it comes to predicting Facebook trends, there are few people who have gotten it right as often as Mari Smith.

The internationally known “Queen of Facebook” has been leading social media marketing strategies for more than a decade. Forbes has named her among the list of top social media influencers year after year, and she trains business leaders around the world to be more successful on the platform.

At this year’s INBOUND conference, Smith shared her top three Facebook trend predictions and offered sound advice to help marketers get ahead of the changes.

When done right, chatbots can act as a concierge for your website, guiding your users on a journey toward helpful resources.