Creating marketing communications materials can be challenging. After decades in the business (yeah, I’m “seasoned”… ), I’ve had multiple experiences with review processes—some great, some good, some not so good, and some absolutely horrendous and extremely frustrating.
Over the years I’ve come to identify a number of best practices that can help to both streamline the content review process and minimize frustrations along the way—for both content creators and subject matter experts.
Continue reading “Addressing Conflicting Feedback as a Content Marketer: The Ideal Review Process”
Content marketing is still something that a lot of companies, large and small, continue to invest in. The ultimate goal, of course, is sales. But, along the way to a sale, content marketers must first capture attention, drive traffic to a website (in most cases), and deliver on the promise that their copy promo or social media post suggested.
You’re sitting at your desk, talking to a colleague about a trip to Spain you’re planning. The next thing you know, you’re seeing ads for Spain pop up in Google search and on Facebook. It’s not magic. It’s the power of voice search. Marketers can use your interactions with voice assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, along with other factors—your search history, shopping activity, visited websites, etc.—to create a comprehensive profile that they can use for ad targeting. Not all voice assistants do this, and the process is actually more complex than it may seem, but it’s illustrative of the shift from text to voice in consumers’ search habits. Voice search is on the rise. 
SEO has long been the holy grail for internet marketers—and content creators—of all kinds. Attracting eyeballs, and website visitors, was job number one. While that’s still the case to a large degree, SEO has become less of a numbers game and more of a driver for creating high-quality, relevant content. This is because of the ongoing algorithmic changes that Google and other search engines make to deliver a positive search experience for users. 
I’ve written about search engine optimization (SEO) in the past and have gathered input from a wide range of content and digital marketing experts about the topic. As someone who was writing advertising copy long before SEO was “a thing,” I have kind of a love/hate relationship with the concept. Or maybe I should say a love/grudging respect for the concept. 
Despite ongoing changes to Google algorithms as well as the ways consumers are seeking information (increasingly via voice and through mobile devices), many organizations continue to fret over SEO to the point that the copy they ultimately publish is bland, peppered with overused catchphrases, and easy to overlook.