Content Marketing

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Marketing for Consumers with a Short Attention Span

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Marketing for Consumers with a Short Attention Span

Today’s consumers have an extremely short attention span. The title of this post is technically too long for modern consumers - to make a point, obviously.

According to medical research, over the last 20 years, the average attention span has dropped from 2 1/2 minutes to just 45 seconds. Our smartphones and technology are decreasing our attention span. Consumers are inundated by information and it’s changing their behavior across all industries. As marketers, once we learn about our customers, we adapt our practices to match their behavior and potentially influence it. Knowing that consumers only pay attention to ads for 45 seconds or less, we create shorter content clips that get the point across faster. This is true across all platforms, but particularly on social media.

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5 Ways to Find Topics for Your Blog

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5 Ways to Find Topics for Your Blog

Keeping a blog for your business can help you reach a wider audience and build stronger relationships with your current and potential customers. Keeping a blog can also help your business get found by search engines and improve your website's SEO and authority. You can keep a running list of topics that make sense for your business so that you always have ideas and information from which you can pull your blog posts, but you have to start that list somewhere, so...

How do you determine the best blog topics for your business?

Whether you blog weekly or monthly, there are several ways you can determine the best topics for your blog posts. Here's a list of five of our favorites that we use here at Silver Shade Group to create our own blog topic lists.

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How Do I Create a Consistent Content Strategy?

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How Do I Create a Consistent Content Strategy?

Consistency is more than doing or saying the same thing again and again. It's also showing up where and when your potential customers expect to find you. If you create consistency in your messages, presence (both online and off), and schedule, you can form long-term relationships with your clients and customers that will generate incremental business over time.

Consistency should start with your branding. Your message should be present throughout and solidified within your website and any physical presence that you have. Your topics and individual articles can branch a bit further with the messages that you create and share through your email communication and your other customer outreach, but the underlying message should be the same across all channels and customer touchpoints.

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How Do I Use Keywords on My Website?

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How Do I Use Keywords on My Website?

A couple of months ago, we talked about how to do keyword research. That post explains how to find your keywords yourself within the Google Keyword Planner. If you prefer, there are other tools available that will provide you with a list of basic keywords for your website for a fee. You enter your business into their tool and they provide a list of keywords that you can use on your site to increase overall traffic.

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Write a Better About Page

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Write a Better About Page

Your About page is probably the second most visited page on your website. Unfortunately, many professionals and entrepreneurs struggle to write their About page. Even product-based businesses need an About page that describes the roots of the company and the reason for being. No matter what kind of business you operate, you can follow a basic formula to write a better About page.

Your About page should feature the best features and qualification of your business. Why do you perform your services or sell your products? What was your best moment in business? Did you have a turning point that put you on the path to success that you're on today? We'll call those your highlights. Create a list of those company highlights that you want your customers and clients to know. The list can be as long as you want. You can pare it down as you write the content for the page and you can even create a timeline if it gets too long.

Design Your Content Writing Process

Design Your Content Writing Process

If you create consistent content for your website and social media posts, you know how time consuming it can be. If you design a process and develop a schedule, you can make copy writing and content creation easier and faster. Here are some suggestions that you can implement to streamline your content writing. Use these tips to design a process that works for you.

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Do I Need a Digital Marketing Strategy?

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Do I Need a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan to increase brand awareness or grow sales using digital channels. Digital channels include everything from your own website and email campaigns to social media and blogs. A good digital marketing strategy helps you reach your customers wherever they want to interact with you by providing several opportunities to learn about, interact with, and possibly even purchase from your business. You can hire a marketing pro to create your digital marketing strategy as part of a larger marketing plan or on its own. Either way, your professional will most likely provide you with a comprehensive plan that leverages your website, email list, social media, and outreach.

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Create a Content Calendar

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Create a Content Calendar

Creating content for your business on a regular basis is incredibly important for SEO and provides more choices for you marketing messages. Google and other search engines reward businesses that publish content on a consistent basis. Consistency helps these search engines understand that your business is an authority on your subject matter. Creating content on a regular basis also helps to establish your reliability as a content creator and as a business in general. If you begin publishing a newsletter every Thursday, your clients and customers will come to expect your newsletters on Thursdays. 

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Develop a Content Strategy for Your Marketing or Website Launch

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Develop a Content Strategy for Your Marketing or Website Launch

Planning content for your entire website during a launch or re-launch can seem daunting, but you can plan ahead to create great content that brings the right customers to your site and looks great in your social media, email marketing, and PR campaigns.

The first step to create quality content for your site is to research the keywords that are relevant for your business. You can research keywords in Google Adwords by searching for your business or product. 

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What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

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What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization means helping search engines direct visitors to your site by using words that are relevant for your business and the search terms that users type into a search engine, like Bing or Google. These search terms are also called keywords.

Optimizing your site for search helps the search engines determine which keywords are most relevant for your website and your business. Search engines use many factors to help them return the best results for their customers. 

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Why Does Content Matter in Digital Marketing?

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Why Does Content Matter in Digital Marketing?

Good content can help your website to become search engine optimization (SEO) friendly. Your content should reflect the products or services your business offers, articles or tips that are helpful to your audience, and information your customers use make a purchase decision.

Simply put, Google (and other search engines) aims to return the most helpful results for each search. Google wants each person conducting a search to find results that are helpful so that they go back to Google for their future searches. Each Google update changes their algorithm slightly to ensure that the best results are returned for each search.