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Content Marketing Pros Share What’s Wrong With Marketing Today
Sh*t’s broken in content marketing. Sure, there are a lot of good things happening with content but there are also a lot of bad, broken things that aren’t working.
Hold on, it gets better! Today’s Listen is going to teach you how to fix the things that are broken. In this podcast, Jess Ostroff, from Convince & Convert interviews 6 content marketing experts to get their take on what’s wrong and how to fix it.
We’ve got all of Jess’s guests time stamped so you can skip right to your favorites:
- (2:22) Lee Odin — So many brands continue to be egocentric about their content. It’s not about you!
- (5:00) Ann Handley — Think of your audiences as having “squad goals”. Stop thinking of the relationship between you and your customers as transactional. It should be person to person; friend to friend.
- (7:41) DJ Waldow — People are too overwhelmed with content. Marketers have too many ideas and are starting too many things, but never really finishing anything. Instead of starting 10,000 new things every week, finish the ones that are difficult, but have potential to be great.
- (12:35) Andy Crestodina — Collaborate with other companies and other teams more! Get out of your own space and find other people to pull into your content. The success of your content is a direct result of how strong your network is. (That’s a really powerful idea.)
- (15:45) Matt Heinz — Attribution is an issue. People aren’t good at measuring the impact of their content.
- (19:55) Jay Baer — Stop lying to yourself. Your audience isn’t too busy to read your content, your content just isn’t good enough to deserve their attention.
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3 Easy Link Building Tactics to Get a Buncha Links
We know, you hear the words “link building” and you automatically tune out. But stick with us on this one. Backlinks are a really important, 100% essential, super-big-deal part of SEO, and we’re gonna help you get a bunch of easy ones today. Your website will be creeping up those search results in no time.
- Search for mentions of your brand, domain name, and founders/execs names. For this, you’re gonna just use Google. Type in exact phrases for what you’re looking for (you might need an advanced search command). Manually check the top 50 – 100 results to make sure that they’re linking to the right place. When we do this for The Daily Carnage, the Google command we use is: “the daily carnage” -site:carney.co. That forces Google to find that exact string of words, but not on our own website.
- Find sites that list your competition. Again, you’re using Google. This time, search for mentions of your competitors. See if you can figure out why they’re mentioned on that site, and contact that site to see if they’ll mention you.
- Search for lists of people/companies with specific attributes. Let’s say, for example, you work for a woman-owned marketing agency. There’s likely a list of these types of businesses somewhere on the internet where you should be listed too.
This one goes way more in-depth than we could handle here so check it out for a deeper look.
Disclaimer: today’s Read is technically also a Watch, but there’s a transcript that goes with the video so we’re calling it a Read. Sue us.
Watch
Riding West with Jeff Bridges & Lyft
Regardless of what side you’re on in the Lyft vs. Uber debate, there’s no doubt that these companies have changed transportation in cities around the world. Remember the days of waiting for a Yellow Cab? Uhhh, how ’bout no?
With all the negative press from Uber lately, Lyft has been taking a bigger and bigger chunk of the ride-sharing market-share. And now they’re setting themselves up to take even more away from Uber with their newest ad campaign.
Lyft teamed up with our dude Jeff Bridges to travel back to the Oregon Trail. In these spots, Bridges discusses the importance of choice when it comes to transportation. That’s definitely a dig at Uber. There are currently 3 spots, but we like number 2 the best.
And in case you’re wondering, we’re on #TeamLyft.
“Marketers tend to think that we are speaking brand-to-customer when instead we should be thinking peer-to-peer.”
Ann Handley
