Category Archives: Content Strategy

Creating A Social Media Strategy

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My last post covered the effective planning of a social media campaign. This next phase of the campaign sees the results of the research being used to inform a social media strategy.

Without a strategy untargeted messages will be posted in channels where the intended audience might not be active. It ensures that there is a common tone of voice used across all the social networks pertinent to the campaign, and that any content posted is relevant. Finally, it determines the results that will measure whether the campaign has been a success or not.

The key stages of strategy development are: monitoring, theme development, channel selection, content planning, setting KPIs and defining the engagement policy. These stages are described below.

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How Financial Services Can Use Social Media

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As we are all aware, social media has radically altered the way businesses can market to their customer base. Some brands like Pringles and Skittles have been able to create a fan base that happily interacts with their various social media activities, but these tend to be in the FMCG sector where entertaining, shareable campaigns are more easily accepted by their customers. What about more “serious” sectors, how can they use social media to reach out to an audience?

This post presents findings I’ve discovered specifically about the issues facing financial services organisations with regard to social media marketing and offers some  recommendations for how they can improve their activity. Continue reading →

Should Your Blog Be Integrated With Your Website?

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Should your blog be integrated with your website or have a life of its own in the blogosphere? There is no right or wrong answer, it depends on your strategy. Here are the pro’s and con’s to help you decide:

The pro’s

  1. Content, as we all know, is good for SEO. Google likes sites that are periodically updated because they have lots of content related to the same cluster of keyword phrases that your target readers search for.
  2. A content-rich website is good for the “Long Tail” – rather than focusing all your efforts on the most popular words and just a few pages, concentrate on making lots of pages serve different keywords niches. There is less competition and you’ll appear more often in Google’s SERPs.
  3.  You might convert your readers into loyal customers because you will have gained their trust as a thought leader.
  4. The more content you have on your website, the longer your visitors are likely to stay which can lead to higher conversion rates.
  5. If you decide to go for a stand-alone blog, you might upset your readers if they follow your blog and they realise that it’s linking to your website. This won’t happen here.

The con’s

  1. People tend to trust corporate blogs less than independent blogs – social sharing will be more difficult.
  2. Because writing a coherent blog that supports the company’s goals is very time-consuming, the blog could fall in the hands off someone who has time on his hands but doesn’t have much to say and thus affect the reputation of the company.
  3. Similarly, because independent blogs are seen as being non-commercial, they tend to receive more user comments which is good for customer insight.
  4. You cannot use another domain name that contains the keywords you’re targeting and that’s unfortunate since the URL and page title are the most important SEO ranking factors.