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Time-Saving Effective Content Creation Tips

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Time-Saving Effective Content Creation Tips

Creating niche content is something all brands should do in order to catch their audience at various stages of their buying cycles.

Content diversifies your rankings, builds your brand’s recognizability, and helps create more conversion funnels throughout the site.

But there’s one huge problem with publishing new content on your site: Time.

Few brands can afford writing teams, and relying on freelancers brings in new risks like inconsistency in voice and lower quality.

How to teach your in-house writers to create more content faster and more productively?

Here are a few tips:

Stop Agonizing About Word Count

Somehow “long-form” content became the best content creation tactic at some point. Just about any content strategy started evolving around “the more words the better”, and writers became stressed with producing 4000-word articles.

This slows down the process a lot.

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Don’t get me wrong, some content topics do require lots of words to cover. But these are very few topics.

When you need to address a popular question on your site, get to the point quickly. If you think about it, people looking for answers online, don’t need your long intros and definitions. They need an answer.

Stop demanding long-form articles from your team. All you need is to ensure your content serves the user right. Encourage your team to search for every search query they are tasked to target, and read a few high-ranking articles. Chances are, those articles will be very well-focused to provide value right away.

Word count is not one of SEO priorities, as confirmed by Google. How well your content addresses the readers’ needs is.

Make Good Use of Artificial Intelligence

I don’t recommend using ChatGPT (or similar AI-driven tools) to write content for you. While the AI-generated content may sound fine and even be useful, it lacks voice and expertise. It is also detectable.

And yet, AI tools can greatly improve the productivity of your writing team if they:

  • Prompt a tool to create an outline for your future article
  • Ask it to create takeaways for your written articles
  • Prompt it to suggest popular questions to cover
  • Ask it to write an introduction or a summary to your article
  • Prompt it to suggest related keywords or concepts to cover, 
  • Ask it to proofread your article and suggest improvements,
  • Prompt the tool to optimize your content for search engines
  • Ask it to compare your article to high-ranking competitors, 
  • Prompt it to suggest related Q&A, etc.

There are also lots of interesting integrations for ChatGPT that will be helpful for writers. For example, Text Optimizer generates semantically-optimized answer to any question you type:

Time Saving Effective Content Creation Tips

Steal Your Competitors’ Ideas

Looking at what your competitors are doing is a great way to understand what’s working. Like I suggested earlier, make sure you or your team actually searches for your target keywords and read some of the content that’s ranking on top of Google. 

This will give you an idea of what your content should look like and how to make more productive and focused decisions when writing yours. WebCEO allows you to analyze your competitors’ content and creates a detailed keyword map informing you where your article is probably missing. This makes your team’s job much as easier as they write and optimize their articles:

1684596571 255 Time Saving Effective Content Creation Tips

Based on your blogging platform, there may be more ways to ensure your content is as well optimized as your competitors’.

Share A Commentary

Don’t believe the myth that you can’t cite articles published elsewhere. Nothing can be further from the truth. Just keep in mind that if you reference an article, you need to accompany it with your own opinion or commentary.

Example: Forbes writes an interesting article related to the uptick in millennials in your industry. You copy and paste a large statistical finding and explanation from the article into a blog post. 

This content takes up the majority of space you would normally fill yourself. Essential to the success of the article, however, is that you then write your opinion regarding the information that you referenced. Tell us why you think the article is correct, incorrect, or perhaps reference your own statistic as a comparison.

Create Seasonal Content

The yearly calendar provides ample opportunities for seasonal content creation inspiration. Between the numerous holidays, people celebrate and the seasons themselves, you can easily increase sales using creative content marketing.

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For example:

  • Focus content on the holiday spirit
  • Tie holidays back to your products, services, or markets
  • Cover local holiday events

Try putting together pieces focused on these calendar-related areas:

The change of seasons – Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall

Popular Holidays

  • New Year’s Day (January 1)
  • Valentine’s Day (February 14)
  • Daylight Savings Time Starts (March 13)
  • April Fool’s Day (April 1)
  • Mother’s Day (Second Sunday in May)
  • Father’s Day (Second to last Sunday in June)
  • American Independence Day (July 4)
  • Women’s Equality Day (August 26)
  • Labor Day (First Monday in September)
  • Halloween (October 31)
  • Thanksgiving (Last Thursday in November)
  • Winter holiday round-up (Last week in November)

Wacky Holidays

  • Trivia Day (January 4)
  • Send a Card to a Friend Day (February 7)
  • Old Stuff Day (March 2)
  • International Moment of Laughter Day (April 14)
  • National Chicken Dance Day (May 14)
  • World Environment Day (June 5)
  • Embrace Your Geekiness Day (July 13)
  • International Left-handers Day (August 13)
  • National Good Neighbor Day (September 28)
  • World Vegetarian Day (October 1)
  • World Kindness Day (November 13)
  • National Cookie Day (December 4)

The following year, make sure to look back at your past seasonal content and update it for the next upcoming season. It’s not about always creating new content, it is also surfacing your old content. This saves lots of time!

To make this tactic even more productive, use one of the WordPress calendars to easier plan your seasonal content. Some of the WordPress alternatives have editorial calendars built-in.

Content creation requires a lot of time and effort but the more you experiment with topics, the faster you produce successful content. This skill won’t come quickly. Steal the above ideas to create content quicker!


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YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]

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YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples

Introduction

With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.

Types of YouTube Ads

Video Ads

  • Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
  • Types:
    • In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
    • Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.

Display Ads

  • Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
  • Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).

Companion Banners

  • Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
  • Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.

In-feed Ads

  • Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.

Outstream Ads

  • Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.

Masthead Ads

  • Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.

YouTube Ad Specs by Type

Skippable In-stream Video Ads

  • Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Vertical: 9:16
    • Square: 1:1
  • Length:
    • Awareness: 15-20 seconds
    • Consideration: 2-3 minutes
    • Action: 15-20 seconds

Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads

  • Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
  • Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Vertical: 9:16
    • Square: 1:1

Bumper Ads

  • Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
  • File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 640 x 360px
    • Vertical: 480 x 360px

In-feed Ads

  • Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Square: 1:1
  • Length:
    • Awareness: 15-20 seconds
    • Consideration: 2-3 minutes
  • Headline/Description:
    • Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
    • Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line

Display Ads

  • Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
  • Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
  • File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
  • File Size: Max 150KB.
  • Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.

Outstream Ads

  • Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
  • Logo Specs:
    • Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
    • File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
    • Max Size: 200KB.

Masthead Ads

  • Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
  • Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
  • File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).

Conclusion

YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!

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Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists

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Why We Are Always 'Clicking to Buy', According to Psychologists

Amazon pillows.

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A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots

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A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots

Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.

To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.

Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots

Salesforce’s evolving architecture

It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?

“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”

Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”

That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.

“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.

Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”

Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot

“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.

For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”

Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”

It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”

What’s new about Einstein Personalization

Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?

“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”

Finally, trust

One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.

“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”

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