content marketing

Are you relevant to today's news cycle?

Are you relevant to today's news cycle?

Promoting your brand or yourself as the brand can be both difficult and easy. With a website and social media you can broadcast your news, information and insight to the world or specifically target your target market with the right data and resources.

Marketing Guide| The ideal length of online content

 

Today we are more mobile than before and rely on our phones and tablets to check the latest news or check up on friends and family. As a result, we not only have to learn how to speak in soundest we have to learn how to say what we want to say in as few words as possible.  That is we are starting to communicate more and more with photos and other images.  Here is a brief guide from PRDaily to help you communicate. 

Facebook - Posts with 40 characters receive 86 percent more engagement than posts with more than that amount - 40 characters

Blog headlines - People tend to only read the first and last three words of a headline - 6 words

Email subject lines - Subject lines that fall within this range average a 12.2 percent open rate and 4 percent click rate - 28-39 characters

YouTube videos - The average length of the top 50 YouTube videos is 2 minutes and 54 seconds - 3 minutes

Podcasts - Podcast listeners won't tune in any longer - 22 minutes

Domain names -  The best domain names are short, easy to spell and remember, and don't have hyphens or numbers - 8 characters

Tweets – Shorter than 100 characters have a 17% higher engagement rate - 100 characters

Paragraphs – Opening paragraphs with larger fonts and fewer charcters per line make it easier for the reader to focus and jump quickly from one line to the next - 40-55 words

Hashtags – Don’t use spaces or special charcters, don't start with or only use numbers and be careful about using slang - 6 characters

Title Tags – Don’t exceed 60 characters or you will get clipped - 55 characters

News Release - Try to limit the content to 1,000 words. Optimal length that is short enough for people to read quickly and search engines to find is between 400-600 words or about a page and half (*Source iReach) - 1,000 words

Headline - 60 characters or you risk the headline cutting cut on a website, phone and tablet - 60 characters

*Source  (unless otherwise indicated)

Your company is the message with branded content

Today's New York Times reports that Harper's Magazine is "joining the growing list of media properties whose publishers are supplementing more traditional forms of advertising with sponsored content".  With the help of public relations professionals or advertising agencies, companies will be able to write the news stories, features and product reviews that appear in magazines and on-line that look like it is part of the magazine (which it is), but is actually an advertisement. It is a new era in how we purchase goods and services. With advances in technology at our fingertips and on our desktops, we do our own research into what we purchase and what solutions it solves, we seek advice from our friends, read the reviews and compare prices before we ever step into a store or office, if we ever do step inside.

As a result, a company's marketing strategy should have, at its core, a content marketing strategy, to create content that is engaging and informative, humorous if appropriate and timely given the news cycle. How that content is distributed will depend on a company's budget and a company should do its own due diligence to determine the best media or channel to distribute that content on.  For example, do your customers read Harper's, The Atlantic, New Yorker, Forbes or even the plethora of trade publications that only include native advertising opportunities for its content.

This is all part of a strategic planning process that your public relations counsel or marketing agency should take you through during your initial kick off meeting.

With the right content you can sell a product by selling solutions and in crafting the right messages, advertorial or branded content, you can take your message directly to those who you want to see it. However, depending who you want to read it and how you want them to see it will just depend on how much you want to spend.