Content Marketing

EBay’s Redesign, Instagram Content Marketing, The 3-Screen Approach

The Content Strategist picks the day’s most relevant and interesting stories about the world of content from around the web. Here’s what you should be reading today:

EBay Mimicking Pinterest in Re-Design

EBay’s new homepage features curated items that the company thinks consumers will want to purchase  kind of like Pinterest, according to Shareen Pathak of AdAge.

“It lets eBay users create personalized home-page profiles by ‘following’ certain categories, such as a favorite musician or brand, and is driven both by what the user tells the company and by his or her purchase and search history,” she writes. “The feed also has a social element, which lets users check out their friends’ home pages and get inspiration from them.”

She points out that other sites have been doing Pinterest-esque redesigns as well: Facebook recently rolled out “Collections,” and Zappos provides “Pin Pointing.”

Content Marketing on Instagram

Content Marketing Institute’s Camella Mendez delves into the businesses using Instagram best and how other brands can mimic their success.

She says that brands can post links to blog posts with their photos to drive traffic to their websites (like Vanity Fair does) or post photos in real time, like TIME.

Three-Screens and the Relation to Marketing

Consumers nowadays are on TV, their computers, and their phones all at the same time. Marketers should be looking for ways to create content and media that utilize all three platforms, writes Jessica Richards of ClickZ.

Her suggestions are to build relationships with media partners so that consumers will have a “singular experience,” to make sure the brand message is consistent, to make the brand story engaging, and to “start with the mediums consumed most often by their customer base. From there, test and learn on other platforms until consumer adoption has advanced and/or measurability is tangible.”

Forbes Asks: “Is Content Marketing The New Advertising?”

It’s a question that is on everyone’s mind: Is content marketing taking over advertising?

Forbes’ Michael Brenner reported on this issue with assistance from Copyblogger’s Frank Strong. Brenner explains how content marketing/strategy has changed what “branding” means, and says, “Great content and engaging stories help your company’s content get found and get shared. When great content is shared, commented on or liked, it is no longer your content alone. It is their content. And user-generated content is trusted more than advertising or promotion.”

ROI of  Content Marketing

Content marketing is an expense, but according to Business 2 Community’s Dragan Mestrovic, it can help businesses garner up to 40 percent more revenue.

Good content will build customer loyalty and increase business visibility, he writes. To do content marketing the right way, businesses should be offering content for free, investing time and money into content creation, and making sure that the content is interesting and shareable.

Focusing on Content Instead of SEO

Is SEO really that helpful? No, reports Copyblogger’s Sonia Simone, who says that it actually can “destroy a small business.” Instead of taking the time to look into keywords and analyze what makes for good SEO themselves, small business owners should look into hiring an outside SEO firm (if they have the budget) or by simply putting out “strategic, valuable content.”

The Worth of Facebook Fans

Sarah E. Needleman of the Wall Street Journal wrote about Facebook and how the site charges for promoted posts.

Small businesses are debating whether or not to pay for these, since the posts reach 16 percent of fans of a page. The article goes into whether small business owners think it’s worth it to pay for that kind of exposure.

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