Different content marketers offered different definitions for Call to Action (CTA) in content marketing.

Here are some of the most popular ones:

  Call to Actions are simple, yet targeted, phrases directly responsible for encouraging your audience to take a next step toward becoming a loyal customer, such as downloading your white paper, following you on Twitter, registering for your webinar, or sharing your content with a friend or colleague. (Content Marketing Institute)

 A call-to-action (usually abbreviated as CTA) is an image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take action. It is, quite literally, a “call” to take an “action.” (HubSpot)

  A call to action (CTA) refers to any device designed to prompt an immediate response or encourage an immediate sale.  (Wikipedia)

 A call to action is an element of a marketing campaign that entices, persuades or otherwise invites a site visitor to take a specific action. The action can refer to making a purchase, requesting more information, subscribing to newsletters and a number of other business goals. (Brafton)

These definitions and many other similar ones can be distilled as follows:

Call-to-Action Examples

Grammarly asks you to add its extension to Chrome browser emphasizing that it’s a free offer.

HubSpot offers you a challenging question: How strong is your website?

Audible pushes you to jump on the bandwagon: Jump on the train that already millions of people have jumped on.

Google AdSense program, assuming that you already know it, just reminds you its slogan: Turn your passion into profit by signing up.

Call-to-Action Guidelines

Considering CTA definition and above examples, it’s not hard to imagine a wide variety of CTAs. Nonetheless, the following points may be helpful in re-evaluating your landing pages and optimizing their conversion rate:

 There are many other actions besides purchasing your product. Don’t consider Call-to-action and Ask-for-Payment as synonyms. Here are a few other options:

• Watching a video or listening to a podcast
• Reading another article
• Subscribing to your mailing list
• Subscribing to your RSS feed
• Bookmarking your page
• Downloading a PDF file
• Writing a comment
• Sharing your content

 Be sure that your CTA is highly visible and is not cluttered up by other contents. Clean designs often lead to higher conversion rates.

 Size matters. This axiom might not hold true in other areas but surely plays a key role in CTAs. Beware of your type size and never use small or even normal fonts.

 What’s your value proposition? You’d never have a second chance to talk about your proposed value. So seize the opportunity and tell your differentiated value to your visitor clearly. Some content marketers refer to this topic as the answer to what’s in it for me question.

 Never trust your intuition. Always use A/B tests and be sure that all your critical assumptions are tested in the real field.

 Less is more when humans are going to choose. Based on what Barry Schwarz teaches us in his book titled Paradox of Choice, offering a wide range of actions to the visitors eventually will lead to inaction. Therefore, it might be helpful to provide two or three different options. But be careful in offering an Action Menu with a broad range of choices.

The post Call to Action: definition, examples, guidelines appeared first on webmindset.

Mark Schaefer used the term content shock for the first time in his article titled why content marketing is not a sustainable strategy.

Here’s how he defines the content shock:

The argument behind the content shock concept

Mark Schaefer’s argument about content shock is based on a few pillars including but not limited to the following statements:

• Content marketing is not a sustainable strategy for many businesses based on the simple economic analysis.
• In the content world, the content price is zero. Therefore, oversupply will force content producers to pay their audience to consume their content.
• Two factors impact the economics of content marketing – the amount of content available and the amount of content consumed.
• The volume of free content is increasing exponentially.
• Our ability to consume the content is finite.
• Content creators have to spend more and more on the platforms like Google and Facebook for convincing audiences to read and consume their content.

What does Schaefer suggest us to do?

About two years after publishing the article, Mark Schaefer published a book titled Content Code. Shaefer believes that he has found the solution for his self-proposed threat to content marketing practice.

If you try to summarize the book in a single word, that world will be Sharing.

Sharing is the secret key Schaefer believes that will be able to break the content marketing deadlock. Let’s read it in his own words:

Schaefer suggests six strategies for achieving the above goal (sometimes acronymized as BADASS):

• Brand Development
• Audiences and Influencers
• Distribution, Advertising, promotion and SEO
• Authority
• Shareability
• Social proof and social signals

How strong is the content shock claim?

The Content Code is a helpful and instructive book to the eyes of every fair reader. But, just if you consider it as a roadmap for achieving higher content sharing rate.

But regarding Schaefer’s argument, as he calls his claims as a purely economic view of the content economy, there is a serious flaw in his content conceptualization as a product:

Content is not a commodity. This is clear for anyone who is familiar with both content and the economy. Ignoring this basic fact will mislead us in analyzing the future of the content economy.

However, still his first claim can be considered as a valid statement: Content marketing won’t be sustainable for many businesses. Not as a result of the content shock. For the most part, because many content marketers like him may consider content as a commodity.

The post Content Shock: Myth or Reality? appeared first on webmindset.

The reading experience is a relatively new term in web design. It’s coined to describe the feeling of the user while reading a web page or navigating through an article.

While the reading experience is a crucial factor for design every single page, it’s critical for landing pages. As you can guess, reading experience directly influences visitor’s stay time, page’s bounce rate and user’s conversion rate.

Some of the factors entailing a better reader experience

Although it’s not possible to propose a comprehensive list of factors related to the reading experience, here, you can find a brief checklist that assures you of some levels of reader satisfaction:

 Combine typefaces and use different styles for headings, subheadings, and body of the content.

 Try to make sentences as short as possible (at list in critical parts).

 Use bold-type and italic-type fonts to make your content easy to skim.

 Keep in mind that the user should be able understand the central theme of the page within 5 seconds.

 Use photos, infographics and illustrations (never underestimate their effect)

 Make sure that your page is well-formatted both in mobile screens and desktop displays.

Count total characters in each line of your page. Something between 50 and 75 characters is the most recommended range. Longer lines will be harder to read and follow (If you have longer lines, it might be helpful to consider more columns in your design).

 Never forget whitespace. Consider enough padding for texts and images.

 Split paragraphs to smaller parts. Unlike paper-printed articles, here you can even have one or two sentences per paragraph.

Use bullets and other graphical icons wherever appropriate.

The post Designing for the better online reading experience appeared first on webmindset.

However, as there are significant differences between the content as a product with other physical products, would be helpful to take a more detailed look at the concept of the content life cycle.

Various models are proposed for the content life cycle. But what I describe here is a modified six stage model inspired by Hilary Marsh and developed based on the concept of product life cycle.

The first stage: Conception

At this stage, you have not created the content yet. But you know (or feel) that you need to publish something.

There’s a crucial question to ask yourself before creating and publishing every piece of content: Why we are going to create it?

Although we always have some reasons in mind, the best way would be putting all these points on the paper and thinking about them explicitly.

To get some ideas, here you can some of the most popular reasons for creating a piece of content:

• Making sure that your business in found on google and other search engines
• Personal branding or corporate branding
• Targeting specific keywords
• Introducing or re-introducing other contents and URLs
• Trying to find new audiences
• Converting the audiences to potential customers
• Converting potential customers to the real customers
• Increasing satisfaction of our current customers or decreasing their dissatisfaction level
• Encouraging current customers to use our product more than before

The second stage: Creation

At this stage, your content is still under development.

You might try to create original in-house generated content or curate relevant contents from other sources.

While you are thinking about the message of your content for your target audience, don’t forget to optimize your content for search engines.

Sure you have to consider the audience as the first priority. But it won’t help if they can not find your article on the web.

The third stage: Publishing

Any content is designed and created to be published somewhere and to be read by some audiences.

Here you have to choose between available channels. There are many factors that can influence your choice:

• Channel Reach
• Channel Cost
• Channel Conversion
• Personas of the channel audiences

Tip: Channel conversion and channel reach to the target audience, is not necessarily correlated with channel cost. Channel cost just indicates the demand and the demand is subject to user perception rather than visitor conversion.

The fourth stage: Promotion

Now we must make sure that the content is exposed to the majority of the target audience.

There are many choices available for content promotion:

• Asking other publishers to introduce your content or to republish it.
• Using PPC advertisement
• Sharing your content via social media
• Providing backlinks for your content from other parts of your website

Sure, even without all the above-mentioned promotion channels, search engine crawlers will find your content and provide it. As they are looking for the best interest of their clients, they will never miss a helpful piece of content,

However, with promotion, we mean trying to reach the customers in the shortest possible time. Especially when your content is not evergreen, and it has a short lifespan.

Generally speaking,  there are two different type of promotion channels available for most of the digital contents:published on the websites, there are two different categories of promotion strategies: on-site and off-site.

• on-site (e.g. banners, articles, specific landing pages)
• off-site (e.g. newsletters, RSS Feeds, search engines, social media)

Tip: Here lies a simple yet crucial point that is often forgotten by content marketers. The content has to be promoted for the target audience.

It’s easy to understand that the content targeted to the relevant audience, will have a longer lifespan and most times, less delivery cost.

The fifth stage: Maintenance

Even the most relevant content will not stay relevant forever.

You need to recheck the content relevance from time to time.

Therefore, the relevance check is considered as one of the most important aspects of content maintenance.

At the same time, you have to regularly measure and evaluate performance of your content. You may need to edit it because of the latest changes in the search engine algorithms, or to adapt it to the newer contents you have published.

Checking the weekly (or monthly) reach, engagement, virality, conversion rate and other similar factors would also provide you with helpful maintenance clues.

 The content maintenance policy can be one of the most crucial competitveness factors in today’s oversaturated content market. 

The sixth stage: Retirement

No content will live forever.

Every content has an expected life and sooner or later it will be of no use, or at least its maintenance cost woud exceed its benefits.

There are a few choices for retiring a piece of content:

• Deleting and forgeting the content or blocking the public access to the content
• Archiving the content and letting the others reach it, but explicitly stating that the content is considered outdated and you accept no liability for it.
• Disassembling the content into a few parts, dismissing useless compontents and reusing the useful parts.

The post Content Strategy and The Content Life Cycle appeared first on webmindset.

Content Optimization (CO) is a subset of SEO helping you to audit/edit your content and make it more appealing to search engines.

Of course, the tools and technics used for content optimization depend on the content type. However, you can consider the following subcategories of the content optimization as the most important ones:

• Article optimization
• Image optimization
• Video optimization
• Link optimization
• News optimization
• Product review optimization

Further reading: Content Marketing Institute‘s guide to content optimization is a good starting point if you’d like to know more about this topic.

Note: Do not confuse the content optimization technics with similar topics such as landing page optimization. Although these concepts are equally important, the former is about attracting more organic traffic while the latter is concerned with conversion rate. Sometimes these two dimensions are aligned with each other, however, there are many cases in which, there is an inevitable trade-off between them.

The post Content Optimization appeared first on webmindset.

Although you will never be able to call your page a perfect one, the following checklist might be helpful in improving your landing pages and providing the visitors with a better landing page experience.

Strategic Concerns

1. Is your landing page focused on a single purpose?
2. What kind of value are you going to provide?
3. Do you communicate your value proposition clearly?
4. What kind of value do you provide for the visitor?
5. If your page has backlinks in other pages (as anchor or banner), does it hold promise?

Lizard Brain Validation

The so-called lizard brain validation is one of the most critical criteria in validating a landing page. It means assessing the first brain reaction to visiting a page.

Here you can find some of the most important points in checking your landing page in this regard:

1. Do you have an eye-catching headline?
2. Could the visitor understand the core message in first 10 seconds? (eye-blink test)
3. Have you capitalized on creating visual elements such as pictures and illustrations?
4. Does the visitor consider you page relevant after skimming through it?
5. Have you omitted extraneous navigations from the page? (to lead the visitor mindlessly into the conversion funnel)

Landing Page Architecture

A landing page has to be something more than a full-width pop-up!

1. Does it look like a generic ad? Although a landing page is definitely a kind of ad, your conversion concern should not overshadow the non-commercial contents of your page.
2. Is your page designed according to the look, style and brand identity?
3. Do you have any subheadings in the page?
4. Have you tried to convert parts of your paragraphs to bullet lists and tables and illustrations?
5. Have you embedded remarketing messages in the next navigation level?
6. Is it necessary to prepare different versions of landing pages? (for different personas or based on where they come from)
7. Do you use a separate landing page for every campaign?
8. Have you considered enough visual clues?

Technical Points

1. Is your page mobile friendly? (responsive layout or mobile version)
2. Have you optimized page title, meta description, and URL for search engines?
3. Have you considered SEO-optimized alternative texts for your images?
4. Have you done A/B test on your page? (long vs. short, 1 CTA vs. 2 CTAs, etc.)

Copy Checklist

1. Does it say what the page is about?
2. Is your content focused?
3. Is the body copy scannable and scrollable?
4. Have you included all the relevant keywords in your copy?
5. Does your copy focus on benefits rather than features? (benefit-driven)

Trust Checklist

How do you assure the visitor about your service?

1. Does your page look credible?
2. Have you provided any social proof?
   1. Industry awards
   2. Consumer awards
   3. Customer testimonials
   4. Links to the articles in the other media about your business/service
3. Are you providing a sample of your product/service/content?

Call-To-Action (Applies to transactional / lead creation landing pages)

1. Do you have a clear call to action?
2. Do you get their email address? (if applicable)
3. Is your CTA visible before the third scroll? (preferably without any scroll)
4. Have you minimized your contact form?
5. Do you have a privacy policy link near the submit button?
6. Do you have a clear refund/customer care statement?
7. Is your submit/purchase button visible enough?
8. If you have a multi-step registration/interaction, have you informed the visitor about it?
9. Is your promotion/offer visible to the visitor?
10. Is your CTA near the top of the page?
11. Is your CTA readable from 2 meters away?
12. Check to be sure that have not more than 3 CTAs on a single page.

The post A 46-point checklist for landing page design and optimization appeared first on webmindset.

However, it would always be helpful to have a list of common content types on the table while thinking about your options in developing your content strategy.

Here’s my own list:

The post The most common content types in digital content marketing appeared first on webmindset.

Landing page experience refers to the experience of the users when they land on a page after clicking a link in SERPs or Ads or social media posts.
Part of this experience is cognitive (rational evaluation), and the other part will be inevitably affective (how they feel about the page).

Guidelines for Improving Landing Page Experience

The best way to improve landing page experience is getting more acquainted with different dimensions of this concept.

Although Google Adwords program have provided a few guidelines for the improving the landing page experience, it’s not hard to draw a list by your own.  As we have landed on many pages in our online life, and we are already easily able to judge the quality of a landing page.

Here I have prepared a list of the various aspects of the landing page experience:

Landing Page Relevance

• Is the content relevant to the proposed description? Users have found your URL somewhere on the internet via SERPs, social media posts, Banners, OTT messages, internal links, etc. Does the description (Ad content, Anchor text, Meta Description, or whatsoever) fit to what user finds on your page?
• The right degree of specificness: If I have searched for specification of Mercedes cars, I’m not interested in knowing about other cars (More general content) as well as Mercedes E-series (More specific content). The right degree of specificness is a very important predictive indicator of the user satisfaction with the page.
• Interests and needs of target persona: Trying to satisfy everybody, most probably would lead to making everybody dissatisfied. Therefore you have to decide who are your target personas and make sure that your content fits their needs and interests.

Content Usefulness

Does your content provide any value for the visitor? As Google proposes in the micro-moment concept, your page has to help the user in one of the following directions. If you do not fulfill at least on the following desires, the ultimate landing page experience would not be achieved, even though you do your best in content creation and web page design.

Content Originality

Excluding users who are totally unfamiliar with the topic, your visitors have already some experiences and expectations from your page based on the previously visited pages. You will be able to delight the users if and only if you go beyond their expectation. The Originality of the content is one of the great solutions to this challenge.

Landing Page Freshness

No one wants to read an outdated content (except historical researchers of course). Freshness has two different aspects:

• The freshness of the content: Let’s suppose that I reach to a page titled the latest books on content marketing and the most recent book in the list belongs to 2010. It would definitely ruin my experience. Therefore providing the user with the latest relevant information on the topic would be an important aspect of the freshness.
• The freshness of the context: Now, let’s consider another case. I am looking for a definition of the meme. One of the most reliable sources for the definition of the term is Susan Blackmore’s brilliant book called The meme machine.
  The book is originally published on 2000 and for someone who is not professional in the field, would probably feel that they have reached an outdated page. So you may start with the definition of the term and continue with the position of the Susan Blackmore in the field. Then the reader would be impressed to know that such a wise definition has been proposed about two or three decades ago.
• Using evergreen content is another key to providing a feeling of freshness for the visitors.

Transparency of Intent

Most of the pages are not designed with a single intent in mind. You are trying to provide the user with some useful content. By the way, you are trying to convince them to subscribe to your mailing list. Furthermore, you have some Google Ads on the side hoping that they click on it and you earn a few cents. Below the page you have some sponsored links or affiliated links which you wish the click them.
Transparency means letting users know these intents. With such a definition, there could be rich guidelines and a long list of recommendations for transparency improvement. Here are just a few points:

• Let the visitors know who you are and where they are.
• Let them know your business or the raison d’être of the page
• Don’t ask them to subscribe to your mailing list before providing them with some value and telling them what they will receive after registration
• Distinguish between the core content and contextual content (related links, sponsored links, Affiliated Links, Call-To-Actions, etc.).

Page Structure

Using H1 and H2 tags and bullet lists and bold fonts and graphics are said to be helpful for receiving better SEO ranks. Sure it’s correct. But not because google counts the tags and bullets.
The main reason behind formatting is ease of reading and improving the reading experience.

Improved reading experience leads to more stay time and reduces bounce rate and automatically the google learning machine would learn that you are the right solution for the user query.

Ease of Navigation

Navigation has two different aspects: inside your page and through your website. As mobile visitors are an important segment of the visitors, you have to consider navigation issue in desktop and mobile devices as separate topics. None of them should cast shadows on the other one.

Page Loading Time

Loading time is a very important component of the experience. Actually, a long loading time would tempt the users to leave your page even without opening it completely. Part of the bounce rate of a URL can be a consequence of slowness in the loading of the page.

Stay Time

 All the above factors would somehow influence the stay time. So you might consider stay time as a dependent variable and not an independent one. However, besides all the above-mentioned factors, the length of the content itself can influence the stay time and it seems reasonable to consider stay time as an indicator of the landing page experience.

Related Links:

Google Landing Page Guidelines (for Adwords)

100 of the best landing page templates (provided by Instapage)

The post Landing Page Experience: What is it? How to improve it? appeared first on webmindset.

Here you can find the most popular landing pages:

• Pages that are accessed directly by the returning users (the blog part of the website)
• Pages used in online advertising and promotion (e.g. emails, banners, social media)
• Pages that are reached via search engines

What’s the goal of designing a landing page?

There are three distinct types of landing pages:

• Reference landing pages

• Lead pages

• Transactional landing pages

 The purpose of a reference page is  nothing more than the visit and the traffic. Most of the reference pages are used in highly click-thirsty sites looking for a high traffic to convince potential advertisers to buy advertising spaces.

 A lead page is designed to  convert visitors to leads. It means persuading the visitor to subscribe to a newsletter or enter personal information or register as a user of the website services.

 Transactional landing pages are  more serious and ask users to make some transaction. Most of the times this transaction means paying money in exchange for a specific product or service.

Excluding IT companies and content providing firms, most of the companies don’t take enough care of their landing pages.

They spend lots of money in digital and physical space pushing people to visit their pages and then forget to invest in designing, analyzing and improving their landing pages.

Thus, excluding the reference pages, which are so close to the standard SEO concept, the main target of the other types of landing pages is conversion, either to a lead or to a transaction.

Here are some of the topics I’m going to discuss in future articles about the landing pages. Most of them are just based on my personal experiences gain working on my various websites:

• Landing Page Experience (what is it and how to improve it)
• Importance of copywriting
• How can we minimize the bounce rate of landing pages?
• Call to action
• A/B testing: hype or help?
• Links or Buttons? Do they have a similar effect?
• Not every link links: the cost of distracting navigational link
• Mobile-friendly pages: It’s something more than distance between touching points and responsiveness
• The second scroll goes to hell, but the last scroll might go somewhere
• Images and Videos? Shall we use it? The costs and benefits of multimedia in landing pages
• How to design and propose better payment options in landing pages?
• Landing page audit checklist

The post What is a landing page? appeared first on webmindset.

Although I have already attempted to provide a broad definition of content, would be more helpful if we make a more specific definition of content in content marketing. As here the term content often refers to the digital web content.

Rahel Bailie’s definition of content

Rahel Bailie defines content as contextualized data, but as Rachel Lovinger comments on her own definition, it’s a little poetic to consider such explanations as practical definitions of content.

Halvorson’s definition of content in content marketing

Christina Halvorson in her article about the content strategy refers to the term in a very generic sense:  the web is content and content is the web. 

Odden Lee’s definition

Odden Lee defines the content in a similar way:  content is the information and experience(s) directed towards an end-user or audience. 

If you would like to adopt a general yet helpful definition of content, I would recommend Lauren Pope‘s definition in her article titled what is content anyway:

Information or an idea that means something to a person in a specific time and place.

Although there are many definitions of the content and, even more, definitions for digital content I’d rather make a clear distinction between the narrow definition of digital content and the broader definition:

In my blog, I use the term digital content with the narrower meaning unless otherwise specified.

Content, in my opinion, is somehow similar to the creativity: we understand it as we see it, but we are not able to define it. So it may be more useful to identify and understand content-related terms in content marketing instead of insisting on proposing a general definition for content.

These are some of the content-related terms I am going to describe in future articles. Understanding of the following terms would be crucial for devising a practical content marketing strategy:

• Evergreen Content
• Adaptive Content
• Content Farm
• Intelligent Content
• Interactive content
• Retired Content
• Micro-moment Solution Content
• User Generated Content
• Cornerstone Content
• Curated Content
• Thin Content

The post Definition of digital content in content marketing appeared first on webmindset.