Five Of My Favorite Content Marketing Acronyms

Every industry has its own set of jargon and acronyms, and marketing is certainly no exception.When it comes to content marketing, KISS doesn’t mean locking lips with your other half, and AIDA has nothing to do with a love of the opera. I personally love acronyms, which as you can imagine drives my friends and colleagues a little crazy – I’m working on it. For today, I thought I’d shed some light on five of my favorites: 1. KISS:Keep It Sweet and Simple You may be familiar with â€Å"Keep It Simple, Stupid,† but I’ll use a more polite version.KISS should be applied to every aspect of your content and here are a few ways you can do just that: Use images – they speak a thousand words and work especially well on social. When ascribing text to an image, make it compelling and brief. Keep emails short – concise and simple are best practice if you want results. Make content scannable – unless you’re at a deeper level of the site with more engaged users, detailed technical specifications are not your friend. People on average only read 28% of the words on a page, so keeping things simple is critical. That does not mean you have to have short copy. Rather, it means you need to make your key points clear as a bell. When you think content, especially in the early stages of your consumer decision making journey (CJD), aim for a minimum viable experience to attract and engage. If we think about marketing resources and keeping things simple from a scalability and operational point of view, social provides a great example. Do you really need to have a presence on every single social network? Probably not. It’s far better to have a strong presence and engaged followers on a couple of social platforms where you know your users are engaged, than to spread yourself too thin and neglect your accounts. 2. FAB:Features, Advantages, Benefits (or RTB: Reasons To Believe) Customers don’t necessarily care what your business does – they care about what it can do for them. Information about your brand’s products or services isn’t useful unless you can connect it to your customers’ needs. This might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many marketers fail to relate their products to the specific pain points of their customers.That’s where FAB statements can help.These statements have three components that let customers know why they should buy your product or service: Features: Identify differentiating product-specific details. Advantages:Clearly describe what sets you above and apart from the competition with respect to solving for your customer’s need. Benefits: Identify the additional benefits that come from choosing your product. Another great way to convey the same powerful message is to switch up your FAB statements: Name a benefit first, then explain how this benefit is brought about by your product or service’s features. Steve Jobs captured the essence of FAB and RTB in a nutshell: â€Å"Your customers don’t care about you. They don’t care about your product or service. They care about themselves, their dreams, their goals. Now, they will care much more if you help them reach their goals, and to do that, you must understand their goals, as well as their needs and deepest desires.† 3. AIDA:Attention, Interest, Desire, Action If you’ve ever bought something after seeing a commercial or advertisement, you were probably influenced by the AIDA technique.This four-step process is a start-to-finish formula for creating powerful content – it hooks the reader right from the start and keeps them interested until they take action.Here’s the breakdown: Attention: Grabs readers’ attention, makes them want to learn more.Interest:Build interest by clearly explaining your understanding of their painpoints. Desire:Create an emotional connection with your audience and move them from liking your product to wanting your product. Action:Motivate the customer to take action with your call to action. 4. BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline This is less about your content and more about your prospective customers.BANT stands for set of criteria used to qualify leads.When assessing a prospect, you need to keep the following questions in mind: Budget:Can they afford us? Authority:Are they the decision-maker? Need: How deep is their need for our product or service? Timeline:Where are they in their decision making journey? 5. SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound Our final acronym comes in handy when you’re setting goals or refining your content marketing strategy.Ask yourself the following questions to decide whether a goal is SMART: Specific:Are the desired outcomes clear, and are they tied to specific strategies and tactics? Measurable: Are outcomes measurable? Achievable: Is this a reasonable goal given any applicable constraints? Relevant: Does this content marketing goal align with bigger business objectives? Time-bound: What’s the endpoint for this goal? This list only scratches the surface – if I attempted to list them all, this article would be venturing into TL;DR territory. 😉 What are your favorite marketing acronyms? Add them to the comments below!

Content Marketing For Highly Regulated Industries

Content Marketing For Highly Regulated Industries Say you work for an ad agency and one of your clients is an e-retailer that sells over 30,000 products. It should be a dream come true for a content marketer, right? With 30,000 options, you have a nearly endless supply of features and benefits, challenges and solutions, lifestyles and demographics to target. A Must Read: The Content Marketing Guide For Highly Regulated Industries via @Now, let’s pretend that for all of those 30,000 products, you can’t actually tell anyone what they’re good for. Instead, all you can do is list out the ingredients and cross your fingers that your customers can figure it out for themselves.   This is the reality the nutraceutical industry lives in, the world of content marketing in a highly regulated industry. And they aren’t alone.    There are several industries you may end up working with that face tough challenges when it comes to how they can market their products to consumers: Alcohol Spirits â€Å"Digital marketing communications should be placed only in media where at least 71.6% of the audience is reasonably expected to be of the legal purchase age,† according to discus.org, the national trade association for distilled spirits in the US. So†¦ beware not only what you say, but where you say it. Healthcare providers Prior to â€Å"Bates v. State Bar of Arizona† in 1977, hospitals and healthcare providers essentially didn’t do any marketing at all. Now that they do, they â€Å"risk their reputation, their license and their livelihood if their marketing efforts run afoul of the maze of local, state or federal laws and regulations.† healthcaresuccess.com Pharmaceutical companies There are so many potential pitfalls here that â€Å"Every major company †¦ has either settled recent government cases, under the False Claims Act, †¦ or is currently under investigation for possible health care fraud,† according to the Wikipedia entry on pharmaceutical marketing The marketing rules and guidelines will vary industry to industry. But when you’re limited in what you can say, where you can say it and to whom you can say it, the driving question is the same for all What’s A Product Without Benefits? â€Å"One of the most repeated rules of writing compelling copy is to stress benefits, not features,† writes Brian Clark of Copyblogger. â€Å"In other words, identify the underlying benefit that each feature of a product or service provides to the prospect, because that’s what will prompt the purchase. This is one rule that always applies, except when it doesn’t.† One of the most repeated rules of writing compelling copy is to stress benefits, not features.   This is one rule that always applies,  except when it doesn’t. – Brian Clark of Copyblogger Our friends at the nutracuetical company fall into that â€Å"except when it doesn’t† category. They know the underlying benefit of taking extra vitamin C is reducing the duration of the common cold, but they can’t say that due to the regulations in place for their industry.   Ad agencies that work with pharmaceutical companies face a similar content challenge. They get to promote their products’ benefits, but they’re also required to rattle off all the potential side-effects (which often exceed the list of benefits). It’s that whole truth in advertising thing. If you’re a distiller of fine spirits, the â€Å"What’s a product without benefits?† question directly applies, as the implied benefit of pouring a glass of Scotch is to take the edge off, relax and alter your mood. At their core, these are implied health claims, which are off limits. And in most cases, the standard closing of â€Å"always drink responsibly† seems to directly compete with the fun-loving message from the rest of the ad.   So with all these rules and roadblocks, what should content marketers do in a heavily regulated industry? Well†¦ you must get creative. And study up. 3 Content Marketing Tips For Highly Regulated Industries

Summary Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 132

Summary - Essay Example With the diversification of learner enrolment, it is evident that the teaching processes also needed to change. The combination of the traditional learning and online teaching-blended learning- has proven useful for the century’s teaching (Poon, 2013). Despite the challenges that come with the blended learning especially when it comes to online learning, this form of learning has been termed cost effective as lots of materials are placed online, and can be utilized over years depending on their suitability. Learners’ satisfaction has also been a major benefit of this form of learning. Poon (2013) says that lots of learners showed perseverance and dedication in the learning process. Other displayed critical thinking skills as opposed to the ones who were simply exposed to face-to-face learning. Conclusively, it is justified to argue that online learning has been greatly beneficial to the learning process as it has greatly boosted the â€Å"traditional† learning. Online learning has presented opportunities to embrace technology in the learning