A winning content strategy in 3 easy stepsSo you’ve written an excellent blog complete with credible facts, eye-catching imagery and informative graphs. You’ve hit the publish button and shared the content on relevant social media sites. Now what? In an ideal world, the communication is a raging success – reaching all the right people at all the right times and converting those clicks to hard cash. But in the digital world, having compelling editorial and marketing presence on a website and social media sites is simply not enough. Nearly 99% of online content, no matter how brilliantly constructed remains anonymous to the world, unless it is made smart.

What is smart content? In the same way that smartphones, smart TVs and smart cities etc. have earned the title, content that uses technology to optimise output and efficiency is considered smart. In the words of Francois Nel, director of journalism leaders’ programme at Central Lancashire University: ‘I see “smart content” as social, measurable and audience-focused, rewarding for all involved and timely.’

For content to be ‘rewarding for all involved’ it has to reach the target audience, generate leads and translate to sales.

This whitepaper aims to inform you of the steps to engineer content using the right tools to help reach your target audience, while acquiring new customers and building brand engagement.

3 easy steps: Optimisation, Amplification, AnalysisLet’s start over: You’ve written an excellent blog complete with credible facts, eye-catching imagery and informative graphs. Now what?

1. Optimisation: Beyond creating and curating this content, you need to be ready to optimise it on the web. Your content needs to be easy for consumers and search engines to understand – and find. SEO helps search engine algorithms figure out why your content is relevant to your audience.

Cision’s social newsroom allows you to publish all your branded content in one place whether it’s press

releases, blog posts, videos or whitepapers. Search engine optimised with myriad social sharing options on every page, users will only have to hit ‘publish’ once for content to be seen, searched for and shared by the target customer.

Case in PointCorel Corporation, a world leader in the development of graphics and multimedia software has found Cision’s social newsroom provides the company with ‘a professional and modern looking hub to host content for journalists, bloggers, customers and partners.’ Daniel Donovan, European PR manager, Corel said: ‘PR has evolved beyond media relations so allowing interaction and dialogue with all our stakeholders is extremely important to us. The plug-ins to Cision’s social newsroom, being able to embed our Twitter feed, hosting shareable images and videos in the media bank and drawing-out key quotes are all excellent features.’

Copyright © Cision, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

www.cision.com 0800 358 311016-22 Baltic St West, London, EC1Y 0UL

Cision Whitepaper

Copyright © Cision, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

www.cision.com 0800 358 311016-22 Baltic St West, London, EC1Y 0UL

2. Amplification What is amplification? It is what you do once you’ve created, curated and optimised your content and you’re ready to share it. Many of you are already organically sharing your content and engaging with your audience on your social channels. But the scope here is limited to your social media network of followers and friends – never increasing or decreasing by a comparative amount. Investing in a content marketing strategy and outsourcing amplification will allow your content to include the mainstream press to your media mix, a critical component to expand and escalate the audience base.

For example, through Cision’s content marketing suite, customers can amplify their posts on premium news sites like The Telegraph, The Guardian and Daily Mail. Links to our client’s amplified content appear as recommendations on the web’s largest content publisher’s sites based on an algorithm that predicts and surfaces the content viewers are the most interested in reading and watching.

3. AnalysisMeasuring the results of your content marketing campaign is a critical step because it allows you to assess the outcome while also providing indicators and metrics to improve future campaigns. It also enables you to decide which key performance

indicators are best for your brand and tie in with your business objectives.

Customers of Cision’s content marketing suite are given metrics that tell them how people accessed their content, how many impressions and click-throughs the content received on the publisher network, and which content is driving the highest user engagement through social sharing.

So there you have it, a winning content marketing strategy in three simple steps. The benefits of adopting this strategy is not limited to immediate gains; it can fit well with your longer term business objectives, requiring fewer resources while maintaining fast turnaround times.

To find out how Cision can make it work for you, visit: www.cision.com/uk/products-and-services/content-marketing/ to request a short demo, or call us on 0800 358 3110.

Case in PointJay Baer, digital marketing strategist and founder of Convince & Convert, a marketing services firm, described the results from Cision’s amplification tool as ‘staggering and immediate.’ He said: ‘Once the RSS feed was uploaded to Cision, I started seeing clicks immediately. During this 16-day test period, Convince & Convert received 74,954 visits overall. The amplification program generated 8,373 of those visits (11.1%). That is traffic that I definitely would not have otherwise garnered.’

Case in PointIn August, St Mary’s University College in Twickenham, London entered clearing for the first time in several years and wanted to communicate tips and pointers to students who were yet to secure a place at university. They used this opportunity to try the content marketing platform and analyse the difference in response generated. A week after the content went live, Cision sent St Mary’s a detailed analytics report that incorporated all the statistics needed to understand how its content strategy performed, including numbers on visits and pageviews, referrals, downloads, impressions, clicks and shares. Cross-checked against the University College’s own performance results, Marina Boor, senior PR and marketing officer at the College said she was, ‘massively impressed.’ The verdict: ‘90% of the clicks received on the clearing post were from Cision– it works!’ she exclaimed.

Cision Whitepaper