Once just the language of click-bait masters and SEO specialists, an assortment of new web apps have emerged to break down some elements of the ever-evolving digital marketing enigma. Here, we’ve selected just five, but depending on your industry and your efforts, skill and goals, there are plenty more out there to be unearthed.
1. Answer the Public and search insights In any effective content marketing strategy, they key is to understand precisely what your target audience is searching for. From here, you can shape your content to best capture that audience. By knowing what questions people are actually asking, you can brainstorm rich, relatable topics and devise headlines that will satisfy and engage your audience. Using the auto suggest results from Google and Bing (you know, when you start typing a search query into Google and it tries to finish your sentence), Answer the Public has unearthed an untapped resource and a ‘goldmine for understanding consumer mindset, motivations and emotions.’ More than other keyword research tools, Answer the Public is essentially an automated autocomplete tool. Its algorithm will do all the hard work, and gather and collate the search insight for you. Simply type your keyword into its seeker search bar (the seeker is a white-bearded agency creative in a grey cable-knit with an odd sounding northern English accent). From there, Answer the Public will produce a one-pager of suggested content topics and titles rendered in a downloadable image. For tips on how to make the most of Answer the Public, check out this guide by Bespoke Digital.
2. Content title generators More content marketing tools. Creating clickable titles that are relevant and aren’t offensively obvious click-bait isn’t easy. Title generators (there are a few) will not give you the most accurate title (a suggestion for this article was ‘How Hollywood Got Digital Marketing So Wrong’). They will, however, at least provide insight and know-how for writing headings that actually capture online eyeballs and clicks. They may even offer up inspiration for making your content a little more buzz-worthy (I considered readjusting this piece to be analysis of Kim and Kanye’s mastery of digital media, branding and celebrity—more on that another time perhaps). Potent’s Content Title Generator is probably the best all-rounder, but you may also like to try SEOProfessor’s version, which will spin a few different options for you. There’s also a version from Up-Worthy—the crew that basically invented click-bait—which randomly pulls from its own thoroughly researched viral headers, with the idea that you can rework to fit your own content.
3. Website audits SEO spiders and website crawlers sound like some kind of deathly skull and cross bones internet virus unleashed from the nether regions of the dark web. Actually though, they’re friendly critters that may be able to provide relatively digestible SEO insight to improve your site’s search listing. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows you to ‘crawl’ your website’s URLs to fetch key elements to analyse onsite SEO. You can download for free, or purchase a yearly licence with additional advanced features. Primarily, the tool finds broken links on your site (those 404 pages), but it will also analyse page titles and meta data, discover duplicate content, and quite a bit more. Basically the spider will pinpoint all of the leaky spots in your site that may be preventing it from ranking better on Google. It also integrates with Google Analytics. Probably one of the more advanced tools on our list, but Screaming Frog has written up this pretty comprehensive user guide to get you started.
4. Facebook Insights From the pool of social media tools on offer—Facebook Insights for business pages may be, well, one of the most insightful out there. By toggling through the options, you can unearth very specific demographic information about your audience of likers. And it’s free. For example, the ‘local’ tab will show you the age, gender, and home location (are they at home or travelling) within 50 metres of your business. You can also see at what time of day the most people are closest to your business. In the ‘people’ tab you can see the gender, age and location of your fans, as well as the people your most recent posts have reached. This is the kind of rich data that will help you frame campaigns and create content your audience will love.
5. Native advertising The concept of native advertising, or paid content on a publisher’s platform, is anything but new. Separate from your own content marketing efforts, native advertising is an article produced and published by a publisher, that matches its editorial standards and audience expectations, while also promoting your business, brand or product. For example, a suburb guide, written and published by Broadsheet Sydney, on behalf of RealEstate.com.au. It’s an article that promotes property searches for the RealEstate.com.au, but is also a piece of content that Broadsheet’s audience would expect to read on their platform. Here, King Content spells out why native advertising can be an important part of your content marketing strategy. Moreover—2016 pretty much flat out proved that people are reading news online, and most specifically from their Facebook feeds. A number of web apps and platforms have been recently released to assist publishers in reaching and holding onto their online readers, creating seamless online and in-app mobile reading. When searching for a publisher to partner with for native advertising, check to see if they are promoting their articles with Facebook Instant Articles, using enhanced mobile experience tools like Google AMP, or are listed on news aggregator platforms like Apple News.
6. Kargo Built off some very sound research on the power of editorial environments online (editorial, as opposed to social or search)—residents of Reservoir by The Office Space Kargo have developed a fine-tuned, results-driven mobile advertising approach. Built off an invite-only, highly curated partnership network of heavyweight publishers like The New York Times, as well as a host of local Australian publications, Kargo’s advertisements outshine spend within Facebook or Google. Their global team is heavy on creative too—so as well as being thoroughly researched and intuitive, Kargo’s mobile campaigns are rich, vivid and memorable.
Want to learn more? Join us at Insight by The Office Space this month as we discuss the power of branding for small businesses with a three-piece panel of experts. Monday 24 April, 5.30pm at Golden Age Cinema and Bar. Get Your tickets here.
