Adding value, humor, and personal touches to your holiday content strategy can boost revenue during the peak holiday season and strengthen your relationship with your customers.

The end of the year is stressful enough. Start your holiday content marketing strategy for this year right now and have one less thing to worry about when the holidays roll around.

We’re giving you a compilation of 12 of the latest in content marketing trends, exercises to brainstorm your holiday content, and actionable tasks to get you well on your way to a successful holiday content marketing season. Bookmark this page so you can refer back to it later!

Let’s get started!

1. It’s the Most Wonderful Time of Year… for Content

So, when does the holiday season for businesses actually start? Well, it’s a bit of a moving target. That’s why it’s in your best interest to plan your holiday content in advance so you can be ready to publish once the timing is right.

The good news is, you’re here! You’re already thinking about the holidays, which is a great place to start.

You wouldn’t wait until the day before a sale to send an email about it, and you can’t expect to rank in SEO with your content overnight. By starting today, you’ll have a wealth of holiday content ideas “in the bank” once it’s time to go live.

Not sure where to begin? Don’t reinvent the wheel! Instead, take a look back at your holiday content from last year. What can you learn?

If you had content that performed well, maybe it only needs to be tweaked a bit to be updated. Use a holiday content calendar to get up to date on the trending keywords for the year. Of course, maybe there are some pieces from last season that you’d rather forget. You can learn from those, too!

Here’s what you can do:

Audit your existing holiday content for what can be recycled. If this is your first year creating holiday content, look through some of your competitors’ content from previous years to see where you can draw inspiration.

2. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Don’t Get Lost in the Noise

There’s no escaping the behemoth of the holiday season: Black Friday. Love it or hate it, it’s become a necessary component of your content marketing strategy. But with all the competition for your target audience’s attention, how do you ensure you get a piece of the proverbial pie?

1. Have a compelling offer. If you’re B2C, chances are you’ve already got at least one offer you’re building your Black Friday/Cyber Monday content around. But if you’re B2B, the picture might be a little less clear. Rather than a discount, consider whether there is something you can add that comes at little or no cost to you and your team. Can you bundle a product or service? Offer a free consultation? Get creative here.
2. Email early and often. According to Gartner, the typical B2B buying group consists of about six to 10 decision-makers. Factor this into your content strategy—you may want to start planting seeds for Black Friday a few months prior. But starting a few weeks in advance works well for B2B and B2C, as it offers more opportunities to resend. There’s no hard and fast rule for the best time to send a Black Friday email. Just know that there’s a lot of content coming at your customers.
3. Drive urgency. Black Friday/Cyber Monday offers are only available for a limited time. Take advantage of it! Decide whether you’ll offer your deal all weekend or just on Friday (or Monday), and plan your content accordingly. Use countdown timers and reminder emails. Pull out all the stops to drive that FOMO!

Here’s what you can do:

Brainstorm your compelling offer. Using the guidelines above, what can you offer your potential customers?

If you already have your compelling offer, start planning when you’ll send emails to your list. Begin with Cyber Monday and work backward. How far in advance will you start teasing your offer?

3. Creating Inclusive Content During the Holidays

It’s Marketing 101. “Know your audience.” You’ve done your homework, created buyer personas, and know exactly where they hang out and how to talk to them.

Year after year, businesses throw all that hard work out the window in the name of “tradition.”

Okay, that might be a bit extreme, but the fact is that now more than ever, your potential customers are looking at your holiday messaging with an eye towards inclusivity. So what does that mean?

Just because something’s worked for years doesn’t mean it’s reflective of the sentiment today. Go through your previous years’ campaigns with a fine-tooth comb. Have you been a bit myopic in your approach?

What feelings are you trying to evoke? What imagery are you using? Are these representative of all the people who would invest in your product?

Here’s what you can do:

Read this in-depth article on inclusivity during the holidays. Following the steps outlined there, begin thinking about your holiday messaging and how it will resonate with your specific audience(s).

What changes can you make to be more inclusive with your holiday content? And how will these guidelines impact the holiday content you create from here on out?

4. Holiday Content Gifts: It’s the Value that Counts

With all the sales, special offers, and general year-end craziness, it’s easy to become singularly focused on content promotion during the holiday season. But think about this — you wouldn’t promote like crazy any other time of the year, so what makes the holidays any different?

The content you share during the holidays can help deepen your relationship with your existing and potential customers. Maintaining a consistent, even balance between promotional and value-driven content will build on the trust you’ve established with your audience throughout the year.

Think about how you already add value to your content and ask yourself how you can expand upon that with holiday messaging.

Here’s what you can do:

Come up with at least three value-driven pieces of content for your holiday content campaign.

5. The Personal Touch that Makes All the Difference

The holiday season is a terrific time to peel back the curtain and show your audience who you are!

Roll up your sleeves and get creative. Ask your employees to write letters to Santa or share what they’re grateful for this season. Share pictures of your team decorating the offices or behind-the-scenes videos from your holiday celebrations.

And a heartfelt message from the CEO can go a long way to building that deep personal connection a customer feels to your company.

Here’s what you can do:

Come up with at least three pieces of personal holiday content showcasing your team, company holiday traditions, and favorite recipes. You name it! Really have fun here. These personal messages don’t have to be super-polished, so let your imagination run wild!

6. Joy to the World: Keep it Light During the Holidays

The holidays evoke a lot of emotions, most of them warm and fuzzy. There’s a lot of temptation to lean into that with your holiday content.

And while there’s nothing wrong with heartwarming content, it’s important to remember that the holiday season can be difficult for many people. Adding fun and humor into the mix is a great way to endear yourself to your audience (with the added bonus of being infinitely shareable).

Want a holiday humor double-whammy? Capitalize on nostalgia.

Google did this to great effect with its “Home Alone Again” campaign.  This well-known Christmas classic is modernized to reflect modern technology, which showcases the company’s product while creating a memorable (and shareable!) piece of content.

You don’t have to create a big-budget short film to impact your holiday content. Work in tandem with the personal content we discussed above. These fun and funny pieces of content can work best when they’re raw and unpolished.

So what holiday classics or traditions do you think could use some lampooning? What will resonate strongly with your audience? And what is feasible with your resources at hand?

Here’s what you can do:

Brainstorm at least three pieces of humorous holiday content (bonus points if they incorporate nostalgia!). Song parodies, awkward family photos, silly video sketches …the sky’s the limit!

7. Gratitude is Always On-Trend

The end of the year is a sentimental time. And the theme of gratitude extends well beyond Thanksgiving itself, weaving its way through all the season’s holidays. So while it may seem cliché to give thanks for your potential and existing customers, that’s no reason not to!

Holiday content trends may come and go, but showing gratitude for your customers and community will never go out of style. People always love to hear they’re appreciated or have made an impact. How will you show your gratitude and appreciation through your content?

Taking it a step further, you may wish to do an entire gratitude campaign. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, you really can’t be TOO thankful. The only word of caution here is that your displays of appreciation must be authentic.

So get personal! Some examples include:

• Creating hand-written notes or letters
• Filming heartfelt video messages from your team
• Providing a special offer or discount code for your loyal customers
• Shouting out your customers or members of your audience on social
• Hosting a giveaway

Here’s what you can do:

Come up with at least three pieces of content showing gratitude for your customers, or outline what a gratitude campaign might look like for your business.

8. Don’t Just Give Thanks. Give Back

Despite the obvious commercialism of the holidays, it is also the time of year when people focus on others. It’s the season of giving, not the season of keeping.

If you’re not very vocal about your charitable outreach throughout the rest of the year, now is a perfect time to incorporate it into your content. Does your business partner with an organization (either local or national) to do good in the community? For example, HVAC company Day and Night, located in Phoenix, AZ, gave back by donating A/C units to the Arizona Humane Society.

How does your company give back? And why is it important to you? If you don’t have an ongoing partnership with a charitable cause or organization, there’s no better time than the holidays to get involved. But, as we mentioned, in regard to gratitude, it must be authentic.

Which causes are aligned with the core values of your business? Are there organizations that are important to the members of your team? In what ways can you make an impact, first during the holidays and then beyond?

Here’s what you can do:

Either ideate three pieces of content around your company’s charitable outreach during the holidays or identify a cause or organization with whom you can authentically align in the short and long term.

9. Spotify Does It. Why Not You? The Year in Review

Sure, lots of brands do a year in review. Maybe you’re already doing one. Or maybe you internally groan every time another one lands in your inbox.

But the year in review is a fantastic opportunity to connect with your customers in a meaningful way. You might want to reconsider if this isn’t part of your holiday content plan.

So how can you make sure yours is resonating with your audience? Here are some pointers:

1. Make it about them. Just like the gratitude content we’ve explored, your year in the review should make your customers and audience feel appreciated. People want to feel like they’re part of something or that they’ve contributed in some way.
2. Get visual. Even if you’ve got a lot to say, break it up with GIFs, photos, or infographics. Blog posts with images get more views, and imagery is more likely to keep your audience engaged when reading a long-form email. And people love to share infographics.
3. Know what story you’re trying to tell. As with all good marketing, you want to make sure you’re telling a compelling story. Take your audience on a journey that they’re excited to be part of. Set up where you’re headed in the next year, and invite folks to come along!

Here’s what you can do:

Brainstorm your year in review. Ask yourself these questions and see what types of content you can create from the answers.

• What are some highlights from the last year that you’d like to share?
• How can you make your content focused on the customer?
• How will you make it interesting and fun?

10. Don’t Make Your Audience Find You — Find Them

Like the rest of the year, a diversified content strategy is the best way to ensure you reach the biggest possible audience. The people you reach with your content will have different interests, so they’ll likely spend time on different platforms.

When you think about your content creation, you should plan to repurpose your pieces of content for maximum impact.

Just because something makes a great blog article doesn’t mean it can’t work on Instagram. A wealth of content across platforms helps you rank higher in SEO (which makes it easier for your ideal customer to find you!). But not just any content. Quality, unique, and brand-consistent content.

This is the content strategy you should employ all year long, and that advice remains true during the holidays.

The good news is that you can easily turn one piece of content into multiple. A video for YouTube can become several for Instagram, an email can become a blog post (or an infographic), and a pillar post can become an ebook. And that’s just for starters!

Identify where you’re likely to capture the attention of your potential customers and plan your content accordingly.

Here’s what you can do:

Revisit the content ideas you’ve created so far and see how they can be repurposed for different content platforms. How can you turn one piece of content into three? (Or more!)

11. Consistency is Key, Even During the Holidays

Other than your product or service, the most important component of your marketing is your brand. Your voice. You use the overall package (or gift wrap, if you prefer) to present your product or service to the world.

And, of course, your brand doesn’t happen by accident. It’s developed over time through testing and thorough research. But once it’s decided, you stick with it, right? Because your brand is critical to ensuring your customers’ trust.

You’ve spent all that time and energy (and probably a couple of dollars) to establish your brand in the eyes of your audience. So even though the holidays present an opportunity to reach your audience in a fun, new way, a consistent brand presence is very important.

But what does that mean?

The content you create during the holidays should feel the same as the content you create throughout the year. A disconnect will feel jarring to your audience and erode that trust you’ve worked so hard to build.

Is there anything more iconic than the red Starbucks cups? As a holiday campaign, it works because it still feels like Starbucks: simple and classic.

Here’s what you can do:

Spend some time thinking about how you want your holiday messaging to look and feel.

• What are some of the key tenets of your brand?
• How can you weave those through your holiday content?
• What are some of the colors and images you can use to spread holiday cheer while maintaining your brand voice?

12. Make Your List, Check it Twice: Putting It All Together

Here it is, the home stretch! If you’ve been following along, you should have a ton of content ideas to safely get you through the holiday season. You know how you want your holiday content to look and feel. It’s time to start plugging these into your content calendar.

Starting with the end of the year and working backward, create a rotation for your heartwarming, personal, humorous, and promotional content. Remember to add more value than you sell.

Here’s what you can do:

Plug your content ideas into your holiday content calendar. Then commit to the date by which this content will be written, created, and delivered. If you’re struggling to ideate content, download our FREE “10 Proven Content Ideation Techniques Expert Marketers Use” and brainstorm some awesome holiday content ideas.

Wrapping It Up

There’s no better time than the holidays to bring the world a little closer together. Here at ClearVoice, we are passionate about helping brands create better content because we believe helping people engage better with one another is a path to creating a better world. We hope you’ll continue to refer to this holiday content creation guide as you build out your marketing strategy for the holiday season.

And with all this new holiday content brewing, you might not be thinking about the other content needs of your business right now. Or maybe the idea of a holiday content haul has you reaching for the eggnog. If that holiday to-do list is looking a little daunting, we hope you’ll talk to us about how we can help.

When you create a custom content plan with ClearVoice, your dedicated team continues to ideate and create content for you so you can focus on whatever else needs your attention. Ready to cross-content creation off your wish list? Talk to a specialist today!

The post 12 Smart Holiday Content Strategies to Implement This Year appeared first on ClearVoice.

Proofreading is the final stage of the editing process before you publish your content. It is where you catch the spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes that can impact your credibility with your audience.

The term “proofreading” is frequently used interchangeably with “copy editing,” but while copy editing can include proofreading, proofreading is not copy editing (more on that in a bit). Proofreading refers to the process of reviewing the physical copy – or proof – sent by a publisher before going to print as a final chance to catch any errors that cannot be fixed after the fact.

Why is proofreading so important?

The internet is riddled with proofreading fails. Certainly, mistakes can — and do — happen; trust takes a long time to build and can be eroded instantly. Publishing content with typos and bad grammar sends a message to your audience that you are either unwilling to invest in quality content or simply don’t care about the quality of content you publish.

Neither of those conclusions will inspire much confidence in your brand with people you’re hoping will invest in your product or service.

If you’re reading this, you understand the importance of putting out quality content as part of your overall marketing strategy. Simply put, your audience will not take your content (and, by extension, your brand) seriously if it’s got errors that could easily be avoided by having someone do a final review before you hit “publish.”

And what’s the point of investing money in content if it’s not going to be top quality?

What’s the difference between proofreading and copy editing?

Some copy editors will proofread as part of their process, but strictly speaking, copy editing is not just looking for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. Copy editing ensures that your brand voice and tone are reflected in your content. It improves story flow, looks for redundancies and ways to streamline, and tightens up the overall quality of the writing itself.

Since so much content is published online these days — versus actually in print — proofreading and copy editing have come to mean the same thing. However, the nuance is important to understand, especially if you have different types of editors as part of your team.

How do you proofread content?

Having a rock-solid grasp of style guides, grammar, and punctuation is critical. But beyond that, here are some best practices to help beef up your proofreading skills:

• Read Aloud. If it doesn’t sound right when you read it out loud, it won’t read right to your audience.
• Reverse Reading. Start from the end and work your way back line by line. This interrupts the part of your brain that wants to scan the passage, which could lead to missing errors.
• Take a Break. Come back to your editing with fresh eyes and you’re more likely to find errors you would otherwise have missed.
• Print it Out. In a different visual context, errors appear more easily.
• Focus on One Thing at a Time. Tackle your proofreading in stages. For example, look for punctuation errors during one read, and then focus on word choice in the next.
• Practice Makes Perfect. As with most things in life, you can’t expect to be an expert right off the bat. Build your skills with repetition.

Should you hire a proofreader?

Whether you outsource your proofreading or have someone else on your team review your content before you hit “publish”, it is imperative to have an objective pair of eyes on anything you put in front of your audience. Anyone who’s written their own content knows you shouldn’t be your own editor. You’re too close to it (even if you’re not sentimental about it).

Of course, you know what you meant when you wrote it, but that doesn’t mean an audience will. And not all great writers are great editors! (That’s nothing to be embarrassed about, by the way.)

There’s a reason why editors exist. It’s a completely different skill set. And even though there are “smart” tools to help catch many simple fixes, nothing beats the human touch.

Get Help With Proofreading Content Today

ClearVoice has a Talent Network of over 200,000 vetted freelancers in 200+ industries, and that includes skilled editors and proofreaders. But more than that, with ClearVoice as your managed content solution we’ll deliver publish-ready content to suit your needs and your resources.

There will be no more copyediting or proofreading — just quality, error-free content. Let us take content production off your plate so that you can focus on your brand and your customers.

Ready to take your content to the next level? Talk to a content strategist today!

The post Proofreading appeared first on ClearVoice.

Not to be confused with proofreading, copy editing is the process by which an editor reviews a piece of content for grammar, punctuation, and spelling, as well as brand voice, tone, and overall story flow.

Depending on the publication, multiple style guides may also be in place — slightly differing in voice and tone from content platform to content platform — and a copy editor ensures that the style of the piece remains consistent with the established brand guidelines.

Why is copy editing so important?

First and foremost, copy editing is important because, well, the internet never forgets. One little editing faux pas and you could be your target audience’s favorite joke — and not in a good way — for months or years to come. While mistakes can and do happen, you can guard yourself from the ire of the internet by utilizing a copy editor for your content.

Secondly, brand trust and loyalty are built with your audience over time. But they are both fragile, and it doesn’t take much to erode them. Content that’s littered with typos and bad grammar/punctuation sends the message to your audience that you’re not willing to take the time and/or invest the money to make sure you’re putting your best content foot forward. If that’s how you approach the content you put out into the world, how is your audience supposed to believe you’ve invested time, money, and care into your product or service?

You can’t build trust and loyalty in your brand without consistency. This comes through in your brand voice and tone, which a copy editor ensures stays consistent throughout all the content you publish.

And thirdly, it’s always important to have an objective set of eyes on anything you choose to put out into the world. (We’ll get into that more below.) Just because you, the author, know what you intended when you wrote that piece of content doesn’t mean the average reader will pick up what you were putting down.

What are some tips for copy editing?

You should already have established some editorial and brand guidelines for your content, so you’ll want to be extremely familiar with those before editing anything. Beyond that, here are some helpful best practices when it comes to copy editing: 

1. Avoid the passive tense. Active tense is exactly what it sounds like — it takes action! You’ll sound confident, and your content will be much easier to read.
2. Edit backward. Start with the last sentence and work backward line by line. This is a handy trick for forcing your brain to actually read what’s in front of you rather than scanning (which is the brain’s natural default setting). It makes you far less likely to miss errors.
3. Be concise. Short, easy-to-read sentences are far more likely to engage readers and keep them on the page. (It also helps with SEO!)
4. Be consistent with stylization. Once again, consistency is key… especially if you’re working with a team of freelancers to generate your content. Your style guide is your friend here.

Why should you hire a copy editor? Can’t you just edit it yourself?

In short, no. Or at least, we strongly advise against it. It is near-impossible to be objective about your own work, and even the most detail-oriented writer is certain to make mistakes from time to time. 

Hiring an editor — whether full-time or freelance — means you’re investing in quality assurance. When your content is error-free and polished, it shows a commitment to providing high-quality content to your audience. That establishes your brand’s credibility, helping you stand out. 

An editor for hire gives you an objective pair of eyes that ensures your content’s message is landing correctly and accurately. They maintain consistency across all your content channels, aligning your messaging with your brand. 

Finally, hiring a freelance editor can be a smart, cost-effective solution to help your business. They add that extra layer of professionalism that ensures revisions are done correctly the first time, ultimately saving you time and money. Who doesn’t want to break free from the exhausting back-and-forth revision loop?

Get Started With a ClearVoice Copy Editor

At ClearVoice, we know how important finding the right freelance editor is to your content’s success. Our content writing solutions include the industry’s best editors for hire to help produce top-tier content every time.

Our Talent Network of over 200,000 vetted freelancers in 200+ industries includes not just content creators but skilled copy editors as well. ClearVoice talent managers manually vet every editor for hire who enters our network, confirming their work, credentials, and viability.

By partnering with ClearVoice, you can fully focus on driving your brand’s success. Ready to get started? Talk to a content specialist today!

The post Copy Editing appeared first on ClearVoice.

A content mission statement is your content strategy “north star.” Your Big Why. It is a statement you craft with your sales and marketing teams to ensure that all of the content you create is in service of not only your company mission but also your sales and marketing objectives. It will inform all of your content decisions and help you build your content strategy.

Why is having a content mission statement so important?

Without a content strategy, you’ll only be publishing content for the sake of publishing content. That can lead to content that is, at best, inconsistent and not aligned with your brand and, at worst, runs the risk of alienating your target audience. But it’s not enough to know what content you’re creating, when, and how.

You have to know why.

Of course, you’re creating content because everyone’s creating content, and you have to stay relevant. But is your content intended to inform? Educate? Entertain? And why is that your intent?

Your content — and by extension, your content strategy — will not be effective if you don’t know what you hope to achieve with it. As an example, what are your sales goals for this quarter? How can your content support that? And how can your content provide value to your target audience in such a way that it also supports your company’s mission and vision?

How do you craft your content mission statement?

Much like your company’s mission statement, you’ll start off by asking yourself some important questions.

• What is the company’s mission? The company vision?
• Who are you trying to reach (buyer personas)?
• What business goals will you address with your content?
• What are your content objectives?

When you’ve compiled the answers to these, you can use them to pull together your content mission statement. (And remember, mission and vision are your micro and macro, respectively. Your mission is what you do today to serve the overall vision or big picture.)

From there, you’ll want to share it with your sales and marketing teams to ensure alignment. Get feedback and make any necessary tweaks. As you start to receive data from your content, you may need to update your content strategy, but never lose sight of your why.

Marketing — and in particular, content marketing — is an iterative process. But as long as your mission guides you, you can make decisions that support your brand and goals.

What’s the difference between a company mission statement and a content mission statement?

Your company’s mission statement will help you craft your content mission statement, but the content mission statement serves a different purpose: to inform your content strategy.

• Your company’s mission statement is the company’s Big Why.
• Your content mission statement is your content’s Big Why.
• And your content strategy is the What, When, and How.

Can ClearVoice help with my content mission statement?

You bet! With ClearVoice as your managed content solution, you can turn over the keys to your content castle and trust us to take care of your content needs. Our managed content creation and expert team can help you craft the perfect statements that boost your brand’s authority and awareness. Not only that, we’ll also create content that serves your mission and vision while helping you crush your content goals.

Your content plan is completely unique to your brand and your resources, so you’re never paying for content you don’t need or won’t use. All while being brand-aligned and SEO-friendly.

Don’t sweat the big stuff! Let ClearVoice take content off your plate so you can focus on what you do best — taking care of your customers. Talk to a content strategist today!

The post Content Mission Statement appeared first on ClearVoice.

Content accessibility is the practice of ensuring that the content you create — across all platforms — is not just accessible to able-bodied individuals but also inclusive of individuals with disabilities.

The ADA defines disability as “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment.” The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), advocates for accessible content in digital spaces, providing “strategies, standards, and supporting resources” to help “make the web more accessible to people with disabilities.”

The goal of content accessibility — and especially content accessibility in digital spaces — is to ensure that all users of all abilities have equal access and opportunity to interact with your content.

Why is content accessibility so important?

First and foremost, it’s considerate! You and/or the people who create your content may not be individuals with disabilities, but you can bet that a not-insignificant portion of your audience does navigate their day-to-day lives with some form of impairment. By only creating content for able-bodied individuals, you could limit the number of people who can see (or have access to) your brand and content.

Secondly, it’s the law. Content accessibility is a requirement for many digital experiences, and not complying with those requirements could mean that you’re leaving yourself open for accessibility-related lawsuits. (Think: costly litigation.)

How do you make your content accessible?

You can create accessible content by utilizing these tips:

1. Understand your audience. This is true of all content creation, but especially so when you’re focused on making your content accessible. Conduct some research to see what people are saying about your brand and others (remembering that negative feedback is also useful). Are there gaps in your content and accessibility?
2. Include individuals with disabilities in your buyer personas. If your personas are not inclusive, the content you create will very likely fail to consider accessibility.
3. Consult guidelines that establish industry standards. Style guides will help you adhere to these standards, but you may also wish to look for large brands whose style guides specifically address content accessibility.
4. Create content designed for assistive technologies (AT). Many individuals with disabilities utilize tools such as screen readers and communication programs to help them access content.

Will content accessibility affect your SEO?

Absolutely not! As it turns out, both humans and the machines they use to assist them appreciate content that is easy to read and navigate. Be sure the content you create is clear, concise, and written in plain language. (Avoid the temptation to load your content with jargon!)

Additionally, you can satisfy both SEO and accessibility requirements by following these guidelines:

• Using headings. Proper headings help both screen readers and search engines understand the hierarchy of the content you’ve presented. Make sure they’re clear and descriptive.
• Implement alt-text on images. Bots can’t “see” images, and neither can visual AT. By adding titles and image descriptions, you can make your images more accessible and SEO-friendly.
• Link text and labels that clearly state intent. A “click here!” might make for a punchy CTA, but a link labeled “register for the workshop” makes it clear what you want the reader (or AT) to do.
• Avoid abbreviations where possible. At the very least, be sure to write out the whole phrase and include the abbreviation in parentheses immediately following.
• Include captions on video content. Captions provide assistance to hearing-impaired viewers while also facilitating indexing on search engines.

Accessibility is not just good manners; It’s good business

If you’ve never been unable to enjoy a piece of content because of a physical limitation — or been denied help or an accommodation to make your experience easier — consider yourself lucky. That is not the way the entire human population experiences the world. And you wouldn’t want to inadvertently exclude someone from the benefits your product or service provides because they can’t access information about it, would you?

When done well, accessibility only adds to the quality of your content. You can trust a managed content solution like ClearVoice to provide good content accessibility.

Embrace accessibility and start reaching more people with your content! Talk to a ClearVoice content strategist today to learn how your content can become more accessible, rank higher, and generate more revenue.

The post Content Accessibility appeared first on ClearVoice.

“Generative AI” is an all-encompassing term that describes the type of artificial intelligence (AI) technology that can create content based on information provided in a prompt. This content can include writing, imagery, and audio.

Why is generative AI so important to your content production?

If you haven’t heard about generative AI for content production by now, you haven’t been paying attention. Everyone is using it (including your competitors), so if you haven’t started exploring how generative AI can change the game for your content production, you may end up getting left behind.

When applied correctly, generative AI will drastically reduce the time it takes to create content. While we don’t recommend utilizing generative AI as a replacement for human content writers (more on that below), it is a handy tool for other areas of your content strategy. These can include:

• Creating content briefs
• Creating outlines
• Content optimization for SEO
• Content ideation

How and when should you use generative AI in your content marketing?

While we cannot overstate the importance of human oversight when it comes to utilizing generative AI, it can absolutely find its way into many areas of your overall content marketing strategy. Generative AI will increase productivity by churning out anything that you might consider a “first pass.” It still needs to be edited and fact-checked. But that initial draft will be in hand in seconds. (And, of course, any writer will tell you there’s nothing scarier than staring at a blank page. Blank pages, be gone!)

AI can assist with your content personalization efforts by generating buyer personas and ideating content for each one. 

You can leverage AI in your SEO strategy as well. AI can generate long-tail keywords, local SEO, and alternative keyword options through data analysis. AI can pull from its wealth of past data to make predictions about trends, which is invaluable for your content strategy.

In terms of imagery, generative AI is great for creating storyboards, infographics, and video effects. 

It is a machine-learning tool, so the more you use it — and the more you teach it — the more effective it will become. You can train AI to understand your brand voice and tone and then use it in your content audits to ensure all of your published content is consistent.

It’s also important to understand when *not* to use generative AI in your content.

Generally speaking, AI’s “hot off the presses“ content is low-quality, with poor word choices and running the risk of being repetitive. It’s best to leave the work to the humans when it involves:

• Emotions and storytelling
• First-hand experience and perspective
• Subject matter expertise
• Sensitive or controversial topics
• Final editing
• Highly customized designs
• Real-time engagement
• A sense of humor (no, really)

Can you use generative AI to publish a ton of articles on your blog?

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Google’s algorithm is based on an E-E-A-T model, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. One thing generative AI-created content lacks is experience. The human element. Emotions, empathy, the real, lived journey that every human being can relate to. 

Generative AI does not understand human emotion or nuance. As a result, the content it creates is not the same quality that will resonate with your dedicated audience.

At the end of the day, search engines are valuable to users because they provide them with useful answers to their questions. If AI-generated content is not delivering a valuable experience to your users, your ranking will reflect that.

Simply put, quality trumps quantity every time.

Overwhelmed? Don’t be.

It’s a brave new world, and technology is advancing daily. It’s not your job to be an expert in generative AI and how it can transform your content — it’s ours!

At ClearVoice, our team follows a comprehensive process designed to make the most of generative AI with a human touch. With ClearVoice as your managed AI solution, you can be sure that your content is:

• Unique, insightful, and brand-aligned
• Factually accurate, verified by experts
• Quality-assured by our human writers and editors
• Compliance-reviewed, based on your needs
• Scalable up or down as needed by your team

Ready to get started with generative AI? Talk to a ClearVoice content strategist today.

The post Generative AI appeared first on ClearVoice.

In short, a content refresh is exactly what it sounds like. It is the stage of your content audit immediately following the stage where you’ve identified which content needs to be updated.

Rather than creating new content to fill content gaps or archiving old content that is no longer relevant or brand-appropriate, the content refresh consists of updating content that could still perform well with just a little love. 

This could look like: 

• Adding new information
• Replacing outdated info with the latest updates
• Enriching it with new media content
• Optimizing it with more relevant keywords
• Updating links

For example, you might have expanded your service offering to include several value-added services. So, you’d want to update your service page to reflect that accurately. Or you might have a new case study supporting an existing blog post. In some cases, simply adding relevant keywords to the content or updating it with supporting imagery could do the trick. There are also WordPress plugins, like image and SEO optimizers, that help you speed up the content refresh process.

Why Refreshing Content is Important

Refreshing content serves a number of purposes, but first and foremost, it reassures your audience that they are reading content that is relevant to their current needs. While your content may be entertaining, in many cases your reader has stumbled upon your content in hopes of solving a problem. Keeping your content up with the times establishes you as an authority in your industry and a trusted source for your audience.

Your content refresh can also:

• Improve the user experience (UX)
• Helps your SEO efforts
• Improves overall website quality

How Often You Should Refresh Content

The short answer is, it depends. Here at ClearVoice, we recommend conducting a content audit every six months, but in reality, you should update your old content as often and as consistently as possible.

The recommended frequency also depends on the scale of your website. If your website is massive (containing thousands of pages), you should consider regular pruning and refreshing every two or three months. Mid-scale websites can rely on a quarterly session, whereas smaller websites may only need content refreshes once every five or six months.

As for blog posts and other resource-type content, be sure to remove any page discussing topics that no longer garner interest. For example, a blog post about using the Vine app will no longer make sense since the app has long been obsolete. Alternatively, consider archiving pages about topics that you’ve written better content about.

Pro Tip: Don’t forget to redirect visitors to a new page that contains relevant information. You don’t want to ruin the user experience by having visitors land on a non-existent page.

Should You Refresh or Archive the Content? 

Your content audit will guide your decision-making here, but there are some governing principles you can employ:

1. Have a clear purpose for your content. Ask the below questions about each piece of content you review. If you can’t provide clear answers, it might be better to archive the content than to try and revive it.
   1. What is the intention behind this piece of content?
   2. What is the value it adds to the digital space?
   3. Are you just adding to the noise?
   4. Are you sharing something with a specific goal in mind?
2. Make data-driven decisions. Before making substantial changes, dive deep into your content’s performance data. Look at the relevant KPIs to each piece of content to help understand which are driving engagement and conversions and which are lagging. Some top metrics to look at could be:
   1. Time on page
   2. Page views
   3. Click-through rate
   4. Conversion rate
   5. Bounce rate
3. Make sure your content is about the customer. If your content is lacking engagement or completely falling flat, check to see if it’s about you or your customers. If it is about you, take the original primary purpose you came up with for your content and see how you can relate it more to your customers’ wants and needs. The spotlight should be on them.

Get Started Refreshing Your Content Today

Having an objective (and expert) set of eyes on your content can take all the guesswork out of what can be a tedious and time-consuming process.

If you need help refreshing one piece or one thousand (or creating new content), we’re here to help. At ClearVoice, we have a Talent Network of 4,000+ top-tier, experienced editors, writers, and SEO specialists who can take your content to the next level.

Let us refresh your content so you can start ranking higher while you focus on what matters most: your brand and your customers. Talk to a content specialist today to get started!

The post Content Refresh appeared first on ClearVoice.

Content personalization is developing and delivering targeted content to specific groups within your wider audience, typically using demographic, behavioral, and socioeconomic data.

In content marketing, a strong content personalization strategy goes beyond just using a customer’s first name or making a simple recommendation. It’s about using an individual’s preferences, behaviors, and interests to craft tailored content that resonates and engages with them. That deeper level of engagement should ultimately lead to increased brand loyalty, trust, and conversions.

Why Content Personalization is Important

Now more than ever, customers want to feel like they have a relationship with the brands they invest in. And relationships are a two-way street! It’s not enough to tell them about you. You want to make your content feel like it’s about them. Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of a “Dear Sir/Madam” email understands how off-putting impersonal content feels. 

According to HubSpot, 58 percent of users are more likely to convert when they receive content based on their previous behavior. Customers are more likely to engage and make purchasing decisions when they feel heard, understood, and valued.

Some of the key benefits of using personalized content in your marketing strategy include:

• Enhanced engagement: Personalized content captivates audiences, resulting in higher readership, social sharing, and better retention
• Improved customer relationships: Personalization fosters deeper customer connections by creating a positive brand experience and cultivating long-lasting relationships
• Increased sales: Businesses can drive targeted website traffic, generate qualified leads, and boost sales through effective lead nurturing and conversion strategies

Simply put, if you’re not personalizing your content, you’re leaving money on the table.

How to Personalize Your Content

An easy place to begin is with segmentation. Rather than focusing on a single individual, segmenting your audience allows you to focus on small groups of individuals. Marketers who focus on segmenting often find success. Studies report that 77 percent of email marketing ROI stems from segmented campaigns.

You may choose to personalize your content to each buyer persona. Yes, these are all members of your target audience, but they likely have different demographics, live in different areas, have different interests, and spend time in different places online. Naturally, the content you create for them will look, feel, and read differently.

Another way is by segmenting your audience according to the current stage of the buyer’s journey. Leads that are close to converting shouldn’t be treated by your sales team the same way as leads that have just entered the pipeline, and the content you create for each stage of the buyer’s journey should differ as well.

And this is important: your decisions about content personalization should always be data-driven. 

For example, you run an email marketing campaign for new leads, and the email contains a link to a product description page. By studying your site analytics, you can see how many go to that page and how long they stay. If the page has a high bounce rate, it’s safe to assume customers aren’t seeing what they want when they arrive. 

On the other hand, for some products or services, your page analytics may reveal that you’re providing too much info. Your analytics may reveal that leads aren’t clicking on anything beneath that first fold — even though there are relevant products farther down. 

The best way to know which avenue to take is to use data to guide your personalization and relevance decisions.

Content Personalization and Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) strategy is where the sales and marketing teams work together to define, identify, engage, and sell to a highly targeted set of client accounts. The sales team gives input on who they want to sell to, and the marketing team creates personalized assets that speak directly to this audience.

ABM is a high-octane version of content personalization. Everything you create — from ads to nurture emails to website content — speaks directly to your target audience. You want to customize your message to address their specific interests and pain points and demonstrate that you understand them.

One of ABM’s main benefits is leveraging content personalization across departments. Instead of using a sales funnel designed to target a wide range of hundreds, even thousands of companies, ABM starts with a small, targeted list that ensures your content and outreach are highly relevant, personalized, and informed.

Outsourcing Content Personalization

While essential, personalization at scale is quite the challenge. A content marketing agency like ClearVoice can help you achieve personalization at scale by providing expertise, tools, and resources. If you’re looking for great content or need help scaling your personalization, we can help. 

Unlock your team’s potential and budget when it comes to content personalization! Talk to a ClearVoice content strategist today.

The post Content Personalization appeared first on ClearVoice.

A content audit is a look at what content you currently have published, how it’s performing, any issues that could be affecting its efficacy, and how it impacts the user experience. A content audit analyzes your content efforts so you can evaluate your strategy to understand what’s working and what’s not. This will help you make more informed content marketing decisions in the future and fix any issues impacting performance right now.

Why Are Content Audits so Important?

You know how much time, effort, and resources it takes to create great content. However, not all content ages well or meets performance expectations. Maybe you’ve had a rebrand. Maybe you’ve some expired links that are affecting your SEO. Maybe the topic is great, but the copy could use a little zhuszh. 

A content audit will tell you exactly what needs fixing and what doesn’t. You will also be able to answer the following questions:

• Which content is generating the most traffic?
• Which content is the most popular and most read among my audience?
• Which content do visitors spend the most time reading?
• Which content is generating the most social engagement?

Having these answers is essential to making decisions impacting the future of your content. Or, put another way: you can’t get where you want to go if you don’t know where you are. Your content audit gives you your starting point.

Key Elements of an Effective Content Audit

Before you begin the content audit itself, you’ll need to establish your goals for the project. This way, you’ll know which data points you actually want to look at. Are you looking to improve your SEO rankings? Boost conversions? Increase audience engagement? Each of these goals will have different metrics associated with them.

So, once you’ve established your goals, you’ll decide on which metrics you’ll be measuring. These might include:

• Average time on page
• Duplicate content
• Organic traffic
• Backlinks
• Keyword rankings
• Bounce rate
• Page views
• Average session duration
• Likes, shares, and mentions
• Internal links
• Leads and conversions

How to Conduct a Content Audit

Now it’s time to conduct your content audit, which should consist of the following steps:

1. Take inventory. A content audit involves all your existing content. You can create this list in an Excel spreadsheet, a project or task management tool, a digital asset management system, or whatever works best for you and your team.
2. Look up metrics for all content. Using tools like HubSpot or Google Analytics, you can look at your website’s analytics and see which content generates the most page views, which content your visitors spend the most time reading, and which content results in the most conversions. Enter this information into your spreadsheet.
3. Categorize your content. Depending on how much content you have in your inventory, you can either categorize by content type or by content topic.
4. Audit your links. Broken links or outbound links to outdated or less-than-reputable content can hurt your SEO, ultimately hurting your content’s overall performance.
5. Create or update your customer profiles. Once you understand what content is the most popular and what isn’t, you can determine who your customers are and what interests them. Update your customer personas accordingly.
6. Build a content schedule. Schedule some time each month to review metrics for content published during the previous month and to also develop content for the upcoming month. Be sure to also consider upcoming events, seasons, and holidays.
7. Refresh and create new content. By this step, you’ve probably noticed a gap in your existing content and your ideal customer profile, so it’s time to either refresh and update old content and/or create new content.
8. Document and update your new content marketing strategy. With everything you’ve learned throughout the process, you are now in a better and more confident position to revamp your content marketing strategy for the future.

Conduct Your Content Audit Today

At ClearVoice, we offer content audit and gap analysis services that will examine your existing on-site content. If you don’t have the proper resources or time to do a full content audit and need some expert help, then maybe this is what you need.

Or maybe you’ve already identified your gaps and need help with content refreshes and new content pieces. ClearVoice has you covered there, too.

With ClearVoice as your managed content solution, we create a custom content plan based on your needs and resources so you never pay for content you don’t need or won’t use. Talk to a content specialist today and start closing those content gaps!

The post Content Audit appeared first on ClearVoice.

Influencer marketing is a content marketing strategy component that involves outsourcing content promoting your product or service to creators with a significant and engaged social media following. 

The type of content and campaign can vary just as widely as the size of the social media following you’re looking to leverage. Unlike hiring a spokesperson to speak to your audience (think: Flo from Progressive), influencer marketing relies on tapping into someone else’s existing audience and allowing them to use their brand voice to influence their audience to hear your message. 

Why is influencer marketing important?

As necessary as marketing is for any product or service to build awareness, people don’t like to be sold to. People do, however, love to hear recommendations about products and services from people they trust, admire, and/or aspire to live like. Imagine your best friend telling you about how great this new product is they just tried. Wouldn’t you be curious to try it, too?

That’s influencer marketing.

Why else is influencer marketing important?

• Influencers are everywhere. No matter what platform your audience is using, established influencers are reaching your target audience with their content
• Influencers come with built-in trust and engagement. Sixty-one percent of social media users say they interact with an influencer at least once daily, with another 35 percent saying they interact multiple times daily
• Influencers are already reaching your target audience, so the leads they generate for you are of higher quality

What qualifies as an “influencer”?

In the early days of social media, influencers were identified solely by the size of their following. Today, however, influencers with huge followings are akin to celebrities (and many of them actually are celebrities), which means that depending on your brand and your budget, they may be out of reach.

The good news is that the ” influencer ” category has since been broken down into tiers, making influencer marketing accessible to any content team, regardless of budget. The rule of thumb is:

• Mega influencer: 1M+ followers
• Macro influencer: 100K – 1M followers
• Micro influencer: 10K – 100K followers
• Nano influencer: 10K or fewer followers

Isn’t influencer marketing expensive?

Not necessarily! If you’re looking to tap into the audience of a certain family of K names, then yes, that will likely be a costly endeavor. However, the benefits of utilizing these lower-tier influencers include much more cost-effective campaigns and a highly targeted, engaged audience.

Let’s look at some numbers:

• Brands prefer to work with small (nano – 39 percent and micro – 30 percent) influencers instead of expensive macro-influencers (19 percent) and celebrities (12 percent)
• On Instagram, nano-influencers charge between $10-100 per post; micro-influencers charge between $100-500 per post; macro-influencers charge between $5,000-$10,000 per post
• On TikTok, nano-influencers charge between $5-$25 per post; micro-influencers charge between $25-$125; macro-influencers charge between $1,250-$2,500

How to Get Started with an Influencer Marketing Strategy

First and foremost, remember that influencer marketing is just one part of your overall content strategy. Just like everything else, it goes hand-in-hand with what’s already working to reach your target audience with consistent brand messaging.

With that in mind, you’ll want to keep these best practices in mind when building out your influencer marketing strategy:

1. Understand platform demographics. Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and TikTok have different user bases. Don’t chase the new and trending platform if it’s not the right fit for your brand. How old is your target demographic? Where are they likely to spend their time?
2. Identify your audience. This is crucial to remember when engaging influencers, especially at the micro and nano levels, where you’re concentrating on a much more targeted group. Working with the wrong influencer for your audience could mean stifling your sales goals and loss of public trust.
3. Be clear about your goals. This will not only help you identify the right influencer but also ensure their services are aligned to match.
4. Ensure transparency. Influencers understand that the key to their success (and, in turn, yours) is authenticity in their content. That’s what resonates with their audience, and any content that doesn’t ring true will turn off their audience. Work together with your influencers to create a campaign that’s engaging and resonates with their audience.
5. Try micro or nano influencers. Their audiences may be smaller but are typically more passionate and engaged. These tiers of influencers are also more cost-effective! If you’re just getting started with influencer marketing, you can stretch your dollar further here.

ClearVoice Can Help with Your Influencer Marketing

Whether it’s helping you identify the right niches for your brand message or constructing an influencer marketing campaign itself, we want to be your content partner. Talk to a content specialist today and be one step closer to reaching your target audience with influencer marketing.

The post Influencer Marketing appeared first on ClearVoice.