In a word: Absolutely.

Yes, you’ve heard the “(Quality) Content is King” argument for years, and I’d never deny that that having quality, original, must-read content is essential to any content strategy.

But the visual presentation is your first impression with the Web visitor: it’s what makes the visitor decide whether or not to consume the content in the first place.

If your content looks boring, time-consuming, salesy, or unprofessional, your visitor will click out of your content before reading the first paragraph.

 

Image credit: IvanCash

Read the full article here.

The post Is “Content Marketing” Style over Substance? appeared first on Alpha Brand Media.

“We shutter up our Social Media teams in their own rooms and leave them to their tweets and Instagram photos while the marketing pros hunker down on the big guns: conversions. Landing Pages. Leads, Costs, ROI.

Sure, most pros acknowledge the power of social media in terms of brand awareness — it’s the flypaper that holds the customer still long enough for us to shove them down the sales funnel, where we cash them in profit.

But we often forget that social media is part of the sales funnel, a crucial element that often clinches the sale or conversion. It’s time to take off our blinders and stop focusing on the short-term conversions that occur “in-house” on our sites.

Conversion is a long-term process, and if you’re ignoring all the long-term factors that lead up to a sale, you’re failing your customers…and you’re failing your business.”

Read the rest here.

The post Jordan Kasteler on Search Engine Land appeared first on Alpha Brand Media.

From the Amazon blurb: “This book moves beyond standard Social Media Marketing books. While most books focus on Facebook and Twitter (sometimes YouTube), this book teaches leveraging all facets of social media and all social media channels involved. This book largely explores concepts of content marketing and leveraging social media to promote that content. Learn how to create and distribute infographics, articles, videos, quizzes, widgets, etc and the proper social sites they should be distributed. While this book features sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more, it’s important to note that it teaches promotion o social media holistically and not a channel-by-channel basis. Use everything together to create a strategy over just tactics.”

Congrats Jordan, we’re proud of ya.

You can get it here.

The post The Must-Have SMM Tome: A-to-Z Social Media Marketing, by Jordan Kasteler appeared first on Alpha Brand Media.