The Role of Social Media in Advancing Your Business Interests

In a very short span of time, social media has rapidly risen to become the most important aspect of the marketing mix for any business of reasonable size, hands down. The influence of social media and the potential to impact your business for better or for worse is beyond dispute. In consequence of this fact, it is essential that you can master social media to ensure your business retains a strong online presence and an excellent reputation.

This does not necessarily mean that you should handle the task personally. In fact, that is usually not a good idea because firstly it is so easy to make a mistake (and the online community is very slow to forgive and forget even the most minor mistakes), and secondly because it is a waste of precious time that you should be investing into managing your business. The smarter way is to hire people who work for you specifically on that one task, either your own employees or an agency.

Ideally your social media marketing mix should provide full coverage of all the major channels, and also be at least aware of emerging trends in social media so you can anticipate future social media activities. You should be providing a lot of information on a regular basis, and that will include announcements, customer service, and advertisements. All of these should really be handled by experts who understand the requirements of the job, and who know how to create a positive image in all circumstances.

According to British SEO agency Bulldog Digital Media, the main goal of Social Media Marketing is to get people talking. Don’t be misled into believing all the hype about virality, although if your content does happen to go viral at some point, that’s definitely a good result. But this is not the goal, and should not be, because if you concentrate too much on that goal you will be missing all the ordinary every day stuff that is just as important, if not more so. Your goal is to get people talking about you, your brand, your products, and preferably talking in a good way.

Making your impression on the social media world is an ongoing task that will require constant attention and effort. It is not something that you can simply “set and forget”, nor is it something that can only be attended to occasionally. For social media marketing to be effective, it is must be a continuous and active presence, and above all, whatever you are posting online should be offering something that is of genuine value to the audience (so not just filler material or special offers, but something your audience will actually want to read about, listen to, or watch).

In general, the more you invest in your social media marketing, the better the results will be. Keeping an eye on the budget is only sensible, but don’t be afraid to invest sufficiently in developing your online presence.

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3 Growth Hacking Tips and Tricks for Your Content Marketing Strategy

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/conversion-rate.jpg.jpg

Let’s face it—the world of marketing has changed so extremely in the past few years that it is almost unrecognizable. Thanks to the explosion of the internet and cellphones marketers everywhere are having to make changes—old-school techniques like cold-calling and telemarketing just aren’t cutting it anymore. Today, the internet is king, and online content is how many businesses choose to promote their products or services. However, it’s far too easy to get lost in the mass of content that is posted every minute online—to stay relevant, you’re going to have to get a little creative. That’s where growth hacking comes in.

Growth hacking may sound scary (like it involves breaking into government data bases to get secret growth codes), but in actuality, it’s a fairly straightforward idea. At its most basic, growth hacking means getting creative to find low-cost and inventive substitutes for traditional marketing techniques. This means researching and utilizing unique ways to promote the content you post online, and in extension, your brand. Luckily, growth hacking is a practice made for the online world—there are nearly endless possibilities for ways to market your content that are inexpensive, effective, and that encourage the brand’s growth. That’s the mantra of growth hackers: what can we do to inspire growth?

If you can’t quite answer that question yet, it may be helpful to see how others have found ways to growth hack their content. Here are three examples of successful growth hacking techniques that you can apply to your own online content:

1. SEO or Search Engine Optimization

This technique is huge. This means, essentially, making your webpage/content easy for search engines to find, deem relevant, and include high up on the search results page. This can include adding relevant keywords in crucial parts of your site (like URL’s, mea descriptions and image alt tags). It can also include linking out to esteemed sources on your site, which can help boost your reputation as a credible site to search engine spiders. The process can be complicated (there are many more potential steps, tricks and tips!), but don’t worry, we’re always here to help! Click here to get into contact with our SEO experts.

2. Utilize Social Media

Social media is the growth hacker’s best friend. It’s an easy, quick and free way to promote your content and inspire sharing of it. Not only this, but it is an excellent way to create a persona for your brand, and to engage with both prospective and current customers. The best part is, you can link to your social media just about anywhere on your online content—at the bottom of blog posts, in your sidebar, under your brand’s name, on your “about us” or ‘contact us” page. The easier it is for someone to share your content on social media, the more likely they are to do so!

3. Include CTA or Calls to Action

Sometimes, the best way to get someone to engage with your content is just to ask! If you want to see more growth on your Facebook page, for example, include links on your content for visitors to “like” “comment” on or “share” it. If you want to encourage sharing of the content elsewhere, you can use words like “spread” “help” or “share” to inspire distribution of it on multiple platforms. The more people share, the more people will become aware of your brand, and the more growth you will achieve!

Of course, growth hacking content can seem like a broad idea, and it can be tough to know where to begin. Let us guide the way! Click here for help getting your brand started on growth hacking practices.

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Why accessibility is so important in digital marketing

If you work in digital marketing or have any kind of business that markets itself online, you’ve probably thought about all sorts of ways to increase your business’s reach and broaden its appeal. But are you considering web accessibility?

Web accessibility is the name given to making websites and online materials usable to people with disabilities, removing barriers to the way they experience the internet.

People with disabilities make up a significant portion of the population, yet are often excluded from brands and digital marketing online due to access barriers.

From physical disabilities like loss of mobility, blindness and deafness to learning difficulties like dyslexia, a wide range of disabilities affect the way that someone accesses the internet.

But a few practical steps can make digital marketing more inclusive, appealing and accessible to all users – immediately increasing your reach, as well as your revenue.

The need for accessibility

The Global Economics of Disability Annual Report 2014 estimated the global population of people with disabilities as 1.3 billion: a market equivalent to the population of China. As a percentage this works out to nearly 18% of the world’s population, or 1 in every 5 people – with a combined disposable income, according to the report, of more than $1.2 trillion.

These numbers are likely to climb as Generation X ages, making catering to age-related disabilities vital to anyone targeting the baby boomer generation.

In no other context would it make sense to exclude such a significant marketing demographic, yet making websites and digital materials accessible is far too often overlooked as a tedious and pointless exercise.

In actual fact, web accessibility brings a whole host of benefits, not least that it goes hand-in-hand with providing a better user experience all around – and greatly improving your website’s SEO to boot.

Accessibility and good user experience go hand-in-hand with search.Image by Paul Veugen on Flickr; some rights reserved

Accessibility, user experience and SEO

Some basic principles of creating an accessible website include: a clearly laid-out, hierarchical structure, clearly labelled information, and meaningful titles and headers. Sound familiar? If they do, it’s because these are also basic principles of Search Engine Optimisation. They also contribute to making a website that much easier for all users to navigate.

Similarly, a site map is a handy point of reference for all users trying to find their way around a website, but is particularly helpful to screen reader users, who can make sense of what the site contains and how the content is organised. It also allows search engine robots to quickly scan and index your site.

Providing text alternatives to images, video and audio, in the form of alt text, closed captions and transcripts, makes that content accessible to users who are visually or hearing impaired. And as search engines rely on text to provide information about a web page, this will also build up a more complete picture of your site for search engine robots.

However, there is a flip-side to this: the practice of ‘keyword-stuffing’ title text and alt tags for SEO purposes can lead to awkward and unhelpful descriptions for users with disabilities, so strike a balance if you can.

Text alternatives to visual content are incredibly beneficial both for search and accessibility, when done right.

Writing your website in simple, jargon-free language can benefit users with a learning difficulty orcognitive disability, but it’s also a helpful practice for everyone, especially those for whom English isn’t their first language. People are more likely to search the web for simple words than for industry jargon, too, so writing your website simply will help ordinary users to find it in search.

Of course, not every single accessibility measure contributes directly to SEO. But there is enough of an overlap to make web accessibility worthwhile on multiple levels, to say nothing of the advantages of opening up your business or marketing campaign to a huge extra audience.

As Mark Jackson wrote about the SEO benefits of web accessibility over on our sister site, Search Engine Watch: “If you can deliver an accessible Web site, you may have just created a tremendous market growth opportunity for yourself.”

Putting it into practice

Many people worry that making their digital content web accessible will require a lot of elaborate work, expert knowledge and a huge financial investment.

While it does involve some extra effort and new ways of thinking, it doesn’t have to break the bank. There are a lot of free tools, guides and resources available for anyone who sets out to design for accessibility.

Public domain image by US National Park Service

An excellent place to start is W3C’s Tips for Getting Started with Web Accessibility, which has sections on designing, writing and developing for accessibility, walking you through each in detail with visual examples.

Deque System, an accessible software company, has also published a series on accessible marketing which includes guides on designing accessible websites and writing accessible marketing content. They’ve created a handy design checklist which divides accessible website design into five key areas, and which you can download here.

To check how accessible your website is already, you can run it through WebAIM’s web accessibility evaluation tool. The Colour Contrast Check by Jonathan Snook allows you to play with different foreground and background combinations and tells you how they rate in terms of accessibility. You can also use lowvision.support to simulate how a website looks for a variety of low vision conditions.

Businesses, brands and marketing strategists are all used to investing time and effort trying to connect with as broad an audience as possible.

Making your web presence accessible is a practical way to do just this, staying ahead of the curve and ahead of the competition – and your clients and customers will thank you for it.

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3 Business Tools That Will Help You Triple Your Online Marketing Business

My web design and Internet marketing agency has had an amazing 24 months and I would

like to share three tools that we have used to rapidly grow our business.

1. Duct Tape Marketing

Duct Tape Marketing is a best-selling book by the undisputed king of small business marketing: John Jantsch. Read this book and it will change the way you look at your customers, and teach you how to build an inbound marketing system that draws in your ideal customers.

Duct Tape Marketing helped me remove my tactical SEO blinders and look at SEO as it really is today: an integral part of a holistic digital marketing strategy. Further, Jantsch places an emphasis on content-driven SEO, which is undoubtedly the present and future of search engine optimization.

Duct Tape Marketing is much more than a book; it’s a complete small business marketing system that can be installed in virtually any business. I installed it in mine and it’s changed my digital agency forever. If you run an Internet marketing agency, and especially if you’re a web designer or SEO professional, you should definitely check it out.

Duct Tape Marketing is also a network of certified marketing professionals that leverages collective purchasing power for access to some of best digital marketing tools and services in the industry. The network also acts as an international brain-trust of leading small business marketing experts. A Duct Tape Marketing Consultant certification will help your agency establish trust in a notoriously sleazy Internet marketing industry that is chock full of cold-calling, email spamming and robo-calling snake oil salesmen.

Duct Tape Marketing, however, isn’t lead generation pixie dust. You need your own talent and ambition to make it work, and especially consistent discipline to practice what Jantsch preaches.

2. UpCity

If you are in SEO and haven’t heard of UpCity yet, you will. This is far and away the best SEO task management and automated SEO reporting system on the planet. I know some agencies that spend a week out of every month generating client reports. UpCity documents your work as you or your staff are doing it, and automatically sends clients detailed monthly (or weekly) reports!

It would be hard to imagine running my business now without UpCity.

This platform has enabled me to systematize my own SEO process into 

detailed tasks so that I can not only improve communication with our 

small business clients, but also scale my business through hiring. If you 

are a true SEO consulting professional, you know that it’s hard to scale 

SEO services because best-practices SEO is a talent-based profession, 

not a commodity service. Since UpCity gives you the ability to document 

your process, its now possible to hire staff to execute your own brand of 

SEO – and thus really scale out your practice.

The company is led by Dan Olson, a guy that knows SEO and digital 

marketing. In other words, UpCity was created by SEOs for SEOs. We 

get great support from their team as well.

What’s even better? Duct Tape Marketing and UpCity go together like 

peanut butter and chocolate.

3. Hatchbuck

We have been blessed over the years with consistent lead flow and it keeps improving every year. Yet, my agency has been terrible with inbound lead management. Everybody wants more leads, but when you get lots of leads all the time and have no way to process or follow up with them, you end up leaving a lot of money on the table.

We tried many vanilla CRMs. None of them worked.

Then I realized what we really needed was a lead management and 

marketing / sales automation system. While many folks love this type of 

system to draw in and nurture cold traffic, in our case, we needed a way 

just to process our consistent flow of warm and hot leads.

After all, this is what good SEO does for your business – you bypass the 

long cycle of education and get to people that want your services

 right now.

Yes it’s a so-called ‘high class problem’, but it’s one on the most 

significant problems we had with respect to scaling. But if you can’t 

effectively follow up on quality leads, you lose business. A lot of it. When 

you start scaling up and taking on more overhead, you can’t cherry pick 

clients anymore and you need to close every ideal client.

We looked at very closely at several small business solutions in this space and Hatchbuck came up the clear winner because of its affordability. There a many great solutions in this space such as Infusionsoft and Ontraport, as well as comprehensive platforms like Hubspot that offer sales and marketing automation as part of a larger platform offering. Hats off to Hatchbuck CEO and co-founder Don Breckenridge Jr. for creating a great product and providing great on-boarding and ongoing support.

This solution enables us to automatically educate prospects on our 

Unique Selling Position, pricing and process, so that if and when we 

meet in person, the client is ready to close on the spot.

Questions or comments? Let me know below. I would love to hear what 

tools and services fellow SEO pros, web designers and marketers use to 

grow and scale their agencies.

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A Digital Marketer’s Christmas Wish List

Ah, it’s that time of year again, Christmas—a time when children of all ages and dispositions take a moment to count their blessings and pencil out all the things they want from dear old Santa Claus. Among the ranks of this year’s holiday season hopefuls is the beleaguered digital marketer, whose job description includes the unenviable task of harnessing the wild, unceasing tumult of a seemingly never-ending and ever-growing Digital Tsunami to enhance the customer experience and generate positive ROI. Faced with such a herculean mandate, we digital marketers need some loving from St. Nick now more than ever.

Partly as an exercise in personal catharsis, and partly in the hope that Santa and his elves are actually listening, I’ve taken the liberty of compiling a generalized Christmas wish list for the beleaguered digital marketer in all of us. Here goes.

Wish #1: Abidingly Authoritative Algorithms

Come on, Google, we get that you’re all about continuous improvement, but how about finally delivering a one-and-done search algorithm that allows the beleaguered digital marketer to set a consistent SEO strategy—you know, something that can be periodically washed, rinsed, and repeated with minimal effort? Enough with the cutsy animal references, you need a name for this new algo update with sufficient gravitas to embody its perpetual nature, something like ALLSEARCH, or better yet, OMNIRITHM. Just spitballing here…

Wish #2: Continuously Copywriting Elves

Santa, let me give you some insight into the dark side of the digital marketing, which is embodied in a maxim that amounts to an unending devil’s bargain for the beleaguered digital marketer: the proliferation of digital media implies, and often necessitates, a corresponding proliferation of digital marketing content.

Bummer, dude.

This is largely because, as I’ve written before, in the mean streets of the online ecosystem—where web-based content reigns supreme—content is the alpha and omega:

In web design parlance, content refers to everything on a website: the words, images, and videos, etc. Just like you need matter to fill the universe and a body to fill a suit, you need content to fill a website page. Setting aside, for now, any debate over the merits of content marketing, in the context of web design content is a thing, not a strategy, tactic, or tool. Moreover, it’s an “are,” not an “is” – think plural rather than singular. When we refer to web-based content, then, we are referring to all the things that occupy or populate a web page, in aggregate.

In other words, the world is fast going digital, and in a digital world, it’s all about the content.

Help.

OK, Santa, you’re a magical dude, you must have an ad hoc solution for this content conundrum: a brood of continuously copywriting elves, perhaps? Nothing to flashy, maybe an underperforming elf on the shelf who would rather be penning poems than pounding together playsets.

Give it some thought.

Wish #3: Socially Savvy CEOs

Here’s a tale of two stats if ever there was one:

• According to the 2014 Global Social CEO Survey by social media consulting firm Brandfog, 83% of senior executives in the U.S. think CEOs who actively participate in social media can build better connections with their customers, employees, and investors. Moreover, nearly three-fourths of these same execs believe that C-Suite leaders who use social media to communicate their core mission and brand values are more trustworthy than those who don’t adopt social media.
• In early 2015, Weber Shandwick released Socializing Your CEO: From Marginal to Mainstream, an audit of the online presence of CEOs from the world’s 50 largest companies. Overall, the study found that social media usage by CEOs is still relatively low, at just 28%. Not surprisingly, the most popular social network was LinkedIn, used by 22% of CEOs, followed by Twitter, used by 10% of CEOs. None of the CEOs audited said they used Facebook or Google Plus.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Ok, I understand the potential liability issues with CEOs directly interacting on social media, especially CEOs of large multinationals. My neighbor is a general counsel for a biggish global travel agency, and he blanched at the very thought of his CEO freely Tweeting or Facebooking.

But come on, surely there is a sensible work-around here. After all, direct social engagement is working fine for Richard Branson, who largely composes his own Tweets to an audience of over 3.5 million Twitter followers. In fact, Branson recently earned the top spot in an analysis of the most social CEOs among Fortune 500 companies. A larger than life persona largely shaped by his relentless commitment to personally engage on social media, Branson is arguably the most popular entrepreneur in the world, well regarded by employees, peers, and the general public alike—sort of a businessperson’s Santa Claus, if you will.

Say, there’s an idea. Santa, maybe you could team up with Branson to host a webinar series on social engagement for CEOs. Two jolly old souls, both consummate marketers, imparting pearls of wisdom to the leaders of today, etc. Santa, if you’re reading this (and I know you are), I’d be happy to work with you and Sir Richard to concept it out. After all, according to Wikipedia, Branson’s nickname is “Old Beardie”—talk about a layup!

Wish #4: Digitally Dedicated Clients

Which brings us to the last item on our list—one that is personally nearest and dearest to my heart. Santa, could you work your elven magic and send us beleaguered digital marketers a brace of digitally dedicated clients? You know, the kind who see social engagement, content creation, and inbound marketing as paradigm-shifting marketing functions rather than one-off campaign initiatives; who regard digital transformation as a fundamental realignment of business culture, mindset, and process rather than a short-term band-aid.

Earlier this year, I recall having a conversation with the CEO of a mid-level healthcare company about putting together an integrated digital marketing strategy for his firm. After politely listening to my recommendations, he circled back to what he felt his company needed: a “really sexy” social campaign, something that would “go viral” on social media. He honestly believed such a campaign would transform his company from the digital laggard that it was to a digital leader overnight, sparing him the need to oversee a fundamental restructuring of the marketing function, and indeed the entire company; to manage the overhaul a business that was originally designed to operate in a pre-digital environment but now had to compete in the digital age.

The budget he had proposed was less than one tenth of what would be needed to accomplish his myopic social media goals, to say nothing of my comprehensive recommendations. Sensing we were at an unbreachable impasse, he politely ushered me to the door and was never heard from again.

Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, he is no longer with the company.

Santa, here is my final wish: help me and my beleaguered digital marketing cohorts convince top executives and business owners—especially small business owners—of the wisdom of employing proven digital marketing strategies. Help them understand that digital marketing and digital transformation are not one-off campaign strategies or short-term business initiatives, but instead are long-term strategic imperatives for most, if not all, brands great and small.

Yes, all these things, and a Doctor Who lunchbox, thanks very much…

Happy Holidays to all!

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5 ways to use Google Analytics to find social media topics

Here's how you can use Google Analytics to come up with interesting and relevant discussion topics that will resonate with your target audience on social media.

Coming up with new, interesting topics for posting on your blog or social media channels can be challenging when you’ve been at it for a long time. That seemingly endless stream of ideas can run low and topics can feel stale after a while. When this becomes an issue, Google Analytics is a handy tool for getting inspired and basing your ideas on data.

Here are five reports in Google Analytics that you can use for generating new topics.

1. SEO keywords

The terms people use to find your site can tell you a lot about their interests, especially the longer-tail keywords. A great place to start is by looking for questions among the keywords. Start off questions with phrases like:

• "What is...?"
• "How to...?"
• "How can...?"

These types of queries can tell you the exactly what answers searchers are looking for when they land on your site.

However, you don’t have to just stop at questions. Look for other terms frequently used by searchers to understand what they are most interested in.

Let’s say you’re a high-end furniture store selling everything from sofas and armchairs, to rugs and decor. You may notice that a high number of people are coming to the site when they search for terms related to coffee tables. By writing about coffee tables - with topics like the merits of different shapes, sizes, and materials, how a coffee table can tie the room together, or what type of coffee table best fits your lifestyle - you know you are hitting on a subject that is of interest to your audience. 

Where the find the report: Acquisition >> Search Engine Optimization >> Queries

2. Site search

Similar to the SEO keywords, you can look at the terms people are using once they get to your site, to learn more about what interests them. However, the thing to keep in mind here is that these users are already on your site, and they are digging in further for more information. Oftentimes these terms will be more product or service specific. But you can still gain insight into which products or services are more popular and, in turn, make for interesting content topics.

Where the find the report: Behavior >> Site Search >> Search Terms

3. Interest categories

If you’ve enabled demographic insights in Google Analytics, you can learn some pretty fascinating things about your site visitors. One especially insightful report for developing content is the Audience Interests report.

As you can see, there are several different interest or behavioral categories that your audience fall into, like:

• Movie Lovers
• Home and Garden
• Travel Buffs
• Arts and Entertainment
• Real Estate 

Use these categories to help you match your products or services to those categories to find content topics. Going back to the home furnishings example, if you see that a large portion of your audience are also movie lovers, you could write a post about how popular movies have used furniture and decor to set a tone, or pick a furniture designer and list every movie their pieces have been shown in.

Where the find the report: Audience >> Interests

4. Pages with most engagement

See which pages on your site are being viewed the most and for the longest time. This goes for static pages, such as categories, products or resource pages, as well as blog posts. Notice if there are any themes of interest across these pages. Are the pages getting the most engagement all about coffee tables or different type of furniture? Is there one particular blog post that continues to receive a good deal of traffic months or even years after posting?

Creating other pieces of content based on these popular topics allows you to write about things you already know are interesting to your visitors. If it’s blog content we’re talking about, think about how you could repurpose that content into other formats. A top 10 blog post could be turned into an infographic or video, or you could expand on each item and come up with ten new blogs in one go!

Where the find the report: Behavior >> Site Content >> All Pages

5. Links from other sources

When other blogs or social media posts link to your website, it’s called a Trackback in Google Analytics. By viewing trackbacks, you can learn what other bloggers think you are credible enough about to link to, and you can also see how many people click those links to visit your site. Note what these blogs are about, and why and how your site is mentioned within the article to determine if these would make for good content topics on your social media channels.

Where the find the report: Acquisition >> Social >> Trackbacks

To sum up

Brainstorming topics for social media content can’t and shouldn't stop with a white board. Google Analytics is great resource for providing inspiration and validating that these topics will be of interest to your customers.

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9 great examples of content from online retailers

This examines content marketing strategies of nine e-commerce retailers that effectively promote their brands and assist customers via videos, quizzes, social communities, and buyers' guides.

Content is vitally important in e-commerce and more and more retailers are building a serious content strategy around their sites. 

In this article, I'll look at examples from sites using content effectively for a number of reasons. 

The use of content by online retailers has a number of potential benefits: 

• Branding. Good content can build awareness of a brand.
   
• SEO. Quality content can give retailers the edge over competitors.
   
• Sales. Well written and persuasive product page copy can convert visitors into customers.
   
• To help customers choose. Content such as Buyer's Guides leads shoppers through the product selection process and also helps with SEO.
   
• User content. This can be used as a form of social proof. 

The following examples showcase these benefits:

1. Bonobos

Bonobos' "Chino Fit Quiz" is a fun way to help customers find the right fit:

2. Home Depot

"Buyer's Guides" and "How-To Guides" are great content for shoppers. 

This one from Home Depot helps visitors to make more informed decisions about ranges, talking customers through the pros and cons of the different types on offer. 

This kind of content has several benefits:

• It helps to keep customers on the site longer during their product research. If they can find the information they need then they don't have to search Google or head to rival sites.
   
• It helps customers to make a decision. This in turn makes it more likely they will buy from your site.
   
• It has major SEO benefits. Done well, a "Buyer's Guide" provides quaility content for customers and the search engines. It also makes your site findable when customers type in product queries. 

3. Blendtec

Yes, this is obvious, but it's a great example of how content can work beautifully for branding. 

The videos have made the brand known around the world and have been viewed more than 265 million times on YouTube. 

These videos are fun, but also have the added benefit of showing how robust the blenders are. 

4. Modcloth

Modcloth's user communities contribute lots of useful content to the site. 

There are reviews on product pages, and a style gallery where customers send photos of themselves wearing the products. 

It's a great use of the community, as these images are shared and help to promote the products more widely. 

In addition, this is valuable social proof that tells potential buyers that this site has lots of satisfied customers. 

5. Patagonia

This site has lots of very detailed and beautifully produced content, which matches the brand's values perfectly. 

Though this isn't content which seeks to sell too hard, it does reference and link to products where it's relevant. 

6. J. Peterman Company

J. Peterman Company's  content really helps to define the brand, and it is pretty entertaining too. 

Unique product page copy is also great from an SEO perspective.

So many retailers lazily reproduce the standard manufacturer product descriptions that sites can stand out by being different. 

7. Chubbies

Chubbies' site, which sells shorts as a kind of lifestyle choice, uses customer content to help promote its products. 

It's a great way for a smaller retailer to promote itself cost-effectively. For the price of a free pair of shorts, the company gets free content and lots of social promotion. 

8. Casper

Casper.com creates content that tells customers about the process behind its products. 

This reinforces the perception of quality, and provides customers with lots of information to help the decide on the right product. 

9. Repair Clinic

Repair Clinic's site sells spare parts for household appliances, and it produces video guides for the majority of its products. 

These video guides work in a number of ways: 

• They tell the customer what to do with the product they're buying, thus ensuring that it works as it should and reduced returns rates.
   
• They promote the brand on social media.
   
• The videos can help with customer acquisition. Users will search for guides on repairing appliances, and these not only help with the how-to, but also where to buy the spare parts they need. 

In summary

These examples of content are produced and used in a variety of ways, but the common factor is that each one not only promotes the brands but also provides help to the customers. 

The brands here have found ways to use content to complement their products and services by explaining the products and features, by allowing their customers to do this work, or simply by providing entertaining and interesting content. 

In each case, the content fits well with the brand values. Practical, in the case of Repair Clinic or Home Depot, or more connected to the consumers' lifestyle, as on Patagonia and Chubbies. 

As with all effective content marketing, strategy is very important.

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