Author: Adria Saracino

Adria is the Head of Outreach at a creative internet marketing agency. When not connecting with interesting people on the web, you can find her writing about style at her personal fashion blog The Emerald Closet. Follow her on Twitter @adriasaracino and stay in touch.

By adria-saracino published September 17, 2013

Build a Better Buyer Persona: 5 Creative Data Sourcing Ideas

focus on buyer personaWe are all aware that buyer personas are integral to creating a focused and successful content marketing strategy. However, what people don’t often tell you about buyer persona development is that collecting the data to create them is a lot of hard work.

Surveys and interviews seem to be the go-to source for learning about your target audience’s needs, interests, and goals, but they are not the only way to accomplish this goal. Below, are some other options for sourcing the data you need to create detailed, multi-faceted personas that provide insights above and beyond what direct questioning techniques can accomplish on their own.Continue Reading

By adria-saracino published October 9, 2012

How to Create Video Content that Actually Works

create video that actually works, CMIVideo is taking over the world, with more than 4 billion hours of video viewed each month. In fact, YouTube is now the second most used search engine, right behind Google (market domination much?).

Unfortunately, integrating video into your marketing campaign isn’t as easy as simply creating a video and putting it up on YouTube. Creating a video that is effective, relevant, and successful can offer big rewards, but how do you integrate it successfully?

Here, we’ll take you through the basics of video as a media type, discuss issues you will want to consider when brainstorming video content ideas, and suggest some types of content that typically work well for video, using case studies to highlight these points in action.Continue Reading

By adria-saracino published September 10, 2012

Why Hybrid Marketing Agencies Rule the Consulting World (and How to Prepare Your Agency for Domination)

Six. That’s how many types of agencies exist in the consulting realm, explained Paul Roetzer of PR 20/20 during his session at Content Marketing World, “Building and Growing Your Content Marketing Agency and Consulting Practice,” which was based on his book, “The Marketing Agency Blueprint.”Continue Reading

By adria-saracino published June 20, 2012

How to Leverage the Sweet Spot Where CRM and Content Marketing Collide

customer relationship management, CMIAs marketers, obsessing over customer relationship management (CRM) is pretty much what we do. We want to know how our customers feel, what they want, and what they think of our companies, and we want to know this ALL THE TIME.

But since the rise of the web, search engines, and social media, the channels for doing this have fundamentally changed.

On the surface, this means that our day-to-day tasks have started to focus primarily on planning for and analyzing multi-channel campaigns. But, at a deeper level, we are shifting from being the mouthpiece for the products and services our businesses sell to being conversation starters, think tanks, entertainers, community builders, and idea hubs.Continue Reading

By adria-saracino published February 20, 2012

How to Embed Outreach into Every Step of Your Content Plan

Content marketing brings visitors and links to your site. As long as you’re producing high quality content, getting it the attention it deserves should be easy right? Well, that’s not always the case.

Outreach is an important part of any content marketing campaign, but even a robust outreach strategy can have lackluster results if it is simply tacked on at the end of a campaign. Instead, you need to embed outreach into your marketing strategy every step of the way.

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