Incompetent bosses, management fads, and bewildering technological changes are a few of the quirky bits of mockings Scott Adams includes in his 1997 book, The Dilbert Principle.
via Remember Dilbert? Has Workplace Incompetency Changed? — From Behind the Pen
If your current content marketing simply isn’t getting the results you want, it may be time to rethink your strategy.
Great content can be the defining factor that sets your business apart from competitors, but it can certainly be hard to find and create. Even the best marketing teams seem to struggle with the creation process.
Most marketing experts will agree that creating unique and valuable content is one of the most challenging tasks on their to-do list. One of the reasons why this is often so difficult is due to the high demand for consistently high-performing content in terms of engagement and quality. Fifty-one percent of marketing teams publish content every single day, which puts a lot of pressure on their writers to constantly come up with fresh ideas.
Chances are, even if your team is extremely talented, they have struggled with coming up with great new content over and over again. If your current content marketing isn’t driving in the numbers you’d like to see, or your team’s stream of ideas seems to have run dry, it may be time to rethink things.
Creating content is more than just writing about something interesting or trending; it also needs to increase your brand’s online visibility and boost its searchability. Knowing the keywords and terms that your audience tends to include in search engine queries is essential for coming up with relevant content topics. But, if your writers are unaware of the optimal keywords to use, it could hurt the effectiveness of their work.
Conducting an SEO audit is a great starting point because it not only shows your team the current status of the keywords your website content is utilizing, but it can also identify new ranking opportunities. It’s a good idea to partner with an SEO agency to conduct this audit and analysis because they will be able to offer unbiased advice and recommendations based on thorough research and expertise.
Switching things up with your content can mean more than just writing about new subjects; it may be quite effective to totally revamp your content style by trying a totally different medium. Visual content like videos and infographics tend to receive higher engagement rates with audiences than traditional blog posts, but one of the latest content trends that many businesses can benefit from is vlogging and podcasting.
Vlogging (video blogging) is highly engaging because it gives your content a face and a personality through the people sharing it. This type of content is also fairly easy to produce, depending on the type of format you wish to use. It can be as simple as sitting a few of your marketing leaders down in front of a camera and filming them discuss a particular subject or reading off the highlights of a previously published piece. Podcasting has also been on the rise and is becoming quite a popular way to quickly consume content during commutes or downtime.
When it comes to targeting audiences, small can often be better. Honing in on the niche segments within your business’s audience is important for increasing engagement and building important connections with your customers.
If your team’s content has been falling flat or engagement rates are simply not where they need to be, it may be time to reassess your audience niches. Your customer’s preferences and interests can change and shift over time, and there may be new niche groups that have formed since your last analysis. Be sure to regularly reexamine audience data and observe shifts and changes in important demographic areas — such as age groups, locations or overall interests. Finding these new audiences can help your content team come up with new topic ideas that speak to these niche segments and strengthen the engagement rates with these small yet mighty groups.
Trying out something totally new and changing the traditional approach that you’ve always followed may be just what your team needs for inspiration. For instance, your marketing team may want to give employee advocacy a try and encourage the entire workplace to share their thoughts and experiences on the business’s content outlets and social media pages.
The important thing here is to actually give things a shot and give them enough time to determine whether or not it actually works. Just because your first video content piece doesn’t receive a lot of views doesn’t mean that it was a total bust. It takes time to figure out what works and what doesn’t, and your team will find ways to adjust and improve their efforts overtime. However, it is still important to constantly track important metrics, such as engagement rates, audience reach, and conversion percentages to see if there is an upward trend.
While you obviously want to be extremely careful not to copy your competition, there is no harm in using their content strategies as inspiration. If there is a competing brand that really resonates well with an audience that is similar to your own, encourage your content marketing team to identify patterns in their strategies that seem to be working. On the flip side, your team may also benefit from checking out struggling brands and seeing what content approaches they should avoid.
A stagnant content strategy simply cannot support a growing business. Keeping things fresh and exciting is certainly a challenge, but staying inspired and finding ways to switch things up can help your marketing team create better and more engaging content on a consistent basis.
BY EVAN MORRIS | techspective
Economists have been studying human behavior for centuries, determining how our ever-changing desires fuel supply-and-demand paradigms. They have conducted in-depth analysis of the legal frameworks responsible for current trading regimens for SMEs, and government enterprises. These centuries-old systems, developed though they may be are now being upended by new-age technology that is adding value, cutting costs, and increasing efficiency like never before. Innovative new technologies are being designed to be more inclusive, more transparent, and more rewarding. These systems allow for easy, quick, and efficient information dissemination.
Of course, these concepts encompass so many other attendant technologies. Innovation management technology has the capacity to radically transform financial, legal, medical and information dissemination networks across the board. These disruptive processes are already yielding results in the way that enterprises function. Global management systems have evolved dramatically over the years. Prior to his passing, Nobel laureate Douglas North pioneered new institutional economics. The institutional economics that he referred to were the rules and frameworks that were established, and the systems that were used to enforce trade. We have evolved from hunter gatherers to formal institutions where banks were involved, and later to online institutions. The global economy has now metamorphosed into a large interconnected online system. Within this online network lies innovation management par excellence.
Human economic activity is now facilitated by way of online institutions through ecommerce operations including Alibaba, Amazon, eBay and the like. Every new iteration that humankind develops through innovation and dynamism – the latest being online connectivity via the Internet – is designed to lower levels of uncertainty when creating value. Before, management systems relied on the banking sector and government for their operational functionality.
Now, we can use sophisticated technology without banking or government to define our new-age economic system. This has resulted in dramatic innovation management systems and a new breed of employees who are bringing this dynamism to life. For many folks, the concept of innovation management remains shrouded in mystery. The power of these new-age management systems is extraordinary, and enterprises are using disruptive innovation management solutions to facilitate cutting-edge systems that are rendering traditional economic models defunct.
We are seeing a merger of innovative technology and innovation management right before our eyes. The traditional system of authoritarian management has given way to collective systems where feedback is encouraged, fostered, and engendered in organizations since the employees have a vested interest in furthering their own objectives alongside those of the enterprise. Even new ICO companies are springing up rapidly, fusing blockchain tech with innovation management systems. These enterprises are proposing new-age solutions that have traditional institutions running scared. The magic of innovation management is that it offers exponential benefits to corporations since these companies are drawing on the synergistic power of their human capital.
It is against this backdrop that companies are able to reshape their activities, redesign their products and services, and refocus their creative wells of inspiration to draw from their strongest assets – their employees. Whether it’s incremental innovation or disruptive innovation, it is thanks to out-of-the-box thinking in concert with innovation management technology that we are able to achieve amazing feats of human ingenuity, trustless systems, and efficient operations.
Article source: https://techspective.net/2018/11/17/disruptive-tech-with-innovation-management/
In today’s IT world, everything is about being fast, flexible and efficient. We work agile, build prototypes and use fast-scaling adoptive cloud infrastructure. At the same time, the advances in the fields of AI and machine learning seem to make a business world possible, in which many tasks are optimized or even taken over by learning algorithms and intelligent software.
But whoever thinks of this world in terms of just picking out the low-hanging fruits from the growing AI-tree might be in for a big disappointment. Sure, rapid hardware advancements and cloud infrastructure enable fast computations but they don’t solve one of the core challenges inherent in the way most algorithms learn: based on mathematical properties that are deducted from input data.
Of course, this is not a secret at all. In many discussion and contributions focusing on the limits of AI and machine learning this topic comes up quickly. As Peter Guy puts it in the South China Morning Post: AI is only as smart as the given data input or Jason Pontin on WIRED: “new situations baffle artificial intelligences, like cows brought up short at a cattle grid”. However, this limitation does not seem to be very prominent when businesses envision the great potential they see in AI bringing them forward. Gartner estimates that in 2021, AI augmentation will generate $2.9 trillion in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity (see “Forecast: The Business Value of Artificial Intelligence, Worldwide, 2017-2025”).
How much time and effort are we willing to spend training machines?
In order to meet these high expectations regarding AI to leverage business processes and boost productivity, we need to deal with the dependency on input data when learning. Otherwise, I’m seriously wondering who is going to teach all those machines. Or else: who is going to get them all the adequate data input they need in order to drive forward a business? When you listen to Michael Chui and James Manyika in their McKinsey podcast about the real- world potential and limitations of artificial intelligence, you get an impression of how tedious and time consuming it can be to teach and generate adequate training data for only one specific machine learning task. And how much this is often underestimated when thinking about “self-learning” machines.
This underestimation could grow into a serious issue because in order to learn properly, algorithms have some requirements, which seem to become scarcer in today’s IT and business: time, consistency and extensive variety. If we want algorithms to pick up patterns and machines to make smart decisions, we need to teach them over time. Or at least give them data, rules and an environment in which they can…Continue reading
Article Source: https://dataconomy.com/2018/10/how-learning-processes-in-artificial-intelligence-ai-can-improve-business-decisions/
Most business industries evolve over time and customer buyer habits change. As a result, how your business adapts to these changes will directly affect how successful you will be in the future.
There are many famous companies in the past that failed to adapt to buying behaviour of customers and as a result, they have been consigned to history. Kodak for example were once probably the most trusted brand in the photography industry. The company failed to adapt to the digital photography revolution, which was one of the fundamental reasons for their downfall.
In this post, I will outline some measures that you can take to help future-proof your business for ongoing success.
It is important that you get regular feedback on your products that you sell or the services that you provide. What you offer needs to evolve to match customer needs.
Disruptive businesses can potentially change buyer behaviours. Netflix and on-demand television services have disrupted more industries than just the movie rentals and general television sector. Off-license liquor stores and take-away restaurants have had to…Continue reading…
Article source: https://www.business2community.com/small-business/how-to-future-proof-your-business-02119529
Opinion by Jon Atkinson
Now a normal part of New Orleans’ lexicon, the word “startup” evokes excitement and energy. A startup’s job is to figure out new and innovative business models, bring novel technology to market, fill underserved gaps in existing marketplaces — and, most importantly, to become a larger business, quickly. Being a startup is typically a temporary phase in a company’s life cycle. It is one characterized by the “search” for unique ways that the company will create value later. Established businesses, by contrast, know their business model and optimize to “execute” it.
Like any good startup, The Idea Village has spent considerable time and energy searching for its ideal business model. Since its founding in 2000, The Idea Village has been a critical part of catalyzing a cultural shift to embracing the new and different and empowering our community to “trust their crazy ideas.” Programs such as New Orleans Entrepreneur Week (NOEW), IDEAcorps, and the IDEAx Accelerator have forged connections, championed a needed dialogue around entrepreneurship, and helped build a foundation from which others have gone on to succeed. The leaders who came before me believed that New Orleans could be an innovation hub, well before that idea was cool.
Today, we have an opportunity for The Idea Village to transition from is initial phase as a startup catalyst to operating as an execution engine that serves startups, their founders and employees, investors, mentors and resource providers.
We must leverage our experience and history to become an execution engine that helps others search for their business model. We also must become a repository of knowledge concerning the problems that are common to early-stage, high-growth startups and package this knowledge into meaningful solutions for the companies we serve. It is our job to do this, so founders can focus on what really matters: building industry-specific expertise, developing their business model and creating meaningful solutions for their customers.
Building great companies doesn’t happen overnight. For every glowing press release about a startup’s success, there are often years of toil, lost sleep and worry about making payroll. Building a vibrant ecosystem is an even longer-term proposition. When I listen to TPG founding partner Jim Coulter’s keynote every NOEW, I find myself wondering where this guy hides his crystal ball. However, I think his secret is that he always has his eyes on the horizon, looking 10, 15, 20 years down the road. To be a successful entrepreneurial community that fosters startups and innovation, we must have staying power and be willing to absorb — and even celebrate — failure.
Staying power is a challenge for startup communities across the country and for many potential founders. To increase our staying power as a community we must build great companies that generate opportunity for people from all backgrounds. Great companies cultivate a cycle of entrepreneurship by training and seeding the next generation of founders. To start this cycle, we must band together as a community to focus our resources on the long-term.
The first phase of building this ecosystem is to create a culture that is accepting of risk-taking and innovation. New Orleans is unique in that we are one of a few places in the country that has meaningfully moved the needle on creating an entrepreneurial culture over the past 15 years. Organizations like The Idea Village helped foster that culture.
The second phase is about cultivating businesses that can succeed at scale. This means solving more meaningful problems, tapping bigger markets — often beyond our borders — attracting capital, managing rapid growth and cultivating, attracting and retaining top-tier talent. The Idea Village was a leader of the first phase; we are now called to search for the resources and solutions to empower and master the second.
If we can successfully make this transition, it will unlock the potential for meaningful economic and community development. This means jobs, upward mobility, opportunities, economic “exports” and civic leadership on a new level.
Building an ecosystem that supports entrepreneurship means we can be who we want to be (a thriving, innovative business-focused city) without compromising who we are (eccentric, fun, a truly unique city). And if we do this right, we can continue to be New Orleans, celebrating our history, culture and sense of place, while creating economic opportunity to improve our neighbors’ lives.
I look forward to leading the Idea Village in this next chapter, so that in another 18 years we can look back again on what we’ve accomplished.
Jon Atkinson is the CEO of The Idea Village in New Orleans and the former director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development at Loyola University New Orleans.
| The Newsman
HTF MI recently broadcasted a new study in its database that highlights the in-depth market analysis with future prospects of Paper and Pulp market. The study covers significant data which makes the research document a handy resource for managers, industry executives and other key people get ready-to-access and self-analyzed study along with graphs and tables to help understand market trends, drivers and market challenges. Some of the key players mentioned in this research are Stora Enso (FI), Fibria (BR), RGE (SG), Sappi (ZA), UMP (FI), ARAUCO (CL), CMPC (CL), APP (SG), Metsa Fibre (FI), Suzano (BR), IP (US), Resolute (CA), Ilim (RU), Sdra Cell (SE), Domtar (US), Nippon Paper (JP), Mercer (CA), Eldorado (BR), Cenibra (BR), Oji Paper (JP), Ence (ES), Canfor (CA), West Fraser (CA), SCA (SE), Chenming (CN), Sun Paper (CN), Yueyang (CN), Yongfeng (CN) & Huatai (CN).
Get Access to sample pages @ https://www.htfmarketreport.com/sample-report/955145-united-states-paper-and-pulp-market-2
The research covers the current market size of the United States Paper and Pulp market and its growth rates based on 5 year history data. It also covers various types of segmentation such as by geography [The West, Southwest, The Middle Atlantic, New England, The South & The Midwest], by product /end user type [Bleached Softwood Kraft Pulp (BSK), Birch Hardwood Kraft Pulp (BHK) & High Yield Pulp (HYP)], by applications [Printing and Writing Paper, Tissue Paper & Other] in overall market. The in-depth information by segments of Paper and Pulp market helps monitor performance & make critical decisions for growth and profitability. It provides information on trends and developments, focuses on markets and materials, capacities, technologies, CAPEX cycle and the changing structure of the United States Paper and Pulp Market.
For more information or any query mail at sales@htfmarketreport.com
This study also contains company profiling, product picture and specifications, sales, market share and contact information of various international, regional, and local vendors of United States Paper and Pulp Market, some of them are Stora Enso (FI), Fibria (BR), RGE (SG), Sappi (ZA), UMP (FI), ARAUCO (CL), CMPC (CL), APP (SG), Metsa Fibre (FI), Suzano (BR), IP (US), Resolute (CA), Ilim (RU), Sdra Cell (SE), Domtar (US), Nippon Paper (JP), Mercer (CA), Eldorado (BR), Cenibra (BR), Oji Paper (JP), Ence (ES), Canfor (CA), West Fraser (CA), SCA (SE), Chenming (CN), Sun Paper (CN), Yueyang (CN), Yongfeng (CN) & Huatai (CN). The market competition is constantly growing higher with the rise in technological innovation and M&A activities in the industry. Moreover, many local and regional vendors are offering specific application products for varied end-users. The new vendor entrants in the market are finding it hard to compete with the international vendors based on quality, reliability, and innovations in technology.
Article source: https://thefreenewsman.com/paper-and-pulp-market-in-depth-analysis-by-opportunities-challenges-key-market-segments-forecast-for-5-years/87024/
By Nate Vickery, Editor at Bizzmark Blog
Content marketing is subjective and can’t be measured by tangible metrics, right? Not true, says Nate Vickery. Content marketing is as much about creativity as it is about knowing your audience, so marketers need to know how to measure what’s working.
One of the major problems content marketers face is not knowing how to track the effectiveness of their content. Many believe that content marketing is subjective and that it depends on some intangible metrics, but it’s not true. There is a wide range of specific metrics that can tell you which strategies really drive more traffic to your site, boost conversions or increase your revenue. All you have to do is learn how to separate the right KPIs from those that may distract you.
With this in mind, here are eight awesome metrics every content marketer should monitor:
The bounce rate shows how many visitors leave your site after viewing just one page. This metric provides you with an invaluable insight, helping you understand your target audience. It gives you an opportunity to find out why someone lands on your site and then kicks it before completing the desired action. It could be a poor page load speed? Maybe your content is not relevant to them or the overall appeal of the site is not that positive. What about your menu and navigation? How clear and user-friendly are they?
The only problem with this metric is that it’s usually misunderstood, as it can sometimes be quite murky. For instance, if someone clicks on your link from Facebook and leaves your site after reading your article from beginning to end, this still counts as a bounce – this is why you shouldn’t rely on this metric solely when determining the success of your content.
The name says it all – retention metrics show how many people return to your site. These metrics include stuff like return visitors and the frequency of returns – they are insanely important to content marketers as they actually show how well your content resonates with your readers. If it’s relevant, informative and engaging enough, they will come back. Most importantly, they will see you as a reliable and trusted source of information. Remember, attracting new visitors to your site is important, but retaining them and boosting their loyalty to your brand is the foundation of your content marketing strategy.
It’s good to know the average amount of time your readers spend on your site since it shows how engaged they are with your content. So if you’ve published a comprehensive 2000-word guide and you see that people leave it after two minutes, this means that they’re not reading it. The same goes for your videos, infographics and podcasts. If your visitors aren’t interested in reading, watching or listening to your content from beginning to end, this means that you’re either targeting the wrong people or that you’re failing to bring value to them.
The major problem with this metric is that it doesn’t really tell you if your readers are actively engaged. For example, if someone opens your article, but then gets distracted by a phone call and spends 15 minutes on that page without reading…Continue reading
Article source: https://www.marketingmag.com.au/hubs-c/opinoin-nate-vickery-eight-awesome-content-marketing-metrics/
We are familiar with the popularity of The Avengers, a comic book series of fictional superheroes published by Marvel Comics. Each character possesses special covert powers and abilities to fight evil forces and save humanity. Yet, there is a takeaway from the storylines of The Avenger series that you can apply to the business operations of your company.
As you examine each member of your team do you take the time to access the scope of talents and abilities each person brings to your business? If you have not closely examined your employee’s specialty niches, then you are wasting valuable talent and shortchanging your company’s growth potential.
Do you have a member of your team who is like the Black Panther (T’Challa) a brilliant tactician, strategist, scientist, and tracker? Or an Ironman (Tony Stark) a genius level intellect who can invent a wide range of sophisticated specialized devices? Or perhaps you have a Black Widow, who is an expert spy knowing what the competition is planning and has devised a plan on how to penetrate the competition’s weakest link?
If you think about a sports team for a minute, you can clearly see that in football everyone cannot be the quarterback or kicker. In basketball, everyone cannot be a point guard or center. In motorsports, everyone cannot be a pit crew chief or racecar driver. Each member of a team has a specialized talent and sometimes leaders fail to identify the value of an individual attribute to the team’s overall success. How would you equip these individuals with the tools, training, and education needed to take your company to the top? Perhaps you can take something from the playbook of The Avengers to teach you how.
InKNOWvative Concepts 
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