Month: August 2021

Categories
Purpose-Driven Marketing Tips

5 Ways to Repurpose Evergreen Content

Content may be king, but it also requires a significant investment of effort and resources. Constantly churning out new content pieces to be your next “crowning achievement” requires a lot of researching, writing, editing, approving, and publishing. 

Luckily, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to achieve your content marketing goals. Your older content has been waiting in the wings and it might finally be time to give it an encore. 

There are many perks of repurposing evergreen content (content that continues to be relevant), such as providing an SEO boost, reaching new audiences, driving traffic, and potentially getting sales. 

However, not all of your old content is evergreen or should necessarily be given a second chance; sometimes, it’s already served its purpose. Instead, look to your best, top-performing, and still-relevant content to give a facelift.

Once you’ve audited your existing collection, keep reading for our five ways to repurpose evergreen content.

1. Transform Evergreen Content into New Content 

These days, books become TV shows, TV shows become movies, movies become, well, more movies. Content is versatile and malleable; it has the ability to become new, exciting things in different mediums. 

This should be good news for your content team. They may have put a lot of effort into creating a piece of content, and transforming it helps ensure you get the most out of their efforts. 

Use the information in an evergreen blog or landing page to create an infographic. Infographics use texts and graphics to display information in a fun, digestible way. Here are some great examples of infographics to inspire you. 

Video content continues to be one of — if not the most — popular forms of content these days. Fifty-four percent of consumers want to see more video content from a brand or business they support. In addition to video content, over 11 million Canadian adults listened to podcasts in the past year. If you have either recording or film equipment, you could turn your content into a podcast or video for your audience to enjoy. 

2. Use Your Evergreen Content to Make an Email Newsletter

If you have an email newsletter, you know the time and energy it takes to come up with quality, consistent email content. Luckily, your older blogs can make their comeback in your next email send. 

Depending on your goals and newsletter style, you could tease your blogs in the email copy and drive traffic to these pages to give them an SEO boost. Crossing an email off your to-do list and boosting your SEO? It’s a win/win. 

Alternatively, you could “borrow” copy from the blog to put into the email itself. For example, a listicle blog could be repurposed into multiple email content blocks or an infographic embedded in the email. Here are some great examples of listicle-style emails. 

3. Turn Your Evergreen Content into a Social Media Post

According to Global WebIndex, 53.6% of the world’s population uses social media with an average daily usage of 2 hours and 25 minutes. There’s no doubt that a good portion of your customers are hanging out on social media — so why not meet them where they’re at? You’re likely already doing social media posts for updates on your latest offerings, so adding in more content-focused posts is a great way to get your content in front of your audience.

Here are some quick stats from Forbes: 54% of social browsers use social media to research products and 71% watch videos on social media to laugh. With this in mind, think of your existing content that could check these boxes. Social content that is interesting, helpful, or funny is more likely to get shared and engaged with. 

So how do you take a blog or webpage and make it into a social post? It’s simple: think of the content and the platform. Stats can be turned into tweets; infographics can be turned into Instagram grid carousels; listicle blogs can be turned into Instagram stories. Don’t be afraid to get creative!

4. Refresh Your Evergreen Blog Posts

Turns out, you can teach an old blog new tricks. Give an old blog a second chance by updating dated information. For example, if you had written a blog at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic about changes to your service offerings, you could update that information with your latest protocols instead of writing an entirely new blog. That way, you don’t add unnecessary work for your copywriters, and you maintain the SEO value of the original blog. 

As consumer behaviour changes, we’re learning how to best market to our target audiences.  Perhaps you had written a long-form blog which isn’t seeing the same performance it once did. Don’t worry, it’s nothing personal. 

According to a Microsoft Study, people have an attention span of eight seconds, a decrease from 12 seconds back in 2000. Consider refreshing that long-form blog into a shorter listicle blog. Alternatively, you could take that longer blog and stretch it out into several, shorter blogs, depending on your goals. 

5. Combine Your Evergreen Content into Long-Form Content

People might have shorter attention spans these days, but that doesn’t mean that longer form content doesn’t have its place. There are lots of reasons for long-form content: they earn the most organic traffic, readers spend more time with them, and Google rewards them. 

So how do you take your existing blogs, infographics, or social media posts and combine them into long-form content? Some ideas include: combining multiple blogs into an ultimate guide or ebook, building out an infographic into a slidedeck for internal brand trainings, or making a blog post featuring your top social media posts. 

Old content doesn’t have to be left behind; it can boost SEO, drive traffic, reach new audiences, and more. Choose evergreen content that’s relevant, high-performing, and engaging, and don’t be afraid to get creative with how you repurpose it. 

Create Incredible Content with Sparx  

At Sparx, our mission is to create content to make the world better.

Whether you want to give your old content new life or create new content, the experts at Sparx Publishing Group are always available to chat. We help purpose driven organizations secure their website, create great content, build experiences to delight their customers, and help grow their business. You can reach us here.

Categories
Work Life & Culture

What is Sparx Trading? A Content Marketing Success Story

Think of your last (virtual) dinner party – maybe terms like “zero-commission trading” or “ETF” came up in conversation. These days, it seems like everyone and their grandma is interested in DIY investing. Perhaps you’ve even considered it, finding yourself Googling online brokerages.

If you’ve ever tried to find information to compare online brokerages, you know it’s not always an easy feat. In fact, you may have spent more time going down reddit rabbit holes than actually putting your hard-earned money to work. Solving this problem was the spark that brought Sparx Trading into existence.

Founded in 2011 in Vancouver, Canada, Sparx Trading was built to make it easy for self-directed investors with different levels of knowledge and experience to research and choose an online brokerage. The overwhelming number of products, services, and materials available in the online brokerage space resulted in a clear need for an educational platform that provided reliable, straightforward, and most importantly, accessible information.

What Does Sparx Trading Do?

  • Helps self-directed investors research and compare online brokerages. Investors come in three main types: those who use portfolio managers to help them make investing decisions, those who use robo-advisors, and self-directed or DIY investors, those who build and manage their portfolios themselves. Sparx Trading’s main focus is on self-directed investors.

    While self-directed investors don’t pay for the services of a portfolio manager, they still have to invest via an online brokerage — which has its own set of potential fees and features — to be able to trade stocks on an exchange.

    Sparx Trading is a one-stop source of industry-grade information for DIY investors about online brokerages. Users are able to find deals, read brokerage reviews, and compare online brokerages with a comprehensive tool.

    The information is designed to improve financial literacy and increase transparency when it comes to online brokerages and the world of investing. In other words, to level the playing field for DIY investors. The material is usable, impartial, accurate, and all in one place, so users at varying levels of experience can make their own decisions on which online brokerage is best for them.

    By having access to this information, self-directed investors are empowered to build their wealth by choosing an online brokerage that can best help them achieve their specific financial goals. 
  • Provides information and analysis for industry professionals. When it comes to news and trends in the online brokerage space, it can be challenging for those in the industry to stay up to date on everything that’s happening, too.

    Each week, Sparx Trading releases the Weekly Roundup, an informative and fun blog that curates important developments in the online brokerage space, and delivers an insightful and data-driven analysis of each development.

    The Weekly Roundup also helps professionals stay on top of overarching customer sentiment by highlighting topics that self-directed investors are discussing across a variety of online forums.

Why is Sparx Trading a Great Example of Content Marketing?

With its unique Weekly Roundup blog series, brokerage comparison tool, index of current deals and promotions, and comprehensive review pages for online brokerages, Sparx Trading produces some pretty valuable and successful content — and others think so too.

In fact, after Sparx Trading was launched in 2011, it attracted the attention of DIY investors and major Canadian financial brands (including several big banks), as well as other businesses in the finance space. Not only did these audiences find value in our content, we also connected with companies who wanted content marketing help, similar to what they’d seen on Sparx Trading. And so, Sparx Publishing Group was born!

Starting with Sparx Trading, a brand that is entirely content-driven, Sparx Publishing Group has worked with many brands on increasingly complex digital marketing challenges. Meanwhile, we continue to build content for Sparx Trading and find new ways to deliver even more value to audiences in the online brokerage space. 

By doing this, we exemplify what we’re able to achieve with content marketing: publishing consistent, timely, value-added content to an engaged audience. We know our content marketing methods work because we’re both the chef and the guest!  

Sparx Trading also aligns with Sparx Publishing Group’s mission to make the world better. Through the content produced by Sparx Trading, self-directed investors are given the tools to improve their financial well-being, a key indicator of overall lifestyle and happiness.

Create Impactful Content Marketing Campaigns with Sparx 

At Sparx, our mission is to create content to make the world better.

If you want to create successful, value-added content but aren’t sure where to start, the experts at Sparx Publishing Group are always available to chat. We help purpose driven organizations secure their website, create great content, build experiences to delight their customers, and help grow their business. You can reach us here.

Categories
Purpose-Driven Marketing Tips

Why and How to Add More Diversity Into Your Marketing Efforts

Following the heightened activity during the COVID-19 lockdowns of ongoing ground-breaking movements like Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate calling attention to systemic issues in society, more people are taking a stand against the hidden and not-so-hidden injustices in the world – and companies are no exception.

There has been a groundswell of corporate engagement on issues that affect marginalized folks, and with it, a push for more diversity and inclusion in marketing campaigns, such as ones done by Coca-Cola, Google, and more.

Diversity goes beyond race and gender; it includes age, socio-economic class, sexual orientation, ability, and a variety of other factors. There are many reasons to consider these groups in your marketing efforts, and beyond. However, it’s important to avoid “woke-washing,” performative efforts to jump on the bandwagon of a movement – often to cash in – while not actually working to address a systemic issue.

Fear not: we’ve come up with a guide to help you add more diversity to your marketing efforts in an authentic, actionable way to truly make the world better.

Why You Should Consider Adding More Diversity to Your Marketing

  • Enhance brand perception and loyalty. An Adobe survey found that 62% of adults say diversity in a company’s ads impacted the way they perceive a brand, and 38% say they’d be more likely to trust a brand with diversity in their advertising. It’s not a coincidence that a brand that focuses on diversity and inclusion makes people feel, well, included.

    On the flip side, lacking diversity can lead to unwanted consequences. Top Design Firms reported this finding: “If two brands offer the exact same product, one in three consumers (34%) would consider each brand’s commitment to diversity and inclusion when making their final purchasing decision.” By showcasing diversity in your marketing, you increase trust and loyalty with your customers.
  • Make customers feel represented. Think of your marketing like a high school cafeteria: if your marketing is mostly white, male, able-bodied, young, and affluent, there’s a big chunk of the population who would feel like they wouldn’t fit in at that table. Instead, these people would go to another spot in the cafeteria where not only would they fit in, but thrive with other similar people. Try to include all types of people in your marketing so everyone feels invited to take a seat.
  • Grow your audience. When your marketing represents more of the population, more people come to your table. Therefore, not only do people feel good about being included, but you grow your audience of people to market to, which continues to build as they share your company with their audiences. It’s really a win/win.
  • Increase your profits. About two-thirds of consumers consider making a purchase immediately after seeing an ad they consider to be diverse, and two-thirds of consumers also consider making a second purchase from a brand they believe is committed to diversity and inclusion, according to a Top Design Firms report. On top of that, by growing your audience, you have a bigger pool of potential customers to market to, and therefore, potentially sell your products or services to. 

How to Add More Diversity to Your Marketing 

  • Think beyond imagery. While it’s important to showcase diversity in your images, it’s important to take it a step further and put in the work behind the scenes. 
    • You’ll want to understand your target audience, including their demographics, values, opinions, and more. This will help you be authentic and thoughtful in your messaging to them. 
    • It’s also recommended to have diverse voices and points of view within your internal team so you’re truly practicing what you preach. This can also help avoid things like inadvertent cultural appropriation, or accidentally coming across as insulting or condescending to any audience segment. 
    • You may also want to audit your internal and external systems to gauge user experience. This is especially important in the case of ability, as you may be unintentionally excluding members of the population with certain disabilities if they’re unable to use your systems due to accessibility challenges. 
    • As well, it’s recommended to continually educate your team on politically-correct terms and allyship practices, historical contexts of certain groups, and current events that affect these groups today. For example, you can acknowledge the Indigenous land your company resides on somewhere on your website or social media profiles, and add the pronouns of your public-facing staff to show support to gender non-comforming and trans folks by helping normalize gender discussions.
  • Be strategic about your marketing. Choose your words and imagery carefully in your content, but know that a single ad or post isn’t going to please all people at all times. Try your best to be inclusive, politically-correct, and authentic, but if something is brought to your attention that wasn’t quite right, use it as a learning opportunity to do better next time. Acknowledge the shortcoming, and apply that knowledge to your next campaign. You can also look to your audience and directly ask what matters to them to ensure they feel seen and heard in your marketing. 

Get Expert Marketing Support with Sparx  

At Sparx, our mission is to create content to make the world better.
If you want to create inclusive marketing campaigns but aren’t sure where to start, the experts at Sparx Publishing Group are always available to chat. We help purpose driven organizations secure their website, create great content, build experiences to delight their customers, and help grow their business. You can reach us here.