Content Marketing Today

Conditioned Air shows how internal content marketing enables internal communications that bind, motivate, and strengthen its team.

You can learn an awful lot about a company during your first few minutes inside their office. Is everything spic and span? Do you get a warm welcome? Do you see energized, friendly staffers. Do you get offers of help?

If the answer to these kinds of questions is an unequivocal Yes, you have just met a company that understands the vital role of internal communications. In fact, it's probably a company that believes at the gut level that the company is a team with every member playing a vital role in its success.

I think Naples-based Conditioned Air is one such company. It also turns out that they understand the importance of content marketing inside the business.

On a recent visit, company CEO, Theo Etzel, and I were discussing content marketing when the subject of internal communications arose. He showed me the most recent edition of their company newsletter. After reading it, I can say that this company walks the walk on internal communications.

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eNewsletter expert, Michael Katz, puts it all in perspective for professional service providers.

Thanks to Patsi Krakoff of  Writing on the Web for leading me to Michael. He gets right to the heart of a major marketing challenge. How do we describe what we do in a way that will attract customers when they have a pressing need? 

For those of us who provide professional services, we often suffer from knowing a lot about a lot. Even worse, we want to share as much as we can about our skill set with prospective clients. Then we hope they can determine how that passel of capabilities might match what they need right now.

Basically, we're asking our prospects to work too hard to understand how we can help when all they want is a precise solution to an urgent problem.

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By bringing strong content forward and giving themselves more space their site can become a much better representation of the good work that they do.

It wouldn't take much to make dramatic improvements in the ability of the HarmonTampa website to increase its appeal to prospective clients who are unfamiliar with the firm. Relatively small changes could make a big difference. Here's where I believe they can improve the user experience and deliver more content marketing benefit to the firm itself:

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Smart marketers are changing the way they connect with their customers. It's all about content marketing. And, it's the subject of our book, Get Content Get Customers.

Be sure to spend some quality online time with us on February 11 at 3pm EST so you can what content marketing is, how it works, and how to do it successfully.

If you missed the first call with my co-author, Joe Pulizzi and me, you missed a practical, put-it-to-work discussion about how to reach customers by designing and deploying a powerful marketing plan that delivers the goods.  Consider this your make up session.

Even if you did listen to our first session, you'll get even more value from our new teleseminar partners Rohit Bhargava, best-selling author of Personality Not Included, and Brian Clark, veteran blogger and founder of Copyblogger.com, for a powerful discussion on why content marketing is critical to your biz and how you can effectively implement this strategy.

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We all know that sex sells in plenty of obvious circumstances. But, sometimes, it may really put off the folks you really want to influence. A recent post in the CopyBlogger reminded me of the dangers that lurk when you fail to understand your target audience. And, it also made me think of PajamaGrams.

As Valentines Day approaches, we are bombarded with TV ads for PajamaGrams.  It may be that most of the recipients of those classy PJ's are comfortable grandmotherly types for whom full-length flannel jammies are more appealing than tiny bits of lace. But their frisky commercials sure seem to target a younger demographic for whom sleep is not the high priority it becomes as we get a bit older. So, in that case sex does sell. We know it's working because they keep rerunning the same commercial year after year.

But, as Simon Payn reminds in When Sex Refuses to Sell, just driving huge amounts of traffic to a site may be completely counterproductive. He recounts past incidents in which his companies' ability to drive traffic based on their sites' temporary sex appeal ultimately drove advertisers away.

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You have plenty of screen real estate. So, use it. Use all of it.

In the early days of the Internet, online news pioneers such as the New York Times were constrained by the average size of a computer screen. Thus, they built very small homepages.  That was okay back then.  It's all wrong now. The New York Times changed its design completely to take advantage of bigger and better screens and of changed reader behavior--in which scrolling down the page to scan all the content is the norm. Effective content marketing depends not only on what you write but by how accessible you make it for those prospective customers who visit your home page. Envision your website as a great publication that will draw in readers just as the New York Times does every day. Read More