Content Marketing Today

When You Deliver Great Content and Control a Critical Buyer Database You Drive Sales

Although they are in the advertising business, small publishing companies have never done much advertising for their magazines. The reasons were simple, but not necessarily obvious: They didn’t have to—and it wouldn’t work if they tried it.

By emulating the best practices of small publishing companies, you can minimize traditional marketing costs, too. Believe it or not, it all comes back to content marketing. 

Why publishers can market effectively without advertising

Here is how publishers increase the likelihood that influential buyers will purchase advertising from them.  It couldn’t be simpler. Simply create an outstanding magazine filled with world-class content that provides thought leadership for their publication within their carefully targeted market.  Not only will  their subscribers value what they do, but their potential advertisers will value them just as much. 

Unfortunately, current business realities are bringing even the best publishers to grief.  But, that means you are even better positioned to benefit from effective content marketing.  

Here’s what to emulate:

Dan Roam in “The Back of the Napkin’ makes a convincing case for a simpler and better approach to communicating based on visual thinking.

There's a reason that school rooms and conference rooms have whiteboards.  We all tend to learn better when we combine what we hear with what we see.  That's why presentations can be more powerful when they integrate appropriate visual imagery. 

That was probably what the creators of PowerPoint had in mind rather than the bevy of bullet point, text-heavy monster presentations it has unleashed upon the world.

There is a better way and it’s all about visual thinking. Dan Rowe makes a powerful case for building on basic visual imagery as the best way to share information, solve problems, and sell ideas.

Build Your Brand and Your Business by Using Local Radio to Drive Prospects to Your Blog

The key to a powerful online presence is great content that targets your best buyers.  Over time, as you increase the critical mass of relevant and compelling content, you will attract increasing levels of traffic.  This is the essence of content marketing strategy.  But, you can do more without breaking the bank by extending and enhancing your online persona with carefully crafted radio commercials.

Although traditional media is facing enormous challenges, smart media companies will certainly survive. I became even more convinced of this following my recent visit to Roanoke Virginia where I spent some quality time with the Mel Wheeler, Inc. radio folks and quite a few of their customers and prospects. 

Wheeler, and especially my host, Lynda Foster, work closely with clients to help them succeed by teaching them how to do a better job of marketing.  This may not always result in immediate radio advertising dollars, but it does strengthen the local businesses and the business community. I am certain that it will ultimately bond dozens and dozens of local advertisers to Wheeler's Southwest Virginia radio stations as we work our way out of the recession.  This is great content marketing by Lynda and her colleagues.

Accelerating the impact of content marketing with smart radio strategies

It's all about asking the right kinds of questions of your ideal target buyers

Most of us don't trust our doctors because they have a lot of diplomas on the wall.  Of course, we sure hope they graduated from medical school, did an internship, and completed a residency.  All  that is necessary not sufficient.

We really trust them because they care enough to ask us just the right kinds of diagnostic questions that will help them uncover what ails us.

We also know that the best questions to really tough medical problems are most likely to come from those doctors who specialize in the specific area of medicine that relates to our current malady.

Our job as marketers is very much the same.

When Their Own Commercial Shows How Hard It Is to Get Urgent Answers, You Know They Have a Problem

Imagine a scenario where catastrophe looms unless an immediate solution can be found.  That’s the situation here where an aquarium worker accidentally creates a crack in the wall which quickly expands to disastrous proportions. 

Can the Yellow Pages save the day?

No. Their ever shrinking content reduces them from ‘must read’ to ‘why bother?’

For centuries, print magazines and newspapers had a publishing information monopoly.

Even when the consumer universe began to rely more on radio and TV, the business to business media was the only route to the industrial buyer. This was true for both public relations and advertising campaigns. If you wanted to get to the folks who bought business products and services, you had to use print media to reach them.

This virtual monopoly persisted unchallenged until the late 1990s when the internet intervened in a very big way. Unfortunately, most business-to-business publishers first ignored and then mishandled the online opportunity.  Too many of them thought like the railroad companies who mistakenly defined themselves as the railroads rather than as transportation providers.  In the same way, print publishing companies, run by smart people who knew how to build powerful print properties, failed to think of themselves as being in the information business. The print mentality was tattooed on their psyche

But, while they hung back, the buying behavior of their print readers changed dramatically. Their customers were moving to the Internet in search of solutions. This change in behavior will not reverse itself no matter what the print attempt.

Eventually, even those media companies late to the game figured out that a strong Internet presence was vital to their survival. And, for while, there was still plenty of print advertising revenue to support the critical mass of print content that made business publications relevant to their readers. For a brief shining moment, they could have the best of both worlds--print and online.  In the spring of 2009 that is no longer true.

Of course you need a website.  But, you need a lot more to succeed.

Your website is a primary location for product and service information for which your customers are searching.  Moreover, it should follow the content marketing mandate of customer centricity.  That is, your website must reflect an understanding of what's most important to your customers in the way that you present content about who you are, what you sell, and why your visitors should care. 

But, that’s still just the essential foundation. An effective website is necessary but not sufficient as an online marketing strategy.  Patsi Krakoff makes this very clear in her insightful post, Why Your Website Is Not Enough (...and never will be, sorry)

It’s much more powerful than those young whippersnappers--Twitter and Facebook

We often talk about the need to develop a content marketing mindset. This requires companies to think like publishers.  And that sounds an awful lot like social media as Wikipedia defines it:

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.

Your blog is your secret social media weapon

Thanks to free or inexpensive blogging tools, any individual can be on the same technological footing as the New York Times or Business Week.  That may seem relatively obvious to many of you.  What I think is less obvious is that your blog is every bit as much a social media tool as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.  In fact, I believe that a blog is the most important social media weapon in your arsenal.