Content Marketing Today

This week, several client meetings reinforced a vital truth:  Content marketing isn’t an arcane theory taught in expensive graduate schools that only billion dollar companies can use. In fact, great  content marketing is much more about brains than big bucks.

Those client conversations took me back to lessons learned from more than a dozen case studies we featured in Get Content Get Customers. What came through loud and clear was that content marketing requires discipline, patience, and persistence, but it doesn’t require an enormous budget. 

It’s particularly gratifying to watch so many small businesses and independent professionals putting content marketing to work.  Here in SW Florida, Dean Piccirillo of HBK Sorce Financial, realtor, Chris Griffith, and Simply Cupcakes of Naples are three inspirational examples. With minimal budgets and maximum creativity, they are executing content marketing strategies that deliver tangible results.  And, for the most part, they have bypassed traditional marketing and advertising.

If you haven’t read Get Content Get Customers, you can cut to the content marketing chase here with the following 10 top takeaways from our case studies. They may just inspire you to stop procrastinating and to kick start your content marketing strategy now. 

These takeaways apply to companies of every size, but will bring outsized benefits to small companies when they use marketing brains to outmaneuver marketing brawn.

How to Get Started on Cheap and Powerful Customer Studies

Unless you understand your customers, you risk  painful marketing missteps.

Because we know that effective content marketing depends on a thorough understanding of your customers, regular research should be a core component of your content marketing strategy. 

Of course, it's possible to do way too much research.  That's when you wind up with the paralysis by analysis situation.  But, most small to midsize  companies suffer from too little research and too much gut feel. That's when some very bad decisions get made.

The good news is that even very small companies with tiny budgets can now conduct high quality research that would have been affordable only for multimillion dollar companies just five or 10 years ago

Although it is possible to spend vast amounts of money on research conducted by high profile research organizations, it is much easier than you might think to conduct valuable research on your own.  Today, numerous online tools make it simple to create and deploy research studies--and that even provide guaranteed numbers of recipients.

How to Get Started on Your All-Important Customer Research

Dean Piccirillo Makes a One-Person Blog-powered Website Look like a Major Corporate Presence Online

Building a solid business blog-powered website is challenging for all of us. But it’s even more difficult for anyone who lives in the financial services universe.

Because financial services professionals must adhere to strict compliance regulations, they must be very careful about what they say and how they say it.  Dean Piccirillo a principal in HBK Sorce Financial, LLC, manages to convey relevant and compelling information while maintaining essential compliance.

Even more impressive is the quality of his own site's design which manages to be simultaneously newsy and professional. To build DeanPiccirillo.com, Dean used a WordPress theme called Live Wire that can be significantly customized for the needs of an individual business.  Perhaps most impressive of all is the fact that Dean did almost all the work himself. Although this may be beyond the capabilities of many of us, it shows what a non-technical businessperson can achieve using the power of a tool like WordPress.

You Must Persuade Me to Act or Your Beautiful Promotional Piece Will Sleep with the Fishes

I was perversely inspired to write this because of a recent gorgeous direct mailing I received from local French restaurant.

They did a lot of things right. There was some beautiful photography that captured the essence of this charming little bistro. They described how the restaurant and its cuisine were uniquely appealing. They shared some impressive awards and recognitions for their excellence. They included their Web address. And, they even provided a little map that showed me exactly how to find it.

There was only one thing missing. But it was the most important thing: They failed to make me an offer that would entice me to dine at the restaurant. In fact, there was no offer at all.

Effective content marketing online drives LifeinBonitaSprings.com to number four on search rankings.

You might think that Realtor.com, Yahoo real estate, the Yellow Pages, either of the two local newspapers or all of the big area real estate companies would trample an individual realtor on Google. But, you’d be wrong.

In fact, when you search for "Bonita Springs real estate" in Google, you pull up a total of 557,000 results. But, standing at an impressive #4 is LifeinBonitaSprings.com. That's the blog powered website of Chris Griffith, a realtor with Downing Frye real estate. It's worth noting that, although Downing Frye is a successful, well-established local realtor, their company website doesn't show up until page 3 of the listings.

Although Chris gets a terrific ranking, does that translate into business for her? You bet it does.

Chris says that she currently gets more than 90% of all of her real estate business directly from the Internet. Just five years ago only half of her business came from the Web.

A Great Product with a Terrible Name Will Sink. A Great Product with Terrific Name Will Soar.

Think Google. Think Bing. Think Kleenex. Think Nike.  But most of all think carefully before you attach that all-important brand name to your shiny new product.

That’s the essential advice from Caitlin Randolph of BrandBucket.com in this guest post. BrandBucket teaches companies how to build new brands with a bang by choosing just the right name.

6 Keys to Turning a Terrific Idea into a Successful Product by Leveraging Just the Right Brand Name.

For many start ups, naming a new business or product is even harder than coming up with the perfect name for your firstborn child. By the time your idea is ready to become a product you may find yourself in desperate need of a great brand name. But you may also find yourself a bit too close to your baby to give it the perfect brand name.

We know how hard and how important it is to develop that name so let us shine some new light on the naming of your future brand.