Content Marketing Today

Joe Pulizzi’s 8th Installment Reviews Record 353 Blogs to Select Content Marketing Thought Leaders

We are delighted to have earned another strong ranking among the content marketing blog elite. We are especially pleased because this is one tough crew of content marketing thought leaders.

The number of blogs reviewed by the Junta42 team has grown as dramatically as the move toward adoption of content marketing strategies among companies of all sizes.  They began in 2007 with just 81 blogs and now evaluate 353 which are chosen through nominations and known content marketing-related blogs.

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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

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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.

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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.

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Use Free Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Directories to Bring Your Business Front and Center on Local Web Searches

(Guest post by WordPress fanatic and small business web consultant Don Campbell)

If your business is an "offline" business with a physical storefront, the most effective way to improve your search rankings in Google is to list your business in the free local business directories from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Once you are listed in these directories, you have a chance to get listed in the "Google 10-Pack" - which is an invaluable way to get the word out about your business when people type in search terms in your local area. In fact, if you don't claim your Google Local Business Center profile, in some cases it can be scooped up by others who want to capitalize on the listings! Read More

Be very specific about what tangible benefits you intend to derive from your efforts.

It seems as though every kind of organization from multinational to small business to nonprofit are beginning to believe that social media should be an important component of their marketing programs. In our own Southwest Florida community, this is clear from the organic growth of the social media coffee sessions organized by a savvy local marketer, Cyndee Woolley.

The perceived importance of social media marketing has grown with astonishing speed even compared to the relatively rapid growth of the business Web. If you think back just 10 years, relatively few small organizations took the Web very seriously. If they had a website, it was probably pretty basic brochureware that did very little more than an actual brochure would have done.

By contrast, within just a few years, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter now represent the concept of social media marketing for small organizations--even if they're not very sure whether and how to use either one of them.

What I found encouraging from this morning's session is that a variety of owners, marketing folks, and nonprofit executives are determined to figure out exactly how to put social media to work. In particular, they are very much engaged in how to determine the ROI on their investment of time and money.

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The best small business solution is to eliminate a separate blog and website.

Unfortunately, typical small companies often misunderstand the power of a business blog--and cannot envision how it can and should be the driving force behind your online presence.  Your best bet is to leverage the power of blogging software to create an online presence which is, at once, timeless and timely.

Most of us began with a website that contains static content that was never intended to change much over time. Your static website will be an essential source of product, service, and company data to the majority of buyers that now relying on the Internet as their primary repository of information for potential purchases. Your static website is a vital beginning.  But, it's only a beginning. 

To compete for the attention of both search engines and buyers, you will need to add more and more dynamic content over time.  That's where a business blog comes into play.  If you already have a blog--or are considering one--you probably think of it as a completely separate entity with limited functionality.  That may be true for large organizations.  But, for a small business, your blog should be the engine behind a full fledged website that delivers much more clout than your old-fashioned static version.

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When your customers have an important need, they need to know the kind of company you are and why they can trust you

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to a combined group of wedding planners from Southwest Florida, the Wedding and Party Planners of Naples and the local National Association of Wedding Planners chapter. 

As I was preparing for the talk, the importance of content marketing in general--and of blogging in particular--really hit home.

Because a wedding is so important in so many ways to women of every age and circumstance, each bride needs to feel absolutely confident that it will come off as perfectly as humanly possible.

The current Sprint commercial that imagines a world in which weddings are run by movie crews captures this feeling beautifully.

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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)

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Joe Pulizzi's 5th Installment Reviews Record 224 Blogs to Select Content Marketing Thought Leaders

The number of blogs reviewed by the Junta42 team has grown as dramatically as the move toward adoption of content marketing strategies among companies of all sizes.

As Joe, founder and chief content officer of Junta42, and my co-author of  "Get Content Get Customers explains: 

"The content marketing revolution is alive and well. We started this almost two years ago with just a handful of blogs. Now at more than 200, it's amazing to witness how many marketing professionals are actively discussing the benefits and challenges of content marketing and custom publishing."

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