Content Marketing Today

Unless You Address This Top of Mind, Unspoken Question, You are Out of the Game

Imagine for a moment, that you are looking out at a hoard of your customers in an actual or virtual audience and that each and every one of them is wearing a hat.

And, on each and every hat, are the words "so what?"

Essentially, that's what they're thinking when you are talking, sending them an e-mail, inviting them to your website, sharing an eNewsletter, mailing them a brochure or presenting them with an advertisement.

Web Content Strategist from Capetown Makes a Memorable Front and Back Impression

A business card is quite literally a small thing. But here’s one that made a big impression on me as a surprising example of content marketing.

The card’s owner/creator, Kerry-Anne Gilowey, participated in a workshop with me at the 2010 Content Strategy Forum. She impressed me as being memorably smart, creative, and witty. Quite separately, I found her card positively memorable, too.  And, I would have done even if I had never met her in person.

Here’s why:

Bus Shelter Ads Offer Can’t Miss Message that Promotes Use of Rider Friendly Technology

AC Transit avoids the "build it and they will come" mistake to which many companies and organizations fall prey. They know that simply offering bus service and implementing technology is just the beginning to motivating Bay Area residents to take the bus regularly.  They also prove that traditional outdoor advertising can still work brilliantly at the right time and place.  This is targeted, visual content marketing at its best.

The San Francisco Bay area boasts excellent public transit systems in the city itself and in surrounding counties. AC Transit is notable not only for a well-run system, but for its effectiveness in marketing the benefits of public transit to its passengers.

AC Transit is the third-largest bus-only transit system in California, serving over 400 square miles of the East Bay.  Every weekday, over 230,000 people ride their fleet of nearly 800 buses.  They run buses on 105 routes with more than 6500 stops.

Even better, they do a great job of marketing all those buses, stops, and routes to current and future passengers.

When you publish a monthly print or electronic newsletter that targets an important audience segment,  you probably invest heavily in generating the content that will make this newsletter relevant and valuable to its readers.  That is obviously critical.  But you can do much more to make that newsletter and its content work harder for your organization. How? Easy. Think outside the newsletter.

After all, the newsletter has a relatively finite reach, even online.  Think beyond this single content product.  You can dramatically increase the impact of your content marketing by thoughtful repurposing of the information and resources you developed in order to create the newsletter itself.

Here are 7 ways to extend the reach of your content far beyond the circulation of that print publication.  None of these require significant incremental expense. But they will consistently deliver dramatic increases in the reach of your content to prospective customers—and the impact it has on them.

  It’s been a very good year for content marketing. In fact, visitors searching our site for the phrase “content marketing” increased by 85% in 2009 over 2008.

Social media certainly loomed larger in the past 12 months but interest in content marketing strategy accounted for the majority of the most popular posts.

Here is the Cliff’s Notes bullet point version with more detail and links to the full articles following:

• How To Create the All-Important Elevator Speech For Your Presentations and for Your Content Marketing
• 5 Reasons an eBook Should be a Core Component of Your Content Marketing Strategy
• 5 Twitter Tips to Strengthen Your Content Marketing Strategy
• Want to Attract and Retain Great Customers? Become Their Online Content Concierge!
• Six Steps to a Successful Small Business Content Marketing Strategy
• 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool
• Why Being Visual Can Bring Beautiful Business Results
• 6 Reasons to Embrace Social Media Today
• Top 10 Lessons Small Businesses Can Takeaway from Smart Content Marketers
• 6 Secrets to Making Online Video Work for Small Business

A more detailed look at the top 10 with links to each complete article is just below.  Kick back and enjoy.

It’s All About the Power of Deep 3 D Content Over Skinny 2 D Content

What's the difference between 2-D marketing and 3-D marketing you might ask? Plenty!

Think of all the junk mail you receive at home or at the office.  Tons of envelopes and a few postcards.  Virtually everything but the bills will be tossed--and much of that without anyone looking at the individual pieces.  There is no depth to all that stuff.

But what if you receive a well-designed magazine that clearly matches your interests, even if you haven't requested it?  What's the likelihood that you will spend at least a few minutes leafing through the magazine.  Thus, the 3-D marketer will have made a memorable and positive impact on you and/or your business. The 2-D marketer will wind up in the wastebasket.

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.

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.

The Paradigm is Shifting. Remodel Your Marketing Now.

Marketing rules are changing all around us. The winners in this new world will be the early adopters who understand the new breed of buyer, take advantage of better and cheaper technology, and deliver problem-solving content.

It's time for marketers to replace traditional publishers. Make sure you aren’t the last one on your block to make the transformation.

Here’s what you need to do and why:

A New Edition of the Timeless Book, Presenting to Win, Explores the Content Marketing Component of In-Person Persuasion.

Whatever audience you must persuade, you need to engage them with compelling content in the form of stories. That’s easy to say, but hard to do.

As Jerry Weissman, author of Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, puts it, "The problem is that no one knows how to tell a story and no one knows that they don't know how to tell a story."  Fortunately, you’ll come away from reading this book armed with the necessary tools to tell those all-important stories brilliantly.

Presenting to Win, in its new expanded edition, teaches you to communicate with a purpose--whether you are convincing employees of the need to change, persuading prospects that you have the best solution to a problem or leading skeptical community groups to support your cause.