Content Marketing Today

Don't get me wrong.  Public relations is still a critical component to any marketing strategy for companies of all sizes.  Nonetheless, I am convinced that we need to turn our notions of public relations upside down so that it functions within a content marketing context. I was inspired to think again about the transformation of public relations by a recent post from David Meerman Scott in his WebInkNow.com blog.  He was sharing some top of mind ideas relating to successful public relations strategies for small businesses.  Here are his top two out of ten: Read More

Our dog has always been full of surprises but her latest achievement topped everything that went before.

When our dog, Mia, learned that I was co-writing a book on content marketing, she apparently decided to learn how to read.  You may be skeptical, but I think this picture tells the story.  And, we all know that pictures never lie.

Even though she's a very smart dog (so smart, in fact, that she has learned to hide rawhide bones so that my wife and I could fetch them for her), we were astonished to come home yesterday to find that she was working her way through, Get Content. Get Customers.  Of course, it does have a lot of illustrations so maybe she was looking at those, but not really reading all the words.

But, if this was a video, you might see her mouthing the words ever so slowly and carefully: T-h-i-n-k  l-i-k-e  a  p-u-b-l-i-s-h-e-r

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Excellent Book Tells us Why Storytelling is So Important. 

You should apply its lessons as you invent and reinvent your content marketing strategy.

We all have heroes. Garrison Keillor, creator of the Prairie Home Companion, is one of mine. Why? He is the best storyteller on the planet. Until recently, I hadn't made the connection between what Garrison Keillor does so well and the business world we all inhabit. The Story Factor by Annette Simmons pulls it all together.

Annette is a consultant with roots in major corporations. In 1992, she attended a bucolic southern storytelling event that reshaped her thinking about making an impact within a business context. She believes that facts may be important, but they don't make the difference.

As she puts it, "People don't want more information. They are up to their eyeballs in information. They want faith-faith in you, your goals, your success, in the story you tell. It is faith that moves mountains, not fact."

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Whether you have already developed and deployed a content marketing strategy or whether you are still in the planning stage, you should seriously consider how to extend the reach of your core content product.

For example, let's suppose you have decided to create a quarterly print magazine that targets an important audience segment.  You will need to spend a significant amount of time and effort in generating the content that will make this magazine relevant and valuable to its readers.  That is obviously critical.  But you can do even more.

After all, the print magazine has a finite reach.  Think beyond print.  Think beyond the magazine.  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 magazine itself.

Here are 15 great ways to extend the reach of your content far beyond the circulation of that print publication.  Many of these involve little or no incremental expense while offering dramatically improved incremental impact.

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A brand-new book explains why this is essential and how to make it happen.

Boring is bad in person.  Boring is worse in the traditional media.  And, boring may be worst of all in in the new social media universe.  That's a critical content marketing message in the new book, Personality Not Included, written by Ogilvy public relations executive, Rohit Bhargava.

Rohit has the double responsibility of explaining why boring is bad and personality is essential while simultaneously proving that he has a personality.  In fact, you have a pretty good idea that his personality is just a bit out there by his choice of book cover, which spotlights garishly colored plastic chickens.

Goofiness aside, at the very top of the website, he explains exactly and succinctly why the book is important, "Personality Not Included is a new marketing book for entrepreneurs, marketers and all businesses about the importance of personality and a guide on how to use it."

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It's all about the return on objective, not the return on investment

We are long past the days when most companies accepted marketing as a vague concept and a mysterious practice that could not really be measured. Today, most marketers and their bosses want to prove that the dollars spent achieve a measurable return.

Typically they are trying to prove a precise ROI or return on their investment dollars.  Unfortunately, that is usually difficult because processes are not now--and perhaps never will be--in-place to connect dollars spent to increased sales.  One reason for failure is that specific, achievable objectives are not established at the beginning of the marketing program.

That's where ROO comes in.  ROO means return on objective.  This is a more realistic way to measure the success of marketing program, but it does require that marketers establish specific objectives from the get go.  Here is why ROO is better than ROI at measuring what you get from your marketing.

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My wife, Maxine, pointed out recently that it has been almost 9 months since my co-author, Joe Pulizzi and I began to work very seriously on our book, Get Content. Get Customers. 

I know that giving birth to a baby is a lot harder--but for a couple of guys writing a book together it seems very much the same. In fact, I think I have even gained some weight over the past nine months.  One thing for sure, we are both more than ready for this book to be delivered. 

It turns out that writing a book is a lot harder than either of us ever imagined.  At the same time, it's been an immensely rewarding experience. 

We have learned that writing a book can make you an expert, but only because you have to do so much thinking, researching, analyzing, writing, rewriting, and rewriting again.  Most importantly, a lot of that expertise comes from absorbing knowledge from so many smart people who have been so generous with their time in helping us create this book. 

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Joe Pulizzi reports from the B2B NetMarketing breakfast in the Big Apple.

Marketing pros in small companies can and must learn important lessons from the emerging strategies of the smartest large company marketers.  Increasingly, those strategies revolve around content marketing that enables genuine conversations with their customers.

Thanks to Joe Pulizzi, we didn't have to attend the BtoB NetMarketing breakfast to feast on the content marketing lessons even small companies can learn from IBM, CIT, Siemens, and Information Builders.

Joe highlighted the good stuff while eliminating the carbs from the buffet table.

The first lesson comes from his first post, "Is the Main Job of Marketing Today Publishing?", he pointed to the irreversible marketing trend that makes content creation a top priority:

Leading marketing organizations such as IBM and Siemens are focusing the majority of their time, attention and resources on the creation and distribution of their own content to customers and prospects.

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You might not know that until recently tourism had been declining significantly in the Bahamas. For a country that derives 60% of its GDP from tourism, that was a disastrous trend.

With the help of branding gurus, Duffy & Partners, the Bahamas has reversed its tourism slide. The company took a hard look at the marketing campaigns that they and their competitive destinations were conducting.

What stood out was that nothing stood out. 

Everything looked pretty much the same. Even though the Bahamas were outspending their competitors, the results were clearly disappointing.  The lack of a comprehensive branding and marketing campaign led to a disappointing ROI on all the money being spent.

The challenge then was obvious: how to reinvent the Bahamas as a unique and compelling destination that would lure tourists back again and again thus reversing the slide in visitors.

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Here's a well-deserved plug for our colleague, Stephanie Diamond.  She's been involved with the web before the web was cool. She's also an AOL marketing alum who really knows what she's talking about.

She focuses her efforts on making it easy for small businesses to deploy effective web marketing efforts.  So, if you are trying to make the web pay off for your business, you may want to pre-order her new book "Web Marketing for Small Businesses: 7 Steps to Explosive Business Growth"  published by Sourcebooks, Inc.

This is the kind of practical book that you can put to work right away.

 

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