Content Marketing Today

Terrific new book from Paul Gillin takes the mystery out of using online conversations and communities to connect with your customers.

Nothing is more rewarding than to read a book that is at once valuable, timely, and engaging. Secrets of Social Media Marketing is all that and more.  Paul has a genius for making the complex simple enough to understand without oversimplifying.

Is there a need for this book?  You bet!

"There has been more change in the media world in the last five years than in the previous 500."--Peter Koran, President, Media & Advertising, IAC

Understanding social media marketing is so difficult because it seems to be so different.  For decades, most of the rules of communicating with customers stayed the same.  You figured out who you were going to sell to.  You did your best to create a product or service that would have value for that target audience.  And then you blasted out your marketing message in print, on billboards, on radio, and since the 1950s on TV.

Now, and in the future, much of those old methods go right out the virtual window. Happily, Paul's book teaches you exactly how to put social media marketing to work by telling you what to do and precisely how to do it.

My co-author,Joe Pulizzi, delivers a persuasive presentation to Cincinnati PRSA.

Public relations practitioners, like most of their marketing colleagues, are struggling with the new realities posed by the decline of traditional media and the rise of unfamiliar new approaches.  The effective use of content marketing will almost certainly replace much of traditional public and media relations. 

Joe's presentation to the Cincinnati PRSA did a terrific job of explaining why these fundamental changes are happening--and how to leverage content marketing to best serve client marketing needs.

A vital recommendation from a useful new book, The Contrarian Effect!

This new book from Michael Port and Elizabeth Marshall delivers plenty of great advice about why and how to abandon old-fashioned sales approaches that just don't work in the age of the empowered customer.

Too many salespeople and organizations are still stuck trying to push products down the throats of their customers.  In The Contrarian Effect, Michael and Elizabeth argue for a completely different approach.  As they stress:

Sales professionals must find a way to build relationships and to be there when customers are ready to buy--a totally different world view and way of interacting with potential customers.  Something that won't be possible if you insist on selling to them and use the usual approach to reach and communicate with them.

Their approach is completely in sync with the fundamentals of content marketing which stress the importance of an in-depth understanding of your customers and their needs. Only after you have developed that understanding should you attempt to encourage them to buy from you. Otherwise, you risk becoming everyone's vision of the worst possible used-car salesman.

Avoid the 5 Perilous Print Advertising Mistakes It Commits

"Print Advertising is dead," says a very smart small business owner friend.  Although print advertising may be more endangered than all those ice-loving polar bears some folks worry about, you can still create effective print ads   that prompt customers to take action. 

Unfortunately, this advertisement isn't one of them.

The actual print version of this ad is a half page in an 8 1/2"  by 11" trade publication that is aimed at the book industry.  That's big enough to make a difference if the ad were not so flawed.

This polar bear ad certainly answered one classic and vital advertising objective--the dominant image of the polar bear does grab your attention. That's great. But, in five important respects, the ad fails both in communicating a brand message and in inspiring action.

Our readers flocked to a broad range of content marketing-related issues over the past 12 months. In fact, the breadth of topics surprised me. Here's the Cliff's Notes version of what you can find:

• Unlearn Traditional PR
• Transform website into sales machine
• The Secret to Online Marketing
• Authenticity at Starbucks
• Sexy Headline Secrets from Cosmo
• A Really Bad Website Concept
• 6 Reasons to Publish an eNewsletter
• 5 Reasons to Launch a Blog-powered Website
• 6 Ways to Survive the Recession with Content Marketing
• Is it Time to Abandon Yellow Pages Advertising

Read on for a quick take on the posts that readers like you made made most popular.

You can learn exactly what you should be doing by avoiding some of these colossal mistakes.

You probably receive a lot of direct mail marketing materials both at work and at home.  Certainly, some of it is terrific and much of it not so terrific.  But, I would be willing to bet that none of it is quite as bad is something I received recently.

It is a postcard sent jointly from a real estate agent and a bank mortgage specialist. To create an effective direct marketing piece, I suggest you do the opposite of each of the marketing missteps listed below:

Your company should become the new trusted publishing source.

The late Michael Crichton was early but eerily prescient with his 1993 prediction of the demise of traditional media.  He may have overstated the case but the recent spate of newspaper and magazine death and near-death experiences support his gloomy vision.

His forecast and today's reality reinforces the need for every business to begin replacing media content with their own content.  Buyers want to go directly to the source for unfiltered information.  Your company can become that reliable information source.

New Book Co-authored by David Meerman Scott Reinforces Content Marketing Principles

Too many companies develop products based on their own inward looking approach.  According to the new book "Tuned In," that's exactly backwards.

They offer as a delightfully disastrous example: The introduction of the Susan B. Anthony dollar in1979. Between the misguided efforts of the US Mint and vending machine lobbyists, the government managed to introduce a product nobody wanted.  In fact, as the authors point out, extensive research had showed that such a coin would be a colossal failure.  Why the failure?  Simple.  Nobody wanted a dollar coin, particularly one that would look almost exactly like a quarter.

To succeed with product development, it is essential to take the opposite approach.  Determine what your customers want and provide a product or service so compelling that your customers will sell it for you. Of course, this approach is at the very heart of successful content marketing best practices.

Sales Streak Past 1000 Copies. Online Marketing Guru Recommends Our Book.

One thousand copies pales in comparison to any of the Harry Potter books.

But, put into context, it suggests solid acceptance of Get Content. Get Customers. among business book buyers.  Here's what our book and every new book is up against in attempting to penetrate a very tough, competitive market(numbers from bookstatistics.com):

• In 1947, there were 357 publishers; in 2004 85,000 publishers
• 2.8 million books in print in 2006
• 291,920 books published in the U.S. in 2006
• average book sells 500 copies in U.S.
• 30% of books had print runs of less than 100
• only 20% of books sold more than 100 copies
• only 10% of books sold more than 1000

Thanks to so many of you and to the support of marketing experts like Shama Hyder, we have been able to beat the odds by exceeding the sales of 90% of all books published in the U.S.

Big bucks squandered to insert content free DVD in magazine

You can be sure that an advertising sales rep did a great job convincing the Harding Poorman Group to insert a DVD in the October 2008 issue of Book Business.

While conceding that they do show off their packaging technology, they blew the opportunity to demonstrate to their prospects the kind of rich content that DVD could and should contain.  In other words, it all boils down to a missed content marketing opportunity.  Prospects are likely to say, "I loved your packaging, but you don't show me why I should invest big bucks to put a DVD in a magazine."