Content Marketing Today

Written by Joe Pulizzi

10 amazing content marketing books that will help persuade your boss (CXO) to give you more budget for content marketing in your company....

 

The New Rules of Marketing & PR

I consider this David Meerman Scott book mandatory reading for all marketers.  This best seller, now published in over 25 languages, clearly states the case for why we need to think about marketing differently. A big part of that…the creation of valuable, relevant and compelling content that positions you as the expert in your industry.

Get Content Get Customers

Yes, forgive me…this is my book written with my co-author Newt Barrett.  This was the first book that really talked about the content marketing industry as we know it today and how to actually handle the changing rules (as DM Scott describes above).  The first half of the book tells you the why of content marketing…the second half is chock full of online, print and integrated case studies. Read More

  Get content. Get customers.,has now sold more than 10,000 copies in its hardcover, paperback, and eBook editions.

Even though Joe Pulizzi and I wrote and updated it in the early stages of the content marketing revolution, our book’s vital lessons and detailed case studies are just as valid and valuable today. The range of organizations that we analyzed extended from huge multibillion dollar public companies to midsize companies with a few hundred employees and even to very small single owner organizations.

If you haven’t yet read Get Content Get Customers, we know that you will want to run out and buy the book because it is chock-full of content marketing knowledge that you can put to work immediately.

But, just to wet your content marketing whistle, here are the top 10 takeaways we gleaned from some brilliant content marketing practitioners. These represent the themes that we recognized again and again as we examined how organizations are putting content marketing to work.

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Via Scoop.it - Content Marketing Now     Sally Hogshead's video explains the 9 second rule. Grab them fast or lose them. Keynote speaker Sally Hogshead is the author of FASCINATE, teaching audiences how to persuade and captivate in a world with a 9 second attention span.       Listen to Sally and You'll Begin to Understand Why You Need to Buy Her Book: Fascinate.

More on this fun, fabulous, and yes, fascinating read: Read More

It’s all about Newsjacking:  The Science of Latching onto a Hot News Story in Near Real-Time, and Making It All about You.

David Meerman Scott is once again the thought leader in helping us get more news coverage than we ever thought possible, whether we are Solopreneur or billion-dollar multinational.

His new book, perfectly titled, Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage, teaches us how to make as much news as the biggest newsmakers in our individual arenas.

David opens his book with the example of Rick Perry's surprise announcement of his run for the presidency simultaneous with the Iowa straw polls. He became the top news story and eclipsed coverage of any of the other candidates who had worked so hard to do well in Iowa. It was a perfect Newsjacking that took full advantage of our 24 hour a day news cycle and the never-ending demand for hot news stories.  Iowa was suddenly boring. Rick Perry was suddenly hot.

David teaches all of us how to become successful Newsjackers whatever our organization’s size or situation.

A number of current realities make Newsjacking possible and powerful:

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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.

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Dan Roam in “The Back of the Napkin’ makes a convincing case for a simpler and better approach to communicating based on visual thinking.

There's a reason that school rooms and conference rooms have whiteboards.  We all tend to learn better when we combine what we hear with what we see.  That's why presentations can be more powerful when they integrate appropriate visual imagery. 

That was probably what the creators of PowerPoint had in mind rather than the bevy of bullet point, text-heavy monster presentations it has unleashed upon the world.

There is a better way and it’s all about visual thinking. Dan Rowe makes a powerful case for building on basic visual imagery as the best way to share information, solve problems, and sell ideas.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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