Content Marketing Today

Proving again that our readers like to dig into a variety of topics under the broad content marketing umbrella.

While you’re enjoying the beach or a barbecue this 4th of July weekend, take a few minutes to ponder how effective content marketing can make you independent of the old-fashioned way of doing things.

Here’s the tasty topics menu from which to choose:

• how to create effective elevator speech to drive your content marketing
• using content marketing to survive the recession
• low cost research as killer weapon
• making an eBook a core component of your content marketing strategy
• become your customers’ online content concierge
• why your blog is your most important social media tool

Read on to see the 6 most popular articles that your fellow content marketers voted for with their visits.

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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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Thanks to my co-author, Joe Pulizzi, and some helpful contributors for making your search for the right implements a lot easier.

If you are starting from scratch, it's almost impossible to figure out what social media and other related online tools will be genuinely useful for marketing your business.  Fortunately, Joe has taken the time to assemble and comment on 42 of the most worthy in his blog.

You'll find that a common thread among many of the 42 is that they involve both inbound and/or outbound communication. In other words, they will help you send a message to your target buyers or listen to what those buyers are saying about you.

My five favorites of the less well known among the 42 that Joe highlights are:

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A Company That Gets It on so Many Levels Minimizes Traditional Marketing Expenditures.

I was surprised, but not too surprised, to learn from a friend and colleague, David Drickhamer, that the famous maker of ergonomic chairs spent almost no money on traditional advertising.

Herman Miller tends to be well ahead of the curve on almost every business front.  After all, this is a company that was into sustainability before it was cool--and before Al Gore was invented global warming (or was that the Internet?). Back in 1984, they stopped using Rosewood when they determined it was an endangered hardwood.

When they introduced their new, high end and incredibly comfortable chair, the Embody, they relied heavily on the blogosphere to spread the word.  Although the traditional press would have been essential to the success of a new product a decade ago, it's the blogosphere that is overwhelmingly influential today. 

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Corporate giants are losing power to communities of consumers--and your company can benefit.

When it comes to the evolution of the Web and of social media, keeping up seems like an impossible task for most business executives.  Nonetheless, keeping up is critically important in order to remain relevant.  The good news that I take away from a recent study by Forrester Research, is that the evolution of the "social Web" will help level the marketing playing field between large and small organizations.  The report was written by a Forrester senior analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, who, not so coincidentally, has a terrific blog, Web Strategy. In the past, large companies had all the cards.  They had lots of money, lots of people and lots of intrusive but effective messaging.  In the old era of in-your-face marketing, corporate giants could control results in many cases by simply outspending smaller rivals. Times have changed.  Consumers are now a surging control via a wisdom of the crowds phenomenon.  That is, buyers now find it easy to aggregate around common interests thanks to social media such as Facebook and Twitter. This fundamental power shift increases the impact of word-of-mouth marketing by orders of magnitude.  Shared consumer experiences are no longer limited to neighborhoods or local communities.  Rather, they have gone global.  This is good news for companies who provide great products and great customer experiences.  And, it is especially good news for small marketers can take advantage of what Forrester Research calls the new "social Web”. Read More

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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It’s much more powerful than those young whippersnappers--Twitter and Facebook

We often talk about the need to develop a content marketing mindset. This requires companies to think like publishers.  And that sounds an awful lot like social media as Wikipedia defines it:

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.

Your blog is your secret social media weapon

Thanks to free or inexpensive blogging tools, any individual can be on the same technological footing as the New York Times or Business Week.  That may seem relatively obvious to many of you.  What I think is less obvious is that your blog is every bit as much a social media tool as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.  In fact, I believe that a blog is the most important social media weapon in your arsenal.

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Phillywordsmith, Emily Sheetz, puts Google Docs to work with a simple, but engaging online slide show for her small business.

There’s plenty that I love about the web. Discovering new people from whom I can learn is one of the most rewarding.

Recently, I lucked onto the PhillyWordsmith blog and wrote about her powerful conceptual construct for drilling down to your brand’s core promise: And Then What? The Question to Ask, Ask, and Ask Again to Get to Your Product’s Soul

Now, I found something else that’s pretty cool on her site. Emily shares representative samples of her creative stuff with a simple slide show built with the basic Google Docs application.  She doesn’t even bother with the Google presentation application.  The link sits right up top on her blog so you don’t have to hunt for it.  Here's why it's so effective for a microbusiness like Emily’s.

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Just Like Toyota’s Famous 5 Whys, Here’s a Way to Drill Down to Pay Dirt

It's not enough just to ask questions.  We need to ask questions that will get us to the root of a problem or that will deliver an in-depth understanding of the soul of our product.  In a wonderful recent article by Philly Wordsmith, we are treated to a unique approach to understanding the essence of our customers’ concerns and of how our products should meet them.

It boils down to asking the same question, "And then what?," iteratively until we get to that fundamental understanding.

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Of course, I'm assuming that you already have a website and are probably doing some business blogging.  You may also do a regular eNewsletter to inform your customers and prospects about the great content you have created recently online.  Your next step is to create an e-book that targets your ideal customers.

Joe and I learned this lesson with the e-book that preceded the print version of Get Content Get Customers.  We were able to distribute our content marketing message to thousands of folks from around the world who took the time to download our e-book.  We got plenty of positive and helpful feedback.

The power of e-books hit me again while I was reading David Meerman Scott's new book, the World Wide Rave.  He wrote about an Australian company the RPO group which is a recruitment outsourcing firm.  Although David covered their website and their blog, I was particularly impressed by their e-book, 5 Secrets of Talent.  It's only 23 pages long, but conveys critical concepts clearly and compellingly. 

Their e-book works for them.  E-books can work for you as well. Here are five reasons why:

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