Content Marketing Today

Powerful Trend Reinforces Need for Effective Content Marketing Strategies

Word of mouth marketing has carried marketing messages since the time of cavemen. Back then, it didn't get your message more than a few cave doors down. Thanks to the impact of the Internet, changes in buyer behavior, and the power of blogging and social media, it will be among the most important ways to market your content and your company. That makes the creation of relevant and compelling content even more important than ever as buyers and prospects spread the word about you and your organization.  Intuitively, we know this to be true.  Solid research now reinforces that intuition. New research from the Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Association(WOMMA) indicates that expenditures for this powerful brand of spreading the word will grow tenfold from 2003 to 2013. According to the research, conducted by PQ Media, spending on word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing rose 14.2% to $1.54 billion in 2008, despite the worst economic recession in 70 years, accentuated by secular and structural trends battering traditional advertising and marketing media. While year-over-year growth is expected to slow in 2009, WoM spending is on pace to grow another 10.2% this year, placing it among the fastest growing advertising and marketing segments. This contrasts with the dramatic decline in the US and global economies. Read More

The best small business solution is to eliminate a separate blog and website.

Unfortunately, typical small companies often misunderstand the power of a business blog--and cannot envision how it can and should be the driving force behind your online presence.  Your best bet is to leverage the power of blogging software to create an online presence which is, at once, timeless and timely.

Most of us began with a website that contains static content that was never intended to change much over time. Your static website will be an essential source of product, service, and company data to the majority of buyers that now relying on the Internet as their primary repository of information for potential purchases. Your static website is a vital beginning.  But, it's only a beginning. 

To compete for the attention of both search engines and buyers, you will need to add more and more dynamic content over time.  That's where a business blog comes into play.  If you already have a blog--or are considering one--you probably think of it as a completely separate entity with limited functionality.  That may be true for large organizations.  But, for a small business, your blog should be the engine behind a full fledged website that delivers much more clout than your old-fashioned static version.

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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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