Content Marketing Today

eNewsletter expert, Michael Katz, puts it all in perspective for professional service providers.

Thanks to Patsi Krakoff of  Writing on the Web for leading me to Michael. He gets right to the heart of a major marketing challenge. How do we describe what we do in a way that will attract customers when they have a pressing need? 

For those of us who provide professional services, we often suffer from knowing a lot about a lot. Even worse, we want to share as much as we can about our skill set with prospective clients. Then we hope they can determine how that passel of capabilities might match what they need right now.

Basically, we're asking our prospects to work too hard to understand how we can help when all they want is a precise solution to an urgent problem.

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Attention & Emotion Grabbing Photo, Call to Action, and Two Paragraph Description Creates Great Response.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for kids and the medical professionals who look after them when they really need help, but this simple eNewsletter got me to click immediately to check out the 'Grape Fest' event photos that you'll find on the SW Florida Wine & Food Fest website.

One thing for sure, powerful imagery combined with an obvious call to action and compelling descriptive text can achieve wonders. When email boxes are overflowing, you won't likely get the attention you need, unless you can grab readers' interest immediately.  The Grape Fest eNewsletter does exactly that.

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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.

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Rare Apple Misstep Sends Weekly News about Music You May Hate

If you are one of the millions of iTunes fans, you appreciate the brilliant work they do in aggregating music creatively.  This includes pre-constructed sets of music from different eras, different artists or different styles in the iTunes store.  In November, it launched the 'Genius Bar' which enables you to create new playlists from your stored music or to discover new tunes that you're likely to love based on a song that you have chosen from your own iTunes collection.

The iTunes folks excel at enabling you to choose,to organize, and to discover all sorts of music that you love.  Of course, you've probably bought quite a few more iTunes selections than you should have thanks to their terrifically targeted musical content. iTunes is brilliant at offering you what you don't even know you want.

That's why I'm astonished at how far off the mark they are with their weekly new music eNewsletter.

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Crank up your communications now.  Don't dial back your efforts.

The knee-jerk reaction for most companies when faced with the recession is to reduce their marketing efforts. However, decades of research show that those who maintain or increase their marketing will blow past their peers once the recession is over. If you accept this reality, you still may be faced with a shortage of spare cash to invest in marketing--particularly in traditional advertising.  What to do? You can and should focus on a content marketing strategy that will require a whole lot of thought and effort, but will not require a lot of money. Read More

Attend an 11 a.m. Friday morning webcast hosted by content expert Roger Parker!

If you haven't yet bought our book, Get Content. Get Customers. you'll have the opportunity to learn a lot for free just by dialing in. You can get the specifics in Roger's website, PublishedandProfitable.com.

To attend the Friday 10/10 11am, eastern time event, call dial 1-218-486-1616 and use PIN #513391

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The Industrial Marketer Is Customer Focused and Content Rich.  Your small company can do exactly the same even with a much smaller budget.

We have written a lot about ThomasNet as the content marketer's content marketer.  In fact, they are featured in our book, Get Content. Get Customers., We applaud them for the great work they do in teaching their clients how to use targeted content to generate online sales from their websites.

Their eNewsletter is a superb example of how their own customer focus makes it completely natural to deliver relevant and valuable content to their target market: small to medium-sized manufacturing companies.  Most of their client companies are no-nonsense, straightforward organizations who work very hard to deliver high-quality products.  The look of their newsletter is equally no-nonsense and straightforward.  It is nicely, but simply designed. Even better, it has a very useful content.

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Billboard marketing is fine on Route 66, but it's all wrong on the information superhighway

Your job as a marketer is to make it easy for your buyers to buy from you. But making it easy for them may be hard for you, unless you can execute an effective content marketing strategy. Content marketing is the art of understanding exactly what buyers need to know and delivering it to them in a relevant and compelling way.  This extends way beyond product information into the realm of best practices, case studies, success stories, and more. Why?  All the rules have changed.  You will need to relearn the marketing game with a brand new marketing mindset.  Those that can adapt will flourish.  Those that don't...well... think of the fate of the dinosaurs. Read More

More than 10,000 visitors voted with their mouse clicks to make these the 6 hottest articles out of 126 that we have posted in the virtual pages of ContentMarketingToday.com from January through June 2008.

They range from transforming an old-fashioned brochure site into a killer sales machine...to why you need to unlearn traditional PR in the 21st century...to why you must publish an eNewsletter. 

Read on to find out why these articles were so popular with so many marketers.

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Stephanie Diamond lays bare mysteries of online marketing for small business executives.

Hyperbole?  Maybe.  But, this is a terrific book.

Marketing is probably the biggest challenge for small business owners and executives.  We typically spend so much time running the business day to day that establishing and maintaining a marketing focus just doesn't happen.  The accelerating pace of Internet marketing change makes it all that much more challenging. 

Happily, Stephanie Diamond has written that rare book which both forces us to think in new and different ways about marketing issues--and simultaneously provides a detailed roadmap so that we can put those thoughts into action. Once you have finished the book, you will be ready to develop and deploy a successful Web marketing strategy. 

Her new book, Web Marketing for Small Businesses, is a much-needed addition to the literature of online marketing.  This book enables us first to grasp complex concepts and then to put them into practice with easy to follow steps.  Even solopreneurs will find significant value in Stephanie's book.  I know that I have already begun to implement several of the strategies about which she writes so knowledgeably.

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