Content Marketing Today

Bus Shelter Ads Offer Can’t Miss Message that Promotes Use of Rider Friendly Technology

AC Transit avoids the "build it and they will come" mistake to which many companies and organizations fall prey. They know that simply offering bus service and implementing technology is just the beginning to motivating Bay Area residents to take the bus regularly.  They also prove that traditional outdoor advertising can still work brilliantly at the right time and place.  This is targeted, visual content marketing at its best.

The San Francisco Bay area boasts excellent public transit systems in the city itself and in surrounding counties. AC Transit is notable not only for a well-run system, but for its effectiveness in marketing the benefits of public transit to its passengers.

AC Transit is the third-largest bus-only transit system in California, serving over 400 square miles of the East Bay.  Every weekday, over 230,000 people ride their fleet of nearly 800 buses.  They run buses on 105 routes with more than 6500 stops.

Even better, they do a great job of marketing all those buses, stops, and routes to current and future passengers.

  It’s been a very good year for content marketing. In fact, visitors searching our site for the phrase “content marketing” increased by 85% in 2009 over 2008.

Social media certainly loomed larger in the past 12 months but interest in content marketing strategy accounted for the majority of the most popular posts.

Here is the Cliff’s Notes bullet point version with more detail and links to the full articles following:

• How To Create the All-Important Elevator Speech For Your Presentations and for Your Content Marketing
• 5 Reasons an eBook Should be a Core Component of Your Content Marketing Strategy
• 5 Twitter Tips to Strengthen Your Content Marketing Strategy
• Want to Attract and Retain Great Customers? Become Their Online Content Concierge!
• Six Steps to a Successful Small Business Content Marketing Strategy
• 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool
• Why Being Visual Can Bring Beautiful Business Results
• 6 Reasons to Embrace Social Media Today
• Top 10 Lessons Small Businesses Can Takeaway from Smart Content Marketers
• 6 Secrets to Making Online Video Work for Small Business

A more detailed look at the top 10 with links to each complete article is just below.  Kick back and enjoy.

Integrate your online and in person efforts by learning from Truebridge's work in the banking industry.

Content marketing works by providing your best customers vital information that helps them be more successful or to live better lives. As a stand-alone effort, content marketing is powerful. What's even better is to integrate your online efforts with your team’s one-on-one work with current and future customers.

As with so much of marketing, this is a lot easier to say than to do. In a world of limited resources, generating great content poses challenges, particularly for smaller organizations. Knowing exactly what to say and how to say it rarely comes naturally to the folks who are running small companies.

Within the financial world, marketers have even greater challenges because they must comply with stringent regulations that restrict how and what they communicate to their prospects and customers.

Banks face a related challenge within their branches where they would like to do a lot more cross-selling of services to their current customers. Cross-selling can be difficult because today's customers do not want to be aggressively sold and because branch employees typically lack sophisticated selling skills.

That’s where Truebridge’s unique approach comes into play.

This Young Neighbor Understands Target Marketing Perfectly

We have just moved into a great new neighborhood with plenty of energetic young kids. While I was out walking our dog, Mia, I was delighted to discover that we have a young marketing-savvy entrepreneur in our midst.  This smart young person has launched a dog sitting service and has figured out how to target that service perfectly to prime prospects.

Engage your listeners so effectively that they will ride with you to the top floor and accompany you all the way to your office enthralled by what you have to say.

I was inspired again by Jay Baer's August 12 post about elevator speeches in which he asserted that the typical elevator speech is too long for today's attention span.

As he put it, "Understand that the Elevator Pitch is Dead. You remember the elevator pitch. The notion that you should be able to describe what your company does in the length of time consumed by the average elevator ride. I’m here to tell you, that’s way too long these days. Elevator rides seem interminable."

I am in absolute agreement that brevity is essential. But, brevity is just the beginning. In fact, the ideal elevator speech should be exactly that--a beginning. Don't think of your short statement as a traditional speech designed to get a big round of applause at the end. Instead, it serves as an opening gambit that engages your listener so effectively that it begins a dialogue of indefinite length.  It can become the welcoming door to your compelling content.

Visitors to two new client websites are spending a lot of time learning about their teams on pages devoted to team members. Why? Because your visitors understand that they must count on your people to deliver solutions to their problems.

When I recently reviewed the Google analytics data from two recently launched websites, the amount of time visitors spent on pages devoted to their team members reinforced the value of showcasing each organization's team. Although, in both cases, a dozen or more pages got a solid level of traffic, their people pages ranked very close to the top.

Your customers want to know that you have the right people on the bus and that you truly value them.

When top corporate executives featured in Good to Great were asked to provide reasons for their success, they focused more than anything on their people. Author, Jim Collins, talked about the importance of getting the right people on the bus. Every leader understood that having the right team in place enabled them to manage almost any situation.  In effect, those leaders indicated that leadership was a heck of a lot easier if you had the right people to lead. 

Your customers know that, too. Sure, they will decide to do business with you in large part because of how you are positioned, on your ability to provide appropriate products and services that solve their problems, and on the competitiveness of your pricing. But, in the end, their trust in your team will take them from strong prospects to solid customers.

How They Use Secret Shoppers to Catch Their Team Members Doing the Right Thing.

If you are looking for great basic meat and potatoes cooking in a casual atmosphere, you can't do much better than Five Guys Burgers and Fries. While working on a client project, I had the opportunity to learn about the way they operate their restaurants--and how they think about their customers and their employees. 

The company launched with a single restaurant in the Washington, DC area in the 1980s and expanded conservatively through the use of 100% company owned outlets until very recently.  The family that owns Five Guys were concerned that they could not maintain a high level of customer experience if they were to expand too far or to move into franchising.  Ultimately, they did make the move but have worked very hard to ensure excellence in every one of their restaurants whether company owned or franchised.

Their first effort tried to play the cute, sympathy card with an actual card. Now they imply its my fault that I bailed on them and trash the company they wrongly assume got my business. 

I wrote recently that Embarq could have saved a lot of marketing moola by providing great customer service in the first place: The Huge Marketing Reality That EMBARQ Forgot. I, along with a likely heard of horses had already left the Embarq barn so it was too late to whistle us back.  But, did they give up? No, now they are starting to sound irritatingly desperate.

Marketing experts shared invaluable insights about how to market in turbulent times through the effective use of content online, in print, and in person.

Custom publishing has gone from being an ancillary, add on component of marketing strategies to becoming a vital ingredient.  Why?  Because content marketing is so important to an increasing number of marketers and companies of all sizes.  Therefore, creating custom content is no longer a nice to-do, if you have the money.  Rather, it has become an absolute must-do as part of an integrated content marketing strategy.

The strategic importance of content marketing, and of its first cousin, social media, was front and center at this year's Custom Content Conference. 

Here are 8 great takeaways that I brought home with me from the conference:

If you really show the love to your current customers, you won't have to beg shamelessly to try to get them back.

Image via Wikipedia

Just like the Swiffer, "Baby, come back" TV ads, once you've lost your long-time customers, you may have to forget about getting them back--even if you send them flowers or sing under their window.

EMBARQ basically failed the in person content marketing test. They completely forgot the vital importance of your people to people relationships.

For many years in our part of the world, Southwest Florida, EMBARQ offered solid reliable phone service that originally ran under the Sprint banner.  But, over the past six months or so, we ran into lots of annoying problems. 

When we called them, rather than taking a proactive approach to figuring out what was wrong and fixing it, they suggested that we must be doing something wrong.  They insisted that we go through all kinds of gyrations to test it out and warned us that--although they could send out a service person--they would have to charge us if it turned out that the fault was ours.