Content Marketing Today

It’s All About Making It Easier for the Customer to Buy

OK, I’ll admit it. I not the primary grocery shopper in the family. But, I’m always happy to hop over to Publix, Fresh Market, Whole Foods or SweetBay to buy stuff.  Since I’m not a grocery aisle guru, it usually takes me way too much time to find the items I have been entrusted to buy and bring home.    Occasionally, that makes me a little cranky.

SweetBay Shopping Carts Saved My Day

But,  Sweetbay has achieved the equivalent of a user-friendly e-commerce interface with its shopping cart. In a move that is as brilliant as it is inexpensive to design and deploy, they have equipped each shopping cart with a sheet that lists major grocery items alphabetically and shows the aisle in which they can be found.

At Sweetbay I was looking for coffee. Because my shopping cart helpfully listed coffee in aisle 6, I found it within 30 seconds rather than the 5 minutes of aimless wandering it would usually take.

The genius of the Sweetbay shopping cart content marketing strategy contrasted with my Publix experience.
While there, I went through the frustrating aisle-wandering exercise to find when I needed. Publix is an excellent supermarket. But, they sure made it much harder for me to buy what I needed to buy.

If a supermarket were a website, I would've been off like a shot from Publix to Sweetbay, knowing that they would take me by the hand to find exactly what I needed in a minimum of time.

Your Sales Team Must Be Content Marketers, Too!

Mike Wisner was my first boss in publishing back in the days of John Denver and disco. He was a unique, colorful, and brilliant character. I learned so much from Mike that some of the lessons he taught me still inform my approach to sales and marketing. In fact, in many ways he was a pioneer content marketer within the sales arena before anyone had imagined such a concept.

Learning a Vital Selling Secret from Mike Wisner before I Ever Got to the Office

Mike delivered a shocking and memorable sales lesson in my first 5 minutes on the job--it was all about why it was essential to get very, very close to your customers and how to make that happen.

He picked me up on an icy January morning at O'Hare Airport on my first day on my first ad sales job for Gorman Publishing. As soon as I had sat down in the passenger seat of his car, he told me, “To be successful, you have to get in bed with your customers.”

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.