Content Marketing Today

Even if you don't love Wal-Mart, you can learn a lot from them, just as conservative Republicans should learn a lot from Barack Obama's election victory. 

Small business marketers especially should pay attention to what this Arkansas giant can teach us about marketing. 

Part of the brilliance of Wal-Mart is their ability to manage a highly complex global supply chain that enables them to deliver an incredible range of inexpensive products to their customers in-store and online.

Equally important, however, is Wal-Mart's understanding of and responsiveness to their customer base.  You may not be able to replicate their supply chain expertise, but you can come very close to replicating the essence of their marketing. 

According to Google Analytics, these are the 5 Most Popular ContentMarketingToday.com Stories from July-September

1. The Secret to Online Marketing in the 21st Century : It’s the Content, Stupid!

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.

Take it from author and PR guru, Rohit Bhargava.  Make your brand talkable.

Generating positive and pervasive word-of-mouth is easy if you do something starts everyone talking about you and your brand.

That's what Rohit Bhargava posits in his wonderful book,  Personality Not Included.  Although I intend to review the entire book soon, I wanted to extract a wonderful point that he makes about the concept of talkability and its relationship to word-of-mouth marketing.

We all know that word-of-mouth marketing has been powerful from time immemorial.  That said, it's easier to talk about it than to make it happen.  And,talkability is the ticket.

When I walk into a room full of strangers at a networking event, my first and most powerful inclination is to turn around and walk right back out. 

Even though much of my business career has been in sales related functions, I don't even come close to anyone's archetype sales guy.  I am shy, reserved, and a hater of small talk.  Perhaps worst of all: I pay no attention to sports.  In short, I'm hopeless at in-person networking.

Actually, I do have a personality and I can be amusing.  But that is only after I have gotten to know people and feel comfortable with them.  So, I'm darned lucky that the Internet and blogging arrived just in time to save me from myself.

Here is why a business blog can become your most powerful networking tool:

Bureaucrats are bouncing baristas, as they move to shut down 600 Starbucks stores. 

It may not be the same everywhere, but in our Southwest corner of Florida, Starbucks is shutting down nine of their stores.  This is likely to have an impact on their local reputation that may well be replicated around the country.

As far as I'm concerned, the Starbucks experience is as much about the people who look after you as it is about the coffee.  They do a brilliant job of hiring so that even though they don't pay gigantic wages, they manage to staff every store with a set of employees who care about what they do and about the needs of their customers.  Those employees are the all-important people component of their content marketing.

Here's just a snippet of what you will learn in the pages of Get Content. Get Customers.

We devote an entire chapter to three very different small business people are delivering content just as creatively—perhaps more creatively—than many of their peers in much larger organizations.

Type of Organization: Single-person businesses.
Major Marketing Objectives: To use content marketing to increase visibility, credibility, and revenues.
Content Types:
» Websites
» Blogs
» In-person content marketing
Unique Element: Content marketing has replaced traditional marketing for each business.
Results: Each business received a tangible return on its marketing investment

Secrets to successful product launches revealed in Schneider PR research study.

This somewhat surprising conclusion is one of many useful insights in a research study from Schneider PR that came my way courtesy of Marketing Sherpa.  The folks at Schneider did an in-depth research study among business-to-business arketing organizations to determine the most important ingredients for a successful product launch.

Here are the 10 most important things they identified in launching a product or service successfully:

Excellent Book Tells us Why Storytelling is So Important. 

You should apply its lessons as you invent and reinvent your content marketing strategy.

We all have heroes. Garrison Keillor, creator of the Prairie Home Companion, is one of mine. Why? He is the best storyteller on the planet. Until recently, I hadn't made the connection between what Garrison Keillor does so well and the business world we all inhabit. The Story Factor by Annette Simmons pulls it all together.

Annette is a consultant with roots in major corporations. In 1992, she attended a bucolic southern storytelling event that reshaped her thinking about making an impact within a business context. She believes that facts may be important, but they don't make the difference.

As she puts it, "People don't want more information. They are up to their eyeballs in information. They want faith-faith in you, your goals, your success, in the story you tell. It is faith that moves mountains, not fact."

A salesperson is a salesperson is a salesperson. Not so.

Because selling and sales professionals are fundamental to your in person content marketing strategy, you must develop just the right team for your company and your market.  However obvious this might seem, here's why so many companies get it all wrong.

Identifying great sales people isn’t as simple as you might think. They don’t all look alike, think alike or act alike. One category of salesperson would die rather than get friends together to sell them Tupperware. Another breed thinks that the purpose of having a lot of friends is so that you can have lots of Tupperware parties.

Difficult or not, selecting the right sales candidate for the right sales situation is fundamental to building a successful company.

You have certainly heard about Starbucks' recent challenges.  This former cultural darling and Wall Street highflyer has been selling a lot less latte of late. 

I do frequent Starbucks, although less frequently than before.  This probably has more to do with the price of almost two dollars for a medium coffee than it does with the quality of the Starbucks' experience.

Apart from the occasional distracting tattoo or disconcerting metal piercing, our local Starbucks' stores provide excellent coffee and excellent service.  None of that has changed over the past 10 years.  Nonetheless, founder, Howard Schultz became very concerned that this high-end coffee icon was not living up to its original ideals.

As smart as Howard Shultz is,you should pay attention to what they're doing--and then vow never to do the same.  Here's why: