Content Marketing Today

Stand Out from the Marketing Crowd

Thanks to Lou Bortone, video marketing guru for this guest post

In an over-crowded and hyper-competitive marketplace, video marketing can help you break through the clutter and deliver your message in a powerful and memorable way. Thanks to YouTube, and inexpensive, easy-to-use camera options like webcams, Flip Video cameras and iPhones, online video is now well within the grasp of just about anyone.

However, just because creating video is more accessible than ever, that doesn’t mean we all know how or where to use it. As with any marketing tool, you’ve got to start with your goals for video. Your video marketing objectives may include greater visibility, enhanced credibility or expert status, higher search engine rankings, increased brand awareness or all of the above!

By beginning with the end in mind, you can decide on how best to use your video to achieve your objectives. To give you some ideas for diving in, here are ten great ways to use online video:

And It's Not Just Content But Mobile Content for the iPhone

The Geico gecko campaign is an excellent example of effective advertising because it integrates humor with a consistent product benefit message. Nonetheless, it suffers from the same limitations that afflict all advertising:

• It calls out to customers whether or not they want to hear the message. Thus, however amusing, it's still an example of interruption marketing.
• Because each ad is short, Geico is limited in the amount of information it can convey.
• There is little intrinsic value to the content of the ads. That is, they don't help Geico customers be more successful or live better lives.
• However amusing, their constant repetition can become annoying even for big fans of Geico like me.
• This is strictly one-way communication that does not enable customer interaction.

Now, however, they have added a powerful content marketing component to their marketing mix.

  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.

Joe Pulizzi’s 7th Installment Reviews Record 300 Blogs to Select Content Marketing Thought Leaders

We are delighted to be part of the content marketing blog elite once again. In fact, we are even happier to have jumped up 4 notches from #13 to #9.

The number of blogs reviewed by the Junta42 team has grown as dramatically as the move toward adoption of content marketing strategies among companies of all sizes.  They began with a list of over 300 blogs through nominations and known content marketing-related blogs (the initial 2007 rankings contained only 81 blogs).

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.

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.

Social media marketing is a trend, not a fad. But,  most small to medium-sized businesses have yet to participate fully and enthusiastically.

We have just written about a powerful new research study that paints a picture of how thousands of smart companies are already benefiting from the inclusion of social media.  What’s clear from that research is that when we evaluate social media, we are not talking about the marketing longevity equivalent of the hula hoop or the Lambada.

Social media marketing is here to stay.  Because you want your organization to be here for the long haul as well, you need to move now.  Not next week. Not next month. But now.

Here are the six reasons that dictate your need to begin social media marketing now:

If you’ve been dragging your feet on social media, it’s time to take both of those feet and jump right in. The just released study on business use of social media from the folks at Business.com is must reading for content marketers who are active, tentative or hesitant about social media.

Their research, 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Study makes it clear that even small business owners need to take social media very seriously indeed. 

The study was designed to assess current trends in the use of social media in North American businesses. Based on 2,948 valid responses to the online Business Social Media Benchmarking Survey during  August and early September, 2009, the results show  how and where businesses, and business people, are finding value in social media.

The study was focused on social media utilization – how people and companies are using social media in a work context today – and not on adoption. All study participants currently used social media in their day-to-day jobs as a resource for business-relevant information and/or worked for a company currently managing, developing or planning social  media initiatives.

In other words, you can learn painlessly from marketers who are already actively participating in social media.

It’s All About the Power of Deep 3 D Content Over Skinny 2 D Content

What's the difference between 2-D marketing and 3-D marketing you might ask? Plenty!

Think of all the junk mail you receive at home or at the office.  Tons of envelopes and a few postcards.  Virtually everything but the bills will be tossed--and much of that without anyone looking at the individual pieces.  There is no depth to all that stuff.

But what if you receive a well-designed magazine that clearly matches your interests, even if you haven't requested it?  What's the likelihood that you will spend at least a few minutes leafing through the magazine.  Thus, the 3-D marketer will have made a memorable and positive impact on you and/or your business. The 2-D marketer will wind up in the wastebasket.

This week, several client meetings reinforced a vital truth:  Content marketing isn’t an arcane theory taught in expensive graduate schools that only billion dollar companies can use. In fact, great  content marketing is much more about brains than big bucks.

Those client conversations took me back to lessons learned from more than a dozen case studies we featured in Get Content Get Customers. What came through loud and clear was that content marketing requires discipline, patience, and persistence, but it doesn’t require an enormous budget. 

It’s particularly gratifying to watch so many small businesses and independent professionals putting content marketing to work.  Here in SW Florida, Dean Piccirillo of HBK Sorce Financial, realtor, Chris Griffith, and Simply Cupcakes of Naples are three inspirational examples. With minimal budgets and maximum creativity, they are executing content marketing strategies that deliver tangible results.  And, for the most part, they have bypassed traditional marketing and advertising.

If you haven’t read Get Content Get Customers, you can cut to the content marketing chase here with the following 10 top takeaways from our case studies. They may just inspire you to stop procrastinating and to kick start your content marketing strategy now. 

These takeaways apply to companies of every size, but will bring outsized benefits to small companies when they use marketing brains to outmaneuver marketing brawn.