Content Marketing Today

How to Get Started on Cheap and Powerful Customer Studies

Unless you understand your customers, you risk  painful marketing missteps.

Because we know that effective content marketing depends on a thorough understanding of your customers, regular research should be a core component of your content marketing strategy. 

Of course, it's possible to do way too much research.  That's when you wind up with the paralysis by analysis situation.  But, most small to midsize  companies suffer from too little research and too much gut feel. That's when some very bad decisions get made.

The good news is that even very small companies with tiny budgets can now conduct high quality research that would have been affordable only for multimillion dollar companies just five or 10 years ago

Although it is possible to spend vast amounts of money on research conducted by high profile research organizations, it is much easier than you might think to conduct valuable research on your own.  Today, numerous online tools make it simple to create and deploy research studies--and that even provide guaranteed numbers of recipients.

How to Get Started on Your All-Important Customer Research

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Kathy Saenz of Neighborhood America Shares What It Takes to Make Video an Effective Content Marketing Tool

Even a micro business can use video effectively to communicate with its customers online. But, as we amateur carpenters know, you can wind up with a mess instead of a masterpiece unless you understand how to use a potentially powerful tool well.   In that spirit we’re happy to can share with you six terrific tips for using video successfully from talented Southwest Florida professional, Kathy Saenz. We recently caught up with Kathy, who is Neighborhood America's corporate communications manager, for a brief interview on the best ways to communicate with video. Kathy's unique background as a university trained former TV producer and reporter taught her what it takes to tell great stories in our short attention span world.  She has been able to help Neighborhood America add  video communications to their core marketing capabilities. When it comes to using video effectively, Kathy and her company really get it.

Here Are Kathy's 6 Secrets to Video Success for Small Business:

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Use Free Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Directories to Bring Your Business Front and Center on Local Web Searches

(Guest post by WordPress fanatic and small business web consultant Don Campbell)

If your business is an "offline" business with a physical storefront, the most effective way to improve your search rankings in Google is to list your business in the free local business directories from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Once you are listed in these directories, you have a chance to get listed in the "Google 10-Pack" - which is an invaluable way to get the word out about your business when people type in search terms in your local area. In fact, if you don't claim your Google Local Business Center profile, in some cases it can be scooped up by others who want to capitalize on the listings! Read More

The best small business solution is to eliminate a separate blog and website.

Unfortunately, typical small companies often misunderstand the power of a business blog--and cannot envision how it can and should be the driving force behind your online presence.  Your best bet is to leverage the power of blogging software to create an online presence which is, at once, timeless and timely.

Most of us began with a website that contains static content that was never intended to change much over time. Your static website will be an essential source of product, service, and company data to the majority of buyers that now relying on the Internet as their primary repository of information for potential purchases. Your static website is a vital beginning.  But, it's only a beginning. 

To compete for the attention of both search engines and buyers, you will need to add more and more dynamic content over time.  That's where a business blog comes into play.  If you already have a blog--or are considering one--you probably think of it as a completely separate entity with limited functionality.  That may be true for large organizations.  But, for a small business, your blog should be the engine behind a full fledged website that delivers much more clout than your old-fashioned static version.

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Thanks to my co-author, Joe Pulizzi, and some helpful contributors for making your search for the right implements a lot easier.

If you are starting from scratch, it's almost impossible to figure out what social media and other related online tools will be genuinely useful for marketing your business.  Fortunately, Joe has taken the time to assemble and comment on 42 of the most worthy in his blog.

You'll find that a common thread among many of the 42 is that they involve both inbound and/or outbound communication. In other words, they will help you send a message to your target buyers or listen to what those buyers are saying about you.

My five favorites of the less well known among the 42 that Joe highlights are:

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Jump Start Your Online Public Relations for Free

They call it public relations for a reason.  Although PR methodology has focused primarily on getting the traditional media to write about your company or your client’s company, the goal has always been to influence ‘the public', that is those members of the population that you want to impact positively.

Thanks to the infinite reach of the Internet, you have the capability to extend that influence dramatically.  But, you need to change your approach and your toolkit as part of a 21st century PR strategy.

If your primary public relations strategy still amounts to sending press releases to a finite number of media contacts, you fail to take advantage of the Internet.  You are not reaching the new influencers, to use Paul Gillen’s term.

You need to do do more than reach those influencers. You need to take advantage of the emerging power of social media by creating a new kind of release to reach a much broader audience.  We have written previously about Shift Communications’ template that offers a useful template on which to create your news content: Social Media Release Template Makes It Easier to Get Social.

Now, another powerful tool has emerged: PitchEngine, which lets you create and share social media releases for free.

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A Length of Wire, a Bunch of Sticky Notes, and a Red Marker Tell an Appealing and Amusing Story

Evernote is a cool web-based application that lets you save notes, web links, webpage clips, documents, images, and even iPhone  phone voice notes. Because the application is both versatile and unique, Evernote requires a bit of explaining.

Most of their explanation takes the form of short videos which illustrate the wide range of capabilities to which users can put Evernote.  In fact, they lead off with a video on the home page.

But, my favorite is a very brief video that uses stuff all of us would have at home to tell the Evernote story in just 44 seconds.

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Great MindMap from the Mindjet Folks Simplifies Twitter and Proves Power of Mindmapping

On the most basic level, it's easy to explain Twitter in a few bullet points:

• Twitter is a micro-blogging service that you can use from anywhere you can get an Internet connection.
• You sign up and give yourself an identity that lives on Twitter, such as mine--Twitter.com/newtbarrett.
• You can then post 140 character text messages which may include hyperlinks.
• You can choose to follow fellow members whose ' tweets ' will show up automatically on your Twitter page.
• Other members can choose to follow you to see what you have to say.
• The heavy hitters on Twitter may have thousands of followers and may post dozens of tweets per day.
• Every Twitter member can pass on or ' retweet' other messages so that the reach of what you have to say is potentially huge and global.
• All of this happens in real time

At this point, you may be thinking, "Okay, I understand that, but what's the point?  Why would I want to do any of that stuff?  That's where this great mindmap created by Mindjet's Michael Deutch comes into play. It illustrates why you need to care about Twitter for your business--and how to get smart about using it. Read More

Use TweetGrid to monitor what's being said about you, your company, your customers, and your competition.

Your business does not exist in a vacuum.  Quite the contrary.  Your success depends upon how well you satisfy the most important needs of your customers.  Their level of satisfaction will be relative to what your competition is doing and what other customers are saying about you to their friends.  If you fail to monitor those external elements, only good luck will rescue you from disaster.

That's where Twitter and TweetGrid come in. 

Simply put, Twitter consists of a universe of 140 character messages in cyberspace communicated amongst members who are sharing their thoughts about a zillion different topics and interests. These messages are delivered as soon as they are sent.  Therefore, if you are logged in to Twitter, you will receive them instantly. 

In the past year, Twitter has grown at a phenomenal rate to become both a social and a business tool. Although there is plenty to say about Twitter, we will examine only its usefulness as a source of feedback to help you understand what's going on among people and organizations that are critical to your success. Thus, Southwest Airlines was able to monitor a tweet complaining about ticket counter customer service in real-time.  They actually responded to solve the problem before the customer had left the counter.

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Save Money. Save Time. Work Anywhere. Collaborate with Anyone. Simplify Computing. Strengthen Security.

Back when a mainframe computer filled an entire room, users all accessed programs remotely on terminals which were the ancestors of today's PCs and laptops. Soon we will be accessing software and data remotely again--but from the Internet cloud. We will achieve dramatic improvements in productivity and reductions in costs. Until recently, almost all of us had moved to a model of individual PCs or Macs on which all of our business applications lived.  Word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics all lived locally. If we worked in an office, we left them behind at night on the company PC.  That changed slightly as the pervasive use of laptops allowed work to follow us almost anywhere.  We are about to change again. Thanks to the Internet, lots of smart companies and business people, are moving everything to the Internet cloud. Read More