Content Marketing Today

A creative mindset enhances what are certainly limited marketing dollars in a tough economic climate.

The Bell Tower Shops is a relatively small but charming shopping center in South Fort Myers, Florida. 

It is anchored by a Saks Fifth Avenue on the north and a Fresh Market on the South. Shoppers can stroll in the shade as they traverse the nice blend of stores and restaurants.

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Social media-powered grassroots marketing is vital to drive changes required to build strong regional economies.

The social media outreach that worked so well for Barack Obama must be put to work for businesses individually and collectively. That lesson came home to me at the January 15, 2009 meeting of Project innovation which is designed to develop a strategy to diversify and strengthen our local economy.

Our speaker was an articulate South Carolinian, Jim Fields, Executive Director of the Palmetto Institute.  He and his colleagues have been working hard to make their state a magnet for the kind of people, jobs, and companies that will ensure long-term prosperity. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that his organization is talking to the same folks that helped Barack Obama devise his social media version of community organizing, Blue State Digital. 

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Use the Wonderful Wordle to Illustrate the Essence of Your Thinking and Writing.

Thanks to the PGreenblog, I discovered an astonishing tool online that takes the black and white linear line up of words from your blog or website and turns them into glorious multi-color word-based designs. 

Wordle lets you create something much like a tag cloud where the size of the words represents their frequency of use. It can tell you or your visitors what's lurking inside the pages of your site. You may also discover that you are under or over-representing certain words or phrases in your writing.

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You won't be able to engage and interact with your visitors if they don't click through.

I've been paying a lot of attention recently to the potential power of social media news releases as an effective content marketing weapon.  These releases appeal both to traditional news organizations and to the broader blogosphere.

Marketwire's Social Media 2.0 Plus is a fascinating tool to enable small to medium-size companies to compete for attention with the big guys.  But it will work only if compelling, customer centric headlines lead visitors to access the news release. I was pleasantly surprised to see that a significant percentage of the headlines really did the job. 

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First, use it to understand your buyers and their needs. Then use the results to prove your credibility in the market.

Content marketers realize that understanding what is most important to your current and prospective customers is vital to your success as an organization.  You cannot possibly connect with your customers without that understanding. Just 10 to 20 years ago, the research necessary to develop that understanding was difficult, complex, time-consuming, and expensive to conduct and to share. All those reasons may well have provided small to medium-size companies with an understandable excuse to avoid their own primary research. Today, there are no more excuses.  It is fast, easy, and inexpensive to conduct high-quality research and to share it with the world. Here are some basics to get you started: Read More

Taking a Great Software Product from Good to Great.

MindManager 8 delivers a greatly enhanced set of mindmapping tools that enable one or more users to collaborate in person or online.

What is mindmapping and why should you care?  Basically, it is a way of organizing and illustrating information visually in the way that we actually think. 

Even for those who consider themselves non-visual, a MindMap represents information within an intuitively obvious structure consisting of a central idea or goal with branches of ideas and sub ideas. It enables users to grasp and to remember even complex concepts very quickly.

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Big bucks squandered to insert content free DVD in magazine

You can be sure that an advertising sales rep did a great job convincing the Harding Poorman Group to insert a DVD in the October 2008 issue of Book Business.

While conceding that they do show off their packaging technology, they blew the opportunity to demonstrate to their prospects the kind of rich content that DVD could and should contain.  In other words, it all boils down to a missed content marketing opportunity.  Prospects are likely to say, "I loved your packaging, but you don't show me why I should invest big bucks to put a DVD in a magazine."

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Guy Kawasaki adds our category to his news aggregation site

Keeping up is hard to do.  You are probably as frustrated as I am in your attempts to stay current on the web with the topics most important to you. There is a new tool that will simplify your life and now will keep you current on content marketing, too. 

Alltop.com, which was created by famous Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, works at solving that problem by gathering high quality information on a broad range of topics in one place.

The site is simple and intuitive to use.  It features content from leading information sources with headline links to recent articles.  The site even reminds you of the topics you have researched most recently.  When you cursor over a headline, up pops the opening paragraphs of the article.  That means you can cover a lot of content ground in a hurry.

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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.

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Leading edge transit technology supplier, NextBus is cited as a great example.

You may think of professors as ivory tower folks who live in a world apart--even an IT Prof within a business school.  But J.P. Allen is a different breed.  He has a great blog that focuses on "the future of IT, business, and society on the new Web."

In a recent post he gave a shout out to NextBus as a great example of a cool company with a cool WordPress-based website, NextBusNews.com. 

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