Content Marketing Today

As Content Marketing Goes from Optional to Obligatory for Business,  Penton Suffers and Miller Electric Shines

Penton’s shift to online only for Welding Design & Fabrication symbolizes the decline of traditional media.  At the same time, Miller Electric shows just how powerful content marketing can be as a replacement for traditional publishing—even when publishers take their acts to the web.

Penton’s print magazine launched in 1959 when Eisenhower was President, Sputnik had just gone into orbit, and most TVs were black and white. After decades of success, the print edition of Welding Design & Fabrication succumbed to fundamental changes in buyer behavior and vanishing ad dollars.  In fact, only an association publication remains in print.

Print pubs are perishing across the B2B landscape as advertisers and readers flee. What’s happening at Penton is happening everywhere. You may regret the demise of B2B print as do I, but you cannot bring it back to life. You can no more expect a return to publishing days gone by than you can to poodle skirts and hula hoops.

Yes, you can apply the best of traditional public relations practices to the new world of social media

Guest post from Kathleen Taylor, APR, President of the Southwest Florida chapter of the Florida Public Relations Association offers 4 top takeaways from their January 2010 Social Media Cafe.   Her report from the seminar illustrates that social media is beginning to permeate PR even in a relatively small market such as the Naples/Ft. Myers Fl area.

By Kathleen Taylor, APR

"The wisdom's in the room. Make a concerted effort to learn from those around you," said Butch Ward from Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, FL, as he spoke with a crowd of public relations professionals at the January 2010 Social Media Café.  Butch and three fellow experts shared new ways of including social media tactics in our public relations practices.

The Poynter Institute describes itself as “a school dedicated to teaching and inspiring journalists and media leaders.” The Institute’s interest in how PR or “business communication” professionals practice exemplifies the social media requirement  to reach beyond the way we’ve always done things. As Butch reminded the audience, we are all learning together as we explore the new  social media sandbox. Fortunately for all of us, not everything is new and unfamiliar.

In fact, as we expand our minds to embrace new technology and new methods, the best of traditional public relations and marketing principles still apply.  Moreover, even new elements such as business blogging don’t need to be intimidating.

Here are 4 useful tips from the Social Media Café seminar that will make even reluctant marketing professionals comfortable about  jumping on board the social media train before it has left the station:

New Crowd Sourced E-Book Is Also a Brilliant Example of Content Marketing

Because all of us are smarter than one of us, you will find lots of value in the new e-book, Key Content Marketing Trends and Predictions  for  2010-- which even includes my own fearless prediction on content marketing. The genius behind this e-book is Ambal Balakrishnan. She has turned crowd sourcing into an art form.

Ambal has recruited 39 experts and given them an opportunity to display their knowledge. She adds her own value by synthesizing the best of those 39 predictions to come up with her own top 10+1.

Aside from its intrinsic merit, this e-book is a perfect example of content marketing at work. It delivers relevant and valuable content for marketers that illustrates how savvy its creator, Ambal, is about content marketing. Thus, it gives her instant credibility among potential clients.

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:

  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.

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.

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