Content Marketing Today

AC Transit's Dedicated Site, ACTForMe.org, Paints a Brilliant and Loving Portrait of the Benefits of Public Transit

AC Transit operates a very sophisticated bus transportation system in the San Francisco Bay area, handling more than 65 million passengers annually in an area covering 364 square miles.  That's pretty impressive. 

But what really impressed me is the fact that they also make excellent use of the web to tell a story that turns taking the bus into the obvious transportation choice.

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If you don't get good answers, keep looking.

If you are a big corporation, you may have plenty of in-house talent or can afford to spend a lot of money to outsource the rebuilding of your website.  Even if you are a small organization with a limited budget,  there are lengthy of technically and graphically talented folks who would love to work with you. Even so, you may not get what you need: A website chock-full of relevant and compelling content.

Before you choose the organization based on their technical competence or creative genius, be sure to ask of these five questions because, in the end, it's all about your content:

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Think of yourself as the ultimate knowledge resource like those concierges serving fine hotels such as the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons—But Available 24/7.

When you find yourself in a new town but are blessed to be staying in a hotel with a knowledgeable and caring concierge, you've got it made.  Any reasonable request you make for help--and perhaps even some not so reasonable or a bit off the wall requests --will be greeted with prompt and enthusiastic action by the concierge.  The very best of the breed combine encyclopedic knowledge, extensive connections, and an innate desire to look after their customers.

Those hotels whose concierges solve their guests’ problems successfully time after time will be rewarded not only with return stays but with unbeatable word-of-mouth as stories are told about the unbelievable lengths to which the concierge went to solve a problem.

When your customers come to your website, they are similarly looking to you to solve their problems.  If you can succeed at providing plenty of substantive information that addresses their biggest problems, you are beginning to play the role of content concierge in their lives.  You have an advantage over a typical hotel.  Your content is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  And, like a hotel, you can provide round-the-clock telephone or chat support that takes your problem-solving to the next level.

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Marketing experts shared invaluable insights about how to market in turbulent times through the effective use of content online, in print, and in person.

Custom publishing has gone from being an ancillary, add on component of marketing strategies to becoming a vital ingredient.  Why?  Because content marketing is so important to an increasing number of marketers and companies of all sizes.  Therefore, creating custom content is no longer a nice to-do, if you have the money.  Rather, it has become an absolute must-do as part of an integrated content marketing strategy.

The strategic importance of content marketing, and of its first cousin, social media, was front and center at this year's Custom Content Conference. 

Here are 8 great takeaways that I brought home with me from the conference:

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Lessons for small business marketers from a very creative insurance website

You might not think of renter's insurance as an especially lucrative product.  Although it may be very profitable, it's certainly not expensive. Even so, there are plenty of renters who don't bother to buy it because they just don't see the value.  And, going after prospects for this inexpensive coverage on the phone or in-person would probably not be worth the effort.

That's where imaginative content marketing plays a key role: It sells this important insurance product to folks who need it, but don't yet know they need it.

Liberty Mutual does a fantastic job online with its YouCovered.com site that targets what seems to be an ideal buyer persona: relatively affluent young people who have a fair amount of stuff that is worth a lot to replace. You can apply the best of what they do even with a small online marketing budget.

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6 Lessons to Learn from a Young Mom Who Has Built a Successful Clothing Brand While Learning Business the Hard Way

Heather Nolte is a self-described 5' 1" Texas firecracker who launched her fun and fashionable  clothing company with tons of energy, but not a shred of entrepreneurial experience.

She targets moms and their very young kids who are desperate for clothing options that are not the same old same old "mommy and me" choices. Her tagline tells the story: "From the crib to the catwalk."

Although Heather was able to get her company up and running on just $2000, she has always had big dreams. Those dreams and her business naivety led her to make some expensive and damaging marketing mistakes very early on.

Instead of conceding defeat, she immediately set out to learn absolutely everything about building a successful business with a combination of creativity and frugality.  What she learned about marketing has made all the difference.

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It is so hard, but so important to explain what it is that you do and how it will benefit the person to whom you are communicating. Not at length.  But so concisely that it can be communicated in less time than it takes an elevator to go up a few floors. And, so compellingly that your listener will remember and repeat it to others. Actually, Nick Morgan is even more precise than this.  He says your elevator speech must be a single sentence. I have just begun to read his wonderful book, Give Your Speech, Change the World. It is absolutely must reading, even if the only speeches you give are internal presentations within your organization. Nick is the founder of Public Words, a communications coaching company. So he gives speeches--and teaches people how to give speeches--for a living. It's obvious from reading his book that he is a very, very good at it. Listen to what he has to say about that all-important elevator speech. Read More

eNewsletter expert, Michael Katz, puts it all in perspective for professional service providers.

Thanks to Patsi Krakoff of  Writing on the Web for leading me to Michael. He gets right to the heart of a major marketing challenge. How do we describe what we do in a way that will attract customers when they have a pressing need? 

For those of us who provide professional services, we often suffer from knowing a lot about a lot. Even worse, we want to share as much as we can about our skill set with prospective clients. Then we hope they can determine how that passel of capabilities might match what they need right now.

Basically, we're asking our prospects to work too hard to understand how we can help when all they want is a precise solution to an urgent problem.

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By bringing strong content forward and giving themselves more space their site can become a much better representation of the good work that they do.

It wouldn't take much to make dramatic improvements in the ability of the HarmonTampa website to increase its appeal to prospective clients who are unfamiliar with the firm. Relatively small changes could make a big difference. Here's where I believe they can improve the user experience and deliver more content marketing benefit to the firm itself:

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You have plenty of screen real estate. So, use it. Use all of it.

In the early days of the Internet, online news pioneers such as the New York Times were constrained by the average size of a computer screen. Thus, they built very small homepages.  That was okay back then.  It's all wrong now. The New York Times changed its design completely to take advantage of bigger and better screens and of changed reader behavior--in which scrolling down the page to scan all the content is the norm. Effective content marketing depends not only on what you write but by how accessible you make it for those prospective customers who visit your home page. Envision your website as a great publication that will draw in readers just as the New York Times does every day. Read More