Content Marketing Today

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

Terrific new book from Paul Gillin takes the mystery out of using online conversations and communities to connect with your customers.

Nothing is more rewarding than to read a book that is at once valuable, timely, and engaging. Secrets of Social Media Marketing is all that and more.  Paul has a genius for making the complex simple enough to understand without oversimplifying.

Is there a need for this book?  You bet!

"There has been more change in the media world in the last five years than in the previous 500."--Peter Koran, President, Media & Advertising, IAC

Understanding social media marketing is so difficult because it seems to be so different.  For decades, most of the rules of communicating with customers stayed the same.  You figured out who you were going to sell to.  You did your best to create a product or service that would have value for that target audience.  And then you blasted out your marketing message in print, on billboards, on radio, and since the 1950s on TV.

Now, and in the future, much of those old methods go right out the virtual window. Happily, Paul's book teaches you exactly how to put social media marketing to work by telling you what to do and precisely how to do it.

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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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As they rush to make their deadlines, be sure reporters can find great content on your website.

Just because your customers are consuming less traditional print news and feature content does not mean that don't still crave information that helps them find solutions to their problems.  Thus, a great news story or feature article that includes information about your company, its people, and its products can drive a ton of new business your way. After all, that's what public relations is all about.

Although you may not have a budget for a public relations staffer or a PR agency, you can still increase the likelihood that you will get solid press coverage by creating a virtual home for reporters. Make it easy for them to do their job by creating a reporter-friendly online media room.  Think of this strategy as content marketing designed to provide relevant and compelling content--not to your customers--but to reporters.

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What I learned from my own blog posts that were poorly read: It's all about the headline. 

Although quite a few of the articles I have written over the past year were well read, a disconcerting number were hardly read it all.  To understand why, I took a hard look at the articles to see if I could discern a pattern that will enable me to improve readership in 2009. 

There is an obvious  common thread: everything relates to headlines. Here are the five most important things about my headlines that got in the way of the story.  By avoiding these headline blunders, you can count on increasing readership.

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Our readers flocked to a broad range of content marketing-related issues over the past 12 months. In fact, the breadth of topics surprised me. Here's the Cliff's Notes version of what you can find:

• Unlearn Traditional PR
• Transform website into sales machine
• The Secret to Online Marketing
• Authenticity at Starbucks
• Sexy Headline Secrets from Cosmo
• A Really Bad Website Concept
• 6 Reasons to Publish an eNewsletter
• 5 Reasons to Launch a Blog-powered Website
• 6 Ways to Survive the Recession with Content Marketing
• Is it Time to Abandon Yellow Pages Advertising

Read on for a quick take on the posts that readers like you made made most popular.

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You Can Apply These Content Marketing Lessons To Make a Measurable Impact on the Effectiveness of Your Website

Kevin Mannion's Sky Road Consulting helps publishing companies survive intensely difficult times by inventing new ways of serving their customers and of generating revenues. 

His website does a superb job of conveying what he does, why it's important, why you can trust them, and how he can help.  You may not be in Kevin's business but you can certainly learn fundamental content marketing lessons from his website.

Kevin and I were colleagues at CMP Media in the 1990s when even a small print publication had revenues exceeding $10 million and profits of 30 to 40%. That was a very good time to be in the business.  Today, both buyer and advertiser behavior has changed so dramatically that it is a very bad time to be in the publishing business. This is where Kevin rides to their rescue with his services--and perhaps, by content marketing example, to your rescue as well.

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