Content Marketing Today

8 Ways to Extend Your Print or eNewsletter's Reach Far Beyond Its Core Subscribers

When you publish a monthly print or electronic newsletter that targets an important audience segment,  you probably invest heavily in generating the content that will make this newsletter relevant and valuable to its readers.  That is obviously critical.  But you can do much more to make that newsletter and its content work harder for your organization. How? Easy. Think outside the newsletter. After all, the newsletter has a relatively finite reach, even online.  Think beyond this single content product.  You can dramatically increase the impact of your content marketing by thoughtful repurposing of the information and resources you developed in order to create the newsletter itself. Here are 8 ways to extend the reach of your content far beyond the circulation of that print publication.  None of these require significant incremental expense. But they will consistently deliver dramatic increases in the reach of your content to prospective customers—and the impact it has on them. Read More

Content Marketers Can Deliver Great Information Products to a Targeted Customer Base

Fortune 500 companies have long had the technological resources and investment capital required to build sophisticated content marketing solutions—and to manage huge amounts of demographic data relating to their prospects and customer bases. Many of these firms, such as Best Buy, Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft, and Amazon.com, probably know more about us than some of our relatives do. They also do a terrific job of delivering relevant and compelling content to different segments of their prospect bases.

Smaller companies, however, have had to rely on media companies to deliver their message to their targeted buyers . This has certainly been true with print publications and, until  recently, online as well. Affordable technology is now changing all of the rules.

Just a few years ago, it would have been laughable to imagine that a very small organization could create and maintain a Web site that could be updated daily—and that would allow visitors to interact and even buy products and services. Today, this is not only possible but pervasive. In fact, a 10-person company may be able to outmarket a 10,000-person company in a carefully chosen niche.

There are four core components underlying the shift in the technological balance of power away from media giants and toward companies of all sizes:

• The ability to create sophisticated online publications such as Web sites, digital magazines, and e-newsletters
• The ability to manage huge amounts of data relating to current and future customers
• The ability to leverage social media to engage targeted customers
• The ability to do each of these simply and inexpensively

 

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What Am I Marketing Chopped Liver?

If you are one of the millions of iTunes fans, you appreciate the brilliant work they do in aggregating music creatively.  But, they squander the opportunity to connect with me by focusing on what their database knows about the music I buy and that lives within my iTunes account.

Normally, I now just delete without reading, but this week’s eNewsletter was so off target I had to write about it.

iTunes Does It Right. But Their Marketing Does Me Wrong.

Not only does iTunes enable you to do infinite organizing of your music, the iTunes store takes it many steps further. The store includes pre-constructed sets of music from different eras, different artists or different styles in the iTunes store. With iTunes itself, I particularly love the ‘Genius Bar’ which enables you to create new playlists from your stored music or to discover new tunes that you’re likely to love based on a song that you have chosen from your own iTunes collection.

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Or Maybe I’m on a special list of empty-headed business people.

But I’m hit by way too many email marketing campaigns that must assume that I’m exceptionally gullible. Perhaps I’m the only person that hates this stuff, but I’m going to share the agonizingly long text of an intelligence-insulting promotional email so you can judge for yourself.

Several normal emails kicked off the campaign promoting an online workshop. That was fine. I’m interested in the topic and am ok getting marketing missives.  But, then came the first ‘oops’ email follow up with a lame 'I goofed’ message. And then the pathetic ‘boo boo mistake’ attempt that you see below in appropriate scarlet letters sneaked into my in box.  Does this woman really think I will fall for this?

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Blase Ciabaton, The DirectMail Man, Teaches a New Way to Do Some Real One-to-One Content Marketing

In order to generate measurable marketing response, you may well continue to rely on direct mail.  Although it may be less effective than in pre-Internet days, direct marketing does work with the right targeted message to the right audience. 

You can optimize your efforts by using a tool suggested by Blase Ciabaton. It’s all about PURLs that let you get personal with your prospects.

As a content marketer, you can target prospects individually with the use of PURLs, which are ‘personalized URLs.'  Thus, a 10,000 person direct marketing campaign would generate 10,000 PURLs which serve as individualized landing pages and can even greet the direct mail recipient by name.

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A Sadly Wasted Effort for a Mystery Event That Might Even Have Been Worth Attending

I just received an email promotion that was so wrong-headed that it makes a perfect negative case study.  As always we can learn from what is terrific or, in this case, not so terrific.

Here are 4 Major Email Promo Mistakes that You Should Avoid:

• The header: This is the email header I saw in my inbox: “invitation for March 17”.  It doesn’t tell me what is happening on that date or why I should care. Since I, like all of you, receive way too many emails, I have no earthly reason to open it. 
  Your header must entice the recipient to open your email by showing quickly that your reader will benefit. It plays the critical role of a headline in a news story or an advertisement and is even more important because it’s the only thing your recipients may see in their crowded in box.

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  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.

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Miss Lucy's House of Holidays understands how to segment its customers and deliver targeted messages as part of a consistent content marketing campaign.

Like many small retailers, Miss Lucy's has a limited marketing budget. Unlike many small retailers, they have a very clear understanding of their ideal target customer and know how to conduct carefully segmented e-mail marketing.

Their elegant shop focuses on high-end product lines and unique gifts which are centered around a holiday theme. Throughout the year, and for a wide variety of holidays, they continually redecorate and refocus the design of their store. Among their collections are Swarovski Crystal, Waterford Crystal Crabtree & Evelyn and Christopher Radko.  They complement their retail efforts with exquisite holiday decorating of homes for affluent customers. This side of the business is so popular that they are booked two years ahead.

Since their founding in October 2006, they have experimented with a variety of marketing that included print advertising, TV advertising, radio advertising, direct mail--and most persistently and effectively e-mail marketing. Today, they do almost no traditional marketing.  They have instead focused their efforts on e-mail marketing.

Here's why that works so well for them:

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A tips eNewsletter can work for a free trial or an actual purchase.

Whether or not you are actually sending out regular eNewsletters to customers and prospects, you should consider creating a special ‘tips’ eNewsletter for new users and/or testers.

As it frequently does, the Avongate blog inspired me with a post that was specific to software companies that need to convert free trial users into paying customers. Guest blogger, Jason Cohen, CEO of Smart Bear Software, emphasizes that you need to do something with your captured customer info, because you will be wasting data otherwise. But, he also suggested that the typical "thanks and hope you're enjoying our software " was not much better than doing nothing.

Instead, he recommends that you do a special-purpose series of three eNewsletters that are filled with tips about how to make best use of the product that prospects are testing. 

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How To Put the Brakes on Their Five Major Marketing Mistakes

[Please note that I have made a few changes to the initial post based on constructive feedback, particularly to clarify that this is a dealer enewsletter,not a BMW corporate effort ] If you were to imagine an eNewsletter from your local BMW dealer, you would probably expect it to lead off with a picture something like the one to the right. As a BMW owner, you tend to be a certain kind of person.  The folks at BMW have understood your persona well over decades in the United States.  That's why I'm mystified at the June 2009 eNewsletter from Germain BMW of Naples. I love my BMW.  I think Germain BMW is a terrific dealership. But, I hate their eNewsletter. Why? Because it has almost nothing to do with the BMW brand promise: BMW—The Ultimate Driving Machine. Call me crazy but when I get an eNewsletter that has something to do with BMW, I expect that it would deliver on that ‘ultimate driving machine’ brand promise.  Instead here's what the eNewsletter delivers by way of core content after stripping away the header and some dealer specific webpage links: Read More