Get content. Get customers.,has now sold more than 10,000 copies in its hardcover, paperback, and eBook editions.

Even though Joe Pulizzi and I wrote and updated it in the early stages of the content marketing revolution, our book’s vital lessons and detailed case studies are just as valid and valuable today. The range of organizations that we analyzed extended from huge multibillion dollar public companies to midsize companies with a few hundred employees and even to very small single owner organizations.

If you haven’t yet read Get Content Get Customers, we know that you will want to run out and buy the book because it is chock-full of content marketing knowledge that you can put to work immediately.

But, just to wet your content marketing whistle, here are the top 10 takeaways we gleaned from some brilliant content marketing practitioners. These represent the themes that we recognized again and again as we examined how organizations are putting content marketing to work.

1. Only content that is intrinsically valuable to your customers will work as a core component of your content marketing strategy.

2. You must have a thorough understanding of your customers and what is most important to them. If you do not understand the problems and challenges they face, you cannot hope to create content that is truly relevant to them. Without understanding their problems, you cannot provide solutions.

3. A comprehensive content marketing strategy may provide a complete or partial replacement of traditional advertising and marketing. Such a strategy can be both more effective and less expensive than doing things the old-fashioned way.

4. Print magazines can be a powerful weapon within your content marketing arsenal. They enable you to reach out with precision to your customers with carefully targeted messaging that is totally under your control.

5. Great design adds significant value to content marketing by making it more accessible, more appealing, and more actionable for your customers.

6. Your best content marketing investment may be in the creation of a dedicated internal or external team who understand how to produce great content and who live and die by the success of your content marketing program.

7. Drink your own Kool-Aid. Whenever possible, use your own company’s products or services to prove their worth to your customers.

8. Get your customers to participate actively with the content you create in print and online. Begin a conversation and keep it going in order to earn their loyalty and trust.

9. Relevant and valuable content is just the first step in turning a prospect or visitor into a customer. You must then make it easy for them to buy.

10. Most of the best practices from the larger companies we profiled can be emulated in whole or in part even by very small organizations. It’s not the money. It’s the content marketing mindset that counts. Big ideas can trump big bucks.

These lessons are fairly simple to express but much harder to put into practice. That’s why we know you will want to buy the book.

Get the paperback edition for overnight delivery. Perfectly priced at $13.74!

Or get the Kindle edition for instant gratification. Only $9.71 with the Amazon discount!!

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.

1. Be certain that each newsletter story links to a dedicated page on your website or blog. You want your readers to find their way easily to your online home so they can discover lots more about your company, its products, and its people.  Your hyperlinked newsletter articles make the natural content connection.  In addition, try to link to more related stories on your site or blog from the original article.

2. Record audio and video of interviews for your newsletter for later repurposing. Post videos of interviews to YouTube and other targeted video portals specific to your industry. Upload audio to your website and blog.  Research podcast directories that may be relevant to your industry. Many of us would rather watch or listen to critical content.

3. Develop a news release schedule before your newsletter comes out. Target three or four key topics that affect your customers and the industry (based on the newsletter content). The release link should take them to the newsletter subscription page. Consider offering a free whitepaper or report as an incentive.

4. Discuss the newsletter and its content on your business blog. Post some of the key findings/issues. If you don’t have a blog, it’s high time you started one to connect to your customers.

5. Send out news releases through a keyword-optimized service such as PRWeb. Make sure that they really are newsworthy. You’ll be surprised at your reach beyond your static newsletter readership. You’ll be picked up in the blogosphere and even by traditional reporters who are always looking for news stories.
Remember, news releases are for much more than getting press; they are for building key links and for helping bloggers and influencers find your site. Industry bloggers will be key to extending the reach and impact of your newsletter.

5. Continue the news release program after your newsletter is released, pushing the audience to  videos, an eBook, or key articles.  Your newsletter content can still be the foundation for newsworthy stories weeks or sometimes months after it hits the virtual street.

6. Be sure to make RSS feeds available for your newsletter and for all of your web content. This is an easy and free way of syndicating your news stories that will extend your newsletter subscriber base dramatically.

7. Be sure each article integrates social media sharing capabilities so that enthusiastic readers can tell your stories to their colleagues and friends on Facebook and Twitter.  If you’re lucky, a great article may go viral and be spread across the web by enthusiasts who value and want to share your content.

8. Provide something remarkable and different on your website or blog for download. This does two things:
1) continues the conversation with your current customers
2) gives you information on prospects so you can begin a conversation with them.
Something remarkable may be a free eBook about the 10 trends in your industry, or a free white paper on a new, cutting-edge technology. Eliminate the sales pitch. Seek only to educate at this point.

Don’t settle for a lonely newsletter. Go above and beyond to get the content marketing results you need.

Unless You Address This Top of Mind, Unspoken Question, You are Out of the Game

Imagine for a moment, that you are looking out at a hoard of your customers in an actual or virtual audience and that each and every one of them is wearing a hat.

And, on each and every hat, are the words "so what?"

Essentially, that’s what they’re thinking when you are talking, sending them an e-mail, inviting them to your website, sharing an eNewsletter, mailing them a brochure or presenting them with an advertisement.

They want to know what’s in it for them. If you can’t tell them, you are out!  You are out of consideration. You are out of their trusted information resource database. You are out of their purchase plans. You are being tossed right out of the game.

My thanks to the late Dave Hagenbuck, sales trainer extraordinaire for this metaphor. He was teaching us about effective sales presentations in a pre-Internet era. But, his metaphor and his advice applies just as much, if not more today.

If you are ready with customer-centric answers to the unspoken ‘So what?’, you’ll be in good shape whenever and however you connect with your customers.

Web Content Strategist from Capetown Makes a Memorable Front and Back Impression

A business card is quite literally a small thing. But here’s one that made a big impression on me as a surprising example of content marketing.

The card’s owner/creator, Kerry-Anne Gilowey, participated in a workshop with me at the 2010 Content Strategy Forum. She impressed me as being memorably smart, creative, and witty. Quite separately, I found her card positively memorable, too.  And, I would have done even if I had never met her in person.

Here’s why:

On the front—very nice but not the killer side

• She leads off with her content marketing/social media credentials. I see those even before I see her phone number
• She asks us to take action, e.g., find me…follow me…call me.
• She doesn’t bother with an address that would have taken up communications space–and these days, who cares?
• Her sunshine graphic reflects her company name nicely but not obtrusively.

On the back—here’s the especially memorable creative side of the card

• She provides a category cloud that shows us at a glance what she does and the relative weight she gives to each element
• We can grasp almost instantly what she does that can help us.
• She doesn’t have to say that she does these things. We just know.
• It’s a creative approach so we spot her creativity.
• It’s web-related so we also figure that she intuitively gets the whole web thing.

I’m sure that there are plenty of wonderfully effective business cards out in the world. But of the dozen+, I collected at the Forum, only Kerry-Anne’s communicated so much, so memorably. In fact, it’s the only one I could have described from memory.

When it comes to your content marketing strategy, even your business cards can make a difference.

Bus Shelter Ads Offer Can’t Miss Message that Promotes Use of Rider Friendly Technology

AC Transit avoids the "build it and they will come" mistake to which many companies and organizations fall prey. They know that simply offering bus service and implementing technology is just the beginning to motivating Bay Area residents to take the bus regularly.  They also prove that traditional outdoor advertising can still work brilliantly at the right time and place.  This is targeted, visual content marketing at its best.

The San Francisco Bay area boasts excellent public transit systems in the city itself and in surrounding counties. AC Transit is notable not only for a well-run system, but for its effectiveness in marketing the benefits of public transit to its passengers.

AC Transit is the third-largest bus-only transit system in California, serving over 400 square miles of the East Bay.  Every weekday, over 230,000 people ride their fleet of nearly 800 buses.  They run buses on 105 routes with more than 6500 stops.

Even better, they do a great job of marketing all those buses, stops, and routes to current and future passengers.

We have already written about their wonderful online marketing campaign that paints such a compelling picture of the benefits of bus travel. AC Transit  created ACT for Me as “Your Guide to the Future of Public Transit.”  They illustrate why AC Transit should be an integral part of your life by sharing a creative range of content—from user-generated videos, to a travel savings calculator, to a discussion of community and environment benefits, and the exciting future of transit. Here’s A Public Agency That Really Understands Content Marketing.

Now they are adding even more value for their customers and continuing their effective campaign in a brand-new way.

Helping Passengers First by Adding Smart Transit Technology—and Then by  Enticing Them with Smart Targeted Marketing

AC Transit committed to NextBus to improve bus travel for their millions of annual passengers.  This system tells riders exactly when the next bus will arrive—and can even send arrival alerts so passengers never miss a bus.  However, they didn’t assume that every rider–or potential rider–would be aware of this new technology nor understand how NextBus could help them

To make the most of their NextBus implementation, they have recently added advertising to their bus shelters.  Now, even passersby get the message about how easy it is to use public transit and to stay on time.  The bus stop ads illustrate that it’s easy to know when the next bus will arrive by using NextBus technology. They use an image of a rider using a smart phone to access bus data with an additional close-up image of a smart phone and showing a NextBus prediction. Of course, they include the appropriate web address to use so that riders can access the NextBus data immediatel

In this way, AC Transit helps current riders to improve their bus riding experience while providing an easy-to-understand marketing message for folks who may be just beginning to think about taking the bus on a regular basis.

Even in Northern California, it can be difficult to get drivers out of their cars and onto the bus. But AC  Transit is doing a stellar job of marketing that is very likely to make that transit transition seem like a very smart idea .

  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.

1. How To Create the All-Important Elevator Speech For Your Presentations and for Your Content Marketing
   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. Click to read more.

2. 5 Reasons an eBook Should be a Core Component of Your Content Marketing Strategy
   Of course, I’m assuming that you already have a website and are probably doing some business blogging.  You may also do a regular eNewsletter to inform your customers and prospects about the great content you have created recently online.  Your next step is to create an e-book that targets your ideal customers. Click here to read more.

3. 5 Twitter Tips to Strengthen Your Content Marketing Strategy
   You may be wondering why something as seemingly simple as Twitter causes so much confusion and consternation among business people.
   Perhaps, it best likened to a tool like a hammer which is simultaneously simple and powerful.  After all, a hammer can be used to put up a basic bookshelf or to build an entire home that will house a family for a lifetime. Click here to read more.

4. Want to Attract and Retain Great Customers? Become Their Online Content Concierge!
   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. Click here to read more.
5. Six Steps to a Successful Small Business Content Marketing Strategy
   How to go from clueless to compelling to transform prospects into buyers
   In 2007, the mention of content marketing brought as many blank stares from small business owners as the mention of a website did 10 years before. In fact, in 1997 when we started our small business magazine in Southwest Florida, few owners had websites, let alone an online marketing strategy.
   In 2009, most small businesses do have websites and the term, ‘content marketing,’ has gone from obscure to fashionable. When I say fashionable, I mean that the usage of the phrase has skyrocketed in the past two years. For example, the number of visitors to our website who arrived because they had done a search for ‘content marketing,’ has increased by a factor of 10. Click here to read more.
6. 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool
   It’s much more powerful than those young whippersnappers–Twitter and Facebook
   Thanks to free or inexpensive blogging tools, any individual can be on the same technological footing as the New York Times or Business Week.  That may seem relatively obvious to many of you.  What I think is less obvious is that your blog is every bit as much a social media tool as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.  In fact, I believe that a blog is the most important social media weapon in your arsenal. Click here to read more.
7. Why Being Visual Can Bring Beautiful Business Results
   Inspiration from ‘Visual Blogger’ Mark Smiciklas of Intersection Marketing
   It’s hard to make things easy. And, it’s even harder to be amusing at the same time.
   But the very best visuals take a complex idea or series of connected ideas and make them instantly understandable. Just the right visuals make those ideas even more memorable when they are funny as well. In the case of the Intersection Marketing blog from Mark Smiciklas, he manages to do both consistently. Click here to read more.
8. 6 Reasons to Embrace Social Media Today
   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. Click here to read more.
9. Top 10 Lessons Small Businesses Can Takeaway from Smart Content Marketers
   This week, several client meetings reinforced a vital truth:  Content marketing isn’t an arcane theory taught in expensive graduate schools that only billion dollar companies can use. In fact, great  content marketing is much more about brains than big bucks.
   Those client conversations took me back to lessons learned from more than a dozen case studies we featured in Get Content Get Customers. What came through loud and clear was that content marketing requires discipline, patience, and persistence, but it doesn’t require an enormous budget.  Click here to read more.
10. 6 Secrets to Making Online Video Work for Small Business
    Kathy Saenz of Neighborhood America Shares What It Takes to Make Video an Effective Content Marketing Tool
    Even a micro business can use video effectively to communicate with its customers online.
    But, as we amateur carpenters know, you can wind up with a mess instead of a masterpiece unless you understand how to use a potentially powerful tool well.   In that spirit we’re happy to can share with you six terrific tips for using video successfully from talented Southwest Florida professional, Kathy Saenz. Click here to read more.

Thanks to everyone for their support in 2009!

It’s All About the Power of Deep 3 D Content Over Skinny 2 D Content

What’s the difference between 2-D marketing and 3-D marketing you might ask? Plenty!

Think of all the junk mail you receive at home or at the office.  Tons of envelopes and a few postcards.  Virtually everything but the bills will be tossed–and much of that without anyone looking at the individual pieces.  There is no depth to all that stuff.

But what if you receive a well-designed magazine that clearly matches your interests, even if you haven’t requested it?  What’s the likelihood that you will spend at least a few minutes leafing through the magazine.  Thus, the 3-D marketer will have made a memorable and positive impact on you and/or your business. The 2-D marketer will wind up in the wastebasket.

3-D analog marketing does very well.

A single page promotional flyer is obviously two-dimensional in a literal sense.  It is also two-dimensional in the figurative sense of lacking real depth.  After all, how much can you communicate on a single sheet of paper? This is similar to a one sheet product sheet sent to a business or an announcement of a 50% off sale at a department store.  Although you can convey important information–and perhaps relevant information, you are extremely limited in how much you can convey.

Let’s take it to the next level.  Think of a carefully targeted custom publication with 32 pages.  Best Magazine from Best Buy provides an excellent example. 

As we have written in Get Content Get Customers, Best Buy’s magazine targets their very best customers with an enthusiast’s paradise chock full of product information about everything from iPods to sports cars.

This is an enthusiast’s magazine in the best tradition of favorites such as Sports Illustrated or Car and Driver. As such,  Best Magazine is three-dimensional analog marketing at its best, providing both literal and figurative depth.

3-D online marketing does brilliantly—and for a much lower cost.

Let’s take 3-D marketing onto the Internet. Imagine a well-designed website with content that is a relative to your needs, tells you everything you need to know in order to make a buying decision, and makes it incredibly easy for you to complete that buying transaction.  This is 3-D marketing taken to its logical extreme.

In the analog world, 3-D marketing beats out 2-D marketing, but at a significant cost differential.  As paper, printing, and postage costs increase, it becomes more challenging to generate a meaningful return within the analog universe.

Conversely, in the digital world, 3-D marketing gives you infinite reach with virtually zero incremental cost.  Better yet, the more depth of content you provide, the more powerful this marketing weapon becomes.

Marketers must understand, however, that a Web presence in and of itself is meaningless.  Great content gives meaning and power to the three dimensions. If your site lacks that content, you might as well go back to mailing postcards and product fliers.

It is worth noting, of course, that you do not need to wear special glasses to get full benefit from 3-D digital marketing.

This week, several client meetings reinforced a vital truth:  Content marketing isn’t an arcane theory taught in expensive graduate schools that only billion dollar companies can use. In fact, great  content marketing is much more about brains than big bucks.

Those client conversations took me back to lessons learned from more than a dozen case studies we featured in Get Content Get Customers. What came through loud and clear was that content marketing requires discipline, patience, and persistence, but it doesn’t require an enormous budget. 

It’s particularly gratifying to watch so many small businesses and independent professionals putting content marketing to work.  Here in SW Florida, Dean Piccirillo of HBK Sorce Financial, realtor, Chris Griffith, and Simply Cupcakes of Naples are three inspirational examples. With minimal budgets and maximum creativity, they are executing content marketing strategies that deliver tangible results.  And, for the most part, they have bypassed traditional marketing and advertising.

If you haven’t read Get Content Get Customers, you can cut to the content marketing chase here with the following 10 top takeaways from our case studies. They may just inspire you to stop procrastinating and to kick start your content marketing strategy now. 

These takeaways apply to companies of every size, but will bring outsized benefits to small companies when they use marketing brains to outmaneuver marketing brawn.

10 Lessons Small Businesses Can Learn from Smart Content Marketers

1. Only content that is intrinsically valuable to your customers will work as a core component of your content marketing strategy.
2. You must have a thorough understanding of your customers and what is most important to them. If you do not understand the problems and challenges that they face, you cannot
   hope to create content that is truly relevant to them. Without understanding their problems, you cannot provide solutions.
3. A comprehensive content marketing strategy may completely or partially replace traditional advertising and marketing. Such a strategy can be both more effective and less expensive
   than doing things the old-fashioned way.
4. Print publications can be a powerful weapon in your content marketing arsenal. They enable you to reach out to your customers with precision, offering carefully targeted messages that are totally under your control.
5. Great design adds significant value to content marketing by making it more accessible, more appealing, and more actionable for your customers.
6. Your best content marketing investment may be in the creation of a dedicated internal or external team that understands how to produce great content and that lives and dies by the
   success of your content marketing program.
7. Drink your own Kool-Aid. Whenever possible, use your own company’s products or services to prove their worth to your customers.
8. Get your customers to participate actively with the content that you create in print and online. Begin a conversation and keep it going in order to earn your customers’ loyalty and
   trust.
9. Relevant and valuable content is just the first step in turning prospects or visitors into customers. You must then make it easy for them to buy.
10. Your small company can emulate most of the best practices from big companies in whole or in part.  It’s not the money. It’s the content marketing mindset that counts. Big ideas can trump big bucks.

The bottom-line: Content marketing is already working for smart small companies.  Now is the time to put it to work for your organization.  Don’t put off the decision any longer. You’ll find that learning from these 10 takeaways is a great way to begin.

You Must Persuade Me to Act or Your Beautiful Promotional Piece Will Sleep with the Fishes

I was perversely inspired to write this because of a recent gorgeous direct mailing I received from local French restaurant.

They did a lot of things right. There was some beautiful photography that captured the essence of this charming little bistro. They described how the restaurant and its cuisine were uniquely appealing. They shared some impressive awards and recognitions for their excellence. They included their Web address. And, they even provided a little map that showed me exactly how to find it.

There was only one thing missing. But it was the most important thing: They failed to make me an offer that would entice me to dine at the restaurant. In fact, there was no offer at all.

So here’s a lesson we all learned long ago from the Godfather: make me an offer I can’t refuse and I will respond promptly and positively. For this restaurant, there were certainly plenty of possibilities. It could’ve been free appetizers, free glasses of the house wine, buy one entrée get one free, 50% off a bottle of wine or free desserts. But they offered me nothing.

Even worse, there was no call to action, offer or no offer. On one side of the 3" x 7" promotion piece the name of the restaurant served as the headline. On the flipside, the only thing resembling a headline was "recipient of many awards".  They didn’t ask me to take any action at all.

For me and I’m sure for most of the recipients who aren’t familiar with this restaurant, we will probably toss the promotion piece without taking any action. It appears to be a pretty expensively produced item so that means between postage, design, and printing they have spent a lot of money. But, I think most of that money was wasted because they neither asked me to come to the restaurant nor offered me any compelling reason to do so.

I am not a direct marketing expert, but I do know this: If you make me an offer I can’t refuse, you increase the likelihood of taking the action you want me to take by orders of magnitude. Moreover, if you had told me to bring an offer-containing promotion piece to the restaurant, you could have measured the results of your marketing efforts precisely. Finally, whatever you gave away would have been more than balanced by the money I spent on everything else during my visit–not to mention the money I would likely spend on future visits.

The direct marketing lesson: When you make your prospective customers an offer they can’t refuse, it will work for you just as effectively as it worked for the Godfather all those years ago.

The Paradigm is Shifting. Remodel Your Marketing Now.

Marketing rules are changing all around us. The winners in this new world will be the early adopters who understand the new breed of buyer, take advantage of better and cheaper technology, and deliver problem-solving content.

It’s time for marketers to replace traditional publishers. Make sure you aren’t the last one on your block to make the transformation.

Here’s what you need to do and why:

Play the Powerful Role of Publisher to Meet Your Buyer’s Critical Information Needs

You can make this happen just as media companies have done it for decades. The best business-to-business and business to consumer publications delivered must read content for the buyers marketers wanted to reach. These buyers, in turn, became loyal followers of the publications and responded actively to both editorial and advertising messages.

As Paul Gillin suggests in The New Influencers, content marketing is all about engaging in a conversation with your customers and prospects:

The next generation of customers will want to interact with businesses in very different ways. The new influencers are here to stay. Your challenge, and your opportunity, is in learning how to influence them and becoming an influencer yourself.

The old influencers, especially traditional media are declining in influence. This has created an unprecedented opportunity for companies to fill the information void. Although media companies are increasingly disappointing your buyers, those same buyers are still hungry for content that offers solutions to their problems — and helps him lead more successful, productive, and enjoyable lives.

Therefore, you have the opportunity to transform the way in which you market by providing relevant content that positions you as a trusted source. You begin as a source of information and continue as a source of products and services.

It’s neither necessary nor desirable to attempt to sell prospects who don’t want to be sold. Instead, your thought leadership positions your company as the obvious source of solutions. As you become increasingly customer centric, you can develop an intensely loyal and lucrative base of repeat customers.

Target and Reach Buyers Affordably and Effectively

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

Smaller companies typically had to rely on media companies to deliver their message to their targeted buyers. This has certainly been true with print publications, and until fairly recently online as well. Affordable technology has changed all of the rules. In fact, a 10 person company may be able to out market a 10,000 person company in a carefully chosen niche. Today, because the software technology required to manage a customer database is now affordable for any size organization, even small companies have less need of the services of trade and consumer publishers. You can target your ideal set of customers both precisely and inexpensively. Of course, in the burgeoning world of social media, tools such as Twitter and Facebook offer even more possibilities of aggregating prospects who are eager to listen to what you have to say.

All of this is vital because effective and efficient distribution powers the very best content marketing strategies. After all, there is not much point in creating great content unless you can deliver it exactly where you want it. Now you can do both.

Generate High-quality Editorial Even with Limited Time and Dollars.

The key to successful media programs for corporations is great content. Your buyers know the difference between great content and a blatant sales pitch. You may have to work hard to provide consistently relevant and compelling content, but it need not be be cost prohibitive.  You can benefit directly from the miseries of traditional media organizations thanks to a growing reservoir of available writers and editors.

Much of the best editorial talent has been forced out of media organizations to save money. The outflow of terrific journalists is headline material everywhere as newspaper and magazine editorial pages shrink in lock step with the drastic drop in ad pages. Companies of all sizes can afford to create high-quality content as they attract high-quality journalists for contract work. In particular, savvy small organizations are also working with talented freelancers to generate consistently solid content.

Great content underlies great content marketing. Your buyers want and need great content. They used to receive it from media companies. Today, they can and should be receiving it from your organization. Even if you do not have internal editorial talent, plenty of brilliant editors and reporters will be happy to put their talents to work on behalf of your company.

Start Becoming a Publisher Now: Developing a Content Marketing Strategy Both Easier and More Important than Ever

The new breed of buyer doesn’t want to be sold. But, he is more desperate for solutions to complex business and life challenges than ever before. Whether it’s a matter of selecting the right HD TV–or selecting the right enterprise software solution, your buyer has big problems that need solving. Delivering the content to solve those problems used to be the province of media company publications. No longer. It’s your world now as the new breed of publisher.

You can deploy content marketing solutions that begin with genuine conversations, continue with careful targeting, and finish with solution-centered content. Your company will become the new media in the minds of your customers–because you both understand and solve their problems in a way that was once upon a time the sole province of publishing companies.

Don’t wait. The time is now. Go for it.

P.S. If you are a small business and wondering exactly what steps to take, here’s a quick primer:

Six Steps to a Successful Small Business Content Marketing Strategy