Content Marketing Today

Starbucks, the Chicago Tribune, and some knuckleheaded commenters

I was planning to write an article about the Starbucks Hail Mary barista quality play that involved closing all of their stores for three hours. Talk about a drought!

But serendipitous searching pointed me in a completely different direction.

As part of my research, I was reading a thoughtful article in the Chicago Tribune online.  Noticing that there were seven comments, I thought they might add some value on the actual user experience following the closing experiment. 

No such luck.

With one exception, the comments were completely useless.  Perhaps worse than useless, they were stupid. Here's a sampling:

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Richmond Public Relations may not be self absorbed in person.  But they are completely self-absorbed online.

If ever there were a profession where it should be all about the client and not about your company it would be public relations. While looking for great public relations sites, I fell upon yet another bad example of a self-absorbed company with an awful website.

I was amazed that a company that makes its living by providing relevant information for a variety of news outlets makes it so hard to get the same kind of information on its website.

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Award-winning print marketing materials may fail completely when translated online.

Churchill Corporate Services provides a broad range of rental, relocation, and disaster housing services both for corporations and individuals. 

They have a corporate website and several micro-sites that are dedicated to specific business divisions.  Collectively, these sites provide a pretty comprehensive look at what the company does and how they can benefit their customers.

Before I had ever looked at their websites, I was alerted to an online brochure.  The print version of the eBrochure had actually won a second-place New Jersey award in 2005 for a direct marketing mail package.  Unfortunately, what worked well in print works poorly online.

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The wrong name in the wrong campaign doomed Oldsmobile.  Let's hope it doesn't happen here.

Of course, this company can't help that it's name begins with 'old.'  Since it's been around since 1845, it is old.  But, in an effort to solve a somewhat Oldsmobile-like problem, Old Mutual's current advertising campaign attempts a very curious approach to turn old into new. 

Like many firms with really bad advertising, their television campaign distracts from what are probably excellent products and services.  You simply cannot figure out what they are selling or why we should care by watching their lamebrained commercials. 

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Yes, you can also learn from marketers who get it wrong. Let them make the mistakes so you don't have to. Here are 5 standout examples of content marketing that went awry. The sad irony is that in each case we are dealing with companies with solid products and services who may well do a good job in terms of their traditional marketing. But in the all important arena of content marketing, but they are almost completely ineffective. Learn what not to do by avoiding what they have done.

1. Who Cares If Grant Thornton is Passionate about the Business of Accounting?

They registered a slogan that’s all about them. It has nothing to do with how they benefit their clients.

If you watch any business-oriented TV, you’ve probably seen the Grant Thornton commercials. They’ve spent millions to tell the world that they have ‘a passion for the business of accounting.’ Are they suggesting that their fellow accounting firms lack a passion for the business of accounting? That seems unlikely. In fact, their slogan has essentially no customer value because it’s all about Grant Thornton. Apparently, they aren’t passionate about content marketing. Couldn’t They Have Been Passionate about the Success of their Clients? Click here to learn from their mistakes. Read More

For small to medium-sized businesses, it's essential to provide great content before wandering onto  social mediopolis venues like FaceBook and Twitter

A powerfully pithy post on the Conversion Rate blog alerted me to some must-read content by web usability guru, Jacob Nielsen. 

According blogger, Brett Gilbertson, online marketing success is all about mastering the basics of providing relevant and accessible content. Done right that will lead to great conversion rates and growing sales. He quotes Nielsen,

“Instead of adding Facebook-like features that let users “bite” other users and turn them into zombies, the B2B site would get more sales by offering clear prices, good product photos, detailed specs, convincing whitepapers, an easily navigable information architecture, and an email newsletter.”

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Let's hope they didn't pay a lot of money for this disaster.

After waiting 15 seconds on a high-speed connection, this is the meaningless page that stares out at us. If you didn't already know what Universal McCann did, you would still be clueless after staring at this page. And, if you were in a hurry, you would have moved right on by. The good news is that this advertising giant proves once again that big budgets and big egos don't add up to an effective web presence. In fact, you can and should do a lot better even as very small company. Money doesn't generate customer-centric content marketing. Thoughtful concern for your customers and their problems are the key to successful marketing strategies. That concern, expressed creatively as compelling content will achieve measurable results. For that, you may need big ideas, but you don't need a big budget. The net effect of Universal McCann's website is to imply to prospective clients that your messaging should be hard to find, take a long time to display, contain huge segments of unbroken, cliche-ridden text, and be all about the client rather than their customers. In fact, it's so bad, that you almost think it was done as a parody of really, really bad websites. Sadly, we know that's not true. Yikes! Here's where they went very wrong and how you can avoid the same traps. Read More

But we can still learn lessons from this content marketing misfire.

I recently received a marketing email via CMPTechDirect (a service of CMP Media) from one of their advertisers. That's part of the price I pay to receive occasionally useful stuff from technology vendors.

CMP Media is a highly respected technology publishing company.  In fact, I spent more than eight great years working there.  So I enjoy staying current via their regular eNewsletters and even via information from tech vendors.  So far so good. But Trend Micro's obnoxious approach put me off completely.

Definitely don't use their sneaky, untargeted, competition-trashing approach.  Do just the opposite.  Here are the 4 things not to emulate:

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Last week I received a special issue of myFORD (myFordmag.com), Ford Motor's owner magazine, entitled "New Directions". First off, I've owned a variety of Fords over the past few decades, and they've all treated me well. But frankly, I'm not really sure what they are trying to do with the latest issue of their custom magazine. If the goal is "sell, sell, sell...feature, feature, feature" then they are doing a good job. myFORD has never been an elite lifestyle magazine (actually, it's always been pretty poor), but this one may take the cake.

There is no need to go into great detail on what's wrong with myFord magazine. It takes just a simple bit of analysis.

There are 17 separate content sections in the magazine (mini-features, sidebars, etc.). Of the 17 areas, Ford is mentioned in the title or first sentence of 14 of them. What this means is that the magazine has nothing to do with customers...it's all about Ford. 

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Here are the most popular posts since the launch of Content Marketing Today in August 2007. See what you may have missed--and what thousands of marketers have learned over the past 5 months. You'll find everything from great newsletters to bad websites... great custom magazines for reluctant buyers... the 7 deadliest content marketing sins... 6 lessons to learn from a shopping mall...using content marketing to speed sales growth curve. Read on for a great refresher course in content marketing. Read More