Content Marketing Today

Excellent Book Tells us Why Storytelling is So Important. 

You should apply its lessons as you invent and reinvent your content marketing strategy.

We all have heroes. Garrison Keillor, creator of the Prairie Home Companion, is one of mine. Why? He is the best storyteller on the planet. Until recently, I hadn't made the connection between what Garrison Keillor does so well and the business world we all inhabit. The Story Factor by Annette Simmons pulls it all together.

Annette is a consultant with roots in major corporations. In 1992, she attended a bucolic southern storytelling event that reshaped her thinking about making an impact within a business context. She believes that facts may be important, but they don't make the difference.

As she puts it, "People don't want more information. They are up to their eyeballs in information. They want faith-faith in you, your goals, your success, in the story you tell. It is faith that moves mountains, not fact."

Stephanie Diamond lays bare mysteries of online marketing for small business executives.

Hyperbole?  Maybe.  But, this is a terrific book.

Marketing is probably the biggest challenge for small business owners and executives.  We typically spend so much time running the business day to day that establishing and maintaining a marketing focus just doesn't happen.  The accelerating pace of Internet marketing change makes it all that much more challenging. 

Happily, Stephanie Diamond has written that rare book which both forces us to think in new and different ways about marketing issues--and simultaneously provides a detailed roadmap so that we can put those thoughts into action. Once you have finished the book, you will be ready to develop and deploy a successful Web marketing strategy. 

Her new book, Web Marketing for Small Businesses, is a much-needed addition to the literature of online marketing.  This book enables us first to grasp complex concepts and then to put them into practice with easy to follow steps.  Even solopreneurs will find significant value in Stephanie's book.  I know that I have already begun to implement several of the strategies about which she writes so knowledgeably.

In the next few weeks, you'll have the opportunity to read our new book, Get Content. Get Customers., hot off the proverbial presses. We're pretty sure that you will find it relevant, valuable, and compelling in just the way that content marketing is supposed to be. But, in case you can't wait for the book itself, here is a MindMap that lays out the entire tome on a virtual or actual page.

Throughout the creation of the book, I have used MindManager MindMap's for numerous book related tasks.

Read on to learn ho mind mappingoptimize the book collaboration and creation process with Joe Pulizzi-- and how it's now helping us with the process of marketing of the book.

Among the ways that mind mapping simplified the creation of the book:

Imagine for a moment that every person surfing the web is wearing an identical baseball cap.  On the front of that baseball camp is not a New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox insignia but 5 capital letters: WIIFM

Those five letters enable you to do a bit of mind reading and may keep you from making a very serious mistake.  They stand for: "What's in it for me ?"

You can bet your business life that unless your website quickly and obviously answers that question, your odds of converting those visitors into customers fall famously between slim--and none.  The rest of your content marketing strategy may be lost unless you can answer that universal question. That's why you must include the too often missing ingredient.

What's the missing ingredient?

It's all about the return on objective, not the return on investment

We are long past the days when most companies accepted marketing as a vague concept and a mysterious practice that could not really be measured. Today, most marketers and their bosses want to prove that the dollars spent achieve a measurable return.

Typically they are trying to prove a precise ROI or return on their investment dollars.  Unfortunately, that is usually difficult because processes are not now--and perhaps never will be--in-place to connect dollars spent to increased sales.  One reason for failure is that specific, achievable objectives are not established at the beginning of the marketing program.

That's where ROO comes in.  ROO means return on objective.  This is a more realistic way to measure the success of marketing program, but it does require that marketers establish specific objectives from the get go.  Here is why ROO is better than ROI at measuring what you get from your marketing.

Here's a well-deserved plug for our colleague, Stephanie Diamond.  She's been involved with the web before the web was cool. She's also an AOL marketing alum who really knows what she's talking about.

She focuses her efforts on making it easy for small businesses to deploy effective web marketing efforts.  So, if you are trying to make the web pay off for your business, you may want to pre-order her new book "Web Marketing for Small Businesses: 7 Steps to Explosive Business Growth"  published by Sourcebooks, Inc.

This is the kind of practical book that you can put to work right away.

To succeed as an entrepreneur, you must embrace the core content marketing component of developing an in-depth understanding of your current or prospective customers. If you fail to achieve that understanding, your marketing strategy and ultimately your business stand a slim chance of success.

Over many years, I have interacted with or learned about a host of new startup ideas--or recently launched businesses.  I have usually feared for their survival.  Here's why: most incipient entrepreneurs appeared to be operating almost entirely by gut feel.  Certainly hunches and instincts are critical components to entrepreneurial success.  In fact, those elements may differentiate entrepreneurs from many folks who were perfectly happy to work within more structured environments.

But gut feel is no substitute for doing basic homework on the viability of a business concept.  Of course, viability extends beyond an understanding of your prospective customers.  But, even an otherwise incredibly well-run business will tank unless that business understands the needs of its target buyers.

Here are 3 sketches of typical startup scenarios where a fundamental failure to understand future customers and their needs poses significant dangers to their ultimate survival: