I continue to be surprised by the number of marketing and advertising companies who have websites that hide examples of the great work that they do behind a bunch of content clichés that fail to distinguish them from every other similar company. 

I recently stumbled upon the website of such a company who is missing its primary content marketing opportunity. They have great stuff, but it’s really hard to find.

Content marketing is all about providing relevant, compelling, and easily accessible information to your prospective customers.

In this case, what is genuinely relevant and compelling is the work that this agency has done on behalf of of its clients. That  visual content represents potential solutions to the problems that its Web visitors are facing.Unfortunately, the content that counts is lurking behind some same old, same old verbiage.

The copy below is from the actual website that I happened upon  They appear to do some really good work. But,  as a potential client, I would have to be truly driven to find that work. First, I would have to wade through all the generic copy that promises pretty much what any good marketing/advertising company could do for me :

“Fill in the Blank” Advertising Company creates custom marketing solutions from strategy through execution to help build and transform your business needs. Let us get to know you inside and out. Let us become instrumental in helping you develop breakthrough solutions to meet your brand objectives and increase your profits. With smart planning & execution, we strengthen your image and reputation as the world around us changes. Change is reality.

We differentiate your company from the competition……

A genuine irony flows from the website copy that makes the promise: "We differentiate your company from the competition."  Sadly, there is almost nothing in the copy that differentiates this agency from its competition.

Actually,  there is a differentiation to be found on this website–but not easily found. That differentiation consists of the proof behind the copy clichés, that is, the actual work that this agency has done. But, you have to struggle to hard-to-find it.

Making It Too Hard to Get to What Really Matters

To get to the good stuff,  you must click on a small  link called, "The Work,"  that sits at the bottom of the page. There, you will find a wealth of visual examples of excellent marketing and advertising projects done for a broad range of companies from relatively small to very very large.  You can even watch videos of commercials that are memorably amusing and interesting.

Moreover, the agency’s work examples include several very well-known brands that add implicit credibility to their skills and experience.

There is another missed opportunity, however. In an era of quantification, none of the work examples are accompanied by information about the objectives of the work and successful outcomes. I’m sure that there were plenty and that they would provide plenty of trust building content for potential clients.

The simple lesson: When you have great work to show, make sure that it is front and center on your website so that impatient visitors find it immediately. Then, use that work to power the copy that populates your homepage and the rest of your site.  Content marketing fails when you cannot find the content that counts quickly and easily. Only pirates love buried treasure.

In other words, when you can show specific successes, you do not have to rely on generic copy that fails to differentiate you from dozens of other similar companies.

Oh,and be sure to avoid clichés like the plague.

Courtesy of PPCBlog.com

If you’re in business today, you have to be on the Internet.  But, being there is barely a beginning.

Once you are on the Internet, it’s vital that your potential customers can find you and your content by searching on Google and other search engines. That’s what SEO is all about.

Before Fretting about SEO, First Get a Clue About How Google Works from PPCBLOG’s Infographic

There have been lots of books white papers, articles and websites devoted to the whole issue of Google and search engine optimization. But for most of business owners and professionals, a basic understanding of how Google works will suffice so that you won’t be bamboozled when some slick-talking SEO sales rep tries to make getting found by Google and the rest sound more complicated than it actually is.

That’s why I love this infographic that takes you on a virtual walk-through of the Google search process. Take five minutes to go through it, you will have a much better understanding of what Google and search engines are all about.

Perhaps this inspiring infographic will also motivate you to create your own visual to illustrate to your potential customers how your business or service works to their benefit.

Check out the full size “How Google Works” infographic at PPCBlog.com

If you provide professional or other  services, you and your organization must be expert at what you do. Therefore, with your advice and instruction, your customers can learn to install their own wall-mounted TVs, organize their own closets, create their own business plans or optimize their own sites for search engines, etc., etc.

You might wonder why you’d want to offer that invaluable assistance at no charge. Wouldn’t you be working yourself out of a job by teaching them to do what you do so very well?  Here’s why I think you don’t have to worry.

Jason MacDonald is an SEO expert who provides a marvelous free webinar that shows businesses how to use the “Top Ten FREE SEO Tools for Google.”  He is the founder and Senior SEO Director of the JM Internet Group.

Jason and his team are ultimately selling in-depth SEO information services rather than providing actual search engine optimization.  But, his approach of providing really valuable content for free before asking anyone to pay for his webinars, applies to any of us who have expertise to share and ultimately to sell. That’s especially true when prospective customers could theoretically apply what we teach without needing to hire us.

Here’s my content marketing insight from Jason:

When customers fully understand the scope of what they might consider attempting to do themselves, most of them will want to rely on an expert to do all that hard work.  Even better, because your highly valuable content has proven your expertise and because your willingness to offer it free sets you apart from the crowd, prospects will likely choose you to solve their problem.

I think you’ll find that some of your prospects may attempt to solve their own problems with the advice you provide.  But, most of them will find it way too daunting.  Moreover, I suspect that quite of few of those adventurous types who went off on their own will come slinking back to beg for your help to fix what they broke.

Offer your prospective customers some of your most valuable content for free. It will likely be one of your smartest revenue generators in the new age of content marketing.

The iPad is the new computing superstar with 2 million units sold in 2 months. As a result, plenty of small companies are benefiting from the apps they have developed for the new tablet computer. Within this new environment, startups can thrive by creating unique and usable software applications that enable iPad users to be more productive.

Todo from Appigo is one such app. It’s a very intuitive application that helps users manage to-do lists, tasks, and projects on their iPad. Because the iPad is hot news, great apps are potentially newsworthy, too. Unfortunately, there are plenty of competitive choices even at this early date.

How, then, can this one small player stand out from the crowd?

As a critical component of their content marketing strategy, the company behind Todo, Appigo,  issued a news release  that makes it very easy to find and to learn about  the company and the product. This is great for users who are looking for information, but it is also a lifesaver for reporters with too much to do and too little time to do it . 

They chose PR Web, which is an affordable new release service offering a lot of handholding for small companies who are new to the PR game.  In addition, it offers broad distribution across the web for every release.

Why This News Release Is so Effective

• Their headline and subhead make it obvious why we should care about this news release and includes keywords(bold type below) for easy findability :
  
  Appigo Raises the Bar for Beautiful iPad Apps by Launching Todo for iPad
  Appigo Todo for iPad Takes Advantage of the iPad’s Large Screen by Presenting a Planner-like Interface for Managing To-do Lists and Tasks. Todo for iPad is Now Available on the iPad App Store at a Special Introductory Price.
  
• They integrate those obvious but important key words such as iPad,to do, task, and Appigo throughout the release so that Google and other search engines—as well as users and reporters–can find the release easily.
• The news release does an excellent job of explaining what Todo does and why we should care. And, it takes only 557 words to do it.
• For potential customers , it tells us exactly where we can buy this App.
• They provide contact information for a real live human being with his phone number and e-mail address.
• They include 5 HTML tags that provide links to external sources. All of those external links are very appealing to Google.
• They highlight a terrific callout quote which sums up the Todo experience– and this quote is hyperlinked to the company website:
  "Holding Todo for iPad in your hand just as you would a daily planner is an incredible experience that gives you motivation to be productive."
• They provide plenty of images that will be available for industry publications or bloggers to use in enhancing their articles. This includes an appealing logo icon and multiple screenshots.
• They offer a window to the company website so you can see what’s available there and can then click to go directly to the site.
• They provide a link to a media kit for reporters and bloggers
• They provide links to printer friendly versions, PDF version, and a Reader version.
• They offer a “Share this” link so that you can spread the word via e-mail, Facebook, Twitteror Google Buzz, among others.

Appigo is a small company, but it’s thinking big about the huge iPad opportunity. Its effective use of a PR Web press release puts it in the same league as much larger organizations.  Did it work? Well, in a search today for “iPad to-do list,” the Appigo App came in 5 of the top ten results on page one. Not bad for a little guy.

P.S. It is a terrific App, one of my iPad favorites.

We hope you’re a firm believer in the value of content marketing. If so, you know how important it is to deliver relevant and valuable content to your most important current and prospective customers. With that understanding, you are ahead of the game.

However, it is vital to incorporate a content strategy process so that you can deliver on the full promise of content marketing.

Content strategy is the kissing cousin of content marketing. As Wikipedia defines it, content strategy is "the practice of planning for content creation, delivery, and governance" and "a repeatable system that defines the entire editorial content development process for a website development project."   If you don’t have an online content strategy, it’s high time you begin work on developing one to keep your content marketing on target.

Thanks to two info-packed days I spent at the April 2010 Content Strategy Forum, I’d like to give you a head start. The Forum provided a wealth of insights on developing and deploying the right process to transform your content marketing vision into a reality that delivers bottom-line results.

Here are the top 10 takeaways on the how-to’s of content strategy:

1. From the very moment you launch your website, you are in the publishing business. As we have said for several years, you need to think like a publisher in order to do content marketing effectively. But the even bigger idea from the Forum is that a website, like it or not, is a publication. For that site, and your strategy, to succeed, you must operate as though you were running a magazine or newspaper.
2. You must assign a content strategy leader with both responsibility and authority in order to succeed. Too many organizations, including many well known global multinationals, are cranking out content without a coherent strategy driven by an appointed leader. In organizations of every size, it is essential that a skilled, trusted individual be given the power to drive your content strategy.
3. Conduct a thorough content audit at the beginning of your process. This means determining exactly what online content you have, where it resides, who’s responsible for it, who is the target reader, and how it is being created and maintained.  Because so many organizations have developed a patchwork quilt of content over many years, they may be completely clueless about what they have and where it is. Without this basic understanding, you cannot hope to roll out an effective content strategy.
4. Effective content is much more than words on a virtual page. Your content includes both the verbal and visual components and should reflect an understanding of how your target users will respond once they reach your website. This requires an understanding of information architecture and user interface design.  All of these elements must work in concert to deliver results.
5. You must have a clear assessment of what your target customers expect to find online when they are searching for answers to their problems. A relatively small number of companies are really clued in to their prospects’ online information needs. These may well be different from what they want at your retail location or when they call you on the phone.
6. Include all participants in the content creation process from the get go. This includes your key marketing folks, your content strategists, copywriters, designers, and, as appropriate, senior management.  When key decision-makers are left out of the process in the beginning, content problem-solving becomes extremely difficult as your launch approaches.
7. Determine what internal and external resources will be required to generate every element of the content that will become part of your online strategy. It’s not enough to determine what you need to provide. Just as important is determining who will be delivering all that content. Moreover, you need to establish a process workflow so that their contributions will show up just the way that you want them and exactly when you need them.
8. Define and deploy a repeatable process in order to maintain and expand your content. Although great ideas underlie great content, without effective process management you cannot hope to deliver consistent quality.  This is very much like a traditional publication which develops an annual editorial calendar and a carefully crafted workflow for each issue. Since you are now in the publishing business, you need to do exactly the same.
9. Design your content so that results are quantifiable and easy to measure. Amorphous marketing is out. Measurable marketing is in.  The nature of the web makes it pretty easy to measure almost every user activity on your website. To make that measurement meaningful, you need to determine what quantifiable results you need, how to deliver those results, and how to make changes when you results don’t match your objectives.  All of this needs to be built in from the beginning.
10. "Content strategy will be as hot as social media and 12 months," Kristina Halvorson.  Although I’m not sure that I’m totally on board with Kristina’s prediction, I am confident that she’s on the right conceptual track. Social media is the bright shiny new toy under the content marketing Christmas tree. Because it’s new and buzzworthy, lots of marketers think they need social media whether or not it’s appropriate. As content marketing replaces more and more traditional marketing, having an effective content strategy will rise to the top of the marketing concept food chain.  Social media isn’t going away. That said, it may well be, just another component of an effective high-level content strategy.

The bottom line: It’s hard to make things easy for your customers online. Without an effective content strategy, hard becomes impossible.

But, with an effective content strategy,it becomes much less hard to make things much more easy for your customers to trust you, to engage with you, and finally to buy from you. 

If you’re ready to start developing that strategy, run out and buy Kristina Halvorson’s practical, put-it-to-work book, Content Strategy for the Web.

Your website may be chock full of terrific content that is both relevant and compelling to your ideal target customers. But, you won’t have a chance to share that content unless you communicate  instantaneously that you provide the precise solutions they are desperately seeking.

Your visitors are the potential customers for whom you have developed your content.  But those visitors won’t root around in the hope of buried treasure. They have neither the time nor the inclination to guess whether you understand their needs and how you can help them.  That’s why you have to engage them them immediately on their arrival on your site.

First Impressions are Important in Person, But Life or Death on the Web

You may make a misstep when you meet someone if you are a bit slow off the mark,  lack an elevator speech or take a business fashion risk. You can often recover from that less than stellar first impression because your prospect will give you more than one second to communicate understanding and value before moving on to another solution provider. 

Unfortunately, you won’t get away with an imperfect first impression on the web. You have only that single second to communicate your relevance to your visitors verbally and visually . If you blow it, they’re racing off to your competition.

On the other hand, if you get it just right, they will almost certainly stay for another 5 seconds to better understand how you can help them. Even better, there is a darned good chance that they’ll hang out even longer to investigate how they can benefit in obvious ways from the information you provide.

Keeping your prospects on your site long enough–with just the right combination of verbal and visual content–enables you to earn their trust. Winning that trust is the essential first step in winning their business.

Want to know how you’re doing with first impressions on your website?

Gather an informal user group and ask them what your site says to them in one second…in five seconds…in two minutes. You may not like what you hear, but that feedback will put you on track to reshape your home page so that those same users grasp exactly the right message when you ask them back. 

I should confess that I just went through this very exercise with a preliminary web design for a good client. The feedback was painful, but it will enable us to reshape our verbal and visual components so that we communicate exactly what our prospects need to know.

Thanks to Kristina Halverson of Brain Traffic for the content pyramid concept (and for a host of other ideas from the Content Strategy Forum in Paris).  If she doesn’t have a fan club, I’d like to start one. She is sensational. Visit her site and buy her book.

Thanks to content marketing maven, Beth Hrusch of Interact Media for this great guest post.

Marketing your small business with Facebook sounds like a lot of fun and a great idea—until it hits you.  You really have no clue how to do it.  Sure you’ve heard of it, and people are certainly on board (some with remarkably good results).  But, getting started can be intimidating, maintenance is scary and how do you measure returns, anyway?

So, now you know how your parents felt when confronted with email.  Don’t worry.  One of the great things about social media for marketing is the fact that it gives small businesses some of the advantages once enjoyed by large corporations with big marketing budgets—namely, tremendous reach and measurable results.   And, you can play around with it until you find the way to use it that works best for you.  And it’s cheap.

If you want to start marketing your small business with Facebook, here are a few pointers:

Create your account

1. Start a business account by creating a Facebook Ad or Page.  A Facebook Page identifies your business, and you can opt for a description of your business type, your product or brand or your position.  Make sure to be accurate here, as this identification is how interested parties will find you.

A couple of things worth noting:  filling out your profile completely helps establish trust with people because it shows that you’re transparent and have nothing to hide.  The more open and honest you can be with your groups the better your results will be.  Also, read the Facebook rules for business accounts before going too far!  They can and will ban your account for certain violations.

2. Customize your settings.  Here, you can control who sees your profile and who can contact you.  You can block users, join networks, set up email and mobile phone notifications of everything from posts to your Wall to any time someone tags you in a photo.

3. Install applications.  Establish feeds whereby all of your groups and networks can see your latest blog posts and tweets (yes, you can integrate your Twitter activity into your Facebook page).  There are a lot of apps for Facebook that do a myriad of amazing things.  Facebook for iPhone 3.0, for example, lets you manage your account on the go with added features like integrated news feeds, Event RSVP and the ability to phone or text people directly from your Page.  A handy way to contact a client or update your page with new content for your customers while away from the office.  Post real-time notes and photos from your trade show or presentation as events are happening or get back to a client who contacts you through your account.

Share with others

When marketing with Facebook, the idea is to keep it fresh and updated with new content, photos, events, feeds and messages so that your network can use it to learn more about your business (see “maintenance is scary”, above).   A lot of companies have employees share the task of adding to the company Page, or designate one person as the social media administrator.  Whoever does it, it’s important to keep your presence on Facebook timely and relevant by posting information regularly.

Also, make it easy for people to check you out.  Try adding your Facebook URL to your email signature, business cards, or other company literature.  Upload email addresses to see who’s on Facebook so you can add them as friends.  Build your professional network using your common interests.

Networks, Fan Pages and groups

Joining a network or group brings you into contact with others who are either looking for your products and services or in the same or related fields.  Sharing resources and information with each other builds business relationships that often lead to sales.  It’s highly recommended that anyone marketing on Facebook join as many relevant groups and networks as possible, and engage with them regularly.

A Fan Page gives you a place to put all of your links, content, photos, company news and Events, so add to it so your fans and groups know what’s going on in your world.  Post some surveys, contests or quizzes every once in a while.  These are popular ways to engage fans and potential customers.

Getting measurable returns

For small business owners, Facebook offers a lot of tools that can help you expand your presence and increase brand awareness.  To see how your efforts are doing, start with Facebook Insights, a free service that analyzes metrics such as user actions, page exposure and behavior related to your Pages and Ads.  These analytics are one important piece of the puzzle when it comes to determining the growth of your pages.

Studying comments, quantity of new connections and how many times your brand is mentioned help you determine which conversations you should engage.  By putting all the pieces together, you can get a picture of how your social media efforts are affecting leads and sales.

Facebook is an economical marketing tool for companies of all sizes.  It allows small businesses, in particular, to take advantage of some very agile features in order to get the same results once reserved for companies with big marketing bucks.  Try it out and see what it can do for you!

Beth Hrusch is Senior Editor at Interact Media, a content marketing software company

If you’re not already a fan of the TV classic in the making, Mad Men, it’s all about the Madison Avenue ad agency world of the early 1960s. There was plenty of drinking, smoking, and carrying on. But, there was plenty of great, and surprisingly timeless, marketing taking place, too.

Most of you probably are not old enough to remember when housewives really did wear shirtwaist dresses to do housework, when color TV was just beginning to take hold, when JFK  had just promised a man on the moon, and when a lot of famous brands were invented or enhanced by the ad agency Mad Men in the title.  That may have been a long time ago, but we can still learn some timeless content marketing truths from one wonderful segment.

In a Mad Men segment about the creation of the Kodak Carousel the roots of content marketing shine through when lead character, Don Draper, makes it clear that building a brand is all about storytelling and engaging the consumer–and not about technology or the company itself.

Way back in the 1960s, Kodak dominated the photography world in ways that seem almost unimaginable today. Their technology was leading edge. How to make it relevant to consumers was the hard part.

The ad agency’s challenge was to launch a new slide projector that enabled customers to load a bunch of slides into a wheel so that they could create a long-running slideshow that ran seamlessly.

Don Draper, the top creative guy, launched his presentation by saying of the still unnamed product, "It’s not a wheel. It’s a carousel." He went on to say, "This device isn’t a space ship. It’s a time machine."

Don then painted a picture of precious family moments captured forever and relived again and again thanks to the wonderful Kodak Carousel "time machine."

What struck me about the Kodak segment was that Don’s approach to marketing a product was essentially timeless. Marketing is still all about telling stories that connect with your customers. Even though we now tell those stories on websites, blogs, and social media, our need to build a bond with the folks who buy our products remains the same.

The best of traditional marketing lives on in today as ‘content marketing.’ To boil it down to basics, here are the timeless marketing commandments that were true for Kodak in 1960 and for all of us today as we focus on delivering content that is relevant and compelling for our customers.

Your job as a content marketer then and now:

• B to B: Make your customers successful
• B to C: Make your customers’ lives better
• 1st understand, then be understood
• Listen, really listen to your customers
• Engage your customers in dialogue
• Encourage word of mouth

Of course, a critically important difference between 1960 and today is the new, affordable, and  powerful tools we can use to pursue all of those content marketing activities. Kodak really understands what content marketing is all about. We might have anticipated that to be true from their eager acceptance of the heartfelt, storytelling approach taken for the launch of the Carousel.

Kodak Has Made the 21st Century Marketing Transition Brilliantly

The Kodak Carousel lives on virtually in an iPhone application that permits all of the capture and sharing of memories that meant so much back in 1960 and still mean so much to us today in 2010.

Kodak understands its customers in 2010 on an emotional level just they did 50 years ago. They now participate enthusiastically in a full range of content marketing activities that revolve around storytelling. And, today, the storytelling comes just as much from customers as it does from Kodak. Here is what they have going online:

• a website that is rich in video and visuals
• multiple blogs
• multiple Facebook pages and games
• a very cool iPhone application
• a presence on Twitter

Content marketing: Important in 1960.  Essential in 2010.   Game changer for small companies.

Today, content is both essential and easy to do. Fortunately, even solopreneurs with micro-resources can be effective content marketers. Content marketing really does level the playing field with with larger–even much larger–competitors.

You may not be able to replicate everything online that Kodak is doing. But you can come pretty darned close. Absolutely every tool they use online is available to you free or inexpensively. In fact, you can’t afford not to implement a content marketing strategy. It’s working for Kodak and it will work for you.

Although our Southwest Florida region comprises mostly small businesses, we are blessed with a surprising number of savvy local experts on content marketing and social media. I was delighted to take part in a recent Collier Business Industry Association (CBIA) Sales and Marketing Council session with just such a group:

• Marc Meyer, Principle at Digital Response Marketing Group
• Jim Cossetta, cofounder of 4what.com
• Paul Mussina, President, Business Technology insight

Attendees from the building industry and related companies struggle with two simultaneous challenges:

• They are suffering from our a especially steep downturn in building that limits both people and dollar resources.
• They need to transform from traditional marketing methods to content marketing and social media.

Fortunately, there is a new generation of affordable tools and techniques that can make that transformation inexpensive—and with a bit of outside help—almost painless.

Here are some practical lessons on content marketing and social media that I’d like to share from the St. Patrick’s Day session.

Top 10 takeaways from my speaker colleagues

1. Social media in general and Twitter in particular are as much about listening as they are about broadcasting. To make this easy, use one of the powerful software tools available. Social media guru, Marc Meyer, suggested TweetDeck as his favorite.
2. Marc noted that you won’t succeed by spending all your time pimping your products and services.  That’s exactly the kind of unwanted spam that content marketers need to avoid.
3. Don’t bother to tweet unless you have something worthwhile to contribute to a set of Twitter followers who share your interests.
4. With Twitter and any social media effort you must allow enough time for results that will slowly build over time. Consistency is critical to your success, as Marc stressed.
5. According to Marc, you are not engaging with content marketing and social media for fun, even though it might be enjoyable. You’re doing it either to make money, to save money or to build equity.
6. "Become a news anchor for your business." That was Jim Cossetta’s advice for thinking about how to use video effectively for content marketing.  In other words, put yourself out front as the most effective spokesperson to explain how your company can benefit its customers by leading them to your site with an introductory video tour.
7. Take advantage of incredibly inexpensive technology like the Sony flip cam to create your own television studio.
8. Consider using video in tandem with your promotional e-mails to create a ‘wow factor.’ He used the example of local contractor, Statewide Painting and their recent email effort which allowed video to tell the story.
9. Make an RFP much less boring by integrating video to demonstrate exactly how you can meet the requirements of the RFP and help your prospect achieve its objectives with your assistance. In effect, you are able to give an in person visual presentation without actually being there.
10. For those of us, who are still using spreadsheets or antiquated content management tools for customer relationship management (CRM), it’s time to step up our game by investing in affordable products that can improve sales results dramatically, according to Paul Messino.

Summing up:

It’s time to implement content marketing and social media as core components in your business strategy. But, there are now plenty of tools and techniques that make it pretty darned easy and inexpensive.

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.

This approach also enables the sender to track activities driven from that landing page precisely because it is attached to a unique individual.

According to Blase, here’s why this approach is so valuable:

“PURLs represent the future of direct mail marketing.  For those already using direct mail successfully, PURLs are very likely increase the response rate.  For anyone who’s avoided direct mail because of the difficulty in measuring response rate, then PURLs are the ideal way to leverage direct mail and have an accurate understanding of response.”

If you are still wondering how you might use this approach, Blase provides the example of a university prospecting for its new Freshman class:

A local college sends out a targeted direct mail campaign to attract rising high school seniors to apply.  Interested students enter their personal URL from the mail piece, and are welcomed by name to their custom landing page.  A very brief survey that’s on the landing page asks the students to select from a list of possible degrees or majors, and then asks for their preferred method of contact while collecting this additional contact info (cell phone @, e-mail address, etc.).

Direct marketing lives on. It fits well within our content marketing universe when the messages we send and the PURLs to which we send our prospects accurately reflect our understanding of their individuality.

You can learn much more about how to put PURLs to work by checking out what Blase has to say at TheDirectMailMan