Written by Geoffrey James.

With inbound marketing, the customer comes to you, but you still have to move the opportunity forward.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of “inbound marketing”–the concept that you should attract prospective customers by offering useful (on a website, for instance).

Inbound marketing is contrasted with outbound (or traditional) marketing, in which you “buy, beg, or bug your way in” via paid advertisements, press releases, and cold calling.

While inbound marketing can be more effective than outbound marketing, most companies implement it in a way that it doesn’t work well.

The biggest issue: bad timing.

See full article on www.inc.com

Rethink Your Content Marketing by Aiming at Billions of Buyers on the Move

For those of us who been around computing since the early days of PCs, the consumer move to mobile devices and away from desktop and even laptop computers is astonishing–and maybe a little terrifying.

Smartphones Soar

First, smartphones such as the Blackberry, Nokia, and iPhone entered the picture. But, as recently as 2007 total smartphone sales were only 122 million. Alex Cocotas of BI Intelligence predicts that annual smartphone sales will hit 1.5 billion units by 2016. That’s 10X growth in less than 10 years.

Tablets Triumph

In the first year of its existence, 1981, the IBM PC sold 100,000 units. Most of those buyers were geeks or leading-edge business users. Apple’s new iPad sold 3 million units in its first weekend and more than 50 million units since the introduction of the first iPad just 2 years ago.

As Tim Bajarin reported in Techland.Time.com in April of 2012:

While the iPod and even the iPhone have been groundbreaking in their own right, it is perhaps Apple’s iPad tablet that may have the most profound impact on the world of personal computing since it is the first computer that is truly portable and easy to carry with you everywhere you go. Yes, the iPhone and smartphones are more portable, but because of their small screens, their computing capabilities are limited. But with their larger screens, the iPad and similar tablets deliver much of the power of a laptop (minus the keyboard) and almost as much flexibility as you can get from bigger portable computers — but in a much smaller package.

IPad users still include geeks and business types but they’re just as likely to include your six-year-old and your grandmother. When I visited our local Apple store, the average customer was a senior citizen who really wanted to learn how to use their iPad effectively. Of course, they all seemed to be carrying iPhones, too. You can bet that their mobile devices will soon–or may already have displaced their PCs.

Social Media Goes Mobile

In research released April 13, 2012, eMarketer predicted a massive shift to mobile devices:

… by 2014, 33.3% of the U.S. population will visit social networking sites using their mobile phones at least once per month. That’s up from 18.7% at the end of 2011. Most of those visits are expected to go to Facebook. In fact, eMarketer estimates that the number of mobile Facebook users in the U.S. will jump from 49.4 million at the end of 2011 to 93.9 million in 2014… In other words, not only will people consume more content via mobile devices in the coming years, but they’ll find much of that content through mobile social networking activities.

IPad and Its Mobile Cousins to the Information Rescue

The iPad, iPhone and their competitive cousins are what we really want from our information devices. They turn on immediately. They’re super responsive. They connect easily to the Internet. They are both powerful and portable. And, perhaps best of all, they don’t rely on a resource hog of an operating system that hangs up when you most need it.

For those of us who do a lot of writing, building complex spreadsheets or other very sophisticated applications, we will probably have to hang on to our desktop or laptop computers. But for many of you and, most importantly, for many of your customers, the use of computing devices is primarily:

• to connect and communicate wherever we are whenever we want
• to consume information via the Internet, including e-mail, news, web-based content
• to get our social media fix
• to consume locally based information from word processing documents, spreadsheets, PDF files, etc.
• to write a e-mail or text messages
• to listen to music, watch videos, watch TV or movies
• to play games
• to research purchases.
• to shop online
• to pick a local retailer so we can buy right now.

We can do all of that with an increasingly rich and robust set of mobile computing devices that include not only the iPad, the Kindle Fire, Android tablets but the iPhone, Blackberry, Android smartphones.

That means that just when you thought it was safe to go back into the content marketing water, you will have to do substantial rethinking. But I think it’s more a matter of adjustment than a dramatic change in your approach to your customers.

How to Take Advantage of This Content Marketing Mobile Inflection Point

You are almost certainly using the Internet as a primary content marketing weapon.  And, it is probably delivering significant a better results than many of your traditional advertising and marketing practices. Now, begin to think slightly differently as your customers go mobile for much of the information they consume.

• Make sure that your website is fully readable on the most important mobile devices which would include the iPhone, the Android, and the iPad. That may mean giving up Flash. At a minimum, it’s critical that any flash on your website takes a secondary rather than a primary role on your home and on your landing pages.
• Consider working with a developer to create an iPhone or an iPad app that will take advantage of the unique capabilities of these two pervasive computing devices.  In particular, think about how the touchscreen might improve your users interaction with your content.
• Get social with Facebook, Twitter or other applications that can reach out to your customers with special offers while they’re on the move and in a buying mood.  
• Provide special offers, coupons, or dedicated discounts that mobile users can bring with them directly on their smart phone or iPad.  Don’t make them print something out if they can to show it to you on their mobile device.

We are at the beginning of a fundamental transformation in the way that we all consume information. Our customers and their computers are on the move as never before.  Just as you may have tried to reach traveling prospects with billboard ads on the highway, now it’s time to make sure that you’re connecting with them on the virtual highway.

The good news is that, unlike driving a Corvette on Route 66, your prospects can slow down to pay attention to what you have to say. Just make sure that the new mobile information you’re providing is still relevant and compelling as all good content marketing must be.

Content Marketing is about the most effective way to harness content’s ubiquity and power. Individual pieces of content work to attract and engage web users, but when the pieces are combined, the effect can be dramatic.

Just as gold must be sourced, mined, processed, shaped and hallmarked to become desirable pieces, so too must high-quality content.

Search-optimised articles, blogs and social media posts can combine to produce a dazzling effect on brand awareness, customer engagement and SEO. But time, care and expertise are needed to ensure your content is solid gold, and not simply gold plated.

The NewsReach infographic explores the processes involved in creating quality content and supports our latest White Paper – The True Value of Content Marketing – which will be released in the coming days.

Read the NewsReach blog to learn more about their infographic.

See on www.newsreach.co.uk

Amanda Maksymiw of OpenView Venture Partners shares her inspiration and advice on content marketing.

In 2009, the Boston-based venture capital firm OpenView Venture Partners was not satisfied with its branding. Rather than hiring a marketing firm, OpenView founder Scott Maxwell found his solution in a book called Get Content Get Customers.(co-authored by Newt Barrett) 

He was so inspired by the potential of content marketing, he brought in co-author Joe Pulizzi to lead a workshop, which in turn sparked OpenView’s marketing and content strategist Amanda Maksymiw to use content as a means of establishing the firm as a thought leader and build a solid brand.

Since launching OpenView Labs—the company’s content hub, featuring blogs, a podcast, videos, and more—website visits have increased by 600 percent. Newsletter subscriptions have risen from 200 to 11,000. And on March 16, OpenView was heralded as a Top 10 VC Brand by Heardable.

Maksymiw, who helps support a content creation team of 25 staff writers and a dozen freelance contributors, recently took some time to talk with us about her favorite tools, the importance of sticking with your core mission, dodging bandwagons, and more.

Via marketeer.kapost.com

Written by Brianne Carlon

A good goal for headlines is to evoke emotion in some way. Whether it is amusement, curiosity, joy or sorrow, intriguing a reader is the biggest responsibility of a headline. And there have been some good ones over the past few years:

• “No Happy Ending” from Daily News when Brett Favre got himself in trouble with a former Jet’s masseuses
• “Battle of the Bulge: Weiner Exposed” and a slew of others when the Anthony Weiner scandal erupted
• “Linsanity!” after Jeremy Lin came out of nowhere to lead the New York Knicks to several straight wins

Admittedly, these are amazing headlines. They are clever, intriguing, and evoking: Shame. Humor. Inspiration. These headlines get the job done.
So what’s the problem? Well unfortunately, this only works for print.

For the rest of the story go right to Kuno Creative

Home pages. If you have a website, you have one of these bad boys.

And no matter whether you’re selling real estate or racoon prevention (that’s really the entire spectrum there, right?) there are certain things that your home page MUST do if you hope to sell your product or service.

Let’s break it down.

The 6 Things Your Home Page Must Do

• Needs to speak the users language
• Needs to communicate who the customer is
• Needs to communicate the core benefits
• Needs to show passion for the product
• Needs to build trust
• Needs to push user into the sales funnel

Via abetteruserexperience.com

Written by Amber Mac, Fast Company.

When I interviewed entrepreneur and author Guy Kawasaki recently, I chatted with him at great lengths about his Twitter publishing habits.

Take a look at his feed, and every few minutes you’ll see a new post, from why videos go viral to Playboy’s plans for a strip club.With so much tweeting, I asked him if he lost followers. In true Guy style, he admitted that yes, he had lost followers–but not nearly as many as he gained.Incidentally, in the time I wrote this post, Guy Kawasaki tweeted five times and gained 41 new followers, debunking the theory that too many tweets is bad for your presence.

Via www.fastcompany.com

By Matthew Turner (@Turndog_million)

Growing up I was under the impression writers were artists… usually alcoholics, people teeming with personal issues, and eccentric as hell. These people wrote, sent out their work, got published, and sat back watching the royalties pour in.

Now, this was probably naïve of me, but for all I know this was true. What I can be sure of it’s no longer the case. Writers are still artists, and they may still be drunks, eccentric, and teeming with personal issues. However, they’re also marketers, and designers, and personal speakers, and coaches, and just about everything else you could possibly think of.

I’m a strategic marketer by trade and as such I look at the world a little differently to most. I see Brands in people, companies, books, songs, and even towns I visit. First impressions are one of, if not the most important thing, and how you layout your Brand is what really counts.

I’m not sure I know much in life, but one thing I’m sure of is that writers need to think about the bigger picture.

What is your Brand?

Who are you?

What makes you stand out?

How do people perceive you?

We all say we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but we do. I’m sure Joel knows this better than most as he lives his life around designing covers for all kinds of people. It doesn’t matter what you go to market with, be it a book or a can of soup, how you portray your Brand is vital…

Via www.thebookdesigner.com

A lot of great marketers make lousy social media marketers.

Most of the time they don’t even know how bad they are at it, probably because they’ve been so successful in some other kind of marketing (advertising, PR, CRM… something).

I’ve seen this in various forms since we opened Ignite Social Media in 2007. Don’t get me wrong, we have great clients and they typically “get it.” But it’s recently become clear to me that the people I come across that don’t get it often miss two fundamental points.

• Specifically: Social media marketing doesn’t work unless people share
• People share content for specific reasons, most of which have to do with how it makes them feel about themselves.

Let’s examine these in turn.
Via www.ignitesocialmedia.com

Naming a company or a product used to involve a number of factors—none of which related to SEO considerations. But no longer. “It doesn’t matter whether your brand is online or not, “[I]t will be googled, ” says Ann Smarty in an article at MarketingProfs.
“So, before you choose your brand name, you should understand … three major facts about how Google rates and ranks personal and business names,” she advises.

Here are the big three:Some search results are ‘obvious.’ Google interprets queries in one of three ways: dominant, common, and minor interpretations. Type “Apple” into the search box and you’ll quickly learn about dominant interpretations. Most people want information about the computer company, and your “Apple Vacations” agency stands zero chance of getting onto the first page of results.

“You don’t want to start a business to later find out there’s no way to rank in the top 10 results for your own business name,” Smarty notes.

Read more: Via www.marketingprofs.com