Content Marketing Today

Lynda McNutt Foster Delivers with Her Weekly Launch List

 

Lynda  overflows with brains, enthusiasm, creativity, and fun.

So, I wasn't surprised to find her new weekly newsletter unique in its approach to its recipients. The 'Launch List' is a quick read that delivers much-needed Monday morning inspiration. Although it reflects Linda's positive personality, it's not all about her. It's all about her customers, colleagues, and friends. Read More

It’s All About Making It Easier for the Customer to Buy

OK, I’ll admit it. I not the primary grocery shopper in the family. But, I’m always happy to hop over to Publix, Fresh Market, Whole Foods or SweetBay to buy stuff.  Since I’m not a grocery aisle guru, it usually takes me way too much time to find the items I have been entrusted to buy and bring home.    Occasionally, that makes me a little cranky.

SweetBay Shopping Carts Saved My Day

But,  Sweetbay has achieved the equivalent of a user-friendly e-commerce interface with its shopping cart. In a move that is as brilliant as it is inexpensive to design and deploy, they have equipped each shopping cart with a sheet that lists major grocery items alphabetically and shows the aisle in which they can be found.

At Sweetbay I was looking for coffee. Because my shopping cart helpfully listed coffee in aisle 6, I found it within 30 seconds rather than the 5 minutes of aimless wandering it would usually take.

The genius of the Sweetbay shopping cart content marketing strategy contrasted with my Publix experience.
While there, I went through the frustrating aisle-wandering exercise to find when I needed. Publix is an excellent supermarket. But, they sure made it much harder for me to buy what I needed to buy.

If a supermarket were a website, I would've been off like a shot from Publix to Sweetbay, knowing that they would take me by the hand to find exactly what I needed in a minimum of time.

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We Got Coverage and Kudos from David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan, and All Top

Yesterday, we discussed how Sasha Baron: successfully newsjacked the Oscars with his successful Red Carpet stunt. Posing as the Dictator, he spilled the alleged ashes of the late North Korean dictator Kim ill Jung on  Ryan Seacrest.   Although we loved the stunt for its own sake, we also hoped that we might pull off a bit of newsjacking ourselves. And, it worked, albeit on a more modest scale.

Because it was a hot Hollywood story, the Red Carpet stunt got all kinds of attention on TV, online, and in print--with lots of YouTube coverage.   So, I decided to see if we could inject ourselves however modestly into that same story.

Grab a hot story that conveys a key concept to maximize  the reach of your important message

If I had been writing a basic, just the facts, ma'am, story that described what newsjacking was and why it might be useful for public relations and marketing professionals,  I doubt that much would've happened. Regular readers of our blog would have benefited. But, I probably would not have generated much attention or additional readership.

Because I was able to inject a real-time element  into our story that incorporated both a hot concept--news jacking--as well as a hot event--the Oscars, we achieved a level of visibility that would've been otherwise impossible.  Read More

Sasha Baron Cohen Grabs the Spotlight with Only a Beard, a Uniform, 2 Pretty 'Security Guards', and the 'Ashes' of Kim Il Jung.

Every year the American Academy Awards attracts tens of millions of viewers, no matter how boring the 3+ hour television event might be.  In 2012, the ceremony itself may have been even more irrelevant than usual, featuring movies that hardly anybody saw and hosted by an aging Billy Crystal most of whose jokes were as creaky as the ceremony itself.

But, never mind, because the real story of the  Oscars in 2012 was the brilliant Newsjacking of the event by Sasha Baron Cohen who grabbed zillions of dollars of free publicity for his upcoming movie, The Dictator (which will never win an Oscar, but who cares?).

Comic Genius Becomes PR Genius, Too

Cohen displayed not just comic genius, but PR genius well. He may not have read David Meerman Scott's great book, Newsjacking, but he could well have been a case study. The basic concept is that, in these days of 24-hour news cycles and real-time public relations, marketing pros can  newsjack an event  by finding a way to do something that is highly newsworthy and is somehow connected to that event. Read More

Just two years after the launch of Social Media Examiner, founder Michael Stelzner has plenty to be proud of. He runs one of the world’s top business blogs, with an email list of more than 124,000 and growing, plus over 450,000 visitors per day. He also recently published his latest book, Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition, that details his strategy for developing new business initiatives. Read More

  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.

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A Compelling  and Affordable Video Did the Trick

Normally in Hollywood, when you're trying to get someone to join the cast of a picture, it involves actors and their agents, directors, studios, sending scripts back and forth, and lots of other rigmarole.

When you're trying to attract a big star like Amy Adams, at best, this process is inefficient. At worst, it is completely ineffective.

The producer of the new Muppets movie, Jason Segel, decided to use content marketing to appeal to Amy Adams, who had lately been appearing in pretty serious dramas such as, The Fighter. Although he probably had no idea that his approach involved content marketing, his perfectly targeted video illustrates all the best of what content marketing can be—and can accomplish.

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Sure They’re on the Web, But They’re Also Out and About on the Streets of Naples, Florida

Imagine my surprise when I pulled up behind this small van on a Naples street.

I started to get hungry just looking at the back of the van. This is mobile marketing that quite literally whets my appetite.

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Solopreneur Firm Understands How to Engage, Educate, and Entertain

There are dozens of electrical firms in Southwest Florida. Many of them have lots of employees. But, one of those firms stands out on Facebook: Martin McMurtrie's Grace Electric with 601 Facebook friends.

Making Vivid Visual Points to Engage Facebook Fans

This photograph from his Facebook page shows the kind of scary electrical fixes customers often attempt , sometimes with disastrous results. It typifies the kind of engaging content he provides regularly and that has enabled him to accumulate those hundreds of Facebook friends.

By contrast, the only local competitors I could find on Facebook provided very little useful information and managed to accumulate fewer than 10 Facebook friends.

For example, one well-known national franchise with numerous Florida locations manages a Facebook page for its Southwest Florida franchisee. But, it has only 9 fans. And, the only content on its Wall is spam from a provider of Acai berry services. 

Grace Electric: Lots of Real Content from a Real Person

Martin proves that you don't need an MBA from Harvard to create an effective presence on Facebook. What comes through on the Grace Electric Facebook page is Martin's natural friendliness and sense of humor, as well as his obvious knowledge of his profession.

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George Bowers Grocery Makes a  Fun 1 to 1 Connection That's Impossible for the Big Chain to Match

The right niche and the right approach enable a two-person company to outshine a retailing giant on Facebook. That's true of George Bowers Grocery in Staunton Virginia where owners Katie McCaskey and Brian Weidman have created a delightful grocery store that focuses on high-quality foods and other specialty products.

The couple knew they could not compete head-to-head with the local Kroger supermarket in their community. Instead they have captured the spirit of the original 19th-century owner as a provider of "staple goods & fancy groceries."

They offer wonderful local meats, cheeses, wines, and craft beers as well as a variety of specialty items. They target the diverse mix of neighborhood residents, local food enthusiasts, and culinary tourists each with their own distinctive interests and needs. The atmosphere of the store itself is an eclectic blend of the old-fashioned and the modern.

And, they have a lot of fun with their marketing, in person and online.

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