Content Marketing Today

Proving again that our readers like to dig into a variety of topics under the broad content marketing umbrella.

While you’re enjoying the beach or a barbecue this 4th of July weekend, take a few minutes to ponder how effective content marketing can make you independent of the old-fashioned way of doing things.

Here’s the tasty topics menu from which to choose:

• how to create effective elevator speech to drive your content marketing
• using content marketing to survive the recession
• low cost research as killer weapon
• making an eBook a core component of your content marketing strategy
• become your customers’ online content concierge
• why your blog is your most important social media tool

Read on to see the 6 most popular articles that your fellow content marketers voted for with their visits.

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When your customers have an important need, they need to know the kind of company you are and why they can trust you

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to a combined group of wedding planners from Southwest Florida, the Wedding and Party Planners of Naples and the local National Association of Wedding Planners chapter. 

As I was preparing for the talk, the importance of content marketing in general--and of blogging in particular--really hit home.

Because a wedding is so important in so many ways to women of every age and circumstance, each bride needs to feel absolutely confident that it will come off as perfectly as humanly possible.

The current Sprint commercial that imagines a world in which weddings are run by movie crews captures this feeling beautifully.

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How To Put the Brakes on Their Five Major Marketing Mistakes

[Please note that I have made a few changes to the initial post based on constructive feedback, particularly to clarify that this is a dealer enewsletter,not a BMW corporate effort ] If you were to imagine an eNewsletter from your local BMW dealer, you would probably expect it to lead off with a picture something like the one to the right. As a BMW owner, you tend to be a certain kind of person.  The folks at BMW have understood your persona well over decades in the United States.  That's why I'm mystified at the June 2009 eNewsletter from Germain BMW of Naples. I love my BMW.  I think Germain BMW is a terrific dealership. But, I hate their eNewsletter. Why? Because it has almost nothing to do with the BMW brand promise: BMW—The Ultimate Driving Machine. Call me crazy but when I get an eNewsletter that has something to do with BMW, I expect that it would deliver on that ‘ultimate driving machine’ brand promise.  Instead here's what the eNewsletter delivers by way of core content after stripping away the header and some dealer specific webpage links: Read More

Thanks to my co-author, Joe Pulizzi, and some helpful contributors for making your search for the right implements a lot easier.

If you are starting from scratch, it's almost impossible to figure out what social media and other related online tools will be genuinely useful for marketing your business.  Fortunately, Joe has taken the time to assemble and comment on 42 of the most worthy in his blog.

You'll find that a common thread among many of the 42 is that they involve both inbound and/or outbound communication. In other words, they will help you send a message to your target buyers or listen to what those buyers are saying about you.

My five favorites of the less well known among the 42 that Joe highlights are:

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When You Deliver Great Content and Control a Critical Buyer Database You Drive Sales

Although they are in the advertising business, small publishing companies have never done much advertising for their magazines. The reasons were simple, but not necessarily obvious: They didn’t have to—and it wouldn’t work if they tried it.

By emulating the best practices of small publishing companies, you can minimize traditional marketing costs, too. Believe it or not, it all comes back to content marketing. 

Why publishers can market effectively without advertising

Here is how publishers increase the likelihood that influential buyers will purchase advertising from them.  It couldn’t be simpler. Simply create an outstanding magazine filled with world-class content that provides thought leadership for their publication within their carefully targeted market.  Not only will  their subscribers value what they do, but their potential advertisers will value them just as much. 

Unfortunately, current business realities are bringing even the best publishers to grief.  But, that means you are even better positioned to benefit from effective content marketing.  

Here’s what to emulate:

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Build Your Brand and Your Business by Using Local Radio to Drive Prospects to Your Blog

The key to a powerful online presence is great content that targets your best buyers.  Over time, as you increase the critical mass of relevant and compelling content, you will attract increasing levels of traffic.  This is the essence of content marketing strategy.  But, you can do more without breaking the bank by extending and enhancing your online persona with carefully crafted radio commercials.

Although traditional media is facing enormous challenges, smart media companies will certainly survive. I became even more convinced of this following my recent visit to Roanoke Virginia where I spent some quality time with the Mel Wheeler, Inc. radio folks and quite a few of their customers and prospects. 

Wheeler, and especially my host, Lynda Foster, work closely with clients to help them succeed by teaching them how to do a better job of marketing.  This may not always result in immediate radio advertising dollars, but it does strengthen the local businesses and the business community. I am certain that it will ultimately bond dozens and dozens of local advertisers to Wheeler's Southwest Virginia radio stations as we work our way out of the recession.  This is great content marketing by Lynda and her colleagues.

Accelerating the impact of content marketing with smart radio strategies

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It's all about asking the right kinds of questions of your ideal target buyers

Most of us don't trust our doctors because they have a lot of diplomas on the wall.  Of course, we sure hope they graduated from medical school, did an internship, and completed a residency.  All  that is necessary not sufficient.

We really trust them because they care enough to ask us just the right kinds of diagnostic questions that will help them uncover what ails us.

We also know that the best questions to really tough medical problems are most likely to come from those doctors who specialize in the specific area of medicine that relates to our current malady.

Our job as marketers is very much the same.

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It’s much more powerful than those young whippersnappers--Twitter and Facebook

We often talk about the need to develop a content marketing mindset. This requires companies to think like publishers.  And that sounds an awful lot like social media as Wikipedia defines it:

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers.

Your blog is your secret social media weapon

Thanks to free or inexpensive blogging tools, any individual can be on the same technological footing as the New York Times or Business Week.  That may seem relatively obvious to many of you.  What I think is less obvious is that your blog is every bit as much a social media tool as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.  In fact, I believe that a blog is the most important social media weapon in your arsenal.

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Jump Start Your Online Public Relations for Free

They call it public relations for a reason.  Although PR methodology has focused primarily on getting the traditional media to write about your company or your client’s company, the goal has always been to influence ‘the public', that is those members of the population that you want to impact positively.

Thanks to the infinite reach of the Internet, you have the capability to extend that influence dramatically.  But, you need to change your approach and your toolkit as part of a 21st century PR strategy.

If your primary public relations strategy still amounts to sending press releases to a finite number of media contacts, you fail to take advantage of the Internet.  You are not reaching the new influencers, to use Paul Gillen’s term.

You need to do do more than reach those influencers. You need to take advantage of the emerging power of social media by creating a new kind of release to reach a much broader audience.  We have written previously about Shift Communications’ template that offers a useful template on which to create your news content: Social Media Release Template Makes It Easier to Get Social.

Now, another powerful tool has emerged: PitchEngine, which lets you create and share social media releases for free.

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If you don't get good answers, keep looking.

If you are a big corporation, you may have plenty of in-house talent or can afford to spend a lot of money to outsource the rebuilding of your website.  Even if you are a small organization with a limited budget,  there are lengthy of technically and graphically talented folks who would love to work with you. Even so, you may not get what you need: A website chock-full of relevant and compelling content.

Before you choose the organization based on their technical competence or creative genius, be sure to ask of these five questions because, in the end, it's all about your content:

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