Content Marketing Today

Unless You Address This Top of Mind, Unspoken Question, You are Out of the Game

Imagine for a moment, that you are looking out at a hoard of your customers in an actual or virtual audience and that each and every one of them is wearing a hat.

And, on each and every hat, are the words "so what?"

Essentially, that's what they're thinking when you are talking, sending them an e-mail, inviting them to your website, sharing an eNewsletter, mailing them a brochure or presenting them with an advertisement.

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Your Content Marketing Must Make It Easy for Your Customers to Understand How You Benefit Them

You may not love Apple or Steve Jobs or their groundbreaking series of  iPhones first launched in 2007 Conversely, you may love much of what Microsoft has brought us in terms of operating systems and office productivity applications.

But, it’s hard not to love the way Steve Jobs keeps it simple and compelling as he introduced the iPhone 4 at their Worldwide Developer Conference in June 2010.  And, it’s hard to find much to love about Steve Ballmer’s own recent presentation on their upcoming smartphone strategy.

So, when you present information, I recommend emulating the Jobs’ simple and graphical approach: Few words and powerful images.

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A New Edition of the Timeless Book, Presenting to Win, Explores the Content Marketing Component of In-Person Persuasion.

Whatever audience you must persuade, you need to engage them with compelling content in the form of stories. That’s easy to say, but hard to do.

As Jerry Weissman, author of Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, puts it, "The problem is that no one knows how to tell a story and no one knows that they don't know how to tell a story."  Fortunately, you’ll come away from reading this book armed with the necessary tools to tell those all-important stories brilliantly.

Presenting to Win, in its new expanded edition, teaches you to communicate with a purpose--whether you are convincing employees of the need to change, persuading prospects that you have the best solution to a problem or leading skeptical community groups to support your cause.

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Nick Morgan's great book, Give Your Speech, Change the World, not only teaches what it takes to become a great speaker. His lessons apply equally to effective content marketing.

Poor presenters and mediocre marketers share certain traits.

• They cannot explain concisely why their audience should care about the information and services they provide.
• They lack focus.
• They do not understand their audience.
• They are more focused on themselves then on their audience.
• They fail to engage in dialogue with their audience.
• They don't urge their audience at the end of their presentation to take specific next-step actions.

It might seem obvious that speakers who exhibit the traits above would do poorly and probably bore their listeners to tears.  But, as marketers, we too often exhibit the same bad behaviors.

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It is so hard, but so important to explain what it is that you do and how it will benefit the person to whom you are communicating. Not at length.  But so concisely that it can be communicated in less time than it takes an elevator to go up a few floors. And, so compellingly that your listener will remember and repeat it to others. Actually, Nick Morgan is even more precise than this.  He says your elevator speech must be a single sentence. I have just begun to read his wonderful book, Give Your Speech, Change the World. It is absolutely must reading, even if the only speeches you give are internal presentations within your organization. Nick is the founder of Public Words, a communications coaching company. So he gives speeches--and teaches people how to give speeches--for a living. It's obvious from reading his book that he is a very, very good at it. Listen to what he has to say about that all-important elevator speech. Read More

London Times editor delivers online slide show to put you on the right track

Tom Whitwell's headline "How to Write Awesome Headlines" might be better than mine.  However, they both have something critical in common: Each tells you exactly why you should read the article that follows.

How important is a great headline versus a poor headline? 

According to Tom, it's not a few percent, it can mean 10 to 20 times greater readership.  That's why paying careful attention to your headlines is vital.  They are the single most important element of your online articles.

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Transform In-Person Content Marketing into Online Content Marketing

If you are selling complex products and services, text and images may not take your visitors where you want them to go.  That's why so many companies are providing video presentations on their websites.  These tools do a great job of walking your prospective customers through lots of information in a logical and compelling way.

Adding videos can be very effective, but they may be time-consuming and often expensive to produce professionally.  This is especially true if your organization is very small.

There is a great free alterative approach.  Be visual without video. Simply repurpose a great sales presentation that you would normally give in person into a self-guide online sales tool. You can make this happen with a combination of Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Docs.  And, if you don't have PowerPoint, you can use the Google Docs Presentation software.  There is almost no learning curve for you--and none at all for your visitors.

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Love 'em or Hate 'em, You Can't Forget 'em. “Where’s the beef?” “So easy even a caveman could do it.” What is it about these phrases and accompanying images from Wendy’s and Geico commercials that make them so memorable? In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip and Dan Heath explain brilliantly why such “sticky” [...] Read More