Content Marketing Today

Pay  Careful Attention to the Upper Right hand Corner of Google Search Results

If you have recently checked your category's Google search results, you may well have been as surprised as was when I recently checked  our first page placement in the  'content marketing'  topic.

In weeks and months past, text ads would have appeared in the upper right-hand corner. Those ads still appear, but they have been bumped down by a gigantic Google+ area that features 2 content marketing gurus,  Joe Pulizzi and Brian Clark.

Interestingly, the Google+ content has exactly the same prominence as the major sponsored search results that appear above the organic search results. I cannot imagine that advertisers are overly pleased by that. 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

  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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Tens of Thousands of Disappointed Users Expected Much More from Jeff Bezos and His Crew

As many content marketing thought leaders have pointed out, Amazon is a superb content marketer. When it comes to books, for example, the content they provide increasingly replicates and replaces the individual attention that independent stores have provided for hundreds of years. Amazon learns what you like, makes great suggestions, invite you to participate in evaluating books, music, videos, and tons of other products.

Although they were not the first to deliver an e-reader, the Kindle quickly came to dominate the e-book marketplace. Moreover, Amazon was brilliant to enable Kindle functionality on your PC, on iPad, on an iPhone on a Android phone, and pretty much anywhere you are likely to consume books.

So, naturally, those of us who are genuine Amazon fans expected much more From the hugely hyped Kindle Fire.

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Content Marketers Can Deliver Great Information Products to a Targeted Customer Base

Fortune 500 companies have long had the technological resources and investment capital required to build sophisticated content marketing solutions—and to manage huge amounts of demographic data relating to their prospects and customer bases. Many of these firms, such as Best Buy, Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft, and Amazon.com, probably know more about us than some of our relatives do. They also do a terrific job of delivering relevant and compelling content to different segments of their prospect bases.

Smaller companies, however, have had to rely on media companies to deliver their message to their targeted buyers . This has certainly been true with print publications and, until  recently, online as well. Affordable technology is now changing all of the rules.

Just a few years ago, it would have been laughable to imagine that a very small organization could create and maintain a Web site that could be updated daily—and that would allow visitors to interact and even buy products and services. Today, this is not only possible but pervasive. In fact, a 10-person company may be able to outmarket a 10,000-person company in a carefully chosen niche.

There are four core components underlying the shift in the technological balance of power away from media giants and toward companies of all sizes:

• The ability to create sophisticated online publications such as Web sites, digital magazines, and e-newsletters
• The ability to manage huge amounts of data relating to current and future customers
• The ability to leverage social media to engage targeted customers
• The ability to do each of these simply and inexpensively

 

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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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Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet will dramatically accelerate the move to e-books

The shift from print business-to-business books to digital versions, whether Kindle, Nook or iBook has been nothing short of astonishing.

Symptomatic of the change is the increasing amount of floor space that Barnes & Noble is devoting to its Nook e-readers. In our Naples store, the Nook retail area takes up almost a quarter of the ground floor book related space, excluding the café and the music section.

Apple's iPad, as the pioneer in the tablet space, has captured the vast majority of the tablet market so far. But, its price point at $500 and up makes it a bit expensive for what may be a secondary computing device for most people.

Nonetheless, more and more business book readers are using the iPad not just as an e-reader, but as a comprehensive content consumption and creation device. Although, a tablet like the iPad is limited in terms of its virtual keyboard, for example, many of us business users have found extraordinary productivity applications in addition to standard e-mail and calendaring.

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Kathy Saenz of Neighborhood America Shares What It Takes to Make Video an Effective Content Marketing Tool

Even a micro business can use video effectively to communicate with its customers online. But, as we amateur carpenters know, you can wind up with a mess instead of a masterpiece unless you understand how to use a potentially powerful tool well.   In that spirit we’re happy to can share with you six terrific tips for using video successfully from talented Southwest Florida professional, Kathy Saenz. We recently caught up with Kathy, who is Neighborhood America's corporate communications manager, for a brief interview on the best ways to communicate with video. Kathy's unique background as a university trained former TV producer and reporter taught her what it takes to tell great stories in our short attention span world.  She has been able to help Neighborhood America add  video communications to their core marketing capabilities. When it comes to using video effectively, Kathy and her company really get it.

Here Are Kathy's 6 Secrets to Video Success for Small Business:

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Inspiration from ‘Visual Blogger’ Mark Smiciklas of Intersection Marketing

It's hard to make things easy. And, it's even harder to be amusing at the same time.

But the very best visuals take a complex idea or series of connected ideas and make them instantly understandable. Just the right visuals make those ideas even more memorable when they are funny as well. In the case of the Intersection Marketing blog from Mark Smiciklas, he manages to do both consistently. Read More

How to go from clueless to compelling to transform prospects into buyers

In 2007, the mention of content marketing brought as many blank stares from small business owners as the mention of a website did 10 years before. In fact, in 1997 when we started our small business magazine in Southwest Florida, few owners had websites, let alone an online marketing strategy. In 2009, most small businesses do have websites and the term, ‘content marketing,' has gone from obscure to fashionable. When I say fashionable, I mean that the usage of the phrase has skyrocketed in the past two years. For example, the number of visitors to our website who arrived because they had done a search for 'content marketing,' has increased by a factor of 10. I'm delighted that content marketing has come out of the shadows and into the spotlight. Even so, for most small businesses, developing a content marketing mindset and a strategy to follow just does not come naturally. Fortunately, the fundamentals of a successful small business content marketing strategy are much more commonsensical than you might think.  In fact, they build on what have long been best marketing practices.  Even those content marketing elements that require a new mindset have a simple and compelling logic that even the smallest business can grasp and adopt.

Here are the six steps that can put you on the path to an effective content marketing strategy:

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