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Newt Barrett is the founder of Succeeding Today and its parent corporation, Voyager Media, Inc.
Here’s what’s important to know about him and how he can provide insights for your readers, viewers or visitors:
The Upcoming Book: Get Content. Get Customers
Newt’s Bio
Newt is a leading thinker on the new discipline of content marketing. He urges marketers to think like publishers by delivering essential, relevant, and timely information that makes customers smarter and wiser–and much more likely to become buyers.
Newt is a successful publishing executive with more than 25 years of experience as both a manager and business owner. He has launched profitable publications in the high tech arena for both CMP and Ziff-Davis. He was an early player on the web in 1996 as Publishing Director of an early Yahoo competitor, NetGuideLive.
As an entrepreneur, he launched Southwest Florida Business and BusinessNewsNow.com in the late nineties, later selling them to Gulfshore Media. His publication still thrives under its new name, Gulfshore Business.
In addition to his sales and marketing skills, Newt is a published writer for Business Currents and Gulfshore Business magazines. He writes on topics as diverse as healthcare, education, public policy, growth, business best practices, and technology.
He knows how to build great brands that serve client marketing needs. He is comfortable driving dramatic market-driven changes. Newt is recognized as a leader with the ability to move teams in new, unexplored directions. He is effective in high level sales and marketing conversations with senior executives in client organizations of all sizes. He delivers successful consulting engagements to improve products, people, and processes.
Interview Newt
Newt is a knowledgeable, articulate, and amusing source for interviews on topics ranging from content marketing to online trends to persuasive presentations.
To arrange an interview with Newt Barrett:
Contact Samantha Scott, Pushing the Envelope
Phone: (239) 443-0033
Interview Questions for Newt Barrett, President of Succeeding Today
1. On your website, you talk about the need to for marketers to think like publishers. What does that mean and why is it important?
2. You are co-authoring an upcoming book on content marketing, who are your target readers and why should they read your book
3. You are at the leading edge of the baby boom generation, isn’t it unusual for you to be immersed in the online world?
4. What are the three biggest mistakes marketers make when trying to implement a content marketing strategy?
5. How do blogs contribute to a content marketing strategy
6. Is there still a role for print magazines and newspapers now that everyone is moving to the web?
7. You once worked in Africa. What motivated you to go there and what were you doing?
8. Can you give me 3 examples of organizations that are doing a great job of content marketing?
9. What advice would you give on promoting a website or a blog?
10. Do online audio and video elements really add significant marketing value?
11. What is the next major trend that marketers need to anticipate?
Story Ideas
Newt can provide commentary, background, story ideas, and entire articles about content marketing, Web 2.0, blogging, website creation, magazine creation and publishing, persuasive presentations, biggest presentation mistakes, biggest missed website opportunities, why job interviewing is like a sales call, managing strengths rather than weaknesses.
Topics Include:
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Designing content marketing programs
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Transforming brochure sites into content rich sites
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Launching your own print publication
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Capturing an information niche
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Making a deadly presentation dynamic
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Putting PowerPoint to work persuading your audience
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How to become a thought leader
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How to understand your what your customers really want
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How to build an engaging, interactive website on a shoestring
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Really bad websites and why they stink
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Websites that could have been great–and how to transfrom them
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Why managing to improve weaknesses is the worst possible strategy
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Can this presentation be saved? Going from awful to awesome
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Your job interview is a sales call–how to make the sale
The Upcoming Book: Get Content. Get Customers.
Marketers face intense pressure to deliver measurable results in a world of ever changing rules and accelerating technology. There hasn’t been a simple, practical, and enjoyable guide to what works and what doesn’t in this tough new marketing world. Until now.
Get Content. Get Customers., co-authored by Newt Barrett and fellow content strategist, Joe Pulizzi, addresses the need of SMBs to understand the newest marketing realities and how to deliver results by following the guidelines they provide and the success stories told by colleaugues in organizations just like theirs.
Newt and Joe simplify this complicated topic and lead their readers toward content marketing strategies that pay off on the bottom-line.
GCGC’s introduction gives you the flavor of the book to follow in Q4 2007.
The world is changing…
Yes, tell me something I don’t know.
Change is all around us, but is possibly happening faster in marketing and media than anything else on the planet. How we communicate with everyone and everything is drastically different today than it was last year at this time. Information technology is changing the way we communicate.
Don’t take my word for it. Ray Kurzweil, famed inventor and futurist, states in the May 14, 2007 issue of Fortune magazine that “…Information technologies are doubling in power every year right now. Doubling every year is multiplying by 1,000 in ten years.” Just think about that. Look at where we are today and what technology is doing…thinking out 10 years in almost unimaginable.
Okay, you get the point, but what does this have to do with marketing. Well, everything.
Technology has created a couple truths over the past few years:
- The consumer is more in control than ever. This will continue and grow with the advancement of technology.
- More seamless and integrated technology is enabling companies to talk with consumers in more and different ways never thought of before.
Conclusion to these two points: You, the marketer, will have more ways to connect with customers than ever before. Beware: your messages better be valuable or the customer will shut you out…forever.
A little hasty…maybe, but this is ultimately the point of this book. Communicating with our customers and prospects is a right and a responsibility. Those that treat it like one, and deliver valuable and relevant information to customers on an ongoing basis, will be loved. Those that are disrespectful and send messaging that only, ultimately benefit the marketer, will be shut out, forgotten and marked as irrelevant in a plethora of technology tools (let alone, the human memory).
So, the advancement of technology and the benefits derived from PDAs, IPODs and IM come back to a very basic, non-technological marketing issue: your marketing message will only be paid attention to if it is valuable and relevant in some way. It could be educational, or entertaining, or thought-provoking, or inspirational. Your knowledge of your audience will help you decide how you want to create “the love” with the use of great content. The technology can and will continue to change, but the content must always be good.
The Anti-Sell
I had lunch recently with colleague of mine who sells, for the most part, print advertising into couple trade magazines. He talked for a while about the ongoing challenges of selling the value of print advertising, and how that is unlikely to ever change due to the measurement challenge issue for marketers and the variety of options available to marketing organizations today. As we discussed the issue, we both came to the exact same realization: Sales today and into the future is all about the “anti-sell.” Consumers are smarter than ever and can sniff a sales motive a mile away. If all you have to offer is the sale, you are ignored. But if you package that sell around content that is of value to that person, your sales message has the opportunity of being accepted.
My point to him was this: Great marketing communications can never look anything like sales. To sell product, you ultimately can’t sell your product. You first must sell the value of your company, your brand. You will be judged worthy to deal with if you give of yourself content that helps your customer or prospect work more efficiently, laugh harder, love sweeter, and so on and so forth. Once you do that, they will accept your sales messages (not that you’d ever send them a pure “sales” message again).
This book is all about the “anti-sell,” otherwise known as content marketing. You may hear some call it branded content, custom publishing, or custom media. First, we’ll tell you all about content marketing, what it is and how it’s used. Then we’ll talk about the industry trends surrounding the growth of content marketing. After that, we’ll dive head first into how companies are using content marketing to their advantage, and how you can follow suit.
Jump in!
To learn more about Get Content. Get Customers. click here and tell us what you’d like to know.
To arrange an interview with Newt Barrett:
Contact Samantha Scott, Pushing the Envelope
Phone: (239) 443-0033
