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Six Questions To Jump-Start Your Content Marketing Plan

Monday, September 13th, 2010

Funny how all the social media pundits were screaming, “Content is King!” from rooftops as far back as there were social media pundits. If you heard that line once in advice, conference talks or webinars from 2005-2008, you heard it 10,000 times. Unfortunately, most of those very content-as-king promoters never put the words “content” and “strategy” together in the same sentence and businesses suffered as a result. “Ya know … just, like, ummmm … write cool stuff, ya know?” Fast forward to 2010 and you’d better come to bat with more than just “Content is King” or clients will laugh you out of the building. Many brands and businesses don’t know anything about content, wouldn’t know good content if it bit them in the ass, have no idea how to generate or where to buy good content and no clue how much it’s really worth. As a digital marketing (or, I would argue marketing marketing) consultant or practitioner, understanding content strategy needs to be among your chief professional assets. Image via Wikipedia That’s why the Social Media Club Louisville and International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) in Louisville are again partnering to make anyone interested smarter about content strategy. We’ll present the IABC/SMC Louisville Content Marketing Summit next Tuesday, Sept. 21, at the Crown Plaza in Louisville. The lineup is, in my humble opinion, an all-star team of content marketing experts. Those attending will walk away with not just great ideas about content, but an actual blueprint for their own content strategy. You can read more about the event at the IABC Kentucky website , where you can also register. Members of either organization get access to the one-day event for just $149. Non-members, just $199. And if you want to join IABC Kentucky, you can do so for just $100 extra. While the highlights of the day will most certainly be Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 and the Content Marketing Institute talking about content marketing strategy and Michael Schechter of Honora Pearls giving brand-side perspective, or content talks from the perspective of search marketing ( Chris Baggott from Compendium Blogware ), email marketing ( Greg Cangialosi of Blue Sky Factory ), media relations ( Amy Mengel from readMedia ), social media channels ( Mike Lewis from Awareness ) or even building the foundation of content marketing success with strong social media policies (Susan Gosselin from Vest Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations ), I’ll be adding a unique spin to the day. My part of the festivities will be to walk attendees through a content blueprint exercise, specific to their business, that will give them a direction to head in as soon as they get back to the office on Wednesday. To provide that blueprint, I’ll have attendees answer a litany of questions. The ones that I start with may be helpful to you in thinking about a content strategy for your organization. Those questions are below. I’d be happy to hear your suggestions for additional ones in the comments. Six Questions To Jump-Start Your Content Marketing Plan What do we know? Generally speaking, what knowledge do you have that others don’t? There’s value in that. Perhaps it’s expertise within your industry or a different take on an existing product or service that your company evangelizes. You have knowledge as a company and individuals within your walls have even more specific knowledge that is most definitely worth sharing. What can we give? Yeah, we can all give away product, but think about the expertise you can give away. Teach your audience how to do things. Share the how-tos and the what-thens and become a trusted resource for doing so. What can we explain? You know what would make me read content from an accountant? Content that explained that world to me in bite-sized chunks I could understand. I hate math, but am fascinated to know why taxes apply to some companies and not others, why outstanding invoices count as revenue and why my accountant wasn’t smoking crack when she told me having a few more items charged on my credit card may help me come year’s end. What can we share? What other companies, media outlets or blogs can we share with our audience to make the audience smarter? Do any of them offer their content under Creative Commons in a fashion that allows us to republish it? Who can we interview? Whether it’s clients, vendors, partners, friends or even people who come to your booth at a trade show, a Flip cam and some interesting questions go a long way. What can we have fun with? Whether it’s the company softball team or the quirky old guy in the building with the funny sayings, there’s something about your business that gives you a chuckle or needed relief from the seriousness of work. Identifying it and sharing it with your audience makes you much more fun. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll do and discuss next Tuesday. If you’re within a decent drive from Louisville, we’d love to have you at the Content Marketing Summit. Register and join us! In the meantime, what questions would you add? The comments, as always, are yours. Related articles by Zemanta Content Marketing Interview with Joe Pulizzi (verticalmeasures.com) In Social Media, Content is Still King (markevanstech.com) Content Marketing More Effective Than Traditional Advertising (eon.businesswire.com) Ramping Up For a Bigger Content Publishing Strategy (mediapost.com) Online Content Doesn’t Have an Expiration Date (hubspot.com) 7 Key Elements Of Great Business Content (hubspot.com)

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Six Questions To Jump-Start Your Content Marketing Plan

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Tags: accountant, advertising, business, content marketing summit, credit-card, funny, Louisville, online

The Future Of Social Is In Content Solutions, Syndication

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

You don’t get very far in talking about social media for business without running into a discussion about content. Companies need to provide informative, entertaining and engaging content to their audiences to attract visits to company blogs, websites, Facebook pages and more. The deeper you get into understanding the various benefits of engaging your audiences with great content (enhanced online reputation, conversational market share, search engine ranking improvement and increased lead or sales generation to name a few) you begin to not only produce the content, but distribute and promote it accordingly. Everyone wants more eyeballs. Because relatively few businesses have crossed the threshold from just blogging to developing content strategies, I see a big opportunity for content providers and promoters in the coming years. The easier brands can provide content (even if they, themselves, don’t create it) and distribute it, driving links, eyeballs and the like, the more successful they’ll be in the social realm. This opens the door for a couple different types of companies or service providers. First, professional blogging services (I hate calling them ghost blogging services for reasons you can see in this 2009 post about the topic ) and free-lance web content providers should see a boon in the need for their services in the next few years. Second, larger scale content distribution companies like wire-services should see a bit of an increase in volume as well. But then there’s a unique opportunity for a company that combines both content creation and distribution to step in and do something neat. Enter NewsUSA and its newest offering, Social Syndication , which is advertising on Social Media Explorer this month. NewsUSA has been a content provider and distributor in the traditional media world for some time. You hire them to take your press release or company news, turn it into an editorial/advertorial piece and they use a network of copyright-free distribution channels to get that article placed in newspapers, magazines and more. And there are a lot of those publications out there looking to fill their pages with interesting content without having to pay for it. The copyright-free syndication houses like NewsUSA were doing good corporate blogging before blogging existed. Sell trophies, like Plaquemaker Plus ? News USA can craft a useful article likely to get picked up by publications looking for such like, “ Tips To Plan A Fun Family Reunion ” and insert the suggestion you get trophies for the kids. It’s advertorial, but it’s non-obtrusive and provides value to the audience beyond just “buy our trophies.” With NewsUSA’s new Social Syndication effort, they’re taking the traditional distribution model and applying it to social channels. And believe me, while Huffington Post and Mashable aren’t the types of websites that would use copyright free, syndicated content, there are TONS of sites out there that will. As more companies get into the “gotta have fresh content” mode, I think you’ll start to see the trend of using copyright free content expand into the brand world. One recent client project NewsUSA shared with me resulted in 156 social and online placements, 127 inbound links to the syndicated story (placed on CopyrightFreeContent.com ) and two inbound links to the client’s website. The story also generated over 100 links and references from Twitter users. Now, none of these numbers are eye-popping, but as the company builds trust and provides value to the social news communities, plus more companies and websites turn to syndication services for useful content, NewsUSA is looking at the tip of a big iceberg. And not one that will sink the ship. One piece of Social Syndication that I offered NewsUSA feedback on was their activity in posting the content to the social news and bookmarking sites. While there’s great potential to increase the exposure and reach of their client’s work there, I felt like they still had some work to do in order to make that piece work better for them. But make no mistake about it, NewsUSA is on the right path and is a company to watch. On the flip side of the syndication argument is the fact that inbound links from sites that use syndicated content may not be as valuable as those from the Huffington Posts of the world. I would never say NewsUSA is a single solution to distributing content or driving inbound links. But as their network grows, they will be able to reasonably guarantee a turnkey number of links based on the sites that grow to trust their content. Debate the merits of advertorial all you want. When companies want content, they want content that is going to help them. And there will always be sites out there hungry enough for content to publish advertorial. When the brands looking for content see they can use a NewsUSA to provide such for their blogs, sites, outposts and more, PLUS distribute it around the web for even more value in exposure, SEO and more, the content creation and syndication companies are going to see customers. How would you polish the content solution and syndication business? What do companies like NewsUSA have to do to convince your brand or company they are worth the investment? The comments are yours. NOTE : For those of you who might be new to Social Media Explorer, I do have advertisers like NewsUSA from time-to-time, but because my audience trusts me, I have some very particular requirements to allow them to be brought to your attention. For more on my advertising policy, see this page on Advertising Relevancy . Related articles by Zemanta The Basics Of Content Syndication (slideshare.net) With Help From NewsUSA, Use Social Media To Keep Your Brand Relevant (prweb.com)

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The Future Of Social Is In Content Solutions, Syndication

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Tags: advertising, Client, content syndication, family, family-reunion, kids, press, search-engine, SEO, Syndication, USA

Does Advertising Your Facebook URL Actually Work?

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

We work in the suburbs of Ireland and across the road there is a local pub that does a great roast lunch and has about four or five old men sitting around the bar drinking whiskey all day. I recently noticed when browsing through the menu that they had added some Facebook logos with their address and I remember thinking at the time how innovative that was for a small local pub. Imagine my surprise when I walked down for my lunch yesterday and saw that they had repainted the pub to include their Facebook URL covering half the facade of their pub. I pretty much nearly fell over with shock after seeing it for the first time. Now the first thing that I would say is that they have some issues with the actual text and spacing of the URL but it got me to thinking about placing Facebook URLs on your marketing material in general. Does it actually work? Do People Actually Click Through? I would say from our experience here as a company and from my own personal experience people don’t always click through to the Facebook page URL. Most people will generally notice the URL and think “wow that is cool must check it out later” but the truth is that by the time you get back to your computer the thought has long left your head. Now you could of course be one of the increasing amount of people to access Facebook through your mobile in which case you could like the page instantly. I’ve seen brands and businesses spend huge amounts of money in ad campaigns that blast their URL (either Facebook or microsites) out to millions of people but I have to say by in large the take up is incredibly poor. I’d be more inclined to spend the money online if all you want to do is get people to your page or website because the conversion rates will be far higher. What Is It Doing To Your Brand? I see examples every single day of the week where brands and businesses are using Facebook because they have heard that they have to and not because they should be and actually have a good business use for it. This particular pub in question might be using Facebook really well but is there maybe a more subtle and effective way of letting it’s patrons know about Facebook? What happens if Facebook turns in to the next Bebo? The painters will have to be called in again pretty quickly. I also see brands advertising Facebook pages where there is little or no interaction on the page and no reason to be sending people to Facebook. At the end of the day Facebook is just a platform in the same way that Google is. Don’t be caught up in trying to be cool and telling the whole world that you are on Facebook just for the sake of it. By the way for what it is worth the pub across the road are actually doing a decent job with their own Facebook page . I am off to paint the front of our own offices now as I can’t have them stealing all our likes on this street Possibly Related Posts: Some Facebook Facts You Probably Didn’t Know Facebook Cover Of Time Magazine : A Defining Moment? New Tool Lets You Check Just How Private Your Facebook Profile Actually Is Could There Ever Be Another Facebook? How Brands Should Be Using Facebook Apps

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Does Advertising Your Facebook URL Actually Work?

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Tags: across-the-road, advertising, branding, defining-moment, facebook, likes, links, Mobile, people, street, traffic, urls

From Stayed To Social: A Social Media Case Study

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Social media marketing, if performed strategically, can do a lot of things. It can effectively engage an audience around your brand. It can empower a group of fans to spread word of you virally through social networks. It can do this with less money than you would spend on advertising to reach a similar audience. And despite what the social media purists try and tell you, social media marketing can drive sales. Case in point: Justin Boots wanted to break out of a somewhat conservative rut and become hip and trendy to the 18-to-24-year-old audience. Keep in mind Justin Boots are kind of the workhorse of the boot category. Cowboys, country music lovers, ranch hands and hillbillies buy them because they’re dependable and affordable, not flashy and hip. In the summer of 2009, however, Justin had a new product to launch. It was a new product line focused on 18-to-24-year-old boot lovers called Justin Bent Rail Boots . They were a new boot for a new (or young) audience. They were trendy and hip in the boot world. To get these new kickers on people’s feet, Justin put aside a $120,000 advertising budget that would have been eaten up with just a couple of print ads in a typical Western magazine. Justin turned to its ad agency, Balcom , in Fort Worth, Texas, and said, “Do it cheaper.” The strategy was to talk to the the target audience where they were: online. Bent Rail launched branded pages on Facebook , MySpace , Twitter and Blip.fm and invited fans to follow the music of Justin’s hip, young country music endorsees (namely Randy Rogers Band , Casey Donahew Band and Wade Bowen , all of which receive only product, not monetary remuneration from Justin). But it wasn’t just following the music. It was following the people. Balcom armed the three bands with smart phones and asked them to capture behind the scenes video, interviews and snapshots of their lives as burgeoning country music stars. The bands uploaded the videos in real-time to JustinBentRail.com , where they were then promoted and used as content on the social outposts. The promotion was called, “I’m With The Band,” and gave that sweet-spot target audience exclusive access to the hip, new country music stars whose music they were discovering. As an aside, having soon-to-be, or already celebrities on your marketing roster isn’t something everyone can grab. How Justin gets these folks to work for them for product and product alone sort of baffles me, but that’s beside the point. The truth is there was no more money spent to get these guys to provide the content. Consider content costs when thinking through your strategies. What resulted for Justin Bent Rail was enough to send the social media purists running for their communes … and in Birkenstocks, no less. While Justin Boots, a Berkshire Hathaway company, would not divulge actual sales numbers (nor do I have the time to legally file for them from the publicly traded company), they did exceed their sales goal for the new product line by 30 percent. They attribute 95 percent of their sales to social media marketing because that’s where they elected to spend their dollars, rather than the previous go-to tactic of expensive print ads. Justin Bent Rail saw 181 band-uploaded videos in five months, over 360,000 impressions of those videos and 10,000 embeds on blogs and social sites. While fan page (525 by December 2009) and Twitter followers (700 in the same time frame) aren’t eye-popping, the strategy focused on driving website traffic and Justin Boots’ most valuable metric, clicks on the “Find a Retailer” tab on its website. Those numbers? A 116 percent increase in website traffic over five months and a 213 percent increase on “Find a Retailer” clicks. And, oh by the way, the results were produced for approximately half of the original advertising budget of $120,000. Yeah … half. None of this would have worked had the brand and its agency not approached social media marketing with strategy in mind. They identified a target audience; narrowed where that audience was consuming content online; developed exclusive, value-adding content especially for them; made the content compelling enough for people to share; and drove people to specific calls to action to see, try or learn more about the new line of boots they were selling. The somewhat stayed, old boot company kicked off the dust a bit and got hip; got cool; got social. And now they’re planning even more. The success of the “Band” social media effort has them thinking of doing more with Bent Rail, but also adding specific strategies for Justin’s overall products, including several other brands within the family. I’m told the company also wants to learn more about its customers using social media including their preferences and pain points. But ultimately their goal with social media marketing is to increase sales. And they’re doing it. Because they approached social media strategically, not as a “we gotta have some” tactical time killer. Social media marketing does five general things for your business: Enhances Branding and Awareness Builds Community/Engagement Around Your Brand Provides Customer Service Channels Facilitates Direct Research and Development Drives Sales or Sales Leads Figure out which one (or more) you’d like it to do for you, identify a target audience for that activity, find them online, then deliver content, programming or activity that will compel them to do what you’d like them to. It may just take you from stayed … to social.

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From Stayed To Social: A Social Media Case Study

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Tags: advertising, business, customer, family, marketing, music, people, public-relations, Social Media, social media case study, social media examples, social media strategy, time, videos

From Staid To Social: A Social Media Case Study

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Social media marketing, if performed strategically, can do a lot of things. It can effectively engage an audience around your brand. It can empower a group of fans to spread word of you virally through social networks. It can do this with less money than you would spend on advertising to reach a similar audience. And despite what the social media purists try and tell you, social media marketing can drive sales. Case in point: Justin Boots wanted to break out of a somewhat conservative rut and become hip and trendy to the 18-to-24-year-old audience. Keep in mind Justin Boots are kind of the workhorse of the boot category. Cowboys, country music lovers, ranch hands and hillbillies buy them because they’re dependable and affordable, not flashy and hip. In the summer of 2009, however, Justin had a new product to launch. It was a new product line focused on 18-to-24-year-old boot lovers called Justin Bent Rail Boots . They were a new boot for a new (or young) audience. They were trendy and hip in the boot world. To get these new kickers on people’s feet, Justin put aside a $120,000 advertising budget that would have been eaten up with just a couple of print ads in a typical Western magazine. Justin turned to its ad agency, Balcom , in Fort Worth, Texas, and said, “Do it cheaper.” The strategy was to talk to the the target audience where they were: online. Bent Rail launched branded pages on Facebook , MySpace , Twitter and Blip.fm and invited fans to follow the music of Justin’s hip, young country music endorsees (namely Randy Rogers Band , Casey Donahew Band and Wade Bowen ). But it wasn’t just following the music. It was following the people. Balcom armed the three bands with smart phones and asked them to capture behind the scenes video, interviews and snapshots of their lives as burgeoning country music stars. The bands uploaded the videos in real-time to JustinBentRail.com , where they were then promoted and used as content on the social outposts. The promotion was called, “I’m With The Band,” and gave that sweet-spot target audience exclusive access to the hip, new country music stars whose music they were discovering. As an aside, having soon-to-be, or already celebrities on your marketing roster isn’t something everyone can grab. The Justin folks assured me there isn’t a huge financial piece that goes into these endorsements, but the truth is there was no more money spent to get these guys to provide the content. Consider content costs when thinking through your strategies. What resulted for Justin Bent Rail was enough to send the social media purists running for their communes … and in Birkenstocks, no less. While Justin Boots, a Berkshire Hathaway company, could not immediately divulge actual sales numbers (but I’ve been told they will provide them soon), they did exceed their sales goal for the new product line by 30 percent. They attribute 95 percent of their sales to social media marketing because that’s where they elected to spend their dollars, rather than the previous go-to tactic of expensive print ads. Justin Bent Rail saw 181 band-uploaded videos in five months, over 360,000 impressions of those videos and 10,000 embeds on blogs and social sites. While fan page (525 by December 2009) and Twitter followers (700 in the same time frame) aren’t eye-popping, the strategy focused on driving website traffic and Justin Boots’ most valuable metric, clicks on the “Find a Retailer” tab on its website. Those numbers? A 116 percent increase in website traffic over five months and a 213 percent increase on “Find a Retailer” clicks. And, oh by the way, the results were produced for approximately half of the original advertising budget of $120,000. Yeah … half. None of this would have worked had the brand and its agency not approached social media marketing with strategy in mind. They identified a target audience; narrowed where that audience was consuming content online; developed exclusive, value-adding content especially for them; made the content compelling enough for people to share; and drove people to specific calls to action to see, try or learn more about the new line of boots they were selling. The somewhat staid, old boot company kicked off the dust a bit and got hip; got cool; got social. And now they’re planning even more. The success of the “Band” social media effort has them thinking of doing more with Bent Rail, but also adding specific strategies for Justin’s overall products, including several other brands within the family. I’m told the company also wants to learn more about its customers using social media including their preferences and pain points. But ultimately their goal with social media marketing is to increase sales. And they’re doing it. Because they approached social media strategically, not as a “we gotta have some” tactical time killer. Social media marketing does five general things for your business: Enhances Branding and Awareness Builds Community/Engagement Around Your Brand Provides Customer Service Channels Facilitates Direct Research and Development Drives Sales or Sales Leads Figure out which one (or more) you’d like it to do for you, identify a target audience for that activity, find them online, then deliver content, programming or activity that will compel them to do what you’d like them to. It may just take you from staid … to social.

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From Staid To Social: A Social Media Case Study

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Tags: advertising, boots, business, development, facebook, family, Social Media, social media case study, social media marketing, social media strategy, videos

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