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Do I Really Need a Content Strategy?

06.06.10 Posted in Content Strategy by admin

content-strategyIf you want to make your life easier, yes. There are a number of reasons a content strategy is critical, but I’ll start with the simple fact that businesses are now being expected by their consumers to engage through content.

Magazines have always been good at creating content, re-purposing content, and planning ahead, but for B2B marketers this hasn’t always been the case.

Kristina Halvorson in her book, Content Strategy for the Web says “Content strategy will help you deliver content that inspires trust. Drives action. Builds loyalty. On time. One budget.”

With such a demand for content, how could you not have a strategy in place? I think ultimately a content strategy and marketing strategy will rival each other, or maybe merge. So much of our marketing strategy is dependent on the content we are creating, our marketing strategies have been shifting from talking about ourselves to truly arming people with the information they need to make better decisions regardless if they use our product or service or not.

5 Reasons for developing a content strategy:

1. Better Content

Developing a content strategy will enable you to create content that will be more engaging. In order to develop the strategy, you’ll need to do some research to determine a few things about your consumers. For example, where are they in the buying process and what kinds of content do they prefer to consume (video, blog posts, comments, tweets, etc). A content strategy will allow you to clearly identify the elements that will add more value and create more interesting experiences for your consumers, over time (allowing us to consider the BIG picture). Read More…

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What is Content Mapping?

05.02.10 Posted in Content Strategy by admin

Content mapping is the process of understanding and organizing the flow of content for your website, nurturing campaigns or blog, so it can be presented to your audience (personas) based on their needs and stage in the buying cycle. Content means web copy, blog posts, videos, interactive presentations, social elements, diagrams or other pieces of information used to engaged users / visitors. Content mapping is closely related to Information Architecture and UI (user interface) design.

A content map in the context of buyer personas will help you organize content to answer questions at various stages of the buying cycle, and create a blueprint for content distribution through multiple channels, so that you are always delivering the right content, at the right time, on the right channel.

For example, earlier stage questions might be best answered on the blog, while a mid or late questions would be more appropriate to answer via a nurturing campaign, or on your corporate website.

A content map is paramount when developing a long-term content strategy for your website, blog, direct marketing, nurturing, sales materials or other communications and content. It’s the foundation you need to optimize relevance and the flow of content for personas’ consumption at various stages of the buying cycle. Remember, a content map can also serve as a your primary content inventory so you always have a place to reference and even re-work content into different formats to keep your content development efforts efficient.

My original post was published on the Connected Marketer

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WTF is Lead Nurturing

04.20.10 Posted in Lead Nurturing & Scoring by admin

If you’ve been hearing about lead nurturing, and you’re still unclear about a few things, this short presentation should help shed some light. It reveals what lead nurturing is, and some compelling reasons why you should be nurturing your leads. There’s also some tips on how to get started, what kind of tools can help you and what you’ll need to be successful. Enjoy. Please add any additional thoughts or tips that you’ve found to work well. If you can’t read it very well, watch it in full screen (option in the lower left hand corner of the presentation). This was originally published on the Connected Marketer

Lead Nurturing: What Is It? And Why Should I Care?

View more presentations from Barbra Gago.
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eBook: How-to Build a Socially Armed Team

04.07.10 Posted in Social Media by admin

How to Build a Socially Armed Team eBook

How to Build a Socially Armed Team eBook

This short eBook will help point you in the right direction of where to start, what to think about and how to get organized when building a socially armed team. It’s not only the responsibility of the marketing department to engage customers anymore, it’s the entire organizations responsibility, and social media has made consumers even more accessible. This ebook will walk you through the steps of preparing, planning and team building. It covers the roles and responsibilities, as well as how you should train team members. Written for and originally published on the Connected Marketer

Intro: What My Father Taught Me About Social Media

My father owns a small business in California. Since I was very young I’ve been learning about supply and demand, customer relationships and integrity in business from my dad. I would say his approach to business and sales is very “old school” and by that I mean, brick and mortar. He sells the way that a general store owner would sell groceries, by getting to know his customers on a deeper level: he saw them once a week and truly cared about them and their success.

I think it’s safe to assume that store owners–back when things were simple–would ask how each of your family members were, or if something remarkable happened they would know and be interested in the outcome. Until recently, it seemed that businesses had lost this sense of connection, they had lost the genuine curiosity for their customers, and they relied only on “messaging”, “direct marketing” and flashing lights and sounds to almost hypnotize people into becoming their customers, rather than taking the time to get to know them. Thankfully things are changing. Read More…

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How to Create Great Content

01.09.10 Posted in Content Strategy, Presentations by admin

You know you need to create content, but what does that really mean?
View more presentations from Barbra Gago.
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What You “Oughta Know [about] Inbound Marketing”

11.21.09 Posted in Social Media by admin

This video was created by Hubspot. I pretty much covers all the do’s and don’t and reasons why you should be practicing Inbound versus Outbound marketing. And, it’s pretty hilarious.

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Quick Tips for Optimized Landing Pages

11.11.09 Posted in Email marketing by admin

  1. Create a clear and concise call to action. Keep it simple, don’t give people too many options. Remember there is a “funnel.”
  2. Test different layouts, and calls to action. If your landing page is not performing, try adjusting the call to action, images, or layout.
  3. Think about this conversion equation: C = 4m + 3v + 2(i – f) – 2a (via Marketing Experiments). I had no idea there would be algebra involved, but it makes perfect sense, and optimizing landing pages is indeed a science.
    • c = probability of conversion
    • m = motivation
    • v = clarity of value proposition
    • i = incentive to take action – create urgency
    • f = friction (elements of process) – avoid too many form fields ( phone number is usually pushing it
)
    • a = anxiety about giving information
  4. Keep the risk low. Know your audience, and address them accordingly.
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Is social media changing the way we communicate, or the way we do business?

11.11.09 Posted in Customer 2.0, Social Media by admin

According to the 2009 Marketing Sherpa Report on Social Media Marketing & PR 76% of marketing and PR professionals “agree” or “strongly agree” that social media marketing is changing the way their organizations communicate.

While I cannot disagree with this, I wonder if “changing the way organizations communicate” is simply a consequence of technology. What I mean is, “the way organizations communicate” will always change. I am more concerned about how this changes the way the organizations do business.

The thing is, as an organization technology gives you the opportunity to change the way you operate and thus bettering the experience for your consumers. With the Internet as such a common and widely used tool for research, the expectation of transparency is great. Companies have never before been subject to this kind of scrutiny by the people they rely on most, their customers.

This kind of dramatic shift has happened once before. During the industrial revolution machines gave us the ability to mass produce products, thus drastically cutting the production time and energy that traditionally went into even the most common goods. With this ability to mass produce there was a flood of products constantly interjected into the marketplace giving consumers the opportunity to choose based on cost or quality. Consequently, businesses were then subject to proving their worth or uniqueness because technology had given the consumer the means to decide for themselves.

Like the tools of the Industrial Revolution, the Internet has also revolutionized business, not just communication. Now you must be transparent, and this gives me hope. For a time, I was very pessimistic about where things were headed with this addiction to consumption, but for me, the Internet and especially social media presents a unique opportunity to change that.

I see consumers being more demanding of their brands, and as technology brings us closer together, the expectations of moral become more and more important. As the consumers identifies more and more with the brand, it wants the brand to be more and more representative of who they are at a much deeper level.

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What you Learn About Social Media While Out to Lunch

11.08.09 Posted in Social Media by admin

urlThis afternoon I found myself a fly on the wall listening to two very insightful, and intelligent women discuss the nature of systems, chaos theory, sustainability and social media. It was quite a delightful surprise.

 One of the women was working to become a consultant of some sort, marketing and business development for sustainable, or non-profit causes, while the other was a Ph.D. in economics whom recently wrote a short (twitter-esk) book on leadership (and consequently was marketing herself via social media).

Anyway, as the two bounced various ideas off one another I understood that while there is this group of people that do in fact realize social media, and the chaos of its system (aka you can’t control it!), they still are unaware of how to use it. They commented that it mostly works for people who are all about “self-promotion” and I have to tend to agree with them to some degree.

Facebook for example, can be a very narcissistic social application. Once you have befriended this person, that person, and their mother it can become more about a constant and detailed account of your life, and your experiences, and your feelings, or what you’re doing right now, and it’s debatable how much it really is about “the community” you are sharing these experiences with?

I read a study recently for example, that non-profits are “engaging” large groups of people through social application, and on Facebook in particular utilizing “causes”, but they are not raising money.  So they may have 20,000 people supporting their cause (although 74% have around 1,300), but less than 3% are raising money, so monetarily speaking these member groups are not substantiated, and there is no real proof that these people do in fact care about this cause (this isn’t to say there is no value, most non-profits surveyed around 65% said they found their SM efforts successful even without raising money).

Read More…

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Not All “New Media” Is Digital

11.08.09 Posted in Social Media by admin

I came across this post on Advertising Is Good For You and I think it raises a very important point. With everyone going wild about new technologies, iphone apps…Facebook this, and Twitter that, I fear the most important thing is being lost. Regardless of new technologies, your biggest concern should really be whether or not you are engaging your consumers in new and interesting ways.

new media_digitalWith all of this technology flying around there are more distractions than ever–how will you really engage people?

 That’s the question you should be asking yourself, and that’s what you should be focusing on. Facebook, and Twitter, are just tools, and tools, like everything meant to survive, evolve. There will always be new tools that come with new technologies. I think a lot of brands are limiting themselves because of the fear of not knowing what to do with all this new technology.

The point is that it’s not about the technology, it’s about how people interact with people, and how brands interact with consumers. It’s about bending yourself, and stretching your limits, and thinking out of the box (or cloud). It’s an evolution of thought, ideas and creativity, and it should be embraced and experimented with.

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