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The Hotel, the Airline, and the Restaurant are all Publishers. Are You?

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At SOBCon Portland last year, I had the honor of interviewing Chris Erickson from the Heathman Hotel for one of our sessions. His hotel was in the news at the time because it had been used as the setting for the Fifty Shades of Grey books.

Rosemary ONeill Chris Erickson interview SOBCon Portland

However, as we all discovered, the hotel already had a well-deserved reputation for being forward-thinking long before E.L. James decided to give them a different type of fame.

One thing Chris said during our interview was, “I consider myself a publisher.”

There was definitely a moment of silence in the room as we all took that in. Imagining how far content marketing, social media, and digital outreach have come. A hotelier says he’s a publisher.

Chris explained that he considers it part of his job to produce content (in many different forms) that will support the Heathman’s reputation and business strategy.

But doesn’t it all go back a lot farther? The airlines have had in-flight magazines for quite a while now.

Chipotle is spending millions on well-executed mini-movies to sell carnitas burritos.

Is it time for every business owner and entrepreneur to think of themselves as a publisher? And how does this mindset shift your process, your work product?

According to Google, a publisher is “a person or company that prepares and issues books, journals, music, or other works for sale.”

Characteristics of Being a Publisher

  • By definition, a publisher is not an amateur. He/she is presenting items for sale, not as a hobby.
  • A publisher both “prepares” and “issues” the materials offered. He/she takes care that the items are error-free and ready to be issued to the world. By issuing, the publisher stands behind what he/she has prepared.
  • Publishers take a risk when they present materials for sale. They invest in the content, not knowing for certain what the reward will be.
  • Publishers must know their market. Is there room for this work? Is it the right time? Is this work creative and different enough to inspire others?
  • A publisher makes hard decisions.

Do you consider yourself a publisher? Why or why not?

Don’t miss out on SOBCon Leverage 2014 yet? You’ll definitely want to be in the room.

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Leveraging Your Relationships For Authentic Content Marketing

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building-relationships-cartoon

The topic of “content marketing” and cutting through the fads surrounding it came up recently in a phone conversation I had with Andy Crestodina, Co-Founder & Strategic Director of Orbit Media Studios.  Knowing Andy’s experienced in this area I shared my curiosity and questions people often ask me.  Things like: What is content marketing, what should you be doing and what shouldn’t you be doing?

The first thing Andy brought up was this important tip:

Whatever you do, please don’t create…

CONTENT FOR THE SAKE OF CONTENT

“It’s never about the content itself; it’s about the relationships.  And SEO, social media marketing and content marketing are coming back to focusing on the relationships.”  It’s no longer someone sitting in a cubicle punching out “tweaked” copy that Google will like.  People want value and great content, not a page  littered with key word phrases.

Old school SEO was more about the key words than their meaning.  What about now?  Andy points out that semantic search is all about context and meaning to get results that will best help the answer a question for the person searching.  In short PR + Data = SEO.  If you want to do great SEO you need:

  • To talk to people on Twitter; have conversations and share their links too.
  • Do Public Relations; which means you have to pitch.
  • You have to go to (offline) events and make friends.

You have to not only understand your links and traffic stats but it’s even more important to understand your target audiences, what they’re reading and why.  You need people to talk about you online and offline and share your content.  That’s all about the relationships, not just clicks.

Social media has also changed.  Social media activity for the sake of activity is just for fun.  If you want to have social conversations and pass the time that’s a choice to make.  But… Social media marketing has a point; you have goals and a structured plan to meet those goals.

So…

WHAT IS “JUST CONTENT” AND HOW CAN YOU CREATE SOMETHING BETTER?

Let’s talk about the analogy: “If a tree falls in the woods and nobody’s around to hear it; does it make a sound?” and compare it to content.  If you create content, put it online and nobody sees or shares it – was it worth creating?

“Just content” falls into the personal blog or hobby market.  It’s created by you, for you and it serves a personal purpose.  If that’s your intention that works.  If your goal is successful marketing with your content you need to do more.

So how can we differentiate between things like

  • Content creation vs. content marketing?
  • Social media activity vs. social media marketing?

Let’s ask and answer this question I posed to Andy…

HOW CAN YOU CREATE AUTHENTIC AND POWERFUL CONTENT MARKETING PROGRAMS?

Marketing means you have a purpose.  You have an audience you want to reach and relationships you want to build.

Content marketing happens when you reach people who:

  • Find your content helpful
  • Believe your content is relevant to their business or career
  • You might be able to help immediately or at a later date and
  • Might be able to help you immediately or at a later date.

In short you’re creating the opportunity to become relevant and important to them as well as finding people and companies who are relevant and important to you.  Those bullet points give you a litmus test to use when you want to create valuable content and successful content marketing campaigns. 

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOU?

The key lesson behind the first two bullet points: You have to know WHO your target markets are and WHAT they need.  This means that you have to create VALUE for those target markets; the content has to be helpful to them.

The key lesson behind the second two bullet points: Relationships are always a two way street; you have to give to get.  That brings us full circle to the point we first talked about in this post: It’s not about the content itself; it’s all about the relationships created or enhanced by the content.

In closing, Andy shared these tips for you to implement today:

  • Write as if you’re writing for one reader; as if you’re talking to one person.
  • If you don’t feel something while you’re writing: STOP.  This means your audience won’t feel any emotion about your writing either.
  • For your marketing strategy: Answer your audience’s WHY’s.  Remind them why you’re in business, why they’re looking at you and why your product or service matters.

 What relationships will YOU leverage this week to create amazing content?

Andy_Headshot_2Andy Crestodina is a co-founder of Orbit Media, an award winning, 35-person web design company here in Chicago. Andy has written hundreds of articles on topics like email marketing, search optimization, social media and Analytics. He is also the author of Content Chemistry and a two-time veteran of SOBCon. He hopes to see you there in June!

 

 

mark-j-carter-sobcon-headshot

About The Author: Mark J. Carter is the founder of ONE80; his mission is bringing conversations & storytelling back to business… through mentoring (programs, events & marketing).  He currently serves as Vice President of Communications for the Chicago Area Chapter of Meeting Professionals International (MPI).

Is Your Content Marketing in Need of Video?

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Content marketing that does not utilize video just seems to fall flat compared to moving image marketing strategies.

And, considering attention spans are getting shorter and shorter with every innovative viral sensation that hits the Internet, if your company’s missing out on video in its marketing content, it’s likely missing out on a huge cyber audience.

So, what are the benefits of using videos as part of your company’s content marketing strategy?

 Video is Growing in Popularity

If you surf the Internet for different advertising and marketing campaigns, chances are you’ll find videos posted in company blogs, on business homepages, and everywhere in between. Simply put, video content marketing is growing in popularity.

Text is and always will be a content essential, but the marketing masses are turning to video in droves as a way to expand on their marketing efforts.

So, to avoid being left out to dry, it’s wise to jump on-board the video bandwagon. Besides, the average Internet user already watches more than 100 videos a month and counting.

Watch-ability Outweighs Readability

As stated before, online attention spans are quickly adapting to the video format, thus giving other forms of content the backseat. With video, your company can say what it wants, how it wants, with visual representation, all in one short video.

Think of it this way, with your busy schedule, would you rather read about a company for 10 minutes, or watch and experience what that company is trying to convey in a 3-minute video? Video gives your company the opportunity to expand beyond the written word and truly reach the audience.

Vlog, Don’t Blog

Blogging is great because it gives your company an opportunity to express itself as well as inform and update online audiences – all of which are essential marketing tools. But, with vlogging, or video blogging, incorporating videos into blog posts brings your company’s online presence to a whole new level.

So, instead of posting a blog about the newest line of products or the most innovative services your company has to offer, vlog instead. Likewise, as far as customer questions go, responding in a vlog post is much more effective than just replying to a customers’ comment via the written format.

Inherently Compelling Content

People relate to images more so than words and with video, your content marketing is already compelling because it’s visual. In other words, what do you think is going to get more online traffic: a how-to article or a how-to video with step-by-step visual instructions?

Everything from demonstrations to interviews to customer testimonials to straightforward advertisements are automatically in class of their own with video. As long as you keep the video content unique and engaging, audiences will watch without even realizing they’re being marketed to.

When it comes to content marketing with an undeniable impact, going the video route will take your company to new cyber-heights.

Photo credit: videobroadcasterservices.com

About the Author: Adam Groff is a freelance writer and creator of content. He writes on a variety of topics including marketing, problems with ripoff report, and social media.

 

4 Precious Content Marketing Lessons from Startups

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By Tracy Vides

Startup founders have lives that are anything but normal: they have to deal with uncertain markets. Their ideas are vulnerable to deep dive into oblivion any time, they suffer scarcity of resources, and they are perennially strapped for cash. Startup founders put their soul – along with themselves – through rigorous (almost insane) time schedules.

A considerable amount of energy, passion, love and work goes into a startup, regardless of whether it succeeds or fails. Although digital marketing, including content marketing, goes with the overall scheme of things, while running a startup, we’ll ignore that for a moment and consider content marketing separately.

So, what happens when you bring startup culture to content marketing? How does the way you do content marketing change when you bring in the ethos that startups are known for?

Here are some lessons from startups that you can apply to content marketing, blogging, and digital marketing in general:

Don’t Fall for the Single Founder Mistake

Paul Graham, author and founder of Y Combinator, lists out some mistakes most startups make, one of the first of which is to have a single founder.

Very few successful startups have just one founder. Google, Apple, Oracle are all examples of companies with humble starts and certainly more than one founder.

Having one founder, Paul believes, is a vote of no confidence. Even if that wasn’t the case, growing a startup is incredibly hard for one person. Startups need a way to weed out bad decisions, and a one-founder startup has no checks and balances in that regard. Having a team spreads out the hard work, keeps stupid decisions in check, and to brainstorm for more ideas.

Lesson: Content development, likewise, isn’t a one-person effort. Whether you are a business looking to develop content for marketing, a content marketer working on various types of content for other businesses, or even a content developer or freelance writer, you’ll need a team.

Working with professional writers, in-house content development teams, and collaborating with experts is a great way to give your content development work a boost. Content marketing is best achieved with collaboration – no matter how you choose to do it.

Starting Up without Research is Doomed

Startups are glamorous. That doesn’t take away the grueling work behind running one, though. According to Toby Ruckert of Stuff.co.nz, “research” is a fundamental building block for a startup. Technically, it’s called “validating ideas”, in startup circles. You’d go out to your potential customer base, launch surveys, brainstorm with your team, and gather material from the web, universities, or libraries.

To know is at the core of a successful startup.

Lesson: Content marketing is impossible without research. Of course, you can hash out trite content but by now, you know that it won’t work for your business. Include research into every piece of content you develop.

Know your readers, and gather analytics that matter to you. If you are approaching other bloggers, find out everything you can about them and their websites. Digging into site owners’ personal details and preferences is easy – you can get to know a lot from their About and Contact pages, and social media profiles.

However, to be a true online detective, you need to know their pain and pleasure points with regard to their day-to-day blog operation. You can use Whois to uncover site owner and administration information, whoishostingthis.com to find their hosting details, SEMRush to know more about visitor traffic and how they get it, and so on.

Startups are Hard

Uncrunched.com has a post with this simple message: If you are not comfortable with the fact that startups are hard work and that a lot of time and sacrifice will go into it, you should get yourself a job.

Startups are hard in more ways than you can imagine. Chris McCann’s post reveals the sweat, blood, and tears involved in a startup founder’s life.

Yet, Kevin Ready, a contributor at Forbes.com, thinks that the hard startup life is good. Technology helps you overcome some hurdles. The Internet makes it easy to hire people (either full-time or on contractual basis), and the availability of affordable tools make it easier to launch a startup today.

However, if you quit whining, embrace the startup life, and do it right, you make history.

Lesson: Too many business owners and marketers think that you have to “make time” for content marketing.

Correction: Drop everything else (except running your business) and go all out at content marketing. Quit whining that it takes a humongous effort, time, money and energy to develop great content, to get good content published as guest blogs, to work on social media, to create videos, and to publish all other sorts of content.

Content marketing – when you do it right – has phenomenal payoffs.

The Value is in Speed, Not Money

Tanya Prive of Forbes gave some convincing reasons why startups succeed, some of which were speed, efficiency, and the rush a startup works with.

Startups also succeed because they provide value while keeping the pace of work fast and efficient. Startups, however, don’t succeed because a VC firm funds them. They don’t succeed just because they have capital.

In fact, most startups don’t even have access to any sort of capital from sources such as banks and VC firms. That’s why it’s not surprising so many of them now turn to crowd-funding options such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Lesson: Traditional marketing spoiled us into thinking that if we had access to cash and an unending stream of funds, we could market and promote our way to success.

All you had to do was to buy media space and bomb the market with as much advertising as your money could buy.

Today, consumers don’t trust traditional advertising much. Instead, they trust their own social networks and their preferred sources of advice online (blogs and publications). Content marketing is all about making the right information available to seed consumers’ hunger for information.

As a brand, you need credibility, trust, social proof, and commercial love. Content marketing has to achieve all of that and not to fill up the Internet with more trash.

To achieve speed and to provide value with content marketing, you have to make a splash, no matter what your current state of available resources is like. Danny Iny of Firepole marketing did just that with his super-powered guest blogging campaigns targeted major blogs. All he had was to use his skill in writing and a burning desire with a willingness to put in the work to get his guest blogs out. His outreach success led him to develop a popular report called Engagement from Scratch.

Content marketing is an overall endeavor to get the word out, to generate trust, to marshal goodwill and to amass social proof. It’s the key to what is now known as Inbound Marketing.

Your content marketing defines you. It makes you money. It tells the world who you are and why you are in business. It convinces, persuades, inspires, and informs.

How do you approach content marketing? How important is it for your business? Which of the lessons do you think you can pick up and run with?

Author’s Bio: Tracy Vides is a content creator and marketer, who loves to blog about subjects as diverse as fashion, technology, and finance. She’s always raring to have a discussion on startups and entrepreneurship. Say “Hi” to her on Twitter @TracyVides. You can also find her on G+ at gplus.to/TracyVides.

Smarter Shoppers: How to Convert on New Buyer Behavior

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By Darren Creasey

Online marketing is an industry that is acutely aware of buyer behaviors and patterns; in fact, many trends in digital marketing are driven by this awareness. The Internet is a positive feedback loop- it has changed the way consumers research, shop, and buy, which in turn shapes how marketers use the web to market to buyers. Do you know how the Internet influences buyer behavior, and how to capitalize on that information? Read on to find out.

1. Shoppers are smarter

One of the best features of the Internet is the accessibility to learning resources that it provides. This is true of product information as well as academic knowledge. Consumers are now taking advantage of this wealth of online resources to learn more about the products and services they are interested in: what their options are, the key differences from each competitor, and what price levels to expect. This smart shopper means that they have an element control over the sales process – they no longer need to wait for your sales presentation to learn the details about your solutions. Instead, you need to be prepared for dealing with a middle of the funnel customer, with knowledge of the product and specific questions, earlier in the buying cycle.

2. Buyers want you to help make them smarter

While a more informed customer might sound like a tough sale at first, it’s important to look at the positives of the situation. A well informed, inquisitive customer will place a lot more value and trust in your brand if you help contribute to their knowledge. Content marketing is a great tool to use here – by publishing information that helps consumers understand your industry, your products, and their options, you are not only demonstrating value to the buyer, but also strengthening your own position as a reputable, knowledgeable company.

3. Consumers are listening online

But buyers aren’t just going to take your word for it. Social media, forums, and other third party online communities help potential customers hear from real users, and can help sway their decisions one way or the other. You should be actively monitoring and engaging in these conversations; you need to know what people are saying about your company, and you need to be ready to jump into a conversation when a question is asked – this is a great opportunity to help educate the customer.

Your turn: how have you changed your strategy to deal with the new, more informed consumer?

Author’s Bio: This article was written by Darren Creasey to inform people about the advantages of online marketing. He believes that through internet marketing techniques, companies can achieve a greater level of success.

Who Is Your Marketing Content Written For?

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By James Ellis

Content marketers love to talk about the power of content. It slices, it dices, it makes unsightly blemishes disappear. Mix some with water to make a paste and it will polish the silver. Content is the cheat code of marketing

But when they talk about content, they usually focus on content that increases lead generation. That’s not a bad thing. We all love new leads. But content can do a number of different things. Content that excites and interests isn’t the same as content that convinces and assures.

So if content works at every level of the sales funnel (and I’m convinced that it can), you need some intentionality.

What do you want this content to do?

Break your sales cycle into stages. Everyone’s funnel is different depending on what book they’re reading at the time, but list every stage. What kind of content will speak to people at each and every single stage?

You might be concerned that your targets won’t know how to find the content for their stage, consider that people in each stage will be looking for different content and will use different terms depending on if they don’t know who you are and if they are trying to validate that you are the correct solution provider. At the awareness stage, their search terms will be about “how to fix…” while their validation stage might be “product name reviews.”

Having killer content at each stage in the sales funnel isn’t an accident. You need to be intentional and build for each stage.

Author’s Bio: James Ellis is a digital strategist, mad scientist, lover, fighter, drummer and blogger living in Chicago. You can reach out to him or just argue with his premise at saltlab.com.