Five Rules of Content Marketing
Content marketing works. That simple premise is why more and more marketers are making content marketing a core part of their lead generation strategies. One of the reasons that they work is that providing high-quality content helps build trust and rapport with prospects and customers, making it easier for them to make an eventual purchasing or renewal decision. It’s not a new idea. Early in my career, I worked at Shell Oil Company in Houston, where the “Come to Shell for Answers” booklets were a primary part of our marketing communications budget. Back then, we called it thought leadership marketing, Read More
5 Easy Pieces of Content Marketing Advice
After a recent article on content and influencer marketing, a reader asked for a set of rules they could follow to create their own successful influencer or content marketing campaign, so here they are. These five easy pieces of content marketing advice work whether you apply them to content published in a blog or on a website, to your social media campaigns, or to your email marketing. In fact, we think they’ll work with almost any marketing initiative. Some of them might seem obvious, but you won’t have to look farther than any search engine to find examples of marketers Read More
Content Marketing Increases Despite Skeptics
Digital lead generation through content marketing was once viewed as an expensive and unproven technique. As recently as 2010, surveys showed that up to a third of executives were unsure that the strategies were worth their time according to a recent article by Nicholas Kinports. That’s not far from the results that we got when we surveyed 190 U.S. and Canadian marketers with the title CMO, Vice President, Sr. Vice President, or Director of Marketing several months ago. In our survey, 45% of the marketers surveyed said that they used content marketing as a lead generation tool, but 55% did Read More
Four Landing Page Mistakes to Avoid
A simple landing page with no navigation links, a clear call to action, and just enough “sell” copy to encourage conversion, can improve campaign results dramatically. The clients I work with are in different industries, and they approach online marketing from very different perspectives. The one thing they have in common is that effective landing pages are critical to their success. In fact, the measured ROI on campaigns often governs budget approval for future campaigns, and the design and function of your landing page is critical to your measured ROI. Like many other digital media tools, landing pages weren’t part Read More
Harnessing the Power of Word-of-Mouse
We often promote this blog through press releases and advance copy sent to other bloggers and journalists. Last week, Forbes.com columnist David Coursey surprised us by a draft blog post that quoted him and submitting it to Forbes.com as a guest post. “I had planned to write something about the topic myself, and link back to your blog as the source for some of the information, but I couldn’t think of anything to write except what you’d already put together,” Coursey said. Before we knew it, our blog post was featured on the top “promo bar” on Forbes.com. And instead Read More
Four Marketing Lessons from The Grateful Dead
By Deb McAlister-Holland On April 15, 2010, IDC analysts Frank Gens and Amy Konary presented an executive briefing called The Maturing Cloud: What the Grateful Dead Can Teach Us About Cloud Economics. In addition to IDC’s usual carefully researched data, the webinar included a wealth of thought-provoking information that used analogies from the band’s storied history and correlated it to the technology industry. When I thought about how Gens and Konary used the Grateful Dead analogy to clarify many of the most confusing aspects of cloud computing, I realized that I could apply the same lessons to distributed marketing. In some ways, of Read More
Measuring Earned Media vs. Paid Media
The newest buzz word for engaging current and prospective customers through social media is earned media. It’s measured with the same metrics as traditional paid media (advertising, press releases, telemarketing, direct mail, and email marketing): impressions/audience size, lifts in brand awareness, message awareness, and purchase intent. Quantifying the value of earned media has moved up the priority list as multi-channel marketers have learned that “free” marketing tools like social media aren’t really free. (Yes, it’s free to set up a Facebook page or a Twitter account, but it takes time and dollars to create the strategy, messages, campaigns, and marketing Read More
Email Evolution: New Trends in a Proven Marketing Communications Channel
By Deb McAlister-Holland For nearly 3 decades, I’ve had an email marketing campaign of some kind running every business day. Yes, there was email 30 years ago. In fact, email is 40 years old. Back when I sent my first few campaigns, there wasn’t a lot of commercial email being sent. I worked for a computer company, and the people who got our email were mostly people who had purchased our products. They were happy to get a notice from us about a new toy they could buy to add to their system, or a new software product that was Read More
Marketers Rank Email #1 in Effectiveness
Multi-channel marketing means delivering the right message, to the right audience, at the right time, through the right communications channel. All without blowing the budget. So how do marketers rate marketing channels when it comes to effectiveness? According to 95% of the CMO’s* who responded to The Distributed Marketing Blog’s survey in July, 2011, email is somewhat or very effective. * 190 marketers with the title CMO, Vice President, Sr. Vice President, or Director of marketing answered a July 2011 survey conducted by The Distributed Marketing Blog. The chart shown here summarizes responses to the question: Please rank the marketing communications channels below Read More
Five Social Media Myths that Can Cripple Marketing
When it comes to social media, even the experts learn something new every day. Most CMO’s admit that developing the expertise they need to effectively use social media is a key priority. Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths out there that can derail almost any social media marketing plan. Here are five that come up often in talks with corporate marketing. Make sure you don’t fall for any of them! Myth #1: Social Media is free. Robert Heinlein’s famous motto TANSTAFL applies here, as everywhere else in life. (“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”) Yes, many of Read More
