Content marketing

Currently Content Marketing is being described as the Holy Grail as Outbound marketing (email – and direct mail campaigns, online- and print advertising) are getting less effective.

Target marketing

While marketers have been using targeted Outbound Marketing to specific target segments of their markets, Content Marketing fails quite often and is in most cases rather very generic: the content should attract interested parties and then generate enough interest from them in order to contact you.
However the latter is failing as only up to 3 percent of all people reading your content will ever contact you. In most cases this will be even less. Hence you will need very compelling, interesting and to the point content for each target marketing segment in order to bring down the walls of not contacting you or your company. Your Content Marketing should present a situation that is fully recognizable to each of our target segments. Your audience should feel you completely understand their problem, issues or situation.

Authority

Moreover your Content Marketing should bring you, your editor or your company forward as an authority in the matters related to the business or industry you sell to. People should no longer think you are working for a vendor or supplier company, but get the perception of a knowledgeable party with authority in the business or industry. As industry and business have multiple target market segments with slightly different issues, problems and challenges, each of them should be addressed by your Content Marketing.

Creating and measuring content

Thus use the business cases of your sales successes for a start, additionally study and analyze the industry and business you are selling to for creating interesting content by target market segment.
Once your content has been published its’ effectiveness should be measured in order to know its’ effectiveness.

How effective is your Content marketing?

The soft learning method fails

How hard you try or how well you prepared and organized the sales meeting for presenting the new products, the remaining of knowledge about the new product after the meeting will be minimal. Motivating the salesmen for new products is hard to do.

They have four reasons:
- New is unproven: reliability, first version problems
- New is more work to explain to customers: thus lesser ROI for the salesman
- New could require to address different people in companies
- New business means new effort to generate leads

The soft learning method isn’t effective.

The hard learning method

In order to get your salesmen to learn fast is to confront them with a prospect for the new product. You should find at least one lead or prospect in order to get your new product going.
As the meeting is set, he then needs to look into the product presentation in order to know at least a bit about the product and the product it solves. Additionally he will be happy having a product sheet or documentation on the solution.

During the meeting he will be challenged by questions he never had expected and probably can’t answer all of them.
This puts him under pressure as sales stands for commission. So he will do his utmost to find answers to the questions and will stat to see the complete picture of the new offering.

In case the prospect moves on through the funnel or when the salesman succeeds in closing the sale, this will stimulate the other salesmen enormously.

Salesmen have their fastest learning curve when a prospect shows interest (chance for commission) and starts asking questions.

Of course the best is to have more than one lead in order to have more than one salesman getting confronted.

How good are you at getting to sell new products ?

During the DotCom era most companies got a website and believed they would be cool, become credible and successful instantly. Of course having a website wasn’t enough to be successful on the Internet.

The same is happening over again as companies have been going into Social Media by starting a blog, getting a page on Facebook and tweeting Tweets on Twitter. Social Media marketing has been portrayed as being cool for companies.
However Social media Marketing is more complex and requires more effort than just having some corporate or new product content on a blog, a Facebook page about the company and Tweets about the company, the CxO’s or the products.
Hence most companies made the same error again: they went with the flow (or trend) to be cool but didn’t questioned what was required to be successful in Social Media, just like they forgot to investigate how to be successful on the WorldWideWeb as it was call before the turn of the century.

1. Target customer audience
For a start you need to know your target customer audience. Who are your customers and your potential customers. Moreover you should know who amongst them would ever read or see any content on Social Media.
If you mainly sell to CxO’s of large traditional corporations, it is unlikely your Social media Marketing will ever have any effect or success.

2. Content
You need to have interesting content that will be interesting for your target audience. Not content that gets interest from people that are not from your potential customers group.
make sure your Content Marketing addresses your customers or potential customers.

3. Realism
Getting a lot of interest or comments from people who will never buy from you is only blurring the reality as you think you a scoring with your Social Media marketing, but in reality you are just wasting your time and effort.

4. Editing
Your content has to be written or presented in an appealing or pleasant way. Even the best and interesting content badly written or presented without imagination will score much lesser or even get hardly any interest.

5. Entertaining
People on Social Media will find information and select what they want to read or see and will decide nearly every second if they will continue to consume the information or not.
if your information is not utterly important or life threatening – which is in most cases – your content needs to be entertaining in order to keep the attention of your audience.

6. Measure
Whenever a company invests, thus also in marketing, it needs to calculate the Return On Investment.
Probably this is hard to achieve with precise numbers and amounts of sale, but at least you should try to measure if you reach your target audience or not.

Once having a website was cool, now posting content through Social media is cool, but in the end only lead generation, sales, generating revenue and making a profit are the real cool things in business.

How cool is your company in Social Media ?

Bought email list

Would you shoot with a machine gun at a herd that someone else has driven together? You would have no clue or certainty what animals are in the herd. Chances are you would be shooting the wrong animals.

This is what happens when you execute an email campaign using a list bought from a provider when you send out a massive email campaign. You haven’t got the slightest clue of their interest, requirement and timing.

Email interested parties only

If instead you would be able to use a sniper rifle and could aim at only the specific species you need that are coming to your bait. That would be more effective.
Your website is your bait as it contains content that attracts the people from companies that are from your target group.
After qualification as suspect why not re-target by email companies these companies that have visited your website and that have shown interest in your products by their visit, pages visited and returning visits?

Still marketers in companies buy email lists while at the same time interested parties are visiting the company website.
Is it because buying email lists is easier?
Or because the lack of awareness of these new type of solutions?
Or because it is just too obvious to re-target your visitors by email?

Do you buy lists and why ?

The hype times of blogging

A few years ago, when the blogging hype was raging, it was important to have your blog listed and rated high on Technorati. It was not granted to all blogs to feature on Technorati. It became an achievement to be listed and your blogs’ influence ranked. It was a privilege to be proud off.

There were even “Technorati Tags” for indexing your content and blog posts by Technorati.

The decline of interest in blogs

Now the interest has decreased dramatically (according to the Compete chart).

Is blogging or the interest in blogs on the decline ? as the same trend is visible for Alltop which is also an aggregation of all kinds of blogs – but less selective.

As the hype and the interest for blogging has declined significantly, is then the goal of blogging for marketing purposes still valid ?

Is your company still blogging ?

Do You Remember
When We Fell In Love
We Were Young
And Innocent Then
Do You Remember
How It All Began
It Just Seemed Like Heaven
So Why Did It End?
Remember The Time – Michael Jackson

Convincing the CxO for social media marketing

Marketing analysts, marketing guru’s and marketing bloggers have all long praised the use of social media for company marketing. This will have convinced most of the Marketing managers but what about the ever hesitant CxO level business executives?
How can you as Marketing manager convince your CxO?
Well NOT!

Awareness social media

If you have to convince the CxO level, you will never get real support.
All the CxO’s in the world have heard about Social media: at least they are aware of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn thanks to TV news and the press. They probably even have experienced it themselves or their relatives.
Awareness doesn’t mean they are interested or see the benefit.

Social Media Battle Field

Hence even if you manage to convince them to approve to use social media for company marketing, then they will be ready to shoot you on the Social Media Battle Field at the first glitch of problems or issues. They will never ever be on board with you for social media marketing. Forget it. Else the Social Media Battle Field becomes your war.

It is better not to try to change the mind of your CxO about social media marketing.

Be prepared for social media marketing

However be prepared for the case your CxO asks why you aren’t using social media marketing as then someone else has influenced and convinced them of the use of social media.
In that case it is not you. It is not your war.

Is your CxO in favor of social media marketing ?

Air miles for loyalty

The goal of air miles was to get loyal frequent travelers who could redeem their air miles gathered throughout the year to have a city-trip or family holiday at a low price.
However booking flights with the collected air miles was always hard to do and many constraints were imposed upon like blackout dates). All this became very time consuming and nerve racking.
Additionally you still had to pay for the Government (embarkation, aviation,…) taxes, authority and airport charges which typically are between 25% and 35% of the total cost.

Low-cost airlines

As the low-cost airlines (Ryanair, Easyjet, Air Berlin, Southwest Airlines, jetBlue, airTran Airways) have developed their network to many holiday destinations, made it easy to book online without any hassle (or stupid constraints) and you could be paying much less than the additional charges still imposed when using air miles, so why would anyone still be interested in gathering air miles ?
The only remaining benefit is using them for an upgrade in case of an intercontinental flight (if you have enough air miles).

Discount airlines have taken the lead.

Obsolete air miles

Air miles have become irrelevant and a thing of the past. Air-travel is no longer an expensive means of transportation but the cheaper way to travel compared to car or train.
Time to dump all these complex air mile schemes that nobody understands fully and are hard to benefit from. Moreover require additional administration and handling (at check in) and have an additional cost due to the call operators at the booking desks explaining why certain rules apply or not for redeeming the air miles.

The biggest set-back of air miles might be the customer dissatisfaction when he finds out his air miles are more or less useless. Totally obsolete.

Your brand loyalty scheme

The same could apply to the brand loyalty scheme your company uses for your customers.
- Is this scheme still interesting for your customers ?
- Is it still up-to-date ?
- Is there still a benefit for the customer ?
- What does it cost to maintain your loyalty scheme ?
Make sure your loyalty scheme doesn’t dissatisfy your customer !

Most people don’t want to register for the download of a white paper.

If they are asked for registration a large part simply clicks away to the next link in Google search. Those who do register often use web email addresses which they use for diverting all email marketing and possible spam emails.
As a result your harvest of useful email addresses is limited and the distribution of your marketing message is even more limited.

Without registration most people that have found your white paper will download it and after reading will distribute it further when they find your content interesting for their colleagues, peers, partners and friends. This way your marketing message gets distributed but you have no clue who your readers are.

You could argue that if your white paper is interesting enough, they will contact you anyway. People who contact you are more likely to end up working with you with less effort compared to people that were lured into giving their email addresses. They gave their email address because they wanted the white paper, not because they wanted to do business with you.

Still, some of us are hunters and like to chase leads instead of sitting idle by the fireplace waiting for them to drop in.

You could include a link to a specific page on your website which you describe with a teasing title within your white paper, catching the visits of most interesting parties. All you need now is a web service that reveals the companies visiting this page, keeps track of further pages visited and informs you about all visits (and future revisits) from every company. Often, this will give you more lead intelligence than that bunch of free web email addresses you captured on your white paper registration form.

It is probably better to remove the white paper registration as the benefits of the white paper distribution without registration can be far higher.

What are your experiences with forced compared to voluntary/no registration?
If you are using forced registration now, would you want to try voluntary/no registration?

It seems there are many definitions of leads.
Apparently people, departments and companies (vendors) use different opinions on what a lead is exactly, such as:

- A lead is qualified prospect
- A lead is a prospect with buying behavior
- A lead is the stage after suspect
- A lead is a person on an opt-in list

For marketing, any contact that can lead to a sale is a lead.
As far as sales is concerned, a lead is anyone who has demonstrated commitment to a purchase and has a valid project in place or planned.

The definition of what Lead generation is supposed to be is even worse as it ranges from list building, opt-in lists to leads from trade shows or websites.

In order to avoid all confusion why not use two different definitions:
- Suspect: person or company that seems to be interested but not yet in their purchase cycle.
- Prospect: person or company that is fully qualified and has a budget.
- Sales opportunity: person or company in their buying cycle evaluating and eliminating different solutions and vendors

Using these definitions we segregate:
- People who have shown interest by for example online form completion, an email for information, an encounter on a trade show or a website visit
From
- People with a need for the solution being offered, planning or a goal for implementation, a budget to support this purchase and implementation and the authority to make the decision.

In any case the final goal is generating sales, but all possible stages and formats before this can be a lead.

The blogging hype: Blog until you drop

One blogging for business was cool.
At the height of the blogging hype bloggers and consultants advised to blog at least once a day – preferably several times a day. Just like the leading bloggers with thousands of subscribers did.
Moreover the search engines drove people to publish as much content as possible as this influenced the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) ranking in searches for the blog or website. The more frequent and more quantity of content – the more importance was given by the search engines to the website.
The more content – the more focus on keywords for SEO.

Hence blog until your drop.

Frequent blogging issues

The 4 problems:
- Even the best bloggers aren’t capable to write interesting things or give interesting views and perspective on events happening in the world or an industry every day.
- People don’t have the time to read all the content produced
- The more content produced by one person the lower the quality
- Finding the good content amongst all of the content published becomes cumbersome

If professional bloggers aren’t capable of producing valuable content at a high frequency, how could non-professional bloggers like CEO’s or CTO’s be able to write at that speed ? They have a company to run in the first place and they don’t have so much interesting to tell.

Blogging after the hype

Now the blogging hype has passed by, we notice bloggers are publishing a blog post once a week. Some even indicate they want to produce a high quality content blog post only once a month.

Still the best is to produce interesting content every day, but as a sole blogger that isn’t possible. When a blog is written and edited by a group of people it is feasible to have posts every day or even have multiple posts a day. Still even for them maintaining quality content will remain a challenge.

Posting once a month and people will forget about you and your blog.
Once a week keeps people interesting but you have to make sure each of your blog posts stands out of the crowd.
Twice or 3 times a week allows you to overcome the problem of one lesser blog post each week. Besides it is hard to know upfront what will be a hit blog post and what will be a laggard or unappreciated. Hence two or tree blog posts a week eliminates the laggards.

Do you or your company still blog ?
How many blog posts a month ?
How many subscribers ?