Online Marketing Blog

Most children are taught at an early age to share and that everything is NOT all about them. It can be a painful life lesson for some to grasp – especially if they don’t pick it up until later in life – but it’s an important one nonetheless.

This particular life lesson also applies to how brands approach content marketing. In the age of brands-as-publishers and empowered consumers, companies need to understand that what they publish cannot only be about themselves.

Why Drop the Me Me Me Act?

Because you don’t want to be “that guy.” You’re so much better than this.

Companies all over the social web are confronted with the need for  ROI in corporate blogging.

Despite blogs being named as more influential than social networks in shaping consumers’ opinions and purchase decisions, many marketers and communicators  are falling short.

Why? A focus on self-promotion has many brands running out of content  ideas and time to show a return on their blog content investment. Tolerance for quantity of content and superficial social engagement metrics as a basis for results is diminishing.

Despite these challenges, blogs provide an incredible content marketing platform for connecting directly with prospects, the media, customers, new employees, investors and the industry at large.

To offer companies a roadmap to realizing these business blogging and content marketing benefits, I will be giving a presentation at the inaugural Social Media Marketing World conference in San Diego on Tuesday, April 9th.

Video has exploded as an online marketing tool over the past few years for B2C marketers. As the interent’s second most popular search engine, YouTube has reduced the barriers to entry to almost nil. As a result, marketers quickly jumped on board with vloggers and other personalities to capitalize on video’s ability to capture and hold the interests of an increasingly attention-deficit consumer.

In fact, video is second only to feature articles as the content marketing tactic with the greatest ROI, according to eMarketer. Video allows marketers to connect with web and mobile customers, across websites, social media and apps, in order to offer targeted information in a visual and auditory format appealing to a wide audience.

The increasing popularity of the visual web as evidenced by the growth of sites like Pinterest and Instagram along with the recent updates to the Facebook News Feed and Google+ cover images has raised the bar on creative content marketing.

Not long ago, it was progressive just to create blog posts and a few social shares every day. Now so many brands have adopted a publisher model for content marketing that the web is flush with content marketing tactics.

Brands are hard pressed to stand out with their content marketing, often taking a “more is better” approach. As David Meerman Scott says, the marketing one hundred is now the marketing ten thousand.

Oprah, Rupert Murdoch Most Influential CEOs in Social Media (or Infographics: This Is How You Do It)

In a brilliant display of content marketing prowess, TopManagementDegrees.com has released a caricature infographic illustrating the 40 CEOs most influential in social media. Oprah tops the list with a Klout score of 92, followed closely by Rupert Murdoch at 91, which just goes to show that social influence is not a popularity contest.

Virgin’s Richard Branson, HDNet’s Mark Cuban, and Jack Dorsey of Square round out the top 5. The top 40 is rife with the usual suspects; tech and marketing CEOs from Twitter, Salesforce, Foursquare, Dell, LinkedIn, etc. One surprising find: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg failed to break the top 50.

Google Analyzes Consumer Device Preferences: Insight Into Mobile Purchasing Journey

Google has just released a blog post and infographic sharing insights into consumer shopping behavior over the recent 2012 shopping season. In many cases, Google said, consumers discovered a business on one device, for example on their smartphone while in a store, and would then engage further with that business on another device at a later time.

It is critical that companies understand the various entry and touchpoints during their customers’ buying journey, then optimize existing and new content to fulfill needs at each point. Your own data will always be most valuable, though the industry trends companies with access to as much relevant data as Google has can be helpful, as well. For example, they found that smartphones were the preferred device for contacting or navigating to a business with 71% of shoppers using a store locator on their phone, while 82% of shoppers used a larger device like PC or tablet for making online purchases. Is your content, whether written, visual or video, currently optimized for mobile formatting and consumption?

One of the most common problems marketers have with content is ideation. This is especially true with companies that have relied on just a few individuals for things like blogging and social promotions. Eventually, people will run out of their own ideas. It is inevitable and a certainty in most cases.

The solution for business content ideation is to be connected to the interests, goals and purchasing journey of the consumer. By knowing the customer lifecycle, content can be planned for each customer segment according the information needs of buyers as they discover, consume and act on content.

Besides that customer centric approach to content planning, there are a variety of opportunities to get ideas in order to be more creative or to surface concepts and stories that are unique. Here are 5 sources that can give marketers useful and practical ideas for serving their customer content marketing needs:

Within the blogging community there’s a substantial number of bloggers that are independent business people and even more that run a personal blog. With the rise and fall and rise again of blogging as an online communications channel there are the expected debates about best practices and such.

One of the debates is around writing content as a stream of consciousness with the assumption that it will attract the audience that it deserves, causing it to be shared and exposed to even more readers.

Then there are the opportunists that seek to scale the reach of their content though blogging by creating processes for generating topics, keyword optimization and social sharing schemes to blast the content everywhere the internet’s sun doesn’t shine.

In just a few weeks, I’ll be making the pilgrimage to London where I will be speaking at the SES London conference about integrated marketing and content, two very hot topics right now.

As the internet marketing industry evolves with innovations in platform technologies and consumer behaviors changing right along, marketers and brands are trying their best to keep up. This is as true in London as it is here in Minneapolis or New York or San Francisco.

Top of mind these days is “content marketing” and a study from Econsultancy and Adobe reports that content marketing is a top digital marketing priority in 2013 for companies worldwide. Another study conducted by Econsultancy & Responsys shows that UK companies are budgeting accordingly with 99% stating they will increase or maintain their content marketing investments in 2013.

Community Manager Appreciation Day Infographic Offers Insight to CM Platforms, Roles & Traits

Women still hold the majority of Community Manager positions, although men are making gains, accounting for 39% across the U.S. This is a marked move towards gender neutrality compared to 2010, when just 31% of Community Managers were male, according to the annual Community Manager Report from Social Fresh. Their data shows that CMs might be more mature, or at least a bit older, than the stereotype indicates: the average age of a CM was 29 in 2011, but expected to reach 32 in 2013.

I am a huge fan of Robert Munsch and have been since he visited our public school, many moons ago, to read to our class the story of The Paperbag Princess. You might remember Munsch from your own childhood; he travelled Canada and the U.S. visiting classrooms and sharing his stories, not because it was a sales driver, but because it was what he loved to do.

If you’re not familiar with his work, Munsch is a popular and much-loved Canadian/American children’s author originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His personal story and professional accomplishments are fascinating, yet it wasn’t until fairly recently that I began to think about how his successes translate so well to marketing.

How to Play the Content Marketing Game

Content marketing software company SocialEars share 14 methods for winning the game of content marketing in this fun infographic. Follow the rules to earn more relevant eyes on your content; be careful, though, over-promotion could result in your company losing the game.

While it’s certainly true that promotion is important, the infographic misses the mark in exactly when this becomes an important consideration. As TopRank CEO Lee Odden has said time and again, the time to think about how a piece of content will be discovered and shared is in its planning. Content promotion should be baked in from idea conception; thinking about how you’re going to get people to read your next big piece after you’ve finished it means you haven’t accounted for your audience’s needs at all in the creative process. You’re already late to the game.