What Great Brands Do That Good Brands Don't in Content Marketing
Okay content is easy. Killer content is hard. This nifty eBook shows you the difference, based on our real-world work with dozens of brands. A must-read!
Guest post from Russ Henneberry, who writes, speaks and executes on content marketing plans for small businesses. He writes a daily blog about how tiny businesses can make mighty profits using a personal computer, a little imagination and a few well placed dollars.
The shift in marketing dollars from traditional advertising mediums to the emerging media available to us via the Internet has more to do with the customers’ behavior than the seller.
Many businesses today are holding onto the hopes that this is all a fad, that this will all go away. Then they can go back to business as usual.
Marketing was much easier when it was controllable. It was much easier when all you had to worry about was getting an average product out to market and ensure that the 4 P’s of Marketing were evident in your ad. It was much easier when the company steered the conversation.
We (the consumer) like these “emerging” types of marketing mediums better than the old ones.
We are no longer consumers of only the products/services provided by a company but also of the marketing content that these companies create. When “new” marketing is done right, it is willingly consumed and not force fed to us.
We like that.
Today, we are looking for one thing in the content that we consume online — whether it is high-dollar marketing content created for the Coca Cola Facebook page or just a personal blog post written by our Aunt Sophie — we are looking for VALUE.
Content can give us value by (among other things):
For example, if you are a CPA and you publish a [well researched and well written] article to your website called…
10 Tax Deductions Uncle Sam Wishes You Didn’t Know About
I will grab the spoon and willingly engage with your business. After all, you could make me money, save me time, protect me and educate me with this article.
As consumers of products/services and also marketing content we are also interested in something else — D.I.S.
We want our marketing content to be:
When considering the mediums you will use to market your business, consider D.I.S.
Below is a graphic that places marketing mediums and tools where I believe their strengths lie on the D.I.S. model
Certainly today, all of these tools and mediums can be made to be discoverable, interactive and shareable — but I wanted to point out that each tool and (in some cases medium) has inherent strengths and weaknesses in this model. For instance, a static web page on a site can be shareable but it is certainly not a strength of a static page. A Facebook profile update is very shareable. However, that Facebook profile update is not inherently discoverable by search engines — creating a weakness for that tool.
This model is a work in progress, I would like you to help me make it better. What major tools am I missing in this model? Where do they belong?
Okay content is easy. Killer content is hard. This nifty eBook shows you the difference, based on our real-world work with dozens of brands. A must-read!