Content Marketing
Content marketing drives brand reputation, audience engagement, and inbound leads. Though content marketing is today’s hot buzzword, the concept dates to the dawn of modern marketing. What is different is our connected information culture and the opportunity for you to find and engage with exactly the right audience—and measure the results.
I help clients with all four aspects of the content marketing model:
Variety: I can help you generate ideas that your audience cares about (not sales pitches or re-posting content from elsewhere) and express them richly. An endless series of one-off blog entries won’t have nearly the impact of a single idea expressed in multiple ways. A webinar can become a transcript, a brochure of highlights, blog articles, a set of infographics, and more. I help you strategize what formats work for any given idea and then help you produce that content. See 42 ways to re-purpose content>>
Copy Writing for our Social and Digital World
Making sure your copy gets seen by relevant audiences is just as important as good writing. Pulitzer Prize winning copy has no value if no one sees it. I create copy with high findability and a clear, motivating brand voice.
More on long form, short form, digital and social media copy writing>>
Video is becoming the dominant form of content. The second most popular search engine is YouTube. 95% percent of consumers better remember video content.. Companies using video enjoy a 41% increase in traffic. Yet many companies don’t use video because of perceived expense and production challenges. We remove both barriers producing high quality web video at affordable prices—at speed–learn more>>.
Repetition: Closely related to variety is repetition. I can help you magnify the impact of your content by ensuring it is consistently seen again and again. Adman Thomas Smith noted the impact of frequency on successful communication back in the 1880s:
The 1st time people look at ad, they don’t see it.
The 2nd time, they don’t notice it.
The 3rd time, they are aware that it is there.
The 4th time, they have a fleeting sense that they’ve seen it before.
The 5th time, they actually read the ad.
The 6th time, they thumb their nose at it.
The 7th time, they get a little irritated with it.
The 8th time, they think, “Here’s that confounded ad again.”
The 9th time, they wonder if they’re missing out on something.
The 10th time, they ask their friends or neighbors if they’ve tried it.
The 11th time, they wonder how the company is paying for all these ads.
The 12th time, they start to think that it must be a good product.
The 13th time, they feel the product has value.
The 14th time, they believe they’ve wanted a product like this for a long time.
The 15th time, they yearn for it because they can’t afford to buy it.
The 16th time, they realize that they will buy it sometime in the future.
The 17th time, they make a commitment to buy the product.
Engagement: When your audience interacts with your content, it spreads your message, enhances understanding, and inspires action. Effective engagement is more than a like:
see it > read it > watch it > hear it > comment on it > share it > debate it > adapt it > use it
Distribution: People have to see your audience has to see your content for it to have any effect. We can help you rank on Google and use dozens of kinds of outreach to get your audience to see and engage with your content.
- Search engine optimization
- Email promotion
- Paid search (Adwords)
- Content placement: (Wikipedia, SlideShare, Quora, Scribd, etc)
- Association pages, lists, community pages/forums, media, events
- Paid display ads and promotions
- Embedded links
- Topic and news connections
- RSS sharing on Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon
- Internal links
- Swarmcasting
- Social posting, group engagement, social ads, social buttons
- Influencer marketing
Note: Influencer marketing doesn’t mean hiring a celebrity. Your best influencers are your own employees, customers, partners and industry connections. Such micro-influencers can have an outsized impact.