content marketing

Content Marketers Should Adopt Newsroom Habits

By now, it’s clear that what it means to be a marketer has changed. As a discipline, marketing is more data-driven, more dependent on technology, more accountable to outcomes.

But the nature of the work has also changed. Yesterday’s campaign-driven projects with their long lead times, well defined scope and clearly delineated beginnings and ends are giving way to something more organic and continuous, something more fluid, even improvisational.

But marketing organizations, by and large, are still organized around a campaign-driven cadence.

As part of the adaptation, marketing leaders are often told their organizations should look more like newsrooms. But what in the world does that mean?

newsroom

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The Nine Letter Word Every Marketer Needs To Remember At All Times

On December 16th of last year I posted a collection of predictions for the coming year from and for the marketing and advertising world. The fearless forecasters I gathered together shared their insights into what they think lies ahead in the coming year and they did so with a twist. They were asked to not only provide a prognostication but to do so with a pop culture reference attached to it.

It turned out to be a lot of fun and I highly recommend you read it. Not because I wrote it. On the contrary, I recommend you read it for it provides a collection of wisdom from the best and brightest minds today, all in one place.number 9

Now the reason I preface my article with all this is due to the fact that my prediction then ties in precisely what I want to talk about today. My foretelling spoke of the need to go back to the beginning, as Inigo Montoya (my pop culture reference) stated so eloquently in the film The Princess Bride.

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Building Customer Relationships with Branded Story-Telling

Brand-story-300x169There are some new buzzwords in marketing going around, everything from “Collaborative Marketing” to “Relationship Marketing,” and even “Branded Content.” But what do those phrases really mean and how can today’s businesses take advantage of them?

Well, we all know that consumers are becoming more and more contemptuous of push advertising, which has traditional marketers scrambling to find a magic bullet to replace it. But with what? When social came along and marketers mistakenly tried to force push advertising messages there, the failures were huge.

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Moneyball For Sales And Marketing (Infographic)

I know what you’re thinking, Steve’s writing about Moneyball only because of the incredible physical similarities between himself and Brad Pitt – who starred in the movie of the same name.

Well, Mr. Pitt’s and my striking resemblances aside, the reason for my article is to share with you something I discovered that ties in the concept of Moneyball with sales and marketing. Now for those of you who are not familiar with the term “Moneyball” please allow me to explain.

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Using Branded Content In Your Content Marketing Arsenal

Regardless of what mediums are in your content marketing arsenal: mobile marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, direct mail, outdoor, and on and on – “branded content has the ability to create brand differentiating by bridging the gap between TV’s emotive power and digital media’s efficient reach.”

The reason for the quotes is that line comes directly from a recently-released Forrester report entitled How To Build Your Brand With Branded Content.

Penned by Forrester Research Principal Analyst Tracy Stokes, the report is chock-full of valuable insight and while stating, as mentioned previously, that branded content offers brands the opportunity to differentiate themselves – “marketers are struggling to build content at scale — to get the right message to the right consumer at the right time.”

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Chevy Proves Long Form Content Marketing On A Mobile Device Can Work

When it comes to content marketing the prevailing thought among marketers is that the longer the content the less likely it will be used on a mobile device. The thought being that people will not engage with long form content marketing on a mobile device thus that type of content is best served on a PC.

Well based on the results of a recent joint campaign between Chevy and mobile media company Zumobi, marketers may want to rethink long form content marketing and its potential use on mobile devices.

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SlideShare: The Quiet Giant Of Content Marketing

Marketers and advertisers the world over are constantly trying to find the “next big thing.” The one thing that will allow them to stand out from the crowd. Back in the day of course it was TV, radio and direct mail or email for example. Then came the digital revolution and mobile marketing and social media marketing took center stage – and rightly so.

Today, it’s content marketing.

While all the aforementioned mediums remain and always will be key players in any integrated marketing communications campaign, clearly content marketing is the next big thing – at least for right now.

And a major tool in the content marketing arsenal may be one that many of you have heard of and visited, but perhaps have not used to date – SlideShare.

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The Decline of Machines – Why Social Media is not Technology and Vice Versa

Originally posted at Collective Bias Blog 

by 

Most of today’s senior business leaders and marketers developed much of their perspective during the dot com boom of the late 90s and early 2000s. It is little wonder then that when approaching social marketing the solution for most folks is rooted in technology.  The same with most start-ups that are still pursuing the model of aggregating a huge audience, using “Big Data” to spot patterns of groups and selling ads. People buy more stuff and we get a ridiculous valuation.

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How to create a content marketing plan — without any content!

When somebody talks about “content marketing,” they’re really talking about “content engineering” — scientifically optimizing documents such as blogs, case studies and white papers to create search engine results and sales leads.

This can be an extremely complicated, time-consuming and expensive proposition! So I started thinking about this in the context of my friends and small business customers who simply can’t afford that kind of effort. It led to this idea: micro-content, or marketing content when you don’t have time to produce content!

Let’s examine ideas about micro-content that even a time-starved business owner should be able to master in 15 minutes a day …

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