Content Is King In Marketing

Sam Harrelson on July 12, 2013

Coca Cola’s marketing agency (evidently) has a magnificent video on their content strategy for the next 7 or so years:

It’s an in-depth look at what Coca-Cola wants to do to grow its content marketing strategies over the next couple of years and leverage the idea of storytelling via social media. Rather than try and dominate by doing everything themselves, CC also wants to use consumer stories to drive their brand success. The video also has some great examples of other companies that have done this successfully. Go watch the whole thing.

SixRevisions also has a great post about creating and maintaining good content now and in the future:

Content is All That Matters on the Web (SixRevisions.com): “Instead of aiming for a spectacular one-time-big-time viral success, it’s necessary to build a solid foundation and plan for the long haul. It can take months, even years, to develop an effective content strategy.”

Rather than try and create something yourself that will go “viral”, tap into existent spaces, memes, trends, etc for your own needs. Take advantage of what’s already on the web and build on it for the long haul rather than trying to aim to create something that will be relevant for x amount of time and then fade out. It’s not worth it and your business is more valuable than that.

Todd Crawford the Podcast

Sam Harrelson on June 17, 2013

Todd Crawford joins Sam for 45 minutes of fascinating talk about domains, online marketing, mustard bbq and knives (and what exactly Impact Radius is doing today and in the next few years).

There’s a different performance marketing landscape in 2013 and Todd has a great vision of what might lie ahead for networks, advertisers, agencies and publishers.

Fascinating.

(Cross published with our Thinking.FM network and about 45 mins and change)

Why Content Is Important for Your Marketing

Sam Harrelson on June 16, 2013

Whether you’re creating unique content or curating existing content into forms that your viewers/users/readers will find relevant, having some notion of a content development strategy is essential to doing successful business on the web going forward.

The PR World’s Play For Content Marketing Clout – Holmes Report: “I just cannot envision how any organisation cannot have a content-first approach to their communications, whether’s it’s for reputation management or marketing purposes,” states Perry. “Clients are attracted to some of the shiny object stuff – what’s far less sexy but more important is making sure your organization is oriented to a new way of doing business.”

Folks like Scott Jangro talk a great deal about content marketing (and curation) as a rapidly growing channel for marketers, advertisers and publishers to find solid footing in what can often feel like a topsy-turvy media landscape.

The real trick to understanding content marketing is that there is no one template for doing it right. Content marketing is a very subjective exercise and should be carefully planned (even if you’re doing spontaneous events or collecting and curating web media for your audience in a “real-time” manner).

As the interesting article above points out, content marketing is becoming essential across various channels of advertising from PR to branding and leaving this variable out of the equation will cost you in the long-term. It’s a major part of what we mean when we talk about discovery marketing.

Original link via Steve Rubel on Twitter

The Golden Gut Exists

Sam Harrelson on June 13, 2013

Why Don Draper Shouldn’t Be Your Ad Guy – Forbes: “As appealing as Don Draper’s (and your in-house guru’s) perfect instincts are, they are indeed fiction. Even experts often fail to correctly predict which ad will perform better than other ads. Chris Goward, founder & CEO of WiderFunnel and author of You Should Test That notes, ‘In every presentation I give to marketers, I ask them to vote on which test variation won. Remember, these are the cream of the crop of digital marketers. In most cases, their gut intuition is wrong.”

I would disagree with this.

As would Steve Jobs… sometimes you get what you pay for and you get a passionate person who knows that if you asked enough people what they wanted in a car, you would have gotten “faster horses” as a response.

There’s room for testing but don’t forget the innovators and the crazy ones.

We love data and testing. But we love guts, intuition, the liberal arts and humanity even more.

“The people who think they are crazy enough to change the world are the ones that do.”

Shareist Renames Notebooks to Projects

Sam Harrelson on June 13, 2013

Renaming Notebooks to Projects, Plus Copying Pages & Element Aliases: “This morning in Shareist, we are changing what we call Notebooks. When we started Shareist, the term Notebooks made sense, but as we added Inboxes, team collaboration, and other features, the metaphor started to fall apart.

We are now calling them Projects, which is a term that lends itself much more toward the direction that Shareist has gone. We think creating a project to manage a website, or a client, or a topic, makes much more sense. Each project has an inbox, and pages, a public website, and potentially a team of collaborators.”

 

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Great news.

We use Shareist a great deal internally as a mixed Basecamp and Omnifocus.

That sounds wonky at first if you think of Shareist as something between Evernote and WordPress, but for us Shareist has been more of a project management system over the past few months than anything else.

The real beauty of Shareist is that it captures images, texts, videos etc from the web so easily and allows them to be ported out to the right place at the right time within the confines of certain projects (or what were formally notebooks).

It’s like Basecamp with social integration (and don’t bring up the bloated Hootsuite platform that is a total lock-in).

It’s great to see the Shareist team embracing a more pro-sumer future. I think there just might be something there for them as more and more companies and agencies will need the type of tools to do social and content marketing that are present in Shareist.

Email as the Ultimate Social Network

Sam Harrelson on June 5, 2013

I can’t agree more that email is the real social glue that binds together the social web, for better or worse.

If you want to have a company that has successful social media presence(s), make sure you’re also doing due diligence with tools such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, Aweber or iContact to ensure the best results over time.

We love and swear by MailChimp but folks like Shawn Collins do the same with Aweber because of its performance marketing features.

Whatever you chose to use, include email as a part of your social media strategy (the linchpin of such a strategy we would say).

Email is, honestly, the greatest marketing tool ever concocted by humans in our opinions (and from looking at our aggregate data):

Email is still the glue that holds the social Web together | TechHive: “But don’t forget that email isn’t just the oldest social network, it’s also the biggest, the broadest, the most user-controllable, the most integrated, the most powerful and ultimately the best social network on the Internet.”

What Does Your Brand Stand For?

Sam Harrelson on May 30, 2013

I’ve asked this question of our clients so many times… “What exactly does your brand stand for so that we can do the best job of marketing that meaning to people who need to hear it?”

The answer I frequently get is “um, well, that’s why we hired you.”

Hiring a marketing agency to help you with getting the word out about your products, services, apps or ideas is a great step but should come after your company has a clear identity. We help folks develop brand strategies, but don’t confuse that with marketing and advertising.

Seth has a good first step for every company to take…

Seth’s Blog – “What does your brand stand for?”: Make a list of the differences and the extremes and start with that. A brand that stands for what all brands stand for stands for nothing much.

Why Email Marketing Still Matters

Sam Harrelson on May 26, 2013

I got my start in online marketing in 2002 working for an email marketing group in Columbia, SC. I was fresh out of an Ivy League masters program with a degree in ancient religion and literature (and some archaeology experience). Needless to say, that wasn’t a highly valued skill set for a 22 year old just moving to South Carolina.

However, those years I spent with that email marketing (eventually affiliate and search marketing) company were the perfect trial-by-fire for finding my legs in the wider world of performance marketing. I realized some very important things about online marketing in general and email marketing specifically. It was a great education in the various ways of doing agency business in a post 9/11 but pre CAN-SPAM world of glitzy conferences, making lifelong connections and getting deals done with great agility and detail.

Although “the long tail” is a term that has lost much of its 2007 cache, there is still a great amount of truth to the term within the concept of online marketing. I’ve argued to clients and friends over and over that email is (and will continue to be) a very long term prospect of increasing returns over time in a world of short-lived Twitter and Facebook promoted posts as advertising.

The SumAll folks have a great post laying out a similar argument and some nice tips you should read at the end…

Why E-mail Marketing is More Valuable Than Ever – SumAll – Blog: “It’s been a widely held notion that after you’ve sent out your campaign, you have 12 hours to get the most opens you can before your e-mail is lost in inbox limbo. But based on our research, e-mails have a much longer tail than people are aware of. “

Whatever marketing channel you’re using, email is a great compliment and something you should bake in early in your campaigns.