A marketing template is the mandatory design, layout and copy applied to your collateral, whether it’s postcards, brochures, posters, promotional products or websites. Inherent in every template is the ability to customize some, but not all, portions of the collateral. Every industry uses some version of templates. For example, when you buy a car, you choose the color but not the chassis.
A good place to find marketing messages that work is by asking your sources for ideas. Your sources fall into at least two categories: Employees and Customers.
There are too many whitepapers floating around, and most of them are too broad to be effective. Niche marketing with whitepapers is more likely to produce actual sales.
Two companies execute the same inbound marketing strategy in exactly the same way. Each company authors a whitepaper on the same topic. The whitepaper is offered free to a targeted mailing list. The same number of people are intrigued by the offer and request the free whitepaper. Both companies follow up with these prospects in exactly the same way. Yet, one company converts significantly more business than the other. Want to know why?
When content marketing fails, a post-mortem examination of why it failed should start with the content itself. One of the mistakes companies often make is producing content that has no value to its audience because the content is too generic to meet their needs.
Creating a campaign, setting a strategy and articulating goals are the fun parts for most marketers. Sitting down to write the actual content is the hard part. Unfortunately, the quickest way to screw up a content marketing plan is to use content that hasn’t been properly developed.
I’ve been doing some writing for a limousine services company in the area. Specifically, I’m helping optimize their website for search engines. But I got to thinking, how could a content marketing campaign work for them? What would it look like? Given some resources, what could this company do beyond search engine optimization that would set it apart?
When creating a content strategy, one decision marketers make is whether to build a model around proprietary content or aggregated content. Each model has advantages and disadvantages. The model built on aggregated content is typically less expensive but also easily imitated.
A simple way for companies to engage in content marketing is to aggregate and disseminate content of interest to their customers on their website, through e-newsletters, etc. Aggregating content has a few benefits, including low cost and time commitment relative to creating original content.
Getting CEOs of companies to blog or write columns can be extremely challenging, but as part of a content strategy, their writing can have great benefits. Here are just a few quick prompts to help your CEO get started:
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