Content marketing, at its essence, is really just a connection. It’s linking those who know something (subject matter experts) with those who want to know it.
This can be a struggle for some marketers who are trying to generate content, especially in complex fields like healthcare IT or power engineering.
That’s why the subject matter expert is so valuable. The vaunted SME (pronounced “Smee.”) Much more knowledgeable than Captain Hook’s right-hand man, but sometimes as ornery as the ol’ captain himself.
To win him or her over, it helps to immerse yourself in the industry to a level that you have their respect.
But to create quality content, it helps to ask the right questions to get that subject matter expert going. Once you tap the keg of passion in a SME, the party about topics important to the egg industry or Sarbanes-Oxley just never ends.
So, to help you generate content for your blogs, videos, email newsletters, podcasts, whitepapers, and the like, here are five general questions that have helped me throughout my career, as I’ve interviewed SMEs to create content.
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When I went to the movies over the holidays, I saw the preview for the new Steve Carrell movie — “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” — about a magician.
Maybe it’s the fact that a good illusionist has to get the audience to opt in to the performance. Or maybe it’s because the trailer featured many scenes in Las Vegas, site of the upcoming Email Summit 2013.
Either way, it got me thinking of some of the key tactics every email marketer should know. So I turned to MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Handbook – Second Edition to pull out some basics.
For example, while every magician should know The Best Coin Fold and The Mystery of Princess Karnac, every email marketer should know …
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“Should we have a blog? What about YouTube videos? Pinterest? Instagram?”
When engaging in content marketing, the question of “where?” always comes up. If you’re just getting started, you want to know on which channels you should focus your content.
If you’re already deeply engaged in content marketing, you likely want to reevaluate the channels you’ve been using at regular intervals as shiny new channels emerge and old channels diminish. (Social networks, like old soldiers, never die; they just fade away.)
To that end, here is a process for evaluating content channels. I’d love to hear your input, as well.
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It’s always fascinating to dig into research on the world of marketing. While recently looking over the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, I found this chart:
Fast loading mobile pages should certainly be a priority, but one finding in this chart disappointed me. Look way down, close to the bottom, and see where only 11% of surveyed B2B marketers reported planning on using dynamically personalized mobile content to improve relevance and engagement.
I think this is a great oversight on the part of marketers active in the mobile marketing channel.
When someone interacts with your mobile website — or your regular website — on a mobile device, that engagement is almost certainly going to be a more intimate experience than someone viewing on a laptop or ultrabook, and certainly more so than on a desktop.
And, that person is very possibly interacting with your content in a more personal space than a dedicated work area or desk.
For B2B marketers, that means you are potentially reaching that person away from a traditional business setting.
Additionally, consumer marketers must consider the possibility that the mobile customer might even be actively shopping and engaging in showrooming, where they are in a brick-and-mortar store and looking at price or feature comparisons.
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This time last year, we put together the top 11 posts of the MarketingSherpa Blog for 2011, and social media marketing easily dominated the list. In 2012, email marketing put up a good fight, but social media marketing along with other inbound strategies and tactics still took the gold.
This year’s list focused on three areas: inbound, email and customer-centric marketing. Along with a brief summary of each post, you’ll also find some interesting tweets about select posts. Read on for 2012’s most popular MarketingSherpa Blog posts, as determined by your peers.
Inbound Marketing
Blog Awards: The 13 best marketing industry blogs (according to you)
Our top post of 2012 shared the results of the MarketingSherpa Reader’s Choice Awards, where we announced the 13 winning blogs, in a variety of categories, as decided by you, the MarketingSherpa Blog audience.
“If you’re looking for information to help you improve performance and advance your career, check these blogs out,” said Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, in the post.
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In the MarketingSherpa 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report (free excerpt at that link), we asked …
Q: How much do you expect your organization’s mobile marketing budget to change from 2012 to 2013?
Click to enlarge
A combined 71% of respondents said they would see budget increases, with over half of those reporting increases seeing more than 10%.
While this is great news for many marketing teams, it’s also a tough challenge: Mobile is still a new channel with several unknowns. So today’s MarketingSherpa blog post will share our discoveries in the hopes that our findings can aid your strategy planning efforts for the upcoming year.
I sat down with Benjamin Filip, Research Manager, Data Sciences, MECLABS, and a lead data analyst for the report, for a look at what we can learn from the data to help you get the best use of your (hopefully bigger) mobile budget.
“It really depends on what an organization’s goals are,” Benjamin said. “Some factors to consider in planning how to spend a bigger budget are usage, effectiveness and difficulty.”
According to the data below, from the 2012 Mobile Marketing Benchmark Report, when comparing the factors of usage, effectiveness and difficulty, we can find some good opportunities. For example, our respondents reported “Includes video content” as a highly effective tactic that is not very difficult to implement, yet it is not highly utilized.
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One buzz word/phrase that became very popular in business circles this year was “big data.” And, even though the term is trendy and probably overused, the overall concept has major implications for marketers.
Marketers are awash in campaign data, more so now than ever before. Email marketing campaigns produce data about open rates, clickthroughs, unsubcribes, and more. Visitor activity on company websites can be tracked, and in the case of registered users or leads flagged for scoring, that activity is not only tracked but also attributed to a particular individual.
Elements tracked can include the website visit itself and activities such as downloading Web content or watching embedded video. That tracking can get pretty granular, such as combining a series of website activities, or exactly where in an embedded video the viewer stopped the playback.
Taken as discrete pieces, all these data points are essentially meaningless. Taken together, they can provide insight into the tracked individual. Furthermore, subjected to deeper analysis, they can provide insight into what the most promising prospect or customer with the most long-term value looks like for the company.
This is where predictive analytics come into play. To provide more insight into predictive analytics and big data, I interviewed Omer Artun, CEO and founder of AgilOne, a cloud-based predictive marketing intelligence company. Omer also has an academic background in pattern recognition, data mining and complex systems.
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Thinking of businesses during the holiday season often conjures up the image of Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge, building his fortune a penny at a time and miserly clutching every one. The uncanny number of movie versions of the tale usually perpetuate this, with an updated Ebenezer being a stingy CEO or mogul – see Bill Murray in Scrooged.
But, for many companies in the marketing industry, the truth is much closer to the old Jimmy Stewart classic, It’s a Wonderful Life – people building a business by working hard while balancing the profits of business and goodwill.
World Synergy is an online marketing firm based out of Cleveland, Ohio, going into its 16th year of business. It provides a real-life example of how companies are integrating giving back with business as usual.
Toys for Tots has been the charity of choice for World Synergy, and Facebook the chosen outlet for the give-back campaign “Likes for Tikes.”
“It is an outreach opportunity for us. … We wanted to get engaged with our current customer base and our employees’ friends and family,” said Glenn Smith, President and CEO, World Synergy. Read more…
Most email marketing campaigns (but not all) focus on three goals:
- Getting the recipient to open the email
- Taking the next step by following the call-to-action in the email
- Clicking through to the final destination, which is often a specific landing page on the website with an action to be taken, such as filling out a registration form
The key performance indicators for email marketing are often open rate and clickthrough rate, and then that final conversion on the website, which can take a number of different forms. A consumer marketing email effort might seek out an immediate purchase, where as a B2B campaign might look for additional information on the email subscriber to more fully populate a database record.
Of course, the key to any email marketing program is getting the recipient to take that first action – opening the email. Without an open, there can be no clickthrough and certainly no final conversion on the website.
With that in mind, improving email open rates should be a priority for email marketers. Based on tweets as a very loose metric, MarketingSherpa Blog posts like “Infographic: Email open rates by time of day,” published at the end of October, and “Email Personalization: 137% increase in open rate from personal note approach,” from a couple of weeks ago, show email open rate is a popular topic with our audience.
To offer our blog readers more on email open rates, I had the chance to speak with Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD and Software Advice Advisory Board Member. Read more…
