From Fast Company Too many tech companies I've worked with focus their marketing energies on telling buyers what they do. The problem? It's nothing more than a boring list of features that doesn't engage the audience. The idea of storytelling is all about using a story to get them to become emotionally connected. The brain is wired for stories - it's the very reason movies as a medium have withstood well over 100 years of success with no end in sight. We love a good story. A

So you posted a blog article, no doubt spouting out some magnificent thought leadership that will change the way the industry thinks about the need for your product. And then, like most companies, you do nothing else with it. Why? That's some really great writing and content! My guess is you have no strategy of what else to use blog content for. Here are a few useful ideas of great uses for blog content. Email Marketing - Not everyone who is a prospect or customer is hitti

I recently finished a project with a client where the focus was to empower partners with every piece of content we could think of so they can focus on selling the product to the end-customer. I was so pleased to take on the project - having been a reseller in a past life, it was refreshing to see a vendor actually focus on building materials to make the parter's life easier. I've worked at a number of tech companies, each with a "partner program" (I use quotes because that te

From SearchEngineWatch.com Content without analysis is meaningless. It's just a bunch of words about a topic. Given that the purpose of content marketing is to provide valuable content to your prospective customers in order to drive customer actions, it's important to measure the response against the actions you thought you would receive and determine if your content needs to change, increase or decrease. The four areas the article author, Uri, points out are as follows with

From Content Marketing Institute Most of you are heads down, pumping out content and creative, bringing in leads, even doing some analysis, but it's not as effective as it could be. Jay Hidalgo breaks down three processes that every marketing team should find time to do in order to improve the quaity and effectiveness of their work. I'll spoil the article a but with the list: Develop a buyer persona. Define the buying process. Develop a content framework. The most important

From Designmodo I'm working on a few projects currently (and can remember quite a few in the past) where the content has great intent, but the execution on the customer experience is all out of whack. Sometimes, it's simply the presentation of the webpage, email or blog post. And sometimes it's the entire customer experience within a journey that spans a few marketing mediums. In either case, do it wrong and you've lost the opportunity to convert that prospect into a customer

From Forbes Modern marketing teams are focused on generating content that engages the customer and causes them to respond. So content is the what's being said. Social Media channels become the where and how you you are getting your message across. The last part of the 'conversation' is what's being said to you. And that's where listening comes into play. In the case of this article, John Foley of Oracle is writing to push a related Oracle product that apparently helps with so

From contentmarketinginstitute.com I love this article. It gets marketing teams thinking about planning and streamlining execution (according to that plan). It also begins by acknowledging that marketing teams, generally, lack enough time to execute (something I saw in all of my previous roles as Marketing VP). While it won't be earth-shattering, it is a great strawman for building out your content marketing. Read the entire article here. #contentmarketing #strategy

From okdork.com Nothing is better for marketing than solid data. In fact, you should see your marketing business as being data-driven. That is, if the data says a purple button is better at converting than an orange one, it should be purple whether you like it or not. This article has such a statistically relevant sample size (100M articles!), the findings are conclusive. This is an important read if you're at all interested in creating content that will be shared (and hopefu

I was reading a article about this very topic where the crux of the article was a simple formula: ROI = (Revenue Generated – Cost of Content Marketing) / Cost of Content Marketing While a valid calculation, there are a few challenges to this. For example, to come up with the revenue Generated value, how do you attribute revenue to a specific piece of content? This is where the rubber meets the road; where marketing execution, technology, tracking mechanisms and analytics all