Listly by Stephan Marais
Does your blogger outreach campaign consist of sending formal press releases to multiple journalists at once? Or, are you ignoring smaller blogs and Tumblrs and opting to pitch highly authoritative sites instead? Well, guess what? You're going about it the wrong way. Well, according to the perspective of a contributor at the popular site BuzzFeed, you are.
Slightly confused, Sean (our content guy) explained to me what it was doing there. "It's an example of content marketing " he said. "I found it at a car boot at the weekend". Fair enough, but this doesn't look like the type of content we all know. First off, it's physical.
Whether it's a leading consumer brand employing a celebrity as creative director or a major B2B tech firm collaborating with a psychologist on a best practice guide, co-creation is a bandwagon that the world's leading brands are rapidly jumping onto.
McNeal Maddox | July 3, 2013 | Comments More brands are exploring crowdsourcing as a way to engage consumers by allowing them to create ads for the products they love. One of the most popular examples of crowdsourced advertising is Doritos' "Crash the Super Bowl" ad contest, which has run for the last seven years.
Companies are defined today by their unique story. Anyone can sell a product but why buy that product over another? Creating radio spots and billboard ads are not enough in today's consumer centric marketplace to connect with customers, it's content that helps craft a story about your business, drive home your unique value and inform potential customers why they should buy your product or service over others.
Today's changing digital landscape is forcing organisations to re-evaluate their media strategy as the lines between paid, earned, and owned media become blurred. It's crucial for marketers to find more cost-effective and coherent means of engaging with consumers, and that's why content marketing has quickly become a key part of any organisation's marketing mix, today used by nine out of ten marketers.
Companies eager to meet the digital information needs of customers are faced with the challenge of creating content on a regular basis and with few additional resources. Customers expect useful information that is easy to find, consume and share, but how can resource strapped marketers meet those expectations?
In a previous blog post, I wrote about the importance of carrying out research during the initial construction stages of your content strategy (see Why Research Should Be A Fundamental Part Of Your Content Strategy). As your strategy starts to come together and your ideas become set in stone, the next phase of the overall content process is to actually create the content.
In 2012, I decided to undertake an evergreen content experiment. I created a piece of content that I planned to update regularly over an extended period of time. The aim was to see if putting ongoing effort into one page on a website would prove more efficient than spending time planning and creating multiple pieces of fresh content.
Ah!!! The (rotten, stinky, cheesy, noxious) smell of the annual marketing budget process is closer than you think. It's time to stock up on antacids and lay in a supply of instant energy drinks, because you've got two daunting tasks ahead.