This post is not about how valuable content is for your business. I feel I’ve made that point pretty consistently the last couple of years, here, here, here, and here just for starters. Instead I want to address the second most common question I get – what type of content is the BEST when it comes to generating new leads? Even if you’re 100% on board with branding through inbound marketing and content creation, you’re…
read moreI had a funny thought this morning. Do call centers advertise? I figure everyone advertises to some degree, right? But what about a company that essentially is an advertising firm? Do they pay for outside advertising or do they just rely on their own services to contact potential clients? I imagine it depends on the company, but more than once I’ve seen companies that rely too heavily on internal resources or knowledge, and miss out…
read moreOne of the biggest challenges for us as a content marketing company is to develop a focused plan for B2C companies that provide big ticket products and services. The message needs to be hyper-targeted to a very specific mindset, both in terms of what will trigger a purchase and what will lead to a search result. I’d say we’re pretty good at it. The issue, and one reason a lot of companies that fit into…
read moreThere is a mistake so grievous and yet so simple that it costs businesses of all sizes billions of dollars per year. In advertising budget. In lost sales. In lost customers. No one is immune to the problem – I’ve seen Fortune 500 corporations fall victim to this as often if not more so than mom and pop operations with three employees. And it’s almost always the exact same. Fortunately, it takes only a few…
read moreI’m very big on free content. As David Meerman Scott points out in his book “The New Rules of PR and Marketing”, good marketing is not done by telling people why to buy your products – it’s done by convincing your readers that you really care if they are able to solve problems. How do you do that? By giving them free stuff. Online, free stuff is synonymous with free content – a report distributed…
read moreWhen you take your business online, one of the first suggestions you will hear is to start a blog. This is after a website, some basic marketing, and a handful of different profiles on other sites like Facebook and Twitter. But, what does a blog entail and how much work will you actually need to do. First, let’s take a look at what a blog does for your business. I won’t write on and on…
read moreOne of the hardest things for any small business hitting the Internet for the first time is social media. Most people have been on Facebook or Twitter personally. They post photos of their vacations, make comments on recent events, and sometimes tell a few gaudy jokes about their friends and family. So, when those same people happen to be business owners or entrepreneurs and create their professional profiles, they struggle with the transition to a…
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