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Communicate with Customers Without Selling

Communicate with Customers Without Selling
Useful content should be at the core of your marketing Consumers have shut off the traditional world of marketing. They own a DVR to skip television advertising, often ignore magazine advertising, and now have become so adept at online “surfing” that they can take in online information without a care for banners or buttons (making them irrelevant). Smart marketers understand that traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective by the minute, and that there has to be a better way. Enter content marketing. But what exactly is content marketing? Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. And they do.

Content marketing §History[edit] 10g Backin package (1902) Advertising has long used content to disseminate information about a brand, and build a brand's reputation. In 1891, August Oetker sold small packages of his Backin baking powder to households with recipes printed on the back. In 1911 he started publishing his very successful cookbook. In 1895, John Deere launched the magazine The Furrow, providing information to farmers on how to become more profitable. Michelin developed the Michelin Guide in 1900, offering drivers information on auto maintenance, accommodations, and other travel tips. 35,000 copies were distributed for free in this first edition.[5] Jell-O salesmen went door-to-door, distributing their cookbook for free in 1904. The phrase "content marketing" was used as early as 1996,[7] when John F. Recently, content marketing has become more prominent, especially where digital and online marketing is concerned. §See also[edit] §References[edit]

44 Content Marketing Resources The term “content marketing” sounds like a hip buzzword to describe the latest marketing craze, but in reality, the concept has been around since the first newsletters came rolling off the presses. And if there’s one single reason why companies around the world continue to incorporate “content marketing strategies” into their yearly plans – it’s because it has been working for hundreds, if not thousands of years! Let’s go over a short recap as to why content marketing is a good marketing strategy to employ for today’s online audience: Show You’re an Authority on a Subject – When you offer unbiased and valuable information on a given subject matter, you earn trust with people who visit your blog or website. The following resources below will help anyone learn about why content marketing is important to any business and how to get the most of it. For Beginners For beginners to people looking for primers on content marketing, these links will get you on the right track. 1. Writers block. 14.

Content Marketing Today Going Where the Customers Want Us - @REI #giftpicks In person, passion and enthusiasm is judged by voice, tone, excitement, actions, and facial expressions. Online, demonstrating all five can be difficult to say the least. REI decided to change that with their recent @REI #giftpicks campaign. To put it lightly, REI loves the outdoors and should you walk into any store nationwide, this sentiment would be well represented. Over the course of one week, the REI social and video teams answered 90 questions from their avid fans and created individualized YouTube videos for each user. Angela LoSasso, director of customer acquisition and advertising at REI, said her team had many goals for the project, but one insight stood out. “Social Media Manager Lulu Gephart and her team did a great job of embracing the tools and the platforms that our customers are using,” LoSasso said. As many community managers will tell you, when customer feedback and inquiries come in, it can be difficult to respond to each one.

10 Tips for Writing Better Online Marketing Content Traditionally, marketing sells by sending information to people. Marketers produce brochures, send direct mail or email, or place advertising. This is known as "push." The marketer starts the conversation. On the web, most contacts are "pull." People come to your site to find information; the visitor starts the conversation. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you craft your marketing content. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Free Editorial Calendar & Campaign Planning Documents - Top Nonprofits Great online communication doesn’t happen by accident. Whether you are a small organization or a large international NGO, communication in many forms is likely crucial to your success. I have adapted several resources to help you better plan, understand goals, and focus and align your team around a communications strategy. A big thanks to my friend and colleague, Jonathan Cottrell of User10, for creating the documents from which these have been adapted. These may not be the perfect fit for your organization, but they should provide a decent framework upon which to build upon. In order to best facilitate this, we’ve shared these documents using Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-alike 3.0 Unported. Free Editorial Calendar – Lite Edition This downloadable free editorial calendar combines content idea generation (second tab) with planning, scheduling, and a commonly used channel checklist. Download ‘Free Editorial Calendar – Lite. Free Editorial Calendar for Large Campaigns Tips

Why Content Marketing Is King When it comes to marketing strategies, content marketing has just been crowned king, far surpassing search engine marketing, public relations and even print, television and radio advertising as the preferred marketing tool for today's business-to-business entrepreneur. Late this summer, HiveFire, a Cambridge, Mass.-based internet marketing software solutions company, surveyed nearly 400 marketing professionals about the state of the business-to-business, or B2B, market, and discovered that marketers are retreating from traditional marketing tactics such as search marketing and have made content marketing the most-used tactic in their brand-enhancing tool box. Fact is, according to HiveFire's B2B Marketing Trends Survey Report, twice as many B2B marketers now employ content marketing as they do print, TV and radio advertising, according to the survey. So what exactly is content marketing? How have you used content marketing to enhance your brand? Photo: Thomas Pajot/Shutterstock

Super Bowl blackout turns into viral gold for Oreo - Related Stories - Word of Mouth Marketing SmartBrief Skip to main content Browse All Briefs by Topic Super Bowl blackout turns into viral gold for Oreo Forward to a friend 02/4/2013 | BuzzFeed Oreo took advantage of the Super Bowl's third-quarter blackout, sharing an image on Twitter captioned with the words "You can still dunk in the dark" that was retweeted thousands of times. View Full Article in: BuzzFeed Media | Marketing | Food & Beverage | Food Manufacturing | Advertising | Business | Small Business Published in Briefs: [ + 2 more] SmartBrief Job Listings for Media View More Job Openings ©2014 SmartBrief

Get the Most From One Blog Post: 21 Advanced Content Tips 1.5K Flares Filament.io 1.5K Flares × Variety is the spice of life … and digital marketing? Variety can certainly make a digital marketer’s life a little easier. When you’ve worked hard to create a perfect piece of content, you can help that content go the extra mile (and then some) by repurposing and recreating the content in a huge number of ways. Is it easy? I took a favorite piece of content from our Buffer blog, “How Often Should You Be Posting to Social Media?” The rundown: All 21 advanced content tips to get more from your original content Hitting “publish” isn’t the end of content creation. 1. Should you share the same post to your social networks more than once? Take our post about Twitter Tips for Beginners, for example. Reposting can be a super simple process, too. Share from Twitter or Facebook directly.Share from the blog post via a sharing browser extension.Share from your Buffer dashboard by clicking and dragging posts from your analytics into your social profile queues 2.

Six retailers that used product videos to improve conversion rates Product videos are a great way to improve conversion rates online as they reassure the customer by helping them make an informed purchase decision. One of the main problem with ecommerce is that you can’t hold the product in your hands before you buy it, which is why offering free returns is such a great selling point. But video is also a great way to limit the impact of returns, as it gives customers a full view 360 degree of the product. We've previously blogged best practice tips for ecommerce product videos, and recently looked at the rise of video in 2013. With this in mind, here’s a round up of some stats showing how product videos have improved conversion rates for six online retailers... Ariat In a presentation last year equestrian sport supplier Ariat said that visits where a product video had been viewed had a conversion rate that was 160% higher than visits where no video was viewed. Fitness business Zappos Anonymous case study For retailer A, the conversion rates were as follows:

Content Marketing | Branded Content Marketing | mcmurry.com 7 Social Media Rules For Brands In 2013 2012 was a big year for social media. Facebook officially took over the world, Twitter collectively told the world they didn't want to play anymore by locking up their API, and Pinterest made everybody with time to kill happy by sucking them into a near endless supply of beautiful food imagery and cat pictures. 2012 was also, quite possibly, the most irritating year of social media to date, particularly in the “social media for brands” department—including gems such as offering a 20% coupon to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy deal with their “boredom,” epic #McDStories (who didn’t see that coming?), and hijacked hashtags. Come on, guys. Now that it is officially 2013 and we’ve all had a few days to let the last bits of 2012 wash over us, we can effectively identify some of the most epic social media fails of all time. 1. Keep your accounts separate. Sign up for a brand-only account. 2. Twitter hashtags are great. Imagine you're face to face with your customers. 4. 5. 6. 7.

How To Write Awesome Original Content: Tricks, Tools, & Techniques Congratulations on your ambition to reduce “content pollution” on the Internet! That’s a big first step, but do you know how to write awesome orginal content? It all starts with knowing yourself and your readers. Once you understand your user personas, product or service, and the relevant keywords - you may think you have the keys to the “content kingdom” and are ready to dive into choosing an article concept and get to writing. The largest challenge still lies ahead of you: making something original and compelling is not easy. Most of the content online does not get 100% original stamp of approval. Know Thy Competitor The first set of tactics fall under the bucket of competitive analysis. Competitor Product/Service Analysis: This is pretty straightforward – know your competitors just as well as you know yourself. Know your competitor like you know yourself. Ready to start spying on the competition? Looking for some additional resources on learning online competitor analysis?

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