Content creation strategies

Image via WikipediaCreating unique content probably sounds daunting, especially if you are running a small business and you are already head cook and bottle washer. To ease some of the burden of creating content you should first come up with a strategic plan for all your inbound marketing initiatives including content. Here are a few thoughts on building a content strategy. If you have other good strategies please share them.
What makes good content?: As described in the previous post, content needs to be high quality, relevant and non-pitchy. 
Forms of content: The items you produce do not need to be a War and Peace sized endeavor. People are already inundated with loads of content so it makes sense to make your materials easily digestible and simple to understand. As such, think of delivering quick snippets from research you have done or read, trends you are seeing in the market and why they are important and what they mean to your customers, and, possibly most importantly, links to other content providers that you consider valuable (see here for a post from Hubspot on the importance of link building). You should also consider developing some white papers and cases studies on how you solved a customers pain.
Shareable: All of the blogging platforms have widgets that allow readers to share your content with others. Make sure you have enabled them.
Tracking: Tracking how readers are reacting to the content is extremely important as it will allow you to spot what your followers are most interested in and not interested as in reading and sharing. There a number of different tools available to track your content (good overview here). At the very least you should use a service like bit.ly for simple tracking purposes. 

These are just a few simple thoughts on how to develop a content strategy. Please share your own.

Integrate Social Media activities into your CRM/MAP systems

The power of a CRM system and a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) is that you are able to see a comprehensive view into the activities around your customers. The lense gets even stronger when you integrate your CRM and MAP so you can see both offline and online activities for your customers. The inability to integrate social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogging into your CRM/MAP systems is a negative but it also represents a great opportunity for the vendor that can figure out how we can do this.

Imagine if you looked up a customer in your CRM system and you had a view of all offline activities such as show attendance and phone calls along with all marketing campaigns from your MAP and all interactions with your various social media sites (retweets, blog visits and comments, FaceBook fan, LinkedIn groups). That would be a true Digital ID. I know Eloqua and Hubspot have done some things for tracking social media activity but I do not think anyone has been able to integrate it all into one view. I am not even sure this is possible, but it would make life a lot easier!

Sequencing Change

Image by Todd Huffman via Flickr

It used to be that technology was adopted first at the corporate level and then by consumers. That sequence has now changed. It is the consumer who is driving the adoption of technology by corporations. Social Media and mobile are prime examples of this switch.

According to Web measurement firm Compete Inc., Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites. I would bet that this traffic is primarily consumer driven. That said, what does this mean for corporations, especially in the B2B space, as it has been shown that the Internet is one of the top places buyers begin their research on a product. Will they now be shifting from Google searches and SEO to FaceBook Fan pages? Searching Twitter for end users or stories? Mining LinkedIn for Groups and people that can help them with their decision? Yes, they will be.

The ramifications for corporations is that they must have a presence on all these sites, regardless if they are B2B or B2C. At my firm, we are really just ramping up the use of FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn to support the launch of our next generation product, Harvard ManageMentor. I am the primary person updating all these sites, as well as contributing to our new blog, and I know that it takes a lot of time and effort. As the use of these mediums becomes more prevalent in buying decisions, the need for a full time person in the marketing department will be mandatory.

Additionally, marketers will need to rethink which marketing automation platform they use and your messaging to fit to these sites. Can you explain your value proposition in 140 characters or less? Firms such as HubSpot are going to become even more important to help analyze the new inbound marketing results. It will be interesting to watch VC investment in this area of analytic's.

It has been interesting to see the new traffic being referred by these sites and I hope it only increases.

Augment your SEM and SEO programs with SMM and SMO

Image via Wikipedia

Everyone is familiar with SEO and SEM. But with the emergence of all the new social media (or social marketing as Mike Volpe from HubSpot is saying it should be called) platforms you should be augmenting your SEO and SEM initiatives with SMM (Social Media Marketing) and SMO (Social Media Optimization).

The interesting thing about SMM and SMO is that it allows you to inexpensively test words to see what resonates with your followers. Maybe these will be the same words that you are using in your SEM/SEO efforts, but you may passibly discover words you had not thought of before and these could turn out to be cheaper than some of the more popular words.

SMO and SMM should be part of your overall marketing strategy and the good thing is that there is not hit to your budget!

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