90 Second Content Marketing Lessons

In your own publications you are free of the self-promoting restrictions you’ll find in trade publications, guest blogging, or conference presentations. But you don’t want to produce only thinly-disguised ads. If you are clever, you can weave promotion right into the body of your newsletter.

Articles in trade magazines, conference presentations, and informational webinar sessions often have some restrictions so you need to be careful about the marketing content. If you have your marketing people produce the content make sure they understand the limitations.

Marketing vs information can sometimes be a battle, especially when working with traditional agencies and seasoned marketing professionals. Many just don’t see the value in producing something that does not include a blatant sales pitch.

 

But if you want to foster trust and elevate your reputation as an industry expert, you’ve got to take a step back from touting the features and benefits of your own products all the time.

Quality and relevance in your customer communications is crucial. But equally important is consistency. You never know when the magic time arrives when a customer is thinking about a solution you can provide. Inconsistent publishing is turns strategy into randomness.

 

Make it easy for your potential newsletter readers to subscribe. Put your subscription form on your website home page and on other pages too. I put a link to my subscription form on every page because I never know where website visitors will be spending their time.

 

I even added a link to my newsletter subscription form to my Outlook email signature. People with whom I correspond may not always make it to my website...

With all those Facebook users, you’d think that Facebook may be the only place you need to distribute your informational content.

 

I disagree.The strategy is different if you are communicating directly to consumers. But for Business to Business communications, e-mail would still be my first choice.

 

This lesson covers the pros and cons of email vs social media as a way to connect with B2B customers.

Do you ever get stuck? Maybe you’ve got a blog that you know you need to update or a newsletter to write and you can’t think of a thing to say?

 

Hey, it happens to all of us! Especially if you write in a particularly small niche. It seems sometimes that there is just nothing new to write about.


This lesson provides a number of ways to overcome writer's block and get writing again.

Creating and publishing great informational content is just part of the mission. You also need to be able to measure the effectiveness of the pieces that you publish against your objectives. There are lots of ways to do this.

This lesson covers measurement.

Stories are great ways to help people remember your message. Think about different speakers you may have heard over the past year. Do remember the figures and statistics? Their Powerpoint slides? Probably not. But if they told an interesting story then chances are you do remember the main points and you remember who told it.

 

Stories are great sources for multi-purpose content, too.

There are lots of people and companies that are publishing news and information about the print and mail business, which is great.

 

The trouble is that there is very little original content. People seem to think that as long as they just re-post a press release or an article they saw somewhere else, that they can cross the “content marketing” task off their to-do list.