Every few years I have a head-smacking moment where I realize I've been missing a trick. A while back I admitted I was wrong to be a content marketing naysayer. Just this year I realized how I’d been missing the boat on YouTube. I’ve known about YouTube, of course. It saved my life teaching me how to fix my Samsung freezer’s ice maker (154,289 views!). My kids don’t really watch television anymore. Just about everything they view is on YouTube. But I never took it seriously as a tool for B2B … [Read more...]
Marketingspeak: What is a ‘Tombstone’?
We’ve all seen them, heeded them, and probably not given them much more thought. But these diminutive symbols are as crucial for periodical readers as compass index lines are for orienteers. A tombstone is a small icon that denotes the end of an article in a magazine or newspaper. Tombstones are typically small squares, circles or diamonds and follow the final sentence of the last paragraph. Some publications tie tombstones to their brand. Fortune, for example, uses the ‘F’ from its logo. … [Read more...]
CMO Tip: Use Magazines to Define and Maintain Your Style
Approachable. Friendly. Trustworthy. Fun without being snarky. Ever see direction like this in a style guide? I have. I’ve even written some of those words. The problem is that they are open to interpretation, and therefore not consistently effective. So, how can you communicate what you want to a wide and changing group of employees and vendors? Here’s an idea. Use one or two magazines to help build your style guide. Magazines are widely available, and more importantly, they are tangible. … [Read more...]
Two Formulas to Measure Content Marketing
For all of the words written about the power of content marketing, too few discuss how it should be measured. Last year I wrote a two-part piece about what I called the economics of content marketing, in which I shared two formulas to measure its impact. The two formulas measure content consumption and profitability. Consumption Compelling people to consume – read, watch, listen to – your content is the name of the game. Here is a really simple for measuring consumption: Consumption = … [Read more...]
Content Marketing Economics – Part II: Consumption and Profitability
In the first part of this post, we discussed the production and distribution of content. Here, we’ll going to dig into how people consume your content, the desired outcomes of that consumption, and whether what it costs you is generating a profitable return. How does consumption relate to production and distribution? It can be represented by this simple equation: Consumption = Production * Distribution The better the quality of the content – the production – multiplied by a larger or more … [Read more...]
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