Best B2B Content Marketing for week ending 8-16-2012

Here are my pick for the best posts related to B2B content marketing of the week ending 8-16-2012

• First start by learning how content duplication can affect your SEO in your B2B content marketing.
• Next up is how story telling trumps selling from the the MarketingProfs – always a content marketing favorite.
• Q: Whats your best advice to social media managers? A: Stop talking about social media — true words.
• From Heidi Cohen at the Content Marketing Institute a great checklist to use before you publish your content.
• Then a great rant on the blog of Marketing Interactions blog  buzzwords overuse in marketing.
• Finally, a post about email deliver-ability and how your reputation might affect this.

 

Three types of website content to avoid if you want to succeed in Google SEO

On Friday, Googles Amit Singhal announced the company’s latest search ranking signal. Unlike other updates, this adjustment wasn’t aimed directly at web-spam or low-quality content. Google reported that sites with copyright complaints filed against them as a result of violations in terms and usage may see their search rankings drop. More than ever, its essential that website publish unique and original content for SEO.

Small business content marketing campaigns are unlikely to be using media that prompts these types of complaints. Copyright infringement on the web often deals with music and movie piracy, but the improper use of another company’s content is similarly bad for a site. The issue, and why it relates to small business content marketing, is that its also bad for users.

Google has rolled out countless search updates and improvements recently and all of these changes focused solely on making the experience better for the user. Google’s quality algorithms all measure a site and determine where it should rank based on value to users. While each covers different areas, they target the same idea of ensuring that the content users see in Google search results is strong, reliable and, now, legal. The updates arent likely to stop, and ensuring that your site offers a valuable experience and quality content will only become more important. [ Read Original ]

Content Marketing: Why Telling Trumps Selling

Our culture no longer has patience for commercials. We fast-forward through them. We do anything we can to avoid them. We endure them only when we have to.

That same mentality is taking place whenever a sales message is presented. We are slightly distrustful of what a company has to say about itself, whether the message reaches us through a traditional salesperson, traditional media, or even online media.

Prove It

The Web has created in us an expectation to be able to evaluate a sales message. Somebody says to us, We have great stuff. You say nothing to them in return but make a mental note of Well see And we then storm the search engines to avail ourselves to the vast amount of information available to us to review those claims. When you are pouring your heart into how much your product will do for your clients, they are reacting with the same apprehension. You are subtly saying, Our stuff is cool, and prospects are subtly saying, I don’t trust you yet.

Count Your Blessings and Your Curses

Marketing on the Web is blessing and curse. It is a blessing because of the tremendous reach we have in communicating our message;it is a curse in that the mentality of a prospect is to hold up the process buying process until they have had time to review your claims. If there was ever any emotive function in the buying process, it is dissipating as the Internet evolves. Prospects and clients want the entire truth and they want it to be verified. They neither need nor want hype.

All in How You Look at It

Savvy companies and marketers can use the both the Web and customers desire for verification to their advantage by engaging in content marketing. Content marketing can be a subjective term, but in its simplest definition, content marketing is making facts about your products available and discoverable to lead prospects into your marketing funnel. Content marketing takes advantage of an aspect of human nature that makes us more trusting to solutions that we discover ourselves over those that are presented to us.

[ Read Original ]

Q: Whats your best advice to social media managers? A: Stop talking about social media

I recently presented at Microstrategy’s Commerce Summit in Amsterdam on the importance of looking inside to improve how to engage on the outside. Following the event, I was invited to join Peter Gentsch of Big, Michael Buck of Dell, and Andreas Bock of Telekom. The conversation explored the importance of rethinking how businesses approach social media. Rather than driving social media strategies based on just clever ideas, campaigns, soft KPIs, and intangible results, I shared the importance of focusing on the bigger picture. At stake is nothing less than not only the future of social media in your organization, but more importantly, how decision makers recognize and value relationships throughout the customer life cycle.

Im often asked what advice do I have for social media strategists and managers. While my answer is below, the truth is that we have to stop talking about social media as the catalyst for earning internal support and instead view it as one of the enablers for transformation.

[ Read Original ]

Content Marketing Checklist: 13 Things You Must Do Before You Publish Content

By HEIDI COHEN 

[ Read Original ]

Bullocks to B2B Marketing Buzzword: Relevance

Recently, Ive felt compelled to take on some B2B marketing terms that make me a bit nuts as their meanings become blurred through the casual way were using them. Ive taken on engagement and conversation, and now Ive got a twist going about relevance.

Be Relevant!

Design content that’s relevant to your audience!

If you’re content isn’t relevant, you’re marketing efforts will fall short.

I agree with all of these statements, which is easy to do because they really don’t say anything. What does relevance really mean in a marketing context? If marketers understood this, there would be a whole lot of content in the trash bin. Just saying

[ Read Original ]

B2B Email Marketing: How reputation, content and brand management affect deliver-ability

An otherwise brilliant email marketing campaign will fail if its emails are caught in spam filters. Deliver-ability is particularly challenging for B2B marketers. That’s because they typically send emails to many different corporate domains, instead of many emails to one provider, such as Gmail or other freemail domains.

Tom Sather, Senior Director of Email Research, Return Path, offers five tactics to help ensure B2B email marketing campaigns safely reach the inbox. The process begins with establishing goals, and includes reputation, content and brand management.

Sather will present this material at the upcoming MarketingSherpa B2B Summit, August 27-30 in Orlando.

[ Read Original ]

 

Related Posts:

• Content Marketing Infographic [Infograph]
• “45% of Leads End up Buying”
• 5 Content Creation Tactics (not Marketing Strategies) to Fill Your Editorial Calendar
• Accelerate Your Content Marketing Now [Video]
• Marketing Analytics [for Content Marketing]: 6 simple steps for interpreting your data