Sword and the Script

Charlotte’s Web was Content Marketing (Photo Credit: Flickr)

by Frank Strong

Enter the content marketing backlash.  We are not far away from seeing posts titled “Content marketing is dead.”

I wouldn’t cast my lot with that following and don’t recommend anyone else do either.   Why?  Because content marketing works and as Ann Handley writes, “Content marketing is a tremendous opportunity.”

Ann wrote a book about it with C.C. Chapman called, Content Rules, which I highly recommend.

Yesterday, The New York Times ran a story about Marcus Sheridan, who often goes by TheSalesLion.  It’s a story about how a guy that sells pools took a business on the brink of bankruptcy and turned it around.  He did it with a ”revolutionary marketing strategy,” which boils down to simply answering customer questions.

In a world filled with complex strategy and where executives spend hours editing and re-editing adverbs for oh, a very pleasing polish, it’s a refreshing read with real world results.  And anybody can do it.

Anyone that’s heard Marcus speak, knows he is plain spoken, brutally honest, and passionately wants to share what he’s done with others, so that they too might find success.  There’s one part of his interview that really jumped out: Read More…

Photo: instagram.com/frankstrong

by Frank Strong

Last week Google reminded marketers about the basics in a blog post:  paid links must be distinguished as paid links.

Links are still arguably the single most important factor in PageRank and therefore search results.  The post was widely reported, earned a shout out on Inbound.org, but it leaves the question of why?

Why would Google’s top spam fighter feel the need to make such a post — especially after the widely felt effects, and subsequent buzz — following the Panda and Penguin updates?

It’s common sense, no?

Some Possible Causes

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan theorized it was a result of a UK-based publisher placing links in advertisements. “It is believed the reason Google has downgraded their PageRank scores is because they were selling links on a massive scale,” he wrote.  Read More…

Photo credit: eMarketer

by Frank Strong

Small businesses are engaged in a growing love affair with content marketing according to a survey by BusinessBolts.com and analyzed by eMarketer.

Three-quarters of small businesses are engaged in content marketing and 74% said they plan to increase their budget on content marketing in the next year.  The results mirrors other findings, for example, in late 2012, a joint report by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs found that 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing and budgets were up 26% from the previous year.

The BusinessBolts.com study says small businesses are finding benefits in traffic, search rankings and brand building in exchange for minimal effort.   Sixty-two percent of small businesses reported spending less than $100 per month on content marketing and almost half (45%) said content has lowered their advertising costs. Read More…

Photo Credit: Flickr

by Frank Strong

Budweiser drew well deserved applause for its Clydesdale commercial.  It was good story which made for great marketing.

Like other brands, it turned to social media to extend the life of it’s big game investment. The commercial on YouTube has racked up nearly 2 million views at the time of this writing and search volume skyrocketed.

However Budweiser had another commercial on the Super Bowl and the company ran a few variations several times before the Clydesdale commercial was shown.  It was the launch of Budweiser Black Crown.  The video, which was also uploaded to YouTube, has just shy of 300,000 views at the time of this writing and search volume is tepid by comparison.

Black Crown is purported to be a premium brand, with a premium price, which also comes with a higher concentration of alcohol.  It’s a brand line extension that says it’s a Budweiser that really isn’t a Budweiser. Read More…

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by Frank Strong

If we want people to read our content — we’ve got to tell them about it.   A great way to do that is to repurpose content as part of a content marketing program.

There’s a good case for repurposing content beyond content promotion:  For me, writing, and specifically blogging, is thinking.

Often my best ideas come only after I’ve written a post. Creative PR is part art and part science.  It’s also cumulative, which means one idea leads to another — that’s the art.

Repurposing content is also practical — it extends the shelf-life of content.  To that end, maybe “repurpose” isn’t the right descriptor perhaps “multipurpose” is better suited, especially if we publish with the preconceived intent to repurpose — that’s the science.

While this post is specifically about taking a blog post and repurposing that content, there are virtually an infinite number of useful ways to repurpose content. I’ll list a few more easy ones below. Read More…

by Frank Strong

There’s an old saying that half of all advertising budgets are wasted but marketers never know which half.  That phrase was coined long before the rich analytics the web provides — and that might lead us to believe we could figure out which half and therefore improve the results.

Certainly, there’s a science to marketing:  create, publish and analyze.  It’s experimenting and then calculating the gain or loss in visitors, page views and conversions.  And it’s true that studying data can improve results.  That’s why email marketers use A/B tests and why ecommerce specialists tweak the location, prominence and copy behind calls to action on the web.

Like most people, I’m a creature of habit.  I like process and methodology.  I like measurement.  I like data.  And I think these things are important.  But the longer I’m in this industry, the more convinced I’ve become that there is an art to marketing and PR is an under-recognized  talent.   Read More…

by Frank Strong

Doing an analysis on the most read posts posts of the year on any given blog is a useful exercise in as so far as it tells us what information people consumed.  TheJackB might point out that posts on our most read posts tells us about our most popular posts but may not in fact tell us which posts are best.

He’s right and I’m sure of it because the most read posts are a puzzle. We have all the information we need to analyze — Google Analytics’ Adam Singer even did the work for us — and all we need to do it put it together.  Thanks to Malcom Gladwell, I can claim there is a distinction between a puzzle and a mystery.

A mystery is forward looking — we do not have any information — and we do not know for certain what will be our most read posts in 2013. We can make inferences and forecasts from our existing data — like a puzzle, where information exists but we just need to put it together — but the fact is no one knows what tomorrow will bring.  Not even the Mayans.

Thank you to all who read this blog, who take the time to offer thoughtful comments and who engage with me on social media. Cheers and hopes for much more in 2013.  Read More…

Note:  a variation of this post first appeared as a guest post on Copyblogger; leave a comment if you’d be interested in having me write a guest post for you! 

>>>Branding isn’t your company name.

It’s not a tag line. It’s not a logo.

Branding is creating a perception.  It gets new customers over the sales hurdle of education.  It renews loyalty with existing customers. It creates envy among the competition.

When marketers ask, “How do we want to brand this product?” what they’re really asking is how they want their audience to think about that product once it comes to market.

A brand is a promise. It’s an expectation of an experience.

The company and tag line and logo and brand colors only exist to call that experience to mind; they do not create it.

Brands can meet that expectation, exceed that expectation … or in the worst cases, fall short of that expectation.  In crisis, brands can lose credibility in a heartbeat; but how brands react to crisis often means more in the long run than the crisis itself. Read More…

by Frank Strong

If content marketing was a technology, Gartner might say it has entered the “trough of disillusionment.”  Ironic that even while those that point out the flaws, they will also continue to embrace the concept in practice.

What started as a charge against the dark result of a system, became a system in need of desperate repair, emerged as an analysis of a debate and settled nearly to where it was placed before it had started.

I have no intention of moving the debate; I’m merely going to state what’s I see from the trenches.

Is there a lot of lousy content on the web?  You bet.  Are good content ideas at a premium and bad content ideas plentiful?  No doubt.  Should we toss the entire concept aside and wait for the next wave to ride?  I don’t think so.

And I don’t think so because I don’t believe content marketing is a fad, I believe it represents an actual evolution: content marketing is the new branding.  This is reflective of the fact that people are distracted, nose-in-the-phone busy, and do not have the attention span for interruptions.  It has become increasingly harder, and vastly more expensive, to buy people’s attention.

Instead we have to earn their attention and content marketing is the path to that end.  Moreover, some very sizable companies, with reputations for marketing excellence, are pouring resources into the concept. Read More…

“Tipping is not just a city in China,” many in the hospitality industry, like bartenders, are quick to proclaim.  But a recent vacation demonstrated it’s no longer a gratuity either.

At resort I signed up for a deep tissue massage on day one – what better way to begin unwinding?   I met the concierge, scheduled a spa time and she promptly asked me for a credit card, ran up the bill and presented it to me:   a $29 “gratuity” was “conveniently” placed on the bill for me; there was no option to remove it.  First world problem?  Maybe.

“Seems a little out of order to include a gratuity before the service is provided,” I said with a half-statement and half-question surprise.

“That’s just the way we have always done it,” replied the concierge.

“Well, I just think that’s dirty,” I was thinking to myself.  But I didn’t argue; after all I came here to decompress, not get all riled up.  Read More…