#Single Review: Zig Zags Killer of Killers

[thejoyofviolentmovement]

New Audio: JOVM Mainstays Zig Zags Release a Blistering Headbanger from Fourth Album

New Audio: JOVM Mainstays Zig Zags Release a Blistering Headbanger from Fourth Album @randysezz @easyriderrecord @usthemgroup

Over the years, I’ve written quite a bit about the  Los Angeles-based thrash punk/metal trio and JOVM mainstays  Zig Zags. And as you may recall, the act, which is currently comprised of founding member Jed Maheu (guitar, vocals), Dane Andrews (drums) and longtime sound engineer, multi-instrumentalist Sean Hoffman (bass) over the course of their eight-plus year have gone through a series of…

[vegas-glitz]

6 Measures To Terrific E-newsletter Editorial

http://topicsofnote.com/?p=6591&utm_source=SocialAutoPoster&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Tumblr

Material is at the time once again king! The wise e-newsletter publishers no matter if they are in print or on the internet are at last coming to the realization that readers usually are not wanting to buying their things. They're on the lookout for remedies.

And the ideal way to deliver options is by offering data viewers can use. It's also the very best way to establish belief with people who may perhaps sooner or later want to obtain your alternatives.

This is a suggestion: The far more market or the centered your solutions, the far better. Why? Simply because the much more you can offer you methods that communicate straight to a person's challenge or soreness stage, the much more valuable it is to the reader.

Whether it can be a B2B e-newsletter that I billed $1,595 for or a $19.95 B2C publication, just one thing that often proved real is that the content experienced to handle remedies for a particular audience. The written content is what retained them coming back. The articles also assisted foster a relationship with audience in which they came to rely on us for other solutions available at conferences, seminars, in manuals, reports, textbooks and other "again-conclusion goods."

But it all starts with important content. Here are my 6 suggestions that have assisted me and my employees around the several years.

6 ways to produce terrific content material

Stage #1: You will have to have a killer story notion to commence. I normally essential our writers/editors to occur to the story assembly with the initially paragraph written out as they see the tale. Typically, it was not good at that issue, but by speaking about the matter we could typically come up with a great strategy and if not, we understood then and there we had to arrive up with a superior direct tale. It can be important to have the writers come to the tale conference with the guide paragraph by now prepared due to the fact you want them to seriously give some considered to how they see that story shaping up.

Move #2: Each and every article should answer the concern: What is In It For the Reader (WIIFR)? In fact, the direct paragraph will generally respond to that issue. If the answer is not in the initial paragraph, it really should be no farther down than the third or fifth paragraph depending on the size of the write-up. Every single article should have a rationale why the writer is saying to the reader, "This is so vital that you ought to not only choose the time to study it, but pay me to read it."

In buy to solution that question, the short article has to be penned for the reader - not for any one else. Some of the newsletters I printed ended up directed to extremely particular markets this kind of as credit union CEOs, lender compliance officers, and vehicle dealers. Not only is each published for a area of interest marketplace, but they are penned to and for a specific situation in that marketplace. Every post must be published with that particular person in head.

Phase #3: What can you do to maintain your readers' desire? Every single publisher worthy of the ink or HTML code wanted to produce the articles is going to make sure he is carrying out methods 1 and 2. So what can you do to make your...article content stand out from the relaxation? If your publication and a competitor's publication are sitting on a desk or coffee desk, what are you heading to do to make positive the reader picks up yours 1st - and not set it down ideal absent?! Can you acquire a contrarian stand? Can you invoke some controversy by pitting two sources towards just about every other? Marketing and advertising pro and business mentor Jon Goldman (www.BrandLauncher.com) asks: "Exactly where can you zig where the some others zag?" What distinctive angle can you have? Are there exclusive sources or ideas you can provide into the write-up?

Move #4: What resources or anecdotes will you use to make the tale arrive alive? A tale is only as great as the thoughts within the story. These stories inside the story usually appear from other sources or from anecdotes that aid paint a photo. For instance, I just completed working with the writers of US News and World Report's new automobile evaluation web-site, and not like most other auto evaluate web pages, it can be fully primarily based on other resources. The articles or blog posts are packed with marvelous automobile obtaining information that is introduced to life with anecdotes and opinions from other reviewers.

Step #5: Generate powerful copy. This is frequently exactly where I see writers, editors and even publishers get lazy. It can be not ample to just set the details collectively. It is received to be compelling. It has to seize you and keep keep of you so you discover you so included that anything at all else would be a impolite, irritating disruption. Will each tale do that? Of course not. But it's one thing your writers and editors really should try for each and every time! Like I typically say, it is an artwork, not a science and so hence it ought to be an artwork that is continuously practiced. That is why I often search for proficient writers who treatment about producing good content material first. You can train the matter subject. That will occur. The care and devotion necessary to develop excellent content is a thing you are not able to teach - and fantastic written content will normally get in a aggressive current market.

Step #6: Publish solid, intriguing headlines and subheads. I mention this previous for a rationale. All the steps in reality are stated in order of how they must be approached. But it is really vital to help you save the headline crafting and subheads for very last. I don't know how a lot of situations I discovered the headline in the to start with paragraph -- or even worse, it truly is buried at the finish of the report. A great headline must seize you, intrigue and notify you why it truly is so crucial that you halt everything you happen to be carrying out to read the short article. Subheads should really not be disregarded, both. The subhead is a instrument to retain the reader engaged in the posting and in some instances, pull the reader into the article so they ought to involve a gain. They as well should respond to the concern: What is actually In it For Me?

Use those people 6 techniques and you'll be on your way to offering wonderful publication editorial your readers can use. For extra recommendations and strategies go to http://www.ThePubGuru.com

Source by Dennis J. Sullivan

[byronheeutgm]

Here’s How Much Your Content Marketing Goals Matter

When it comes to content marketing, have you been slow getting out of the starting gate? Or are you struggling to keep up with larger competitors that crank out tons of content? It’s not an enviable position, but all is not lost. You’re still in the race—if you take the right approach and focus on your content marketing goals.

Despite your instinct to knock out blog post after blog post to catch up, adopting a goal-focused content strategy will provide greater dividends in both the short and long terms. If this sounds obvious, it’s actually the zag to the zig of most marketers. Some 70 percent of them lack a consistent or integrated content strategy, according to Altimeter.

Part of this no-strategy approach likely involves failing to focus on producing a single business goal with each piece of content. Some content managers won’t consider a goal at all when developing a blog post, white paper, or webinar, while others will try to shoot the moon. Both tend to produce an ROI of roughly zilch.

One Piece of Content, One Content Marketing Goal

Though your overarching content strategy will likely have multiple content goals (awareness, lead generation, customer retention, engagement, etc.), each piece of content should focus on a single one. A campaign enables brands to build upon the successes of individual pieces of content to move their audience to conversion.

For example, a blog post may lead to a newsletter sign up, which leads to downloading an ebook, which leads to requesting information from a sales representative. That’s an overly simplified roadmap, but it illustrates how you can use content to create a customized and efficient pathway for your target audience.

Your content strategy may have multiple goals, but each piece of content should focus on only one. Click To Tweet Getting Started with Business Goals

While organizations and content strategies differ, the following four steps will help you understand the content you need to produce in order to achieve your desired business objective:

Define a goal for each piece of content.

Select a specific audience that makes sense for that goal.

Identify the content topics/mediums that will move that audience to the desired outcome.

Analyze the results, adjust and/or expand.

Remember, each step should lead to the next. For example, identifying the objective and audience helps you hone your content types (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and topics, enabling you to deliver the right message at the right time with greater frequency.

Though the steps are simple, you and your team should write down your conclusions—formally, not on a dinner napkin. The extra effort pays off. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of marketers do not formally document their objectives, audience, or goals. That diminishes their chances for success, according to a study by Dominican University’s Gail Matthews which showed that people who write down goals, review them, and share them are 33 percent more successful than those who don’t.

Preparing Individual Content Pieces

When preparing content, remember that competition is fierce for your target audience’s attention; they are the metaphorical belle of the content marketing ball, and many brands want a dance. Identifying and creating content around the specific needs of your target audience will attract their attention, and a strong call to action for the one next step (whether it’s to purchase, learn more, subscribe to your newsletter, or something else) is the final touch.

So what does this look like? Michael Smart did a masterful job with a piece of content that he posted to his blog and also distributed via email.

Objective: Get registrations for his upcoming marketing seminar.

Audience: Communications managers and executives looking to advance their career.

Resonating Content: How do you pique the interest of high-level communicators? Appeal to their skepticism. Michael wrote about an attendee at a conference who doubted he could provide new insights. He challenged her to stay. She did. She succeeded. Then he challenged his readers to sign up for the seminar’s last nine remaining seats.

Analyze and Adjust: Without speaking to him personally (and if you’re reading this Michael, give us a call some time!), it’s impossible to say with certainty that he analyzed results. However, Michael is a savvy PR professional and marketer who has dedicated enormous time and effort to creating content and building his newsletter list. He deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Navigating Around Gatekeepers

Xerox wanted to engage with senior-level executives but found they often couldn’t get past those executives’ administrators who triaged calls and removed marketing materials from snail mail piles. This, of course, impacted Xerox’s sales, so they found a different path.

To increase sales leads (Objective), Xerox created engaging content for C-suite prospects (Audience) that wouldn’t get earmarked as a solicitation by the admins. This involved reshaping the focus of its content marketing. Rather than continuing to focus on client problems, Xerox shared how clients solved those problems and the mindset that drove their success through a collaboration with Forbes on a publication called Chief Optimist magazine (Content).

The company creates five editions of the magazine that cater to specific industries and will send customized print versions to key prospects. It promoted the publications through email and printed cards that sales reps delivered personally.

It didn’t take long for the results to pile up. Email readership leaped 300 to 400 percent. The company gathered 20,000 new contacts and set up more than 1,000 appointments for its sales people. The result:  More than $1 billion in pipeline revenue with a 12- to 18-month sales cycle. To keep customers returning to the site, it launched online forums headed by business celebrities such as Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company (Analyze and Adjust).

Smaller companies with fewer resources don’t have the ability to launch a full scale campaign like this, but they can identify the key concerns and topics their audiences care about with content intelligence. Solutions like the Ceralytics platform analyze content from around the web to identify key opportunities for your brand. (And yes, it can even help companies like Xerox.)

Capitalizing on Pop Culture

SunGard had a challenge that so many brands can relate to: a product or service that doesn’t stoke people’s interest. However, they became a buzzed about brand in the crowded B2B technology space (Objective) by capitalizing on our fascination with zombies.

SunGard focused specifically on reaching IT executives (Audience) with an infographic and ebook that showed the importance of having a resilient business infrastructure, in this case one that could survive a zombie apocalypse (Content). The infographic took the audience step by step through the procedures used to protect data and applications in the event of a zombie attack. To disseminate its gory graphic and the corresponding ebook, SunGard initiated two email campaigns: one broad-based to IT executives with titles director and above for companies earning more than $50 million annually, and another to IT executives who hadn’t responded to a SunGard email in six months.

What made this zombie infographic extra killer? The call to action. Recipients clicked through to a landing page where they could enter to win a physical zombie survival kit. As the campaign took off, SunGard monitored how many times the infographic was shared by influential third-party cloud-based sites (Analyze and Adjust).

The brilliance of this campaign comes from its use of zombies. Had they intended to connect with prospects only a step or two from making a purchase, zombies and a survival kit likely wouldn’t have moved the needle. When considering whether to invest in one solution or another, people tend to want cold, hard facts and case studies. However, for brand awareness, SunGard’s decision to capitalize on the zombie trend more than did the trick.

SunGard’s zombie campaign produced astounding results, tripling expected downloads and doubling expected click-through rates. Additionally, several niche cloud websites featured the infographic on their home pages. Following this success, SunGard adjusted the program, initiating a direct mail-campaign and then a social media campaign.

The accomplishments of Michael Smart, Xerox, and SunGard flow directly from their well thought-out approaches. Success doesn’t have to be predicated on a long history of content production. Content marketing come-latelys can enter this saturated arena and drive results. The key is being strategic and focused on a single goal.

http://ift.tt/2kjbRNg

[mercedessharonwo1]

Here’s How Much Your Content Marketing Goals Matter

When it comes to content marketing, have you been slow getting out of the starting gate? Or are you struggling to keep up with larger competitors that crank out tons of content? It’s not an enviable position, but all is not lost. You’re still in the race—if you take the right approach and focus on your content marketing goals.

Despite your instinct to knock out blog post after blog post to catch up, adopting a goal-focused content strategy will provide greater dividends in both the short and long terms. If this sounds obvious, it’s actually the zag to the zig of most marketers. Some 70 percent of them lack a consistent or integrated content strategy, according to Altimeter.

Part of this no-strategy approach likely involves failing to focus on producing a single business goal with each piece of content. Some content managers won’t consider a goal at all when developing a blog post, white paper, or webinar, while others will try to shoot the moon. Both tend to produce an ROI of roughly zilch.

One Piece of Content, One Content Marketing Goal

Though your overarching content strategy will likely have multiple content goals (awareness, lead generation, customer retention, engagement, etc.), each piece of content should focus on a single one. A campaign enables brands to build upon the successes of individual pieces of content to move their audience to conversion.

For example, a blog post may lead to a newsletter sign up, which leads to downloading an ebook, which leads to requesting information from a sales representative. That’s an overly simplified roadmap, but it illustrates how you can use content to create a customized and efficient pathway for your target audience.

Your content strategy may have multiple goals, but each piece of content should focus on only one. Click To Tweet Getting Started with Business Goals

While organizations and content strategies differ, the following four steps will help you understand the content you need to produce in order to achieve your desired business objective:

Define a goal for each piece of content.

Select a specific audience that makes sense for that goal.

Identify the content topics/mediums that will move that audience to the desired outcome.

Analyze the results, adjust and/or expand.

Remember, each step should lead to the next. For example, identifying the objective and audience helps you hone your content types (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and topics, enabling you to deliver the right message at the right time with greater frequency.

Though the steps are simple, you and your team should write down your conclusions—formally, not on a dinner napkin. The extra effort pays off. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of marketers do not formally document their objectives, audience, or goals. That diminishes their chances for success, according to a study by Dominican University’s Gail Matthews which showed that people who write down goals, review them, and share them are 33 percent more successful than those who don’t.

Preparing Individual Content Pieces

When preparing content, remember that competition is fierce for your target audience’s attention; they are the metaphorical belle of the content marketing ball, and many brands want a dance. Identifying and creating content around the specific needs of your target audience will attract their attention, and a strong call to action for the one next step (whether it’s to purchase, learn more, subscribe to your newsletter, or something else) is the final touch.

So what does this look like? Michael Smart did a masterful job with a piece of content that he posted to his blog and also distributed via email.

Objective: Get registrations for his upcoming marketing seminar.

Audience: Communications managers and executives looking to advance their career.

Resonating Content: How do you pique the interest of high-level communicators? Appeal to their skepticism. Michael wrote about an attendee at a conference who doubted he could provide new insights. He challenged her to stay. She did. She succeeded. Then he challenged his readers to sign up for the seminar’s last nine remaining seats.

Analyze and Adjust: Without speaking to him personally (and if you’re reading this Michael, give us a call some time!), it’s impossible to say with certainty that he analyzed results. However, Michael is a savvy PR professional and marketer who has dedicated enormous time and effort to creating content and building his newsletter list. He deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Navigating Around Gatekeepers

Xerox wanted to engage with senior-level executives but found they often couldn’t get past those executives’ administrators who triaged calls and removed marketing materials from snail mail piles. This, of course, impacted Xerox’s sales, so they found a different path.

To increase sales leads (Objective), Xerox created engaging content for C-suite prospects (Audience) that wouldn’t get earmarked as a solicitation by the admins. This involved reshaping the focus of its content marketing. Rather than continuing to focus on client problems, Xerox shared how clients solved those problems and the mindset that drove their success through a collaboration with Forbes on a publication called Chief Optimist magazine (Content).

The company creates five editions of the magazine that cater to specific industries and will send customized print versions to key prospects. It promoted the publications through email and printed cards that sales reps delivered personally.

It didn’t take long for the results to pile up. Email readership leaped 300 to 400 percent. The company gathered 20,000 new contacts and set up more than 1,000 appointments for its sales people. The result:  More than $1 billion in pipeline revenue with a 12- to 18-month sales cycle. To keep customers returning to the site, it launched online forums headed by business celebrities such as Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company (Analyze and Adjust).

Smaller companies with fewer resources don’t have the ability to launch a full scale campaign like this, but they can identify the key concerns and topics their audiences care about with content intelligence. Solutions like the Ceralytics platform analyze content from around the web to identify key opportunities for your brand. (And yes, it can even help companies like Xerox.)

Capitalizing on Pop Culture

SunGard had a challenge that so many brands can relate to: a product or service that doesn’t stoke people’s interest. However, they became a buzzed about brand in the crowded B2B technology space (Objective) by capitalizing on our fascination with zombies.

SunGard focused specifically on reaching IT executives (Audience) with an infographic and ebook that showed the importance of having a resilient business infrastructure, in this case one that could survive a zombie apocalypse (Content). The infographic took the audience step by step through the procedures used to protect data and applications in the event of a zombie attack. To disseminate its gory graphic and the corresponding ebook, SunGard initiated two email campaigns: one broad-based to IT executives with titles director and above for companies earning more than $50 million annually, and another to IT executives who hadn’t responded to a SunGard email in six months.

What made this zombie infographic extra killer? The call to action. Recipients clicked through to a landing page where they could enter to win a physical zombie survival kit. As the campaign took off, SunGard monitored how many times the infographic was shared by influential third-party cloud-based sites (Analyze and Adjust).

The brilliance of this campaign comes from its use of zombies. Had they intended to connect with prospects only a step or two from making a purchase, zombies and a survival kit likely wouldn’t have moved the needle. When considering whether to invest in one solution or another, people tend to want cold, hard facts and case studies. However, for brand awareness, SunGard’s decision to capitalize on the zombie trend more than did the trick.

SunGard’s zombie campaign produced astounding results, tripling expected downloads and doubling expected click-through rates. Additionally, several niche cloud websites featured the infographic on their home pages. Following this success, SunGard adjusted the program, initiating a direct mail-campaign and then a social media campaign.

The accomplishments of Michael Smart, Xerox, and SunGard flow directly from their well thought-out approaches. Success doesn’t have to be predicated on a long history of content production. Content marketing come-latelys can enter this saturated arena and drive results. The key is being strategic and focused on a single goal.

http://ift.tt/2kjbRNg

[conniecogeie]

Here’s How Much Your Content Marketing Goals Matter

When it comes to content marketing, have you been slow getting out of the starting gate? Or are you struggling to keep up with larger competitors that crank out tons of content? It’s not an enviable position, but all is not lost. You’re still in the race—if you take the right approach and focus on your content marketing goals.

Despite your instinct to knock out blog post after blog post to catch up, adopting a goal-focused content strategy will provide greater dividends in both the short and long terms. If this sounds obvious, it’s actually the zag to the zig of most marketers. Some 70 percent of them lack a consistent or integrated content strategy, according to Altimeter.

Part of this no-strategy approach likely involves failing to focus on producing a single business goal with each piece of content. Some content managers won’t consider a goal at all when developing a blog post, white paper, or webinar, while others will try to shoot the moon. Both tend to produce an ROI of roughly zilch.

One Piece of Content, One Content Marketing Goal

Though your overarching content strategy will likely have multiple content goals (awareness, lead generation, customer retention, engagement, etc.), each piece of content should focus on a single one. A campaign enables brands to build upon the successes of individual pieces of content to move their audience to conversion.

For example, a blog post may lead to a newsletter sign up, which leads to downloading an ebook, which leads to requesting information from a sales representative. That’s an overly simplified roadmap, but it illustrates how you can use content to create a customized and efficient pathway for your target audience.

Your content strategy may have multiple goals, but each piece of content should focus on only one. Click To Tweet Getting Started with Business Goals

While organizations and content strategies differ, the following four steps will help you understand the content you need to produce in order to achieve your desired business objective:

Define a goal for each piece of content.

Select a specific audience that makes sense for that goal.

Identify the content topics/mediums that will move that audience to the desired outcome.

Analyze the results, adjust and/or expand.

Remember, each step should lead to the next. For example, identifying the objective and audience helps you hone your content types (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and topics, enabling you to deliver the right message at the right time with greater frequency.

Though the steps are simple, you and your team should write down your conclusions—formally, not on a dinner napkin. The extra effort pays off. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of marketers do not formally document their objectives, audience, or goals. That diminishes their chances for success, according to a study by Dominican University’s Gail Matthews which showed that people who write down goals, review them, and share them are 33 percent more successful than those who don’t.

Preparing Individual Content Pieces

When preparing content, remember that competition is fierce for your target audience’s attention; they are the metaphorical belle of the content marketing ball, and many brands want a dance. Identifying and creating content around the specific needs of your target audience will attract their attention, and a strong call to action for the one next step (whether it’s to purchase, learn more, subscribe to your newsletter, or something else) is the final touch.

So what does this look like? Michael Smart did a masterful job with a piece of content that he posted to his blog and also distributed via email.

Objective: Get registrations for his upcoming marketing seminar.

Audience: Communications managers and executives looking to advance their career.

Resonating Content: How do you pique the interest of high-level communicators? Appeal to their skepticism. Michael wrote about an attendee at a conference who doubted he could provide new insights. He challenged her to stay. She did. She succeeded. Then he challenged his readers to sign up for the seminar’s last nine remaining seats.

Analyze and Adjust: Without speaking to him personally (and if you’re reading this Michael, give us a call some time!), it’s impossible to say with certainty that he analyzed results. However, Michael is a savvy PR professional and marketer who has dedicated enormous time and effort to creating content and building his newsletter list. He deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Navigating Around Gatekeepers

Xerox wanted to engage with senior-level executives but found they often couldn’t get past those executives’ administrators who triaged calls and removed marketing materials from snail mail piles. This, of course, impacted Xerox’s sales, so they found a different path.

To increase sales leads (Objective), Xerox created engaging content for C-suite prospects (Audience) that wouldn’t get earmarked as a solicitation by the admins. This involved reshaping the focus of its content marketing. Rather than continuing to focus on client problems, Xerox shared how clients solved those problems and the mindset that drove their success through a collaboration with Forbes on a publication called Chief Optimist magazine (Content).

The company creates five editions of the magazine that cater to specific industries and will send customized print versions to key prospects. It promoted the publications through email and printed cards that sales reps delivered personally.

It didn’t take long for the results to pile up. Email readership leaped 300 to 400 percent. The company gathered 20,000 new contacts and set up more than 1,000 appointments for its sales people. The result:  More than $1 billion in pipeline revenue with a 12- to 18-month sales cycle. To keep customers returning to the site, it launched online forums headed by business celebrities such as Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company (Analyze and Adjust).

Smaller companies with fewer resources don’t have the ability to launch a full scale campaign like this, but they can identify the key concerns and topics their audiences care about with content intelligence. Solutions like the Ceralytics platform analyze content from around the web to identify key opportunities for your brand. (And yes, it can even help companies like Xerox.)

Capitalizing on Pop Culture

SunGard had a challenge that so many brands can relate to: a product or service that doesn’t stoke people’s interest. However, they became a buzzed about brand in the crowded B2B technology space (Objective) by capitalizing on our fascination with zombies.

SunGard focused specifically on reaching IT executives (Audience) with an infographic and ebook that showed the importance of having a resilient business infrastructure, in this case one that could survive a zombie apocalypse (Content). The infographic took the audience step by step through the procedures used to protect data and applications in the event of a zombie attack. To disseminate its gory graphic and the corresponding ebook, SunGard initiated two email campaigns: one broad-based to IT executives with titles director and above for companies earning more than $50 million annually, and another to IT executives who hadn’t responded to a SunGard email in six months.

What made this zombie infographic extra killer? The call to action. Recipients clicked through to a landing page where they could enter to win a physical zombie survival kit. As the campaign took off, SunGard monitored how many times the infographic was shared by influential third-party cloud-based sites (Analyze and Adjust).

The brilliance of this campaign comes from its use of zombies. Had they intended to connect with prospects only a step or two from making a purchase, zombies and a survival kit likely wouldn’t have moved the needle. When considering whether to invest in one solution or another, people tend to want cold, hard facts and case studies. However, for brand awareness, SunGard’s decision to capitalize on the zombie trend more than did the trick.

SunGard’s zombie campaign produced astounding results, tripling expected downloads and doubling expected click-through rates. Additionally, several niche cloud websites featured the infographic on their home pages. Following this success, SunGard adjusted the program, initiating a direct mail-campaign and then a social media campaign.

The accomplishments of Michael Smart, Xerox, and SunGard flow directly from their well thought-out approaches. Success doesn’t have to be predicated on a long history of content production. Content marketing come-latelys can enter this saturated arena and drive results. The key is being strategic and focused on a single goal.

http://ift.tt/2kjbRNg

[christinesumpmg]

Here’s How Much Your Content Marketing Goals Matter

When it comes to content marketing, have you been slow getting out of the starting gate? Or are you struggling to keep up with larger competitors that crank out tons of content? It’s not an enviable position, but all is not lost. You’re still in the race—if you take the right approach and focus on your content marketing goals.

Despite your instinct to knock out blog post after blog post to catch up, adopting a goal-focused content strategy will provide greater dividends in both the short and long terms. If this sounds obvious, it’s actually the zag to the zig of most marketers. Some 70 percent of them lack a consistent or integrated content strategy, according to Altimeter.

Part of this no-strategy approach likely involves failing to focus on producing a single business goal with each piece of content. Some content managers won’t consider a goal at all when developing a blog post, white paper, or webinar, while others will try to shoot the moon. Both tend to produce an ROI of roughly zilch.

One Piece of Content, One Content Marketing Goal

Though your overarching content strategy will likely have multiple content goals (awareness, lead generation, customer retention, engagement, etc.), each piece of content should focus on a single one. A campaign enables brands to build upon the successes of individual pieces of content to move their audience to conversion.

For example, a blog post may lead to a newsletter sign up, which leads to downloading an ebook, which leads to requesting information from a sales representative. That’s an overly simplified roadmap, but it illustrates how you can use content to create a customized and efficient pathway for your target audience.

Your content strategy may have multiple goals, but each piece of content should focus on only one. Click To Tweet Getting Started with Business Goals

While organizations and content strategies differ, the following four steps will help you understand the content you need to produce in order to achieve your desired business objective:

Define a goal for each piece of content.

Select a specific audience that makes sense for that goal.

Identify the content topics/mediums that will move that audience to the desired outcome.

Analyze the results, adjust and/or expand.

Remember, each step should lead to the next. For example, identifying the objective and audience helps you hone your content types (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and topics, enabling you to deliver the right message at the right time with greater frequency.

Though the steps are simple, you and your team should write down your conclusions—formally, not on a dinner napkin. The extra effort pays off. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of marketers do not formally document their objectives, audience, or goals. That diminishes their chances for success, according to a study by Dominican University’s Gail Matthews which showed that people who write down goals, review them, and share them are 33 percent more successful than those who don’t.

Preparing Individual Content Pieces

When preparing content, remember that competition is fierce for your target audience’s attention; they are the metaphorical belle of the content marketing ball, and many brands want a dance. Identifying and creating content around the specific needs of your target audience will attract their attention, and a strong call to action for the one next step (whether it’s to purchase, learn more, subscribe to your newsletter, or something else) is the final touch.

So what does this look like? Michael Smart did a masterful job with a piece of content that he posted to his blog and also distributed via email.

Objective: Get registrations for his upcoming marketing seminar.

Audience: Communications managers and executives looking to advance their career.

Resonating Content: How do you pique the interest of high-level communicators? Appeal to their skepticism. Michael wrote about an attendee at a conference who doubted he could provide new insights. He challenged her to stay. She did. She succeeded. Then he challenged his readers to sign up for the seminar’s last nine remaining seats.

Analyze and Adjust: Without speaking to him personally (and if you’re reading this Michael, give us a call some time!), it’s impossible to say with certainty that he analyzed results. However, Michael is a savvy PR professional and marketer who has dedicated enormous time and effort to creating content and building his newsletter list. He deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Navigating Around Gatekeepers

Xerox wanted to engage with senior-level executives but found they often couldn’t get past those executives’ administrators who triaged calls and removed marketing materials from snail mail piles. This, of course, impacted Xerox’s sales, so they found a different path.

To increase sales leads (Objective), Xerox created engaging content for C-suite prospects (Audience) that wouldn’t get earmarked as a solicitation by the admins. This involved reshaping the focus of its content marketing. Rather than continuing to focus on client problems, Xerox shared how clients solved those problems and the mindset that drove their success through a collaboration with Forbes on a publication called Chief Optimist magazine (Content).

The company creates five editions of the magazine that cater to specific industries and will send customized print versions to key prospects. It promoted the publications through email and printed cards that sales reps delivered personally.

It didn’t take long for the results to pile up. Email readership leaped 300 to 400 percent. The company gathered 20,000 new contacts and set up more than 1,000 appointments for its sales people. The result:  More than $1 billion in pipeline revenue with a 12- to 18-month sales cycle. To keep customers returning to the site, it launched online forums headed by business celebrities such as Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company (Analyze and Adjust).

Smaller companies with fewer resources don’t have the ability to launch a full scale campaign like this, but they can identify the key concerns and topics their audiences care about with content intelligence. Solutions like the Ceralytics platform analyze content from around the web to identify key opportunities for your brand. (And yes, it can even help companies like Xerox.)

Capitalizing on Pop Culture

SunGard had a challenge that so many brands can relate to: a product or service that doesn’t stoke people’s interest. However, they became a buzzed about brand in the crowded B2B technology space (Objective) by capitalizing on our fascination with zombies.

SunGard focused specifically on reaching IT executives (Audience) with an infographic and ebook that showed the importance of having a resilient business infrastructure, in this case one that could survive a zombie apocalypse (Content). The infographic took the audience step by step through the procedures used to protect data and applications in the event of a zombie attack. To disseminate its gory graphic and the corresponding ebook, SunGard initiated two email campaigns: one broad-based to IT executives with titles director and above for companies earning more than $50 million annually, and another to IT executives who hadn’t responded to a SunGard email in six months.

What made this zombie infographic extra killer? The call to action. Recipients clicked through to a landing page where they could enter to win a physical zombie survival kit. As the campaign took off, SunGard monitored how many times the infographic was shared by influential third-party cloud-based sites (Analyze and Adjust).

The brilliance of this campaign comes from its use of zombies. Had they intended to connect with prospects only a step or two from making a purchase, zombies and a survival kit likely wouldn’t have moved the needle. When considering whether to invest in one solution or another, people tend to want cold, hard facts and case studies. However, for brand awareness, SunGard’s decision to capitalize on the zombie trend more than did the trick.

SunGard’s zombie campaign produced astounding results, tripling expected downloads and doubling expected click-through rates. Additionally, several niche cloud websites featured the infographic on their home pages. Following this success, SunGard adjusted the program, initiating a direct mail-campaign and then a social media campaign.

The accomplishments of Michael Smart, Xerox, and SunGard flow directly from their well thought-out approaches. Success doesn’t have to be predicated on a long history of content production. Content marketing come-latelys can enter this saturated arena and drive results. The key is being strategic and focused on a single goal.

http://ift.tt/2kjbRNg

[mariasolemarionqi]

Here’s How Much Your Content Marketing Goals Matter

When it comes to content marketing, have you been slow getting out of the starting gate? Or are you struggling to keep up with larger competitors that crank out tons of content? It’s not an enviable position, but all is not lost. You’re still in the race—if you take the right approach and focus on your content marketing goals.

Despite your instinct to knock out blog post after blog post to catch up, adopting a goal-focused content strategy will provide greater dividends in both the short and long terms. If this sounds obvious, it’s actually the zag to the zig of most marketers. Some 70 percent of them lack a consistent or integrated content strategy, according to Altimeter.

Part of this no-strategy approach likely involves failing to focus on producing a single business goal with each piece of content. Some content managers won’t consider a goal at all when developing a blog post, white paper, or webinar, while others will try to shoot the moon. Both tend to produce an ROI of roughly zilch.

One Piece of Content, One Content Marketing Goal

Though your overarching content strategy will likely have multiple content goals (awareness, lead generation, customer retention, engagement, etc.), each piece of content should focus on a single one. A campaign enables brands to build upon the successes of individual pieces of content to move their audience to conversion.

For example, a blog post may lead to a newsletter sign up, which leads to downloading an ebook, which leads to requesting information from a sales representative. That’s an overly simplified roadmap, but it illustrates how you can use content to create a customized and efficient pathway for your target audience.

Your content strategy may have multiple goals, but each piece of content should focus on only one. Click To Tweet Getting Started with Business Goals

While organizations and content strategies differ, the following four steps will help you understand the content you need to produce in order to achieve your desired business objective:

Define a goal for each piece of content.

Select a specific audience that makes sense for that goal.

Identify the content topics/mediums that will move that audience to the desired outcome.

Analyze the results, adjust and/or expand.

Remember, each step should lead to the next. For example, identifying the objective and audience helps you hone your content types (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and topics, enabling you to deliver the right message at the right time with greater frequency.

Though the steps are simple, you and your team should write down your conclusions—formally, not on a dinner napkin. The extra effort pays off. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of marketers do not formally document their objectives, audience, or goals. That diminishes their chances for success, according to a study by Dominican University’s Gail Matthews which showed that people who write down goals, review them, and share them are 33 percent more successful than those who don’t.

Preparing Individual Content Pieces

When preparing content, remember that competition is fierce for your target audience’s attention; they are the metaphorical belle of the content marketing ball, and many brands want a dance. Identifying and creating content around the specific needs of your target audience will attract their attention, and a strong call to action for the one next step (whether it’s to purchase, learn more, subscribe to your newsletter, or something else) is the final touch.

So what does this look like? Michael Smart did a masterful job with a piece of content that he posted to his blog and also distributed via email.

Objective: Get registrations for his upcoming marketing seminar.

Audience: Communications managers and executives looking to advance their career.

Resonating Content: How do you pique the interest of high-level communicators? Appeal to their skepticism. Michael wrote about an attendee at a conference who doubted he could provide new insights. He challenged her to stay. She did. She succeeded. Then he challenged his readers to sign up for the seminar’s last nine remaining seats.

Analyze and Adjust: Without speaking to him personally (and if you’re reading this Michael, give us a call some time!), it’s impossible to say with certainty that he analyzed results. However, Michael is a savvy PR professional and marketer who has dedicated enormous time and effort to creating content and building his newsletter list. He deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Navigating Around Gatekeepers

Xerox wanted to engage with senior-level executives but found they often couldn’t get past those executives’ administrators who triaged calls and removed marketing materials from snail mail piles. This, of course, impacted Xerox’s sales, so they found a different path.

To increase sales leads (Objective), Xerox created engaging content for C-suite prospects (Audience) that wouldn’t get earmarked as a solicitation by the admins. This involved reshaping the focus of its content marketing. Rather than continuing to focus on client problems, Xerox shared how clients solved those problems and the mindset that drove their success through a collaboration with Forbes on a publication called Chief Optimist magazine (Content).

The company creates five editions of the magazine that cater to specific industries and will send customized print versions to key prospects. It promoted the publications through email and printed cards that sales reps delivered personally.

It didn’t take long for the results to pile up. Email readership leaped 300 to 400 percent. The company gathered 20,000 new contacts and set up more than 1,000 appointments for its sales people. The result:  More than $1 billion in pipeline revenue with a 12- to 18-month sales cycle. To keep customers returning to the site, it launched online forums headed by business celebrities such as Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company (Analyze and Adjust).

Smaller companies with fewer resources don’t have the ability to launch a full scale campaign like this, but they can identify the key concerns and topics their audiences care about with content intelligence. Solutions like the Ceralytics platform analyze content from around the web to identify key opportunities for your brand. (And yes, it can even help companies like Xerox.)

Capitalizing on Pop Culture

SunGard had a challenge that so many brands can relate to: a product or service that doesn’t stoke people’s interest. However, they became a buzzed about brand in the crowded B2B technology space (Objective) by capitalizing on our fascination with zombies.

SunGard focused specifically on reaching IT executives (Audience) with an infographic and ebook that showed the importance of having a resilient business infrastructure, in this case one that could survive a zombie apocalypse (Content). The infographic took the audience step by step through the procedures used to protect data and applications in the event of a zombie attack. To disseminate its gory graphic and the corresponding ebook, SunGard initiated two email campaigns: one broad-based to IT executives with titles director and above for companies earning more than $50 million annually, and another to IT executives who hadn’t responded to a SunGard email in six months.

What made this zombie infographic extra killer? The call to action. Recipients clicked through to a landing page where they could enter to win a physical zombie survival kit. As the campaign took off, SunGard monitored how many times the infographic was shared by influential third-party cloud-based sites (Analyze and Adjust).

The brilliance of this campaign comes from its use of zombies. Had they intended to connect with prospects only a step or two from making a purchase, zombies and a survival kit likely wouldn’t have moved the needle. When considering whether to invest in one solution or another, people tend to want cold, hard facts and case studies. However, for brand awareness, SunGard’s decision to capitalize on the zombie trend more than did the trick.

SunGard’s zombie campaign produced astounding results, tripling expected downloads and doubling expected click-through rates. Additionally, several niche cloud websites featured the infographic on their home pages. Following this success, SunGard adjusted the program, initiating a direct mail-campaign and then a social media campaign.

The accomplishments of Michael Smart, Xerox, and SunGard flow directly from their well thought-out approaches. Success doesn’t have to be predicated on a long history of content production. Content marketing come-latelys can enter this saturated arena and drive results. The key is being strategic and focused on a single goal.

http://ift.tt/2kjbRNg

[christinesumpmg1]

Here’s How Much Your Content Marketing Goals Matter

When it comes to content marketing, have you been slow getting out of the starting gate? Or are you struggling to keep up with larger competitors that crank out tons of content? It’s not an enviable position, but all is not lost. You’re still in the race—if you take the right approach and focus on your content marketing goals.

Despite your instinct to knock out blog post after blog post to catch up, adopting a goal-focused content strategy will provide greater dividends in both the short and long terms. If this sounds obvious, it’s actually the zag to the zig of most marketers. Some 70 percent of them lack a consistent or integrated content strategy, according to Altimeter.

Part of this no-strategy approach likely involves failing to focus on producing a single business goal with each piece of content. Some content managers won’t consider a goal at all when developing a blog post, white paper, or webinar, while others will try to shoot the moon. Both tend to produce an ROI of roughly zilch.

One Piece of Content, One Content Marketing Goal

Though your overarching content strategy will likely have multiple content goals (awareness, lead generation, customer retention, engagement, etc.), each piece of content should focus on a single one. A campaign enables brands to build upon the successes of individual pieces of content to move their audience to conversion.

For example, a blog post may lead to a newsletter sign up, which leads to downloading an ebook, which leads to requesting information from a sales representative. That’s an overly simplified roadmap, but it illustrates how you can use content to create a customized and efficient pathway for your target audience.

Your content strategy may have multiple goals, but each piece of content should focus on only one. Click To Tweet Getting Started with Business Goals

While organizations and content strategies differ, the following four steps will help you understand the content you need to produce in order to achieve your desired business objective:

Define a goal for each piece of content.

Select a specific audience that makes sense for that goal.

Identify the content topics/mediums that will move that audience to the desired outcome.

Analyze the results, adjust and/or expand.

Remember, each step should lead to the next. For example, identifying the objective and audience helps you hone your content types (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and topics, enabling you to deliver the right message at the right time with greater frequency.

Though the steps are simple, you and your team should write down your conclusions—formally, not on a dinner napkin. The extra effort pays off. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of marketers do not formally document their objectives, audience, or goals. That diminishes their chances for success, according to a study by Dominican University’s Gail Matthews which showed that people who write down goals, review them, and share them are 33 percent more successful than those who don’t.

Preparing Individual Content Pieces

When preparing content, remember that competition is fierce for your target audience’s attention; they are the metaphorical belle of the content marketing ball, and many brands want a dance. Identifying and creating content around the specific needs of your target audience will attract their attention, and a strong call to action for the one next step (whether it’s to purchase, learn more, subscribe to your newsletter, or something else) is the final touch.

So what does this look like? Michael Smart did a masterful job with a piece of content that he posted to his blog and also distributed via email.

Objective: Get registrations for his upcoming marketing seminar.

Audience: Communications managers and executives looking to advance their career.

Resonating Content: How do you pique the interest of high-level communicators? Appeal to their skepticism. Michael wrote about an attendee at a conference who doubted he could provide new insights. He challenged her to stay. She did. She succeeded. Then he challenged his readers to sign up for the seminar’s last nine remaining seats.

Analyze and Adjust: Without speaking to him personally (and if you’re reading this Michael, give us a call some time!), it’s impossible to say with certainty that he analyzed results. However, Michael is a savvy PR professional and marketer who has dedicated enormous time and effort to creating content and building his newsletter list. He deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Navigating Around Gatekeepers

Xerox wanted to engage with senior-level executives but found they often couldn’t get past those executives’ administrators who triaged calls and removed marketing materials from snail mail piles. This, of course, impacted Xerox’s sales, so they found a different path.

To increase sales leads (Objective), Xerox created engaging content for C-suite prospects (Audience) that wouldn’t get earmarked as a solicitation by the admins. This involved reshaping the focus of its content marketing. Rather than continuing to focus on client problems, Xerox shared how clients solved those problems and the mindset that drove their success through a collaboration with Forbes on a publication called Chief Optimist magazine (Content).

The company creates five editions of the magazine that cater to specific industries and will send customized print versions to key prospects. It promoted the publications through email and printed cards that sales reps delivered personally.

It didn’t take long for the results to pile up. Email readership leaped 300 to 400 percent. The company gathered 20,000 new contacts and set up more than 1,000 appointments for its sales people. The result:  More than $1 billion in pipeline revenue with a 12- to 18-month sales cycle. To keep customers returning to the site, it launched online forums headed by business celebrities such as Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company (Analyze and Adjust).

Smaller companies with fewer resources don’t have the ability to launch a full scale campaign like this, but they can identify the key concerns and topics their audiences care about with content intelligence. Solutions like the Ceralytics platform analyze content from around the web to identify key opportunities for your brand. (And yes, it can even help companies like Xerox.)

Capitalizing on Pop Culture

SunGard had a challenge that so many brands can relate to: a product or service that doesn’t stoke people’s interest. However, they became a buzzed about brand in the crowded B2B technology space (Objective) by capitalizing on our fascination with zombies.

SunGard focused specifically on reaching IT executives (Audience) with an infographic and ebook that showed the importance of having a resilient business infrastructure, in this case one that could survive a zombie apocalypse (Content). The infographic took the audience step by step through the procedures used to protect data and applications in the event of a zombie attack. To disseminate its gory graphic and the corresponding ebook, SunGard initiated two email campaigns: one broad-based to IT executives with titles director and above for companies earning more than $50 million annually, and another to IT executives who hadn’t responded to a SunGard email in six months.

What made this zombie infographic extra killer? The call to action. Recipients clicked through to a landing page where they could enter to win a physical zombie survival kit. As the campaign took off, SunGard monitored how many times the infographic was shared by influential third-party cloud-based sites (Analyze and Adjust).

The brilliance of this campaign comes from its use of zombies. Had they intended to connect with prospects only a step or two from making a purchase, zombies and a survival kit likely wouldn’t have moved the needle. When considering whether to invest in one solution or another, people tend to want cold, hard facts and case studies. However, for brand awareness, SunGard’s decision to capitalize on the zombie trend more than did the trick.

SunGard’s zombie campaign produced astounding results, tripling expected downloads and doubling expected click-through rates. Additionally, several niche cloud websites featured the infographic on their home pages. Following this success, SunGard adjusted the program, initiating a direct mail-campaign and then a social media campaign.

The accomplishments of Michael Smart, Xerox, and SunGard flow directly from their well thought-out approaches. Success doesn’t have to be predicated on a long history of content production. Content marketing come-latelys can enter this saturated arena and drive results. The key is being strategic and focused on a single goal.

http://ift.tt/2kjbRNg

[rodneyevesuarywk]

Here’s How Much Your Content Marketing Goals Matter

When it comes to content marketing, have you been slow getting out of the starting gate? Or are you struggling to keep up with larger competitors that crank out tons of content? It’s not an enviable position, but all is not lost. You’re still in the race—if you take the right approach and focus on your content marketing goals.

Despite your instinct to knock out blog post after blog post to catch up, adopting a goal-focused content strategy will provide greater dividends in both the short and long terms. If this sounds obvious, it’s actually the zag to the zig of most marketers. Some 70 percent of them lack a consistent or integrated content strategy, according to Altimeter.

Part of this no-strategy approach likely involves failing to focus on producing a single business goal with each piece of content. Some content managers won’t consider a goal at all when developing a blog post, white paper, or webinar, while others will try to shoot the moon. Both tend to produce an ROI of roughly zilch.

One Piece of Content, One Content Marketing Goal

Though your overarching content strategy will likely have multiple content goals (awareness, lead generation, customer retention, engagement, etc.), each piece of content should focus on a single one. A campaign enables brands to build upon the successes of individual pieces of content to move their audience to conversion.

For example, a blog post may lead to a newsletter sign up, which leads to downloading an ebook, which leads to requesting information from a sales representative. That’s an overly simplified roadmap, but it illustrates how you can use content to create a customized and efficient pathway for your target audience.

Your content strategy may have multiple goals, but each piece of content should focus on only one. Click To Tweet Getting Started with Business Goals

While organizations and content strategies differ, the following four steps will help you understand the content you need to produce in order to achieve your desired business objective:

Define a goal for each piece of content.

Select a specific audience that makes sense for that goal.

Identify the content topics/mediums that will move that audience to the desired outcome.

Analyze the results, adjust and/or expand.

Remember, each step should lead to the next. For example, identifying the objective and audience helps you hone your content types (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and topics, enabling you to deliver the right message at the right time with greater frequency.

Though the steps are simple, you and your team should write down your conclusions—formally, not on a dinner napkin. The extra effort pays off. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of marketers do not formally document their objectives, audience, or goals. That diminishes their chances for success, according to a study by Dominican University’s Gail Matthews which showed that people who write down goals, review them, and share them are 33 percent more successful than those who don’t.

Preparing Individual Content Pieces

When preparing content, remember that competition is fierce for your target audience’s attention; they are the metaphorical belle of the content marketing ball, and many brands want a dance. Identifying and creating content around the specific needs of your target audience will attract their attention, and a strong call to action for the one next step (whether it’s to purchase, learn more, subscribe to your newsletter, or something else) is the final touch.

So what does this look like? Michael Smart did a masterful job with a piece of content that he posted to his blog and also distributed via email.

Objective: Get registrations for his upcoming marketing seminar.

Audience: Communications managers and executives looking to advance their career.

Resonating Content: How do you pique the interest of high-level communicators? Appeal to their skepticism. Michael wrote about an attendee at a conference who doubted he could provide new insights. He challenged her to stay. She did. She succeeded. Then he challenged his readers to sign up for the seminar’s last nine remaining seats.

Analyze and Adjust: Without speaking to him personally (and if you’re reading this Michael, give us a call some time!), it’s impossible to say with certainty that he analyzed results. However, Michael is a savvy PR professional and marketer who has dedicated enormous time and effort to creating content and building his newsletter list. He deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Navigating Around Gatekeepers

Xerox wanted to engage with senior-level executives but found they often couldn’t get past those executives’ administrators who triaged calls and removed marketing materials from snail mail piles. This, of course, impacted Xerox’s sales, so they found a different path.

To increase sales leads (Objective), Xerox created engaging content for C-suite prospects (Audience) that wouldn’t get earmarked as a solicitation by the admins. This involved reshaping the focus of its content marketing. Rather than continuing to focus on client problems, Xerox shared how clients solved those problems and the mindset that drove their success through a collaboration with Forbes on a publication called Chief Optimist magazine (Content).

The company creates five editions of the magazine that cater to specific industries and will send customized print versions to key prospects. It promoted the publications through email and printed cards that sales reps delivered personally.

It didn’t take long for the results to pile up. Email readership leaped 300 to 400 percent. The company gathered 20,000 new contacts and set up more than 1,000 appointments for its sales people. The result:  More than $1 billion in pipeline revenue with a 12- to 18-month sales cycle. To keep customers returning to the site, it launched online forums headed by business celebrities such as Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company (Analyze and Adjust).

Smaller companies with fewer resources don’t have the ability to launch a full scale campaign like this, but they can identify the key concerns and topics their audiences care about with content intelligence. Solutions like the Ceralytics platform analyze content from around the web to identify key opportunities for your brand. (And yes, it can even help companies like Xerox.)

Capitalizing on Pop Culture

SunGard had a challenge that so many brands can relate to: a product or service that doesn’t stoke people’s interest. However, they became a buzzed about brand in the crowded B2B technology space (Objective) by capitalizing on our fascination with zombies.

SunGard focused specifically on reaching IT executives (Audience) with an infographic and ebook that showed the importance of having a resilient business infrastructure, in this case one that could survive a zombie apocalypse (Content). The infographic took the audience step by step through the procedures used to protect data and applications in the event of a zombie attack. To disseminate its gory graphic and the corresponding ebook, SunGard initiated two email campaigns: one broad-based to IT executives with titles director and above for companies earning more than $50 million annually, and another to IT executives who hadn’t responded to a SunGard email in six months.

What made this zombie infographic extra killer? The call to action. Recipients clicked through to a landing page where they could enter to win a physical zombie survival kit. As the campaign took off, SunGard monitored how many times the infographic was shared by influential third-party cloud-based sites (Analyze and Adjust).

The brilliance of this campaign comes from its use of zombies. Had they intended to connect with prospects only a step or two from making a purchase, zombies and a survival kit likely wouldn’t have moved the needle. When considering whether to invest in one solution or another, people tend to want cold, hard facts and case studies. However, for brand awareness, SunGard’s decision to capitalize on the zombie trend more than did the trick.

SunGard’s zombie campaign produced astounding results, tripling expected downloads and doubling expected click-through rates. Additionally, several niche cloud websites featured the infographic on their home pages. Following this success, SunGard adjusted the program, initiating a direct mail-campaign and then a social media campaign.

The accomplishments of Michael Smart, Xerox, and SunGard flow directly from their well thought-out approaches. Success doesn’t have to be predicated on a long history of content production. Content marketing come-latelys can enter this saturated arena and drive results. The key is being strategic and focused on a single goal.

http://ift.tt/2kjbRNg

[fairchildlingpo1]

Here’s How Much Your Content Marketing Goals Matter

When it comes to content marketing, have you been slow getting out of the starting gate? Or are you struggling to keep up with larger competitors that crank out tons of content? It’s not an enviable position, but all is not lost. You’re still in the race—if you take the right approach and focus on your content marketing goals.

Despite your instinct to knock out blog post after blog post to catch up, adopting a goal-focused content strategy will provide greater dividends in both the short and long terms. If this sounds obvious, it’s actually the zag to the zig of most marketers. Some 70 percent of them lack a consistent or integrated content strategy, according to Altimeter.

Part of this no-strategy approach likely involves failing to focus on producing a single business goal with each piece of content. Some content managers won’t consider a goal at all when developing a blog post, white paper, or webinar, while others will try to shoot the moon. Both tend to produce an ROI of roughly zilch.

One Piece of Content, One Content Marketing Goal

Though your overarching content strategy will likely have multiple content goals (awareness, lead generation, customer retention, engagement, etc.), each piece of content should focus on a single one. A campaign enables brands to build upon the successes of individual pieces of content to move their audience to conversion.

For example, a blog post may lead to a newsletter sign up, which leads to downloading an ebook, which leads to requesting information from a sales representative. That’s an overly simplified roadmap, but it illustrates how you can use content to create a customized and efficient pathway for your target audience.

Your content strategy may have multiple goals, but each piece of content should focus on only one. Click To Tweet Getting Started with Business Goals

While organizations and content strategies differ, the following four steps will help you understand the content you need to produce in order to achieve your desired business objective:

Define a goal for each piece of content.

Select a specific audience that makes sense for that goal.

Identify the content topics/mediums that will move that audience to the desired outcome.

Analyze the results, adjust and/or expand.

Remember, each step should lead to the next. For example, identifying the objective and audience helps you hone your content types (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and topics, enabling you to deliver the right message at the right time with greater frequency.

Though the steps are simple, you and your team should write down your conclusions—formally, not on a dinner napkin. The extra effort pays off. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of marketers do not formally document their objectives, audience, or goals. That diminishes their chances for success, according to a study by Dominican University’s Gail Matthews which showed that people who write down goals, review them, and share them are 33 percent more successful than those who don’t.

Preparing Individual Content Pieces

When preparing content, remember that competition is fierce for your target audience’s attention; they are the metaphorical belle of the content marketing ball, and many brands want a dance. Identifying and creating content around the specific needs of your target audience will attract their attention, and a strong call to action for the one next step (whether it’s to purchase, learn more, subscribe to your newsletter, or something else) is the final touch.

So what does this look like? Michael Smart did a masterful job with a piece of content that he posted to his blog and also distributed via email.

Objective: Get registrations for his upcoming marketing seminar.

Audience: Communications managers and executives looking to advance their career.

Resonating Content: How do you pique the interest of high-level communicators? Appeal to their skepticism. Michael wrote about an attendee at a conference who doubted he could provide new insights. He challenged her to stay. She did. She succeeded. Then he challenged his readers to sign up for the seminar’s last nine remaining seats.

Analyze and Adjust: Without speaking to him personally (and if you’re reading this Michael, give us a call some time!), it’s impossible to say with certainty that he analyzed results. However, Michael is a savvy PR professional and marketer who has dedicated enormous time and effort to creating content and building his newsletter list. He deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Navigating Around Gatekeepers

Xerox wanted to engage with senior-level executives but found they often couldn’t get past those executives’ administrators who triaged calls and removed marketing materials from snail mail piles. This, of course, impacted Xerox’s sales, so they found a different path.

To increase sales leads (Objective), Xerox created engaging content for C-suite prospects (Audience) that wouldn’t get earmarked as a solicitation by the admins. This involved reshaping the focus of its content marketing. Rather than continuing to focus on client problems, Xerox shared how clients solved those problems and the mindset that drove their success through a collaboration with Forbes on a publication called Chief Optimist magazine (Content).

The company creates five editions of the magazine that cater to specific industries and will send customized print versions to key prospects. It promoted the publications through email and printed cards that sales reps delivered personally.

It didn’t take long for the results to pile up. Email readership leaped 300 to 400 percent. The company gathered 20,000 new contacts and set up more than 1,000 appointments for its sales people. The result:  More than $1 billion in pipeline revenue with a 12- to 18-month sales cycle. To keep customers returning to the site, it launched online forums headed by business celebrities such as Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company (Analyze and Adjust).

Smaller companies with fewer resources don’t have the ability to launch a full scale campaign like this, but they can identify the key concerns and topics their audiences care about with content intelligence. Solutions like the Ceralytics platform analyze content from around the web to identify key opportunities for your brand. (And yes, it can even help companies like Xerox.)

Capitalizing on Pop Culture

SunGard had a challenge that so many brands can relate to: a product or service that doesn’t stoke people’s interest. However, they became a buzzed about brand in the crowded B2B technology space (Objective) by capitalizing on our fascination with zombies.

SunGard focused specifically on reaching IT executives (Audience) with an infographic and ebook that showed the importance of having a resilient business infrastructure, in this case one that could survive a zombie apocalypse (Content). The infographic took the audience step by step through the procedures used to protect data and applications in the event of a zombie attack. To disseminate its gory graphic and the corresponding ebook, SunGard initiated two email campaigns: one broad-based to IT executives with titles director and above for companies earning more than $50 million annually, and another to IT executives who hadn’t responded to a SunGard email in six months.

What made this zombie infographic extra killer? The call to action. Recipients clicked through to a landing page where they could enter to win a physical zombie survival kit. As the campaign took off, SunGard monitored how many times the infographic was shared by influential third-party cloud-based sites (Analyze and Adjust).

The brilliance of this campaign comes from its use of zombies. Had they intended to connect with prospects only a step or two from making a purchase, zombies and a survival kit likely wouldn’t have moved the needle. When considering whether to invest in one solution or another, people tend to want cold, hard facts and case studies. However, for brand awareness, SunGard’s decision to capitalize on the zombie trend more than did the trick.

SunGard’s zombie campaign produced astounding results, tripling expected downloads and doubling expected click-through rates. Additionally, several niche cloud websites featured the infographic on their home pages. Following this success, SunGard adjusted the program, initiating a direct mail-campaign and then a social media campaign.

The accomplishments of Michael Smart, Xerox, and SunGard flow directly from their well thought-out approaches. Success doesn’t have to be predicated on a long history of content production. Content marketing come-latelys can enter this saturated arena and drive results. The key is being strategic and focused on a single goal.

http://ift.tt/2kjbRNg

[dainiaolivahm]

Here’s How Much Your Content Marketing Goals Matter

When it comes to content marketing, have you been slow getting out of the starting gate? Or are you struggling to keep up with larger competitors that crank out tons of content? It’s not an enviable position, but all is not lost. You’re still in the race—if you take the right approach and focus on your content marketing goals.

Despite your instinct to knock out blog post after blog post to catch up, adopting a goal-focused content strategy will provide greater dividends in both the short and long terms. If this sounds obvious, it’s actually the zag to the zig of most marketers. Some 70 percent of them lack a consistent or integrated content strategy, according to Altimeter.

Part of this no-strategy approach likely involves failing to focus on producing a single business goal with each piece of content. Some content managers won’t consider a goal at all when developing a blog post, white paper, or webinar, while others will try to shoot the moon. Both tend to produce an ROI of roughly zilch.

One Piece of Content, One Content Marketing Goal

Though your overarching content strategy will likely have multiple content goals (awareness, lead generation, customer retention, engagement, etc.), each piece of content should focus on a single one. A campaign enables brands to build upon the successes of individual pieces of content to move their audience to conversion.

For example, a blog post may lead to a newsletter sign up, which leads to downloading an ebook, which leads to requesting information from a sales representative. That’s an overly simplified roadmap, but it illustrates how you can use content to create a customized and efficient pathway for your target audience.

Your content strategy may have multiple goals, but each piece of content should focus on only one. Click To Tweet Getting Started with Business Goals

While organizations and content strategies differ, the following four steps will help you understand the content you need to produce in order to achieve your desired business objective:

Define a goal for each piece of content.

Select a specific audience that makes sense for that goal.

Identify the content topics/mediums that will move that audience to the desired outcome.

Analyze the results, adjust and/or expand.

Remember, each step should lead to the next. For example, identifying the objective and audience helps you hone your content types (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and topics, enabling you to deliver the right message at the right time with greater frequency.

Though the steps are simple, you and your team should write down your conclusions—formally, not on a dinner napkin. The extra effort pays off. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of marketers do not formally document their objectives, audience, or goals. That diminishes their chances for success, according to a study by Dominican University’s Gail Matthews which showed that people who write down goals, review them, and share them are 33 percent more successful than those who don’t.

Preparing Individual Content Pieces

When preparing content, remember that competition is fierce for your target audience’s attention; they are the metaphorical belle of the content marketing ball, and many brands want a dance. Identifying and creating content around the specific needs of your target audience will attract their attention, and a strong call to action for the one next step (whether it’s to purchase, learn more, subscribe to your newsletter, or something else) is the final touch.

So what does this look like? Michael Smart did a masterful job with a piece of content that he posted to his blog and also distributed via email.

Objective: Get registrations for his upcoming marketing seminar.

Audience: Communications managers and executives looking to advance their career.

Resonating Content: How do you pique the interest of high-level communicators? Appeal to their skepticism. Michael wrote about an attendee at a conference who doubted he could provide new insights. He challenged her to stay. She did. She succeeded. Then he challenged his readers to sign up for the seminar’s last nine remaining seats.

Analyze and Adjust: Without speaking to him personally (and if you’re reading this Michael, give us a call some time!), it’s impossible to say with certainty that he analyzed results. However, Michael is a savvy PR professional and marketer who has dedicated enormous time and effort to creating content and building his newsletter list. He deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Navigating Around Gatekeepers

Xerox wanted to engage with senior-level executives but found they often couldn’t get past those executives’ administrators who triaged calls and removed marketing materials from snail mail piles. This, of course, impacted Xerox’s sales, so they found a different path.

To increase sales leads (Objective), Xerox created engaging content for C-suite prospects (Audience) that wouldn’t get earmarked as a solicitation by the admins. This involved reshaping the focus of its content marketing. Rather than continuing to focus on client problems, Xerox shared how clients solved those problems and the mindset that drove their success through a collaboration with Forbes on a publication called Chief Optimist magazine (Content).

The company creates five editions of the magazine that cater to specific industries and will send customized print versions to key prospects. It promoted the publications through email and printed cards that sales reps delivered personally.

It didn’t take long for the results to pile up. Email readership leaped 300 to 400 percent. The company gathered 20,000 new contacts and set up more than 1,000 appointments for its sales people. The result:  More than $1 billion in pipeline revenue with a 12- to 18-month sales cycle. To keep customers returning to the site, it launched online forums headed by business celebrities such as Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company (Analyze and Adjust).

Smaller companies with fewer resources don’t have the ability to launch a full scale campaign like this, but they can identify the key concerns and topics their audiences care about with content intelligence. Solutions like the Ceralytics platform analyze content from around the web to identify key opportunities for your brand. (And yes, it can even help companies like Xerox.)

Capitalizing on Pop Culture

SunGard had a challenge that so many brands can relate to: a product or service that doesn’t stoke people’s interest. However, they became a buzzed about brand in the crowded B2B technology space (Objective) by capitalizing on our fascination with zombies.

SunGard focused specifically on reaching IT executives (Audience) with an infographic and ebook that showed the importance of having a resilient business infrastructure, in this case one that could survive a zombie apocalypse (Content). The infographic took the audience step by step through the procedures used to protect data and applications in the event of a zombie attack. To disseminate its gory graphic and the corresponding ebook, SunGard initiated two email campaigns: one broad-based to IT executives with titles director and above for companies earning more than $50 million annually, and another to IT executives who hadn’t responded to a SunGard email in six months.

What made this zombie infographic extra killer? The call to action. Recipients clicked through to a landing page where they could enter to win a physical zombie survival kit. As the campaign took off, SunGard monitored how many times the infographic was shared by influential third-party cloud-based sites (Analyze and Adjust).

The brilliance of this campaign comes from its use of zombies. Had they intended to connect with prospects only a step or two from making a purchase, zombies and a survival kit likely wouldn’t have moved the needle. When considering whether to invest in one solution or another, people tend to want cold, hard facts and case studies. However, for brand awareness, SunGard’s decision to capitalize on the zombie trend more than did the trick.

SunGard’s zombie campaign produced astounding results, tripling expected downloads and doubling expected click-through rates. Additionally, several niche cloud websites featured the infographic on their home pages. Following this success, SunGard adjusted the program, initiating a direct mail-campaign and then a social media campaign.

The accomplishments of Michael Smart, Xerox, and SunGard flow directly from their well thought-out approaches. Success doesn’t have to be predicated on a long history of content production. Content marketing come-latelys can enter this saturated arena and drive results. The key is being strategic and focused on a single goal.

http://ift.tt/2kjbRNg

[maryhare96]

Here’s How Much Your Content Marketing Goals Matter

When it comes to content marketing, have you been slow getting out of the starting gate? Or are you struggling to keep up with larger competitors that crank out tons of content? It’s not an enviable position, but all is not lost. You’re still in the race—if you take the right approach and focus on your content marketing goals.

Despite your instinct to knock out blog post after blog post to catch up, adopting a goal-focused content strategy will provide greater dividends in both the short and long terms. If this sounds obvious, it’s actually the zag to the zig of most marketers. Some 70 percent of them lack a consistent or integrated content strategy, according to Altimeter.

Part of this no-strategy approach likely involves failing to focus on producing a single business goal with each piece of content. Some content managers won’t consider a goal at all when developing a blog post, white paper, or webinar, while others will try to shoot the moon. Both tend to produce an ROI of roughly zilch.

One Piece of Content, One Content Marketing Goal

Though your overarching content strategy will likely have multiple content goals (awareness, lead generation, customer retention, engagement, etc.), each piece of content should focus on a single one. A campaign enables brands to build upon the successes of individual pieces of content to move their audience to conversion.

For example, a blog post may lead to a newsletter sign up, which leads to downloading an ebook, which leads to requesting information from a sales representative. That’s an overly simplified roadmap, but it illustrates how you can use content to create a customized and efficient pathway for your target audience.

Your content strategy may have multiple goals, but each piece of content should focus on only one. Click To Tweet Getting Started with Business Goals

While organizations and content strategies differ, the following four steps will help you understand the content you need to produce in order to achieve your desired business objective:

Define a goal for each piece of content.

Select a specific audience that makes sense for that goal.

Identify the content topics/mediums that will move that audience to the desired outcome.

Analyze the results, adjust and/or expand.

Remember, each step should lead to the next. For example, identifying the objective and audience helps you hone your content types (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and topics, enabling you to deliver the right message at the right time with greater frequency.

Though the steps are simple, you and your team should write down your conclusions—formally, not on a dinner napkin. The extra effort pays off. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of marketers do not formally document their objectives, audience, or goals. That diminishes their chances for success, according to a study by Dominican University’s Gail Matthews which showed that people who write down goals, review them, and share them are 33 percent more successful than those who don’t.

Preparing Individual Content Pieces

When preparing content, remember that competition is fierce for your target audience’s attention; they are the metaphorical belle of the content marketing ball, and many brands want a dance. Identifying and creating content around the specific needs of your target audience will attract their attention, and a strong call to action for the one next step (whether it’s to purchase, learn more, subscribe to your newsletter, or something else) is the final touch.

So what does this look like? Michael Smart did a masterful job with a piece of content that he posted to his blog and also distributed via email.

Objective: Get registrations for his upcoming marketing seminar.

Audience: Communications managers and executives looking to advance their career.

Resonating Content: How do you pique the interest of high-level communicators? Appeal to their skepticism. Michael wrote about an attendee at a conference who doubted he could provide new insights. He challenged her to stay. She did. She succeeded. Then he challenged his readers to sign up for the seminar’s last nine remaining seats.

Analyze and Adjust: Without speaking to him personally (and if you’re reading this Michael, give us a call some time!), it’s impossible to say with certainty that he analyzed results. However, Michael is a savvy PR professional and marketer who has dedicated enormous time and effort to creating content and building his newsletter list. He deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Navigating Around Gatekeepers

Xerox wanted to engage with senior-level executives but found they often couldn’t get past those executives’ administrators who triaged calls and removed marketing materials from snail mail piles. This, of course, impacted Xerox’s sales, so they found a different path.

To increase sales leads (Objective), Xerox created engaging content for C-suite prospects (Audience) that wouldn’t get earmarked as a solicitation by the admins. This involved reshaping the focus of its content marketing. Rather than continuing to focus on client problems, Xerox shared how clients solved those problems and the mindset that drove their success through a collaboration with Forbes on a publication called Chief Optimist magazine (Content).

The company creates five editions of the magazine that cater to specific industries and will send customized print versions to key prospects. It promoted the publications through email and printed cards that sales reps delivered personally.

It didn’t take long for the results to pile up. Email readership leaped 300 to 400 percent. The company gathered 20,000 new contacts and set up more than 1,000 appointments for its sales people. The result:  More than $1 billion in pipeline revenue with a 12- to 18-month sales cycle. To keep customers returning to the site, it launched online forums headed by business celebrities such as Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company (Analyze and Adjust).

Smaller companies with fewer resources don’t have the ability to launch a full scale campaign like this, but they can identify the key concerns and topics their audiences care about with content intelligence. Solutions like the Ceralytics platform analyze content from around the web to identify key opportunities for your brand. (And yes, it can even help companies like Xerox.)

Capitalizing on Pop Culture

SunGard had a challenge that so many brands can relate to: a product or service that doesn’t stoke people’s interest. However, they became a buzzed about brand in the crowded B2B technology space (Objective) by capitalizing on our fascination with zombies.

SunGard focused specifically on reaching IT executives (Audience) with an infographic and ebook that showed the importance of having a resilient business infrastructure, in this case one that could survive a zombie apocalypse (Content). The infographic took the audience step by step through the procedures used to protect data and applications in the event of a zombie attack. To disseminate its gory graphic and the corresponding ebook, SunGard initiated two email campaigns: one broad-based to IT executives with titles director and above for companies earning more than $50 million annually, and another to IT executives who hadn’t responded to a SunGard email in six months.

What made this zombie infographic extra killer? The call to action. Recipients clicked through to a landing page where they could enter to win a physical zombie survival kit. As the campaign took off, SunGard monitored how many times the infographic was shared by influential third-party cloud-based sites (Analyze and Adjust).

The brilliance of this campaign comes from its use of zombies. Had they intended to connect with prospects only a step or two from making a purchase, zombies and a survival kit likely wouldn’t have moved the needle. When considering whether to invest in one solution or another, people tend to want cold, hard facts and case studies. However, for brand awareness, SunGard’s decision to capitalize on the zombie trend more than did the trick.

SunGard’s zombie campaign produced astounding results, tripling expected downloads and doubling expected click-through rates. Additionally, several niche cloud websites featured the infographic on their home pages. Following this success, SunGard adjusted the program, initiating a direct mail-campaign and then a social media campaign.

The accomplishments of Michael Smart, Xerox, and SunGard flow directly from their well thought-out approaches. Success doesn’t have to be predicated on a long history of content production. Content marketing come-latelys can enter this saturated arena and drive results. The key is being strategic and focused on a single goal.

http://ift.tt/2kjbRNg

[kraussoutene]

Here’s How Much Your Content Marketing Goals Matter

When it comes to content marketing, have you been slow getting out of the starting gate? Or are you struggling to keep up with larger competitors that crank out tons of content? It’s not an enviable position, but all is not lost. You’re still in the race—if you take the right approach and focus on your content marketing goals.

Despite your instinct to knock out blog post after blog post to catch up, adopting a goal-focused content strategy will provide greater dividends in both the short and long terms. If this sounds obvious, it’s actually the zag to the zig of most marketers. Some 70 percent of them lack a consistent or integrated content strategy, according to Altimeter.

Part of this no-strategy approach likely involves failing to focus on producing a single business goal with each piece of content. Some content managers won’t consider a goal at all when developing a blog post, white paper, or webinar, while others will try to shoot the moon. Both tend to produce an ROI of roughly zilch.

One Piece of Content, One Content Marketing Goal

Though your overarching content strategy will likely have multiple content goals (awareness, lead generation, customer retention, engagement, etc.), each piece of content should focus on a single one. A campaign enables brands to build upon the successes of individual pieces of content to move their audience to conversion.

For example, a blog post may lead to a newsletter sign up, which leads to downloading an ebook, which leads to requesting information from a sales representative. That’s an overly simplified roadmap, but it illustrates how you can use content to create a customized and efficient pathway for your target audience.

Your content strategy may have multiple goals, but each piece of content should focus on only one. Click To Tweet Getting Started with Business Goals

While organizations and content strategies differ, the following four steps will help you understand the content you need to produce in order to achieve your desired business objective:

Define a goal for each piece of content.

Select a specific audience that makes sense for that goal.

Identify the content topics/mediums that will move that audience to the desired outcome.

Analyze the results, adjust and/or expand.

Remember, each step should lead to the next. For example, identifying the objective and audience helps you hone your content types (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and topics, enabling you to deliver the right message at the right time with greater frequency.

Though the steps are simple, you and your team should write down your conclusions—formally, not on a dinner napkin. The extra effort pays off. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60 percent of marketers do not formally document their objectives, audience, or goals. That diminishes their chances for success, according to a study by Dominican University’s Gail Matthews which showed that people who write down goals, review them, and share them are 33 percent more successful than those who don’t.

Preparing Individual Content Pieces

When preparing content, remember that competition is fierce for your target audience’s attention; they are the metaphorical belle of the content marketing ball, and many brands want a dance. Identifying and creating content around the specific needs of your target audience will attract their attention, and a strong call to action for the one next step (whether it’s to purchase, learn more, subscribe to your newsletter, or something else) is the final touch.

So what does this look like? Michael Smart did a masterful job with a piece of content that he posted to his blog and also distributed via email.

Objective: Get registrations for his upcoming marketing seminar.

Audience: Communications managers and executives looking to advance their career.

Resonating Content: How do you pique the interest of high-level communicators? Appeal to their skepticism. Michael wrote about an attendee at a conference who doubted he could provide new insights. He challenged her to stay. She did. She succeeded. Then he challenged his readers to sign up for the seminar’s last nine remaining seats.

Analyze and Adjust: Without speaking to him personally (and if you’re reading this Michael, give us a call some time!), it’s impossible to say with certainty that he analyzed results. However, Michael is a savvy PR professional and marketer who has dedicated enormous time and effort to creating content and building his newsletter list. He deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Navigating Around Gatekeepers

Xerox wanted to engage with senior-level executives but found they often couldn’t get past those executives’ administrators who triaged calls and removed marketing materials from snail mail piles. This, of course, impacted Xerox’s sales, so they found a different path.

To increase sales leads (Objective), Xerox created engaging content for C-suite prospects (Audience) that wouldn’t get earmarked as a solicitation by the admins. This involved reshaping the focus of its content marketing. Rather than continuing to focus on client problems, Xerox shared how clients solved those problems and the mindset that drove their success through a collaboration with Forbes on a publication called Chief Optimist magazine (Content).

The company creates five editions of the magazine that cater to specific industries and will send customized print versions to key prospects. It promoted the publications through email and printed cards that sales reps delivered personally.

It didn’t take long for the results to pile up. Email readership leaped 300 to 400 percent. The company gathered 20,000 new contacts and set up more than 1,000 appointments for its sales people. The result:  More than $1 billion in pipeline revenue with a 12- to 18-month sales cycle. To keep customers returning to the site, it launched online forums headed by business celebrities such as Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company (Analyze and Adjust).

Smaller companies with fewer resources don’t have the ability to launch a full scale campaign like this, but they can identify the key concerns and topics their audiences care about with content intelligence. Solutions like the Ceralytics platform analyze content from around the web to identify key opportunities for your brand. (And yes, it can even help companies like Xerox.)

Capitalizing on Pop Culture

SunGard had a challenge that so many brands can relate to: a product or service that doesn’t stoke people’s interest. However, they became a buzzed about brand in the crowded B2B technology space (Objective) by capitalizing on our fascination with zombies.

SunGard focused specifically on reaching IT executives (Audience) with an infographic and ebook that showed the importance of having a resilient business infrastructure, in this case one that could survive a zombie apocalypse (Content). The infographic took the audience step by step through the procedures used to protect data and applications in the event of a zombie attack. To disseminate its gory graphic and the corresponding ebook, SunGard initiated two email campaigns: one broad-based to IT executives with titles director and above for companies earning more than $50 million annually, and another to IT executives who hadn’t responded to a SunGard email in six months.

What made this zombie infographic extra killer? The call to action. Recipients clicked through to a landing page where they could enter to win a physical zombie survival kit. As the campaign took off, SunGard monitored how many times the infographic was shared by influential third-party cloud-based sites (Analyze and Adjust).

The brilliance of this campaign comes from its use of zombies. Had they intended to connect with prospects only a step or two from making a purchase, zombies and a survival kit likely wouldn’t have moved the needle. When considering whether to invest in one solution or another, people tend to want cold, hard facts and case studies. However, for brand awareness, SunGard’s decision to capitalize on the zombie trend more than did the trick.

SunGard’s zombie campaign produced astounding results, tripling expected downloads and doubling expected click-through rates. Additionally, several niche cloud websites featured the infographic on their home pages. Following this success, SunGard adjusted the program, initiating a direct mail-campaign and then a social media campaign.

The accomplishments of Michael Smart, Xerox, and SunGard flow directly from their well thought-out approaches. Success doesn’t have to be predicated on a long history of content production. Content marketing come-latelys can enter this saturated arena and drive results. The key is being strategic and focused on a single goal.

http://ift.tt/2kjbRNg