As traditional outbound marketing gives way to inbound content marketing, it is increasingly important to foster a mindset of putting customers first and delivering value. If you consistently offer interesting and useful content, people will notice you and come back again and again. By growing and engaging your audience, you will have an opportunity to gain even more new customers and learn from them so that you can continually adapt your strategy.

But while you are making the shift to inbound marketing, how will all those potential customers find you? You can’t engage people and offer them valuable content if they don’t know you exist. In this blog post, Michael Brenner offers these seven steps to “getting found” using inbound marketing:

These steps are both basic and critical for successfully implementing your inbound content marketing strategy. For more detailed information and guidance as you begin the shift to inbound marketing, contact us.

And viewed through the lens of analyzing inbound content marketing efforts, we need to know if these newbies are worth the effort.

The one that seems the most on the bubble at this moment is Klout, which puts itself out there as a way to measure social media influence. You may not even know it, but you may have a Klout score right now.

There’s lots of debate about how accurate the score is, and there’s lots chatter about if that score can be “gamed.” The question here, however, is if it’s worth it to pay attention to that score?

The people from Klout, of course, think that you should. We recently tweeted a link to this story, which the CEO of Klout says you can use a good Klout score for “Fame, Fortune, and Perks.”

It’s not clear that you really can get any of those three because of a good Klout score, but the Klout score may reflect the fact that you’ve already achieved some level of social media fame.

The key metric for Klout, unsurprisingly, is the creation of new content. ”We believe that every person that creates content has influence,” the CEO said in that same story.

So for your inbound content marketing, content is, and always will be, the king, no matter what new tools come along to measure or spread the influence of that content.

If you’d like to learn how Accendo Digital can help you with your inbound content marketing, please contact us.

The next step, says Kipp Bodnar, inbound marketing strategist at HubSpot, is for marketers to plug the power of social media into their own websites.

“Social media engagement happens across the web and isn’t limited to your Facebook business page or your favorite LinkedIn Group,” he writes in a guest blog for Social Media Explorer. “With social media becoming a larger part of the internet in general, marketers must more completely integrate social media into their entire sales and marketing process.”

Bodnar offers six basic strategies for integrating social media into marketing efforts:

• Start collecting social-media user names — While email addresses are still important, information such as a client’s LinkedIn URL gives sales people far wider and more useful databases.
• Use one-click follow buttons on your website — Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, Bodnar notes, all have free one-click buttons that let visitors follow your business without having to leave your site.
• Leverage existing customers — While you’re adding to your community, don’t forget the clients you already have. Encouraging them to connect with you on social media gives them benefits, and lets you gain new content  and new leads.
• Place social sharing buttons on all important website pages — Those buttons aren’t just for your blog posts, either. On the inbound marketing landscape, Bodnar counsels, you need lots of content pages on your website, too — product pages, for example, or landing pages for ebooks.

However, he cautions, don’t overdo it. Don’t overwhelm visitors with too many choices.

• Teach sales people how to prospect with social media — Social media can help your sales team understand client backgrounds and motivations. The better they understand a lead, the better their chances of gaining “trusted adviser” status, Bodnar says.
• Nurture leads — Automated emails won’t be enough. Think how incorporating social media can move the process along. Follow up behavior-based automation software, for example, with a tweet to see if prospects have any questions.

The idea, according to Bodnar, is not to limit your focus. Don’t stop within the walls of individual social networks — spread your efforts across the whole web.

“Social media,” he says, “isn’t limited to the confines of the networks themselves. Instead, much of social media’s leverage resides in your websites, emails and other marketing efforts.”

Unsure where to start? Contact us – we’ll show you some options.  Our owner, Scott, is an official Inbound Marketing Certified Professional by HubSpot.

The Internet gives you a tremendous number of very powerful – and very free tools to use in marketing your business.

Limited to 140 characters in length per “tweet,” you might be tempted to think that there’s not much by way of marketing that you can do with Twitter. But don’t be so quick to dismiss this very powerful, completely free marketing tool.

A recent article in USA Today really drives home the capabilities of this microblogging platform:

Cheryl and Karen Daskas, owners of the upscale Tender boutique in Birmingham, Mich., were trying to find a way to draw their social-media friends into the store this year. So they created an offer. They would sell their private-label Tender tights for $15 a pair — a bargain at a store that sells $1,500 messenger bags and $300 designer dresses.“We sold out thousands of pairs in a few days,” Cheryl Daskas said. “Blasting it on Twitter really drove it home. It was a lot of fun.”

The article went on to point out that using social media tools – like Twitter and Facebook – is a very definite growth trend, expected to increase “exponentially in 2012.” And this even though the general feeling is that the economy is still on the sluggish side.

The ability to actively engage your customers and potential customers is the key. Do more than just post links to your site; share stories, post pictures, encourage customers to post their pictures, hold “caption contests” – these are just some of the easy (and amazingly powerful) ways you can increase your brand’s visibility, foster goodwill with customers and potential customers, and drive business not just to your site, but to your bottom line.

Online marketing experts suggest doing more than just throwing out post after post about the awesomeness of your product; instead:

Rather than product-focused content, focus on content rich with tips and tricks which can help to relieve your target customers’ pain points. When you target the content you’re offering to the different marketing personas you have defined for your business, then your prospects will be much more likely to engage with your brand and therefore, more likely to complete a lead-capture form for a piece of your content. In short, providing targeted, useful content will help you generate more qualified leads who may genuinely be interested in what you have to offer.

The key – and the true power behind online marketing – is to find your crowd, to find the people that will help you tell your story:

These are your influencers, your colleagues, or your friends. They are the people nearest to you. Southwest Airlines is a strong believer in this. According to Brooke Thomas, emerging media coordinator, stories can be found everywhere, especially on Twitter: “Every tweet is essentially a story idea.” A recent example of Southwest embracing crowd-generated content was when frequent flyer Paul Lovine proposed to his girlfriend on a Southwest Airline flight and then tweeted that she had accepted. Southwest picked up the story, contacted Paul, and wrote a blog entry about it. Why would Southwest Airlines go through this trouble for one passenger? In our personal lives, we are judged and defined by the company we keep, by the people that surround us. It’s the same for brands and companies. A brand is defined by its customers, its friends, and its influencers. Engaging with them and sharing the stories they tell about your brand ultimately reflects what kind of company you are or want to be – your influencers can add to your credibility.

The “big boys” are keenly aware of this, which is why large media- and marketing-conscious companies like Coca-Cola, HP, and others invest a sizable amount of their operating capital in online marketing efforts, leveraging the interactive power of social media.

You as a small, local business, in many ways, can leverage that same power even more effectively.

But don’t sell yourself short.

You might not have a staff of correspondents filing dispatches from all over your store, but you’ve already got a key component: a knowledgeable source. (That’s you, of course.)

Who better to turn to for content that will keep your audience interested and primed to do business with you? You know your business and your products better than anybody — now you just need to find effective ways to communicate that knowledge to your customers.

Here’s an exercise: When someone at a party asks what you do, what do you tell them? We bet you wouldn’t be tongue-tied with an opening like that.

So think of that setting when you’re planning your content marketing. Consider it a conversation — maybe just small talk — with your clients. They want to know what you do, and you already have the answers. Just tell them — point to current trends, social and web media postings, or whatever else helps illustrate the message you’d like them to take away.

You can do that, right?

All that’s left now is to think of some creative avenues and angles for reaching your target market.

A new post in Business Insider’s Small Business Trends blog offers suggestions to get you started in 2012. Here are some content marketing ideas:

• Start a free course on a topic related to your business and invite people in your neighborhood to attend. So in your case, maybe you host a workshop on arranging living room furniture, color schemes or how to keep fabrics clean. Create some buzz ahead of time on your website or social networks.
• Compile your 20 best/most trafficked/most commented on blog posts into an ebook and offer them as a free download.
• Put together a buying guide related to your industry. If potential customers see your unbiased expertise and better understand what they should be looking for, they’ll remember you and trust you when purchase time comes.
• Start an industry-specific Twitter chat. There’s always something worth passing along.
• Create a video interview series in which you visit with influential people in your industry or community, then post the videos on your website. Invite the mayor to talk about how the city chose the seats for City Hall’s new auditorium — or have a doctor come on to explain lumbar support or something.
• Start an email newsletter. Include photos of furniture you’re featuring, seasonal tips and so on.
• Write case studies or customer-success stories for your website. You know: The guy who’d suffered with a sore back for years … until he found the perfect easy chair at your store.

See how this works? Not quite as intimidating as you think, eh?

If you get stuck or want to kick around some ideas, contact us. We’d love to talk.

But like we said, you’re the top expert when it comes to your business — don’t sell yourself short.

Content marketing is defined as creating and distributing relevant content for the purpose of engaging a targeted audience in order to achieve business goals. Social media is defined by Wikipedia as the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue.

So a way to look at the relationship between the two might be to consider social media as one of the distribution channels used in content marketing. After the content is created, social media sites like Facebook are used to deliver it to the target audience. Technically this is correct, but is this view is somewhat simplistic?

A deeper, more insightful way is to look at the relationship between three broader concepts: marketing, content, and conversation.

When we consider marketing, it’s easy to see that without good content any marketing effort will most likely fall short. If you don’t grab and hold the attention of your audience, there is simply no way to get your message across. At the same time, marketing without conversation becomes a one-way conduit that simply dumps the information in front of people. Even if this effort is well targeted, without conversation your audience will most likely glance over your content and quickly move on. There is already a tremendous amount of content “out there” competing for attention and standing out without the conversation often requires extensive resources beyond the reach of medium and small businesses.

On the other hand, conversations without content or with content that’s not interesting are not likely to work very well either, if at all. It’s like speaking to a boring person or someone who has little or nothing to say about what you’re trying to talk about. Great content, on the other hand, can stimulate vigorous conversation that maintain momentum and often grow virally.

Looking at it all from a bird’s eye perspective, it’s clear that in order for marketing to be as effective as it can be, it needs to have great content as well as be social. This is especially true for internet marketing because the web is fast becoming one giant social network. It’s becoming difficult to find a web site that’s not enabled one way or another to support some form of conversation or social media.

So while social media and content marketing are two separate concepts, they are increasingly interrelated and interdependent. Working with an expert partner like Accendo Digital, who understands and is able to navigate this relationship is crucial to a successful marketing campaign. Contact us to explore how content marketing and social media can help your business.

In other words, classic outbound marketing. Also known as interruption marketing, outbound marketing has been the practice for quite some time, and legitimately so when there were no good methods of tracking what marketing was successfully converting customers to buyers and what was turning them off. In today’s digital world, that is no longer true. Not only can everything be measured, it is much easier for the public to turn off the deluge.

Inbound marketing changes this dynamic. Rather than trying to grab everyone’s attention, you can instead invite select people into your world with the promise that what you have to say is of great relevance to them, allowing those who aren’t interested to, very simply, not be bothered.

Inbound marketing allows you to tightly target your marketing efforts to your most qualified and desirable customers. You become a trusted resource of relevant information that your customer’s want to visit time and time again; one who can answer any questions about your industry, products, and services without pressure to buy.

According to research from companies like Aberdeen and Forrester, inbound marketing doesn’t just bring in a higher quality customer; it saves money as well, as much as 62% less than traditional outbound marketing. When you take into account the high percentages of people who skip commercials, throw out direct mail unopened, and even opting out of a favorite website due to intrusive advertising, the possibility for a better revenue stream is even more striking.

What are the tools of inbound marketing?

• Social media, including a dependably updated blog; interactions on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook; participation in industry forums; and other social outlets.
• White papers, articles, e-books, podcasts, video, and infographics.
• Targeted email, landing pages, and relevant offers.

In other words, content marketing — great content that fits your targeted customers like a tailored suit.  And the more interaction you have, the better you will know your customers. You can quickly and easily tweak content to more closely align with their needs and desires. You can develop a marketing funnel with specialized content for each segment in the buying cycle.  All leading to higher conversion rates, more qualified traffic, and greater customer loyalty while driving higher revenues and lowering your marketing costs.

Contact us to learn more about how inbound marketing can work for your business.

Related:

• Content Marketing Should be Sustainable
• Secrets to Getting More From Your Content Marketing
• Content Marketing for Your Business
• Social Media: Essential For Marketing Strategy

That’s why it’s essential to plan for continuity in content marketing. By incorporating a story, characters, a theme, or a hook that lasts, you can make your content sustainable for the long term. The article lists four themes — Character, Curation, Community and Rubrics — that can help you start thinking about ways to foster sustainability in your content marketing.

Character

Mascots can be found everywhere in advertising, and with good reason. A strong character drives narrative.

An example is Macy’s ”Believe” campaign, which centers around a fictionalized version of Virginia O’Hanlon (as in “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”) The animated Virginia can be found on the store’s website, in stores, and in her own television special. There are even licensing agreements underway for a line of dolls and toys.

Curation

Content may be king, but without curation, it can be simply overwhelming. For any product, service, or industry, there is already plenty of information out there, with more content being produced every day. For many people, all of this content becomes too much to sift through.

That’s why content curation can be a key to finding and retaining your target audience. In short, you do the sifting for them. By consistently providing relevant information on your topic, industry or area, you can become a trusted source for quality content.

Community

The article points out that many companies have benefited from creating communities in which consumers can gather to discuss given topics. This holds particularly true in the tech sector, where electronics manufacturers run forums where members can discuss business problems and product issues, offering one another help and support.

The benefits go far beyond ongoing content creation. By listening and participating in discussions, the sponsoring brand has an early-warning system regarding problems, issues, and, often, competition in the field. Monitoring discussions can lead to advances in product development, and customer service expenditures can be dramatically reduced when customers are empowered to help one another.

Rubrics

Just as regular features in periodicals — such as a daily horoscope or a weekly home and garden section — are designed to keep readers coming back regularly, content marketing can use the same principle.

The author suggests developing regular, repeatable content units like an events calendar, expert opinion columns, how-tos, or a video of the week. These kinds of regular, repeatable features can provide your audience with new material while providing a comforting sense of familiarity.

This list doesn’t come close to covering all the aspects of content marketing, but hopefully it starts you thinking about some strategies and tactics that can promote longevity and make your content sustainable.

At Accendo Digital marketing & media, we work with you to build out a content marketing system: your website as a marketing hub, your overall web presence and email marketing. Contact us to discover how we can help you build and engage audiences, convert customers, and develop stamina for that content marketing marathon.

Every company is a media company.

Put more simply… EC = MC.

Have you wondered what it really means? To us, it’s not just another glossy marketing slogan. We see content as an essential element that every business needs in order to build and engage audiences and convert them to customers. So let’s take a minute and look at your business as a media company.

Traditional media companies are in business of making money by 1) building an audience through the use of content, and 2) selling advertising to reach that audience. Magazines, websites, TV networks, radio are all media companies. Their commodity is information, and the quality of that information is usually the measure of how successful they are. From the advertiser’s perspective, their commodity is attention and the opportunity to engage.

So why not build your own audience and opportunity to engage?  The Internet makes this very possible today for any sized business.

You might be selling potted plants, Caribbean vacation packages, or professional services. But what makes someone who sells goods or services a media company?

There’s probably a sign with your company name and logo outside your offices. Chances are, you have a website and might even be listed in the phone book (although these days that’s not a given). You have phone lines, send out emails, letters, create brochures, probably put together PowerPoint presentations, and are most likely engaged with some kind of advertising and marketing efforts.

In other words, if you have customers, or want to get new ones, you need to talk to them (your audience). And to reach them, you need content and a platform for them to engage with the content. From a Facebook Page to your company brochure, it’s all content. Just as with a person listening to the radio, the person reading the whitepaper they just downloaded from your website is attracted by and engaged with content. And with an engaged audience, you have the opportunity to convert them to customers.

The better the content you put out as a company – in all shapes and forms – the more likely you are to be successful. Just like content of a magazine needs to be fresh and engaging in order to sell it, you need to put out content that’s interesting, appealing and relevant in order to generate demand for and sell your business to new customers and retain the existing ones.

For years, businesses have been paying other companies to build audiences and create opportunities to engage them, but now… you can do it yourself!  And in doing so, your marketing expense has a residual effect — it builds “audience equity” that you own and control.  Now that is something your CFO can appreciate.

That’s why we say that every company is a media company, or said another way, every business is a media company. Learn more about content marketing and how Accendo Digital can help you become a great media company…

Related: What is Content Marketing?

The line-up included big names like Sheryl Sandberg (COO Facebook), Glenn Beck (now owner of Mercury Radio Arts), and Mark Cuban. Some of my favs were Alex Kazim (CEO, Ongo), David Siminoff (VC; Founder, Shmoop.com), George Kliavkoff (CEO, Manilla), Kevin Ryan (CEO, Gilt Groupe), John Battelle (Federated Media), and of course Henry Blodget is always great. A number of people said it was the best conference they had been to in a while, I would agree — the speakers and networking opportunities were solid.

Read the coverage by Business Insider >>
View the Speakers list (some names referenced in Tweets below) >>

And here you go… a digital media conference experienced via Tweets…