There’s little doubt that content marketing offers businesses great opportunity to educate customers, improve SEO and establish thought leadership. Many businesses are coming to realize the benefits of content marketing. But therein lies a problem.

The democratization of content enables any business anywhere to produce content that’s just as accessible as content produced by big brands. The problem is that it leaves customers with an overabundance of content to wade through. And much of this content lacks quality and fails to address our readers’ needs.

What does this mean for marketers? It means that we must position our brands and position them well. We must hone our messaging and ensure that every bit of content we produce speaks to that messaging.

Understand that any content that doesn’t communicate our key messaging is a waste of readers’ time. While blog posts about the company barbeque offer yet another opportunity to reach customers and feed the search engines, it’s not the type of content our customers need or want.

With every piece of content you produce, ask yourself if it satisfies the following criteria:

• Is it educational and informative?

• Does it speak to our company’s key messaging?

• Does it focus on us or our reader?

• Does it address our customers’ specific challenges?

• Does it inspire readers to learn more about our company and products?

• Is it unique and specific to our brand (or are we emulating our competitors)?

• Does it encourage the types of conversations we want to have with our customers?

To embrace content marketing and its many benefits, we must make it easy for readers to understand our brand and the messages we want to communicate. Anything else is merely clutter.

New survey results from marketing software company HubSpot show that blogging in today’s social media world can significantly increase lead volume.

For several years now, B2C companies have consistently blogged and seen their results grow. B2B companies have been a little slower to jump on the bandwagon, but as this research shows, blogging brings in leads for both B2B and B2C companies.

Specifically, those who blogged just 16-20 times per month got three times more leads than those who didn’t blog.

B2B companies who blogged just 16-20 times per month got three times more leads than those who didn’t blog. Compare this to the slightly higher increase for B2C business, and you see that B2B bloggers have definitely become a player in the content marketing game.

Note that blogging frequency matters. Businesses who blogged 16-20 times per month got twice as much traffic than those who blogged less than four times per month. Those who blogged at least 20 times per month had five times more traffic than those who blogged less than four times per month.

Overwhelmed by the mere idea of blogging? Maybe I can help.

There’s no doubt that content marketing has taken hold in today’s social media world. While anyone with an Internet connection can write an article or blog post and call it marketing, the truly successful content marketers follow four key tenets.

These tenets are defined by a single guiding principle:

Never forget that you are marketing to people.

If you are to stand out among the clutter, you must keep your targeted buyer top of mind and never forget that as they look for educational and entertaining content, they seek the same qualities you do. So without further ado, the following are the four tenets of content marketing:

Make your content easy to read
In today’s economy where layoffs are rampant, your targeted buyers are doing the jobs of two or more people. If you are serious about establishing long-term relationships with them, your content must show that you value their time. Whether you’re producing a short case study or a weighty white paper, ensure your content is easy to read and digest.

Ensure your content is relevant
The Internet has transformed the way we communicate and educate ourselves. With so much relevant content at our fingertips, we are less tolerant of content that doesn’t address our needs. You must earn your reader’s attention by focusing on them, not on yourself. You must share a resource or solve a problem and not just shill your stuff. While this puts the onus on you, the good news is that relevant content will effectively earn your prospects’ attention.

View yourself as a publisher
A Roper Public Affairs survey shows that 90 percent of consumers find custom content useful. More than three-quarters of them understand that a company is trying to sell them something. They say they’re okay with that as long as they’re getting valuable information. This shows that your readers aren’t concerned with the objectivity offered by typical publishers. They don’t care where content comes from–as long as it’s relevant and well written.

Publish only quality content
While the Internet affords enormous opportunity to publish content, this also means that anybody anywhere can do the same. The bad content cluttering the Internet is astounding. In its 2010 B2B Technology Collateral Survey Report, Eccolo Media asked respondents what would most disappoint them when reading a white paper. “Poorly written content was most frequently ranked as the number one reason for respondents expressing disappointment in a white paper.” There’s nothing more frustrated to a busy, overworked buyer than to discover a promising white paper only to find that its content falls flat. Whether you’re in a rush to meet a product launch or simply don’t take the time to properly research your content, don’t fall into this trap. Good content will garner good attention.

It is for these reasons and more that content has begun to dominate today’s B2B marketing campaigns. Download our white paper to learn more about producing an effective white paper as part of a larger content marketing strategy. We’ll show you how white papers can turn your dismissive, overworked buyer into a savvy, eager proponent of your business.

This case study shows how Simi Valley Hospital has increased point-of-service cash collections with MedeAnalytics’ Patient Access Intelligence solution.

This white paper discusses how MedeAnalytics’ data analytics solutions help hospital compliance officers address healthcare reform and regulatory pressures with confidence.

This is the third in a series of posts discussing the shift away from interruption marketing methods and the rising power of permission-based marketing.

Marketers are closet psychologists. They yearn to understand what makes us buy and how they can take advantage of our natural inclinations. Whether they’re selling spray paint hair or “exercise in a bottle” pills, the “as seen on TV” folks want us to think that if something is so popular, it must be good. But we all know that the spray paint hair factory is just down the road from where that commercial was created. Likely, they can churn out ten cans faster than you can say, “buy now!”

What interruption marketers don’t realize is that our ability to hit the “off” button is far more powerful than their attempts to psychoanalyze us. In social media circles especially, consumers gather together around a similar idea and there’s power in numbers.

In fact, consumers’ power to avoid intrusive ads has resulted in widespread technologies that give us even more power: “Consumers feel overwhelmed by intrusive, irrelevant ads. The result: a backlash against advertising—manifesting itself in the growing popularity of do-not-call lists, spam filters, online ad blockers, and ad skipping on digital video recorders (DVRs),” (Jim Nail, The Consumer Advertising Backlash, Forrester Research, 2004).

This is why marketers must ditch their intrusive methods for tactics that give the consumer more control. Permission marketing does just that. It respects the power of the consumer.

In his book Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day, marketer Dave Evans hits the nail on the head when describing the declining power of interruption marketing: “It’s all about trust…. ‘If you have to interrupt or annoy me to get your ad across, how valuable can what you offer really be? If you think I’m dumb enough to fall for this, how can I trust you?’”

Amen.

This is the second in a series of posts discussing the shift away from interruption marketing methods and the rising power of permission-based marketing.

As we established in my first post in this series, permission-based marketing methods are beginning to take precedence over interruption marketing methods. The “as seen on TV” Billy Mays of this world just don’t cut it in today’s social media environment.

In social media, consumers have all the power. If marketers are to succeed in gaining attention, they must first earn their consumers’ trust. Honesty plays a key role in this.

Call now and you’ll receive…

Ignoring the importance of honesty, interruption marketers do their best to seduce us. With the words “call now and you’ll receive…” they tell us that if we buy just one bottle of their super, fantastic, magic cleaning product, we’ll get four more free…for just $49.99! You think, wow, what a deal! That is, until you do the math. Not two seconds later, you realize that you can get one bottle just like it at Target for $2.99—and you change the channel.

Smart marketers have figured out that they don’t need to dupe us into buying their products. Quite the opposite is true. Rather than draw us in with their seductions, smart marketers offer honest, valuable content to earn our trust. This is what drives success in social media.

The research proves this to be true. As much as advertisers first feared TiVo, studies show that viewers will watch commercials that pique their interest. Remember that commercial with the Volkswagen stuck in a tree? Or the eTrade talking baby commercials? Brilliant. I don’t know about you, but I genuinely enjoy watching those commercials.

Lest you fear the social media equivalent of the fast-forward button on your consumers’ DVR remotes, read this. “Ad avoidance is less about skipping ads than it is about skipping irrelevant or intrusive ads,” says marketer Dave Evans in his book Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day.

Evans discusses two studies which found that viewers will often rewind and view again commercials that are interesting or entertaining. Evans says, “Both [studies] underscored the value of user control over content and the newfound ability to selectively watch ‘good’ content while skipping over fluff.”

If only interruption marketers offered honest content—with the intent of earning our trust rather than pulling the wool over our eyes—we might actually want to watch.

This is the first in a series of posts discussing the shift away from interruption marketing methods and the rising power of permission-based marketing.

I have nothing against Billy Mays, may he rest in peace. In fact, the man was a selling machine. But Billy Mays’ legacy represents all that is wrong with the advertising and marketing methods of the last 30 years. Billy Mays and his interruption marketing methods must give way to permission-based methods that will reign in today’s consumer-driven social media landscape.

But wait, there’s more!

While Billy Mays’ commercials might have been effective, they are loud and obnoxious. The phrase, “but wait, there’s more,” implies that we want to change the channel. And yes, when I see a Billy Mays commercial (or one like it), I hit “skip” on my DVR remote. Or just as likely, I’ll turn off the TV and open up my laptop where I’ll readily find content that isn’t loud or obnoxious.

Billy Mays and his kind have succeeded because they realize they are competing for our attention. Rather than simply showing us the Shamwow and giving its price, they must sell the heck out of the thing before we move on to the next guy’s ad.

In a prophetic 1998 Fast Company article, Seth Godin (who coined the term “permission marketing”) said, “We are entering an era that’s going to change the way almost everything is marketed to almost everybody…. The interruption model is extremely effective when there’s not an overflow of interruptions. But there’s too much going on in our lives for us to enjoy being interrupted anymore.”

As laughably entertaining as those infomercials might be, Seth Godin is right. I’m too busy and there’s so much more relevant, less obnoxious content out there.