As podcasting continues to grow — both in terms of its popularity and its marketing potential — more and more content marketers are leveraging this audio content technique to build regularly scheduled, long-term relationships with customers and prospects. As a medium, audio represents a powerful and engaging content creation platform. Continue Reading

From trash to technological treasure

Meet Kelvin Doe, otherwise known as DJ Focus. Kelvin is a 15-year-old boy from Sierra Leone who wanted to be a DJ so badly that he decided to build his own radio station from electronics scraps he found in trash. If you haven’t seen Kelvin’s story, I recommend you watch it now. (It’s well worth the 10 minutes.)Continue Reading

Delivering consistent results for content marketers

Too many content marketers seem to struggle with building a consistent audience. Indeed, some publish content that becomes a big hit — it drives engagement,  it gets shared, and it delivers new leads. However, many of these efforts don’t produce successful results on a dependable and repeatable basis.Continue Reading

Treating your content like a product

There’s a big difference between creating branded content and building a content brand. Branded content is egocentric brand marketing. Developing a content brand takes an audience-first approach to business storytelling that builds a loyal audience. Deloitte Debates is branded content (notice how the brand is in the title of the content). Will it Blend? is a content brand (see how there’s no mention of the Blendtec brand in the title?). The most successful business storytellers build content brands — not branded content. Instead of thinking like a marketer, try thinking like a television producer.Continue Reading

What’s a hook?

If you’re going to create valuable content for your target audience, and you’re going to stick to a format, you must have a hook. Formats give your content structure; a hook gives it character. A hook is, quite simply, a unique content concept that is designed to ensnare and trap your unsuspecting audience into consuming and sharing your content.

Hooks enable your audience to build a relationship with your content each time it’s delivered. A twist on a familiar structure is what makes your content unique, but a hook is what gets people to talk about it.Continue Reading

I had a wonderful time presenting to the attendees of CMI’s recent webinar, Brandscaping and the New Content Marketers. (For those of you who attended, I’m sorry about my cellular connection… I know it made it difficult in those first five minutes.)

The webinar generated 55 questions from our intrigued, interested, and extremely intelligent audience. We only got to four or five of those questions in the time allotted, so I offered to answer some of the questions that we were not addressed.Continue Reading

In 2010, GEICO spent $745 million on advertising. You know — the ads featuring the talking gecko urging us to save 15 percent by switching insurance companies. What if GEICO spent more on supporting content creation than on buying ads?

You may already know this (I didn’t), but GEICO sells 19 different types of insurance. Even if you divided its ad spend across all 19 lines, each product would still get $39 million to produce content instead of advertising.Continue Reading

Geoff Cottrill sells shoes. As the CMO at Converse, that’s his job. So, why would a shoe manufacturer create content for musicians like this:Continue Reading