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Posts from the ‘Content Marketing’ Category

28
May

From Content Marketing to Meaningful Marketing: Crossing the Chasm

content marketing and social businessCrossing the Chasm is a marketing book by Geoffrey A. Moore that focuses on the specifics of marketing high tech products during the early start up period.

It provides a great analogy for companies aspiring to move their content marketing initiative beyond content marketing, through social business towards meaningful marketing.

In this blog post I’ll  explain why I believe the path to meaningful marketing starts with content marketing, gradually becoming a social business, and then towards meaningful marketing.

The question is how do you move from content marketing, to social business, towards meaningful marketing ? Read more »

14
May

Employer Branding using Real Customer Stories, Through Employee Peer-to-Peer Connectivity

employer brandingCurrent employer branding implementations are incomplete.

Employer branding is much more than a slogan send through traditional stories to future employees.

If you want to attract the right candidate, usually hard to get candidates, you’ll have to do more than setting up branded job sites with “feel good” content. Read more »

30
Apr

9 Key Change Management Essentials for Epic Content Marketing

change management essentials for content marketing

What change is needed in an organization to be successful with content marketing?

Answering todays marketing challenges is a daunting task for most of us.

Not only is marketing increasingly becoming a digital environment, marketing itself is changing. Buyers demand value on top of existing products and services. They want you to inspire them, educate them, and entertain them.

Embracing a content marketing culture is the first step towards becoming a social business. It is the first step to creating marketing that people actually want.

It requires great, or small changes, depending on your current corporate culture:

  • from outbound to inbound
  • from self-centric to meaningful
  • from classic to digital
  • from art to science

Here are some of the key change management essential ingredients you need to take into account when changing a company towards a content marketing culture:

  1. assess your marketing maturity
  2. corporate and leadership alignment
  3. embed openness and authenticity
  4. embrace new customer centric processes
  5. employee activation and skills transfer
  6. internal communication
  7. quick-wins planning
  8. content quality gate-keeping
  9. embedding the change

Read more »

16
Apr

What is the future of Native Advertising?

native advertisement future

RU into the latest “bling bling” Native Advertising thing? Should you?

The problem with marketers is that they are so passionate about what they do. Each time something new pops-up, they want to know.

Often “over-hyped”, and in a sense too young to go mainstream, we try these new “must-haves”.

As is the case with Native Advertising.

The first timid attempts tend to fail, as in the famous example of The Atlantic.

The 157-year old newspaper published an article in which they clearly supported the Scientology Church. Although the article was clearly marked as “sponsor content”, they received a lot of bad reactions, and had to retract the article and publish an apology to their readers.

But of course, we learn from this. In my previous blog post about Native Advertising I explored what Native Advertising exactly is, and how you should apply it.

This blog post is about:
• What kind of content you need when going for Native Advertising?
• How does the future of Native Advertising look like? Read more »

18
Feb

The rise of Smart Content Marketing

smart content marketingContent marketing is changing from an art to a science. That’s what I talked about at an event a few days ago.

The event is called Trends Night, and is organized by STIMA, the largest independent marketing industry organization in Belgium.

The event featured a couple of excellent speakers like Bart De Waele (@netlash), Hakim Zemni (Insites Consulting, @hakimzemni), and Norm Johnston (Mindshare, @ntjohnston).

Admittedly, no big international names, but what they said was pretty interesting. You can find their presentations on Slideshare:

And I spoke about:

Content marketing is becoming smart content marketing. And in general, marketing is transforming from an art to a science, or something in the middle if you will. 

Here’s why… Read more »

3
Feb

Should you invest in Native Advertising as Marketer ?

native advertisingI’m looking at it and I just don’t quite get it. Banner ads don’t work, and yet marketers still keep investing in it. According to a recent article in Smart Insight click-through rates remain impressively low with “banner blindness” as a key reason for ignoring ads.

One day, someone needs to explain me why a marketer doesn’t get fired by the CEO for spending thousands of ad euros and reporting a conversion of 0.2%. But let’s keep that discussion for another time.

Native advertising. They are the latest addition to digital advertising land. Named as the “disruptive” technology that will change the advertising business model. It is considered the fresh air that the beleaguered publishers need.

They seem to be more efficient, according to recent research from IPG Media and Sharethrough:

  • Consumers looked at native ads 52% more frequently than banner ads.
  • Native advertisements registered 9% higher lift for brand affinity and 18% higher lift for purchase intent responses.
  • Consumers looked at native ads more than the original editorial content.

Some feel as native advertising is the same as advertorials or article marketing.

It’s not. 

OK. So what is native advertising? And do you need to use it your marketing mix? Read more »

20
Jan

How to Embrace Digital, Social and Content as a Company?

20131113_Embrace_Digital_Social_and_Content_as_a_company_Slideshare_version_pptxThe reactions where heartwarming. Although I knew I had a nice story, I didn’t expect these fantastic reactions.

A couple of week ago I presented to around 60 B2B decision makers. The topic was basically about the biggest challenges of marketers today, and how they can solve these challenges.

When I posted a trimmed down version of my presentation on Slideshare, I got another happy surprise. It got voted “presentation of the day” on Slideshare. I think that’s pretty cool. And that my friends, as you can imagine, made me a little bit proud and totally made my day.

Here’s what I presented… Read more »

7
Jan

Digital Marketing Trends for 2014

digital marketing trends 2014As marketers, we have to “do” a lot. Just when we have social a bit under control, we need to do mobile. And just when we have our first “responsive” website ready, also this doesn’t seem to be enough. Nay, now it’s all context, big- data, gamification, customer experience and collaboration.

Pfffff.

It’s not easy today for marketers. And it won’t become any easier. How should a company deal with these changes? And how do you create new opportunities? Read more »

18
Oct

How to get started with Content Marketing in B2B? The Educated Approach

well educated in content marketing

In order to be successful and rise above the clutter, serious B2B companies are starting to pay more and more attention to content marketing.

B2B companies devote large budgets to placing ads in industry publications or building large and expensive booths at trade shows. With marketing budgets under pressure, and with classic marketing techniques being less and less efficient, being found and being relevant to buyers has become the mantra of many marketers.

If content marketing is becoming critical to your company, it is time to start taking it seriously.

This blog post is not intended to give you a step-by-step detailed guide on how to do this. There are many great resources out there.

It does however try to guide you on what you should do before diving into developing your own content marketing strategy. Read more »

8
Oct

A Motion to Kill Content Marketing

The word "content" in Content Marketing deserves more credit. Will you vote ? (image from Amsterdamnewspolitics)

The word “content” in Content Marketing deserves more credit. Will you vote ? (image : Amsterdamnewspolitics)

Whenever I talk to fellow marketing managers about Content Marketing, I feel as if the word “content” in itself just kills the whole conversation.

When the word content is used, people think of text. They think of paper, copywriting, layout, online and print. Some are more informed, and know that content marketing is more than the output of content creators.

Content marketing is all about providing customers with answers to their questions. The format in which these answers are delivered to them is irrelevant. By providing these answers, you lift your brand to become a company that is seen as a go-to-resource for knowledge and insight. By providing these answers you become a trusted party to which they’ll turn to when they have a problem, a question, an opportunity.

And doing that, my friends, is scary stuff for marketers. Read more »

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