What is a Content Identity?
The goal of any marketing initiative is to reach your business objectives. These business objectives can be very divers. You might want to create awareness around a new product, get more market share or sell more of an existing product in existing markets or new markets.
In practice you’ll create strategy elements and tactical elements that align with each of these different business objectives.
In the world of content marketing, that means developing content programs specifically aimed at each of these business objectives.
But once you get multiple content programs, or when your content programs become larger, it becomes complicated and difficult to keep you focused on the goal of a particular program. Read more 
What is the future of Native Advertising?
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
Marketers flawed in listening to customers
When was the last time you listened to a customer?
When was the last time you spoke to a customer? Or let me rephrase that: when was the last time you listened to a customer?
Everyone knows you have to listen to your customers.
Practically the entire business of marketing revolves around customer insight.
The logic is simple: if we can understand them more clearly, then we can better connect with and serve them, with timely, relevant, useful and helpful information.
I love to use the word meaningful content, and so meaningful content is what is needed to connect with them.
Marketers are fooling themselves
Tell me honestly: when was the last time you really listened to customers?
I am not talking about a customer satisfaction survey, a net promoter score, a market research report. Not even a focus group session or formal ITIL “voice of the customer programs”. Read more
Should you invest in Native Advertising as Marketer ?
I’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
11 Reasons that show you are not yet a real Digital Marketer
I could pull up Wikipedia, but let me quickly translate what most of us understand under the job-title “Digital Marketer”. A digital marketers is someone who wants to influence customers with websites, blogs, video’s but also with online ads, email and social media, so they will choose your brand.
Something like that? I think you agree with me this is close enough as a definition. The exact definition is even not that important at this moment.
Not so long ago Mashable published an infographic about the different types of digital marketing people they see. In that article they visualize “puppets” representing digital marketers who are all good in something: one is the social, the other is the data-person, and yet another is in the “let’s make it pretty” department.
It keeps surprising me that we marketers have such a hard time in selling ourselves, and this article certainly doesn’t help.
Why are digital marketers not busy with what is really important for the company? Read more
Aligning Marketing and Sales Systems: Building the Right Foundations
Too busy to build foundations, Too busy because of the wrong foundations…
Many B2B companies haven’t integrated their marketing and sales systems.
You have tools for marketing planning, events, webinars, email, PR, marketing automation, websites, document management, CRM, ERP, … Your customer services department also has its own systems, also containing customer touchpoint data. And the finance department is also sitting on similar data.
The effect? Dispersed contact databases, standalone CRM implementations and Excel import-export nightmares. These situations are more the rule than the exception.
We all know we need to integrate these systems. But how do you move towards integrated systems, to the benefit of the business? Read more
When Content Marketers Lose Contact With Customers
Content marketers behind bars, locked away from customer contact…
When Tammy Cannizzaro, Director of Marketing at IBM, wrote about “The Content Wars“, she talked how increasingly difficult it will become to ignite and connect with your buyers:
- She talked about how people consume content in a different way. Only the best brands are finding ways to engage prospects by creating exceptional online experiences.
- Prospects are jaded about marketing, she says. They are target of too much messaging. Only when your content mimics a conversation with your customers you will create meaningful engagement.
- Only the exceptional will stand out. Your content needs to be relevant, differentiated and compelling.
Although she touches the very basic foundations of what modern marketing is all about, I couldn’t keep thinking about what’s going to happen when everyone is fighting for the attention of that same customer, all with these same tactics. Read more
The Necessary Evil of Advertising in B2B: A Contradictory Experiment.
1920 Experiment : Karl Krall (on the right) tried to detect the thinking radiation he assumed to flow between the dog and the human. (source: http://www.weirdexperiments.com)
This isn’t a blog post about how good content marketing is, and that you should stop advertising. Quite the contrary.
Allow me to explain: advertising had been shifting to online. It’s been shifting online for a while now. The most obvious reason for that is that people spend more time online. However, B2B marketers out there know that click-through rates are terrible. Leaderboard banners, skyscrapers, and what-ever-they-look-like-banners, get click-through rates below 1%.
And still online advertising seems to be growing, according to Google. There must be people who can explain that contradiction. I can’t.
Whatever.
It’s clear that online advertising just doesn’t work. Ask anyone you know which on-line ad they still remember, while we all spend hours per day online. The answer will be zero.
But let me tell you why B2B marketers still need to keep on advertising, on- and off-line… Read more
The Art and Science of Online Content Creation
da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a diagram of the ideal proportions of a man’s body.
Knowing how to write for the online world is of strategic importance these days. If you know how to write for the web, your content will be found, and it will be read.
Your content might be fantastic, but if it is not written for the online world, you might as well not create that content.
But how do you create online content that actually gets read?
Read more
From Theory to Practice: How to become a “digital, social, and content” driven B2B company ?
Training your organization on digital, content and social media marketing
Most marketers in B2B today have a project to introduce or expand digital, content and social media marketing into their companies.
In the last few years these types of marketing have become extremely important.
I believe it is the solution to the B2B marketing challenges of today, where companies can transcend from fulfilling the basic marketing needs of their customers.
Transcend towards connecting with their audience by creating experiences that lasts. These experiences that provides your customers with the desire to share their experiences, and become your brand advocates.
But how do you move from theory to practice ?
