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13
Jul

What is a Content Identity?

content identityThe 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 »

22
Jun

Social Business has now become Inevitable and Unavoidable

Social Business Change-is-InevitableWhen Facebook ended the “free love era”, they drastically scaled back the organic reach of brands. It seemed for many marketers as if history repeated itself.

For a few years they enjoyed the exposure the network brought. But today, if you want exposure, you’ll need to pay to play. For brands on Facebook, these are dark days. They can choose to spend more money to reach fans they had already accumulated in the past, but Facebook will likely decrease branded reach even further.

It isn’t long before other large social media networks will do the same.

What are brands to do when social media networks are choosing to reduce the freedom that brands can play on their networks?

The evolution of Facebook – signaling the era of Social 3.0

organic search decline - reason to go for social business

According to a new report from Simply Measured, the total engagement for the top 10 most-followed brands on Facebook has declined 40 percent year-over-year—even as brands have increased the amount of content they’re posting by 20.1 percent.

To understand a little bit on what’s happening, we need to go back a few years in the history of Facebook, and then look into the future of what is most probably going to happen. Read more »

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 »

1
Apr

The Rise of Online Advertising, and why I don’t get it

online advertising - why is it growing?

On the one hand online advertising is growing, and on the other hand stats show they are not effective. Can someone explain?

For a couple of years I have been blogging to help others. Now has the moment come where I need your help!

My question is very simple:

Why do marketers keep advertising online, while clearly it doesn’t seem to be working?

And before your click away, no, this is not yet another blog post “yelling” to stop advertising, and to start doing content marketing.

This is something else, and I am merely trying to get my head around something.

And for this I need your help… Read more »

16
Mar

Marketers flawed in listening to customers

listening process

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 »

5
Mar

The Future of Advertising is Google’s “Don’t be Evil”

the future of advertising

Google’s über cookie

Marketers are trying to collect a lot of data, in a move towards big data. But Google and users are fighting against it : keyword not provided, cookie not accepted, location turned off, notification turned off.

On the other hand, we are leaving more data trails than we have ever done before. Even garbage cans are scanning our mobile phones to get the MAC address from your phone to understand how many times you came by (they’ve stopped that now due to protest).

Next thing is you’ll get an iBeacon  alert trying to sell you something because they know you’ll pass by on monday at 8u30.

Think about this for a second how addicted we are to our mobile devices and how addicted we are to using cool technology like Google. In many ways you could say Google knows us better than our wives or our husbands because all the stuff we put in there lasts seven years.

Google’s über cookie is coming

Google is in a way walking a very thin line. On the one hand they claim to protect our privacy (keyword not provided), but on the other hand Google is reinventing the bowser cookie into an über cookie: AdID.

The stuff you browse on your laptop and the stuff you browse on your smartphone could all be lumped into one big profile on you. Advertisers will be able to tap into this information, because that’s where the money comes from for Google. Some even speculate that Google will connect your online behavior with your real profile.

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 »

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