22 ROI Examples of Content Marketing showing Hard Business Results
In the end CEO’s prefer to see clear results. Hard business results. They want to see the ROI of Content Marketing.
In this article I show you those hard business results using 22 examples of companies that used content marketing, and which had clear business results. These are not business results in terms of brand lift, social following increase, or whatever vanity metric you can come up with.
I will show you real cases, providing you with real numbers, where content marketing is increasing revenue for both B2C as B2B companies.
Before we jump into those 22 cases of hard cold business results of content marketing, first a little intro on the business value of content marketing. Read more 
From Content Marketing to Meaningful Marketing: Crossing the Chasm
Crossing 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
Employer Branding using Real Customer Stories, Through Employee Peer-to-Peer Connectivity
Current 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
9 Key Change Management Essentials for Epic 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:
How to Embrace Digital, Social and Content as a Company?
The 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
How to get started with Content Marketing in B2B? The Educated Approach
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
A Motion to Kill Content Marketing
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
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?
