Content Marketing When I was a kid, I remember reading every single word in Life magazine, both the editorial and the ads. Well, no one does that anymore. Yet most marketers assume people do exactly that. As we move forward in time, less and less marketing will look like traditional advertising. This is not good news for ad agencies. Print and online ads that herald white papers, surveys, reports, or believable USPs are the order of the day. Take Cushman & Wakefield's site, which features valuations of commercial real estate for the previous quarter, as an example. It offers a clear and immediate value to the reader. Anyone interested in that information is clearly a prospect for the firm. WDFM itself is a marketing tool for yours truly. Way back in April of 1995, I had a decision to make. I could either spend enormous amounts of money to keep my name in front of the public, or invest in editorial and start a newsletter. I started WDFM, which is now received by over 38K subscribers, many of whom have hired me to consult or speak or write for them. WDFM has gotten me to Sweden, France and Holland, not to mention all around the US and Canada and into USA Today, Bottom Line Business and scores of other publications. People and companies basically live in obscurity unless they send out signals that they exist and are there to provide products and services of a certain type. Simply running "wallpaper ads" saying you do such and such is less and less effective. Showing people what and how you do your voodoo is "proof-in-the-pudding" marketing. Does an email newsletter like WDFM look or smell like an ad in a magazine? No. Is it a marketing tool that provides value on an ongoing basis? Yes. I've helped lots of people start email newsletters for their respective industries. The first thing I advise them to do is go to a place like PAML to see what newsletters in their niche are already out there. PAML is a good place to start, but isn't complete; no one database of email newsletters is. There are hundreds of thousands of email newsletters and discussion lists on the Net. So you have to really do your due diligence and visit many of PAML's competitors to establish what exists in your space -- which will help point you to what you should publish. Once you get your head around what you should publish, you then need to establish a marketing strategy for propagating that list. You have to make sure your acquisition rate is higher than your churn rate. These are fascinating challenges that take you far afield of simply producing an ad or commercial. I can tell you from personal experience, it's a richly rewarding endeavour. |
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