Marketers Continue to Rate Email the Most Effective Digital Marketing Tactic

Link to content: http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/marketers-continue-to-rate-email-the-most-effective-digital-marketing-tactic-46295/

Do You Know What Your Online Media Mix Looks Like?

Most non-marketers have no idea how to think about their marketing efforts. 

"Let's write a press release!" is not an analysis of your marketing, or lack thereof...

Need a quick primer on the different kinds of content that you need to be producing?

Here you go:

Paid, Earned, Owned and Shared Media – What’s Your Online Marketing Media Mix? - Top Rank Blog

Interview with Matt Langan- Social Media and Content Marketing

Last week, I interviewed marketing consultant Matt Langan on the Straight to the Point podcast series. Matt is the CEO of L&R Communications and is also the editor-in-chief of GotGeoInt.com, the nations preeminent geospatial intelligence blog.  

Two years ago, as social media was starting to be adopted by marketers targeting the government customer, Matt and I had a great discussion about how companies needed to adopt a more aggressive content marketing approach in order to successfully grow their government business.


What has changed since then? Did our predictions turn out to be accurate? 

You can listen to the podcast here: Interview with Matt Langan

What did we cover?

• How the slow economic recovery is influencing marketing budgets?
• Are marketing executives rotating funds into social media and content marketing?
• How important is social media to achieving marketing objectives now? 
• How important is mobile marketing to the marketing mix? 
• What marketing trends do you see that are going to impact the industry most over the next few years?

Compelling Content is the New Advertising

As more and more companies adopt and incorporate social media into their overall marketing structure, understanding of what makes social media marketing effective is spreading. Back in the day, most companies would consider the "social media box" checked if they found a young, college graduate to set up a Twitter account. Now, a more sophisticated, strategic approach is being rolled out in many places...

We at Strategic have always said that creating and aggregating compelling, value added content was one of the keys to successfully building and engaging with a targeted audience. You company has just as much right to a computer screen as the New York Times, but if your content stinks, guess who is going to get the traffic. Your content has to be the Three E's: engaging, education and entertaining. And it has to be distributed to the right folks in the appropriate way. Tweeting your latest press release is a waste of time.

More and more people are getting on board with this approach. Check out this latest post from Copyblogger, "3 Steps to Foolish Online Advertising" (I highly suggest reading the whole thing...)

Remember this first and foremost – educate first and foremost. Give people something they can use, and they’re primed for more value. And that’s exactly what the Motley Fool report does.
While delivering on its promise and providing value, it becomes clear that this information is just the tip of the iceberg, and clearer that deeper analysis is valuable and worth paying for. That’s the natural point to make an offer – when people have been educated enough to do business with you.

Do You Have to Pay for Advertising?

Absolutely not. We’ve been preaching for almost five years that compelling content is the new advertising, thanks to the fact that compelling content spreads for free via social media.
People actually want content.

Compelling content is the new advertising. Compelling content is the new marketing. Compelling content is the new...everything.

Straight to the Point- Now with Three Columns!

As you may have noticed, I now have three columns on this blog. I bet you are wondering, wow, that's exciting, why did he do that?

Well, let me tell you.

I have been of the opinion that the content of blog determine, in part, its value. Content, in my case, is the words that communicate an idea. The main idea of my blog is to highlight the fundamental changes going on the public relations industry as it is transformed by the impact of so-called web 2.0 technology (social media, blogs, twitter, etc) from the slightly critical perspective of a early mainstream adopter. As you can tell, I'll post about technology and business news as well, but this is the main thrust of the blog.

So why, three columns? When I started up this blog over a year ago, I wanted to make sure the focus was on the words, so I avoided any templates that were too graphics heavy. I picked a plain vanilla Minima Lefty template from Blogger. It's simple and clean. Now, I've added a bunch of widgets and other crap to the site over time that have pushed that content waaay down the page, which kind of bothered me.

The other day, one of our client teams was asking if anyone know anything about converting a two column Blogger template into a three column one. I volunteered to be the guinea pig. Voila!

Just for your edification, a step by step is located here: http://bguide.blogspot.com/2008/03/3-columns-minima-left-and-right.html

It's actually a fairly simple process, but since I'm almost completely ignorant of coding above a very simple level, it took me about two hours. If you have any skill at all, block out about five minutes.

So, tell me what you think? Better? Worse? Should I add color? Should I stop blogging? ;)

Widgets

I've been doing a little research on widgets. Yes, you read that right. Widgets are the little pieces of code that can be easily shared among various social media sites, networks, blogs, etc. A widget can be merely a bit of static content, a functionality, a dynamically generated feed, or practically anything else you can think of. Apparently, the widgitized web is going to be the future of the online experience.

So, like I said, I've been doing a little research and a little experimentation. I've added two widgets to this blog on the left hand side: one neatly allows my dear readers to send me a complimentary text message to my cell phone, the other is a non-standard, but Google based search box that allows me dear readers to search for their favorite content on the site. I found both of these widgets at WidgetBox.

Of course, my fear is that too many widgets will lead to too much clutter. I've always been a believer that the key to an enjoyable web experience is a clean, uncluttered, easy to read screen. Mmmmm. So what are your thoughts? Too many widgets, just the right amount, or not enough?

(Next: Jeff Twitters!)