The Innovative Marketer's Blog

The role of a marketing agency has become relatively simple: create quality content. Clients look to you to increase sales.  However, they are constantly frustrated, since every tactical internet marketing solution they knew to be successful in the past is being phased out by ever faster developments in technology. I find this focus on "tactical marketing solutions" to be my number one challenge when talking with clients. To be a successful "business grower," which all of us should strive to be, we must help our clients embrace sustainable growth strategies, rather than allowing ourselves to be subject to increasing costs per click, expensive email lists and strategy busting search engine algorithm updates. Today, sustainable internet marketing strategies boil down to one thing: quality content, not quality tactics.

Automated marketing technology allows us to gather lots of lead data. But at the same time, the amount of data we have at our disposal can be a bit overwhelming and marketers can quickly lose sight of the goal: to give people what they want. Segmented messaging is key to moving prospects down your inbound marketing funnel without creating churn in your lead base. At a high level you want to nurture your leads with communications and offers that align with their needs and interests. This article shows how to segment your messaging based on the single most important lead quality—qualification—then create a workflow that automates your email messaging to that group. Once you get that down, you can move on to segmentation based on what leads are interested in. I will follow up with an "interest workflow" article.

Content marketing has revolutionized the way marketers, companies and organizations of all types generate interest, reach their audiences and convert prospects.  Successful content creation now calls for more than traditional SEO tactics and a focus on run-of-the-mill industry topics.  The quality and social capital of content has taken on paramount importance.  To attain a high-traffic website and booming business operations, you need to produce unique, cutting-edge, captivating and yet still highly relevant content.  Substance matters.  While high-impact, exciting topics may boost your visibility initially, information-rich content jam-packed with deep industry insight will win you long-time blog subscribers and frequent website visitors.    

In today's competitive business world, the strategic use of information technology has become an integral part of every business plan—especially within sales processes and marketing campaigns. Historically, consumers have relied on direct mail, newspaper ads, Yellow Page ads, local television and radio spots to discover local products and services.  With the modern state of widespread internet use, consumers are now increasingly turning to search engines to seek out local products and services.  

Content marketing is a requirement for success in today’s competitive business environment.  Whether you are a large corporation, a small or big business, an educational institution or a non-profit organization, your website visitors desire high-quality, information-rich, high-impact, insightful and engaging blog content.  We live in the information age; your prospects do a significant amount of online research comparing you to your competitors.  How can you stand out and rise above them in the content marketing game?  Strategic content marketing starts with a top-notch blog. 

Have you ever created content so popular that it went viral?  The signs of a viral content outbreak include a multitude of tweets, trending on LinkedIn Today, features on industry websites and explosive website traffic.  Often, what could cause content to go viral is out of your control, such as when it is featured as a top story on Social Media Today or tweeted by high-profile industry influencers.  Although you cannot control everything that happens to your content once it is published, there are certain steps you can take to increase the likelihood of it going viral.   

With over 200 million users, LinkedIn is every networker’s dream.  The social network is one of the best ways to learn about and interact with millions of business people and their employees.  For many business owners, there is a temptation to use social networks to aggressive promote their business and broadcast their marketing content.  However, unlike Facebook and other social media platforms, LinkedIn is cut from a different cloth.  Your followers need more than a quick status update and recycled Twitter content.  While the LinkedIn crowd is a tougher and more refined audience, the professional social network has a significantly higher lead conversion rate than any other major social network.

Is your content attracting high rates of website traffic and lead generation?  If not, you are failing to produce highly contagious content.  Contagious content is the key to enhancing SEO and greatly amplifying website traffic and new business generation.  Contagious content is fresh, exciting, relevant, engaging, actionable and high-impact, and it achieves high rates of social content curation—or social sharing.  Such content is valuable, because it compels your audience to share it on social media. 

The internet has fundamentally changed the way people discover and read content, and the field of journalism has unfortunately suffered and been irrevocably altered.  Now is the time for online content creators to shine.  Chris Warden, CEO of Spread Effect, even went so far as to say: “In the age of content marketing, it’s a writer’s world; we’re just living in it.”  Content creation is partly an art, which is not easily distilled into universal guidelines.  Only a minority of content writers create artistic and engaging content that draws a large captive audience and compels high rates of social content curation.  Gaining the spotlight requires highly shareable content, which evokes genuine emotion and interest in readers.  Nowadays, people are deluged with a surplus of data and content coming from every angle—blogs, websites, email marketing, social media, television and even their mobile devices.  Content creators strive to break through the noise and attract attention with their writing.

Are you attracting a high rate of website traffic and generating quality leads with your content?  If not, you are not producing highly shareable content.  The quality and social capital of content is becoming increasingly more important to SEO.  To attain high website traffic and generate new business, you need to create engaging, information-rich, high-impact and highly shareable content.  To enhance SEO and lead generation, your content needs to achieve high rates of social content curation—social sharing.  Excellent content creation requires commitment, creativity, real-time industry knowledge, fresh ideas and extensive research and writing skills.  To rock content marketing, highly shareable content is required.