The web allows companies and brands to showcase their expertise and thought leadership through content marketing with minimal friction online that can be spread through different mediums and channels at a lower cost.

So what is content marketing?

A definition by Wikipedia “Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases. In contrast to traditional marketing methods that aim to increase sales or awareness through interruption techniques, content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty better than traditional marketing techniques”

Junta 42 ( A content marketing focused company)  defines it this way “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

A new survey from Junta 42 reveals the key content marketing survey findings:

• According to the survey, content marketing spending comprises 33% of the total marketing budget (up 11% from 2008)
• Smaller companies spend more than 2x that of larger companies on content marketing
• Marketers are increasing their focus on mobile content solutions
• Only 7% of marketers are spending less on content in 2010

The top content products that are being used and should be included in your marketing plans are:

1. Social Media
2. e-Newsletters
3. Blogs
4. White Papers
5. Article Marketing
6. Case Studies
7. Online Videos

This shows that marketers are leveraging new media content products more than ever – nearly 3/4 are leveraging content through social media and a majority are tapping into blogs and enewsletters. White papers and case studies continue to be mainstays in the content marketing portfolio.

What is rather revealing is the continuing marketing importance of email marketing (e-Newsletters) in the marketing mix with a ranking at number two.

The other content medium to watch is mobile content as the Smart Phone and faster mobile broadband speeds allow a more meanginful experience for mobile users as well as the emerging Gen Y users that consume more and more content on the move via their mobile phones.

So is content marketing in its different mediums and channels part of your marketing plans for 2010?

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Flickr

They claim their “Jewel in the Crown” is the Ford Fiesta Movement that involved selecting 100 socially vibrant individuals who were provided with the European version of the Ford Fiesta 18 months prior to it being manufactured and released in the USA. These socially media aware fanatics were encouraged to share their experience with the Ford Fiesta over the 6 months on their Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube channels.

What were the strategies that Ford implemented to create viral awareness without one dollar of traditional marketing spend?

Fords Social Media Marketing Success

1. People trust corporations less so with the rise of social media you need to allow other people through word of mouth create trust for you through Social Media (it amplifies your message)
2. Reached out to those who are listening and let them do the talking for you and to connect with people like themselves
3. Let them know that you are real people just like them and are passionate about what they do and the Ford Brand
4. Run a competition involving Social Media eg.. To be selected to drive a Ford Fiesta for six months – select 100 of those who are “socially vibrant” such as Michelle McCormack ..view her application on YouTube.
5. Aggregated the content on Fords Fiesta movement website(crowd sourcing content) without editing it!
6. Implemented multiple Social Media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to create digital buzz
7. “Get On Board” the executive team and the board of directors

The Results

• 11 million Social Networking impressions
• 5 million engagements on social networks (people sharing and receiving)
• 11,000 videos posted
• 15,000 tweets.. not including retweets
• 13,000 photos
• 50,000 hand raisers who have seen the product in person or on a video who said that they want to know more about it when it comes out and 97% of those don’t currently drive a Ford vehicle
• 38% awareness by Gen Y about the product, without spending a dollar on traditional advertising ( Fords model “Fusion” doesn’t have that awareness after 2 years of being out in production and yet it has received hundreds of millions of dollars in traditional marketing spend).

Following the Ford Fiesta movement the launch of the Fiesta Ford did run a traditional marketing campaign including  TV, Print and and Outdoor advertising.

According to J.D. Power, about 9% of spending this year by automakers will be digital (Ford’s share spend is 25%.. and they were the only company not bailed out by the Federal Government), but that will rise to about 12% by 2012 as more companies embrace social networking, online gaming and rich media ads in place of traditional TV and print.

Fords advice on whether Social Media Marketing is right for your company?

“If your customers are there you need to be there too” , and they go on to say “You need to listen.. see how they behave and act similiarly”

So how can you apply these strategies to your company’s marketing mix?

So how would you optimise the online presence of your business  to drive inbound enquiry for new customers and not have to cold call again or buy expensive mass media? Here are a number of strategic considerations to drive traffic to your ecommerce  website, enquiries to your email inbox and make your phone start ringing:

1. Be Authentic. Be Real. Be Yourself…

2. Embrace the role of Thought Leader and Teacher for your marketplace…

• Do not sell, but engage (trying to sell just turns prospective clients away)
  
• Provide online tutorials and how to’s.
• The theory stands that some people are visual, others are verbal and others are kinesthetic and a mutiple variety of stimulus reinforces learning and recall. Stop the corporate chat and provide content in a variety of ways becuase everyone learns in different ways, such as:
• Text
• Video
• Presentations
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Slideshows

3. Plan and Write Content for the Markets You Are Targetting

Every business has different market segments within their client base and they all have their own issues and problems and pain points that you need to provide answers to. So when you are developing content for your website or blog you need to consider writing content that adresses each customer persona. This should include asking your audience questions such as:

1. Who are you selling to?
2. What are their goals and aspirations?
3. What are their problems?

Some companies even develop and maintain multiple blogs – delivering content in different segments or styles.

4. Have a Great Headline For Your Content

Did you know that on average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the body? This is the secret to the power of the headline, and why it so highly determines the effectiveness of the entire piece. Here are some headline types and examples:

• Get What You Want (In Health, Wealth, Relationships, Time and Lifestyle) eg.. The Secret To Getting More Money For Your Property !
• Crystal Ball and History eg.. 10 Predictions on the Future of Social Media
• Problems and Fears eg … Get Rid of Your Debt Once and For All
• Fact, Fiction, Truth and Lies example.. Little Known Ways To Make Money On The Stock Exchange
• How To, Tricks Of The Trade. such as..  How To Plan The Ultimate Holiday
• Best and Worst  eg The 10 Worst Mistakes Made by Bloggers

5. Amplify Your Message through Social Media

The Top 5 Social Media channels to consider using depending on your target markets are:

1. Facebook (80%),
2. Twitter (66%),
3. YouTube (55%),
4. LinkedIn (49%) and
5. Blogs (43%).

Also consider using multiple social media channels as it amplifies your  message and gives it the best chance to go viral. Social media can leverage your message, and the more platforms you can sustain the greater your potential in this area.

6. Build Your Subscriber List RSS for Your Blog, Email and for your e-Newsletter

Offer a variety of ways for people to subscribe at different locations on your website and blog such as at the top, the bottom and on the side panel (make it as easy as possible)

• Subscribe via RSS
• Subscribe via email

7. Search Engine Optimisation

If people think you’re important, so will Google. This perplexes many webmasters and online marketers, since they wonder how people will consider them important when people use search engines to find things online in the first place. How are you important if you’re invisible in the search engines to start with?

And how does Google know people think you’re important any­way? For one, they know because people link to you, and Google fol­lows those links to index and rank web pages. And thanks to services such as:

• Google Toolbar
• Google Analytics
• Feedburner
• Google Reader
• Gmail and other applications that keep you logged-in to your Google account

Google has an enormous amount of usage data that shows what people actually spend time doing online. So, there’s that. But how do you kick it off?

To get people to link to you and generally pay attention in the first place, you have to start thinking about authority in a different sense.

8: Have The Website and Blog developed with well written code

Use a developer that does the basics well for your Website and blog

Website:

Two aspects to consider On-site and Off-site Optimisation

On-Site Optimisation.

This where they research and investigate your existing website design, build and content and recommend changes to elements such as:

• Keywords and Phrases
• Meta Descriptions
• Keywords added as Metadata,
• Search Engine friendly URL’s
• Title to contain keywords
• Restructuring website content
• Make text more readable and user friendly on website
• Offer different media formats
• Clean coding structure optimised for search engine crawlers

Off-Site Optimisation

This is where we research and recommend activities to improve Google search that are not dependent on your existing website but strategies that can be undertaken to improve search engines ranking of the company’s website.

This can be achieved through:

• Link Building
• Blog commenting
• Press Releases
• Forums
• Directory Submissions
• Article submissions
• Interacting with Social Media Channels such as
  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Blog
• Engaging Bloggers
• Developing content for your various target market “personas” such as for example for a non profit site
  • Students and Researchers at Universities
  • NGO’s (such as World Bank and United Nations)
  • Business and Business Leaders
  • Foundations

Blog

You’ll hear time and again that WordPress is the best way to build a site  and that it’s extremely SEO friendly. The Thesis framework for Word­Press is worth considering, as some of the biggest names now use it for their own.

9. Design Your Website To Enhance Your Brand and Authority

If you want to look professional then the website has to give your brand an image that can in a lot of cases make you look bigger than your competitors because they are sloppy with their website design. Do not overlook this.

10. Nourish Your Tribe

Once you have started providing information that solves your customers and subscribers needs, continue to develop and your grow your content so that they want to keep coming back again and again.

So could your business do with a bit of digital optimising of your inbound marketing so you don’t have to cold call again?  We’re waiting for your call at Brightfire – to hear about your challenges and begin talking about how we can help you overcome them.

Britons are the biggest online spenders in Europe, making nearly a third of all internet purchases across the continent during 2009, a report showed today.

Consumers in the UK collectively spent an estimated £38 billion online last year, accounting for 30 per cent of total European internet sales, according to price comparison site Kelkoo.

Key Content Marketing Survey Findings:

• According to the survey, Content Marketing Spending comprises 33% of the total marketing budget (up 11% from 2008)
• Smaller companies spend more than 2x that of larger companies on content marketing
• Marketers are increasing their focus on mobile content solutions
• Only 7% of marketers are spending less on content in 2010

Download the complete content marketing spending report here (no signup required). 

2010 Content Marketing Spending

59% of marketers surveyed plan to increase content marketing spending in 2010, compared with 56% in 2009 and 42% in 2008.

Content Product Breakdown

Marketers are leveraging new media content products more than ever – nearly 3/4 are leveraging content through social media and a majority are tapping into blogs and enewsletters. White papers and case studies continue to be mainstays in the content marketing portfolio.

Content Marketing Education

The clear winner for educational needs is mobile content marketing solutions, up 63% from 2009 survey figures. Considering only 10% are currently using mobile content marketing, 2011 should show a dramatic increase in that area.

Download the complete content marketing spending report here (no signup required).

Marketing is the art and science of getting the attention of a prospective customer and keeping it until she buys something; sales is the art and science of getting that customer to make the purchase. While the disciplines remain distinct, the two need to work as a coherent team to accomplish the objectives of a 21st-century organization. That means they need a unified vision, and their efforts need to be coordinated as if driven by the same objectives.

Salespeople are focused around short-term results such as making quarterly quotas. They’re measured by the number of calls they make or the number of presentations they give, so quantity anchors their key performance indicators. They’re rewarded by commissions, not long-term business development.

Marketing departments also have short-term objectives, but they’re often tied to long-term ones. They develop initiatives around brand-building that take some time. Brand-building is fine when you have the luxury to do it, but, more often than not, their marketing dollars have to generate leads.

Marketing people still need to grab customers’ attention, and salespeople still have to sell. All in all, sales and marketing are driven by different imperatives but company success is ultimately a product of their mutual alignment.

Marketing 2.0: New Mindset, New Tools

What I’m about to say may be obvious, but doing what I’m about to say just isn’t easy. In order for you to sell to someone, they have to care enough to know who you are, know what you sell, and see some reason to buy what you sell. They also have to see the reason why they should buy what you sell from you since they can probably get something similar from someone else. That’s the essence of marketing, but to achieve that customer advocacy nirvana takes a lot. It takes a strategy, the use of tools and systems, and a completely new view of what marketing is today.

Conversation-Centric Marketing

By making knowledge instead of product the source of competitive advantage, the customer’s willingness to engage is increased. But keep in mind this is still only one-way communication. There is so much more to be thinking about. In the new marketing model, sales and marketing are not the only aligned departments. There has to be a commonly constructed purpose that makes mutual sense for a relationship between marketing and customer service.

Part of marketing’s responsibility, forced by this social change, is engaging the customer in a conversation. One way they can do that is to figure out what the customer is saying outside the company’s four walls. That means monitoring and listening to the conversation going on about the company. Once they’re able to hear it, they will, with the right tools, be able to figure out who are the most influential people doing the talking.

The new model is always aligned around the ongoing experience that the customer has in his or her interactions with the company. Marketing becomes the seeker of conversation, the teller of stories, the purveyor of content, and the one at the door shaking the customer’s hand before anyone else. They not only talk to the customer, they listen to them and act accordingly. Marketing moves from being the pusher of product, or the brand protector, to the initial contact for customer engagement and value creation.

What are the best ways to take this new marketing model and run with it? Dissecting marketing types is a Herculean effort: search engine marketing, relationship marketing, database marketing, emotional marketing, trust-based marketing, direct mail marketing, email marketing, mobile marketing, social media marketing, product marketing, solution-based marketing, and, well, let’s just make ad nauseum the punctuation.

But the one that has captured the imagination of marketers, primarily because customers are responding to it, is social media marketing—or, more properly, using social media tools as part of a marketing strategy. The numbers are there to justify it. A 2008 study by Cone on business in social media found that 60 percent of Americans are using social media, with half of those using it more than twice a week. The numbers have skyrocketed since 2008, according to other studies, to between 74 percent and 84 percent. But what’s incontrovertible is that a majority of Americans are engaged in some form of social media—from passive blog reading to participation in social networks to active content creation.

In April 2009, a Forrester Research report forecast a growth in all areas of interactive marketing from 2009 to 2014, but the growth in social media marketing (34 percent) and mobile marketing (27 percent) were at least twice the growth of any other category. Spending on social media marketing alone is set to skyrocket from $716 million in 2009 to $3.1 billion in 2014. Gulp.

That doesn’t mean, however, that there’s a long or deep cultural adoption of social media marketing. That would require a change in culture that would portend the discarding of the existing product- or company-centric models. That ain’t an easy task. (See “Marketing Models: The Old and the New.”)

What Does the Conversation Sound Like?

Actually, a marketing person who’s aligned perfectly with sales has to monitor two things: information and conversation. Monitoring information and business intelligence will only get you data on the prospects you have and the prospects you want. What’s more germane is the conversation that comes next. What do you do to track the conversation? Is that all you track? What do you do with it when you find it?

One of the upsides of social media monitoring tools is that not only can they make coherent sense out of what is otherwise an apparent constant indistinguishable buzz, but they can capture the data and then integrate it, if they’re really good, into traditional CRM data stores.

Most of the CRM applications and even the standalone marketing automation applications are traditional in their functionality and aren’t that great at it either. Even the new-breed CRM marketing automation applications are built along traditional lines, though they’re good and focused on small shops rather than larger enterprises.

But there are some changes afoot. Marketing automation, analytics, and email marketing companies are increasingly incorporating social features and, while doing that, strengthening their more traditional CRM-ish functionality. Social media monitoring applications are increasingly adding CRM-level functionality or integrating with CRM applications to bring their data into the CRM databases and to make their data usefully actionable. [Editors’ Note: To find out which vendors earn Greenberg’s specific praise, visit us online at http://sn.im/feb10-issue.]

As sophistication about what it means to engage customers has grown, so has the understanding that the entire organization should be involved in the process of engaging customers and the community online. Personal referral and customer feedback continue to be the most important facets of how sales occur. Social networking and social media give ordinary people the ability to efficiently refer (or “market”) products and services to their peers. Companies that facilitate such referrals and listen to customer feedback will accelerate the process of referral.

Managing the volume of content in social media is difficult. Not only does monitoring take significant effort—understanding what’s being said about a company and its brands—but significant time is also required to respond to the community. Customer service in the world of social media is outside such existing channels of communication as email and the telephone.

Because any response takes place in the public realm, companies are unsure as to which department should field a service opportunity. Public relations is more adept at navigating the process of responding to media questions, while customer service has the infrastructure and the answers. Companies have to understand the new reality and build a new infrastructure that can deal with how social media works. This new infrastructure will be different for every company, different people drawn from different disciplines and with different workflow processes.

“Selling to”: Sales Driven by Product

Sales processes were and are a salesperson’s traditional method to interact with the customer. But these processes tend to be product-driven, which objectifies the way the customer is going to be approached. They’re organized around the concepts of finding and qualifying a lead, identifying that lead as a prospect, creating an opportunity with that prospect, proposing a sale, negotiating a deal with that prospect, and then closing that deal.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with using sales processes. They may vary from company to company and from industry to industry, but they’re traditionally derived from the most successful practices of salespeople over a long period of time. Those practices have been organized and hardened into a methodology.

These kinds of sales processes and methodologies are commonly available with sales force automation (SFA) tools—representing one of the characteristic differences between SFA and contact management—and the ability to tweak those processes (or create your own) is a common part of traditional CRM. But is it enough to have an established sales methodology to sell to a newly empowered, peer-trusting, myth-busting, never-rusting social customer?

“Selling with”: Sales Driven by Experience and Relationship

The social customer might not really give a you-know-what about the sales processes that require a salesperson to qualify for commissions and bonuses by entering transactional data and customer information into “the system.” What the social customer is expecting is a human being who’s not selling products at them or just following a particular path, but providing a relationship that will be mutually beneficial. [Editors’ Note: For more on this view, see Lior Arussy’s Customer Centricity column this month, “Customers Don’t Buy What You Sell.”]

For the salesperson, this experience will be the purchase of something by the customer. For the customer, it will be an experience that provides her with what she needs to solve a part of her personal agenda—be it in a B2B environment (such as meeting an equipment need) or in a B2C environment (purchasing a family vacation package). But the expectation goes beyond that. The customer is looking to have a relationship—if not with the salesperson then with the company the salesperson represents. Skeptical? Think about your own relationship to Amazon.com, and why you shop there: It’s convenient, and the site “knows” you.

Handling Opportunities Better

What happens once you’ve generated this lead and made it into some sort of opportunity, you hip, way-cool Sales 2.0 guy?

Then comes the need to optimize your chances of closing the deal, and there are Sales 2.0 tools for collaboration within the enterprise and for richer insights on your possible customer. There are companies that provide the sales intelligence tools and the Sales 2.0 collaboration tools that can improve your chances of effectively concluding the sale.

There are two important social capabilities for the Sales 2.0 professional. First is the ability to engage the resources and knowledge of your company, not just your sales team. That means that the collective knowledge of the staff can be put to good use helping you determine what resources you need to help you with your opportunity. The second is the use of tools to scour the Web for information that will give you a competitive edge, a.k.a. sales intelligence. [Greenberg’s take on the sales intelligence tools of CRM vendor InsideView, one of CRM magazine’s 2009 Rising Stars, can be found at http://sn.im/feb10-issue, along with his assessment of the new generation of lead generation.]

Collaboration: Sales 2.0 for the Enterprise

Engaging other employees—say, in the marketing department—who know the companies or people involved in your opportunities, who have legal expertise you might need, or who are on other sales teams that might have sold a similar deal, has become something that can make or break a closing. That doesn’t mean you have to walk department to department to find the individuals who might know a snippet or a chunk of information. It doesn’t mean you have to send out an email query in the hope of response. What it means is that, using contemporary digital tools, you can actually improve your chances of winning a deal.

IBM Lotus Connections has an outcome-based social software module called “activities”—a temporary wiki built around a specific time-constrained event that is retired to an archive when the activity is completed. Salespeople use it to create an opportunity-focused collaboration space where all the possible experts or knowledgeable individuals in regard to the opportunity can aggregate that knowledge.

For the longer term, sales organizations use wikis, not just the activities, to do things like fine-tune sales “scripts” or develop field sales guides that cover all components of selling at a particular company or to a particular customer segment. What makes these collaborations particularly valuable is the addition of comments on the different facets of selling that enhance the skills of the salesperson. To put it simply, shared content rules.

Salesforce.com is one company that’s providing a platform for aggregating content for the benefit of salespeople. In 2007, the vendor acquired a startup called Koral Technologies and rebranded Koral’s social content management system as Salesforce ContentExchange atop its own platform. Users can now incorporate any content and then comment on it, tag it, rate it, rank it, create RSS feeds—all the things needed to make a genuine conversation that draws on actual knowledge.

That’s just one of the tools that sales can use—especially when aligned with marketing. The two departments, at this point, necessarily need alignment. At some point, sales and marketing may even be integrated. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

The Sales 2.0 Value Proposition

Here’s a quick review of why Sales 2.0 is the currency of contemporary business.

• Increased potential for success. If you make a collaborative effort, have better forecasting tools, and know more about your customer, your odds of success are that much greater.

• Increased customer insight. Based on data that goes far beyond transactions, this insight gets to the personal profiles, the influencer relationships, and the state of a particular company or account. To top it off, some of this is based on input from other customers and employees.

• Mitigated risk. The better the chances of success, the lower the risk. (Duh.)

• Collaborative environment. The benefits of working well with coworkers on projects are long established.

• Improved engagement with customers. The more you know them, the better your relationship, the more likely the deal closes.

• Increased portability. Many of the Sales 2.0 applications are delivered as software-as-a-service applications or on mobile devices.

• Competitive differentiation. You’re able to target more precisely than in the past.

• Reputation, influence, persuasion. It’s not who you know, but who you know who knows who you need to know. Those “loose connections” can be more powerful than direct connections. Understand how the connections among people are organized and who can influence whom.

[blog originally posted at DesinationCRM]

What are likely to be the big business issues of the newyear?

So-called Letternomics, or what sort of shape economic recovery will the world experience; V, W or L, and in particular will Asia remain a big engine of growth?

Will economic recovery come with jobs, and is there much risk of a surge in inflation?

Also, bankers – is there any chance that financial sector employees will restore their reputations?

As the decade turns, we also discuss the big business developments of the last ten years, and try a bit of longer-term crystal ball-gazing, as we explore what might be the big business stories over the decade to come.

Jonathan Frewin talks to Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, and Daniel Franklin, editor of The Economist’s World in 2010 magazine.

[First broadcast on BBC World Business News]