SMARTblog

It's All about the Content

At the core of successful Social Media Marketing must-haves is the ability to develop, leverage and distribute meaningful content. In Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett’s book Get Content: Get Customers (highly recommended), they define content marketing as “…the art of understanding exactly what your customers need to know and delivering it to them in a relevant and compelling way… Once you’ve delivered relevant content, you become a trusted resource.”

To effectively leverage content via Social Media Marketing, or any other form of media for that matter, you need to act as a magazine publisher and/or public relations person would -- carefully planning, crafting, timing and then delivering your content to your target audience. This, of course, is based on your understanding of how your customers respond and how you want them to respond, to some degree.

SMART Marketers Get in the Game

Another Marketing (R)Evolution!

It’s happening again! The ways smart marketers communicate with, influence and generate response from customers is evolving in monumental proportion. With the introduction of Web 2.0 and Social Media Marketing, businesses of all sizes now have the unique opportunity to support new customer acquisition/retention, revenue growth, decreased costs, brand awareness, improved market share and a whole host of other business and customer relationship management benefits more efficiently than ever!

An apparent shift in mindset is also occurring (again):

From                                                   To

- Marketing to individuals                    - Marketing to individual networks

- Managed communications               - Radically transparent communications

- Forced, static promotion                  - Collaborative, dynamic and participatory promotions

- Interruption advertising/marketing    - Invitation advertising/marketing

- Exclusive and finite reach                 - Inclusive, exponential and viral reach

Now don’t get me wrong: the traditional definition, rules and benefits of marketing still apply and work! Marketing is, after all, “getting the right message to the right people via the right media and methods,” or at least that’s my favorite definition. The most successful campaigns have a well-thought-through plan and strategy including tracking of key success metrics. Knowing your customer intimately and targeting them with laser-precision usually contributes to a high Return On Objective. And, developing a key message and communicating that effectively can really help ‘hook ‘em’ well for sales to ‘reel ‘em in.’ However, the media and methods used are evolving. In other words, where our customers live and breathe, how they communicate, how trends are set, how influence transmits among specific and general audiences and, most importantly, how decisions are made, are changing. As a smart marketer, you should be acutely aware of this, at the very least. And, to be and/or stay competitive, you should consider getting in the game.