by Madi Secareanu | Oct 3, 2012 | Interactive, Social Media
There was a time, in the world of advertising and marketing that when it came to B2B marketing, the strategies were quite different from B2C marketing techniques. However there’s a shift that is occurring in the marketing world and it is all because of the emergence of the digital platform and yes, social media.
Today, content marketing is a strategy that can be applied effectively to both types of marketing concepts.
Now more than ever, companies are focusing on content marketing as a way to carve out their position in the marketplace, support their SEO initiatives and build valued relationships. Content marketing is a straightforward concept but only successful if it is properly executed.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a strategy that leverages the creation and sharing of valuable industry-related information. Its objective is to help your company position itself as a thought leader and to ultimately generate sales. Much a like a Professor publishes reputable papers in her field that add to her credentials, content marketing can help make your company a go-to resource; an expert in its field. It’s a way of educating clients and potential clients about the field.
What is the objective of content marketing?
Taking on content marketing as a strategy is a way for your company to attract and convert potential clients into clients, and clients into repeat buyers of your products or services.
What are the types of content?
Here are a few examples content marketing material examples that your company can develop and implement.
- Newsletters: Create and send out a monthly newsletter to customers and potential customers. But don’t focus only on “what’s new” in your company; try to keep your customers posted about new industry trends and changes. This will show your customers that you are up-to-date and knowledgeable and have the latest techniques that bring real value to them and their business success.
- White Papers: Traditionally used in B2B marketing, white papers are a great way to help customers understand a concept or to promote a specific product or service that your company offers. They are designed to educate, persuade and to identify a problem or opportunity. Preparing a white paper and positioning its content (your service or product) as a solution is a great way to subtly pitch to customers and potential customers.
- Courses and Webcasts: Again, helping to position your company as an industry expert, developing a course or a webcast can be a great way to generate leads and keep current customers informed. A company can either offer these for free or for a charge. Be sure to focus on topics closely related to your industry, or the industry that your clients belong to as a great way to add to your thought leadership strategy.
- Publish a Blog Book: If your company publishes a blog, which itself is a content marketing technique, you can consider putting together a book that contains some of your most informative blog posts. It can be sent to potential clients or current customers and used as a reference piece for important industry information and insight.
- Publish e-books: With mobile technologies and tablets now being the norm for many readers, publishing an e-book can be great way to tap into a tech-savvy market. Target your audience with relevant topics and maybe even create a series to keep them coming back for more. Asking readers to fill out a bit of information before downloading is also a great way to generate leads. Here at 3H we publish a series of e-books that showcase what we call “biz-isms” – concise doctrines and philosophies that can be applied to marketing.
Regardless of what form your content marketing materials take, the real success or failure of a content marketing strategy relies on the content itself. If the content is not written well, properly executed and compelling then the efforts simply won’t pay off. Create strong content and you will begin to see results. If the content is strong enough, customers may not even look at it as a marketing sell technique.
Do you leverage content marketing as a strategy? What materials do you produce?
by Miriam Hara | Sep 28, 2012 | Advertising, Branding, Business Success, Social Media
Or I should say, “Grow Brand Grow!” I often say that I see a Brand in terms of a life – it’s a natural! We speak of Brands as having a product life cycle, we speak of their maturity and we carefully have to nurture them.
In the height of social brand awareness, in today’s communications sphere, the concept of Brand as a living being has never been more true. Not only does Brand have to have a consistent presence through visual media, but it now has to have a consistent brand voice throughout it’s consistent platforms.
In the era of fast turnaround, communications technology is easy to fall into the momentum of constant change. It’s easy to react rather than reflect, assume rather than do research and actually know. We’ve gravitated from too much research and analysis to no research and quick fix strategies that fail in the long term. Don’t get me wrong, for tactics such as promotions and campaigns, quick analytical reference is fantastic to allow for tweaking and changing details. Although, from a Brand strategy and Brand development perspective, changing quickly is often not optimal. If Brand is not resonating with your audience, then quickly changing the tone and approach might not be the answer. But I digress.
The real subject of this post is to speak about Brands and Brand Evolution. Evolving Brands in today’s world can be a minefield. It’s important to be consistent with tone and voice, but also engage and add value. Prior to social media, Brands had to maintain a steady course in how they visually presented themselves to their audience and how they spoke to them through broadcast channels.
Today, the spectrum of Brand Personality has been broadened substantially: thanks to Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter, to name only a few. It’s not about presenting Brand in a one way flow. Today interaction is key. Traditional channels of advertising, or rather, as I like to term it classic advertising channels may still set the tone but new channels of advertising and engagement build intimacy with the audience. It is because of this intimacy that a Brand’s evolution pace is quickened. This challenges corporations and businesses to “engage” their Brand while having the ability to hold their position and evolve almost each and every day – while staying the course.
Working on Brand marketing as we do – being as close to the Brands that we work on and with – we tend to forget that our audience is not as intimate with our Brand, regardless of the new engagement channel. We are closer to our audiences than ever before, but still, they need a little more time to get to know it. Resisting the temptation to change it, to add to it is the hardest part of branding – even in today’s world.
by cassandr | Sep 26, 2012 | Branding, Business Success, Social Media
Social media usage is no longer limited to people just being social online; it is now a major tool for marketing business and brands. As social media becomes more important for businesses, most incorporate it within their brand marketing, and in turn want to make a good ROI.
With the “newness” of social media come many unanswered questions, naturally on the results garnered by engaging in social media… on ROI, on value and on measurement.
A deciding contributing factor on results and value is a social media tactic that continues to divide opinion – namely whether or not business should venture into automated engagement. Automating social media activities is arguably a very controversial topic.
Many believe that you should never automate your social media activities because, after all, it’s supposed to be social. There is also a fair share of businesses that believe automating to be effective and less time consuming.
In today’s day and age it can be very tempting for businesses to automate their social networking workloads. After all, one less thing to constantly worry about!
Recently there has been an increasing range of softwares hitting the market that allows you to schedule and manage your tweets, Facebook posts, and LinkedIn profiles, etc. In theory this means that you can simply set up these programs to manage your posts and then sit back and relax. It sounds perfect in theory but there are a number of potential drawbacks like irrelevancy or insensitivity.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. That’s what 3H’s Chief Creative Officer, Miriam Hara always says!
I tend to agree with this stance as I think social media shouldn’t be automated. What’s the point of using social media if you’re not being personally social? It’s like owning a Ferrari but getting a chauffeur to drive it…does that really make sense? Social Media is a thrilling channel for business to be part of. It’s fresh, it’s exciting, its very now.
It’s all about being current and staying relevant
If you’re not writing your tweets in real time, you are not taking into account what’s currently going on in the world. More importantly you can’t engage in real time. The very aspect of automation takes you out of the engagement that most brands want to harness!
It only takes seconds to turn something bad into something good… or vice versa. If there’s something relevant in your industry… or a controversy that breaks out that touches your business and brands… you want to be tweeting about that.This could have a serious impact on your company’s reputation and social standing, and sometimes there’s no coming back on top. You must take this fact into consideration that your posts are sensitive and relevant to current affairs.
Is it human? Or not?
As if this isn’t already an issue, you don’t’ want your posts or tweets being mistaken for spam! Think this through. If you have taken the time to set up a blog, develop content for that blog, established a Twitter account, then why take the shortcut on the last step and peeve off the people have taken the time to follow you and make them feel that they aren’t worthy of timely conversation.
Spread the social around!
The bottom line is that you need to look at your social media strategy and determine the approach that’s right for your business, not someone else’s. If you are a small business, with not too many employees and a lot of workload, automating your social media can be very attractive… However, I would caution against it. Social Media should be part of your business’ culture… it’s part of your business’ voice. So spread the social around! It doesn’t have to be one person who is solely responsible. If you’re a business owner, it’s a great way to develop rapport with your employees as well as with your customer’s communities.
After all, that’s what social media is all about!
I’d love to hear what you think.
Do you automate or schedule any of your social media activities? Why or why not? Do you think this approach helps or hurts a business?
by Miriam Hara | Sep 24, 2012 | Advertising, Business Success, Creative, Design
Just how expensive is do it yourself marketing? In an age where technology has everything accessible to pretty much everyone the question begs to be asked… is this smart or not… and how costly is it? Today business owners can create their own logos, tagline statements, ads and websites all on their own. But like everything else in life, you have ask yourself… just because you can… should you? Just like speaking English doesn’t necessarily make you a writer, knowing software such as Photoshop or InDesign doesn’t make you a designer and understanding your market doesn’t make you a “creative thinker”.
Many businesses, B2B, B2C, retail or service proudly give out their business cards or show off their website with “I did it myself” attitude. This always surprises me. Businesses who hire carpenters, electricians or decorators to do up their offices, or even pay extra in rent to be at the right location, will skimp on designing a proper logo, establish a proper tagline and develop a proper site. What is it about the creative part of the Marketing field that makes business people think that it’s just an optional expense when establishing a business? What’s the point of having a website if it isn’t user friendly or it isn’t optimized for user experience so when people actually get to your site they get to access the information that they require effortlessly? How about the copy – if your site isn’t written properly for your target, and more importantly, if the copy written doesn’t take into account keywords for ranking optimization what’s the point of having the site up anyway? Isn’t the whole purpose of having a website to inform and get found on Google in order to call or come to your store?
I once went to a spa that charged me $175 for a 1 hour massage and then gave me a brochure with all their services. The brochure was a mess! Not only was it poorly designed, but it was riddled with typos… words were cut off and even the folding of the brochure was uneven. I felt that charging that much for a massage, the least that the spa should have done is offer their customers a brochure that has the same “upscale” feeling as their pricing! It left me with the feeling that they didn’t want to go that extra mile to sell me… to convince me that they were worth those extra dollars. In this case, good enough just wasn’t.
Most people wouldn’t even consider doing major repairs or transformations to their homes. I too can swing a hammer… most times I even hit the nail. And sawing a 2×4 piece of wood shouldn’t be too complicated, at least I don’t think so… just don’t ask me to saw a right angle! I’ll get it just about right, but not quite. Ask yourself this – if every time you walk into the kitchen and see the work that you did yourself, that isn’t just so… can you live with it?
Contrary to home improvements, the creative part of Business Marketing isn’t something that you can or should ‘live with’. First of all, it isn’t just you living with it… it’s your potential clients and customers that will be subject to it. Designers, writers, and professional marketers don’t just know how to use the tools… they know how to think marketing… they know strategy and market assessment. They do their homework for your business, looking at the competition, evaluating the market, understanding your business. Each of these professional designations (writer, marketer or designer) think in a process to determine the best way to market your business or brand, visually and cohesively… dare I say strategically?
I do understand that designing a logo, developing a tagline and creating a website can get expensive and ultimately it is an expense. But ask yourself how expensive is it to get it all wrong? To ruin your business’ first impression? Or not have the desired result from your website? Before you throw your hands up in the air and tell designers and writers how expensive they are, think of how expensive it would be not to have your business seen in the best light possible, or be found? Sometimes $1 spent poorly is a lot more costly then $1000 spent wisely.
by Miriam Hara | Sep 18, 2012 | Business Success
With every generation comes a Corporate Culture evolution. As technology facilitates logistics and streamlines work processes, so too must corporate culture evolve. Every generation brings its own brand of innovation to culture. But Corporate Culture is not a one-way street. As corporations strive to accommodate the changing dynamics of the workforce, the workforce must step up to the plate and perform to deliver on productivity and profitability.
I recently read an article citing that work culture was an important element in the decision-making process of Millennials to accept a job. In the ‘it’s all about me’ generation, work places and environments have been bending backwards trying to retrofit their current work culture into one that will speak to the Millennials. Before going any further, the precise definition of Millennials is the generation between the ages of 18-34. The entire article centered on the employees’ needs and “what’s in it for them”. Not once within the article was any reference made to the employer, to the current work culture or to the needs of the organization. That really surprised me.
The concept of organizations modifying corporate culture and work models is nothing new. Okay, be forewarned as I am going to be dating myself – thirty years ago when my generation was interviewing for jobs, we too had our own ideas and it often was very different from the work place culture that we were trying to break into. I remember when everyone in management had to wear suits and women couldn’t wear dresses without pantyhose! More relevant to today’s corporate make-up was the fact that there were very few women in upper management! I was just entry-level at the time, but I do remember. Listen up Generation Millennial – the “jeans on Friday” routine and the current “business casual” came from the evolution of the tail end Boomers and X generation. What the Millennial generation wants is to make its mark on the evolution of Corporate Culture, and that’s no different from what any of us wanted – we who are now at the maturing stages of our careers.
Having run an organization for over 20 years, I have come to realization that any solid business relationship, whether it’s client relationship or employee-employer relationship, is very much a two-way street. The fit has to be there for both parties. Any organization that places ads for people understands that its work environment is the biggest challenge it faces in finding that right person. The culture at work is a big part of developing job definitions and defining employee success and achievement models. At the risk of sounding self-promoting, 3H has a very distinct culture and a solid work ethic. We always state at the get go that we are hard working – Slackers need not apply. At 3H, we pride ourselves as being mentors for the younger members of our team. We take the responsibility of assisting in shaping the work ethics and skills, which will carry these younger team members in their future, very seriously. Our culture is one of high energy, attention to detail, speed, creativity and ownership. 3H prides itself in the development of its people’s creative mind agility and broadening their scope and horizons within the marketing creative field.
So… am I right, or am I wrong? Call to organizations… I’d like to hear your thoughts!
