On Words and Business

By now you must have seen the Old Spice marketing campaign.

B2B marketers can learn from the success of this creative strategy, as it includes just the ingredients needed to launch a successful content marketing campaign.

1. It wasn’t an overnight success. It was a three year effort culminating in the ads, videos, and social media presence we see today.
2. It involved trial and error. The agency took risks, evaluated what worked, and didn’t give up when something didn’t work.
3. It involved a lot of planning, a significant budget, and trust in the process.

According to the Tech Target Media Consumption Benchmark Report, 64% of IT buyers always use the Internet to research IT solutions and 31% do so frequently.

The top 7 types of content these buyers find most useful for identifying a problem and gathering information when considering a purchase:

1. ebooks
2. email newsletters
3. whitepapers
4. podcasts
5. online videos
6. customer case studies
7. webcasts

For the IT companies out there…are you sharing your information with the 95% of buyers who are seeking answers online?

Your message is more than the words you choose. It’s how you get the message to your audience.

Social media may be hot these days but it’s just one of the tools in the box. Think about how to use all of your tools to your advantage.

Do you understand what works with your audience? Do they wish to interact? If so, how and where? What channel works best to get their attention and at what point in the buying cycle?

It’s not hard to find a lecture, networking event, or article that focuses on how to use various types of social media to market your business. I’ve talked about it myself.

As the conversation about social media gets more feverish, I get less interested.

Agreed: as a way to get the message out and have a conversation with your customers and stakeholders, social media platforms really do the job.

But shouldn’t the focus be on the actual message? And once you figure out what that is, then spend time thinking about the right medium to share the message? Depending on your message, the best way to share could be rock carvings, skywriting, or good old fashioned paper.

No matter your business, there probably should be some form of social media in the marketing mix. But the exercise of figuring out what platform would work best and why isn’t a trivial step.

Interesting premise to this blog post: we are all knowledge workers and companies who get this will win in the end.

The message here is that everyone is the face of the company, whether their job is in PR or corporate communications, or they are on the front lines. That anyone in a company can be communicating about the company and there isn’t as much oversight to outbound communications as there used to be. That’s a good thing in general. But these days it’s so easy for a message (good or bad) to spread, that it opens up a can of corporate worms.

It involves a lot of trust on the part of any company that empowers their employees via social media and let’s them join the conversation.  The companies that do this will win in the end. Does that make everyone a knowledge worker? I’m not sure.

Being social and networking are all about making the right connections. So is social media.

So how do you get people to notice you or your company? That’s a great question that many companies struggle with.

Like the six degrees of separation theory, having a social media presence means reaching the people who have lots of followers–the mass influencers–and tapping into their energy. Forrester talks about how to engage the mass influencers with the use of feedback. In this case, the story is about a site where reviews are posted and it makes sense. But does the idea work for different types of content?

Think about reaching out to anyone who comments on a blog post, separate from the blog; contacting them when you post something you think they will especially like or be able to respond to and asking for feedback. Contests to get people talking about your site.

What other ideas are out there for reaching mass influencers?