On Words and Business

How does your content marketing campaign fit with the 3 stages of buying?

A few thoughts:

1. Identifying the problem

• Whitepaper discussing the nature of the issue and a resolution
• Case study showing what challenges previous customers faced
• Ebook sharing thought leadership about the industry and common challenges

2. Identifying the solution

• Enewsletter with brief case studies showing how customers have resolved the problem
• Webcast answering typical customer questions
• Whitepaper discussing the nature of the issue and a resolution

3. Identifying the right solution

• Podcast with one of your subject matter experts talking about the benefits of your solution
• Online video showing your product in action
• Case study of customer who tried many solutions before finding yours

In case you are wondering about social media and if and how it reaches your (or any) audience, check out 20+ mind-blowing social media stats.

Some that I find interesting:

• LinkedIn has gained about 1 million members each month since last August
• More than 65 million Facebook members access their accounts via a mobile device
• Average number of tweets per day (as of end of 2009): 27.3 million

I get the irony of linking to this article, but I loved it: Meet the rehashed, repeated, warmed over web

It begins…”Stop me if you’ve read this one before. Actually, stop me if you’ve read anything at all original on the Web over the last year. Odds are whatever you did read was copied or repeated from someone else, who took it from someone else, who took it … and so on and so on.”

In looking for information about how to set create a social media strategy, I found this great entry on Beth’s Blog: Creating your organization’s social media strategy map.

The target market is non-profits but I think it works for any business, especially small businesses with limited resources.

The highlights:

1. Identify objectives
2. Identify the audience
3. Integrate
4. Culture change
5. Capacity
6. Tactics and tools
7. Measurement
8. Experiment

As I’ve said before, I’m not big on the lack of standardized categories for website content.

Like most, I’ve gotten used to searching Google for things. Although I’m not anti-Google, most of my searches are done reluctantly and with a sigh at the knowledge of all the dreck I’ll have to sort through. These days, sadly, it’s almost the only way to find something online.

Then…there is an outage. Here’s a great article on the single point of failure for finding content on the web.

Just when I think I’ve finally gotten a handle on a technology, it morphs into something new. On which I do not have a handle. This isn’t anything too new (not bleeding edge, this), but optimizing website for mobile devices is getting to be more important.

iMedia asks Is your website ready for a handheld world? Good question. What I’m curious to know about is the size of the market. Cell phones are big sellers no doubt. What percentage have internet access capabilities? What percentage access the internet via cell phone?

I’m not doubting this market is important. Just looking to understand how size of the pie.