Content Strategy

Weekly Roundup: 2/22/13

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Marketing
Content Marketing Best Practices: 5 Tips for the Modern CMO—What I like most about this article is that fact that as a CMO, he realizes the importance of getting down and dirty with current marketing technologies. As a CMO, you’ve got enough on your plate, but if you don’t use the tools at all, you won’t understand how they can help your business.

In Marketing, People Are Not Numbers—This article is kind of abstract, but I think it brings up an issue that marketers need to be aware of. You can’t just push anymore.

Infographic: B2B Tech Buyers Leverage Video to Advance Purchase Behavior—I like this because it shows the role of video in the B2B technology buying process. Video is a very important communication vehicle and if your company doesn’t have a solid video marketing plan, you need to start thinking about getting one.

Social Media
Vine Tips for B2B Marketing—Vine is a very new video service that lets people share six second videos on social networks like Twitter. I think there is a lot of potential in the video space, so take a look at these tips for using Vine in a business context and try it out.
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Let’s Declare War on Collateral!

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Content Development

Thanks to LinkedIn’s improved functionality, I recently have received multiple endorsements from former and current coworkers for my expertise in marketing communications. Every time I get one, I have to confess, I cringe a little.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the votes of confidence. (I do. Really. Thank you.) And I’ve spent a lot of time over the years concepting, writing, editing, producing, and otherwise creating and project-managing all kinds of communication vehicles for marketing. White papers, webinars, datasheets, sales presentations, press releases, FAQs, web content, articles, brochures, blogs, newsletters, posters, mailers, table tents, sales tools – the list goes on. Some of it’s been good, too.

But let’s face it. Marketing communications is so yesterday. Content marketing is today. And the two are not synonymous.

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From Content to Customers with Marketing Automation

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Content Strategy

Marketing automation provides a way to automatically manage the targeting, timing, and content of outbound marketing messages in response to prospects’ inbound actions and online behaviors. It can help you cope with the growing volume, speed, and complexity of marketing campaigns and help measure the impact of your lead-nurturing activities. Finally, and arguably most importantly, it can help marketing and sales clarify the boundary between lead nurturing and sales readiness.

In a previous post, we discussed how marketing automation facilitates the process of delivering the right content to the right people at the right time by keeping track of which buyers are at which stage in the process and what interactions they’ve had with your organization along the way.

Of course, content marketing and marketing automation go hand in hand. On our Yesler blog, Tyson Roberts shares more about how marketing automation can help marketers manage bigger, faster, smarter marketing campaigns, with the ultimate goal of increasing conversion rates.

Bigger campaigns though, require more content, and that’s one of the ways marketing automation can help:

To make content marketing campaigns successful, marketing teams have to provide prospects and leads at every stage of the buying cycle with information that resonates with their current needs, job roles, intent, and interest level. They have to greatly increase the amount and types of content they produce and they have to produce better content that ever before.

Read on to learn more.

Weekly Roundup 9/7/12

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Content Strategy, Customer Engagement, Marketing Musings, Social Media

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Content Strategy
10 Content Marketing Tips from Social Media Experts—Tips delivered straight from the experts at the Content Marketing World conference. My two faves from this article: 1.) The chasm between privacy and personalization is immense. Speak to me, but don’t stalk me. (Mitch Joel) and 2.) Create “holy smokes!” content (Jason Falls).

Customer Engagement
IBM Launches New Data-Driven Services to Accelerate Customer Engagement—Based on exhaustive research and its survey of more than 1,700 CMS worldwide, IBM announced a new set of services designed to help marketers deliver more meaningful, targeted communications to prospects and customers.

Social Media
America’s First ‘Social’ President—Tips on Social Media Strategy from Barack Obama—During the past four years, it’s become clear that the Obama administration is hip to social media. This article highlights a few of the ways that team Obama stays ahead of the curve when it comes to social brand building.

Projectline Posts
Why I Am Afraid of Social Media and What I Intend to Do About It—Projectline senior marketing consultant David Dorrian talks about the sometimes overwhelming inevitability of social media and why, especially as marketers, we have an obligation to grapple with it.

CONFAB 2012 Cliff’s Notes: Visual Thinking, Content Down to a Science, and My Summer Reading List

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Content Development, Content Strategy, Marketing Musings

I spent three enlightening days at CONFAB: The Content Strategy Conference 2012 in Minneapolis last week. The sun was shining and folks involved with content and strategy worldwide came to share, learn, and mingle. I met some great people, learned a lot, and was immersed in the world of content strategy.

With references to Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Sherlock, I felt at home–literally. Like watching cable with friends and discussing favorite shows during commercial breaks, there was a sense of camaraderie. Kristina Halvorson, CEO and Founder of Brain Traffic, said in her welcome that CONFAB is a rare opportunity when all those involved with content strategy get to be with their people. Indeed. I felt I was with a kindred bunch of folks who are all keen on the future of content in the digital space and read uncommon yet fascinatingly applicable books.

Over three days, I went to many sessions and took enough notes to fill several scrolling pages. Each was thought provoking and a few really stuck with me. Below are a few of my notes from two of those sessions:

Be Vivid: How to Make Content Work — Even When Words Don’t Work – Dan Roam
Roam discussed how it is important to really think about the content we create so that it doesn’t become “a wall of noise.” He stresses that we need to have enough purpose behind our content so that folks are willing to take the time to read it. The content needs to be “vivid.” It needs to be “absolutely clear because it is expressed with both words and pictures.” Using the metaphor of a sooty lump of coal turned sparkling diamond, Roam described what the pneumonic, “vivid,” means in a world where we don’t rely so heavily on words.

Vivid Thinking
Vi = visual
V = verbal
Id – interdependent

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Weekly Roundup: 4/13/12

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Content Strategy, Marketing Operations

Welcome to the Projectline Weekly Roundup. We know that the week can move pretty fast. Since Fridays sometimes offer a chance for a breather, we wanted to share links to some of the articles we liked this week. As always, we’d love to get your take, so feel free to leave a comment or chat us up on Twitter. Happy reading and have a great weekend!

Weekly Roundup

Content Strategy
Infographics Discussion—As part of the weekly #MMchat Twitter chat, Projectline and many others participated in a discussion about infographics. This is the transcript of the session. If infographics are something you have an interest in, this transcript is worth your time. Project scope, data validation, timeline, and lots of other aspects were covered.

Show Me the Content Strategy—This post talks about the preliminary conversations that need to happen before embarking on a content strategy project. First things first, it’s imperative to define terms and align expectations around substance, structure, workflow, and governance. Read on to find out more.

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Playing in Our Own Sand Box

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Content Strategy, Marketing Musings

Crazy-low budgets, tight deadlines, and scope creep. These three specters haunt many projects large and small, but they are a given when it comes to one of the most challenging projects of all. I’m talking here about the inside job: refreshing the company website.

But taking a busman’s holiday can also provide an opportunity to try new approaches and take risks. So when we set out to refresh the Projectline website, we decided to test-drive some new practices. Here’s what we sampled and tried—and what we found out along the way.

Messaging Architecture Really Works. We wanted our new website to showcase all that Projectline has to offer, but before we could tell a cohesive story, we needed to get on the same page—literally. Taking a cue from Margot Bloomstein’s Confab 2011 presentation about messaging architecture, “Message Matters,” Projectline stakeholders participated in a card-sorting exercise that led us to identify and prioritize five key values. We then used this list of principles as a litmus test at every critical juncture, from first draft and wireframe to final editorial and design decisions, to ensure we were all headed in the same direction.

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