“My name is Lucille Meachum, but I’m Lucy to everyone, only Lucille on my business cards. I’m 41, and happily married now for seventeen years — wow. I have two great kids that can really get my blood pressure going one minute, but can be sweet and caring the next, even to each other.”
No, that’s not an exercise in creative writing you’re reading, it’s an example of a persona you should be creating for your content marketing strategy, according to Keith Weigold, a contributor to Junta42’s new Content Marketing Institute blog.
To know who you’re targeting with your content, Weigold says, you have to understand more than just their demographics. “A key to engaging content is put the customer first, to solve her problems and answer his questions. This requires understanding their beliefs, feelings, wants and needs,” he says.
Weigold walks us through the process of creating a persona–starting with the information we’re most likely to have about our customers (demographics) and filling in the blanks until you can write your target customer’s narrative.
“This ultimate step truly places you within her shoes and provides the customer-centric viewpoint so crucial to effective content marketing,” Weigold concludes.
“A veteran – whether active duty, retired, National Guard or Reserve – is someone who, at one point in his (or her) life, wrote a blank check made payable to the United States of America for an amount of ‘up to and including my life’.”
Memorial Day has been set aside as a time to remember those who have paid that ultimate price, and also to honor and thank those who returned from their time of service.
We think often of our military serving overseas, but time and again, they have come to aid citizens here when floods, blizzards, hurricanes and other disasters strike. It matters not whether they faced combat or served in a time of – always relative – peace. What matters is that they were willing to put their lives between us and our enemies in serving America.
Hammock Inc. has the privilege of publishing the member magazine for the Marine Corps League. None of us is a veteran, but as we tell members who ask, we try to be a friend. And though most of the rest of the year we’d argue that the Marines are America’s best, on Memorial Day, and Veterans’ Day, we lay that aside to honor all equally.
In the 4 years that we have worked with the League and heard amazing stories of heroism and hardship, I’ve often thought back to the immortal speech William Shakespeare gave Henry V before that battle on St. Crispian’s Day. It’s worth repeating part of it here, as a reminder of why veterans deserve honor not due to us civilians:
” We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”
(Photo At Top: Airman Jacob Proffer, a member of the Air Force Honor Guard, pauses to salute a grave after placing a miniature flag at its base during the “Flags In” tribute at Arlington National Cemetery, May 21, 2009. “When I do this, it makes me take a lot more pride every time I put on my uniform, seeing the measure of sacrifice so many have made,” he said. DoD photo by Donna Miles”)
Though good-quality and engaging video production can be a daunting task, it pays off for some businesses. The popularity of YouTube can be turned to commercial purposes, and ROI can be gauged using the site’s analytics functions.
Creating your own channel is a particularly effective strategy to attract visitors and monitor viewings, comments and feedback. Once you’ve created a channel, you must maintain it much as you would a blog or text-oriented social media presence, according to Mashable.com’s “Top 10 YouTube Tips for Small Business.”
The advice on using YouTube’s social capabilities – favoriting appropriate videos and making “friends”; using tags; and promoting your videos elsewhere – are particularly important in getting noticed.
We’d add an 11th tip: Determine your audience before you go on air. That will help shape the content and production of your videos, as well as whether YouTube is a good fit in the first place.
In most cases, a client’s website plays a big role in their overall content strategy. But how many companies take the time to think about the goals of their website and how they fit within their overall content marketing strategy? Not many, based on our experience. The good news is that it’s never too late to stop and rethink the purpose of your website.
Patsi Krakoff, content marketing specialist and co-founder of The Blog Squad, shares recommendations for five content marketing goals for websites:
Lots of businesses are setting up accounts on various social media sites lately, but not all of them really “get it.” While there aren’t steadfast rules on how to use the sites, there are best practices and certain etiquette guidelines that most seasoned users try to follow. OnlineMarketingBlog hits many of them in this recent article, and while they specify the tips are for e-commerce sites, they really can apply to any business’ social media strategy. Tips include:
For more tips on social media best practices, visit the social media section of hammock.com.
Writers and editors frequently need to find experts who can speak authoritatively on the subject of an article. Journalists who specialize in a given field soon accumulate a list of go-to gurus, but generalists don’t have that advantage.
Probably the first thing you try will be a direct online search. You may strike gold—especially in the sources cited by sites such as Wikipedia—or you may be overwhelmed with irrelevant sites. And even after refining your search, the results may still be ambiguous or less than solid.
Here are some suggestions for narrowing your search:
• Ask your editor for suggestions about experts.
• Run a search for other articles on the topic to see who’s been consulted previously, or, even better, experts who write on the topic.
• Blogs can be a good source of leads to experts. Similarly, Twitter may help you find people who post regularly on a given topic.
• Contact relevant professional or trade associations. The organization itself may include highly knowledgeable individuals, or they can direct you to members who are versed in the subject. Suite 101 also recommends consulting universities, whose faculty may be knowledgeable or can direct you to colleagues who can help.
• Websites such as Help A Reporter Out and Media Bistro serve as a crossroads for writers seeking information and public relations professionals and businesses eager to supply it. The Adventurous Writer recommends Prof.net as a source of professional experts.
• JournalismNet describes itself as “a free web site with over 600 pages … designed to bring you an investigative guide to the Internet – the best tools, tricks and websites from around the world.”
• Friends and colleagues may be able to help—writers and editors minds are attics where all sorts of odd facts lie waiting to be discovered.
Once you have a list of experts, take time to check them out online to see what others have said about them, such as possible biases. You may still use an expert with a known slant, but you will be able to include that as a caveat to your readers.
How-to articles for using Twitter abound, but we liked the way this article from Connected Marketer zeroed in on helpful tips for tweeting responsibly and building a B2B community on Twitter. Blogger Jeremy Victor outlines the how Twitter can help “start conversations and build real life relationships” that will ultimately benefit your business.
Our favorite tips:
Don’t: Flood your audience with self- or company-promotional tweets. A balance is critical.
Don’t: Post negatively about a competitor. Don’t post negatively about anything for that matter.
Do: Provide value and be selective in your tweeting. Only tweet about things that the community of people whom you are working to attract will find interesting or valuable. A great place to start is to share links to industry news or new product announcements.
It’s been a little over a month since Apple’s iPad was released, and while the full effect of the device will not emerge for quite some time, a few content marketers have shared their first impressions of the device.
Rex recently outlined his thoughts about the iPad, touching on the debate among early adopters regarding whether or not the iPad is “good for creating content.” Google Docs are read-only on the device, but the Keynote app allows you to create an entire presentation.
And while he doesn’t view magazines as a medium that needs saving, he does believe that the iPad “provides lots of opportunities for magazine companies who do something other than replicate magazines on an app.”
Over at PM Digital, they asked their digital bloggers for first impressions of the iPad:
Measuring ROI seems to be a hot topic this week, as Bill previously pointed to an article about why it’s important to measure ROI on social media marketing efforts.
A new study by Omniture doesn’t go into why measuring ROI is so important, but it does show that marketers simply aren’t doing it, regardless of online marketing method: “80% believe ROI from online marketing activities is important to measure, but only 31% of marketers can effectively measure it,” according to the 2010 Omniture Online Analytics Benchmark Survey. Further, “86% of respondents think conversion rate from online marketing activities is important to measure, but 25% cannot effectively measure it.”
At Hammock, we do a lot of content marketing for clients, and for each of those clients, we report back on a monthly basis about how our content marketing efforts are working for them. And by “report back” I don’t mean vague statements about how awesome our work is; I mean specific metrics that clearly show how our work is helping our clients achieve their business goals.
The Nashville community has come together in remarkable ways after the devastating Nashville Flood. The tech community, in particular, worked cooperatively over the course of one week to build and add content to an online tool called Donate Nashville. Launched on Saturday, May 8, the Craigslist-like tool helps fill in the gaps as Nashville starts to recover and rebuild from the flood.