Content That Works

This year Hammock once again hit the events trail for our client, the Marine Corps League, making 2010 a record year in event-related advertising and expo sales.

The old saying “you can’t tell the players without a program” holds for trade shows where strapped-for-time attendees want to know what’s on display and where.

Since 2006, in addition to relaunching its member magazine, Semper Fi, Hammock has produced directories for each of the three annual Marine Military Expos sponsored by our client, The Marine Corps League. In that time, both Semper Fi and the Expo directories have experienced significant growth in advertising sales and print quantity.

Managed by Nielsen Expositions, a part of the Nielsen Company, these shows bring defense industry suppliers together with the Marines for frank discussions and critiques of the products and services.

The Expos are held at the Marine Corps bases at Camp Pendleton, CA, Camp Lejeune, NC, and Quantico, VA, outside Washington, DC. The latter is by far the biggest, drawing as many as 450 vendors and thousands of attendees.

In 2006, the guide for the Quantico event was 24 pages long, contained only two paid ads and was printed as part of the magazine. Since then it has doubled in size to 48 pages this year, with more than 19 pages of paid advertising that generated significant revenue for our client. The other two guides have seen similar growth.

Robust ad sales efforts and opportunities for vendor listings to be highlighted have helped fuel this growth, but advertisers say a redesign of both magazine and guides in 2006 plus a strong—and very Marine—content strategy make them increasingly desirable media buys.

If you need any more convincing that great online content telling your story's brand or describing the importance of your service is an essential form of marketing, consider this. According to a recent survey from Pew Research, almost 60 percent of U.S. adults say they conduct research online about products and services they are considering purchasing or using. Don’t miss your opportunity to connect with this group of existing customers and prospects by having an online content marketing strategy in place that ensures your site is easy to find and is rich with the type of content researchers are looking for.

Savvy marketers no longer depend solely on traditional advertising in traditional media to reach their audience. Creating and managing their own branded media -- from e-media to print magazines and from video to iPad apps --marketers now are learning that content is the glue holding their marketplaces together. Since our own Rex Hammock helped to create what is now the largest content marketing trade group in the United States, the Custom Content Council, we asked him to answer one simple question that we get asked a lot these days: “What exactly is content marketing?”

At Hammock, we create content that helps our clients accomplish business objectives. Sounds great, but what objectives are we helping them achieve?

The following five objectives are what you can expect to influence and measure with a well-developed and executed content marketing strategy:

1. Lead generation
2. Direct sales
3. Customer retention
4. Branding support
5. Thought leadership

For today’s post, let’s focus on lead generation.

Content marketing is part of the marketing mix for nine out of 10 B2B marketers, but these same marketers are uncertain about the effectiveness of these channels. These findings are part of the recent “B2B Content Marketing: 2010 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends” report developed by MarketingProfs and Junta42. The report identified that marketers are facing a confidence gap—between the content marketing tactics they employ and their ability to measure their effectiveness. While 79 percent of marketers surveyed are using social media tactics (excluding blogs), only 31 percent of those who use social media tactics rate the tactic as effective.