It’s easy to understand the logic behind content marketing—that establishing yourself as a thought leader will build your brand and generate leads. But it’s one thing to appreciate the idea; it’s another to actually create a content marketing culture in a company to enable successful execution of the strategy.

The Content Challenge

Content marketing can take many forms—blogs, white papers, email newsletters, social media postings, You Tube videos, personal appearances, self-published print magazines, and so on. But where does all this content come from? According to a recent survey, this is clearly the biggest problem with implementation—with respondents saying that their greatest content marketing challenges are producing engaging content (36%), producing enough content (21%), and budget to produce content (20%). Continue Reading…

A friend working on a very cool stealth start-up approached me the other day to talk about sign up forms and the type of questions he should be asking people when they join his soon to be popular site. In a world of Facebook Connect, I first questioned what percentage of his audience would even create their own login on his site but as we discussed further it became apparent to me that whether people signed up directly on his site or they used FB Connect he needed to collect certain pieces of information that would not be readily available through FB but were vital for the marketing of his business. So again, in a world where it is anticipated that most users will log on to the site using FB, how could he capture the three or four (note that it is important to narrow down to at most 3/4 additional questions) pieces of information that would be vital to personalize marketing communications? Continue Reading…

Being a lawyer by degree, articled and called to the bar and having spent my fair share of time in and around law firms I can say that the words digital or social do not really enter the marketing of most law firms. Of course every firm has a web presence and a few have even taken a leading role with iPhone apps, but the foray into real digital or social marketing has been slow if at all. Given that so much of today’s modern digital marketing is about creating content you would think that law firms which do this incredibly well would be all over blogs and sharing links across the social web but there is little activity. So my small piece of advice to law firms is this, start small and start with Facebook for recruiting. You really cannot go wrong and the effort while not large in scale will pay dividends in the form of a connection with top notch law school talent.  Continue Reading…

Some of the best ideas are the ones that at the heart are really quite simple but it is in the execution that the winners and losers are separated. The “coming soon” page has been a staple of Internet business from the very beginnings of websites. As the Internet got more mature so did these pages, initially showing countdown clocks to launch dates and eventually including email signups and social media links. So if the idea was so simple, why then were so many companies struggling to be able to use their coming soon page to help build momentum and hype before launch? Sure many companies promised that if you signed up and tweeted a specific line you would get an advanced place in their beta launch list, but really nobody had come up with a way to make this all automated and effectively simple. Enter Launchrock. Continue Reading…