August, 2010
Published by Dianna Huff
Volume 10, Number 8

Welcome!

I've been asked to speak about developing content for Search Engine Marketing New England (SEMNE) as well as to develop a course for the Online Marketing Institute on the same topic.

Coming up with content ideas is often an insurmountable hurdle for people. When I recommend that companies develop a content strategy, I often hear, "But what do we write about?!"

The first step is to develop a "beat" in much the same way a reporter or journalist covers a certain aspect of an industry (think Walt Mossberg of the WSJ). I first wrote about developing a beat in 2008 -- and have updated the original blog post for this month's newsletter.

In addition to attending SEMNE (for those of you in the greater Boston area), don't forget to join me on my Facebook page. I've been adding examples of B2B Pages -- many of which are *very* good, including the one by Grasshopper.com.

Regards,

Dianna Huff

B2B Content Marketing: Think Like a Reporter

When I talk to my clients about developing content for their B2B Websites, I often hear, "But what will we write about? We're a [insert description here] type of company. We make widgets. We have nothing to say. Waaaa!"

First off, you don't want to write about your company and its products (or at least not all the time). Instead, you want to develop content that gives people information they find interesting and can actually use.

This is why white papers, e-books, guides, reports, and blog articles are so popular.

Think about developing content this way: a trade journal doesn't publish information about how to publish a magazine month after month (which is its specialty when you get down to it). Instead, it gives its readers industry news that's of interest to them.

When developing content for your Website, you need to think of yourself as a micro-publisher, not a manufacturer or developer or whatever else you are.

It also helps if you develop a "beat" in much the same way a reporter has a beat or niche industry / news focus he or she covers.

Just as Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal covers all things relating to personal technology, you'll cover a slice of your own industry.

Developing a beat helps narrow your focus, which in turn makes it easier to come up with content ideas.

Instead of being overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of information out there, you cull sources and experts down to only those that relate to your topic area and then begin reading / following them.

By narrowing your focus, you're then able skim content for those items within your beat -- versus reading the publication (online or off) start to finish, which takes waaaay too much time. You'll also begin to generate ideas for blog posts, white papers, reports, articles and other information (not to mention you'll learn how your competitors position themselves).

As an example, here is my daily / weekly / monthly beat:

Print Media

I read the Wall Street Journal just about every day -- focusing mostly on the Marketplace and Personal Journal sections plus any relevant business news on the front page.

I like to read articles about companies and their successes and failures and anything about Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, P&G, Steve Jobs, women in business, technology, and social media. I also carefully study the B2B ads -- which often become fodder for blog posts.

I also read Fortune magazine, Inc., Fortune Small Business, and Fast Company and will often retweet items of interest (Hootsuite makes this easy as it has a built-in URL shortener).

I'm also constantly on the lookout for articles / news that pertain to my clients' industries. Because I have a client who works with high network individuals, for example, I read articles about changes to tax laws, investing, and anything else that pertains to their audience. (This is how I'm able to come up with content ideas for their blog, which I ghostwrite).

Google News / Twitter

I log in to Google News and/or Twitter several times a day to see what's new. I find lots of interesting information this way, such as the fact that the hugely successful Old Spice social media campaign has lifted sales by 107%.

E-newsletters / Blogs / Google Alerts

I have a few blogs I follow religiously plus those I read as time permits. I also read a number of e-newsletters from companies and individuals.

I keep an eagle eye for any new reports, data, surveys, etc. that I can use in my presentations, blog posts, etc. For example, I recently posted about a terrific white paper that Silverpop published for B2B marketers.

I run a number of Google Alerts for specific keywords and as time permits, cull through any interesting items.

Broadcast Media

Although I'm not a heavy TV watcher, I do like to watch weekend sporting events occasionally -- but only for the commercials as B2B companies will often advertise. In addition, listening to the radio is a great source of ideas, especially when it comes to how companies pitch themselves.

That in a nutshell is how you develop "a beat." It sounds like it takes a lot of time, but for the most part, it's pretty easy to maintain. The secret is to skim for items of interest -- and cull items for future blog posts, newsletter articles, and e-books / white papers.

SEMNE: Content Marketing for SEO Professionals

In one of his talks, Google’s Matt Cutts said that SEO professionals have to start thinking like marketers. That’s because the name of the game these days is content. Content that educates, content that entertains, content that drives purchasing decisions and sales.

To add significant value to client relationships, SEO professionals must now give recommendations for creating content that gets found in the search engines and passed around via social media. In this presentation, I'll be discussing:

• Answering site visitors’ unspoken questions through content
• Using Google Analytics, Alerts, and social media to develop content ideas
• Recommending the types of content that helps drive conversions

Event details

Content Marketing for SEO Professionals

Location: Crown Plaza Hotel, Natick, MA

Date and time: Wednesday, September 15, 2010

6:30 – 7:30 Networking

7:30 – 9:00 Talk and questions

Reach Close to 3,000 B2B Marketers

Finding and reaching the right target audience is difficult. Now you can reach over 3,000 B2B marketers by sponsoring my blog and newsletter.

Each week I'll run a custom ad about your company and feature it on my blog. This ad will live "forever," driving traffic back to your site. In addition, you can opt to sponsor this newsletter.

Either way, you’ll reach an audience of hundreds of highly targeted B2B corporate marketers and consultants, PR professionals, CEOs, and other industry experts.

For more information and rates, see my Blog Sponsorship page.

What's New with DH Communications?

It's been a busy summer with lots of new and ongoing marketing projects for clients such as:

Martin Marietta Magnesia Specialties -- Complete Website overhaul (read the case study)

Thermo Scientific -- Marketing collateral copywriting

NetLine Corporation -- Lead generation email campaign

Litigation Solutions, LLC -- Marketing Opportunity Audit and case study

Veterans Development -- Complete Website overhaul

Nashaquisset - Nantucket Rental Homes -- SEO / local search

Brooks Brokerage -- Ongoing marketing, PR, and social media

New Rise Investments, LLC -- Ongoing marketing and social media

Inca Gold Products -- Ongoing marketing consulting

Helaine Smith, DMD -- Complete Website overhaul

To see how I can help you drive leads and sales through B2B marketing strategies that work, give me a call at 603-382-8093 or send email to info@dhcommunications.com.

Contact DH Communications

Telephone: 603-382-8093
Email: info@dhcommunications.com

Keep up with the latest B2B marketing news at Dianna Huff's B2B MarCom Writer Blog.

I watched the Old Spice campaign go viral and while my one Tweet sums up my initial response to it (“The Old Spice brand may now be ‘trendy’ due to social media + hottie Isaiah Mustafa, but it still smells icky to me”), technology writer Robert X. Cringely of InfoWorld’s take on it made me stop and think.

The result is my guest post, “Don’t Copycat the Old Spice YouTube Campaign!” for the BlogNotions Marketers blog.

Yes, it’s applicable to B2B marketers.

Enjoy!

My lucky duck son got an iPhone 4 for his birthday and the day it arrived, a friend of our family eagerly asked if he could “FaceTime” us. (See Apple’s YouTube channel for some pretty cool video.)

After participating in the call, all I can say is “Coooool.” Real time video calling — an activity we’ve seen in futuristic movies and George Jetson cartoons — is here.

It took only a few seconds for me to grasp the marketing implications, and what I predict is that FaceTime or applications like it will totally and irrevocably change marketing.

Right now I regularly receive calls from really dumb telemarketers who work for clueless companies. These people call me pitching products and services . . . yet they have no idea who I am (something social media is supposed to solve).

I even had one telemarketer from a major company ask me, “So what exactly do you do anyway?” after pitching some kind of business product at me.

A simple two-second Internet search would have given her links to my Website, my blog, my Google, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, and some of the articles I’ve written.

Once marketers start using video calls to reach prospects, however, things will start getting nasty.

Granted, relatively few people have an iPhone 4. However, given the rate of technological advances, video calls will be commonplace in a few years. FaceTime will migrate from iPhones to iPads and other smart mobile devices.

Say I’m reading the Wall Street Journal on my iPad over breakfast and in comes a FaceTime call from a telemarketer trying to sell me something and like most telemarketers, he has no clue who I am.

Can you imagine the amount of ill-will this company will have created with one simple call? Forget negative Tweets — let’s talk about posting actual dumb FaceTime marketing calls on YouTube, Facebook, and blogs.

As marketers, myself included, we talk about how social media will help us get to know our customers / prospects — even as they get to know us.

Although you the marketer have “joined the conversation” and work hard to not use social media to push you-focused content, lots of other companies / marketers / consultants use social media as another one-to-many broadcast medium.

Just witness the number of self-serving DMs you receive when you follow people, the self-promotional spam posts on LinkedIn Groups, and the companies that use blogs and social media to push press releases and other corporate dreck.

FaceTime and apps like it will change this scenario.

FaceTime, I predict, will force companies and organizations to really think about how they market to people and what they want to accomplish — or face extreme opposition and blowback.

This is already happening with social media as evidenced when the moderator of the Nestle Facebook page talked smack with its Fans — an event that became fodder for major online media pundents. (See Michelle Tripp’s excellent write-up about how this went down.)

What do you think? Will marketers abuse FaceTime the way they’ve abused social media, direct mail, and the telephone? Or will it force them to change their ways?

Want to watch four kids launch a start-up and market a product they’re currently developing?

Check out the Kickstarter project Diaspora (full disclosure: I’m a financial backer — to the tune of $36.). Once it’s developed, Diaspora will be an open-source alternative to Facebook.

Started by four college kids (who have yet to graduate), the new social networking site will allow you to manage your own content and privacy settings.

What I like about this project, however, is how the founders are marketing it. They have a blog and have posted a wonderful video about why they’re developing Diaspora. It’s raw, it’s unedited, and it suits their “12-hour days, coffee, pizza, and passion galore” ethos.

They also have posts available only to backers — one of which apologizes for the founders not quite understanding how the Kickstarter survey function works. (People have to fill out all the fields, even though the survey questions say you don’t.)

The responses to this post show a real marketing lesson: no matter how easy you make things, people will continue to ask lots of questions (sorta like school), so you had better be sure you have the bandwidth to answer them.

I also agree with one of the posters: the Diaspora founders need to hire someone to help them post interesting content on their progress as well as answer people’s questions versus making t-shirts available to financial backers.

And, they need to answer one really big question: Just how easy will it be to use this thing? Nodes? What is a node? Sounds complicated.

Back in my salad days, I managed the office of a small manufacturing business for seven years, and during that time I discovered the secret to tracking which marketing methods worked.

Are you sitting down? It’s pretty revolutionary.

I simply asked, “How did you hear about us?”

Because I answered the telephone (in those days we didn’t have voice mail or email), I got to speak one-on-one with everyone who called inquiring about the company’s technical sewing services.

I kept a piece of paper by the telephone and each time someone new called, I always made sure to ask how he/she found us. Because these were pre-Internet days, the answers were usually, “The Thomas Register,” “the Yellow Pages,” or “You were referred to us.”

I’d then put a tick mark next to the appropriate answer on the piece of paper.

At the end of each quarter, I added up the tick marks — and that’s how we knew to keep advertising in the Yellow Pages (including which cities and categories) and the Thomas Register.

Low-tech I know, but it worked.

It still works today, too. I know, because with all the high-tech tools available for tracking marketing ROI, I still use this same exact method. (I also recommend it to the small business owners who work with me.)

When someone new calls or emails me, I immediately pull out my Prospect Questionnaire, a form I use to help me remember to ask important questions, including “How did you hear about me?”

Every six months or so, I go back through these forms, check off how people found me using a piece of paper and a pencil, and then analyze the results. The process takes about an hour, and I get a really good overview of what’s working and what’s not.

(Internet search and referrals are huge for me. Everything else — meh.)

Granted, this method won’t work for all companies. But for those small B2B companies with one to 10 people, it’s a great back-of-the-napkin method for quickly determining your marketing ROI.

Best of all, it’s free, easy, and fast.

To help you get started, feel free to download my Prospect Questionnaire as well as the quick and dirty “call tracking form” I’ve given to clients to use. Like I said, neither is sexy, but they work.

If you’re a small company or one-person business, do you have other low-cost, low-tech methods for tracking marketing ROI? Please share them!

I’ve spent the better part of the last two months doing a serious update to my Website. If you’re reading this post through a blog reader, click on through and take a peek.

Because traffic to my blog had outstripped traffic to my site, and because I was tired of maintaining two sites, I incorporated the blog into my site and moved the whole kit and kaboodle to WordPress.

Woot! This is something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while now.

Working on a project of this nature is like redoing your bathroom. You take down the ugly wallpaper and realize you need to gut the entire bathroom.

I started moving content over and quickly realized my old copy did not describe what I now offer clients — my business having changed dramatically in the last two years.

As a result, I had an existential break-down trying to figure out what exactly I do for a living — and ended up calling Michele Linn, who graciously took over writing my Services pages and my “Why I’m Different” page. She also went through my entire site and made a bunch of recommendations — all of which I incorporated.

Michele, you are awesome! XOXOXOXOXOXOX

A huge thank you, too, to Stephen and Rachel at Cre8d Design who oversaw the move, redesigned the headers, and made sure everything works fine. If you need WordPress experts — call them. They’re the absolute best.

Take a look around and let me know what you think. And if you find any typos or broken links, let me know and I’ll send you a $5 Starbucks card.

Now I’m off to go have a cocktail (maybe two!).

Each year I “unplug” for 10 days. Basically this means I don’t use the computer — for anything. I’m always surprised by how difficult this is — and how the first two days are like going without caffeine.

Checking things like Twitter, LinkedIn, other blogs, this blog’s comments, email, etc. does give me a buzz. (I also realize how much time these things take, too.)

Suffice to say, I always come back refreshed and full of ideas, and that’s because I spend my time not thinking about much of anything, sleeping, and reading. It’s a wonderful 10 days.

And with that, Friday afternoon (today!) starts my annual unplugged vacation! Woo hoo!

I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth, although judging by my lack of blog posts, it appears that I might have.

My lack of posting is due to a number of factors: I went on vacation, I moved my office, and I’ve been working hard on getting my new site up and running: The Profitable Consultant.

I’m pretty excited about this site — which is geared toward consultants and freelancers in any industry who want to learn how to better market their businesses.

As I explain on the About Us page, I’ve worked with small to large B2B companies for years now, but have always had consultants and freelancers call me to ask for advice about how to start a business, how to optimize their sites, or how to better market themselves.

My mission has always been to help businesses achieve real results through marketing, so combining marketing, coaching, and my love for helping people made sense — hence, The Profitable Consultant.

Check it out and let me know what you think! I’m still fixing minor bugs, so if you find anything, give me a shout.

Also be sure to download my latest product: Goof-Proof Email: How to Avoid the Seven Most Common Email Pitfalls.

Photo credit goes to Carlton SooHoo, a *fabulous* photographer. Site design by Sonora DesignWorks in Amesbury, MA. (Thanks a bunch, Del!)

A few years ago, the Boston Globe ran a full size ad. In the left column were four lines:

Most People

I have a dream I won the lottery.

I have a dream that I own a big house and a big car.

I have a dream that I am a big movie star.

On the right hand side of the page it reads:

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The text of his “I have a dream” speech which extends down the length of the page

The visual difference between “normal” dreams and Dr. King’s dreams is striking, which is why I hung that page on the wall in my office. Each time I read it, I think, “How do I dream?” It reminds me that while having a house or success is nice, there are more important things.

In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I’ve included the full 17 minute video of his speech.

If you’re a mom, you have to watch this mom video. It’s priceless.

Hat tip to Karen Gedney for sending the link.