Content Marketing with Promotional Products

For years, the promotional products industry experienced double-digit growth. Marketers poured money into branded stress balls, notepads, pens and so on. They put their logo on anything they could, the theory being that people would hang onto the product and it would raise awareness of their brand.

It became such a booming industry that more people started making and selling promotional products. Margins on pens might run as high as 50 to 100 percent depending on who you sold to. The industry became saturated with manufacturers and salespeople who saw they could make a quick buck putting logos on promotional products without offering expertise.

So with more people selling these products, the quality of expertise has suffered. Too many of them take orders instead of consulting with clients about marketing goals.

Content marketing is necessarily a consultative business. You can’t take orders for content like you would for pens or some other commodity product. The promotional products industry needs more consultants who can provide content marketing expertise.

Promotional products are just another platform for message delivery. Most marketers put their company’s logo on a notepad and consider the job done. They could be using promotional products to provide valuable and relevant information.

In another post, I’ll list some examples of ways that content can be incorporated effectively into promotional products. In the meantime, here’s an article that does it for me:

http://printsolutionsmag.com/issues/august09/10.cfm.

Filed under: Content Delivery, Content Marketing, Content Development, Content Marketing, On Promotional Products

Content Marketing on a Truck

Here’s an illustration why it’s not the platform that matters, but the content itself. The side of a truck is as good a platform as a newsletter, but the content still needs to be useful, entertaining and relevant.

Filed under: Content Delivery, Content Marketing, Content Development, Content Marketing

Writing a Book Doesn’t Make You an Expert

Books are a powerful type of content vehicle. They convey heft and weight, both physically (when they’re printed) and psychologically. That’s why so many marketing gurus recommend publishing a book as a way to brand yourself as an expert.

It’s a great idea…if you actually are an expert. The challenge with writing and publishing books is that the content between the covers still matters. As with every form of content delivery, books have become less and less expensive to produce. It’s the content that determines whether your book will stand out from the rest.

If you want to know whether or not you should publish a book, consider this article by Ron Pramschufer. I’m a big fan of his newsletter. It has been a long-times source of quality information about publishing trends. So while you’re at it it, sign up for the newsletter as well.

Filed under: Content Delivery, Content Products, On Book Publishing

Marketing with YouTube Videos

Videos—especially those uploaded to YouTube—can be powerful marketing vehicles, but they’re still only as effective as the content they deliver. Before you decide to use videos as marketing vehicles, determine who’s going to develop the content. Do you have in-house staff with experience writing, filming and editing video? Do they need it?

Many publishing organizations now purchase Flip cameras for staff and have them record interviews and otherwise develop content. It seems like an inexpensive way to create video content, but a little expertise can go a long way toward making your videos more effective. And that expertise doesn’t have to cost a lot more.

To illustrate my point, compare the following videos. First, a disclaimer: These videos were not solicited, sponsored or endorsed by Turkey Hill. My brother and I made “Man Loves His Turkey Hill Iced Tea” as an act of love and slightly obsessive fandom and not as part of Sway Engine.

I hope the differences are obvious. Ours has a narrative structure with varied cinematography. It was filmed and cut by a trained, skilled editor (my bro). It has a purpose and an audience in mind. Is it perfect? No, but it also didn’t take long to make, given the difference in quality.

Imagine if your organization wanted a similar video. Our relatively quick project took less than 36 hours total to write, film, produce and upload. With basically no marketing, at least 300 people have watched it already in the last three weeks.

For those of you to whom ROI matters, how much is this worth paying for? Let’s say that instead of 300 people, you’re going to reach 10,000 people. When you consider that this is the kind of content that will last forever, how much is a good investment for the life of the project?

My point is, a little expertise goes a long way, and eventually organizations that engage in content marketing will need that expertise to maintain a competitive edge. And not just to produce videos.

Filed under: Content Delivery, Content Development, Content Marketing, Content Development, On Video, Viral Marketing

Priorities Make Content Relevant

I went to lunch yesterday with a bunch of industry folk who are on Capitol Hill to lobby for the transportation bill, which may or may not go anywhere this year. They had a lunch speaker from a trade association who presented them with an overview of what’s in the transportation bill, its current status on the Hill, what work still needs to be done and the obstacles facing its passage.

All fine and good, but the audience wasn’t interested in three-quarters of the speech. This became obvious during the Q&A session afterwards, when attendees asked a lot of questions that the presentation didn’t cover.

This isn’t a post about legislation or lobbying. It’s a post about programming and content delivery. The lesson here is broad content only appeals to broad audiences. As soon as you start to target narrower segments of your audience, the content needs revision. From a reporter’s point of view, what this lunch presentation needed was a new lede. The overall content was valuable and interesting, but its relevance got lost in the way it was presented as a broad overview, in which every piece of information (every statistic, every policy recommendation, every obstacle) was treated as equal.

A teacher of mine used to say, “You have to have things one way before you can have them two ways.” In other words, content is always improved with prioritization. What is the most important fact or the most important takeaway? If you are planning a presentation or facilitating one, you can improve the relevancy of your speech by asking a few questions ahead of time:

1. What does this audience expect to take away from this presentation?
2. What do they already know about this topic?
3. What are the two or three things they want to know about this topic?
4. Is there anything specifically I should not talk about during this presentation?

Filed under: Content Delivery, Content Development, On Live Presentations