“She was a bold-looking girl of about twenty-seven, with thick dark hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements…” You might view ‘buyer personas’ a bit like this description of Julia from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four – vaguely interesting, somewhat entertaining, but with no real relevance to the serious business of content marketing. There’s no […]
Content that connects: the proper use of buyer personas Read More »
The company CEO sighed and looked up at the blank white ceiling. I half expected to see a metal ceiling fan there, ponderously pushing air around, whup, whup, whup… but there was none. “I don’t know about content marketing, or even marketing in general,” he says at last, speaking slowly and twisting his lips to
The rising of content marketing as a viable promotional strategy may be just the lifeline that the struggling media industry, journalists and digital advertising agencies in New Zealand need, provided they can put aside their adherence to outdated roles and philosophies. In its purest form, content marketing is brand journalism – the creation of content
The content tussle between PR & digital – who will win? Read More »
I bought my 5-year-old daughter a pink piggybank because I wanted her to learn how to save. Then she discovered it made a splendid noise, and turned it into a nerve shredding shaker… A good thing gone bad? Isn’t it interesting, how often something is made, invented, created, intended for a particular purpose, only to have
Synthetic highs: a trope for corrupt content marketing? Read More »
It’s not how we say it, but what we say… This is a blog about something to say, about truth, and about how it feels when you ‘discover’ something sooo cool, only to realise too late that everybody has been there and done that. Quite a few times in fact… I was sitting in the
I told this story recently at the New Zealand Content Marketing Conference #2014CMC, and it was well received – probably the most interesting part of my presentation was about how I managed to embarrass myself, again! It’s a story about how cool customer incentives and promotions that everybody will love, aren’t necessarily – it fact
What hair and hockey taught me about conversions Read More »
A key message is public relations tool defined as: “A short, concise and memorable sentence used to convey an important message during an interview”. Key messages however have far broader application in a marketing context. Most organisations have several buyer personas with different needs and problems, multiple products, services, benefits and a list of different
Consider using key messages in your content marketing Read More »
Could journalists be the new marketing consultants of tomorrow? It’s already happening and the discipline even has a name. It’s called brand journalism. For years I used my journalism skills to help clients with their sales and marketing (over and above simple copywriting), but I considered myself relatively unique. Not anymore. I always thought it
Content marketing is not article marketing – it’s not writing a bunch of articles, sometimes of dubious quality, and loading them chockfull of keywords before publishing them on free sites in as many places as possible in order to build links. If an SEO (search engine optimisation) company says they do content marketing, think again