Tag Archives: B2B

Humanizing Content Marketing

humanizing content marketing, content, marketing, people, numbers

The numbers matter, but people matter much more.

Today I visited a local marketing firm, to speak with the CEO about collaborating on a project. When I walked in the front door, a beautiful mid-size dog walked quietly from the back into the reception area to greet me. She was followed by a larger but equally quiet and friendly male dog. I crouched down to meet them both.

Later, as I was considering what might be the topic of my new blog article, I thought of the dogs. The CEO told me they were rescues that she received after promising that they would not be left alone at home, even together, each day as she and her husband went to work. Now, they are a fixture at her office.

Being a content marketer, this is an interesting tidbit that I would definitely want to tell her clients and potential clients. I know a lot of dog lovers who would appreciate the value of doing business with someone who has proven empathy towards animals. Continue reading

The LinkedIn Invitation Mistake

linkedin, invitation, social media, connection, contact, media, LinkedIn, professional, website, work, career

Write something personal and show that you care.

Do I know you?

That’s my first question when I check my LinkedIn Invitations tab, to see who’s trying to connect with me.

Typically, it would be someone from my professional past, long before LinkedIn existed. It could be a friend. It might also be someone I’ve recently met at a networking event.

Far too often it’s someone I’ve never met or heard of. I don’t know why they want to connect with me because they don’t tell me. They use the LinkedIn invitation template, which says “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.” They could have replaced that with up to 300 characters of text that actually means something to me. Continue reading

Flipping The Switch To Content Marketing

content marketing, journalism, sales,  promotions, advertising, B2B, B2C

Content Marketing is about as complicated as digital journalism.

What does an experienced digital journalist and trained fiction writer have to offer to companies for the purpose of content marketing? Plenty. The tools and experience are already in place. He/she just flips a mental switch and continues doing the same things in a different way.

One quick visit to Wikipedia tells us that content marketing “is any marketing that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire and retain customers.”

The two words that I hone in on, naturally, are “media” and “content,” because I have spent all my working years creating and producing content for media. My area of specific expertise is digital media. Lucky for me, digital media is the ‘here and now’ and the foreseeable future for media. By the way, in my world digital media also includes social media.

So, the question is: what specifically am I able to offer companies that are in search of someone with writing and content development abilities? People generally abhor being sold to and much prefer being told stories and presented with useful information. I offer a long history of successfully doing these two things. Continue reading