First: A Career Move

The cat’s out of the bag. I am leaving my current employer and will be joining Vaughan Premier, parent of Lights for All Occasions and several other e-commerce sites, as Marketing Manager in just over a week’s time.

While I’m sad to trade a 1.5 mile bike/walk commute for a thirty-mile drive one, I am looking forward to spending my time focusing on strategic marketing initiatives and heading up an in-house marketing team. Things I won’t miss: time entries and sorting through 100+ emails per day.

What will I be doing?

Big picture marketing strategy. However, one area I am truly excited to focus my efforts is developing and implementing integrated content marketing strategies. And, to throw another buzz word in the mix, working with the CFO (who’s an analytics guru) to use big data to target these strategies.

Earlier in the week, iMediaConnection posted an article about social media and online marketing trends for 2014.

The first one, content marketing, caught my attention:

…top B2B content marketing strategies are articles on a company’s website, social media, e-newsletters, case studies, videos and articles on other websites. Marketing to the masses is becoming passé – it’s more effective to produce engaging content designed for specific audiences.

I must say, I’m a bit passionate about content marketing. That’s to say I’m a bit passionate about CREATING strategic, targeted content with a purpose: achieving an end goal, something qualitative or quantitative, that impacts the bottom line for a business.

This is an area I am sure will dominate my time at Vaughan. Blog posts, e-mail marketing, YouTube videos, social media. Maybe even some blogger outreach. And I can’t wait to join the team and get started.

On to 2014 and Content Marketing

Jayson DeMers, SEO and online marketing guru and Forbes contributor, is the author of Forbes article “The Top 7 Online Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2014”.

In at number one, he notes “Content Marketing Will be Bigger Than Ever.”

Content marketing is a great way to demonstrate expertise in a field, relay knowledge about a subject, develop an audience and/or fan-base, and spread the word about your company. This is achieved through strategically generated and targeted content development.

Alright, that sounds a lot more technical and difficult than it should.

Think of it as crafting and spreading a core message across many channels. Essentially, it’s integrated marketing and communication, focused on the online world.

Let’s use a real world example. Say your goal is to increase sales of a group of products (in this case we’ll call them “Halloween Units”) by x percent this year. What do you do? Something like this:

Website Content & Blog Posts

Create a blog post (or posts) highlighting the product. This could be in the form of a list of hot-selling Halloween Units, an instructional post on how Halloween Units can make the day special for family, or something else that’s catchy, targeted, and interesting to the target audience. Above all, make the content useful and engaging to the target audience.

Video

Film videos showing off Halloween Units and post them to YouTube. Again, the strategy is in the idea behind the videos: make them interesting, make them funny, and just as important as the content… use appropriate keywords and titles! If you’re new to this arena, making videos for videos sake may be alright to get your feet wet. But you’ll want to quickly move on to making strategic, useful videos that people will actually want to watch, and better yet share!

Images

Take a few eye-catching photos, post ’em on Instagram and pin ’em on Pinterest. Number three on DeMers list is “Image-Centric Content Will Rule.” This is a no-brainer as photos have dominated social media for well over a year now. It’s what made Pinterest huge and led Facebook to purchase Instagram. Use striking photography to your advantage. And, again, title and tag it appropriately!

Blogger Outreach

Reach out to bloggers that may be interested in reviewing one of the products. Thanks to FensePost, I am on the receiving end of blogger outreach. Bloggers love free things; it’s one reason we blog. And getting through to the right blogger can help grow your audience by reaching theirs. This one is a bit trickier as it’s more a publicity/PR role, and therefore must be managed as such.

Social Media

Share all of the above across your other social media presences. That’s what integrated marketing is all about: a consistent message dispersed across multiple communication channels. If you’re already in multiple areas, why not take advantage of it!? And, of course, the opportunities extend beyond sharing from contests and coupons to strategically developed themed posts.

You’ll want to develop a social media calendar to manage all of this (that’s a post for another day).

For now, the above can act as a launching point to get your creative content juices flowing.