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Content Marketing Needs Mobile Publishing Apps

12/05/2013 By Jayme Soulati

When you say and see content marketing touted all over the Interwebz, it’s more about blogging, right? But what about the other pieces of content so critical to attaining goals and objectives? The white paper is one of the most important documents a business can include in its content marketing strategy; yet, few engage with white papers?

Why?

The first reason there are fewer white papers is obvious – they are more challenging to write, right?

Secondly, if a business does not have a solid inbound marketing strategy to use white papers as a lead generator for sales, then companies merely rely on blogging.

Revisiting Inbound Marketing

As a digital marketer, the goal for inbound marketing is to feature content as the lure, if you will, to generate leads from external audiences which turn into conversions.
Think of a funnel when considering what inbound marketing looks like. At the top of the wide open funnel is a wide berth of content ideas e.g. 10 reasons why you need a certified plumber; 25 social media tips from an SEO consultant; 7 critical mobile apps to fuel your mobile marketing strategy in 2014, and more.

These pieces of content can be blog posts, lists, tip sheets and even broader white papers on related topics to these respective themes. They are offered to interested prospects via a call to action in a sidebar of a website on a website page and even more pertinent – on a specialized landing page.
Once the individual indicates they want to download the content, they are asked for their email via a form and the free content is made available.

Publishing Formats for Content

Because a white paper is lengthier than a page; they’re often about 2000 words, give or take 800, the immediate format consideration is a PDF. Think about PDFs a moment. This file format is ubiquitous, and everyone relies on it. However, is it the best file format for your content marketing strategy?

No, and here’s why…PDFs are one dimensional without hyperlinks and without the ability to convert leads, without SEO, and basically, they are DEAD!

Now think a moment about your company newsletter (yes, there are still b-to-b companies publishing newsletters). Typically, it’s posted in a news center as a PDF or sent as a PDF in an email marketing campaign, right?

New Mobile Ways To Publish Pieces of Content

The proliferation of mobile marketing is the biggest trend since sliced bread. I’m not kidding. There are data galore shoving businesses to responsive mobile marketing, and your company needs to get there, too.

The first step is to make your website mobile responsive. You want the pages and elements of your site to scale to any portable and mobile device. Just last weekend, I sat in the movie theater during the pre-movie junk surfing sites on my iPhone, posting to Twitter and resharing content plus commenting on blogs. Look around the movie theater next time and see if others are doing the same? Then, think about your company’s website and worry that it’s responsive for this mobile audience.

Secondly, explore mobile publishing platforms. I recently explored a web app that makes publishing live content, such as white papers, magazines and newsletters, a breeze. Check out this demo of Readz right here. What you’ll see is the ability to scroll pages, click on hyperlinks, enlarge images, and simulate reading a document page by page – from left to right (unlike a PDF that is up to down in a vertical orientation).

You may use the cool iPad apps like Flipboard or daily newspapers and magazines? These apps make the user experience way more intensely entertaining. It’s time for you to do the same with your mobile- and-inbound marketing strategy. Eliminate the dead PDF file format from your content marketing and put in a live publishing platform for all your documents; your audience will thank you.

{Disclaimer: Sponsored Post}

The Happy Friday Series: Suddenly Delightful Jamie

11/29/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Think about your online friends and how long you’ve known them. In 2009, when I was a Twitter noob, this woman with my same name and different spelling asked for people to vote her to the top of some contest. What did I know? I stepped up to help without a clue what I was doing, but I lent her support because she asked and it seemed to be a good cause.

Since then, Jamie Wallace and I have uncovered more similarities betwixt and between. She’s a good egg and one who shows her smarts in a variety of places. As communities go, she’s one to invite, befriend and love for life.

As Suddenly Jamie on Twitter (I never knew why she suddenly became Jamie – maybe she changed her name suddenly?) and via her blog, Suddenly Marketing https://suddenlymarketing.com, Jamie writes about stuff like this:

I help my clients craft standout brands, transform ideas and visions into profitable content, and create rave-worthy brand experiences. Part strategist, part writer, and part cheerleader, I love making marketing fun. I’m also a mom, an aspiring fiction writer, a prolific blogger, and a student of voice, trapeze, and horseback riding (not at the same time … though, that would be interesting …).

When she was invited to write for The Happy Friday Series, she did that with aplomb; her obvious life zest is apparent in the story when she asked whether life should be serious.

Here’s what’s cool about Jamie…she approaches life with appreciation, asking why all the way.

Look at this post she wrote about “delight.” It’s a word she says we don’t use often…see here:

Delightful is not a word we use very often. It seems, perhaps, slightly antiquated for our times – a little too naive, a little too simple.
Such a shame.
To me, delight is more than just pleasure or even joy. Delight embodies a more complex feeling that is layered with the sense of having been given a gift (as in when we say, “Delighted to meet you”) and a sense of surprise – of happily coming upon some unexpected goodness, beauty, or kindness.

But what is really delightful is this sentence Jamie wrote and today’s gift Jayme gave:

So, to be delighted is to be gently jolted out of your everyday existence by someone or something presenting you with an unexpected gift.

Thank you for writing for The Happy Friday Series, Jamie.

Love, Jayme.

How Twitter IPO Changes Its Focus

11/18/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Few people understand what happens when a company goes public. We watched how Facebook maneuvered an ever increasingly heated spotlight, and now Twitter is undergoing the same.

In this piece Nov. 11, 2013 in Advertising Age, “Twitter’s task: Getting new users to understand it,” it seems the biggest issue Twitter has with new users is its complexity.

To follow this line of thinking, go back to the very first tweet you posted. Perhaps you need to go back to the very first time you logged in and saw a blank screen with some stranger popping up to say hi. Were you as nervous as I and almost backed out?

There are still people who don’t engage on Twitter because they believe the common misnomer that it’s a bunch of people talking about what they eat and where they go to the movies. We in the know, know better, right?

Because Twitter is now publicly traded (NYSE: TWTR) with a valuation of more than $20 billion and a 73 percent “stock pop” (says Ad Age) on day one of trading, it has to think differently about how to behave:

Attract more of the masses (a major hurdle)
Onboarding new users and making them feel comfy out of the gate
Reduce consumer churn – the rate that new users drop off in a short period of time
Increase advertising dollars for marketers who want proof the users are there to click through and make a buy

Take a look at Twitter’s number of users in the U.S., says Advertising Age:

Q1 2013 – 48 million monthly active users

Q2 2013 – 49 million monthly active users

Q3 2013 – 53 million monthly active users

Facebook has three times the scale. At the end of Q2 2013, it boasted 179 million monthly active users

It’s like comparing apples to oranges, however, because look at the skill and understanding a Twitter peep has to communicate. When you read tweets from accounts trying to sell, they’re awkward. Engagement and relationship building are the keys to earning followers; Facebook is about existing relationships among friends you already know. Not so Twitter.

It’s because of Twitter that I have a new network of true and real friends I’ve met IRL, spoken with on the phone, engaged with on Skype, and hired into my business. Not so Facebook.

There are so many ways Twitter can be used to enhance knowledge of the world.

When there is a natural disaster like the ones in New Orleans, Haiti, the Philippines, New Zealand, and elsewhere, Twitter comes alive with tweets around the world providing updates about the crises and how peeps can help. Not so Facebook.

The hashtag is finally coming into its own as a way to follow conversations; its now in use by Facebook AND Google+. We owe that to Twitter as the first channel to adopt hashtags; I think I first began hashtagging #RockHot in August 2010, and all the threads of tweets featuring that phrase I created are documented. Pretty cool.

I digress…

What I’m hoping doesn’t happen with Twitter as it has with Facebook is the social channel’s intense need to put advertisers first and revenue above service. We who have been around since the early days know quite well the quirky and secretive nature of Twitter with a tribe mentality.

It’s too bad Twitter will change itself to appeal to the masses who don’t and won’t get it (although I’ve heard from a lot of moms that the kids are hitting Twitter in droves and foregoing Facebook). Groups of young boys (about freshmen age in high school) are forming Twitter accounts and buying followers to gain immediate traction.

Perhaps Twitter needs to look within among users who already prefer the channel over the others instead of trying at this late juncture to appeal to those who won’t get it to also thus appeal to marketers sinking advertising dollars into the channel.

Time will tell…

7 Selling Factors And Relationship Building (Babolat)

10/31/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Selling. Relationship building, and the deal.

What do you think is the most important when someone is trying to make the sale? The deal may be the lowest and best one; yet, there’s something more to earning the sale than just the numbers.

As a professional blogger and public relations professional of three decades, I am pitched every day by sales people trying to lure me in. The tools of my trade are expensive especially for any solo business, and I know I must make an investment in many of them in order to service my clients well and efficiently.

Each year at this time, it becomes a battle between the two largest media vendors and others wanting a piece of the action vying for my business. Each year I weigh the deal to determine the best approach for my clients. But, this year was different.

7 Selling Factors to Earn the Business

The Deal.

When you’re a solo business and every expense penny counts, the total of the expenditure matters. How much is the very first answer I want to hear.

Sales Team.

Sadly, one of the vendors has a revolving door of sales staff. They email and call me frequently, they fight over territory, and I never know who my sales rep is should I need to call. The trust in the infrastructure of an organization is absolutely akin to the stability of the sales team. On the other side of the street, I just heard from the same sales rep I had last year; this business is tough…having the same face and name selling me over two years says something.

Service.

How about the service side? Will they be there to support the customer? Will they be knowledgeable and will there also be videos or Q&A and live chat features to help me should I have an issue? I’m not one to call in for help; it’s a time suck. I want to find the answer myself or better yet, make the product usability intuitive.

Salesmanship.

The young woman with whom I spoke yesterday told me she wasn’t going to hard sell me because that wasn’t her style. I appreciate that. When someone slips me the slime, I run. When you’re authentic and genuine with me, that’s when I listen and exchange helpful selling tips in return.

The Product.

There’s no question you get what you pay for. Because I have used both these products extensively during the long tenure of my career, I’m familiar with the product and each has selling points while one has more failures, in my opinion. Usability, as mentioned above, needs to be intuitive. I don’t want to have to guess where to find something; that’s frustrating, annoying and a time suck.

Closing The Deal.

When someone tells me they are coming back to me as they need to speak with their boss about the features of the package I need and they don’t for more than four days, then I seriously consider what happened. Turns out illness put my sales woman on her back, and I fell through the cracks. Understood; yet the deadline for my deal to close is today and that means I’m in conversations with a variety of vendors to seal it.

Relationship Building.

I’ve saved the best for last. There are so many, many ways to build relationships to earn a sale. I’m going to tell you what impresses me the most.
1. Visit my blog and make a comment. There is content galore in this site, and archives from the last four years. There’s got to be a way to impress me.

2. Know who I am as a customer and professional. When you take a moment to read my bio or remark on something I shared or wrote on the Interwebz, that means you’re really getting to know me and my needs.

3. Acknowledge the fact the sales team is a revolving door, but you’re going to work hard to earn my trust in selling to me.

4. Instead of selling me, educate me and tell me how your product has improved, especially if I tell you I don’t care for it.

5. Engage with me on social media. Let me tell you a story about tennis racquets.

Babolat Tennis And Earning the Sale

Happy Halloweenie #Tennis! via soulati

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a tennis freak. In the fall and winter, when I can reclaim an evening as my own (kidlet has every night for her extracurriculars), I play about six hours a week. I’ve been demoing new racquets, and tweeting about my demos with Babolat.

My friend Brian Vickery plays extensively too, and his family of four are all Babolat users. I’ve been a Prince loyalist until I began my quest to find the best racquet.

I’ve now demoed about five or six Babolats, and I’m still not certain which one to invest in (tennis racquets average $200 each, and you need two of the same).

Yesterday, I tweeted Brian and mentioned I didn’t think Babolat was on Twitter as I had mentioned its name and it racquets by name a variety of times and crickets. Lo, I got several immediate tweets and a phone call from Babolat sales!! How freaking exciting is that??

Tickled, I tweeted back and made the phone call.What ensued was the most amazing conversation I’ve ever had with someone in sales who wasn’t selling; he was educating.

We talked about racquet stiffness and weighting, body wear and tear, and strings. We talked strings every which way from Sunday (don’t you love that expression?), and I was the happiest camper in the world because Babolat was treating me as if I was on the ATP circuit. As merely a 3.5/4.0 USTA player, I have a ways to go before I join the professionals and beat the crap out of them (heh). BUT, here’s the point…Daniel of Babolat didn’t treat me like a low life; he put me on the top of his pedestal as the most important tennis player in the world.

He built a relationship with me, he treated me respectfully, and guess what else he shared?

Brand Engagement On Twitter

Babolat had seen my tweets with Brian over time; they saw that I was only mentioning the brand in my posts and not addressing the tweets to Babolat.

The sales team wasn’t sure whether to intercede on the conversation; they didn’t want to interfere as it looked like we were not asking for help.

I assured Daniel of Babolat to absolutely toss out a tweet saying “Hey, we noticed your tweets about our racquets, is there anything we can do to help your decision?”

Having that kind of “we’re here to help” tweet from a trusted brand is what jazzes consumers. I’m not one to hit the forums or Facebook and sift through line after line of content that doesn’t concern me. If I want something, I will post it on Twitter and wait for the brand’s response.
In this case, I was tentative as a consumer thinking I was too much a small fry for Babolat’s attention, and Babolat the brand was tentative thinking they shouldn’t jump in with a “hey, we’re here” tweet.

Relationship Building Fuels Brand Loyalty

And, now, after that story? Where do you think my loyalty lies? I’m going to become a Babolat user for the first time. I’m going to invest in the Babolat Drive Max, a lighter weight racquet, RED (yay!), and get it weighted. Then I’m going to put more expensive softer strings on it to protect my arm and get the controlled power (at least that’s what I think Daniel told me). And, before I do all of that, I’m going to call Daniel or tweet him again because he invited me to do that whenever I wanted to. He gave me his cell phone and I programmed him into speed dial! (Just kidding, but that’s how he made me feel.)

Brand loyalty has so much more to do with product and service selection, and all the factors I listed above are critical; yet relationship building is by far the most. The Babolat story happened yesterday, and it jazzed my brand loyalty as a first-time customer for the long-term.

How about you, can you relate?

Hoop.la: An Online Community Platform For Your Social Hub

09/17/2013 By Jayme Soulati

Recently, my good friend, Rosemary O’Neill, President of Social Strata, was good enough to grant me an interview about the most #RockHot name for a company solution I know — Hoop.la. We originally met via Social Slam, my used-to-be-favorite spring fling that is now defunct. I love to give her grief about her crazy Twitter handle (@rhogroupee) and for that she’s now affectionately called RoHo. In all seriousness, her company’s latest community application is pretty cool, and we’re sharing here in a Q&A that’s sure to get your juices flowing, so grab a spittoon.

What is a Hoop.la? Do you have to sing that?
First of all Jayme, I love the way you say “Hoop.la!” Hoop.la is an online community application that integrates blog, forums, chat, calendar, and media/file uploads in an easy-to-use (and mobile-friendly) interface. It’s SaaS, so there’s no software to install, no plug-ins. Hoop.la was first released in 2010, and is currently supporting over 4,000 sites serving millions of page views every day.

Who would need this?
Well, we’ve got customers ranging from small non-profits using our free Hoop.la Spark plan to run their donor/volunteer communities all the way up to Pro Enterprise-level deployments for Rodale’s Runner’s World Magazine community. If you’re a business looking to create a social hub on your own website, and wanting to pull together your crazy array of social “outposts” (as Chris Brogan calls them), you might want to check out Hoop.la.

Do I have to give up my WordPress blog?
No. That’s the cool thing. Hoop.la is designed to be really flexible, so that you can turn off or on any of the modules (like blogging or chat) with the click of a button. We also offer import services, if you do decide to bring over your existing blog or forum content from another platform.

How can you fit Hoop.la in with the rest of your website?
You can easily make custom pages within Hoop.la that have any HTML you like. Also, there are built-in widgets that are embeddable on your existing site; so, for example, if you want to pop a widget that shows recent forum topics on your home page, you can do it with the click of a button. No geekery required. (However, if you’re feeling saucy, you can access the custom CSS to really tailor the look and feel.)

How is this better than just using a Facebook page?
Would you like to be earning SEO juice for yourself instead of Mark Zuckerberg? We definitely aren’t saying you don’t need Facebook; however, every business should have their own social “center of gravity” that’s under their direct control. With Hoop.la you own the data and you control the experience, period. We have lots of customers who are successfully cross-pollinating from their Facebook page to their Hoop.la site, making even more engagement opportunities.

Can I use it for private or internal communities too?
Definitely! Hoop.la is designed with really granular permissions, so you can keep the whole site public, or you can restrict certain features or forums, and you can even monetize certain activities with built-in premium memberships (no merchant account required). Long John Silver’s is using Hoop.la for its private, internal franchisee community.

Hoop.la is worth checking out, Jayme adds. Please do reach Roho aka Rosemary O’Neill at 206-283-5999 ext 106 for a demo.

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