In-bound Marketing and Content Marketing-Synonymous?

OK, so I am going to admit something that I may not normally admit. Why? I need your help. You see, I’m a bit confused. It started the other day when a colleague asked me, “What is the difference between content marketing and inbound marketing?” After a moment or two of pause, I simply said, great question, let me get back to you.

It was the first time that I really had considered the question and these two terms together. I hear them and see them used all the time. We even just hosted our Twitter #B2Bbookclub on Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media) with Dharmesh Shah. But I still felt unsure how to respond appropriately to the question. So I set out to find some data to clarify my understanding.

The first place I turned was Wikipedia. Here are the definitions as found on Wikipedia:

Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases. In contrast to traditional marketing methods that aim to increase sales or awareness through interruption techniques, content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action.

Inbound marketing and its opposite outbound marketing have various meanings depending on the context. One pair of definitions are:

Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and Seth Godin’s idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends that marketers “publish their way in” (via blogs etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy their way in” (via paid advertisements). Next best action marketing can also be applied.

Traditional marketing (outbound marketing) is where companies focus on finding customers by advertising. This sense is related to intrusion marketing and Godin’s term interruption marketing.

Both definitions specifically state that content marketing and inbound marketing are “in contrast” to traditional or outbound marketing methods. So on the surface when I looked at these two definitions, I was learning toward an answer of yes, they are synonyms.

Click here to link to the rest of the story at BtoBblogger>>>>click here.

Professor Content says, advertising, marketing, public relations are all implemented techniques and methodologies which get measured then adjusted leading to sales.

Is In-Bound marketing not a part of marketing which then leads to leads and finally to sales?

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Posted by Shannon Sweetser

The following is a guest post from Jack Napoli, who has been a member of the HubSpot community for over 3 years. With 31 years in High Tech and 26 years in Direct Sales, Customer Care & Sales Development, Jack has a lot of experience getting his messages through the clutter. He’s now a semi-retired entrepreneur and acronym enthusiast focused on Sales Education, Coaching, and Consulting. You can contact him at jack.napoli@cox.net.

As Kevin Kelly, internet pop icon and co-founder of Wired magazine said in the New Rules for the New Economy, “the only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.”

In this internet and media driven world we live in, we all have the same limitations when it comes to retaining information. Acronyms help your clients manage the abundance of information about you, your products, and services. They cut through the noise and communicate who you are and what you do in the most memorable fashion.

Use can use acronyms to:

•    sell to potential clients.
•    expand your footprint with existing customers.
•    attract investors.
•    educate sales & marketing people.
•    communicate with your executive teams.

I, like most people, find that retaining large amounts of information can be difficult. Information is easier to recall when written and spoken communications are grouped into nuggets of distinction. I’m an acronym lover and have been using acronyms for as long as I can remember. They are a learning tool that I’ve used throughout my schooling and my career. I swear, if not for acronyms, there would be no diplomas at any level. Now, I pass on the secret to creating lasting acronyms to you.

Create Remarkable Acronyms Using the 4 R’s

To become remarkable, I believe an acronym needs to have the characteristics of the 4 R’s:

Retain – Is your message simplified so your audience can retain it?
Recall – Can the audience recall your message in 2 minutes, 2 hours, 2 days, 2 weeks or 2 martinis later?
Repeat – Can they repeat it?
Research – If they cannot do the above, do they at least know what the acronym is so they can research why you are relevant in their world?

Give Your Acronym Meaning, Stickiness and Legs using SIMPLE

Here to link to the full article at HubSpot>>>>click

Professor Content says, Does anyone have a good spot remover? I’ve got this nasty spot on my Hub.

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Web 2.0 - Social Media

For Social Media to be strategic, there must be an integrated marketing plan in place that guides our efforts in Social Media so that time and money is not wasted.

Here are the facets of our Social Media Marketing Campaign services to ensure your business gets the optimum benefits:

Social Media Marketing Activation

A Social Media Campaign (SMC) begins with understanding your goals and choosing the strategic network of target distribution and delivery points that become your network infrastructure of social media solutions working together for your successful Internet presence.

No two solutions are the same because each one must target your ideal customer. Your business, your customers, your B2B network, your vendors, your public. We research and set your social media to be received by the most promising audiences.

Each audience influences the tools and resources to be selected to become your targeted social media network. The role of your Social Media Specialist (SMS) will be to analyze your business to strategically determine the best tools to support your SMC.

Social Media Marketing Orchestration

Someone must be the conductor of your social media orchestra – guiding it according to an integrated strategy. Think of your Social Media Campaign as an orchestra of different instruments:
• Blogs
• Web 2 friendy-building sites
• Micro blogs (Twitter)
• Distributors and Syndicators

Like a brass, wind and percussion section of an orchestra, your social media campaign will require management of a number of different “instruments” in your social media campaign (SMC). Your Social Media Specialist will be the conductor knows how to perfectly synchronize each player to produce the best-finished results.

Social Media Marketing Optimization

Your verbiage is the core content that people will read and searches will find. Thus, to optimize your copy for the best-finished results your SMS will skillfully write your copy from a marketing perspective to insure an optimal use of keywords and hyperlinks back to your main web site.

All keywords are not of equal value to you and your Social Media needs to focus first on the primary ones to have the largest positive effect.

Social Media Optimization is about taking advantage of the “share-ability” inherently built into Social Media networks to get your business’ products, services and brand “out there” for maximum effect. Covenant Designs’ Social Media Specialist (SMS) will establish trackback, ping, permalinks and other RSS feeds to insure maximum portability of every post.

Search Engine Placement

Armed with your rich, hyperlinked copy posted to your blog, backed by the full distribution through the blog-world, will insure higher ranking positioning on search results in Google and Yahoo. Our strategic Pay Per Click services (PPC) will further improve your business’ visibility and marketing ROI.

Social Media Positioning

Strategic timing and ad positioning in specific target markets with high local impact will insure your investment in a coordinated social media campaign will result in measurable results.

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By Kipp Bodnar from Social Media B2B dot com

If you are new to social media, or are someone who has been in the industry for a while, you are likely familiar with Mashable, the most popular blog dedicated to discussions about the social web. Jeff and I talk frequently about what makes Mashable so successful. Interestingly though, how they succeed has a lot of application on B2B content marketing.

I have decided to break down some of the strategies that make Mashable successful and show how they apply to B2B social media marketing. When a site has an audience of this size, they must be doing something right:

6 Strategies From Mashable For B2B Social Media Marketing

1. Headlines Drive Traffic And Sales – A quick scroll through the home page of Mashable shows you that they have mastered the art of simple yet attention grabbing headlines. This is a key component of their success because great headlines don’t just drive pageviews, they drive engagement and make people want to spread the content across the social web. Writing good headlines is one of the most important things B2B companies can do when publishing digital content. Good headlines make a possibly complex issue seem more interesting and more approachable.

2. Being First Is Important – The web almost always rewards someone for being “first.” Mashable has become a master of breaking stories before other news outlets. Am I telling your B2B organization to start breaking news? No. I am asking you to think about in what ways your organization can be “first” on the web.

Many B2B companies fail to realize that in niche industries where none of the players have begun publishing on the web, the first one that does gets a huge advantage. Google rewards those who talk about a keyword first by moving them up on the search engine results page. Being first in B2B is about establishing credibility and building a long-term, sustainable audience on the web.

Click here for the rest of the article.

Professor Content says,  first create a marketing plan, implement, manage, measure and finally adjust. This plan includes social media which is a part of marketing, social media is not a marketing plan. Here’s what the good old professor thinks, advertising is step one, which leads to marketing and then this leads finally to the sales process.

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By Howard Greenstein on 07/22/2009 20:26 from Social Media Today dot com

From the Start-Up Toolkit

I’ve been writing about having a small business website, in 8 Options to Quickly Build a Web Presence for your Startup, about using a blog to promote your business in Building Success By Blogging: An Architect’s Story and even about Smart Blogging Strategies. Today we’re going to explore the magic of a technology called RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS lets you publish content on your site, and have other people easily view it on many other sites.

While RSS is well known to many of my technical friends, it really can be a magic way to improve your marketing presence. All blogs create RSS feeds, which is why I often recommend a blog to customers.

Click through for more insight and information at Social Media Today dot com.

Professor Content say, RSS is Really Simple Syndication so syndicate till the cows come home.

Technorati Tags: advertising, brand optimization, branding, content, Content Marketing, creative services, custom publishing, marketing, PR, re-content, re-contenting, social media, web 2.0

A brand is a name or trademark connected with a product or producer.^[1] Brands have become increasingly important components of culture and the economy, now being described as “cultural accessories and personal philosophies”.^{[2][page needed]}

Concepts

Some people distinguish the psychological aspect of a brand from the experiential aspect. The experiential aspect consists of the sum of all points of contact with the brand and is known as the brand experience. The psychological aspect, sometimes referred to as the brand image, is a symbolic construct created within the minds of people and consists of all the information and expectations associated with a product or service.

People engaged in branding seek to develop or align the expectations behind the brand experience, creating the impression that a brand associated with a product or service has certain qualities or characteristics that make it special or unique. A brand is therefore one of the most valuable elements in an advertising theme, as it demonstrates what the brand owner is able to offer in the marketplace. The art of creating and maintaining a brand is called brand management. Orientation of the whole organisation towards its brand is called integrated marketing.

Careful brand management, supported by a cleverly crafted advertising campaign, can be highly successful in convincing consumers to pay remarkably high prices for products which are inherently extremely cheap to make. This concept, known as creating value, essentially consists of manipulating the projected image of the product so that the consumer sees the product as being worth the amount that the advertiser wants him/her to see, rather than a more logical valuation that comprises an aggregate of the cost of raw materials, plus the cost of manufacture, plus the cost of distribution. Modern value-creation branding-and-advertising campaigns are highly successful at inducing consumers to pay, for example, 50 dollars for a T-shirt that cost a mere 50 cents to make, or 5 dollars for a box of breakfast cereal that contains a few cents’ worth of wheat.

Brands should be seen as more than the difference between the actual cost of a product and its selling price – they represent the sum of all valuable qualities of a product to the consumer. There are many intangibles involved in business, intangibles left wholly from the income statement and balance sheet which determine how a business is perceived. The learned skill of a knowledge worker, the type of metal working, the type of stitch: all may be without an ‘accounting cost’ but for those who truly know the product, for it is these people the company should wish to find and keep, the difference is incomparable. Failing to recognize these assets that a business, any business, can create and maintain will set an enterprise at a serious disadvantage.

A brand which is widely known in the marketplace acquires brand recognition. When brand recognition builds up to a point where a brand enjoys a critical mass of positive sentiment in the marketplace, it is said to have achieved brand franchise. One goal in brand recognition is the identification of a brand without the name of the company present. For example, Disney has been successful at branding with their particular script font (originally created for Walt Disney’s “signature” logo), which it used in the logo for go.com.

Consumers may look on branding as an important value added aspect of products or services, as it often serves to denote a certain attractive quality or characteristic (see also brand promise). From the perspective of brand owners, branded products or services also command higher prices. Where two products resemble each other, but one of the products has no associated branding (such as a generic, store-branded product), people may often select the more expensive branded product on the basis of the quality of the brand or the reputation of the brand owner.

[edit]Brand name

The brand name is quite often used interchangeably within “brand”, although it is more correctly used to specifically denote written or spoken linguistic elements of any product. In this context a “brand name” constitutes a type of trademark, if the brand name exclusively identifies the brand owner as the commercial source of products or services. A brand owner may seek to protect proprietary rights in relation to a brand name through trademark registration. Advertising spokespersons have also become part of some brands, for example: Mr. Whipple of Charmin toilet tissue and Tony the Tiger of Kellogg’s.

Brand names will fall into one of three spectrums of use – Descriptive, Associative or Freestanding.

Descriptive brand names assist in describing the distinguishable selling point(s) of the product to the customer (eg Snap, Crackle and Pop or Bitter Lemon).

Associative brand names provide the customer with an associated word for what the product promises to do or be (e.g. Walkman, Sensodyne or Natrel)

Finally, Freestanding brand names have no links or ties to either descriptions or associations of use. (eg Mars Bar or Pantene)

The act of associating a product or service with a brand has become part of pop culture. Most products have some kind of brand identity, from common table salt todesigner jeans. A brandnomer is a brand name that has colloquially become a generic term for a product or service, such as Band-Aid or Kleenex, which are often used to describe any kind of adhesive bandage or any kind of facial tissue respectively.

[edit]Brand identity

A product identity, or brand image are typically the attributes one associates with a brand, how the brand owner wants the consumer to perceive the brand – and by extension the branded company, organization, product or service. The brand owner will seek to bridge the gap between the brand image and the brand identity.^[3]Effective brand names build a connection between the brand personality as it is perceived by the target audience and the actual product/service. The brand name should be conceptually on target with the product/service (what the company stands for). Furthermore, the brand name should be on target with the branddemographic.^[4] Typically, sustainable brand names are easy to remember, transcend trends and have positive connotations. Brand identity is fundamental to consumer recognition and symbolizes the brand’s differentiation from competitors.

Brand identity is what the owner wants to communicate to its potential consumers. However, over time, a products brand identity may acquire (evolve), gaining new attributes from consumer perspective but not necessarily from the marketing communications an owner percolates to targeted consumers. Therefore, brand associations become handy to check the consumer’s perception of the brand.^[5]

Brand identity needs to focus on authentic qualities – real characteristics of the value and brand promise being provided and sustained by organisational and/or production characteristics^[6][7].

Technorati Tags: brand, brand optimization, branding, re-brand, re-branding