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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content marketing - social media

Last week I asked the question, “Should Social Media be a College Course” and received quite a number of mixed comments. In the end, I’ve realized that there is an absolute need for at least an interactive marketing course at the college level for marketing majors. New graduates need the tools to succeed online and they deserve to have learned at least the fundamentals.

So if a course is going to be taught what should it cover? How do you get past the fact that so much will change during the semester? I’ve outlined what I would tell the professor, but I want to know what you think too. Here are my thoughts on the subject.

1. Have Them Wonder Why Social Media Works

Why does social media marketing work? What makes it different from other marketing strategies? These are questions your students should be asking themselves.

Before you can effectively create a social media strategy, you need to understand why it works. Is it relationships? Is it the platforms? Or is it because of the large number of consumers in one area?

Once the students can identify the individual effects of social media on a marketing strategy, then they’ll be able to incorporate it into a larger campaign.

2. Ask Them to Monitor Their Social Media Usage

Tell your students to watch how they use social media. What do they do on Facebook? When are they using Twitter?

Make your students take notes on what they do online and why they share things. If they can better understand what they do, they’ll better understand how people use social media platforms.

That knowledge is what helps a strategist differentiate from a campaign that will spread versus one that no one will take part in.

Check out the 3 other things at Social Media Today, pretty sweet!

Professor Content says, well I am a professor and there are no social media experts – period!

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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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Junta42.com – Joe Pulizzi

I’m extremely thankful this year…for many things. Re: business, it’s hard to imagine just a few years ago I was working for “the man” and how this year I have been able to spread the word about content marketing all over the world.  It’s quite humbling actually.

Here’s what I’ll be doing more of over the next year to insure more good things will happen in 2010.

1. Share more expertise. This is the hardest part about content marketing.  Most businesses feel they need to protect their expertise. They believe that’s their competitive advantage. The truth is, the more expertise you share, the more business you will get.  Every time I give a speech, I get more speaking offers. Every time we blog about a key issue, the more of the right web traffic we get and the more people spread that content for us. What will you share next year?
2. More audio and video. Slideshare is fantastic, but more and more Junta42 readers have been asking for video or audio with our Slideshare presentations.  It’s not hard to do, we just have to do it.  We’re thinking if we add this component, more good will happen.
3. Continue to be human. This is a challenge for businesses, and a key to successful social media. How do you act online?  Like a person.  Throw out the corporate speak and be real.

Effective content marketing means more sharing, more giving and more marketing with meaning. When you help your customers on a consistent basis, you’ll get chosen (more than not) when they are ready to buy.

Now that’s something to be thankful about!

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Get over it your sh*# is not that good. And the whole wide world is one big scrape. To prove this just follow a big content marketer on Twitter.

The Content Pyramid – David Naylor & Paul C arpenter

I was thinking about the different types of content the other day and how you to organise your approach to it – in terms of both building content and acquiring links from that content. And now, I present to you the result of my deliberations: The Content Pyramid.

Content Marketing - Content Pyramid

THE ORIGINATORS

At the top of the content pyramid are the real ideas guys – people who have resources, time and the sheer smarts to come up with things that can change your perception of an issue. Not wishing to suck up to Dave, but he’s the kind of guy I mean. In a 60 word post he can put out an idea or observation that sets lightbulbs off over people’s heads.

THE COMMENTARIAT

At the second level of content are the people who follow the originators. Often they have more audience reach because they dedicate more of their time to honing their style or are attached to a big publication.

They’re still smart – because they not only understand what the originators are saying but can contextualise it for non-specialists. They can also see the implications and will often put together something that speculates on where an idea will end up.

The difference between these guys and the originators is probably like the relationship between a chef and a restaurant critic. The critic probably has more readers every week than the restaurant could sit in a year. This is where ‘word of mouth’ really starts.

Case in point: our original story about the Twitter hack got a fraction of the retweets that the rewrite on Mashable did over the first days as the story was breaking.

THE AGGREGATORS

The third tier are people with an interest in a subject but with no real insight of their own. The kind of people who retweet the aggregators or make a list of “10 Great Resources” from stuff they’ve read in the papers that week. You’re looking at the kind of content that is read just by a small circle of people.

I class my own blog in that kind of sphere – I could probably give you the names of 50% of my daily visitors and I don’t really write anything of consequence there. But! The people who come there have a laugh and remember it. There are a lot of these blogs out there, and they touch each other in unexpected ways. You might not get relevant links from a site like this, but the ripples can spread quite widely. These people are probably also susceptible to a little flattery or cash 

THE THIEVES

The bottom feeders of the content chain are those who outright steal from any of the points above. It could be a direct content scrape or a respouting of an opinion or fact without any real addition. The people who visit these sites are probably accidental, one-time only visitors.

WHERE DO YOU SIT?

Arguably, being at the top of the content pyramid is the best place of all. You’re the domain expert. People can’t talk about the subject without touching on your work or ideas and it is your content that goes out through the aggregators. But, the aggregators might be where the traffic and exposure really is to push down into the volume sectors.

As a general rule, very few of us sit at the top of the pyramid (that’s why it’s a pyramid, doofus). We should all aim for it when writing content – because from there your influence can spread through and define a whole market. Realistically, most markets are saturated and you’re swimming in an ocean of Same – who really needs another article on link building, ferchrissakes?

If that’s you, then you need to look for a longer term strategy. You need to have opinions and develop a writing style that engages an audience. You need to spread the word so far and wide that people will learn about ideas from you, even if it all proves is that you subscribe to the blog of someone much smarter. From that comes traffic… and links from lower down the chain… and ultimately authority: the holy grail.

Finally, if you’re looking at getting links from people, think about where they sit in the pyramid. If it’s a splog, move on. If it’s an aggregator you need to get in front of them. If it’s an originator, you probably need to sidle up to them at a bar the next time they’re speaking at a conference and ply them with booze.

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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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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