By Linda Forrest
There’s an art to successfully pitching and writing effective contributed articles as part of a content marketing strategy for your business-to-business technology company. Why should this tactic be considered as a component of your marketing plan? There are many benefits that support the creation and placement of bylined articles, as outlined in a post on the Idea Marketers blog espousing their virtues:
By Francis Moran
Everywhere I turn these days, it seems that content marketing is being touted as the latest must-do for business-to-business technology marketers. And there seems to be considerable angst over how to do it properly.
“Content marketing is a fairly new concept that many marketers are struggling to figure out,” said a post yesterday on business2community.com. In the post, author Rachel Foster reported on a recent survey of LinkedIn’s B2B Technology Marketer’s Group that asked, “Can you use one word to describe the biggest challenge facing B2B marketing today?” A word cloud of the more than 1,000 comments so far clearly shows ROI to be the dominant concern, followed very closely by content.
In a similar vein, in a round-up earlier this month of the biggest B2B marketing disruptions of 2011, Michael Brenner of B2B Marketing Insider said, “People have been talking about content marketing for at least a couple of years. But in 2011, it really seemed to hit its stride.”
I could cite several additional examples, but I think you get my point. According to a large swath of the B2B braintrust out there, content marketing is the greatest new thing, and we’d better all get aboard.
This week marked the one-year anniversary of our new blog. We thank you for being with us and participating in our conversations, which covered a whole host of technology marketing issues.
Last month, we offered new counsel for startups from startup founders themselves. Screenreach, Host Analytics, CommentAir, Genevolve and NanoScale all weighed in on the specific issues that all entrepreneurs should be aware of, including the importance of strong teams, ways to overcome the status quo, how to ensure your product meets a specific market demand, attracting a flagship customer, and how to bring to market a compelling product that is protected by a rigorous intellectual property strategy.
We also explored the benefits that could come from industry and academia working together, what an IP coordinator should know and tribes in a techno world. Of course, this list just scrapes the surface. Read ahead for more.
January 3: When selling yourself as faster and cheaper is no longer enough: Part 2 by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
January 10: Putting your assumptions to the test by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
January 18: Wanted: Partners willing to take a leap of faith by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
January 23: What an IP coordinator should know: Are we getting value for our money? by David French
January 25: Dealing with the devilish details by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
January 30: Preparing for a major offensive by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
January 31: You really can achieve great things when industry, academia work together by Jason Flick
And on a related note…
By Francis Moran
One of my favourite personal-development aphorisms is the phrase, “Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” On Wednesday, at an event organised by TEC Canada, a peer-to-peer mentoring program for business leaders of which I’ve been a member for more than five years, noted author and thinker Dr. Chris Luebkeman took it one step further.
“Change is constant. The future is fiction. Participation is what shapes our world,” he told 175 CEOs and other business people gathered for the event. “If you’re not participating in writing the story of tomorrow, you’re going to live in a story that someone else wrote.”
By Alexandra Reid
Whether or not blog comments are valuable has been debated for a long time in the blogosphere, but recently it seems more people are standing even firmer on their chosen side of the debate.
In a recent article by GigaOm, blogger Mathew Ingram brought up the comment debate once again by calling attention to the ongoing battle between TechCrunch writer-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler and VC Fred Wilson. Siegler “doesn’t have comments on his blog and has written several posts defending his decision, saying they are 99-percent bile and a waste of his time,” writes Ingram. While Wilson says “Siegler is missing a lot by not allowing comments.”
Ingram goes on to list some of the prominent individuals who have decided to turn off blog comments for various reasons, including Matt Gemmell and Seth Godin.
