By Caroline Kealey
One of the things that often drives communicators crazy about their jobs is the Superhero Consultant syndrome. You’ve been advocating for months — maybe even years — in favour of a course of action your organization should take to step up its communications. You know it’s the right thing to do, and you’ve got research and consultation findings to bolster your case. But still you’ve been hitting a brick wall, time and time again. Then one day a consultant is hired, flying in wearing a fancy suit (and carrying a hefty per diem rate to match) and presto! The senior leadership magically sees the light, endorsing precisely the approach you’ve been urging all along.
Sound familiar?
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By Leo Valiquette
Quality writing, whether it is for journalistic, marketing or public relations purposes, is too often considered a commodity service. For those of us who have experience with the community newspaper business, where editorial content (to quote a colleague of mine) has often been viewed by publishers as “the shit that keeps the ads from bumping together,” this was painfully evident long before the advent of the Internet content mill.
The question is whether our present-day age of real-time, on-demand news and information is driving this to an extreme and leading many writers to, either accidentally or intentionally, break those tenets of ethical writing most often talked about in the context of journalism.
To be frank, some forms of content are a commodity and can be pumped out far more quickly than others. Nor are all writers created equal. I have worked with no shortage of wordsmiths who, despite the fact that this is their profession, still agonize for hours to produce something on a deadline that will still read much better if they are granted a second crack at it the next day.
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By Alexandra Reid
Getting noticed online today requires more effort than ever before, as many businesses are getting more skillful at producing content and sharing it in interesting ways to engage their audiences.
Research from Content Marketing Institute shows that content marketing spending is increasing, more tactics are being employed and marketers are getting more confident at how they use content to engage audiences online.
But that doesn’t mean most businesses are doing content marketing successfully. Content Marketing Institute also said that 90 percent of B2B marketers do some form of content marketing, whether they realize it or not. It then went on to list the most popular content marketing tactics — article posting, social media, blogs, eNewsletters, case studies, and in-person events.
Either those businesses don’t realize they are marketing when they share content through those channels or through their other less popular marketing activities, or they don’t identify those marketing activities as content marketing. Either way, it’s concerning.
But, like many statistics, this one doesn’t paint the full picture. I would like to know those details – what percentage of businesses are doing content marketing without realizing it, and, specifically, why is this the case?
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By Rob Woyzbun
You’ve spent hours to design what you thought was a perfect, logical, competitive, customer-focused, go-to-market marketing plan. Despite all that effort, the results are underwhelming, revenue nowhere near target, and members of your team are buffing their LinkedIn profiles. What’s happening?
Well, it could be a strategy issue or a problem with implementation, or both. Poor execution has been a weakness for many, especially in the tech and B2B sectors. The sad reality is that great implementation of an average strategy can often trump a poorly executed gold-medal plan. And while this all sounds like basic “project management” stuff, marketing implementation is arguably more complex and risky than for most business functions. Why? Because marketers often have responsibility for success without the ability to directly control all the downstream groups involved in the process!
In this post we’ll look at three ideas that can help bulletproof your marketing implementation.
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By Francis Moran
Imagine you want to go to New York. And New York is a five-hour drive away. You start out on a certain route but after two hours, you haven’t reached New York yet. So you conclude that the route you’re on isn’t the right one and you change routes. An hour later, you’re still not in New York, so you change routes again. After yet another hour, you’re still not in New York, so you change routes again. And then you run out of gas. So you abandon your trip to New York; indeed, you begin to wonder whether New York ever really existed or whether there was any way at all that you could get there from where you were.
Nobody in their right minds would try to get to New York this way. Or come to those conclusions about getting to New York if their efforts failed.
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How to get the media’s attention with your dignity and reputation intact
August 09, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
Last week I talked about how any media coverage can be good media coverage if it provides an opportunity to establish rapport with a journalist. Of course, this statement comes with the big fat caveat –it’s only true if said journalist is not on a witch hunt […]
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5 tips content marketers should take from journalists
August 08, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As companies increasingly opt to bypass the traditional press in favour of content marketing, journalists are being increasingly sought after to tell company stories, communicate with their audiences, and deliver information that is valuable to their marketplaces […]
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Don Drummond on productivity
August 07, 2012 by Denzil Doyle
Productivity is a topic that attracts a great deal of attention at both the federal and provincial levels of government in Canada. Most observers paint a grim picture of Canadian productivity across all sectors […]
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July roundup: What does it take to bring technology to market?
August 03, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As usual, we covered a lot of ground last month on our blog. We talked about social media, customer service, content marketing, trademarks for small businesses, neuromarketing, the trials of RIM, government funding for startups and what they have to get right […]
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Waterloo will not commit suttee on any RIM funeral pyre
August 02, 2012 by Francis Moran
An article in The Verge this week posited the not uncommon suggestion that as goes RIM, so go the fortunes of its home town, Waterloo. Now, I’ve been travelling down to Waterloo every couple of months for the past four or five years, and we’ve written a heck […]
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Any press is not always good press, but it may pay dividends down the road
August 01, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
Business and trade press journalists regularly find themselves in the position of needing owners or executives who are willing to talk about specific issues in their industries and how their businesses have dealt with them. For a PR practitioner it’s the classic dilemma […]
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A nice little story about the value of storytelling in content marketing
July 31, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
I’ve been volunteering at Big Brothers Big Sisters Ottawa for about a year now, running the child and youth mentoring organization’s online accounts and helping with its blog. As a non-profit, its budget for marketing activities is tight and so it relies greatly on word […]
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The pitch from a neuromarketing perspective
July 30, 2012 by Bob Bailly
In the July 13 post on Francis Moran and Associates blog’s Great Articles Roundup, this excerpt was referenced and it caught my eye: The startup pitch in the corporate context […]
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By Caroline Kealey
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The Future of A&R – Walabe : [...] http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/top-10-questions-every-strategic-communicator-should-ask... [...]
Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]