Tell your readers what they want to know, and do it fast. Here’s how Motown did it. “Now, if you were hungry and had only one dollar, would you buy this record or a hot dog?” In the early days of Motown Records, Berry Gordy Jr. would pose this question to his employees in their [...]
“Find your voice,” say the top bloggers. Some businesses don’t need to find it; it’s the only one they have, as in this example. Like most newspapers, the U-T San Diego is changing fast. The paper-based press has to move fast to keep up with the news cycle, and even faster to stay in business. [...]
Elevator speeches, About Us pages, press release boilerplate and LinkedIn profiles are your chance to describe what you do in one sentence. Can you pull that off? Quick – What does your company do? Did it take you more than one sentence to answer that question? It probably did. Now suppose you were an entrepreneur [...]
Some marketing teams let others in the organization run their own content projects. Here are three tips to keep them from getting out of hand. If your organization is large enough to have a Web content manager or a content editor, you’re probably moving a lot of copy around. Maybe your content policy allows people [...]
Writing a contributed article, or byline: easy. Getting it to look in print the way you intended: not so easy. A few tips for marketing managers getting from A to Z. It’s like a bucket brigade, really – the path between the marketing communications writer and the finally posted content. The bucket starts out full, [...]
Low-brow email addressees need not apply? What’s up with that? Some content owners have started getting fussy about the addresses their prospects give. My colleague, Merle Tenney, announced his upcoming presentation in a webinar some weeks back. It was sponsored by a content quality software company I’ll call Katzenjammer, just because I’ve been itching to [...]
What do you use to prepare your marketing communications writers for a project? A creative brief? A phone call? Put them on your mailing lists and throw everything at them. If your writers were groupies – your groupies – would you like them less? If they’re delivering good content on time, then their groupie-hood should [...]
Embedding a “Retweet This” inside a PDF is a neat hack. Recent Twitter changes have affected it, though – yet again. If your Old Twitter retweet links aren’t working, here’s a solution. Have you embedded “Retweet This” in your PDFs? Perhaps you’d better go back and make sure that they’re still working. I’ve had to. [...]
Don’t you get tired of fretting about content marketing? Don’t you envy businesses that can somehow do without it? I’ve spent a decade or more in content marketing, helping clients refine and tell their story with case studies, white papers, newsletter articles and Web content. I’ve been helping them demonstrate that they understand their customers’ [...]
Your readers need to see themselves in the marketing content you publish. Otherwise, you’re a marketing manager just writing to hear yourself shout. You know those year-end letters you receive around the holidays from your friends and family members? The ones filled with all the valuable content and important details that pop into your Uncle [...]
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