Traditional Marketing is Dead, content is king

I was invited to give a presentation yesterday here at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (#WPC13) (www.digitalwpc.com) taking place in Houston, Texas on the topic of ‘Developing a Content Marketing Strategy for your Business.’ For those who missed the series of Social 101 sessions over in the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) social hub today, there’s a full schedule on Wednesday and Thursday, during which I’ll be presenting twice more on other topics.

In my role as an evangelist, content marketing is a BIG part of my day to day job – and it has played a huge part in my company’s success and growth over the past 3 years. Without completely stealing the thunder from my presentation below, there are some key themes which you should remember as you think about building out your own content marketing strategy and building your personal or corporate brand:

1. Be consistent
   Its more than just blogging a lot, although volume of content is a key part of being consistent – its more about consistency in tone and message through each distribution method (your personal blog, your company blog, industry portals) and across your broader messaging strategy (how you talk about your products and services.
2. Be verbose
   Brevity of message is for Twitter, but in content marketing, its good to be chatty. That doesn’t mean you should drone on and on – there are definitely long topics that should be broken down into their fundamental arguments and examples – but you should not be afraid to tackle big problems and get all of your ideas down on paper (or on screen). But the idea is to demonstrate your knowledge, your expertise, not write more ad copy. Use your content to talk through your ideas from beginning to end.
3. Be strategic
   Which topics you cover within each of your distribution methods is a big part of building your content marketing strategy. For example, I might have an idea for an article based on a conference I just attended, and create something that closely aligns with my company’s products in a professional tone, then write a corresponding post for my personal blog where I get a bit more personal and share some specific anecdotes from that conference in a more casual tone, and then possibly write a longer feature article that takes a more neutral stance and professional tone, with industry data and counter points from analysts, for a mainstream online content portal. Three articles with related content, strategically written and with timed releases so that I can maximize my message across the audiences that I serve.

Here’s the presentation I gave at the Social 101 session yesterday, which provides some additional examples for building out your content marketing strategy:

I also published a free ebook a while back that provides some additional examples of how you can extend your content marketing strategy, and in the process build out your personal or corporate brands. I’ve been kicking around the idea of updating this ebook for some time….and its just been a time issue. Maybe later this summer.

What ideas are working for you? I’d love to hear your ideas and feedback.