It’s without a doubt the biggest mistake I see when it comes to any form of content marketing – people spend too much time blowing their own horns.  Whether through social media, blogging, bylined articles, email marketing or any other form of content, you can’t spend the vast majority of the time selling your self-proclaimed greatness.

Think about it – it’s no different than if you are at a networking event or a party.  Nobody wants to spend time cornered by the person who only talks about themself, everything they have been doing, and how wonderful they are.  Typically, the cornered person tries to run from that conversation as quickly as possible (I have a few well-tested escape tactics – email me if you need them).  Yet companies think nothing of sending sales focused email newsletters, blogging about how great their company is, and generally running down the path of self-promotion.

People often ask us to explain why they should invest time or dollars in content marketing, or say they want social media when they really want content marketing. The problem? They just don’t know what content marketing is.  My simple explanation is to ask this question: what would you do if you had the opportunity to be the keynote speaker at the best event in your industry? Wouldn’t that opportunity be great?  And wouldn’t you want to get up there and make a fantastic speech or presentation to that audience?  You certainly wouldn’t get up there and just talk about yourself for an hour, right?  Content marketing provides that same opportunity, but it is ongoing, not once a year, you don’t have to travel – you don’t even have to wear your best pressed suit and sweat too much.

As Mike Sweeney always says “educate, educate, educate” and it’s true. The best content marketing primarily involves sharing knowledge, helping people learn or understand something new, and only then can you write the occasional piece about your own company.  When done right, content marketing absolutely supports your sales efforts –but you can’t use it to make the hard sell or it falls flat on its face.  So stop blowing your own horn.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Want to post a whole bunch of great stuff about your company here?  Chime in with your comments below.

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As college students across the country graduate, seek jobs, or plan for the next academic year, I thought I would share the strategies I learned while an undergrad at Duke that have served me well in my career.

While this post strays from our normal digital marketing fare, the below tactics apply to anyone who needs to secure buy-in from a group of people, whether you’re a Chief Marketing Officer trying to sell the company on content marketing, an entry level employee with great ideas, or the president of the college climbing club who wants more members.

Every student group I was involved in faced two major challenges: how do we get new members, and how do we increase the participation of our current members? Replace “new members” with “new business,” and “current members” with “employees,” and you can boil those challenges down to the same marketing and leadership challenges most companies face.  Right Source Marketing, where I work now, specializes in solving these challenges for companies: in my experience, if you have solved problems for a college group, you can learn to solve them for companies.

Here are some ways to start:

1. Give out pizza.

On the quad: Offer free food at all club events, and advertise the food as much as you advertise the content of the event. Though college students live surrounded by a cornucopia of prepaid food, it seems as if the separation anxiety from Ma and Pa’s fridge makes the phrase “free pizza” just as compelling as “free beer,” though providing both might get you in trouble.

In the cube: The magnetic effect of “free pizza” is just as strong in the office environment. No matter what budget you’re working with, find money for pizza. And free beer might not get you in as much trouble here, especially for initiatives you’re pushing after hours.

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I was speaking with a few colleagues the other day about the different benefits of social media as a whole, and blogging in particular.  The folks in the room had varying levels of social media involvement, from no involvement at all to heavy involvement.  Each of us discussed what we hope to get out of social media, why we blog or might consider it, and how businesses can benefit from blogging.  The discussion went on for some time, covering the wide ranging benefits from SEO opportunities to more frequent customer touch points and everything in between.  After a while, it quieted down a bit and somebody asked me if they had missed anything on the list.

Skip the First Meeting

While our blog serves many purposes, one of them I hadn’t heard mentioned by the group was one of the things that I find most useful.  Having a well planned blog and social media presence, with what we hope is interesting and insightful content, allows us to Skip the First Meeting.

So what do I mean when I say Skip the First Meeting?  Unfortunately, despite how well you may try to vet things ahead of time, inevitably in our business you run into an opportunity that 5 minutes into that first meeting, after you’ve sniffed each other and gotten a bit more of a sense of your businesses –  you both know isn’t a fit.  You don’t think alike, you don’t value the same things, really whatever those components may be.  Of course generally by this time somebody has ordered food, or driven out of their way, or fired up a PowerPoint or laser lights show, or something else entirely, and it’s too late to do anything but spend the next 45-60 minutes or more there despite you each knowing this isn’t going to work out.

Now, we often head this meeting off at the pass.  We’ll send a contact or prospect a link to our blog ahead of time, and also encourage them to connect with and follow us on social networks, and ask them to read through these pieces ahead of time before scheduling that first get together.  By doing this, we make much more efficient use of their time and ours.  We try to convey the idea here that we want to be involved in strategy and planning and believe in taking a holistic view of marketing, and that shines through in our posts.

When we discover the poor fit, we each save ourselves the time of an unproductive meeting where we just won’t be a fit for each other (although sometimes we do miss those laser light shows).  And just as importantly, for those that could be a fit, we’ve fast forwarded over the glossy part of the first meeting and are digging right into the important and meaningful parts that are usually saved for a second meeting.

So while there are probably 100s of reasons to blog and to get involved in social media, if it works for your business you may want to try to Skip the First Meeting.

About the Author: Will Davis is Managing Partner of Right Source Marketing.  Don’t hesitate to drop Will a comment on this post.  If you liked this post, follow @willdavis on Twitter for more commentary like this.

It should come as no surprise to any business executive that marketing dollars are shifting to the web at breakneck speed.  To give you an idea of just how significant this shift is, Forrester forecasts that interactive marketing spending will reach $61.3 billion in 2012, from $18.4 billion in 2007.

Every organization needs to address interactive marketing.  There are no exceptions, not anymore.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re small or large.  Or whether you’re selling products or services.  Or whether you’re growing rapidly or flat lining.  You cannot ignore interactive marketing.

That’s the easy part.  Most organizations know that interactive marketing needs to play a role in strategic planning.

Here’s the unknown part, at least for businesspeople that aren’t involved in marketing on a regular basis.  The average organization fails in their first attempts to execute an effective interactive marketing strategy.  There are many reasons for this failure, but the most common one we see is a lack of interactive marketing expertise.  In particular, this lack of interactive marketing expertise manifests itself in the planning stages, which then trickles down and impacts individual tactics.

In order to help organizations build a comprehensive interactive marketing audit and interactive marketing plan, today we launched Interactive Shift, a program designed to identify the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities in your organization’s internet marketing strategy.

I don’t want to regurgitate all the information you can find on the Interactive Shift page, but I do want to touch on the concept of timing your interactive marketing audit and planning.  I could make an argument that a marketing audit should be conducted every month, quarter and year.   And you should absolutely revisit your interactive marketing plan annually, if not more frequently.  That being said, there are some situations that lend themselves to conducting your audit and planning process:

• You are considering overhauling your web presence.
• Current interactive marketing programs are underperforming.
• You’re trying to determine budget allocations for interactive marketing.
• Your competition appears to be ahead of you in the interactive marketing category.
• You’re in the midst of developing a strategic marketing plan.

Regardless of when or how you handle this process, make sure you embrace the interactive audit and planning process.  If done right, it will expose significant opportunities for improvement, and in some cases spur a significant shift in thinking about how you’ll market your organization overall.

So you’ve managed to create a marketing program that is generating leads.  Real, ready-to-be-qualified, hopefully big budget leads.  Fantastic.  What do you do next?

If you’re structured like a lot of organizations, that lead is entered into a CRM system, perhaps assigned to a sales or marketing representative, and the dance begins.  A small percentage of those leads will become hot, sales-ready, take-the-next-step type leads.   A larger percentage of those leads will become qualified but not ready to fully engage type leads.  An even larger percentage of those leads will not be ready to engage with anyone at all.  That could indicate a host of different things, but never assume that means the lead is unqualified.

All three categories – the hot lead, the warm lead, and the cold lead – require lead nurturing at this point, yet the average organization fails to nurture leads effectively.  Why?  Too many organizations still assume that their primary lead nurturing weapons are a salesperson and a phone call.

Let’s take a look at a 4-step lead nurturing plan, and briefly describe why each step is important and how you can begin to address each one.

1. Understand why lead nurturing is important.

It’s no secret that the average B2B buyer prefers to work with someone they perceive as a trusted advisor, as opposed to just a sales representative.  So how can your sales representative become that trusted advisor?  The trusted advisor is able to prove the following over time:

• That the advisor – and the company in general – is an expert in the field being considered.
• That the advisor – and the company in general – understands the problem or issue facing your company, and can help solve it.
• That the advisor – and the company in general – will be easy to work with.

You think all three of those things can be established in a single phone call?  No chance.  Those three components are generally proven out over time.  Sure, referral business may move quicker through this process, but they still need to check off all three stages.

2. Identify the tactics you can use for lead nurturing.

This is typically the area where sales/marketing organizations sell themselves short, and ultimately revert back to using phone calls and email as their primary lead nurturing tactics.  If you’ve read this blog previously, you know that content is king in marketing.  Here’s a partial list of all the different forms of content that can be used to nurture leads:

• Case studies
• Press releases
• Free trials
• Whitepapers
• Webinars
• E-Newsletters
• Printed newsletters
• Events
• Third-party articles
• Phone calls
• Emails
• Research reports
• Blog posts

The list could go on and on.  Make your own list.  You likely have some of these materials already, and some you’ll want to develop.  Next comes the easy part – use them, and use them without abandon.  If your content is well-developed, most prospects will appreciate you sending it.

3. Schedule your lead nurturing activity.

You understand why lead nurturing is important, and you’ve now identified the materials you have at your disposal.  What now?  Make a schedule for when and how you will touch each lead.  This doesn’t have to be complicated.  It may be as simple as the following:

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