Drop the Campaign! The Necessary Shift in Marketers’ Mentality

The price of advertising is constantly growing with the globalization of the markets and with internet advertising. The cost for a TV ad can break the bank account of a smaller business. Internet advertising rates are calculated per 1,000 viewers, to show how many eyeballs they need just to calculate the unit cost.

On the other hand, content marketing is perceived to be less expensive, but not for the right reasons. Business owners expect to pay pennies on originally produced content. However, for a quality piece of material there is no way around it, you need to pay for its value.

However, the reason why content marketing is overall cheaper than traditional advertising lays in the return you get for these two types of investment. Not in the production cost.

The return on investment (ROI) of an advertorial material can only be measured once, at the end of the campaign timeframe. There is no way around it. The success is measured based on the number of prospects that were exposed to it, for that limited period of time. When the campaign is over and off the public eye, there is no extra cent a business can pull from it.

On the other hand, the ROI of a quality material published on an online platform can be measured again and again. Since the exposure of the material is continuous, the ROI measuring is ongoing as well.

That is the main difference between the advertising and the content marketing mentality.

Operating with the advertising mentality, always starting from zero with yet another ad campaign, you cannot build on previous efforts. You can only hope that prospects remember your old campaigns and their awareness is raised with viewing a new commercial. But you can only hope that.

Neither can you reuse old ideas or ads. Just imagine reusing last year’s Easter commercial, just to save costs, or because you didn’t get a satisfactory ROI on it. That’s unheard of, and would hurt your brand’s image.

Knowing these facts, the content marketing mentality should be a viable alternative for any marketer or business owner.

The materials you create don’t have an expiration date, like an ad. Your work is there to stay and be read over and over by any new prospect coming to your page. Your articles and reports are as useful for a prospect today as they will be for another one next month. The condition, of course, being that you publish quality materials that are of real help.

On top of that, if you have a well-crafted editorial plan for the materials you publish, you will actually build upon past materials. The articles will add up in a structured way, almost like the chapters of a book. Only that you publish every finished chapter, not waiting until the book is complete. And we all know how many generations can read a good book.

The ROI you measure again and again becomes that much higher with time, bringing you more prospects on your website, eager to consume your already created materials.

Presenting the two approaches in a mirrored way, it becomes quite clear for any marketer that they should choose the path that brings higher ROI.

However, I believe the biggest challenge for today’s marketers is not to understand the numbers, but to succeed in shifting their mentality. To drop the campaign approach to marketing and understand that it is an ongoing process. To stop chasing for the quick profit and start aiming for the long run gain. In doing so they would not only get a better ROI for their efforts, but also bring their business to higher levels.

I want to know your opinion on this. Are you convinced by the content marketing mentality or you still believe campaigns are the best way to get new customers?

Images source: FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Pull your Prospects: Content Curation to Match your Business Goals

In the first article of this 2-part series, I debated on how badly executed content curation can  be a waste of your and your readers’ time, and advocated for the purposed content curation that brings an added value to your reader. The content curation tactic will help you offer more diverse materials to satisfy the shoppers’ informational needs at the various stages of the buying cycle.

Today’s article, continues with a look at the value content curation brings to your ultimate business goal, which is to acquire more clients. Keep in mind though, that content curation, just like any other content marketing tactic, has an indirect role, as you can never expect a collection of informational material to directly yield a sale.

Pull your Readers

Prospects come to your webpage and expect to find useful information they need in their quest to shop for the most suitable product or service. And at various stages, they are looking for different types of materials, from the more generic, to more specific, practical and even crowd-sourced. 

The direct business goal of content curation is to offer prospecting readers the information they are looking for and answer their questions, thus pulling them through the sales funnel to the next stage.

With the help of

Are You Wasting Your Readers’ Time with Curated Content?

As a part of your digital marketing strategy, content curation can be an option, in order to diversify your content offering.

No doubt, content curation, done right, can keep your prospects and customers on your platform, while you actually chat about other webs’ interesting materials. However, I believe there is no added value in simply republishing an article you found interesting.

It’s almost like stealing and spamming combined.

You need to bring more to the materials you are citing, amplifying their message within a context that suits your business. Your customers need to feel like they got something more out of your curation process than by simply reading the original piece.

The Popular View on Content Curation

Always producing fresh content can be difficult and expensive for any business, so you may turn to content curation, thinking it’s cheaper and easier. You may see content curation as a no-brainer: gathering related pieces from your field, and just plastering them all over your company’s digital walls, retweet-style.

With that practice, content curation is, in my opinion, a waste of time.

Not only you multiply

Three Questions to Help You Make Your Travel Content Stand Apart

When time comes to look for info about a trip we want to take, there is much more information available out there than we are able to digest. There are business sites, the travel agencies sites, the personal blogs, the collaboration blogs, the review sites with travel info…

Where to start to make sure we waste as little possible time and we get our questions answered as fast as possible?!

This scenario about travel customers happens every single day, countless times. Like me, you can suspect that it’s frustrating for them and it makes them leave great sites just because they came across unsuitable information. And, as a travel marketer, you need to jump through this over-populated web of information and get the attention of your targeted customer.

Check out these 3 questions that will help you make your materials and articles stand apart:

Is your content too generic?

In the travel sector, there are way too many generic articles out there, like “the beaches of Costa Brava”, or “best hotels in Ibiza”. These topics are called in the journalistic sphere evergreens or soft topics. You can introduce them anytime you need to fill some white space on your site. They don’t actually help any reader, quite the contrary: they are a waste of their time.

More than that: if your keyword and content strategy revolves around such broad topics, your target customer would get

Spanish Success Story: Traveling with eDreams

The series about Spanish companies successfully using relevant content to market themselves started with Iberia and their inspirational blog, “Me Gusta Volar”. Today, the second Spanish Success Story is about eDreams, the travel portal used in more than 30 countries by people from all continents,

The Barcelona-based travel company eDreams won this spring the eAward as the best international web, among more than 30 participants. The winner was selected based on the effectiveness of their digital marketing implementation and the tactics of using targeted, relevant content, across a multitude of reader groups.

More than Booking: Inspiration to Travel

At a closer look at the eDreams website, from a digital marketing perspective, and not from a traveller one, it becomes clear that the portal has become much more than a search & book place.

Just a few years ago, this type of sites, involving flight or hotel search and comparison, were like a database, in design and functionality, with the search part primarily in focus. It was considered that the potential customer was

Think Like a Publisher, Write Like a Journalist

For some odd reason, content marketing has become very fashionable in the past year or so. Everyone has heard about it, everyone wants a piece of the cake, and – as usual – everyone wants the benefits before understanding what it can do for your business.

Biggest Challenge when using Content Marketing Tactics

For most companies, the biggest challenge is to keep the pace set at the beginning, to keep producing content that convinces and converts.

A tactical way of diminishing this challenge is to have a well-crafted editorial plan. If you keep your plan filled out, well in advance, you won’t have problems producing new content, according to the plan. In theory.

But another problem is that many companies just embarking on the content marketing boat don’t see the relevance in spending time and cash to do strategic planning, to understand their client, to create an editorial plan, and so on. They want an article posted on the blog tomorrow.

Like you’ve ever started a cupcake shop business by putting pictures of cupcakes on the empty in-construction shop walls.

eShow Barcelona ’13 Conclusions: Go Mobile & Invest in Valuable Content

The eShow took place on the 13^th and 14^th of March in Barcelona, gathering professionals from e-commerce and digital marketing fields, to discuss latest industry trends and to share experiences from various brands first-hand.

The eShow is a major fair in the digital economy sector, organized in several cities throughout the year, from Madrid to Sao Paolo, passing by Lisbon and Barcelona. The aim is to bring together the leading providers of products and services in the e-commerce field that share their novelties in order to help companies develop their online business.

This year’s eShow included several conferences from the industry leaders, with some of them being addressed to the emerging entrepreneurs. At the end of 2 days filled with latest advances and inspiration from successful businesses, here are some conclusions.

Entrepreneurs’ Forum