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Grain Surfboards understands that when you share your work on the web, you spread your ideas and grow your business as a result. Throughout these pages, we’ll discuss how to create content that educates and informs, just like Grain Surfboards does.
Had it not been for Grain Surfboards’ content-rich website, beautiful images, detailed process information, and happy customer showcase, I would have quickly clicked away to check out other manufacturers. Instead, I spent thousands of dollars, rewarding a company that had treated me with respect and invited me into the wooden surfboard world.
There used to be only three ways to get noticed: Buy expensive advertising, beg the mainstream media to tell your story for you, or hire a huge sales staff to bug people individually about your products.
The skills that worked offline to help you buy or beg or bug your way into opportunity are the skills of interruption and coercion. Online success comes from thinking like a journalist and
publishing amazing content that will brand you as an organization or person it would be a pleasure to do business with. You are in charge of your own success.
we wrote and sent dozens of releases ourselves. Each time we sent a release, it appeared at online services such as Yahoo! and resulted in sales leads.
we created a monthly newsletter called The Edge,
This book actually started as web marketing on my blog more than a decade ago.
I published an e-book called The New Rules of PR,1
I blogged the book, section by section, as I wrote the first edition.
I didn’t spend a single penny advertising or promoting it.
I offered advance copies to approximately 130 important bloggers, I sent out nearly 20 news releases (you’ll read later in the book about news releases as a tool to reach buyers directly), and my publisher alerted contacts in the media. That’s it.
relations are constantly evolving. Consider this: When I wrote the first edition of the book, Twitter didn’t even exist and Facebook was available only to students.
I first wrote about newsjacking, the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story to generate tons of media coverage, get sales leads, and grow business, back in 2011. I’m honored and grateful that because of
the number of people using voice assistants from the likes of Amazon, Google, and Apple has dramatically increased. That means understanding how people use voice to ask questions has become an important aspect of Search Engine Optimization,
this edition includes a brand-new chapter on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
The chapter explores ways that AI can help marketers, such as analyzing which blog or email newsletter topics have the greatest chance of getting seen and shared,
When I use the words company and organization throughout this book, I’m including all types of organizations and individuals. Feel free to mentally insert nonprofit, government agency, political candidate, church, school, sports team, legal
firm, or other entity in place of company and organization.
Similarly, when I use the word buyers, I also mean subscribers, voters, volunteers, applicants, and donors, because the new rules...
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When people come to you online, they are not looking for TV commercials. They are looking for information to help them make a decision.
Advertising also works in many trade publications. If your company makes deck sealant, then you probably want to advertise in Professional Deck Builder magazine
for millions of other organizations—for those of us who are professionals, musicians, artists, nonprofit organizations, churches, and niche product companies—traditional advertising is generally so wide and broad that it is ineffective.
The web is different. Instead of one-way interruption, web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment a buyer needs it. It’s about interaction, information, education, and choice.
Discussions I’ve had with journalists in other industries confirm that I’m not the only one who doesn’t use unsolicited press releases. Instead, I think about a subject that I want to write about, and I check out what I can find on blogs, on Twitter, and through search engines. If I find a press release on the subject through Google or a company’s online media room, great! But I don’t wait for press releases to come to me.
The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media. Blogs, online video, news releases, and other forms of web content let organizations communicate directly with buyers.
Marketers must shift their thinking away from the short head of the demand curve—mainstream marketing to the masses—and toward the long tail—a strategy of targeting vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web.
Marketing on the web is not about generic banner ads designed to trick people with neon color or wacky movement. It is about understanding the keywords and phrases that our buyers are using, and creating the content that they seek.
Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars per month on a media relations program that tries to convince a handful of reporters at select magazines, newspapers, and TV stations to cover us, we should be targeting the plugged-in bloggers, online news sites, micropublications, public speakers, analysts, and consultants who reach the targeted audiences who are looking for what we have to offer.
Oprah ignored 100 books a day, but bloggers run to their mailboxes to see what interesting things might be in there.
People use the ZeroTrash Facebook page to organize events and to connect local store owners with residents.
The team researches what people are searching on—terms like “Belize honeymoon” and “Belize all-inclusive vacation”—and then works to craft content for the Lodge at Chaa Creek’s site, as well as its Belize Travel Blog.5 The goal is to offer content that is valuable
what visitors really want is content that first describes the issues and problems they face and then provides details on how to solve those problems.
Who are my readers? How do I reach them? What are their motivations? What are the problems I can help them solve? How can I entertain them and inform them at the same time? What content will compel them to purchase what I have to offer? To be successful, you need to consider these same questions.
in the center of the room is what they call “the bridge,” which is where the operations manager for the entire American Airlines system sits together with a handful of key staff. And right next to the operations manager is a representative of the social team.
Do you go into a large gathering filled with a few acquaintances and tons of people you do not know and shout, “BUY MY PRODUCT!”? Do you go into a cocktail party and ask every single person you meet for a business card before you agree to speak with them?
Do you try to meet every single person, or do you have a few great conversations? Do you listen more than you speak? Are you helpful, providing valuable information to people with no expectation of getting something tangible in return? Or do you avoid the social interaction of cocktail parties altogether because you are uncomfortable in such situations?
“In the marijuana business, believe it or not, print magazines are huge. I think there are about 20 magazines in this space, titles like Cannabis Business Times, Marijuana Business Magazine, and Marijuana Venture. So for us, our marketing strategy quickly became trade shows, getting out our own email list, and bartering with these magazines and trade show providers. We’ve got deals with all the big guys now where we trade them our database for free ads and trade show booth space. This was the way everyone marketed 15 or 20 years ago!”
As people engage with each other on social media sites, there are plenty of opportunities to network. Just like at a physical cocktail party, if you are unemployed and looking for work, the people you meet may be in a position to introduce you to that perfect employer. The converse is also true: Smart employers look to social networking sites to find the sort of plugged-in people who would fit in at their company or in a certain job.
To find a job via social networks, you have to stop thinking like an advertiser of a product and start thinking like a publisher of information.
The most popular form by far is the individual blog.
Create a public about.me3 profile for yourself and then use that as the URL that you point people to when you leave a comment on a blog or join a social networking site like Twitter.
“Bloggers are united in their desire for distinctive content, particularly around new product developments and reviews, feedback on content posted on their blog, and
interviews with key people,” says Jeremy Woolf, global social media lead for Text 100.
Many organizations create videos to showcase their expertise and provide valuable information to buyers in an easy-to-understand medium. The interview format is very popular, because it’s so easy to interview guests and post the resulting video. Other common forms of online video include humor-based approaches (frequently used to try to garner many views or even go viral), product overviews, and executive speeches. An added benefit of producing videos for your organization is that the media, bloggers, and others in a position to talk you up tend to like to watch videos to get story ideas. See
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As he started to realize that his videos were helping introduce people to his business, Risinger then focused on establishing a regular publishing schedule with upgraded video quality.
In particular, I’d like to challenge the assumption that B2B marketing must be dreadfully boring.
I think this attitude came about because B2B marketers hear the word business (twice) and think, “I am marketing to a business.” This results in an overly serious tone.
B2B marketers seem to forget that what all marketers need to do is communicate
to people.
