The importance of great content cannot be
overstated. Without content, there is no
marketing. Period.

So what is content marketing? To make things simple, let's start with what it's not:
 
Copy. 
Advertorial.
Spam (we had to say it!)

Think of content marketing as a method of
creating and distributing content of value to your customers and prospects. The guiding principle behind content marketing is the belief that by offering relevant, meaningful content, businesses can build their brand integrity, loyalty and eventually, their customer base. What channels can content marketing encompass? Your website, whitepapers, webinars, blogs, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter - the list goes on. 

Many companies recognize the importance of content marketing, but feel daunted or confused about where to begin. Creating content doesn't have to be a burden - it can be incredibly rewarding, and a great way to foster contribution amongst various departments in your organization. Setting yourself up for success in content marketing involves building the right infrastructure to support content creation.

Here are some tips and tricks to help get you started in your content marketing strategy:

1.   Find Your Editor 

You need to create a content marketing process that works for your organization, one that ensures timely, relevant content in support of your business objectives. When it comes to content creation, envision your company as a traditional print magazine: the best place to begin is to build an editorial calendar, one which lays out all the hot topics your audience would find value in reading and sharing. Be sure to also incorporate any special “ad hoc” events or promotions planning into the calendar.

Don't forget seasonality! Framing your content around milestone holidays can provide instant relevance to your customers.

2.   Get the Right People Involved - Look Inside

Before you think about outsourcing your content creation, look to those within your company. You may be surprised at the number of fantastic writers around you!  Or, at the very least, you will discover those with lots of great ideas who can contribute to your content plan. If you find at least one avid Tweeter, you will already be in a better place to start building your content marketing strategy. This is where your company's subject matter experts (i.e product developers) and customer-facing staff can really thrive. They are the ones with the deepest insight into what you are selling and who you are selling to, including their concerns, interests and priorities.

Find a way to reward these people for their involvement! It can be a prize, or even just bragging rights for the most-visited blog post. Either way, take a note from those gamification gurus and give your colleagues playful incentives to contribute. Also, getting a sense of where everyone's interests lie will help them find fun in the process - some people love Tweeting, others love taking photos - capitalize on people's interests and that passion will translate through into your final product.

3.   Look Outside

Leverage the voices of your customer into your content marketing plan - let them be your ambassadors! For example, if you have some really vocal customers or fans on any of your social media, invite them to help produce content for you. Case in point: MTV did this in 2010 with their search to find a Twitter "jockey".

4.   Use Variety

They call it the spice of life for a reason! Experiment with the types of content you produce. Enlist the help of your creative department to produce unique, highly-valued infographics, and link to relevant audio and videos (think interviews!) Not only will your audiences be instantly drawn in, it makes your content easy to distribute across platforms and channels, reaching more people.

5.    Don't Launch and Leave

Monitor your blog comments and social media sites and keep your responses timely - the more active you are in responding, the more willing your readers and followers will be to engage in dialogue with your business. Don't forget to make it share-able by implementing social sharing plug-ins to your blog.

Following these simple tips and tricks, your organization will be in a much better position to build a sound process, with opportunities to evolve your content marketing strategy over time.

To finish off, here are some useful quotes about content marketing. Hopefully you find them as inspiring as we do!

Thanks to everyone who attended our latest webinar, "Cloud CMS: The Best Marketing Investment You Can Make This Year". We had a great group in attendance!

Our hosts, Richard Sharp, VP of Marketing, and Adam Koebel, Product Specialist, provided their thoughts and observations about the current digital marketing and next generation CMS landscape.

Here are some highlights from the webinar:

•  The web is complex and fragmented – yet, integrating tactics is crucial to proving ROI.
•  With traditional web tools, control of web content rested with a legacy CMS, IT or an agency. The next generation of CMS is agile, flexible and marketing-enabled.
•  Next generation CMS allows for a lead’s successful journey through multiple touchpoints.
•  CMS tools and tactics provide measurable returns for your business, improving lead engagement, capture, nurture, qualification and closing.

If you’d like to know more about Cloud CMS or next generation content management, check out the full webinar here. Also, stay tuned for the next webinar in our series, coming soon!

You may have heard some buzz around the notion of gamification. The term has been
characterized by some as the next frontier in web and mobile, one predicted to
become as central to marketing as social media has become.

So what is it? Gamification refers to the use of game mechanics and tactics in non-gaming environments, and it relies on rewards, incentives and challenges to stimulate action and motivate behaviour. The explosion of social gaming in recent years (Foursquare are Zynga are two prime examples) has brought with it a wave of game mechanics increasingly woven into the fabric of our daily lives. A recent Gartner report predicts that by 2015, more than 50% of organizations that manage "innovation processes" will gamify those processes.

Marketers have recently tapped into the power of game mechanics, applying similar principles to their website design and functionality, under the premise that successful websites encourage participation via many of the tactics more traditionally reserved for the gaming space. 

Check out some of our quick tips and resources below on "gamifying" your website. Does your organization currently use any of these tactics?

User- Generated Content
The aim here is to provide incentives for visitors to generate their own content on your site. Not only will it increase engagement, it will make your site richer and more SEO-friendly. UGC can be encouraged through feedback mechanisms such as ratings, reviews and comments. How can you reward people for this type of user-generated content? One way is to consider providing “badges” to those users who comment or participate frequently.

Feedback Tools
You’ve heard of the Facebook “like” button and Google’s “+1”. Both of these are tools for people to share content while also providing their feedback on it. One way to encourage this is to reward users for “liking” or taking some kind of action on your site. Often this is done through an activity feed, which shows popular articles or pages on your site, along with top users' activities (i.e those with “badges”).

Social Login
Keeping with the social nature of today's web consumer, it follows that many visitors will participate in game-like scenarios if the benefits of doing so extend beyond the game itself (i.e users are more likely to become involved in activities that those in their social circle are engaged in).

These tactics really are just the tip of the iceberg - check out these resources for more in-depth info on gamification and examples of successful gamification-in-action.

In the past web content management and website updates were solely in the power of IT. Any changes to websites had to be run past a strict IT department with a focus on content updates and ownership, content back-up and security, update scheduling consistency and audit trails. While that model may have worked in the past, web content management has come a long way and websites now tend to be (and in our opinion should be) in the realm of marketing departments rather than IT. Marketers need a web content management system that allows them to incorporate all the integrated aspects and channels of their marketing plans which include things like blogging, social media, subscribers, email marketing, RSS feeds and more.

So—what do marketing teams really want in a web content management system?

1. Flexibility and ease-of-use for non-technical users without HTML knowledge.
2. Easy page creation and editing tools including a WYSIWYG with image scaling/editing abilities.
3. Business blogging functionality that’s integrated and uses the same WYSIWYG module. 
4. Easy content syndication and social media integration (automatically generated RSS feeds). 
5. Quick and comprehensive analytics integration to allow for easy tracking and testing of campaigns. 
6. Simple form creation and management tools complete with auto responders. 
7. A built in lead-database with complete lead profile and activity history. 
8. Email campaigns with lead nurturing capabilities. 
9. Workflow and approvals for easy content collaboration (as well as versioning). 
10. Roles and permissions for accountability and secure content updates. 
11. Easy digital asset management.

So there you have it, those are the things that marketers really want out of a WCM platform. Is yours providing your marketing team with those characteristics? Or are you still relying on IT?

Image by Karen Eliot on Flickr.

Ever heard of Software-as-a-Service? Well if you haven't you should make note, it is definitely one of the best options available for you when it comes to several different types of software including CRM systems (a popular example is Salesforce.com) and many CMS tools (like Marqui CMS).

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is basically software that is deployed over the internet. With SaaS a vendor licenses their software application to customers either by subscription, on-demand, in a pay-as-you-go model or for free.

There are many benefits to choosing a SaaS solution, and they include:

• Rapid deployment time.With no software to buy or install, implementation time for SaaS service products tends to be extremely fast in comparison with other software options.
• Ease of access.Because this type of software is deployed over the internet, users can access the software at anytime over any internet browser making it much more convenient for many businesses.
• Low cost of ownership.Everyone who's had experience with any type of software knows that after you purchase it there are often additional costs for maintenance and upgrades. That isn't the case with a SaaS solution. Since you haven't purchased software itself, the vendor is responsible for upkeep and upgrades to the application.
• Easy to customize.Because SaaS providers with a multi tenant architecture are able to customize their products capabilities to suit the needs of each of their customers, the products tend to be both extremely flexible and scalable. In addition, most SaaS providers have their own API for their product so it is easy to integrate with businesses' current software applications (like a CRM).

All of these benefits make SaaS CMS solutions a good choice for many organizations, but there is one benefit that outweighs them all in our opinion and that is SaaS vendors' dedication to customer success. The SaaS model itself requires vendors to take a keen interest in their customer service because since the solutions tend to be subscription based and easy to implement, they are also easy for customers to choose to switch away from. In a SaaS model, if a customer is unsuccessful with a vendor's product, often the only requirement for quitting a service is to call the vendor and say they are canceling after their next payment date. This very flexibility means that if a vendor isn't completely dedicated and highly motivated towards ensuring that each and every one of their customers are successful then they won't last very long in such a competitive space.

Image by gfpeck on Flickr.

A content management system (CMS) allows regular business owners with little or no technical experience to update and manage their websites quickly and easily. An effective CMS can also be a powerful tool for supporting your business' search engine optimization (SEO) strategy since it provides a powerful base from which you can develop and maintain your website's content, and, consequently, support your overall SEO goals.

Choosing the right CMS for your business is a complicated task and there are many different elements which need to be addressed, however, the one thing it is essential for you to remember when making your decision is that the CMS you choose needs to have the capability of helping your overall web marketing strategy which should include SEO.

So what can you do to make sure you’re choosing a CMS that will help your overall SEO strategy?

1. Widen your focus beyond the technology.  As we’ve mentioned before, one of the problems that many organizations have when attempting to choose a CMS is that they focus too much on the myriad technological aspects of a CMS rather than looking at its capabilities from the perspective of your overall marketing strategy. One of the most important aspects of a CMS is its ability to help non-technical users carry-out their marketing goals (like SEO). Ensure when you’re choosing your CMS that it has the ability to support creation and updates of your key on-page SEO elements. Often if the control of this type of decision is left in the hands of IT you end up with a technologically solution that doesn’t support other aspects of your marketing strategy.
2. Make sure all key stakeholders are involved.  This relates to our previous point about widening your focus. If one of the goals implanting your CMS is to support your SEO strategy then it’s crucial to have your team’s SEO expert as an active part of the decision making process because they will have insight into the necessary aspects of a CMS that other team members may not and they’ll ensure that your CMS solution is capable of allowing updates and creation of custom URLs, HTML coding, Title Tags, Alt Tags, and all the other essential SEO elements. 
3. Keep your assets intact. As recommended by Marketing Sherpa in a recent article, it’s important to make sure when you’re choosing a new CMS that it doesn’t discard your current digital assets. Over time a website will collect a large amount of assets including inbound links, pages, and content that rank highly in search engines. Losing these, even if you’re gaining a new CMS platform, can actually be detrimental to your overall SEO strategy. 
4. Know exactly what you're looking for. It is important when you are evaluating vendors that you are looking at solutions which have the core functionality that you actually need and want with regards to SEO.  Many CMS vendors offer products that are much more complex, or too simple for the SEO goals that you want to accomplish. Before looking at possible solution, it is a good idea to do a comprehensive analysis of what your needs are as an organization. Choosing a solution that has the correct functionality to meet your website’s SEO targets can ensure that you end up with a product which effectively meets all of your needs.

Image by MichaelGoodin on Flickr.

One of the most important benefits of using a web content management system like Marqui, is the ability for marketers to take control of their web content, shifting the power from IT departments to marketing teams.

To help you understand how you can effectively leverage your website as a critical channel to drive business results, we're offering a free 45 minute webinar on Thursday May 13th, at 10:30 am Pacific / 1:30 pm Eastern which will discuss:

• The challenges and opportunities offered by the web as a channel to drive growth
• The needs of web content management for marketing success verses IT control
• Steps to take to harness the potential of the web to build demand
• What skills really matter for marketers to win with web marketing

You can register for the webinar here. We look forward to seeing you!