Social Media & Content Marketing Part 11

Posted on December 9, 2016 by ianotr

Social Media & Content Marketing

Social Media opens many new doors instantly

Social media has provided a big boost to content marketing because it allows you to organize audiences that you create into groups. It’s possible to use one social media platform to talk with various groups of followers. Using various platforms to reach various niches is an option, but the more interaction can be consolidated into one place, the easier it is to manage your social media campaigns.

Audience Size

The beauty of content marketing is that it does not have to reach millions of people to have an impact. Crafting niche content that attracts one thousand followers who have the intent to make online purchases is not a difficult goal to reach anymore. Analytics give us a lot of numbers to think about such as page views and number of unique visitors, but as soon as you can attract hundreds of followers, it’s possible to develop a steady stream of online income.

An online audience can essentially be built for free if you take the time to connect with new people one at a time. Finding five new online friends per day is enough to build a base of over 100 followers in a month. All you really have to do is click people after studying their profile. Each of the major social networks has a system for requesting online friendships. Google+ is a social network that encourages new relationships.Facebook puts audience limits on personal profiles but allows professional profiles to have thousands of followers. Audience size is based on how much time you want to invest in building it.

Friends of Friends

The key to building a loyal market that reflects your values, is to build a network one person at a time with individuals who match your target market. This project can take several months, but it simply involves interacting with friends of friends on social networks, leading to a maze of new contacts. You simply study a friend’s profile and look for people who share your views. It’s a good idea to avoid people who don’t share your views so that you can avoid a lot of long time consuming conversations.

As people who like the same things are grouped into networks, it becomes easier for like-minded people to connect more often. It’s important for friends to “like” each other’s posts on Facebook because it tells Facebook the content is important. It gives Facebook a better idea of which content should be displayed on individual news feeds.

Personalized Market Research

One of the most profound ways social media has revolutionized marketing is that it has created a more intense focus on actual individuals rather than treating customers as statistics. You can now find out many things about a customer through social media interactivity that was not known by marketers in the past. Finding out someone’s favorite movies or sports teams might be an ice breaker in a conversation about selling tax preparation services.

Social media has become a barometer for how respected you are as an online entertainer. You can figure out which type of posts get the best reactions. You can study the posts of popular social media superstars. You can also learn who your most loyal supporters are and the content they like the most. Social media lets you learn the emotions and inside stories about your market, giving you a better sense of awareness than raw statistics.

Facebook and other social networks have allowed believers in the same message to find each other easily online. Take the lead in content marketing by joining social network groups devoted to your topic and make new genuine friendships.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web, a web development company creating market ready websites since 2000, with locations in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web – Delivers What You Need With Style.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web

Multimedia Entertainment & Content Marketing Part 10

Posted on July 18, 2016 by ianotr

Multimedia Entertainment & Content Marketing

Technology Lets Us Be More Entertaining

Technology has turned many individuals into multimedia entertainers. No longer are art and commerce considered far apart, as it usually takes some form of graphic art to bring brands to life through content marketing. People appreciate the combination of not only text with photographs, but text with video, audio, animation, infographics or other form of digital expression.

Online Entertainers

Social media and mobile technology are the two important factors that give anyone access to creating their own media channel. Facebook alone has accelerated society into a state in which creating and sharing customized media is becoming common. No longer is fame a distant destination. It’s possible to build an online following just by adding remarks to news articles. The tools are now in place for anyone to entertain an audience on a daily basis and build the audience through social networks.

Last century many people had dreams about being entertainers but did not train themselves to be entertainers. People were taught that the chances of making it as a star in the entertainment business were slim. Last century it took a lot of effort to get 10 people to show up to an event. This century’s tools make it possible to put communities together in the hundreds or thousands all because of the direction that content marketing is moving, which is mixing information with entertainment.

Niche Video Stars

YouTube has created an incredible number of niche video stars in the new century. It’s important to understand that this shift toward allowing anyone in the public to have their own video channel with no prior video experience has dramatically changed many of the rules about video production. No longer does production have to be slick and carefully scripted.

Most of the videos you find on YouTube designed for business presentation is much more relaxed than the characters you might see in a television commercial. People have learned to be themselves on camera after a few decades of home movies. It turns out that acting comfortable on camera does not require acting lessons or a Hollywood resume.

The growing popularity of YouTube is a signal that online video is here to stay and that home video can be taken seriously when it captures memorable content. The combination of producing useful video content in an entertaining way with appropriate tags can help build an online following, especially since Google now gives high rankings to unique informative videos.

Multimedia Experimentation

Content marketing is all about experimenting with various multimedia to get the attention of an online audience. Video has been the most common way to showcase the new paradigm of multimedia entertainment. Audiences have been latching onto video games, animation and slide shows in addition to consuming niche videos that are not necessarily targeted for a large audience.

We are still in an age in which the limits of multimedia are undefined. Multimedia has been a slowly brewing dimension that can go many creative directions. The interactive quality of multimedia continues to be a wide open frontier for tech designers. The more developers can get people to interact with their gadgets, the more multimedia becomes a seamless part of everyday life. Apps have helped multimedia become mainstream.

But new ideas for multimedia do not necessarily have to come from engineers. Like people who upload videos to YouTube or music to ReverbNation, anyone can experiment with content to expand the possibilities of multimedia. There are enough tools to play with, such as WordPress, Photoshop and iMovie, to create captivating presentations. Take the lead in multimedia production by working with creative graphic artists who understand animation.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web, a web development company creating market ready websites since 2000, with locations in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web – Delivers What You Need With Style.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web

Inbound Marketing & Business Relationships Part 9

Posted on May 24, 2016 by ianotr

Inbound Marketing & Business Relationships

Business relationships are becoming more personalized

The era of customers being treated only as statistics is ending. A more personalized approach to marketing is becoming more common, especially when it comes to business relationships that involve a lot of transactions. Loyalty and trust have become the benchmarks to winning online business through inbound marketing, which connects niche markets with unique content about the products.

Personalized Business Culture

One of the feelings you can easily get exploring the web is that it’s much easier to communicate with a CEO or managers of small companies than getting any kind of response from big business management. The internet can be used to strengthen associations in a matter of clicks on a contact page. Marketing software allows a company to create profiles for each of their customers. Businesses that use marketing software can establish closer relationships with customers and categorize them according to their purchasing behavior.

At one time everyone was pitched by pushy sales people. But the internet has made almost every industry more competitive, so a lot of the pushy attitude has faded. Pushy sales techniques have become bothersome because they can waste the time of a person not interested in the product. The hard sell approach began to become very unpopular during the financial crash of 2008, which found half the country deep in credit card debt. The financial crash caused many people to pay closer attention to their expenses and to the businesses they spend money on.

Community Vision

The key to understanding how inbound marketing is changing the business world is that many business decisions now relate to shared vision. Crowdfunding is a form of shared vision that offers alternative ways to fund projects. Small businesses, through creativity and partnerships, can succeed by serving the needs of online communities with similar visions.

When you think of all the different communities that exist in the world, it’s unlikely that there is a definitive website for every community. How many times have you tried searching online for something that you knew existed but the search delivered zero search results? The point is that it is fairly easy to start a website devoted to an existing large community without facing much competition.

Trying to get to know a thousand different people online is no longer a big issue, since friends from Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn can end up being in the thousands for any given person. It’s now fairly simple to connect with real people online as business is naturally becoming more social media-friendly and personalized. More than ever before, there is a need to document as much information about customer behavior as possible, especially if they care about the company’s vision.

How Business Becomes Personalized

One way that business becomes personalized is through a constant reminder such as a newsletter. A well written blog has a personalized feel and becomes even more personalized with reader comments. For many businesses, their social media profile delivers their personal message to the world. For free, a business can build content on a Facebook page and then have their web domain point to the Facebook page. Social media interaction is how many business relationships permeate over time.

Perhaps the most important reason why business is becoming more personalized is that consumers have quickly adopted trust as the main criterion for establishing loyalty with a business. Trust can be built on elaborate inbound marketing through deep devotion to the product. It can also be built on open discussions about customer feedback. Take the lead in earning the trust of online followers by sharing a wealth of meaningful information about your industry.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web, a web development company creating market ready websites since 2000, with locations in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web – Delivers What You Need With Style.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Web requirements

Contact OTR Web.

Content Marketing & Thought Leaders Part 8

Posted on April 26, 2016 by ianotr

Thought Leaders & Content Marketing

Consumers are gravitating toward Thought Leaders

Bloggers are the stars of the online world in terms of being viewed as influencers by search engines if they are popular and authoritative enough. Blogging is part of what makes content marketing valuable since effective blogs can create online followings. The reason blogs have become important in SEO is that they represent a chance to bring keywords to life in a unique story.

Blogs vs Articles

Many people have used the terms “blogs” and “articles” interchangeably, but the two are very different. Articles are written in a more traditional style, almost like a newspaper story, whereas blogs are more conversational and creative while delivering information that can be hard to find elsewhere. Another big difference is that blogs are written from the perspective of an expert, whereas articles are written by objective observers who can be anybody.

When you think about it, if you’re not getting information from an expert, why should you trust the information? Search engines favor experts because they are better sources than non-experts. The internet is flooded with articles by non-experts who are mostly duplicating information that already exists. Bloggers, on the other hand, offer new information and original perspectives, which are two components of content marketing that search engines reward.

How Blogs Become Big

Big media helps put the spotlight on popular bloggers, but it’s also possible to develop a blog that grows in popularity organically. The main strategy for building an organic online following is the combination of SEO and unique content that can be categorized many different ways. Your blog can be planned out many months in advance based on all the different angles you see in an industry.

When you think of all the different types of people who are attracted to your industry and start writing blogs about the different reasons people use certain products, you can gain acceptance as a leading observer in that field. Once you’ve written about a hundred quality blogs about your industry, it’s likely that your name or brand will be referenced in many different ways associated with the industry in search engines. The more unique blogs you write, the more chances search engines will consider you to be an authoritative expert.

Maximizing Blogs

Not all blogs are successful partly because not everyone is a good storyteller. Certain industries work well with blogging if they are already very detail-oriented. Sharing food recipes, for example, can create endless excitement for cooking fans since there are infinite ways to prepare food. But sharing information on how to operate machinery used in redundant situations is not the best approach to blogging if it doesn’t spawn many different ideas.

Ideally, you want to create blogs that other people share on social networks. One of the ways to make a blog attractive is to start with a colorful photograph, design or infographic. A blog that accompanies a picture and video has extra advantages. The reason you want to make sure the blog has a nice picture is because people see hundreds of stories and pictures as they scroll through their social network newsfeeds, but only so many catch their attention.

A blogger who interviews experts, especially on video, can gain even more credibility. By taking the role of a multimedia curator who explores an industry deeply, you can gain the reputation of a Thought Leader. When your blog becomes what people turn to with high expectation of gaining new information, you have become a Thought Leader, a monumental goal of bloggers. Take the lead in content marketing by reviewing new products and helping other bloggers create a buzz about them.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web, a web development company creating market ready websites since 2000, with locations in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Certified Partner with HubSpot and Google.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web.

The Value of Information

Posted on June 29, 2015 by Bob Niles

The Value of Information

The rain pelted across the old Volkswagen windshield as if it had been sprayed on by a garden hose. The tired wipers complained with a stuttered uh-uh-uh as they tried to keep ahead of the horizontal liquid barrage of all things blurry through every window.
To say it was dark would be an understatement. Because this dark suffered from black ink that blew sideways trying to knock the little car off the dirt road. Headlights?…Bill remembered he had them before the rain started but was now unable to confirm their existence.
Bill and Tammy were taking,….well,..Buddy home. They didn’t know the poor guys name. They were doing a Good Samaritan / Designated Driver thing. They had found him slumped between two cars in the parking lot at the pub they had visited after the hockey game.
Bill had tried to get him back on his feet, but as soon as he had righted him, Buddy folded himself back up like a city map. His folds and creases just didn’t look right.
“We’ve got to take him home Bill.” Tammy insisted while Bill was trying to stop the bleeding. Seems Buddy had kissed the side view mirror in his effort to regain his original horizontal format.
It was after two more attempts at verbally insisting and physically attempting to vertically right Buddy that Bill gave in. Buddy was getting pretty beat up by they car they kept trying to stand him beside. A bleeding lip, a bloody nose, and a serious looking scratch which made him look a little like Al Pachino in the movie Scarface.
He gave no name but seemed happy with the temporary title of Buddy. And in his extreme state of inebriation in public Bill could relate as to why he might want to keep his name in question.
“Can you tell us where you live Buddy? Do you know where your house is? Is there someone we can phone? Are you here alone? We’ll drive you…..”
“45,..3? No 454,..5 Spp pruucee Lane.” He sprayed, as he interrupted Tammy. Each number four he pronounced had about fifteen ‘Fs’ in it and probably about as many ‘Fs’ again in the fives. At least he cut back on the ‘Ps’ Tammy thankfully noted.
The rain now started to accompany the already annoying wind as Bill folded Buddy into the back of his space challenger. That is to say his vintage Volkswagen was limited in seating area.
Tammy, now wishing she hadn’t worn a short tight skirt, crawled in the back with Buddy, holding a now bloody compress against his nose. Bill started the car checked his gas and smiled at Tammy in in rear view mirror as they started into the night.
Bill checked his watch as he turned left on to Spruce Lane. Chinese dentist time he smiled remembering his grandpa had always called 2:30 Chinese dentist time.
Slowly he followed the address to 4541, 4543 and 4545, destination achieved. Bill stopped the car on the road and pulled up on the hand brake. Tammy woke up Buddy with a cheery, almost excited “We’re here! We got you home Buddy. Let’s get you out.”
Bill leaned the drivers seat forward as Tammy poured more than pushed Buddy out of the back seat. Bill wrapped Buddy’s right arm around his shoulder and with Tammy manning the left side they made their way through a gate, along a walk, up a ramp and to the front door. Tammy pressed the door bell which started a dog barking in the back of the house, and with each bark it seemed another light turned on. Both Bill and Tammy sensing their job was done, and Buddy was home safe to face the music, turned to leave before the door could open. Buddy, seeming to admit defeat to a vertical lifestyle again folded himself back down to his city map style just as the door opened.
Both Tammy and,…? Mrs Buddy, let out a little scream which deadened the sound of Buddy’s head connecting with the door. Buddy, now much more awake began using and slurring words his former Sunday School Teacher would not have approved of.
Buddy ran out into the front yard. Peed on three trees and back into the house. Apparently Buddy was the dogs name as well. “Good boy Buddy!” Mrs. Buddy said.
No introductions were made as Bill and Tammy were now wet and wind blown and wanted nothing more than to get in the car and head home. Mrs. Buddy stopped them with a heartfelt thank you and wished there were more people like them. She then asked if he had been beat up and robbed. Both looked at each other and feigned ignorance as to his condition and assured her that he probably hadn’t been.
“Well thank you again for bringing him home.” Mrs. Buddy yelled over the wind as she cradled his head. “He sometimes gets like this when,…? Ya have to love them right? For better our worse.”
She stood up gave them both a hug as they turned to go. Bill had just opened the gate for Tammy when Mrs. Buddy yelled through the weather “Do you happen to have his wheelchair?”

Information has been and always will be a valuable tool. Using search engines and inbound marketing with original, factual information satisfies a big active audience searching to buy. And to become successful at inbound marketing the knowledgeable public demand valuable information about your product.
Make your mom proud of your success! Take the lead in inbound marketing by offering free information that helps others gain economic advantages and make your site more valuable than sites with perhaps less information.
And by helping other gain economic advantages not only is mom happy but you’re also being a Good Samaritan. And a Good Samaritan with valuable information is highly valued. Don’t be a Bill and Tammy who the only information they knew about Buddy was that he peed on trees in the front yard and was highly praised for doing so.
We’re still looking for Bill Jensen’s wheelchair.

Bob Niles

Read more articles from Bob’s personal life experiences on his Blogspot site. Superiordribble.blogspot.com

Image Problems – Contact Marketing vs Interruptive Marketing

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Bob Niles

Image Problems

Contact Marketing vs Interruptive Marketing

Young Tom Booker was the trouble maker at Arrow Flats. If something was stolen, broken, painted over with graffiti or shot at it was usually Tom who received the first call from the sheriff. So it should of been no surprise to Tom when Sheriff Gibson questioned him about the number of fish he’d been bragging about down at Mel’s.

Mel’s was the coffee shop in town where all the locals shared breakfast, news and gossip over Mel’s weak bitter coffee. Seems Tom was shooting his mouth off to anyone who would listen about the number of fish he had caught in just half an hour. Sheriff Gibson, armed with this gossip and the complaint phone calls about explosions down at the lake had him very suspicious of young Tom.

“Now Tom,” Sheriff Gibson questioned through the hay stalk he held in one side of his mouth. “Am I to understanding that you caught six rainbow trout and two perch in less than half an hour? At Lake Peed? Yesterday afternoon? Just you,…by yourself?” “Why yes-sir-ee-sir I sure did! And if-in you like Sheriff Gibson you could come with me today and we can catch us some more.”

“Now Tom, people think you’re using dynamite to do yer fishin. And we can’t have that round these parts. Understand Tom?” Sheriff Gibson pressed as the brim of his hat touched Toms face. “Oh no sir, yes sir Officer Gibson.” Tom gulped. “You go home and get yer poles and nets and bait and maybe yer fly rod with yer famous flys you tie that I’ve herd so much about and meet me down at the wharf?”

“Meet me in half an hour Tom.” said Sheriff Gibson as he walked to his car.
It was the sheriffs third trip from the car to the wharf with all his fishing gear before he even saw young Tom. He was whistling coming down the dock with what looked like a kids lunch box. “Where’s yer fishin gear Tom?” Hollered the Sheriff. To which Tom raised the box in his left hand and pointed to it with his right. “If-in yer using dynamite, like I think you are, to catch fish you’ll wind up in the county jail so fast it’ll make” … “Sheriff,” Tom interrupted, “I promise to you that ‘I’ am not using dynamite today to catch fish. Besides look at all that there equipment you got fer catching fish.”

They both hopped in the boat, Tom pulled on the motor, and they both set off to Toms secret fishing spot. A cool breeze lightly rippled the top of Peed Lake as Sheriff Gibson was switching from casting to fly fishing. He certainly had all the gear but it just wasn’t working today. He had just tied on his lucky fly to his line when he looked up to see Young Tom holding a lit stick of dynamite. “I knew it Tom! You can’t fool an old fisherman like me! I know how many fish are in here and how to catch them the tried and true way and YOU” … just then Young Tom threw the dynamite stick with the quickly shrinking lit fuse to Sheriff Gibson. The sheriff now holding the dynamite started doing some boat capsizing jig when Tom questioned his intentions. “Well sheriff are you gonna just dance around talking or are you gonna go fishin?”

Now just as young Tom exaggerated and tricked Sheriff Gibson into buying his method of fishing so do advertisers in their product lines. Audiences have learned to see through advertisers claims and it now has become a challenge to win the trust of customers. With contact marketing it’s more about communicating with the target market. And in doing so makes sense to try and gain as much respect as possible by telling the truth than to exaggerate the facts just to trick people into sales. Image problems occur when people realize they’ve been fooled by advertising. It can and does damage association with your brand.

Just ask young Tom whose spending time in the same place for the next 30 days.

Bob Niles

Read more articles from Bob’s personal life experiences on his Blogspot site. Superiordribble.blogspot.com

Inbound Marketing – SEO Part 6

Posted on April 15, 2015 by ianotr

Inbound Marketing – SEO

People want information, not persuasive ads

Consumers have naturally become more curious in the internet era about products before they buy them. Instead of the more expensive trial and error approach of learning over time which products meet specific needs, consumers can learn from other consumers quickly at no cost thanks to online reviews. In the 20th century consumers were generally quiet about products that didn’t deliver what the advertising promised, but in the new century there is much less room for error.

Product Information

The internet has elevated people’s awareness about the value of product information. Inbound Marketing should be combined with SEO thus devoting entire articles to specific products or services. Storytelling about products in blogs and articles has become a common form of content marketing. At the same time, consumers are learning to be more careful about how they spend money online. More people are using the internet to learn about products, even if they make purchases at physical stores.

At one time consumers weren’t expected to know a lot of product information, back when they were sold one size fits all packages prior to computers becoming mainstream. The computer revolution was part of what changed the consumer landscape, as consumers were expected to choose the variables of hardware and software. People now have a lot of brand awareness about various facets of the computer industry thanks to tech marketing turning common people into techies.

Avoiding the Hype

As the online community has become empowered to know sets of choices for almost any circumstance, online surfers try to maximize search time by avoiding links that do not produce desired results. The weakest web pages are the ones in which the intent was clearly marketing with minimal product information given. There should be a link to deeper information until you get to the product page.

Products no longer need outrageous slogans and taglines to get people’s attention. Now it’s easier to get people’s attention by being more relatable, using sensible SEO. The reason brands are expected to live up to their claims more than ever is that a different brand is always a click away. One of the main causes of people avoiding a brand is pushy sales.People now have many ways to quickly find many different alternative choices.A brand is powerful if it can explain itself using various media that can be instantly accessed.

One of the most evident trends in content marketing is to avoid any type of traditional sales approach. While the goal of traditional marketing was to develop sales leads and convert them as soon as possible, the goal of content marketing is more to nurture leads and worry about sales as they happen. More value is placed on individual relationships than whether or not someone has made a purchase.

The Rise of Blogging

Bloggers became important to the online community the same way DJs became important to the music community. Successful bloggers attract a big online following by sharing useful information. The most popular bloggers are considered “influencers” of other writers and users of social networks. Bloggers try to be early adopters of products to show followers that they are on the cutting edge. Getting your product covered by a popular blogger is free valuable advertising.

Search engines treat authoritative bloggers as priorities when it comes to search rankings, so part of the marketing strategy of a product is researching bloggers. Writing your own blog using SEO also carries more weight than a web page full of ads. Take the lead in content marketing by avoiding persuasive language and focusing on writing that acts more as a gateway to a learning experience.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web a web development company creating market ready websites since 2000, with locations in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Certified Partner with HubSpot and Google.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web.

Content Marketing vs Interruptive Marketing Part 4

Posted on March 4, 2015 by ianotr

Content Marketing vs Interruptive Marketing

Interruptive marketing annoys more than it helps

Interruptive marketing still exists online for those who can afford it. Since most people do not go online to click ads, online advertising should only be done when it makes sense and you have an idea how many people you will be reaching. It’s possible to create a successful campaign with interruptive advertising, usually after learning from failed campaigns.

Why Ads are Annoying

A big reason why interruptive ads continue to be annoying is that people have become more conscious of how time can get wasted, especially people who spend a lot of time watching television. Interruptive advertising on websites is forcing many users to move on to the next website faster, especially when it comes to trying to watch videos. Getting hit with an ad has become a two minute slowdown. Many times it’s easier to exit a website than wait for an ad to finish.

Since ads represent clutter, they are usually bothersome. Only once in awhile do ads communicate the way they were designed. Interruptive ads are starting to become hard to justify except in narrowly targeted situations. The problem with constantly interrupting people who don’t want to be interrupted is that it gets old. The person can also form a negative image of the brand if it is over-marketed.

Image Problems

We are moving into an era in which brands are considered phony if they don’t live up to their claims. It’s now easy to look up customer feedback for almost any brand, now that sites like Amazon keep track of consumer comments. Consumers are now conscious of giving such feedback sites weight compared with advertising. The rising popularity of content marketing is causing businesses to understand the negative impact of interruptive advertising.

Now that audiences have learned to see through advertiser claims, it’s becoming a challenge for businesses to win the trust of customers. Since content marketing is more about communicating with the target market, it makes sense to try to gain as much respect as possible by telling the truth than to exaggerate the facts just to trick people into sales. When people realize they’ve been fooled by advertising, it can damage association with the brand.

Less Like Radio

The irony about radio advertising is that it does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. Instead of delivering a message to a mass audience, it’s delivering a message to people who have switched stations during commercials.In order to meet the standards of content marketing, it’s important to think of the opposite of how radio commercials have been made. Many commercials have used phony voices to try to give the spot more energy. Today’s marketing is closer to being conversational without theatrical characters.

Traditional radio commercials usually told you a limited amount of information to fit the format of a 30 or 60 second spot, whereas content marketing does not limit its message to the constraints of a third party. Radio commercials always get clustered with other commercials in “stopsets,” which is exactly when many people tune out of the radio. Clearly, most people do not listen to radio commercials no matter what the message is.

Another problem with radio commercials is due to the time constraint, many times the announcer will speed up his or her voice and speak too fast to be understood. If you watch business videos designed to raise brand awareness through content marketing, you will likely come across more relaxed than hyper presentations. Interruptive ads have become more annoying over time now that people have learned to use the internet as a quick gateway to many free activities.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000, with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web – Delivers What You Need With Style.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web.

Content Marketing vs Mass Marketing Part 3

Posted on February 18, 2015 by ianotr

Content Marketing vs Mass Marketing

People Have Learned To Tune Out Mass Marketing

Content marketing of the 21st century is quickly turning into something much different than the marketing of the previous century. In the 20th century not much attention was paid to how many people you offended through marketing. All that mattered was sales conversions. In the new century, consumers are looked at more as individuals rather than statistics, so this shift has created a set of new marketing standards.

Consumer Behavior

It’s difficult to predict consumer behavior, regardless of the type of marketing. One thing clear about the internet revolution is that consumers are no longer quiet about bad purchases. Social media, forums and blog activity have steered a growing number of self-educated consumers toward using the internet for research before making a purchase. Customer reviews on sites like Amazon have become part of research.

Throughout the growth of the internet, users have been bombarded with thousands of ads that had zero effect. People have now seen so much advertising since the 1990s on a daily basis that it has a nullifying effect on most advertising. People learn to not worry about the stack of coupons kept in a drawer or in their email. Since people witness so much marketing in any given day, it’s easy to conclude that most of this marketing doesn’t work for any given individual, as most advertising represents clutter.

Years of Advertising

People have figured out that advertising does not always present the best messages about products. Many times products are over-hyped by ads. Consumers are no longer easily fooled by emotional appeal used by advertisers. The internet has taught many consumers how to articulate what they like or dislike about a product. Ultimately, as people sharpen their brand awareness skills, advertising is becoming more informational than persuasive, at least with content marketing.

One of the important lessons that stands out about advertising is that consumers have become aware of sales pressure, which can lead to high credit card bills. The internet has erased the barrier of location, which gives consumers more choices. Sales pressure is not embraced in content marketing, which favors guiding users through a sales funnel with interesting facts that eventually lead to a product.

Authenticity in Demand

Now that it’s easy for anyone to start their own web business, there is a growing need to separate helpful websites from sites that waste time. Mass marketers can be found everywhere online, which has contributed to an overall consumer skepticism about advertising. Like all advertising arenas, the number of people who respond to ads even on popular social networks is a small percentage.

The reason authenticity is becoming part of the new marketing paradigm is that original content rather than duplicate content is favored by search engines. The more your website follows Google’s guidelines, the less you have to worry about it. The main objective of content marketing is to provide plenty of valuable content that is of interest to an online community.

Why Content Marketing Works

Content marketing is a completely different world than interruptive marketing. Instead of interrupting someone’s day, your articles and blogs are found in search engines by people who care. Instead of annoying users with advertisements, you provide them with stories that promote products. These stories are presented in a unique way, which helps search rankings.

A main strength to content marketing is that it helps establish the relationship between the business and the customer. Interactivity through social networks or email helps achieve goals for both parties. While traditional marketing relied on wordplay and image, today’s content marketing is more about developing trust through sharing accurate and helpful information.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Certified Partner with HubSpot and Google.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web.

Inbound Marketing & Big Media Advertising Part 2

Posted on February 11, 2015 by ianotr

Inbound Marketing & Big Media Advertising

Big media advertising is expensive and high risk

One of the traps that many start-ups have fallen into has been to set aside a budget for traditional media advertising. This budget can be drained quickly because it involves a fun element, which is creating commercials. But once the spots are run, pressure builds to see a return on investment. Television and radio spots are seen and heard by thousands of people, but most viewers and listeners still consider commercials to be an interruption.

Inbound Marketing vs. Traditional Media

Traditional media such as television, radio and newspapers still reach a huge audience. It’s still a way to deliver a message to the masses and hope that the numbers game will produce a return on investment. The cost of a radio spot depends on how big the station’s market is, but in major markets a sixty second spot can cost hundreds of dollars per minute. Even though television advertising is much more expensive than radio advertising, they both equate to seeing thousands of dollars spent quickly.Inbound marketing usually does not reach as many people as television or radio audiences, but connects more with the target market. While traditional media marketing relies on reaching as many people as possible to produce a single digit percentage of respondents, inbound marketing aims at building a more loyal following, instead of a general following. Reaching followers through blogs and social media has a more personalized feel than traditional media.

Commercial Risks

In the late 1990s one of the reasons there was a “dotcom bust” was that many new internet companies thought they could create markets for their brands through buying radio and television time. Many of these companies attracted funding that helped pay for the advertising, but they eventually collapsed due to having poor business models that did not have clear revenue streams.

The lesson of the dotcom implosion helped steer internet companies toward more concrete business models. The collapse of hundreds of companies served as a reminder that markets cannot be created so quickly just by spending a lot of money on exposure. Part of marketing that remains true is that you cannot build a brand overnight regardless of the medium.

Print Advantages

In recent decades the number of newspapers and magazines have dwindled, but advertising rates have remained high. Ask yourself if advertising in a newspaper helps your cause in any way, knowing that most of your market gets its news online. Big ads – the expensive kind – work best in print, but the best deal when it comes to print is printing your own flyer and mass distributing it through various channels.

You can combine print with inbound marketing by offering printed materials to people who request them through your website. A big part of inbound marketing is offering free items that give people a chance to engage with your brand. You can use print to promote your website locally at stores that reflect your industry. Working with a printer is also helpful in getting your logo on various marketing items.

Avoiding Expensive Advertising

There’s a tendency for some business owners to blame sales declines on lack of advertising. But a business is much more than the product it advertises, which is why advertising does not always work. Mass advertising works when many factors have come together. Loyalty, brand awareness and reputation are just as important as the message being advertised.

It’s better to conserve resources and develop a business slowly than to try to jump start a business with expensive media advertising. By building a market with inbound marketing, a company can focus on developing a long term organic following.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Certified Partner with HubSpot and Google.

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