Who hath become the new King of Content?

How good are you at playing the marketing game of poker? Well, there’s only so much bluffing you can do before you need some pretty good cards. Most poker players would agree that a Royal Flush is a good hand, right? For those that don’t play, that’s an ace, king, queen, jack and ten. For inbound marketers, it’s important to know how your “hand” is best played online, and in the changing stream of strategies and tactics — “Content” is no longer King. Ace? Nope. I place it now as Queen in a Royal Flush of successful online marketing tactics — I’ll tell precisely why, and what the higher cards are, in this post.

“You must unlearn what you have learned” – Yoda

Four reasons why Content is King no longer:

• Content is not social, and therefore does not engage prospects, person to person
• Content does not close sales in B2B — you need real people to do that
• Content is a static part of the “Connection Marketing” Cycle
• Visitor Behavior trumps Content. When you are interested in increasing conversions, often copy, and design must be changed based on what visitors actually do (or don’t do).

Above, you should get a clue about what the new “King” is in your hand. It’s Connection. That is, where one real person, actively engages another person. In business, the other person should be a prospect or client. Content can prompt this exchange, but not make it happen. Content doesn’t sell — people do, and people like to buy from other people they know. I’ve seen a lot of content marketers making the mistake of simply redistributing content automatically on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN and other Social Media sites, with no other connection efforts at all. This is like leaving your tradeshow booth unmanned, and hoping your literature will make the sale.  Think authentic connection, not automated connection. Also, content requires optimizing to increase sales via testing, tweaking, analytics review… then repeat — a cycle of continual improvement.

The auto content distribution tactic does increase visibility, but it makes no real and lasting connections with real warm people. Think social. That’s the key — real people, make real connections. You’ve got to have a presence… a personality.

TIP: How do you build in this connection work in an efficient, way for your sales team? One idea…CRM — Batchbook, is an interesting new solution that factors in Twitter and other social media for your sales team for Small to Medium sized Businesses.

So, if Connection is King, and Content is now Queen (a pretty good royal marriage), then what are the other cards in your hand?

• King = Connection — as in Social Media plus Business Blog.  Isn’t “content” what shows up on Social locations like Twitter?  Yup.  But I’m not talking about reading material.  I’m talking about when real live people are present in real time and get to know each other.  That’s a connection.
• Queen = Content Marketing — Get useful content for your audience online & increase visibility using SEO, and other tactics
• Jack = Conversions — as in “CRO”, conversion rate optimization, and adjust content based on Visitor Behavior.
• 10 = Conversation (lead nurturing) — the dialog and negotiations that lead to sales.  Aren’t sales most important to the life of a business?  Yes.  Then why isn’t Conversation top?  Because you need Connection and Content first — the King and Queen dance together — and you need optimize what you’re doing in order to Convert more prospects into the Conversation phase.  The Royals work together to do that.  There are 10 success points to Conversation… watch for them in a forthcoming post.

Now that’s a pretty good hand to play, partner. The new King, “Connection” trumps content here because you can have the best Content in the World, but no connection – no sales. And, where’s your ace? Ah ha. Good question. Well just like a poker game has several rounds before you can call it an evening, we’re going to reserve the Ace for a symbol of that process: deal, play, learn, modify, play the next hand — repeat. In one word, the Ace is your Cycle, as in Connection Cycle Marketing – CCM. I’ll be talking more about CCM in upcoming posts.

Why is the Cycle most important of all? Well aside from the fact that the days of “brochure” websites are over, if you want to actively find new customers online, here are three reasons with which I’ll conclude.

3 Reasons why the Connection Marketing Cycle is your Ace

• Marketing is now Publishing, and Publishing is sales — all good sales people know there’s a cycle to selling.
• For best ROI, you need to always be testing and adjusting your content, and SMM strategies and tactics
• The game is constantly changing — Twitter came out of nowhere, Google search is evolving with lead capture built in, and the Google “Wave” is yet another game changing technology. This means you need to continually review, adapt, and cycle around again.

So be prepared to continually unlearn what you have learned, as Yoda says, then apply the new thinking to the next round of your CCM.

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What is your Video Strategy? Video Strategy? Yes… get ready for it. I too held off, but WebFadds just received a new client as a result of my first video posted on YouTube in January.  I mentioned this WordPress 2.7 with conversion tip video in an earlier edition, but some of you said the video was not permitted in your email — so here’s a direct link: WordPress 2.7 Introduction – Using WordPress as Your CMS.

Whether you’re a service provider, or selling products… video is becoming a key component of good content. But, will sales result from any video you place on your site? Jon Quarto-vonTivadar, writes how that is NOT the case in his article: “Video Views Up, When Will Sales Follow?” Take a look — he has good advice.  And here’s a series of articles about producing videos.

The Most Important C’s of Successful Online Marketing: A while back, I wrote an article on the five C’s that contribute to your success online: Content, Community, Conversation, Connection, and Conversions. Note that at the original writing the final word was Convergence, though I am updating this strategy to change that to Conversions, for the best focus, from a business perspective. Which of the “C’s” are most important?

Content. Everything else is secondary.
Conversions. Everything else — except Content — is secondary.

Get Content… and you'll Get Customers.

What about the other three C’s? They’re important too, because even in these times of new technology… people will still buy from those they know. But they’re not primary.   Because you can chat people up and plant links here and there back to your site, doesn’t mean you’ll be successful… even if your Google pagerank increases. Unless you have persuasive content, and continually focus on improving your conversion rates, all else is just busy work with no pay off.

And yet, I often see many requests for SEO work, or social network linking projects with little consideration toward first making your Content compelling, on target, and persuasive — a discipline my colleagues Newt Barrett and Joe Pulizzi write about in a new book about, “Content Marketing.” You should get their book – Get Content, Get Customers.

I see even fewer marketing project proposals written with an eye toward Conversions. Why?

I’ll close with some interesting results from our LinkedIn poll on “How well does your website convert visitors to leads or customers?“  which point to the answer to that question:

Results by Job Function…

This result shows that some creatives actually focus on conversions — those are the ones you want to hire, because they begin with the end in mind (your strategic business goals).  Marketing types, so far in this poll, seem focused on sales (yellow), but not completely clear on the concept of conversions — they do not understand how “optimizing” (blue) landing pages (adding your value proposition, for example), can increase your conversions .

So… how well is your site converting? Stop by at LinkedIn and take the poll… and if you’d like to focus on, and increase your conversions — give me a call.