Content is the future of marketing says Anton Jansen van Rensburg. He looks at the pitfalls and solutions

More and more marketers, digital specialists and communicators are realising that content is the key to success. We’ve often heard content is king but with the growth of online campaigns it has become crystal clear that to be effective, a brand must disseminate valuable, compelling and relevant content consistently.

Moving away from the traditional view that publishing is the marketing of content in order to generate revenue, a relatively new thought is shared among the likes of Seth Godin, (author of Purple cow) and Joe Pulizzi (author of Get content, get customers) that marketers have had to adapt and are now in fact, the new publishers.

By creating and marketing content, companies create brand awareness and build loyalty. Even though they don’t generate revenue from the actual content, the revenue from the sale of products compensates for that.

Anton J van Rensburg of puruma business communications says, “With the vast social online realm and the technical and financial barriers to entry all but fallen away, the difference between owning a media channel (be it a blog, presenting webinars or having an online archive) versus renting one, in the traditional “media buying” sense of the word opens up a whole new galaxy of opportunities”. Forget about the tools and focus on the strategy and content marketing.

The marketers role has changed dramatically and content marketing is fast becoming one of the, if not, the fastest growing area of marketing in the world.

Brands that tell more stories, sell more products and the role of the marketer is to get your brand to a point where people are willing, wanting and waiting for your marketing material.

“In the States, roughly 69% of marketing professionals that have tackled a social media campaign feel that they were ineffective. Take into consideration that approximately 26% of budget is allocated to content creation and that South Africa can focus on content marketing right from the start and we can effectively avoid this confidence gap,’ says Anton who lists 10 reasons why your campaign is likely to fail, and gives suggestions to help you succeed.

1. There is a lack of organisational goals

You need a FB page because your competitor has one, you need to retain customers, you need to break into new markets are just going to detract from a focused approach. Decide on something – Choose one organisational goal and stick with it.

2. You are creating content about all and sundry

You are trying to position yourself as what? Decide what you want your company to be perceived as, your core messages, focus and go super niche! Position yourself as a trusted expert in your area of business.

3. Your content is about you, you, you

Deliver content that is relevant, informative and consistent. Make your audience want your marketing material because they see value in it.

4. Good enough is just not good enough anymore

You are no longer only competing with competitors but every content generator on the net. Cut through the clutter by being original in your content creation.

5. You lack a content calendar

If you were a buying agency you would have had one, if you were in marketing you would have had one, so why don’t you have a content creation calendar? A press release is written, FB status updates are done daily, tweets hourly prior to a quarterly event, all ending in a bi-annual webinar where your audience can download a whitepaper if they participate in your case study.

6. You are not leveraging off your employees’ content creation skills

Most of your employees are active online, involve them by creating an employee based blog, manage it properly and you might have struck gold.

7. You think that people will magically engage with you

Get involved. Listen and observe where people are talking about you, join in the conversation and don’t forget to take that conversation offline as well. Face-to-face has never lost its impact.

8. Your content has no owner

Appoint a spokesperson who people can associate with your brand. It makes your brand personal and more approachable.

9. You have no content creation experience

Not everyone is a wordsmith, if you feel that you don’t have the capability of crafting engaging content – hire a freelance journalist.

10. You have no C-level internal support

It doesn’t form part of their duties, they don’t have time and marketing should take care of it are usually the answers received from managers and CEOs but marketing and PR is just too important to be left to the marketing department.

Finally, Anton adds, “ROI has become very important however, very difficult to measure unless directly coupled to sales figures, which in some instances are difficult to do due to various external variables. If you can manage a campaign according to preset objectives, showing your value in terms of ROO (Return on objective) becomes much more valuable and measurable.

By: Gavin Moffat

The World Wide Web is vast, made up of billions of pages of information, some of them useful and relevant to your interests and many of them simply not fit for anyone’s consumption. So how do you find your way around the Web and get to the info that you need quickly and efficiently?

It’s simple – you just need to master your Google-Fu. There is a range of commands and modifiers built into search engines such Google, Yahoo and Bing that will help you to track down the information you need without trawling through a lot of stuff that you’re not interested in.

Phrase searches

By putting double quotes around a set of words, you will instruct the search engine to find all web pages that contain the exact phrase contained between the quotes. For example, typing in “Graeme Smith” will bring up pages that reference the cricketer. That can help you to search with a great deal of precision for the info you need.

Search within a site

Not every Web site has an accurate, user-friendly search engine, but most Web sites are indexed by Google. If you’re looking for the contact details for the Rosebank, branch of FNB for example, you could ask Google to search your bank’s Web site for the information. Simply type out the text enclosed in the square brackets: [contact details Rosebank Johannesburg site:

fnb.co.za]

Excluding terms

By putting a minus sign immediately before a word, you can ask the search engine to exclude pages that do not include the term from your search. For example, if you want to find out about ‘world’ and keep getting results that reference world maps, world music, and the World Series, you can enter your search as follows: [world -music -maps -series] (NOTE: no space between the minus and the word it refers to).

Fill in the blanks (*)

The * wildcard tells the search engine to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term and then find the best matches. Type in: [Jacob Zuma * speech], for example, and you’ll get results for ‘Jacob Zuma State of the Nation speech’ and ‘Jacob Zuma inauguration speech’, among others.

OR searches

If you want to find out about retail trade shows in 2010 and 2011, you could search for: [retail trade shows 2009 OR 2011]. The OR modifier must be in capital letters). That will give results for both years.

Define terms

Have you come across a piece of jargon you don’t understand? If you want a definition of a word, you can use the define: modifier. For example, if you want to know what a firewall is, you would simply type in the phrase in square brackets: [define: firewall].

Closing words

To get the best search results, be as simple, precise and descriptive as you can when you’re inputting information into the search engine. Focused searches that use the modifiers above can be real time savers and help you to make the very best of what the Internet has to offer you.

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@ingridlotze in a panel discussion with @art2gee and @MichBranco on Media Matters on SABC 3, Saturday, 4 December 2010

by Gavin Moffat

Keeping tabs of all your customers and prospects is a tough task – it’s hard enough simply to identity them all and build up an accurate database of their contact details. But talking to customers in a personalised manner using the right communication channels and mechanisms is critical to the success of any business that wants to grow and retain its customer base.

So how do you go about it? To put it simply, you need to be out there in the real and virtual worlds talking to your customers wherever they are. I highlighted one example of this in my column last month – setting up a Web site. But there are other basics to cover – setting up a Google Maps listing, ensuring that your business is listed in all relevant online and local directories, perhaps even advertising online.

The right place to start, perhaps, is to figure out where your customers are and what communications tools and media they’re using every day. Before throwing your time at setting up and maintaining a Facebook page, ask your customers if they use Facebook and whether they’d value your presence there. For example, set up a poll on your Web site, ask customers in-store or send an email survey out.

This being South Africa, just about everyone has a cellphone, and that will probably apply to your customers. Why not ask them for permission to interact with them using SMS messaging? They would probably be happy to hear from you from time to time, provided that you don’t abuse the privilege – only send your messages to people who have given you permission to do so.

Perhaps most importantly, make sure that your messages of your value to the customer – for example, SMS is a perfect way to let customers know that a long-awaited item is in stock again or that you’re having a clearance sale with some great bargains on offer.

Keeping in touch with your customers via SMS is both easy and relatively inexpensive. There are a number of platforms to use and companies that offer services. I have used www.bulksms.co.za for a while now and find their application to be very useful for sending reminders to customers and media before events.

These communications are still fairly one-sided – you are pushing information to your customers in the hope that they will get it, consume it, and take an action that benefits your business. But SMS does offer you a flexible, immediate and reliable way of talking to many people.So my big tip for the day is ‘use SMS’? Well, yes and no. SMS is great communications tool for South African businesses, but like Facebook, email and all the other channels at your disposal, it is just a tool.

The message matters as much as the medium. You need to look at your customers, understand them, and then talk to them in their language in the right place and at the right time. Then you’ll find that talking to your customers will help you forge closer relationships with them that result in better business results for you.

I’m fortunate enough to be involved in the industry so many of these are known to me, however when my friend asked what RAM was I had an ‘aha’ moment and thought why not spread the word and share what I know. Below are a few TLA’s (three letter acronyms) explained, we have tired to take the confusion out of a few ICT terms.

LCD – liquid crystal display this is simply a thin, flat panel that uses liquid crystal cells that change reflectivity in an applied electric field. It can be used to display text, images, and moving pictures. Its uses include monitors for computers, televisions, and instrument panels to mention just a few.

LED light-emitting diode, this one is a little harder to explain but here goes: – it is a semiconductor light source. WOW – and what is that??? This semiconductor or diode allows current/electricity to travel in one direction only. When a current/electricity is run through the diode it emits photons, “units” of light.

RAM Random-access memory is a type of computer information/data storage that provides much faster access than your Hard Disk Drive. It allows stored information to be accessed in any order (i.e., at random). Which, trust me, makes your life so much easier. You want to be able to access Facebook, your Outlook quickly, check figures in a spreadsheet while you write a letter to your client. RAM allows all of this to happen. So you can retrieve any piece of data constantly regardless of its physical location and whether or not it is related to the previous piece of data.

HDD Hard disk drive, by the book this means a computer device which stores digitally encoded data??? Hmm, ok so in other words, the mother load, the all important hub, and where everything you do on your computer gets translated into 0100011101010101 – computer speak.

GB Gigabyte, a unit of information used. It is important to know how many your computer has, because it will let you know what your computer’s storage capacity is and how fast and powerful your computer is. More GB is better. Remember RAM and HDD are different types of memory; both will have a GB capacity. You need more HDD than RAM.

CPU Central Processing Unit or the processor is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, and is the primary element carrying out the computer’s functions. Often in my frustration I blame my computer, when actually it is just following a command – your command. The processor reads the computer speak 0101010100001101001010, and translates into what you see on the screen.

App Application this is a program or group of programs designed for you – the end-user. Applications software (also called end-user programs) includes database programs, word processors, and spreadsheets. They provide many of the functions you use everyday.

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By Gavin Moffat

As a small to medium sized business, your technology budget is precious. You can’t afford to squander money on solutions that don’t deliver real business benefit – and in the middle of protracted downturn, you’re probably more careful than ever about how you spend your money.

Yet there is a wealth of solutions that could enhance your business. So how does one go about choosing them? By remembering that technology is only truly useful to your business if it allows you to increase your revenues or decrease your costs. The worth of any technology to your business should be benchmarked against those goals.

No longer should you be seduced into buying a solution just because it’s new or to keep up with the Joneses – any solution you acquire must be measured against a clear business objective. Smaller businesses should probably take care not to buy into technologies too early in the hype cycle, but wait for them to offer tangible benefit. At the same time, you shouldn’t be left behind by technologies that could make a difference for your business. Keeping that in mind, what are the trends to watch for in 2010?

One element of your business that you should certainly be looking at is your online presence. According to the latest statistics from respected research firm World Wide Worx, more than 10% of South Africans are now online (some 5 million) and the number of connected people can be expected to double over the next five years.

Falling data costs (a gigabyte of ADSL data costs far less than it did just a year ago) means that your customers will do more online in the year to come and that you can do more online as well.

You don’t necessarily need to be setting up a major electronic commerce portal – that depends on the business you’re in – but you should be looking at what people are saying about your business using social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook and on customer service sites like HelloPeter. It’s an easy way to keep tabs on what your customers are saying and to respond to them, and the only cost is a little time.

 In addition, you should also try to set up a web site if you don’t already have one and ensure that it’s up to date if you do. Thanks to innovations like Google AdWords, the online world also offers you some economical options for advertising.

Another important technology for the year ahead is mobile communications. Smartphones are finally at a point where they are easy to use and offer decent battery life; what’s more, data costs have fallen to a point where they are affordable. There is no reason for your managers and salespeople not to have email and calendar access wherever they go – this is a big potential money-saver since your employees can all use your time more efficiently.

They don’t need to come to the office to check email between appointments, for example. Receiving an email in a timely manner while you’re away from the office could sometimes spell the difference between closing a deal or not. It’s the sort of technology that is ideal for an SME – cheap and practical.

The world of technology is constantly changing and evolving, but the basic business principles remain the same. Choose technologies that are simple, affordable and have provable business benefits and you’ll reap a real return on investment from them without breaking the bank.