Effective Content Marketing [SKIL] Who cares? How can you tell?

Tourists do not come to New York, London or Paris for the animals, they come to shop and see shows

When you get down to bottom line results, all the writing, editing, drawing, promoting and selling comes down to: who cares? What is all the effort yielding? Are you making sales? Are you informing or influencing people? Are people commenting, contributing, correcting or even criticizing? For the most part, most of the writing and graphics designed for the internet is not effective. In the marketing world, this is bad news. A big part of ineffective marketing is in the quality and relevance. Quality is not an easy problem to solve. For the most part, high quality marketing content is created by efforts from product developers, marketers, feedback from the market (real potential customers) and channels (reps, resellers, field sales). The internet gives us the benefit of reaching customers directly, this is what we can do where print and broadcast simply can not. We have the ability to evoke feedback quickly and directly. The difficulty does not lie simply in the writing and editing. It is a bigger problem of coordinating messages, testing relevancy and clarity, improving the content and eventually tracking it back to the customer's response. Closing the communication loop is what we need to do. If nobody cares and they don't understand, it's like talking to the wall.

All Work and No Play: After the Design and AdWords

When first evaluating content creation, especially as an outsourced service, the process seems like "real work" / you are "getting it" (sarcastically saying) / Jean-François Millet- TheGleaners

This month I started looking for new "serious" customers. "Serious" customers are ones which not only need my services, but also actually benefit immediately. This may mean getting business right away (i.e. at Tikal Networks), or getting attention or a unique advantage over competitors (i.e. SolidRun). The process is simple: I contact a CEO or marketing director, they tell me what they need, I pitch an idea and sometimes write a short proposal or sample. Then we are off to the races. If the CEO is not sure how unique content, targeted at his market will help, they will usually ask the "hard questions". Which means, answering about the same questions every time (after 7 years this is normal), and showing some examples. Either this works or it doesn't. If the initial screening process works, then comes the real shock: "oh this is real work! I tried this before and it has not really worked for me!" This may sound sarcastic, but believe me, it is not.