Content Marketing Journal

While you’re enjoying the beach or a barbecue this 4th of July weekend, take a few minutes to ponder how effective content marketing can make you independent of the old-fashioned way of doing things.

Here’s the tasty topics menu from which to choose:

* How to create effective elevator speech to drive your content marketing

* Using content marketing to survive the recession

* Low cost research as killer weapon

* Making an eBook a core component of your content marketing strategy

* Become your customers’ online content concierge

* Why your blog is your most important social media tool

Read on to see the 6 most popular articles that your fellow content marketers voted for with their visits

1. How To Create the All-ImportantElevator Speech For Your Presentations and for Your Content Marketing    
   It is so hard, but so important to explain what it is that you do and how it will benefit the person to whom you are communicating. Not at length.  But so concisely that it can be communicated in less time than it takes an elevator to go up a few floors. And, so compellingly that your listener will remember and repeat it to others.
   Actually, Nick Morgan is even more precise than this.  He says your elevator speech must be a single sentence. Read more.
   
2. Ways Content Marketing Can Help You Survive the Recession
   Crank up your communications now.  Don’t dial back your efforts.
   The knee-jerk reaction for most companies when faced with the recession is to reduce their marketing efforts. However, decades of research show that those who maintain or increase their marketing will blow past their peers once the recession is over. Read more.
   

3. Why You Should Use Low Cost Research as a Killer Content Marketing Weapon
   First, use it to understand your buyers and their needs. Then use the results to prove your credibility in the market.
   Content marketers realize that understanding what is most important to your current and prospective customers is vital to your success as an organization.  You cannot possibly connect with your customers without that understanding. Read more.

4. Five Reasons an e-Book Should Be a Core Component Of Your Content Marketing Strategy
   Of course, I’m assuming that you already have a website and are probably doing some business blogging.  You may also do a regular eNewsletter to inform your customers and prospects about the great content you have created recently online.  Your next step is to create an e-book that targets your ideal customers. Read more.

5. Want to Attract and Retain Great Customers? Become Their Online Content Concierge!Think of yourself as the ultimate knowledge resource like those concierges serving fine  hotels such as the Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons—But Available 24/7.
   When you find yourself in a new town but are blessed to be staying in a hotel with a knowledgeable and caring concierge, you’ve got it made. When your customers come to your website, they are similarly looking to you to solve their problems.  If you can succeed at providing plenty of substantive information that addresses their biggest problems, you are beginning to play the role of content concierge in their lives. Read more.

6. 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Is Your Most Important Social Media Tool
   It’s much more powerful than those young whippersnappers–Twitter and Facebook
   Thanks to free or inexpensive blogging tools, any individual can be on the same technological footing as the New York Times or Business Week.  That may seem relatively obvious to many of you.  What I think is less obvious is that your blog is every bit as much a social media tool as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace.  In fact, I believe that a blog is the most important social media weapon in your arsenal. Read more.

Enjoy.

And have a wonderfully, independent and freedom-rich 4th of July!