Custom Publishing

Do you know what content marketing practices work best? What challenges firms are facing? How well they’re performing?

Discover the answers by taking our brief survey, B2B Content Marketing: Practices, Challenges, Performance. You’ll receive the complete results – free.

Take the survey now: http://bit.ly/B2B-Content

Sponsored by the Philadelphia Chapter of the Business Marketing Association and conducted by Dance Communications, the survey is designed to identify current content marketing practices that have proven successful for high-performing marketing organizations.

As a thank you for your time and effort, you will receive a complete copy of the survey results which can be used to:

• Benchmark your organization against others
• Determine what distinguishes high-performing organizations from low-performers
• Build your business case to justify the value of content marketing to senior management.

The survey should take you less than 10 minutes to complete and all responses will be strictly confidential. The survey will close on Friday, November 19.

Please click the url below to begin the survey. If you have any issues, please cut and paste this url into your browser:

• http://bit.ly/B2B-Content

Thank you in advance for contributing to this research.

Traci Browne
President, Business Marketing Association-Philadelphia

Jim Pennypacker
President, Dance Communications

If you experience technical difficulties accessing or submitting the survey please contact Jim Pennypacker at 610.883.7988 or jpennypacker@dancecommunications.com

You don’t engage in social media activities for the fun of it (although it can be fun). You’re in business, and you have business goals to meet. You think that using social media will help you meet those goals — like making money — but how. You need a clearly defined social media strategy. Strategic clarity will guide you in meeting those goals. Without clarity, your social media activities become scattershot and vague. They lack energy because they lack focus.

Focus on your social media goals

Why are you engaging in social media? To build relationships, to position your company as a thought leader, to better understand your customers’ needs, to build credibility through word of mouth, for direct sales. Whatever your goals, you need to clearly understand them and focus your content on helping you reach those goals. Always ask yourself, what action do we need potential customers to take to help us meet our goals?

Match your content to your audience

Who is your audience. Right now. In the particular social media channel you’re using. Are they people who don’t know you? Show them that you have insights about industry trends. Offer original research, link to other highly regarded sources of information. Are they prospects who know your brand but don’t know that you have a solution to their problem? Use customer stories that demonstrate that you’ve solved similar problems for others. Are they almost ready to buy but aren’t sure who to buy from? Use content that compares you to your competitors or content that implies a recommendation. Include case studies and examples of how your ideas were applied successfully.

Make it clear — it’s not about you!

When considering your content, your audience is asking themselves one question: Why should I care? They are only engaging with you because they believe there’s something in it for them. You need to make it clear that you appreciate that, and that your content has been created specifically because it has something in it for them.

For more information

• Social Media Content: 10 Ways to Energize Your Conversation
• Social Media Examiner: Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
• Survey of B2B Buyers’ Use of Social Media

There are two general types of e-books, each with its own purpose. The first is the e-book that was originally a printed book that has been converted to an e-book (see ebooks.com for thousands of examples). These books are usually 100-400 pages long, almost all words, with minimal design — you know, a book. They are expected to be read starting at the beginning and continuing, reading page after page, until you’ve reached the end. These books are usually produced by publishers and made available for sale, just like traditional books only online. They are usually Adobe Acrobat files or in proprietary formats for e-reading devices like the Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, and others.

The other e-book type is primarily used for marketing, especially thought leadership marketing or content marketing. They are usually 24-60 pages long (some are longer, some shorter). They are designed specifically to be e-books. By that I mean they are designed to be read online. They often have extensive graphics, including photos, illustrations, graphs, sidebars, callouts, a broad range of type sizes. This type of e-book is often read out of order — these books are often reference tools with discrete sections that address specific topics of interest to the reader. The e-books are usually Adobe Acrobat files since the reader, like the e-book, is free. The following are a few bits of advice for creating a well-designed, effective marketing ebook:

• Make it clear to the reader up front what value they’ll get in reading the e-book — and then deliver.
• Write your e-book in chunks — short chapters, short paragraphs, bulleted lists, lots of subheads. This makes it much easier to read online. The e-book examples below demonstrate this perfectly.
• Design the e-book for online reading (most people read online rather than printing ebooks, even long ones). That means thinking about how the reader will see the book on their screen — consider publishing the book landscape. And make your type larger than you would in print.
• Use fonts that are optimized for online reading, particularly for smaller type. For sans-serif faces I like Avenir, Calibri, Franklin Gothic, Frutiger, ITC Kabel, Stone Sans, Transport, Trebuchet, Universe, Verdana. For serif faces I like Berling, Cambria, ITC Charter, Constantia, Georgia, Serifa, Stone Serif, Trump Mediaeval, Utopia. For a great source of fonts, check out myfonts.com.
• Use consistent styles throughout the book to guide the reader. For example, the body text should look the same throughout the book. All titles should be the same font type, size, color — the same goes for subheads, callouts, captions, etc. Roger Parker offers great basic design advice in 14 Biggest e-Book Design Mistakes.
• It’s difficult to read a line of type that is much longer than 4”, so design your ebook accordingly. If you use multiple columns, don’t have the text at the bottom of the first column continue at the top of the second column on the same page, causing the reader to scroll. Use white space or graphics to keep the line width narrow.
• Take advantage of the “e” aspect of e-books – use bookmarks, links, and other devices to make it easier for the reader to navigate throughout the book (think of the e-book as a website).
• Create a table of contents and use page numbers so the reader knows where they are at all times. Provide a link to the contents page on all other pages.
• Optimize your Adobe Acrobat-based ebook for search engines — yes, search engines will analyze your PDF files. How to do it is too complicated for this blog, but Galen De Young wrote a helpful, succinct blog offering 17 Strategies for Optimizing Your PDFs that I recommend you read.
• You want to use your e-book to engage your reader, so you might want to consider something unusual to connect with them. Create a form or survey for them to complete and send to you — with a simple click of the mouse. Add music, animation, video.

The e-book provides writers and designers new opportunities to creatively engage their reader. Take advantage of those opportunities. There are thousands of free e-books available online for you to compare (although many, if not most, are poorly written and designed). Three of my favorites are The eBook eBook by Jonathan Kranz and designed by Ciano Design, MarketTech 08 by Dana VanDen Heuvel, and Lost Control of Your Marketing by David Meerman Scott. If you have favorites, let us know.