Getting your tone of voice right is central to making the biggest possible impact with your content. The impact of your content marketing can be gauged by the quality of your story amplified by your tone of voice, as Doug Kessler, Co-Founder and Creative Director of Velocity Partners, explained in his presentation at Content Marketing World.Continue Reading
Author: David Drickhamer
David Drickhamer helps clients tell and share stories that engage today’s business executives and leaders. Like any good liberal arts major, he's flexible and open to new opportunities, but tends to specialize in developing thought leadership content focused on operational excellence, management, business transformation and innovation. You can follow him on Twitter @biznotboring.
By drickhamer published
November 13, 2014
10 Harmonious Tips for Managing Tone of Voice for Maximum Impact
By drickhamer published
November 30, 2012
How to Get Started with Benchmarking for Content Marketing
Most B2B marketers I know have a hard time keeping up with everything that’s thrown their way. Depending on the size of the company, they’re ultimately responsible for advertising, public relations, organizing customer events, writing and distributing press releases, editing case studies and white papers, and running the social media machine. Keeping up with competitors’ content marketing and thought leadership activities gets pushed pretty far down on their to-do list.
But it’s an essential effort, and here’s why: Failure to develop and maintain a comprehensive view of the content marketing and thought leadership activities in your key markets can lead to lackluster results from “me too” projects, wasted resources, abandoned initiatives, and squandered customer goodwill.
This post will show why content benchmarking is important and what it entails. I’ll go through how benchmarking knowledge can be used to create more engaging and effective content in my next post. Continue Reading
By drickhamer published
May 28, 2012
How to Launch an Industry Award Program that Increases Your Visibility and Credibility
Time for a little transparency: As readers may or may not be aware, this year CMI has introduced the CMI Orange Awards for content marketing agencies and brand marketers. The two new award programs will spotlight the top individual and team talent in our industry. (Obligatory exclamatory promotion: The deadline is June 15! Nominate yourself or your firm and enter today!)Continue Reading
By drickhamer published
November 4, 2011
5 Things Content Marketers Can Learn from a New Thought Leadership Platform
A few weeks ago, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) relaunched its online platform for thought leadership content, bcgperspectives.com. Content marketers can learn a lot from how the company handled its launch efforts. Take a look at some examples.Continue Reading
By drickhamer published
October 1, 2011
The 48-Hour Way to Create High Quality Content
Even if you’ve never been a reporter for your campus newspaper or have never edited copy and page proofs late into the night on a deadline, you can appreciate the intensity and focus (and coffee consumption) instilled by a press deadline. Longshot magazine harnesses that same intensity: crowdsourcing content to produce an entire 60+ page magazine and related podcasts, from topic announcement to final pages, in two days (in both digital and print editions).
Longshot was co-founded by Gizmodo’s Mat Honan, The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal, and GOOD magazine’s Sarah Rich. Their first effort that followed this “48-hour” model (which was produced under a since-redacted title that provoked the ire of CBS’s attorneys) won a 2010 Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism.Continue Reading
By drickhamer published
September 9, 2011
Creating Compelling (and Legal) Content in Financial, Healthcare and Other Regulated Industries
When he changed marketing jobs from a local bank to become Director of Digital Marketing at the Cleveland Clinic, Scott Linabarger went from a world where every piece of content—even minor word changes on the bank’s website—had to be reviewed by legal and compliance, to the Wild West where practically anyone could write and post an article on the world-renowned hospital system’s website.
That was a little too “loosey goosey” for Scott, as he noted yesterday in a late morning session at Content Marketing World 2011 in Cleveland. So he implemented some internal controls. Today there are still 200-plus contributors to the Clinic’s website and related digital media, but someone on his staff now reviews it all—for grammar if nothing else—before it’s posted.Continue Reading
By drickhamer published
September 7, 2011
10 Lessons for Creating a Content Factory: Live from Content Marketing World
Building a content factory requires the right attitude in addition to an effective system for generating authentic stories that focus on the problems of customers and clients. That’s how AJ Huisman (@AJHuisman), Marketing Director from Kennedy Van der Laan, a legal firm headquartered in Amsterdam, led off his presentation near the end of the first day of Content Marketing World 2011 in Cleveland.
