Content Creation: Is it All in the Name?

Whether you’re scrolling through Facebook, reading tweets on Twitter, perusing the latest update on your favorite blog, or enjoying a delightful book on a Saturday morning, you are consuming content. We here at SJC are all about content creation. However, according to Scott MacFarland, it might be time for a re-brand of that phrase. Could this be the case?

MacFarland gives us some examples of content: “telling a story, writing, editing, 18459566_s (1)designing, shooting photos, video, writing a blog, posting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, creating audio, music, a voiceover, creating advertising for the online and offline world.” This is only the beginning of what could be defined as content creation. Content is words, pictures or videos and each aspect that goes into those things.

Is content selling or does it sell something else? It appears that it is doing both. Producing compelling content is a way to sell this content itself. The strategic use of content can be used to sell certain products. The former is a newspaper article or a TV commercial; those are just a couple of examples. However, the latter is something like a book review or the blog posts we write, or even the TV commercials that are used to sell products.

These are things that create the very fabric of the world that surrounds us. How can we even begin to dive into changing the words, “content creation”? Changing those words might actually change the finished content, which might have a devastating effect on what we create content for.

At the very end of MacFarland’s article he mentions that it was a complete failure to even suggest re-branding content creation. But what are your thoughts? If you could re-brand content creation, how would you change it?

Since content creation is what Susan J. Campbell Copywriting Solutions does, we like to say, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet…” and mention that even if it does get a re-branding, we’re here to help you!

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Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

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Marketing Lessons From Duck Dynasty

We are all very much aware of the Duck Dynasty and Phil Robertson deal.Duck Dynasty 1 However, have you thought about what kind of marketing lessons we can glean from this story?

The cliché saying, “there’s always two sides to the story” doesn’t really apply in this situation and here’s why: There are four sides to this story. The first is obvious, Phil’s story. The second and third are A&E and their advertisers. The fourth and final side is that of the Duck Dynasty fans. Let’s take a look at some things that we can learn from each of these stories.

Phil’s Story:

Obviously, Phil has created his own brand over the years. He is who he is and has never been ashamed of that fact. It is important to remember to take the time and energy needed to create a quality brand. This means building out a brand strategy and combining that with a solid marketing strategy, which might (and probably will) include a social media strategy as well. While it could be debated that Phil’s words came across as very dogmatic and harsh, his message was consistent with his brand. Maintaining consistency throughout all of your messaging is important to building your brand.

A&E’s Story:

A&E is in a unique situation. Their target market is the advertisers and viewers, which is vastly different than the typical target market situation. A&E has to consistently take into consideration the necessary steps to keep their advertisers happy. In this particular situation, A&E felt that a formal and public response was needed to keep the majority of their sponsors. While it seems A&E still has most of their advertisers, what about their viewers – that other half of their target market. An article by Michael Garland mentions that A&E didn’t realize that Duck Dynasty was going to be such a huge success. They originally produced the show so people would “laugh at the backward rednecks.” When this didn’t happen, A&E seemed to get a little uncomfortable. This provides a great lesson that it is necessary to understand what your entire target market is looking for. Do you recall the New Coke Debacle of 1985?

Advertisers/Sponsors’ Story:

This part goes back to branding as well. The brands that support A&E, through their buying of commercial time, sit in a unique position. They must maintain their branding; they must decide what messages they are going to send. Skyjacker Suspensions came out in support of Phil, stating that it was an easy choice, because they are a Christian-based company. The first sentence in their About Us section states, “At Skyjacker, we believe our relationship with Jesus Christ has been the driving force in the success of our company.” This is a great example of a company sticking to the foundations of their brand in all decisions they make.

The Duck Dynasty Fan’s Story:

How are they responding to this entire situation? It’s important to keep in mind that fans and followers will always have the opportunity to respond. Just take a minute to reflect on your Facebook newsfeed in the hours after the story was released. Your Twitter was probably blowing up with tweets about Phil, Duck Dynasty, A&E, and all sorts of other things that were tied to this. A quick Google search for “Duck Dynasty response blog” will provide you with several blog posts, opinion articles, and news articles regarding the response to Phil’s remarks. We need to remember that our messaging and our branding does matter to our audiences. They will find a way to respond, even if we’re not invited to the conversation.

It is hard to always send the right message. It’s even harder to try and make everyone happy with your branding choices. SJC is here to understand your target market and create messages that work the best with the brand you want to create.

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Monday Morning Coffee: Merry Christmas From Our Team to You

Merry Christmas 1It’s that time of year again. You know, the only time it’s really fun to get mail because everyone is sending Christmas letters and you get to catch up on what family and friends have been doing all year. Who can forget those letters from Great Aunt Kathy, giving an update of her year by way of a “Christmas” acrostic poem? This year, Susan J. Campbell Copywriting Solutions is happy to share 2013’s highlights with you. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, but what’s more, we’re thrilled for our clients and the exciting things that are happening in their businesses since opening their marketing avenues with us.

What would our Christmas letter look like?

We’d probably brag about all of the places we’ve traveled, well virtually travelled.

Considering that we help our clients spread the word about their services all over the country, we’ve technically traveled all over this year. Throughout the U.S. and even across the world, SJC clients are assisted by a team of professionals working together to develop brand and marketing strategies, social media management and online content creation. Whether it’s a blog, article, brochure, news release, case study, white paper, social media management or comprehensive marketing campaign, we have sent our clients right where they need to be to reach their target audience.

We would boast about our jobs.

And who could blame us? Not only do we get the pleasure of working with like-minded, talented people, we all have a lot in common. We love to talk. We love to write. We love to bounce ideas off of each other in a flurry of brainstorming. We all love working for a company that puts family first and we all share a love of coffee. Can you see why we love coming to work? Working for a company who saw a 700 percent growth this year has its perks.

We would talk about the highlights of our year.

Experience and expertise in the fields of marketing, copywriting and social media is how SJC has helped several nonprofits and small businesses enhance their services, increase their bottom line and reach their goals. We even had the pleasure of adding three new faces to our team this year. Alisha Corbett, the wearer of many hats, including editorial calendar extraordinaire and the one who schedules our social media posts, keeps us organized. Rebekah Young came on board to take our clients’ social media presence to a whole new level, specializing in engagement and Jen Herron joined our team to help us expand our reach to new regions and lend her marketing talents wherever she can. They join the rest of our team including our creative marketing specialist, project coordinator, designer, writers and support staff  to work together to accomplish all that we did this year.

Like every great Christmas card, we would probably share photos of our happiest moments. You could expect to see us at our laptops, typing away about a new client we are excited about or sending emails regarding brand strategies, directory articles and keyword analysis. We also find time to help pet lovers show off their outstanding fur pals and challenge home decor enthusiasts to share their creations. We might even be brainstorming ways for us to eat cupcakes during our weekly team meetings and call it “research.”

Our Christmas card would end with a sincere message about how much we love what we do and what an amazing year 2013 has been for Susan J Campbell Copywriting Solutions, LCC. We love writing, sharing and planning so that our clients can do what they do best: shine.

Let us be a part of your 2014. Call Susan J. Campbell Copywriting Solutions today to see how we can help take your nonprofit organization or small business further in the year ahead.

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Social Media Marketing: 2014 Predictions For the New Year

Marketing professionals are always looking for ways to reach out to new consumers and social media is an extremely popular choice in achieving this. What can we expect in social media marketing in the new year?

More brands will put as much emphasis on their social media presence as they do on their corporate website. Coca-Cola went as far to say that the corporate website is dead. Why? Because most corporate websites don’t offer a place for interaction, which is what social media is all about. People have come to expect interaction online and corporate websites historically have not done this. Social Social Media Marketing 2media marketing will take a front seat.

Managing the social media presence is sometimes a total nightmare, but brands need to be daring enough to generate some buzz online and social media is the fastest, most efficient place to do that. The people behind the brand need to show that they’re interested in the product through social media, but hopefully not as much as the Taco Bell employee who posted a photo on Facebook depicting him licking a customer’s taco.

Marketers know that people today are completely tethered to their mobile devices, which is what prompted some of them to invest time and money in building a native app. The problem many of these brands have discovered is that getting them noticed among the hundreds of thousands of other apps is difficult. So is updating them and fixing bugs. Marketers will instead put more effort into mobile ad products on social media channels. Perhaps even Twitter will offer up more diverse mobile sponsored products?

It’s not all about Facebook, either. Teenagers are not using Facebook as much as they once did. Now, they’ve got Twitter, Instagram, Vine and Tumblr to visit. In 2014, marketers will continue to expand their view and invest more social media marketing time on sites across many platforms.

Susan J. Campbell Copywriting Solutions is ready to help you develop a social media marketing plan for 2014. Give us a call today to see how we can help get your company noticed.

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Prevent Content Fade Out

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Content Creation That Stands Out in the Crowd

When you log on to your social media feeds, do you sometimes feel like you are seeing the same things over and over again? Do you notice how the same ads on the side of a website don’t register in your brain after seeing them more than once? That’s because we are all looking for something new and exciting. How can you stay unique and relevant when writing about your own product?

Consider these tips in your content creation process to produce material that is original and thought provoking.

1. Write about what moves you

Who can forget those moving Kleenex commercials where they invite people to Kleenex 1sit down on a couch in the middle of town and tell their stories? In no time at all, complete strangers were bonding over shared experiences, loss and support. Cue the Kleenex, the perfect tissue to wipe away your tears. “Let it out” they said. And people did. If the content in your advertisements, blog posts and website moves you, chances are it will strike a chord with your audience as well, connecting everyone on a personal level.

2. Let your personality shine

When you talk about your company, pretend you are in a room full of your closest friends and relatives. Talk as if they’ve known you for years and you’ll instantly create a conversational atmosphere that encourages back and forth discussion and feedback. Unless your family includes 10 brothers and sisters and even more uncles and cousins; in which case you might want to take turns raising hands.

3. Collaborate with like-minded people in your industry

In your content creation process, you may find yourself with writer’s block. Have no fear, because with a little research, you’ll easily find online discussions in your field of work or you can read blogs written by fellow business owners in your industry. You don’t have to do exactly what everyone else is doing, but chances are you’ll have an opinion or story that you can build off of theirs.

The easiest way to generate content that is creative and unique is to write about what you know. At Susan J. Campbell Copywriting Solutions, we know you’re the experts and we want to help you shine by listening to your stories and creating content for your marketing strategies that speak to your target audiences.

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LinkedIn Looks to Boost Content Marketing

Wanting to do more content marketing on LinkedIn? Now you can as the site is opening up to more granular updates on company pages.

LinkedIn 2LinkedIn has more than 3 million company pages at the moment, but experimented in a pilot program with showcase pages for Adobe, Cisco, HP and Microsoft. Instead of just offering information about the company and job posting, these companies were able to post more updates about their various products.

Perhaps you’ve seen Microsoft’s company page for its Office product? The page offers a product overview with descriptions of five aspects of what the software will do as well as an informational video. Cisco Security also has a page in the pilot program for its TRAC Fahrenheit product. The page included pictures and links to further information about the product.

The changes made by LinkedIn will allow marketers to use the content as
sponsored updates that will appear between the updates from users’ contacts and posts by people/businesses they follow. Some industry experts believe this
could be LinkedIn’s attempt to boost its advertising revenue, which was $74.9 million in the second quarter of 2013. Sponsored updates are LinkedIn’s rendition of native ads, which appear in users’ news feeds.

Marketers could be enticed to try out paid promotion if they’re already
accustomed to creating more content and attracting more followers. LinkedIn
wants to grow its ad business by having brands promote their white papers and
links to the content that LinkedIn is already publishing on their company pages. Sponsored updates have been available since July.

This represents quite a shift for LinkedIn, which has led the company’s CEO to
contend that they’re in a transition period currently. It’s no longer a site for simple business networking and dropping resumes – it’s becoming a more
powerful tool for marketers. If you are looking to boost your content marketing
on LinkedIn contact Susan J. Campbell Copywriting Solutions, we can help you do just that.

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Monday Morning Coffee: Congratulations to Our Own LuAnn Cadden on Her New Book

LuAnn Cadden MMC 1A great writer can find a great story anywhere – even hidden behind the green mile marker signs that point to journeys taken long ago, dotting the long stretches of highway that many of us may pass without a second thought.

For anyone who has traveled from Chicago to St. Louis, you know that the I-55 could be described very simply as rather flat and uneventful. The goal of our own SJC team member LuAnn Cadden and Dr. Ted Cable is to change that perception with their new book, “Traveling through Illinois: Stories of I-55 Landmarks & Landscapes between Chicago & St. Louis.”

LuAnn moved to St. Joseph in 1996, but previously spent a number of years traveling on the I-55 Highway. Having a natural interest in landscapes, cultural history, tourism and stories about the way things used to be led her to ponder about the oddities along the way.

Today, the result of her questions about this stretch of highway is now your opportunity to learn about why Steven Spielberg visited Waggoner, Illinois. You will get the story behind the St. Paul Lutheran’s neon cross, and so many other interesting things that happened in the towns you pass as you’re cruising to your next destination.

Don’t travel on I-55 very often? Don’t worry – LuAnn and Dr. Cable bring their creative energy and curiosity to life in another book about I-70, “Driving across Missouri: A Guide to I-70.” Written in 2010, they made stories of Native Americans, French explorers, and German settlers come to life. You’ll never see this stretch of road the same way again. The book has been featured in the Denver Post, the Walt Bodine Show and on National Public Radio, among other sources.

About LuAnn Cadden:  LuAnn has been sharing her insights and writing talent with the SJC team for nearly three years, and we are proud to have her as a member of our team. Before coming to our team, she worked as a professional naturalist for the Missouri Department of Conservation where she wrote magazine and research journal articles, as well as interpretive trail guides, and several other duties related to giving people new insights about the world around them. This provided some of the inspiration to work on the two books she and Cable published. She is also active in the historic Lovers Lane Neighborhood Association and as a school volunteer and a dedicated (and often-requested) substitute teacher.

LuAnn and Dr. Cable hope that can take a little time to enjoy these stories while you’re driving from Chicago to St. Louis, or from St. Louis to Kansas City. On a deeper level, our team at Susan J. Campbell Copywriting Solutions appreciates and honors this belief that in everything is a story — and that being curious leads to some pretty amazing discoveries.

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A Few Words About Writing a Successful Blog

Blog 13Blogging is a great way to share important business information and connect with customers.  Writing a successful blog includes keeping your audience a priority. Here are a few tips that can help you write successful blogs for your market:

1. Pick your audience
You need to identify your target audience and then learn all you can about them. Flesh out your audience by creating a marketing persona so that you can really know to whom you are writing and they, in turn, sense a connection point with you.

2. Know your audience
Listen to what those in your target audience are saying on social media. If you listen well, you will begin to figure out what are some common concerns and interests. Writing a successful blog requires the ability to identify with the reader and that happens best when you’re a good listener.

3. Help your audience
Once you understand the most common needs in your target audience you are ready to identify specific ways you  can meet those needs. Your blogs will refer to problems and solutions with a voice that is engaging and practical.

4. Eye candy for your audience
You want to create a positive experience for visitors to your blog and more and more this means that you will want to use eye-catching visuals. One expert suggests envisioning your blog as a magazine layout.

5. Take your audience where you want them to go
Make it easy for your readers to link from your blog to social media outlets. The aim of writing a successful blog is to see your content shared with others. Once you’ve mastered the content in terms of subject and style you want to make your content as portable as possible.

There are plenty of other tricks to the blogging trade and at SJC Copywriting Solutions we’re ready to put them to work for your business. Call or email us today.

 

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