The changing face of Marketing

As the social web evolves and we collectively turn off our ears to unidirectional ads and messaging, the face of marketing continues to evolve. Prospects continually seek to find and pull valuable information and content without wanting to give up much in exchange. How do marketer’s respond?

The new goal is to provide something of value…something so valuable that folks who have never even heard of you or your brand want to share it with their friends. The content that you provide might be a public webcast, podcast, video, white paper, etc. It might be funny, proprietary and valuable research, or something else that will resonate with your target demographic. The idea is to get something interesting and valuable in front of the eyes of some key buyers and influencers within your demographic.

An interesting thing happened this week. Eloqua, a leader in marketing automation, drip campaigns, marketing analytics, and all the traditional fundamental building blocks of marketing did something different.

They created and shared freely a couple of pieces that most marketers will find value. No opt-in. No forms. No registration.

Not only is their content valuable, especially for those marketers just getting started and trying to wade through the variety of tools and how to incorporate them into their marketing mix. More significantly, a marketing automation company just became another living example of how marketers must evolve in order to gain Attention – the first step in the 5 Stages of Customer Acquisition for the Social Business.

The Content Grid
This graphic creates a framework for creating and distributing content to align with the demands of the new marketplace. Personally, I have some questions and don’t totally agree with or understand everything in it, but it’s a fantastic piece of reference and valuable as a framework as organizations begin to organize their content strategy.

The Social Media Playbook

Click on the image below to download the playbook. It’s built and designed for those new to the Social web, and provides an overview of all the tools out there. It doesn’t speak too much about the strategy of participation, or corporate strategy for actually bringing customers into the corporate ecosystem (critical first steps), but it does provide loads of tactical tidbits and an overview of the many of the leading publicly available tools for use on the social web.

Both pieces were done in collaboration with Jess3, the creators who worked in collaboration with Brian Solis to create the now ubiquitous Conversation Prism and the video embedded below – “The State of the Internet”, which contains a dizzying array of facts about today’s internet (or yesterday’s as it is now a few months old, but helpful nonetheless)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpAW0yRaKws&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Need more examples of valuable content that went viral, or why every company should be creating and providing valuable content? Check out “Three New Roles for your company: Media Mogul”

Have more examples to share? Please post them below.