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Focusing on marketing channels, Robert Rose of Big Blue Moose prepped the attendees with advice on making content decisions based on the right audience. "The social web is a waste if you don't apply the right context to channels," he said, noting the need for a channel strategy incorporating situational analysis, audience research and an editorial plan.
Alison Bolen of SAS charted her company's journey from producing one print product in the 1990s to a multichannel marketing effort including blogs, research papers, newsletters, magazines and social media. "You have to implement policies for your channels and then have best practices for following them through," she said. The hard part is tracking multiple accounts across marketing channels and building a "social media architecture" around each of them. "We decided our channels should talk about our people at SAS, our customers and our technology—from there we decide the best channels to tell our story."
In organizing marketing efforts, the company decided to focus on topics rather than channels, incorporating teams who work across marketing channels to create and distribute content. This helped the company understand where consolidation could and should occur, removing unnecessary duplications between channels. Planning for product launches must include looking beyond the details of pricing and packing to figure out if there is a story to tell, Bolen said, citing SAS's business visualization software. "There are so many stories you can tell about visualization beyond, 'Rah rah rah, we have a new visualization product.'"
The company maintains detailed editorial calendars to manage communication channels, works with partners to distribute and amplify marketing content across the web, and measures traffic to do comparative analysis of marketing channels.
The company holds workshops to share knowledge across teams. "Celebrate successes," she says.
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Valuable Content Marketing
Mastering Mobile Marketing
