Content marketing: A win-win for customers and businesses

By Daniel Hindin

If a major tenet of integrated marketing communications is customer-centricity, a great way that marketers today are plying their trade is through content marketing.

Content marketing is all about sharing valuable information with potential and existing customers and clients. The information is usually shared for free, and many people take that knowledge and apply it to their lives or businesses without ever engaging in a transaction with the company offering the information.

What better way to form a bond with the public and put the customer first than giving away free, no-strings-attached information?

I’m spending my summer quarter away from Medill working at a communications agency in Chicago called Arment Dietrich, where I manage the globally respected blog Spin Sucks.

What I love about my work there is the unbelievable volume of positive interactions I have with our readers. A large portion of my job consists of procuring valuable content that I think our audience will enjoy and having fun with our readers in the comment section of our blog, through my personal Twitter account, on the company’s Facebook page and wherever else we might find each other.

As early as my first day on the job, I felt an outpouring of warmth from our community. And when I say “community,” I’m talking about both paying customers as well as readers who have never spent a dollar with our company and quite possibly never will.

It doesn’t bother us that most of our readers won’t become customers. We’re committed to providing what amounts to a free media channel focusing on marketing, social media and entrepreneurism for small- to medium-sized businesses. And that commitment will basically cost us the same amount whether 100 people are reading or 100,000 people are reading.

In July, more than 15,000 people visited Spin Sucks. If 14,900 of them never do business with us, we still end up with far more clients on our hands than an agency of our size could handle.

But beyond that, these 15,000 visitors are coming to our site because they want to be there. We’re not buying ads anywhere. We’re not bombarding them with mismatched messages as they go about their day. Our readers are self-selecting themselves as potential clients by simply being attracted by the information we’re providing.

So it’s a win-win situation. Our readers win because they benefit from our knowledge and experience from the comfort of their own home or office. We win because more people every day are learning about us and the services we provide.

By putting the customer first and not putting on the hard sell, through Spin Sucks and content marketing, Arment Dietrich is enjoying more success every day.

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Daniel Hindin is Managing Director of Vitamin IMC and a student in the Masters in Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern University’s Medill School. He also works as Community Manager of Arment Dietrich’s blog Spin Sucks and can be found tweeting at all hours of the day at www.twitter.com/danielhindin.

IMC and social media: A match made in marketing heaven

By Daniel Hindin

If there wasn’t already enough motivation for marketers to hop on the IMC bandwagon, the explosion of social media over the last several years has brought IMC to the forefront of the marketing conversation once again.

I was recently interviewed for an article about Vitamin IMC that has since been published on the Medill website. One of the questions was: “How do you see social media fitting in with IMC?” My answer didn’t make it into the article, but I think it’s an important point, so I’ve decided to expand upon it here.

At its most basic level, IMC is about customer-centricity. A common description of IMC is data-driven marketing. While this is true, the term can sometimes come across as impersonal when you start thinking about all the numbers, formulas, data schemes and information that lead us to our marketing strategies.

But all of these techniques are aimed at one thing: a deeper understanding of the consumer. The further an IMCer can escape the generalities of a mass audience and focus on the individual human being making specific choices for themselves and their family, the better he or she can do their job.

Social media has given tremendous power to the individual consumer. The concept of brand has never been whatever the marketer tells the consumer it is. The brand has always been the idea of that brand that the consumer holds in their mind. And that can be different things to different people. Consumers have always had these ideas, but until recently, we as marketers rarely heard from them.

With the advent of social media, consumers can (and do) tell us (and anyone else who will listen) what they think of our brands whenever they feel like it. Some of these thoughts may be positive, and some may be negative.

Whatever the case may be, it’s real live communication. This not only gives us a greater understanding of our brand, but it also gives us an opportunity to respond individually to our consumers’ concerns. If they’re enjoying the brand experience, we can provide them with ways to interact with it on a deeper level. If they’re not enjoying it, we can attempt to understand the disconnect and perhaps bridge the gap.

Either way, a two-way conversation has been established. The pinnacle of a brand experience in the mind of an IMCer is for the consumer to establish a relationship with the brand. Relationships are difficult to form without two-way communication. This is the gift that social media has given to IMC.

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Daniel Hindin is Managing Director of Vitamin IMC and a student in the Master’s in Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern University’s Medill School. He’s also a social media addict. You can find him tweeting at http://twitter.com/danielhindin.

The science of marketing: What makes IMC different

By Daniel Hindin

What is IMC and how is it different than traditional marketing? We Medill IMCers get this question a lot.

Part of what sets our graduate program apart is the diversity of knowledge we develop. By the time I graduate this December, I expect to have taken courses in five subject areas: Branding & Advertising Strategy, Media Management, Direct & Interactive Marketing, Marketing Analytics and Corporate Communications & Public Relations.

Though marketing is both an art and a science, I find that most people only think of the art, the right-brained side, the creative message. Marketing agencies have long had the reputation as a place where you hole up a bunch of creatives until they come up with the magic message that will get your product flying off the shelf.

It turns out there’s a lot more to it than that. Sure branding and corporate communications are important tools for any well-rounded marketer. That’s where the message is ultimately formed. But making decisions within those areas should be far more than the gut instinct that determines the fate of too many marketing budgets.

The science, the left-brained part of marketing, is what should drive any smart marketer’s decisions. This is where hard data comes into play. Who’s spending? When? On what? Do the profits from each customer exceed their costs? Yes? Well, these are the people to target with your messages. No? Then they’re just costing you money.

Once you know who your ideal customer is, you can take the data a step further and figure out what types of messages spur them to action and in what form those messages can be delivered most effectively. Through analytic tools such as multiple regression, cluster analysis and factor analysis, you can figure out what is likely to work and why.

Now you’re on your way to understanding how to deploy your creative team. Marketing will always be part art. But when you start to use data to form the basis of your art, that’s where science comes in. That’s how you get results. And that’s how you speak the language of the CFO and other budget decision-makers.

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Daniel Hindin is Managing Director of Vitamin IMC and a student in the Masters in Integrated Marketing Communication program at Northwestern University’s Medill School. He enjoys using as many different parts of his brain as possible. You can reach him at DanielHindin2010@u.northwestern.edu.

Authenticity, Relationships and the Economy: Why Little is Getting Bigger

One day last quarter in his Marketing Management class, Medill IMC Professor Frank Mulhern noted that today is the age of the mega-business. Whether it’s through acquisition like many of the media empires or through internal growth like Walmart, Big is where it’s at. Economies of scale. Multi-layered specialization. Reach. To be a market leader, you have to basically take over the market. Become a category killer.

While there’s truth in all that, Professor Mulhern could not deny there’s also a distinct rebellion against the notion that bigger is better. In contrast to the mass industrialization of last century, many people now prefer to own items and pursue experiences that are authentic and as close to one-of-a-kind as possible.

In the world of marketing, this presents a distinct opportunity for the Little Guy. Amid this current Great Recession, many smart, talented businesspeople have turned away from corporate behemoths toward independent entrepreneurial ventures. Whether triggered by a quest for personal meaning or the result of downsizing, these people have joined in a movement. And the movement has legs.

And if the economy and individualism serve as those legs, social media will gladly be the eyes, ears and mouth. No longer is the Little Guy outgunned by access to mass media. The playing field has been leveled.

But don’t be distracted by the tools. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are leading the Democratization of Media, but they’re just instruments. They serve no purpose if used incorrectly.

The true value of social media lies in personal relationships. It’s almost a return to the days of door-to-door salesmen, but the difference is your business of one, five or 20 people can interact with individual households in Chicago, Barstow and Shanghai – all at the same time.

It’s that personalization that allows small businesses to find their niches and offer consumers what they want when they want it. These entrepreneurs literally *know* their audience. People will no longer tolerate being just another faceless customer. They want to connect.

Consumers prefer building relationships with other people to building relationships with corporations. That’s the power of social media. That’s the power of the Little Guy.

--Daniel Hindin

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Daniel Hindin is the Managing Director of Vitamin IMC and a student in the Masters in Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern University’s Medill School. He loves it when people comment on his blog postings. He can also be reached at DanielHindin2010@u.northwestern.edu.