Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Hopefully you’ve concluded that today’s marketing requires lots of content, lots of education and lots of trust building via expertise sharing. And you’ve also likely concluded that all of that is a ton of work. It is a ton of work, well worth it in the long-run, but work to build no matter.

The secret to maximizing this content production play is to develop strategies that help you multiply your efforts, that make it naturally easier to produce content, and that employ technology and services that provide huge return on your time invested.

One such strategy that puts all of the above into service utilizes the recorded word as the foundational tactic. For some reason many people find it easier to say what’s on their mind than to write what’s on their mind. Funny thing is for most the spoken story is much more authentic and personal too. When business owners sit down to write a marketing piece, they end up sounding like marketers trying to sell something and make it sound important. When they speak the same marketing piece it comes off much more engaging and real.

So, get the Belkin Tune Talk stereo mic attachment for your iPod and start speaking your marketing materials and web pages and then get them transcribed by a service such as Casting Words and then use a service like TaskUs to “punch it up a bit.” This little content creation routine may just be the secret weapon that turns you into the content super-producer.

But, why stop with marketing materials per se? What about white papers, expert interviews and customer success stories. Start recording this type of content via the phone using a service like SkypeIn and Ecamm Call Recorder. Take your interviews back to CastingWords and all of sudden you are creating content and information products on the fly.

I did a live interview with Seth Godin recently and exposed one audience to the live session, thousands more to the audio download and now, thousands more will consume the audio transcript of our session.
Download interview transcript with Seth Godin.

Content creation mirrors the recycling mantra in many ways – reduce (your time to create), reuse (what you create in different formats), and recycle (what you create in different forums and audiences.)

Posted by: John Jantsch on Feb 16, 09 | 7:07 am
Category: Branding, Marketing Materials, Marketing Strategy | Tags: , belkin, castingwords, ipod, Seth Godin, Skype, taskus