Webinar Summary: Many people think that using tools like Twitter and Facebook is an effective social media marketing strategy. While these sites are helpful, they are merely tactics which do not address the over-arching goals of a social media marketing campaign in the first place. Join us on Wednesday the 26th of May at 11:00am PST when we discuss how to generate results for your social media marketing campaign. Our special guest will be Aaron Bare, CEO of Buzzmouth. Recently I caught up with Aaron for a a few minutes to talk about what we will be discussing on the webinar:

Produce Advanced, Remarkable Content

http://success.hubspot.com/methodology/get-found/create/produce-advanced-content

Overview

There are many forms of advanced content you can (and should) be creating to truly excel at inbound marketing.

The main types of advanced content you should be concerned with are:

• Videos
• Photos
• Webinars
• Presentations
• In-Person Events
• Podcasts
• Press Releases
• Whitepapers & eBooks
• Kits
• Online Tools, Games & Quizzes

Before you dive into creating advanced content, consider two high-level points:

First, you may need to shift investment away from marketing programs and re-allocate to human resources who can produce advanced content. Our CFO at HubSpot is a really cool guy, no doubt. But rest assured that our head of marketing, Mike, had to present a very compelling and progressive marketing budget to justify his spending on awesome people to produce remarkable content instead of more “typical” spending on tradeshows and telemarketing.

Second, you should look throughout your organization for all the people who can help you produce content. They might be developers, support folks, finance folks, etc. As an inbound marketer, you need to encourage everyone in your organization to produce remarkable content and share it with you so you can help optimize and promote it.

Step by Step

Video
Do you have a video camera? How about a webcam? You can film a customer testimonial, some office foosball, a live tv show in your office, or a viral video. These are just a few HubSpot examples. The idea is to think about what kinds of videos you can create, and then to get good at producing video content. At HubSpot, we even went so far as to hire a video & content superstar in our marketing department to produce content.

• Need help with video? Follow business video best practices to make a video yourself or hire video professionals to help. Buy Video Production Service for $500

Photos
Always be in the mindest of creating content. Going to an event, or working on a cool project? Bring a camera and snap a few photos. Post those on a company flickr page or in some blog posts.

Webinars
Webinars are a great way to deliver your content in an engaging way and generate more inbound leads. You can use a webinar software provider like GotoWebinar or WebEx, or use unconventional (but free / very inexpensive) choices like UStream or Mogulus to live-stream your presentation or SlideRocket to present your slides over the web. Follow these intructions for hosting your own live webinars.

Presentations

You likely already have slide presentations that you’ve used for speaking events or webinars – why not post them online? As long as they contain informational (rather than sales-y) content, a prospect could very possibly find your company through a presentation you posted on SlideShare or a blog article summarizing the presentation.

In-Person Events

You may already be organizing in-person conferences, user meetings, or networking events. This, too, is a great form of content creation. In-person events allow you to create content yourself (with presentations, for example) while also leveraging your community (attendees, speakers, sponsors) to create content for you. Events present an opportunity to take photos, film video interviews, and blog about the content being presented.

Podcasts

Once you’ve gotten comfortable with video or audio production, the next step is to create a series that you can publish as a podcast. What’s great about a podcast is that people can download and subscribe to your content, helping you build another marketing channel.

Press Releases

For many businesses, press releases may be the most frequently updated professional content you already produce. While the PR value of issuing press releases is very little now, they are still another form of content for your site and can help you generate more inbound links. To make sure you structure your release to get the most value out of it, run your release through Press Release Grader. And, in addition to distributing your press releases over a wire service, also post them on your website, perhaps on a company news blog.

Whitepapers & eBooks

A whitepaper is a document or report that you can produce and post on your website for download as a PDF. To quote David Meerman Scott, an ebook is the “hip and stylish younger sister to the nerdy whitepaper.” eBooks are often horizontally-oriented (landscape instead of portrait) and have more images. For both whitepapers and ebooks, however, you should communicate valuable information and interesting ideas.

Kits

Another way to create content is to repackage the content you already have into a “kit“. By combining archived webinars and ebooks, you can create much more compelling offers to website visitors.

Online Tools, Games & Quizzes

A great way to start to get known in your industry and drive tons of traffic and inbound links is to create fun, interesting, and/or valuable tools, games, or quizzes. In the early days of HubSpot, we unleashed a formerly internal-only tool that graded websites according to their marketing effectiveness. This tool, Website Grader, has now graded over 800,000 unique websites, generated tens of thousands of inbound links and inbound leads. From the success of this free online tool, we invested more time and resources – including hiring a “marketing developer” – to develop more tools and games.

Have other ideas for content? Try it out! And be sure to share your experiences in the forums.

Don’t forget to add a Marketing Event whenever you publish a new piece of advanced content!Contnet is king