Content is king in today's marketing . Marketing savvy companies are turning themselves into part-time publishing companies so their prospects will have a reason to say "tell me more" and enter the sales funnel process. Distributing that content across all the marketing channels that reach a company's prospects is another matter altogether. The smart money is rapidly going toward digital opportunities and the mother lode is currently seen as social media.

Social media marketing, however, is nascent. Like every new-to-the-world product, social media has a long ways to go to prove itself useful to lots of companies. Right now, the tipping point is predicted to happen in or around 2012 when Web 3.0 gains legs. (Click here to read about Web 3.0) In the meantime, marketing technologies are emerging that take the cumbersome labor out of distributing "tell me more" content to dozens, if not hundreds, of social media sites.

What's the cost benefit for companies? For one thing it reduces marketing labor costs while expanding a company's market reach and/or market penetration appreciably. These types of tools, offered now in subscriber services, cost way less than SEO (search engine optimization) and work far better in driving a company's search engine rankings higher. With these tools a company can simply send new content (white paper, videocast, podcast, blog, article, press release, etc.) to one place with a click of the mouse. That content then gets distributed to hundreds of social media sites, PR sites, blogsites and so on. And there's no labor involved other than the creation of the content!

Pretty amazing stuff. One cutting edge company is WorldClass ID, based in San Diego. Keep an eye on this one and others like it. They represent a tremendous opportunity for cutting marketing costs by driving marketing labor out of the equation...while yielding terrific results.

RETURN TO APRIL NEWSLETTER