Tag : content marketing strategy

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3Apr
arrows-1915356_1280When Can a Proven Thought Leadership Strategy Also Impact Your Customer Conversions?

When Can a Proven Thought Leadership Strategy Also Impact Your Customer Conversions?

In the realm of customer conversions, a proven thought leadership strategy holds immense potential to elevate your approach and enhance credibility. David Lomas, CEO of M3 Media Group, advocates for leveraging thought leadership articles as tools to not only add credibility but also provide valuable insights into one’s character and expertise.

“The strategic introduction of a published thought leadership article into a conversation can set the stage for meaningful interactions with prospects,” David underscored. By referencing an interview in a reputable publication, business owners can establish themselves as authorities in their field, earning the trust and respect of potential clients.

“This approach goes beyond traditional sales tactics—it’s about building rapport and establishing a foundation of trust.” – David Lomas, CEO of M3 Media Group

By sharing valuable content that addresses the prospect’s challenges, business owners can position themselves as trusted advisors rather than mere salespeople.

The impact of a proven thought leadership strategy extends beyond individual interactions—it influences the entire customer conversion process. From initial engagement to final decision-making, thought leadership plays a pivotal role in shaping perceptions and driving conversions.

In conclusion, a well-executed thought leadership strategy has the power to transform customer conversions by infusing interactions with credibility, authenticity, and value. By harnessing the influence of thought leadership, businesses can cultivate lasting relationships with their audience and drive sustainable growth.

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25Oct
nick-morrison-FHnnjk1Yj7Y-unsplashUnlocking Sales Success: The Power of Thought Leadership in Engaging Prospects

Unlocking Sales Success: The Power of Thought Leadership in Engaging Prospects

In the fast-paced world of modern business, making a lasting impression and capturing the attention of potential clients is a challenge that every company faces. The traditional ‘sales pitch’ is losing its effectiveness, as prospects are becoming more discerning and selective about who they engage with. To succeed in this competitive landscape, businesses need to explore innovative ways to stand out, add value, and establish credibility from the very first interaction. 

How do I stand out more?

This is where the “Profile Booster Package” offered by M3 Media Publishing really comes into play, revolutionising the way businesses engage with their prospects. At the heart of this strategy is the creation of insightful and compelling thought leadership articles. M3 Media Publishing’s approach involves interviewing business clients to gain a deep understanding of the challenges and pain points their customers experience. These interviews lead to the creation of three thought leadership headlines, which become the focal points of the subsequent articles. 

The choice of magazines for publication covers a broad spectrum, including Business, Property & Construction, HR, Manufacturing, Supply Chain, Export, Marketing, Social Impact, and an Over 50’s lifestyle magazine, ensuring the right audience is reached. The impact of this approach is profound. By providing thought-provoking and solution-oriented content, businesses can not only demonstrate their expertise but also offer something of value to their prospects. Each article is meticulously crafted, with links to the client’s LinkedIn profile, website, and a corresponding case study, creating an internet funnel to measure response—an invaluable tool in modern marketing.

How can it grow my business?

The real magic, however, happens when these articles are strategically integrated into sales conversations. Instead of the traditional sales pitch, businesses can engage prospects by sharing their thought leadership content. This approach shifts the conversation from a ‘salesy’ interaction to a meaningful discussion about the challenges and solutions presented in the article. It provides a non-intrusive way to establish credibility and demonstrate value.
The result? Prospects are more receptive, as they appreciate the thought leadership offered by the business. They are more likely to exchange contact details and set up a subsequent consultative discussion. This approach not only increases the chances of conversion but also builds trust and fosters long-lasting client relationships.

In an era where authenticity, value, and credibility matter more than ever, M3 Media Publishing’s Profile Booster Package can be a game-changer for businesses seeking to elevate their sales success. It transforms initial discussions with prospects, making them more engaging, insightful, and effective, while removing the traditional sales pitch from the equation. By offering valuable content and expertise upfront, businesses not only stand out but also win the trust of potential clients—a winning strategy for today’s competitive market.

To find out more, please get in touch by emailing david@m3publishing.co.uk.

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29May
PR strategyCould Strategic PR Bring You Bragging Rights?

Could Strategic PR Bring You Bragging Rights?

How much is the traditional view of British reticence true when it comes to businesses and entrepreneurs?

For SMEs, PR can be an essential tool in how they market themselves, but not everyone is comfortable with the idea of singing their own praises.

Also, this can have its pitfalls, if a business chooses the wrong channels for the tone of voice its PR is adopting.

For example, the business-is-personal aspects of LinkedIn can make it a minefield for companies seeking to spread the news about their achievements.

What, then, are the best ways for businesses to send out positive PR messages about themselves and what they have accomplished?

Where is the Value?

For PR to work there has to be substance behind it, and a buy-in for the channels you are using.

What will make someone want to publish your story, or a journalist to use your PR as the basis for a piece about you?

As with other aspects of marketing, the content needs to work for its intended audience.

Talking up your achievements can only work if, ultimately, there is something of value  there for the reader to take away

Also, what is the value of your PR to the publication, website, channel, or to the individual journalist?

They are looking for strong content to attract their audience, just as you are looking for ways to promote your brand.

Build Your Credibility

Credibility attracts and sells.

Media coverage is a means of promoting yourself as an expert and your brand as the answer to people’s needs.

Sharing your expertise boosts your profile but, more importantly, appeals to your audience

However, credibility is not easy to establish, especially through digital channels.

Nowadays, everyone appears to be an expert, from the lone blogger upwards.

You may feel you have bragging rights due to your achievements but this comes back to having something of substance to say: you must demonstrate your value.

Case studies can fulfil this need. Presented in the right way and they can combine documentary evidence with potent storytelling. Be sure to include figures to back up the facts.

Written testimonials make a powerful case for credibility, and video testimonials even more so. You can leverage these further by writing the testimonial for your clients, and asking them to take ownership of it on your behalf.

The Third Party Endorsement

If you are clever and strategic about your PR, you can have others talk about you, rather than doing the talking yourself.

Someone commenting about your brand, or highlighting your views through a credible, recognised third party channel, can add to your authority significantly

Smart PR is not about you doing the shouting, but someone else doing it on your behalf. You still retain your bragging rights, but you are exercising them in a strategic way to help market your brand.

To achieve your bragging rights, through our credible, third party channel, please contact us.

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16Jan
MSN 2019Marketing Aspects Magazine is Media Partner at MSN 2019

Marketing Aspects Magazine is Media Partner at MSN 2019

 (MSN 2019) was previously known as Prolific North Live, and is the largest marketing expo outside London, which covers the broad interests of marketing and media.

That makes it an ideal fit for M3 Media Publishing to partner with them, via our Marketing Aspects Magazine.

 

The Importance of Content in Marketing

We talk a lot about the importance of content, but that’s because it really does matter.

One of the topics we’ve discussed is the way that content and expos complement each other, and how digital and physical marketing activities dovetail to maximise opportunities.

MSN 2019 provides us with the opportunity to put our words into practice.

The expo provides professionals from across a range of marketing disciplines to come together. It’s also an excellent opportunity for buyers and suppliers to connect with different marketing businesses.

 

We aim to showcase the power of content, and the huge potential of content marketing in raising the awareness of target audiences and helping businesses engage and connect with them

 

In this, we have our own unique publishing platform in Marketing Aspects Magazine.

At the expo, you’ll find us in the Media Partner Zone.

 

About MSN 2019

promises to be an unmissable opportunity for anyone connected to – or interested in – marketing and its various strands.

Expect to see key figures representing leading brands in the world of marketing. There’ll be seminars and workshops to attend, along with expert speakers and dynamic demos.

For its networking value alone, MSN 2019 is a key event in the marketing calendar, and a dynamic destination for making new contacts and meeting potential prospects and clients.

It is run by Prolific North, an independently-owned publishing and events company based in Manchester, and event specialists Don’t Panic Event Management.

Marketing Show North runs for two days, on 27 and 28 February 2019, in EventCity, next to the Trafford Centre, Manchester.

For more information about Marketing Show North 2019, or to register, please visit .

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16Jan
content marketingCan Content Marketing Boost Business Exhibition Success?

Can Content Marketing Boost Business Exhibition Success?

The marketing activity you do before a business exhibition plays a vital part in deciding whether it is successful. A content strategy is critical to this.

Business events are unlikely to be effective in simply selling themselves. Marketing is essential.

This means putting in the necessary work in advance, and much of this should focus on content marketing.

 

How Content Marketing Helps Events

The point of content marketing is to use content to raise awareness, both of the event and of its exhibitors.

This content should be shaped, refined and distributed with the aim of changing people’s behaviours and actions, to ensure they attend the event.

To do this, it must work to fulfill certain key objectives, such as:

  • Attracting more attendees to the event
  • Attracting prospects for the event’s exhibitors
  • Driving event attendees to specific exhibition stands
  • Cross-selling products or services, or highlighting opportunities on the back of the event

 

Exhibitions will typically have a broad range of exhibitors, with different target audiences, so it must be clear who this content is aimed at

 

What Kind of Content is Effective?

Content comes in a variety of forms, including videos, audio and written words. However, one kind of content that works across these different media and is highly effective is storytelling.

 

Making storytelling a focus for content means finding the hook that will attract audiences to you

 

This includes discovering your audiences’ pain points and how you demonstrate your understanding of them, and what you can do to ease them.

Content marketing is not about direct sales messages.

 

Distributing and Sharing Content

Which channels you choose to ensure your content reaches its target audience is also a hugely important decision.

It relies on you developing a clear understanding of your audience and where you’re most likely to be able to engage with them, including the social networks and platforms they use.

A useful way of making content attractive to target audiences is through the use of a third party platform.

This is where someone talks about you, and quotes you as an expert in your field, rather than you addressing your audience directly.

Our portfolio of sector specific magazines offers this kind of third-party platform for content marketing.

 

What Happens After the Event?

This is as important as preparation before the exhibition, and activity during it.

 

For following up leads, content can continue to add value by refining and repurposing it to help further engage and connect with leads, turning them into prospects

 

These follow-ups should be relevant and you should make them a priority.

It is important not to let your content go to waste. Use it as a vital strategic tool in marketing your business exhibition, and to support your exhibitors.

To discover how content can improve your chances of success before, during and after your next business exhibition, please click here.

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31Oct
differentiationWhat is the Lasting Impact of Differentiation?

What is the Lasting Impact of Differentiation?

Differentiation can give your business a competitive advantage with prospects and customers, but only if you choose the right kind of differentiation and you have the right marketing strategy to achieve it.

For many companies, their focus is on making minor adjustments to products to try and differentiate them in the marketplace. This is very much a “new and improved” approach.

However, it is unlikely to yield lasting results.  In fact it can become a one-hit wonder, and end up negatively impacting how target audiences perceive your brand.

There is a way to look at differentiation differently and to use dynamic content to turn it into something with lasting impact.

 

Raising Awareness and Changing Perceptions

If you tell your story powerfully and differently enough, it can help to attract your target audience while building your credibility.

This is differentiation through strategic positioning, using content marketing as the means to achieve this.

 

Good quality, properly targeted content has the potential to engage and connect with audiences and help build and shape a brand’s personality

 

This is likely to have a more lasting impact than individual product differentiation because it is about your entire brand and what it represents to your audience.

What does this involve?  It means shaping narratives that are appropriate to your target audience, and that identify with their issues, needs, fears and pain points.

 

It is crucial to creating powerful story arcs that emphasise your expertise while focusing on what your audience wants to know

 

It is a measured, consistent process of disseminating information about you, creating a positive impression of you that stays in the minds of your audience.  It is not a hard sales message, nor is it to do with publicising your achievements.

What will differentiate you is depth. The more your audience feels it knows you, the more it will feel it can trust you, and, ultimately, buy from you.

 

What Could Differentiation Mean For YOU?

M3 Media Publishing hosted one of their regular, dynamic breakfast workshops in Central Manchester, which explored how differentiation can help your business to thrive.

For more information about these events, or to book your place, please watch the video below or click here.





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5Oct
Marketing challenges at the Marketing Challenge eventMarketing Challenges: Should You Think Differently About Pitching?

Marketing Challenges: Should You Think Differently About Pitching?

M3 Media Publishing’s recent Marketing Challenge event, held at The St James’s Club in Manchester City Centre, focused on storytelling as a prospecting tool.

Pitching to prospects, or even starting a conversation, can be an important part of your marketing strategy, and it should involve content.

 

The Marketing Challenges of Storytelling

What sort of introduction should you make when meeting potential prospects?

You might provide an answer that may just be a job title or role.  You may describe the nuts and bolts of what you do.  Instead, you should capture concisely how you help others.

 

The legacy of what you do is what counts. If you have substantially made a difference to a business, or saved or made them lots of money, that will immediately get your potential prospect’s attention

 

How does this translate into a narrative?

It’s like constructing a plot. How many films or books have you seen where they begin with something riveting and explosive? They might even begin with a climactic event, then work back to show you how this event has come to be.

In our recent Marketing Challenge event, we encouraged our guests to look again at how they communicate on a personal level, and how to leverage storytelling to help them become pitch perfect.

 

What Content Marketing Means

One of the marketing challenges is that people don’t always realise that certain aspects of their communication and interaction are marketing activities.

 

Content marketing is not restricted to words or images, or things posted online or put into print, as it can also be about the verbal delivery of content

 

This is one of the ways our Marketing Challenge events set out to challenge thinking: it’s about how marketing is integral to your business objectives.

It’s not simply to do with whether you choose to spend your budget on campaigns, or enlist specialist help.

 

You are marketing yourself whether you intend to or not, by the very act of communicating to others about your business

 

That means that it makes sense to make this marketing activity count.

What marketing challenges do you face?  Contact us to find out how we can help you think differently about addressing them.

Alternatively, to discover more about our Marketing Challenge events, or to book onto a future event, please click here.

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24Sep
business prospectingWhat is Challenging Your Business Prospecting Success?

What is Challenging Your Business Prospecting Success?

Business prospecting has certain things in common with a much older form of prospecting.

The California Gold Rush began in 1848, drawing approximately 300,000 people to what became a frantic scramble for gold.  For many of these prospectors, they relied on basic, labour-intensive techniques to extract gold from streams and riverbeds, such as panning.

Later, more advanced mining technology allowed people to recover the modern-day equivalent of billions of dollars of gold.  However, by the end of the Gold Rush, relatively few prospectors had significant riches to show for their efforts.

 

In business prospecting, competing for the attention of potential prospects, it can also feel a touch primitive, involving lots of energy for little return

 

What if there a was a way of striking a richer seam of reward, using more sophisticated methods to attract prospects?

This is what dynamic content marketing offers.

 

Is There an Alternative Route to Prospecting Success?

There’s a potentially valuable online business audience looking for answers, for guidance and for things that will make their lives easier.

How would you get their attention? How do you attract, engage and connect with these valuable business leads?

 

Like the original Gold Rush prospectors, do you run with the crowd? Are you attending the same networking events as everyone else, or looking for the same kind of contacts, the managers and decision-makers?

 

What if there was an alternative route to success, a different map to lead you to the richest seams for prospecting?  And what if you could use it to partially pre-qualify your prospects?

This is where using powerful content can make a difference.

Content marketing is the map to your gold seam. But there’s a twist.  You supply the map to your prospects, so that instead of you spending all your time looking for them, it brings them to YOU.

 

Will You Take the Marketing Challenge?

What’s the best way of discovering alternative routes for business prospecting, how to use content to attract your target audience, and how to help you build useful and potentially profitable relationships?

M3 Media Publishing’s regular, dynamic Marketing Challenge events, held at The St James’s Club in Central Manchester, answer these questions and more.

The Marketing Challenge event, on 3 October 2018, focuses on how you can avoid the competition when prospecting.  To attend this event, or to discover more about future events, please click below:

 

 

For an accompanying read about our previous events, please visit:

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22Feb
linkedin content strategyHow Crucial is LinkedIn to Your Content Strategy?

How Crucial is LinkedIn to Your Content Strategy?

LinkedIn is a social media platform for business. It was launched in 2003, with a focus on career-development for its users. However, since then, things have changed.  What LinkedIn now offers is an excellent platform for B2B content marketing.

However, to use it effectively requires that you first have a content strategy.  If you do not, you risk treating LinkedIn too randomly, casually dipping in and out, without making any kind of impact, or, more importantly, the sort of connections that will mean more business for you.

 

What is Content Strategy?

A content strategy means working out how to use content to engage with others. Your content must have value for this to be effective, and you should be measuring the value of its effectiveness.

What is your strategy for?

 

You should be using content to achieve specific objectives, whether this is raising awareness of your brand, driving more sales or building useful relationships Click To Tweet

 

To meet these objectives with your content strategy requires you use certain tactics.

This is where LinkedIn can play a key role, as a social media channel to help you reach your objectives through the tactical use of content.

 

The Value of LinkedIn for Content

LinkedIn is not the biggest social media network, but it is full of business leaders, professionals and entrepreneurs. It is where you find decision-makers, people who are otherwise hard to reach.

How can you build relationships with these people? By engaging with them.

This is how to use your content on LinkedIn.

 

Your content is an asset, and it’s up to you to use it properly Click To Tweet

 

There are over 500 million LinkedIn users worldwide. On the one hand, that’s a lot of opportunity; on the other it presents a challenge. Where do you start?

The good news is that LinkedIn enables you to develop a targeted reach. Its members have profiles, CV details. You can set your parameters and filters. And you can connect with selected individuals.

Then you can strengthen these connections, and broaden your base, using carefully constructed content.

 

The right content can help position you as an authority in your field and help you attract interest from your target audience by addressing issues they are interested in Click To Tweet

 

Remember, LinkedIn is a platform especially for business people and professionals, therefore your content should be useful to them. Unlike on other social media platforms, business and work-related issues are the main reasons why they’re here. This should give you an in-built advantage with your content and how you shape and distribute it.

 

Visibility and Attraction

Being active means people are more likely to find you. This is a guiding principle behind using content online.  Fundamentally, creating content should give you greater visibility and attract people to your brand.

LinkedIn is a gift in this respect, because the more active you are on it, the more likely it is that prospects will find you.

Content will help them to do this, but first you must get it right.

 

The Tone of Your Content

B2B customers are people too. LinkedIn members are individuals, with emotional responses to content.  Just because LinkedIn is a social media platform for business doesn’t mean you should neglect the social aspect.

 

Your content must be engaging on a human, emotional level. Yes, it can still have weight, carry substance, but keep it readable and, most of all, make sure it resonates with its readers Click To Tweet

 

Posting content that reads like a dull, corporate report will not engage your target audience.  Content that makes them feel something, that stimulates their thoughts, will.

What are their pains and problems? What slant can you take on business issues that will appeal directly to their emotions, that will make them think you understand their needs?

Use your content to share the experiences that will be relevant to your target audience, inform and inspire them with your insight.

 

LinkedIn Users Trust Content

More people trust a brand’s social media content than its advertising, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer report of 2017.  Business Insider has reported that more users trust LinkedIn than either Facebook or Twitter.

People trust the information and advice given to them on LinkedIn. Trust is a powerful element when it comes to building business and winning new customers.

LinkedIn offers the opportunity to help build your reputation and build relationships on this kind of trust.

 

Content and Conversions

LinkedIn is neither a magic bullet nor a fast route to business success. It is, however, a hugely valuable platform from which to launch targeted content which can, in time, lead to sales conversions.

 

LinkedIn isn't about posting a single piece of killer content, but rather the cumulative effect of being consistent, and establishing a trustworthy presence on the platform Click To Tweet

 

This goes back to your content strategy. Treat content creation for LinkedIn as a long-term investment.

Be persistent, and patient, and then you will start to see significant returns.

To discuss how we can develop and turn your content into opportunities, please contact M3 Media Publishing.

 

For an additional read, please visit:

 





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