Speaker Spotlight Series
Content marketing isn’t just a fad; not just the next marketing buzz term that you won’t care about next year. Properly understood, it is the heart and soul of your online marketing.
Mark Traphagen
Perhaps the biggest buzzword in the digital marketing world since social media, everyone recommends it. Everyone thinks they ought to be doing it. But at the same time, a growing number of observers and pundits are declaring that the easy entry days of content marketing may already be over (if there ever really were such days). Some are beginning to talk about “content shock” or a “content glut.” The fear is with so many piling on the content marketing craze, consumers and prospects will become “content blind.”
Mark Traphagen is the Senior Director of Online Marketing for Stone Temple Consulting, a Boston-based national digital marketing agency. He is responsible for building the online reputation, authority, and visibility of the Stone Temple Consulting brand, as well as consulting with Stone Temple clients. He is widely recognized as an expert on Google Authorship, and has over 80,000 followers on Google+!
He got his start in a small independent book store in Philadelphia that was getting killed by Amazon. When the manager tasked him with taking the business online, based on nothing more than his deep qualification of “being a guy who likes to blog”, he was thrown into the world of online marketing. He learned quickly, and in two years had built a store and an online presence that was actually competing well in its niche market.
One of Mark’s pet peeves is “people who think it [content marketing] can be done effectively with the right set of tactics or tips”. I can smell that belief when I read their content. Effective content marketing, as with any marketing discipline, can’t be reduced to a set of tricks. Anyone who thinks it’s about “creating list posts” or “posts of a certain word count” or “all about the keywords” is missing the boat big time, and not doing their business any good.”
When you attend Mark’s session – How Not to Be the Next Online Content Marketing Casualty, you’ll learn why content marketing is essential to building your brand online, why so many fail at it, and how to build an effective strategy to be one of the success stories. Come ready to be both inspired and educated in the world of effective content marketing for your business.
