Women’s second nature helps with content marketing – it is her best friend.
Collaboration, generosity and sharing tend be second nature to women, whether by nature or nurture, but we tend to unlearn those qualities in the corporate environment.
Business is about competition, right?
Not when it comes to content marketing. This week, I want to illustrate the point with a story about a company called Magnetic Content, which is a content marketing agency. And to advocate that you dust off your womanly tendencies. They are a good fit in this circumstance.
Building trust and loyalty – content marketing
When I started by content marketing practice last year, I coined the term Magnetic Content, developed the Magnetic Content Model, that I use to explain my ideas, and publish a weekly newsletter also called Magnetic Content.
Imagine my surprise when a friend alerted me to this other Magentic Content. A rival, if you like, because not only are they implementing content marketing (like me), they also do training (like me).
So, I thought I would write a feature about them.
Why? Because every true content marketer will write about their rivals.
After all, you might prefer to hire the team from Magnetic Content — which was started in March this year by Brian Corrigan, a man with a perfectly fine journalistic pedigree — rather than me.
What I care about, as a content marketer, is that you are fully informed about the market – and can make your own buying choices.
It turns out, too, that I really like what Corrigan’s Magnetic Content business is doing, and why, and I reckon you might like him too.
I decided to give Corrigan a ring.
Hello Brian
What did I discover? Corrigan, another former Fairfax journo (like me), is the brains behind this new agency.
Corrigan’s new venture has the backing of a heavyweight parent company, public relations agency, Spectrums Communications.
Spectrum in turn is owned by the 125-year-old printing giant, IPMG, which last year turned over $400 million, according to IBIS World.
Corrigan, as I mentioned, is an experienced journalist. After moving here from the UK, he edited Fairfax tech mags such as MIS and CIO (acronyms that techie people understand) and the online edition of the Australian Financial Review.
Having left Fairfax in 2012, he spent a two-year sabbatical back in the UK looking after elderly grandparents, and hatching a plan for a new career. “I wasn’t keen to go back into journalism,” Corrigan says. “But wanted to use the skills I had gained. Everyone was talking about content.”
He set up meetings with half a dozen agencies, and landed job with Spectrum. “We spent four months developing Magnetic Content and the range of service we would take to market,” he says.
Plan, create, share, measure, enable
Corrigan breaks down the process for his clients into these five steps: plan, create, share, measure and enable.
While he takes a thorough approach to the first three steps, it is in the last two categories that Magnetic Content (the second) adopts a decidedly different tack to other agencies in the market.
“A lot of organisations are tracking clicks, likes and shares, which are important metrics, but which generally don’t convince the CEO or CFO to spend more money,” he says. “We help companies nail real lead generation programs that they can feed to sales people to follow up. By having landing pages, and different calls-to-action, we can track how many leads per month we are delivering.”
I was also impressed by Corrigan’s final step – enable – which involves training the senior executive of companies. “This involves helping senior executive to have a voice in social media. So if you are the CEO of a technology company, you are not blogging or tweeting about technology, but about leadership. If you are the head of finance, you are talking about cost saving initiatives.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself!
Conclusion – content marketing
You see, Corrigan is an interesting guy, isn’t he? You might like to get him to do some work at your organisation. (If you do, tell him that you read about him here.)
There’s quite a few agencies out there now – King Content, Edge Custom, and now Magnetic Content – and me. (I’m changing my newsletter’s name to Sticky Content, by the way.)
I’d prefer that you came to my site to read about those agencies and decide if they are right for you. That’s why I love content marketing. It is about respect: with enough information, we all make decision we feel are right.
That is the world I want to live in.
