About Joe
Joe Pulizzi is a leading author, speaker and strategist for content marketing. Joe is founder of the Content Marketing Institute and SocialTract. This blog looks at the trends in content marketing, and how marketers can learn to think and act like publishers.
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Get Content Get Customers… the book that started the Content Marketing revolution. Learn how to develop compelling content and seamlessly deliver it to customers— without interrupting their lives.
Managing Content Marketing… how to put content marketing to work. Managing Content Marketing shows you, in detail, how to manage content marketing within your organization, whether you come from a small company or multi-billion dollar brand.
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Online Content Marketing – A Banner that Works?
I have to be honest and say that I rarely, if ever, acknowledge banner ads or tile ads on websites. Advertising, to me, is about delivering a compelling, relevant, and targeted message. Frankly, it’s challenging to do that in a banner, button, or tile ad…until now.
Scottrade has been running a series of ads in conjuction with Yahoo! Finance for a few months now. Scottrade is a discount brokerage company that competes with the likes of E*Trade and Ameritrade to complete online trades for customers. I religiously follow a few stocks, and check them on Yahoo! Finance throughout the day. Whenever I click to see a stock’s complete summary (in this case, a company called Global Sources [full disclosure: I own Global Sources stock]), Scottrade provides a relevant ad on technical analysis just to the lower right portion of the page (see image).
In less that 40 words, Scottrade has educated me on the technical analysis of Global Sources, a stock that I truly care about. By clicking on the ad, Scottrade gives a bit more information on their product, Scottrade SmartText, which is included in any Scottrade account.
I’m a fanatic about long-form content marketing or editorial style content…but Scottrade proves that online content marketing can be effective if the information is extremely valuable.
Recommendation: Scottrade does a great job, but I would recommend that they include a free offer of some kind to at least get people to take the next step. Now, if they are getting 10%+ conversion rates on the ad, don’t do a thing. But if conversion rates are low, they could try a free eZine, eBook, report, or newsletter offer in conjunction with SmartText. Possibly an enewsletter on the top 10 bullish or bearish charts of the month or week. At least this way they could get the prospect’s information, and then work to build a long-term relationship.
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