He previously served as a senior copywriter at Hellman for five and a half years, and has nearly 16 years of advertising agency experience in the Cedar Valley.

"Today's internet users want to find what they need quickly and easily," said David McNurlen, chief creative officer at Hellman. "David's passion for user experience design and search engine optimization helps them do just that."

As digital marketing strategist, he will assist clients with content strategy, inbound marketing and search engine optimization. He will also play a key role in the agency's new digital publishing product.

Hellman is an employee-owned, full-service B2B marketing agency specializing in powering complex brands. The company is in its 47th year of business. Hellman headquarters is in Waterloo, Iowa, with regional offices in the Minneapolis – St. Paul, Minnesota and Denver, Colorado area. Learn more about Hellman at www.hellman.com.

"Demand for digital marketing is at an all-time high," said David McNurlen, chief creative officer at Hellman. "Matt's interactive design skills will help us meet that demand, as well as grow our new digital publishing product."

He will design websites, as well as create motion graphics, animation and special effects for digital publications and videos.

Hellman is an employee-owned, full-service B2B marketing agency specializing in powering complex brands. The company is in its 47th year of business. Hellman headquarters is in Waterloo, Iowa, with regional offices in the Minneapolis – St. Paul, Minnesota and Denver, Colorado area. Learn more about Hellman at www.hellman.com.

"Hellman has doubled its video and animation staff in the past year to meet the growing demand for our services," said David McNurlen, chief creative officer at Hellman. "To recruit a talent like Travis from out of state speaks highly about the level of creativity and the quality of life in our community."

Wade will create special effects, 3D animation and other visual images for online videos and TV commercials.

He was previously a video production specialist at F.J. Westcott in Maumee, Ohio.

Hellman is an employee-owned, full-service B2B marketing agency specializing in powering complex brands. The company is in its 47th year of business. Hellman headquarters is in Waterloo, Iowa, with regional offices in the Minneapolis – St. Paul, Minnesota and Denver, Colorado area. Learn more about Hellman at www.hellman.com.

Here’s one of the best ideas I’ve heard for creating a content strategy.

During a social media presentation at Social Brand Forum 2012, Mack Collier shared how baby products brand Graco launched its blog.

You, too, can create an effective content strategy using these three baby steps.

Step 1. Identify your audience.
Graco spent several months analyzing online conversations about its products. Once the company understood what the conversation was, they were able to identify their core audience: young parents with young children.

Step 2. Learn what interests your audience.
Graco found that these young parents were new to marriage and parenthood. They were looking for guidance and answers to their questions about both topics.

Step 3. Decide who will create the content.
Graco recruited members of the very audience they were trying to reach to write blog posts.

Their strategy was a success. Eighteen months after the blog’s launch, online mentions of Graco had almost doubled and positive mentions had increased from 68% to 83%.

What content strategy challenges are you facing? What content strategy tips have worked for you? Please share them below.

Just 36% of B2B marketers believe they are effective at content marketing.

So shared Ann Handley of Marketing Profs at Social Brand Forum 2012

That statistic tells us there are two challenges that B2B marketers must face:

1. We need to know what makes content effective.
2. We need more confidence.

Luckily for those of us in attendance, Handley and other presenters offered insight into both.

There are three keys to effective content for B2B marketers that I took away from the conference.

1. Focus on customers, not your company. “The story isn’t about you,” said Handley. “Your customer is the hero of your story.”
2. Solve your customers’ business problems. People love case studies and actionable insights, shared David B. Thomas, senior director of content and community for Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
3. Don’t sound like a marketer. “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing,” said Handley, quoting Tom Fishburne of Marketoonist.com. Another take on it: “No kid ever says at night, ‘Daddy, will you read me a press release,’” said Thomas.

As for confidence, you can’t let fear hold you back from creating and sharing marketing content.

“You will make mistakes in social media,” said Kary Delaria, a principal at Kane Consulting.

Let the fact that everything won’t always go perfect empower you.

“Take risks. Be ‘flawsome,’” said Handley.

You know why creating valuable B2B content can’t wait. You know what makes content effective. Now learn how to create your content strategy in three baby steps.

Here's a startling statistic. 60% of the sales cycle is over before a buyer talks to your salesperson. So shared HubSpot inbound marketer Kipp Bodnar at Social Brand Forum 2012

If you already produce valuable content (like blog posts, case studies, tweets and how-to videos), that statistic should make you smile. But if you’re not confident in your content, this is your wake-up call.

It used to be that salespeople opened the doors to new business.
In other words, you approached prospects. Marketing content – including the information on your website and social media – was a secondary sales tool.

Those days are done.
As this statistic shows, prospects aren’t waiting around for you to approach them. They’re using search engines to find reviews and compare options, and social media to see what thought leaders have to say.

Brand guru John Morgan, author of the book “Brand Against the Machine,” takes the idea a step further. He told Social Brand Forum 2012 attendees that if you’re still cold calling, you’re hurting your brand. You don’t like to be interrupted with unwelcome and unwanted calls; neither do your prospects.

Great content can’t wait.
If your content shows up prominently in search engines and social media, you’re on your prospects’ radar. If your content helps them solve a problem and builds trust in your company, you’re in contention.

But if you’re not creating this type of content, you’re not part of the conversation. In fact, your company might not even be under consideration.

Be part of the conversation.
Get started now by learning the three keys to effective content and how to create your content strategy in three baby steps.

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but a bad tagline will just stink up the joint. Here’s how not to offend your olfactory system – and your customers.

A great poem by Emily Dickinson suggests that rose oil and poetry have a lot in common. Both are the purest distillation of the source material. Both are the result of a grueling, crushing process. And, if done right, the final product is memorable, valuable, and lives on long after the flower or the author cease to be.

The same can be said for advertising taglines.

A good tagline is your company’s essence. Your product, your people, your process – all distilled down to a few simple words. As quickly and easily as one can identify the familiar smell of roses, your stakeholders’ senses should perk up when they hear your bang-on tagline – because it’s just so darn you.

Using modern distilling techniques (sorry Emily), let’s consider how best to cook up an essential tagline.

1. Harvest your raw materials.
Start brainstorming about what makes your company unique. Yes, think about your products and services and why they are better than your competitors’. But also consider your people. Your corporate culture. Your values as a company. Everything should be on the table. (Hint: Some of your most valuable insight may come from employees who have nothing to do with marketing and administration. Go have a conversation with the people who actually make what you sell.)

2. Close the still and boil the water.
There’s a recurring movie montage that symbolizes hard work in the business world. A locked boardroom. Picked over Chinese take-out. Bleary-eyed executives with loosened ties and rolled-up sleeves working furiously into the night, ripping pages out of notepads, balling them up and tossing them three-pointer style into overflowing wastebaskets.

Welcome to your own personal boardroom montage.

Gather your best creative minds. Lay out the raw materials from above. Then beat the hell out of ‘em – the materials, not your creative team. Your team will feel sufficiently beaten and exhausted when the exercise is over, because tagline writing is long, grueling work. It should take days, weeks, even months – never hours.

And what should you be doing during those days, weeks and months? Thinking. Talking. Arguing. Poring over your online thesauruses and dictionaries for new words and double meanings. Exhausting one idea, redirecting the conversation, then returning to the old idea when somebody has a fresh thought.  Mumbling your way through lines like you are trying to solve the final puzzle on Wheel of Fortune (some of the best taglines come from this technique).

Basically, you brainstorm until you can’t brainstorm anymore. Then you go home, take a shower, get some sleep, and start all over again.

3. Watch out for contaminants.
It’s said that there are no bad ideas in brainstorming. But there are ideas that lead to nowhere good. Stay away from the following; they’ll only muddy your message:

• Overused words and phrases: Quality. Excellence. Trust. They sound nice, right? There’s a reason they sound like tagline words – they are painfully overused, to the point that they say nothing new about your organization. Use them and risk your message getting buried.Other words that fall into this category include: empowering, advancing, extraordinary, exceptional, tradition, opportunities, leadership, committed, dependable, world-class, expert, partnership and “since insert year here.” These words are as bad as corporate jargon – they fall stunningly flat with consumers, they engender no loyalty or enthusiasm, they convey zero personality, and they move nobody to action. Find better words.

• Multitasking: Your tagline can’t be all things to all people. The best taglines convey one idea, and convey it really, really well.

• A message that’s not unique to you: Undistinguishable ideas are arguably worse than unoriginal words. The ideas are the crime – the words are merely the getaway car.Let’s consider this made-up tagline for a university: “Enhancing learning through educational opportunities.” Sounds fancy. It also says nothing. Don’t all universities enhance learning through educational opportunities?

  If your tagline is true about you – as well as everybody else in your industry – find a new tagline.

4. Filter the collected oil.
Cutting down your idea list can feel an awful lot like cleaning out your closet. You’ll find some obvious keepers. You’ll come across others that are so dull they immediately end up in the “discard” pile. And then there are the ones you linger over – maaaaybe you can make it work, if you only lose 20 pounds/completely alter your business model?

Don’t torture yourself. If a line doesn’t fit, cut it.

5. Give it the smell test.
Spend hours with ideas and you’ll know them intimately. Unfortunately, you’ll also lose your objectivity. So corral some new faces – people who are unfamiliar with the project – and hand them your list. Ask them, which ones are authentic? Which ones resonate? Which ones really sound like us?

Usually, you’ll have some true standouts. Occasionally, you’ll come to the harsh realization you’ve got nothing but stinkers. Don’t be afraid to toss the batch and start over.

6. Bottle and let sit.
After much grueling work, you’ve got a shortlist of really solid taglines. So how do you choose the winner?

Put the list in a drawer and forget it.

Why? Because the right line will linger, revisiting you day and night. The others will eventually go stale.

How do you keep your tagline from turning? Share in the comments below.

Man, I love marketing manifestos.

You should, too. When done right, they add personality, authenticity and believability to your brand.

So, what’s a manifesto?

A manifesto is a written statement that publicly declares your intentions, motives or views. In other words, it’s a declaration of who you are and what you believe in.

Here are two of my favorites:

• Potter and designer Jonathan Alder

• Italian food market Eataly

I love these manifestos because they give the brands:

• Personality – The unique voice makes the company come alive. Suddenly, you can relate to the brand.

• Authenticity – They stand for something. That makes the brands seem genuine.

• Believability – If you find yourself nodding as you read them, you’re likely to purchase their products and services.

Do you have a manifesto? Have you seen a great manifesto online? Please share it with us below.

Much of marketing is now disregarded as unimportant, annoying and useless. It was bound to happen. For years and years marketers have been pushing content at their audience rudely and sometimes crudely. Who isn’t tired of it all? At Inbound 2012, HubSpot founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah suggested that it’s time to make a change in marketing. It’s time to make marketing that people not just like, but LOVE.

How do we do that? It all starts with strategy.

If you don’t think about how to make your marketing more lovable and just start throwing stuff out there, you’re wasting your time. Instead, take the time to evaluate what you want to do, how to do it and how to make people really fall head over heels for it.

First, focus on your brand strategy. If your brand strategy isn’t up to par, the rest will follow suit.

Brand Strategy
People literally love brands. Sometimes they even get tatoos of their favorite brands. In the B2B realm, the brand tattoo is rare, but the fact remains that people become extremely loyal to brands. So it’s essential to create a brand that people WANT to love.

It all starts with value. Ask yourself  how your brand can add value to your customers’ businesses or lives?

Once you figure that out, you need to decide how to communicate your value to your current customers and potential ones. This requires keeping up with the way people are now communicating. It may be sad to some, but the old rules of advertising are broken and quickly becoming obsolete. As Brian Halligan pointed out in his Inbound 2012 keynote, you can actually damage your brand by using the old marketing playbook in some cases. This is where the next strategy comes into play.

Content Strategy
David Meerman Scott said it best in his keynote: “You are what you publish online. When you publish nothing, you are nothing. And when you publish crap, you are crap.”

Offering valuable content is key to successful marketing, but you have to develop a strategy that works best for your situation. Go back to your brand strategy; who or what have you decided you want to be for customers and prospects? Use that to drive your content.

When you’ve decided what you want to offer, you have to decide how you are going to accomplish that. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here. A marketing team with three copywriters will be able to create a lot more content in-house than a team with one or none. You have to choose a path that will allow you to be successful.

Finally, keep in mind that your content should:

• Differentiate your brand
• Communicate something valuable
• Integrate easily with the rest of your marketing efforts

If you can keep those three items in mind throughout your strategy creation, your end result should be a perfect fit for your company and successful in the long-term.

Social Strategy
Tim Reis from Google pointed out in his Social 3.0 session that social is the spine behind all new marketing efforts. It’s where the conversations are and where content gets shared.

Since social is the spine, the social strategy connects with all the other strategies you use in your marketing efforts. There are a few key things to keep in mind when developing your social strategy:

• Don’t only push content, but engage with your audience.
  Participate in group discussions on LinkedIn. Post comments to other people’s blogs. Join conversations on Twitter. Read and comment on other people’s presentations on SlideShare.
• Have a personality.
  Social networks let companies become more personable. Talk with your followers, engage them and appreciate them. Give yourself a persona and stick to it.
• Have a voice.
  Static tweets never get clicked on. Have an opinion! Be positive or negative but don’t ever stay in the middle. Dan Zarrella’s data shows us that sticking to the middle ground online isn’t going to help you be successful.

For more social media tips, check out “How to Be a Good Social Citizen.”

Email Strategy
I learned during the Email Marketing that People LOVE session with Amanda Iglesias and Julie Montgomery that 60 percent of people unsubscribe to emails simply because they’re irrelevant to them. That’s a problem that can be mitigated with an email marketing strategy. To start your strategy, identify:

• Your Audience
  Who, for this particular email or email campaign, are you targeting? Creating personas can be a big help in targeting your audience. If you need help creating your personas, check out our Persona and Scenario worksheet for help.
• Your Goals
  The main thing you need to decide: “What do I want recipients to do when they read this email?” From here you can expand to how you are going to communicate what you want them to do, how you will measure your success and more.
• Your Message
  What are you going to communicate and how? This part of email strategy can take a little longer, but it’s probably the most essential part, as it’s the focus of your entire campaign. Our Email Marketing Cheat Sheet can help you work through the basics of your messaging and the rest of your email strategy.

This is, of course, a very abbreviated run-down of Creating Marketing that People Love strategy points from Inbound 2012. If you only remember one thing from this post, remember that strategy should come first, always. Without strategy, marketing is just throwing out words and hoping something sticks.

The new iPhone 5 is here. In fact, you might be reading this on one.

Its innovations – a slimmer design, bigger screen and ultra-fast wireless – are remarkable.

Just as interesting, though, is the insight that those features give us into the future of marketing for B2B companies.

• A slimmer design says that less is more. Too often, companies try to say too much in their marketing. Instead of remembering everything, people retain nothing. As more B2B marketing goes mobile, watch for people to use fewer words – especially on websites.

• A bigger display shows us that we’re still in the visual revolution. B2B brands are using infographics, Pinterest and Instagram to share their stories. In other words, embrace your visual side – this trend isn’t going away. We expect digital publishing to be the next big service that agencies offer.

• Ultra-fast wireless tells us who the winners – and losers – will be. Today, it’s not enough just to be good. The speed of business is faster than ever and the stakes are higher. Even if you’re the best at what you do, if you can’t act quickly, you’re archaic. In this age of viral videos and instant tweets, the most responsive companies win.

What trends do you see in B2B marketing? Share them with us below.