According to a new survey conducted by Junta42, businesses are increasingly understanding the value of creating remarkable content. One of the key marketing themes predicted for 2010 will be centered around content marketing.

Most people think it is expensive to create content for their marketing program. But in fact it can actually be inexpensive to create if you can create it in-house instead. When you think about it the content could be as easy as putting together a presentation that you regularly take on sales calls and putting that content online. your content specific to your best value propositions. Then think about adding audio or video to your website. Even uploading your content to Slideshare.net is also a great help in getting more people to link to your website when they find the content useful.

Key Finding of the survey:

• 59% of the 259 marketers surveyed plan to increase their spending on content efforts, which compares to 56% in 2009 and 42% in 2008.  This is an 11% increase in spending from 2008 to 2010.

So what does this mean for Small Business? Well if you look at the comparison of the use of content marketing spending between small businesses and larger sized businesses.  According to the report, smaller companies are allocating 40% of their marketing budgets to content marketing, which is more than twice the amount of larger companies, who are allocating 18%.

Do you have content marketing in your plans for 2010? Discuss on Facebook

Image Source: Flickr – Danard Vincente

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Many businesses have started creating their own Facebook Fan pages to communicate with their customers and fans. However not everyone knows that you can also use your Fan page to collect valuable email addresses to contact your fans directly in their inbox. Adding a newsletter sign up form to your Facebook fan page only takes a few minutes but can be very effective in growing your email list.

If you are looking for more information on why your business needs a Facebook Page you can read our earlier post: Do you need a Facebook Fan Page for your business?

What you will need:

1) Facebook Fan Page
2) Email sign up form (Many online email marketing tools offer a built-in tool to create an HTML sign up form for your website)

How to add a Newsletter Signup form to your Facebook fan page

Step 1: Login to Facebook and go to your Fan Page
Step 2: Click on the “Ads and Pages” link in the footer toolbar of your Fan page
Step 3: Click on the “Pages” link, and then on “View Page”

Step 4: Add the “Static FBML” application to your page by click on the “Application” icon in the footer toolbar.
Then select “Browse More Applications”

Step 5: Search for “Static FBML“, and click on the icon for the application.
Looks like this:

Step 6: Click on the “Add to my Page”

Step 6: Configure your newly added application, by clicking on “Edit Page” on the left menu.

Step 7: Put your mouse cursor over the blue pencil icon, and click on “edit” under the Admin Options.

Step 8: Paste the HTML code for your sign up form. This was the second item from our what you will need checklist above.
On the Edit FBML screen paste your sign up for source code and then click “Save Changes“.

Step 9: Your Facebook Fan page should not contain a new Newsletter tab which when clicked will display your email sign up form.
If you do not see the Newsletter Signup form option click on the ‘+’ sign to see more tabs. Your page probably looks something like this:

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