Stories make life interesting and give people a way to connect. People crave them, which creates a big opportunity for brand storytelling.

Unfortunately, a lot of companies don’t think of themselves as a brand, let alone consider whether they have a story to tell. But the problem is not that they don’t have a story — they just don’t understand how to find it, or how they should be sharing it.

A brand story is made up of all that you are and all that you do. From the company’s history, mission, inspiration, goals, audience, and raison d’être, it’s why you exist. Your story is the people, places, and ideas that your company thrives on. It’s the foundation that keeps a brand going and growing. It’s a blend of those vital little core pieces of information about your business — how you came to be, why your products or services are special, what you’re passionate about, your company culture, how you make people’s lives better, and why you would do business with your company.

Brand stories can be told in many different forms, with an evolving story line and cast of characters, but content creators must be vigilant about continuity and consistency, avoiding any holes. Your brand’s story has to resonate with people at a level that goes way beyond what’s tangible — the functionality, features, and benefits of your products or services — to create a deep, emotional connection with your audience. You have to create something that they want to be a part of and show that you really “get” who they are and what they need.

Here are a few basic questions to answer to help you pull your story out of its box:

1. What’s your reason for being?

To tell your story, you have to know your reason for being in business and be able to articulate it clearly. What is your purpose? What is important to you? What makes your product different from the competition?

Business leaders must understand the essence of their own company’s mission — and get real with themselves as to how durable and realistic that mission is. Businesses also must have clear corporate positioning that identifies who they are at their core, and is based on a deep understanding of why they are in business and who they are in business for. The strategy, mission, and vision are part of the true essence of a brand story, and are essential to aligning that story with truth and reality. If you are building upon a weak foundation, there will always be cracks in your story.

Answering fundamental questions about why you’re in business often reveals those vital nuggets of information about what makes you different, compelling, and interesting to others. Knowing where you’ve been will help you know where you’re going.

Example: Splenda: When Splenda launched onto the scene with its sunny, yellow packets, it quickly captured market share by introducing Sucralose, a new zero calorie sweetener “made from real sugar.” Early on, the folks at Splenda were committed to telling their story. In fact, Splenda takes storytelling so seriously that an entire section of its website is dedicated to telling its brand story. Splenda doesn’t assume brand loyalty will be enough to lure consumers; it gives consumers a brand story to be loyal to.

Splenda’s story.

Telling your brand story helps you distinguish yourself from the overload of information out there. It’s why some brands, like Apple and Starbucks, give some people the warm fuzzies — and create an irrational teenage-like crush in others.

2. What’s your history?

From shampoo to chocolate to logistics companies, people want to know the history of your products or services and how they came to be. Has anyone else owned your company? How did it come to be? Was there a creative or historical event behind the origin of your business? If you’re stuck for inspiration, consider that the luxury notebook company Moleskine created a fictional history around its notebooks, describing them as “The legendary notebook used by artists and thinkers over the past two centuries: among them Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin.”

Example: Oren International: Think your business isn’t that exciting? Paper converting likely doesn’t sound thrilling either. In fact, the folks at Oren International once had a dry, boring website focused on numbers, weights and measurements, and type of paper they convert — it certainly didn’t tell the story of a fun, creative group with an amazing paper facility that services major clients — including restaurants, pharmaceutical companies and advertising agencies — worldwide.

Once we got to know the real story behind Oren’s operations, we found gems of information to bring out its personality and enhance its custom services through more fitting words and visuals.

Oren’s new content explains how it partners with companies to bring their visions to life and conveys its passion for the possibilities of paper. It has a voice and perspective and effectively communicates what Oren can do for clients, from developing innovative alternatives for product parts to make them more green and economical, to collaborating with project engineers to execute ideas.

Within the first three months of its new site launch, Oren International saw a 69 percent conversion rate for its eBook, which targeted restaurants, and an 86 percent conversion rate on an eBook about the environment. Both of these pieces show Oren’s expertise and commitment to quality through interesting storytelling.

Oren International’s website (before)

Oren International’s website (after)

3. Who are your main characters?

Every brand story has main characters that helped it take shape. Was your business inspired by a book? Did your founders have a chance meeting with someone on a subway? Was there an aha moment while jogging? To find the heart of your story, start by identifying all of the people (real or fictional) who make your business thrive, and use them as your cast of characters.

4. What’s your corporate mission?

This is your business’ ultimate reason for being. Why are you in business? What call are you responding to? What problems are you trying to solve? Method Products founders Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry set out to turn the consumer goods industry on its head by creating products that “inspire a happy and healthy home revolution” with ingredients that “come from plants, not chemical plants” and will be “role models in bottles.” Method’s annual revenue now exceeds $100 million.

5. How have you failed?

Failure often breeds success. Showing people how you failed along the way and transparently embracing those pitfalls demonstrates the humanity of your business and will help them feel more connected to you on a personal level. Even Henry Ford failed in his early businesses and lost his fortune five times before founding the Ford Motor Company.

6. Where are your gaps?

As you dive into the Q&A, pay attention to topics or subjects that you see people being hesitant to share. It’s common practice to try and fill every month and year of your working life when creating a resume. You aren’t “supposed” to have any gaps in your professional life.  From our experience, those gaps are usually where the most interesting stories take place.  Whether a year of work is missing from traveling the world, starting a family, or simply being unemployed, the best stories often come from those empty spaces.

A simple way to look for those intriguing gaps is to create a timeline for your company. Don’t try to sugar coat a slow year by blaming it on economic downturns or “transitions.” Be honest with yourself and acknowledge the good and the bad.  What you’ll likely find is that during those times you normally wouldn’t highlight, the most interesting part of your story will emerge.

A slow year may have forced your company to invent a new product or service. A rebranding campaign may have resulted from bringing on a new partner or letting someone go.  The times where everything seemed status quo or even boring may have been when your next big idea was actually brewing underneath the surface.   The gaps often hold the key to why you have a story in the first place.  Whether you are a new or old brand, taking some time to remember why you started or how an idea came to you can be the essence of your story.

Conclusion

You have to know who you are before you can explain it to someone else. Brands that don’t have their core value propositions in place, or have internal discrepancies about what they are even trying to say, will never be able to share their story with the world in an honest and engaging way.

Learn more about brand content creation from Debbie Williams when she takes the stage at Content Marketing World 2013. Her latest book, “Brands in Glass Houses: How to Embrace Transparency Through Content Marketing to Grow Your Business,” will be released by CMI Books in September, 2013.

Cover image via Bigstock.

This post will attempt to analyze and translate Google’s post-launch comments and explain how they impact content creators.

SEO analysis & translation #1

If you’re doing high quality content when you’re doing SEO, then this [Penguin 2.0] shouldn’t be a big surprise. You shouldn’t have to worry about a lot of different changes. — Matt Cutts

Enterprise marketers who produce valuable, problem-solving and/or entertaining content, both earned and owned, have nothing to worry about. The true impact of this update will be felt by traditional link builders and brokers who place links on questionable websites pointing to generic product, service, or category pages for the sake of SEO instead of creating remarkable, compelling content.

Cyrus Shepard of SEOmoz says, “If you don’t have a linkable asset, now is the time to start working on one because they earn more links than anything else.”

He’s simply stating that remarkable online assets like eBooks, guides, studies, and white papers with real value are link bait. They naturally attract link citations throughout the web. Most generic product, service, and category pages aren’t remarkable or shareable.

By adding a little digital PR, marketers can pitch this advanced content to online media outlets for write-ups, exposure, and citations, too. These efforts can drive hundreds — even thousands — of natural links in a short amount of time. Short-term benefits include brand coverage, increased website traffic, and conversions. Search benefits are realized and grow over the long-term.

Takeaway #1: Quality content, on- and off-page, is a future-proof SEO strategy.

SEO analysis & translation #2

We’re doing a better job of detecting when someone is more of an authority on a specific space. You know, it could be medical. It could be travel. Whatever. And try[ing] to make sure that those rank a little more highly if you’re some sort of authority… we think might be a little more appropriate for users. — Matt Cutts

The best off-page SEO practitioners today get inbound links from relevant and authoritative websites. Google maintains a very short list of these websites, called Hilltops.

Earning inbound links from Hilltops requires two things. The content the link points to must be remarkable, problem solving, and/or entertaining. Next, there must be topical relevance between the Hilltop and the site it links to. The best content marketing fulfills these two requirements, earning inbound links from highly authoritative websites.

When several industry Hilltops link to a brand, Google will most likely view it as an industry authority, too. Matt Cutts says above that they want these brands to “rank a little more highly” than the others. Because of this, links from Hilltops don’t just affect the page they link to — they also have a positive impact on the entire website.

Takeaway #2: Google’s goal is to promote authoritative websites. Climbing Hilltops in your industry is a future-proof SEO strategy.

SEO analysis & translation #3

If someone pays for coverage, or pays for an ad or something like that, those ads should not flow PageRank… We’ll be looking at some efforts to be a little bit stronger on our enforcement as far as advertorials that violate our quality guidelines. — Matt Cutts

Buying links has been against Google’s webmaster guidelines for a long time. Brands that get caught buying and selling follow-links risk being de-indexed from its algorithm. Google has gotten much better at detecting these practices. Great content marketing earns inbound links that add value over the long run without risk of penalty.

Takeaway #3: You can’t buy a ticket to the Hilltop. Earning links, rather than buying links, is a future-proof SEO strategy.

SEO analysis & translation #4

We are looking at Panda and seeing if we can find some additional signals, and we think we’ve got some to help refine things for sites that are kind of in the border zone… if we can soften the effect a little bit for those sites that we believe have some additional signals of quality, that will help sites that were previously affected… to some degree [by Panda]. — Matt Cutts

Driving quality off-page signals (like links and mentions) can help offset any previous negative impact from Google’s Panda algorithm. In essence, the Penguin can reverse the Panda. The best way to drive the biggest and most diverse set of off-page signals is by deploying a deliberate and strategic earned media campaign. This can exponentially expose current owned media and content marketing efforts to a targeted, usually larger, audience. Some off-page signals include:

• Social mentions: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, G+, Pinterest, Digg, reddit
• Middle-of-the-pack direct advertising website links: Articles on industry communities and blogs
• News curation websites: Paper.li, Scoop.it
• News aggregation websites: The Huffington Post, Alltop
• News feed syndication: Private companies and public organizations
• Print publications: Remarkable online content can be cited by magazines, newspapers, and trade publications
• Slideshows: SlideShare, PDFs

Having a broad diversification of off-page signals communicates authority and trust to Google. Earned media and content marketing can meaningfully drive these signals naturally. Search engine algorithms will easily be able to determine the authenticity of the off-page signals.

Takeaway #4: Earned media and digital PR can help you recover from Panda. Driving a variety of quality digital signals is a future-proof SEO strategy.

Content marketing and digital PR folks who primarily rely on their compelling content to drive search engine traffic should be smiling now because the future looks bright for them. It looks bright because with each algorithm update, Google gets even better at rewarding good content from authoritative people and brands.

Get more insight on best SEO practices that will help your content win the Google game — register today to attend Content Marketing World 2013. 

Cover image credit: seanbjack

• Planning your upcoming strategies
• Validating the directions you’re taking
• Making the business case for content in your organization

At CMI, we’re pretty passionate about research, too. In fact, we conduct original research every year to help set budgets and benchmarks for your effective content marketing efforts. But, we also like to keep tabs on what others are saying about content marketing, so we can make sure we are keeping up with the latest trends.

As you know, one stat on its own may be valuable, and even tweet-worthy, but seeing multiple stats that validate your point of view is definitely more convincing.

That’s why we’ve compiled this list of some of the best content marketing research out there. It’s designed to serve as a go-to resource for the information we think will be most valuable — and we’d love to add your research, as well.

Huge thanks go to Anna Ritchie, who helped us compile this list.

In the research-focused List.ly above, you’ll find:

• B2B and B2C benchmarks, budgets and trends for North America, the U.K. and Australia
• Research reports broken down by industry
• Meaningful insights on the current state of digital marketing — and the specific implications for content marketers
• Discussions on the way social media usage impacts content marketing strategy
• Ideas for building stronger connections between your content and sales teams 

Sharing your own resources with List.ly

We created this list using List.ly, which is a simple way to create and share lists on pretty much anything and everything. Here’s how it works:

• Gather relevant research pieces for your list, adding filters so you can easily sort and browse through the studies to find those most relevant to you.
• Rank the reports — you can vote each one “up” or “down” in your rankings, as well as add comments wherever you would like.
• Pick reports to save or share from your list. You can even share or embed the entire list on your website or within your own social networks.

Through the process, we found that List.ly really helped us minimize the legwork involved, which made it really quick and easy to find the stats we wanted to highlight and share.

The studies we selected contain dozens and dozens of charts, graphs, stats, and commentary gathered from thousands of marketers just like you. But this list is just the beginning. We’ll be curating this data in various ways to make it even more useful. But in the meantime, we would love your help in making this list a more comprehensive resource. What would you add? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

For more resources and research to help guide your effective content marketing strategies, visit CMI’s Original Research page. 

Cover image via Bigstock

CMI video on Vimeo

Have a sneaking suspicion that you’re missing out on a world of video opportunity? You may be right. Limiting your brand to YouTube without combing through the other available options may curb your video content marketing potential.

A quickly evolving marketplace means frequent stops to reevaluate your online video strategy. To get some perspective on video distribution channels, I spoke with some video experts, including Eric Leslie, President of OnScene Productions and the man behind the lens at events like Content Marketing World.

Eric helped me assemble a comparison of the biggest and brightest video distribution networks on the market. We compiled questions to help guide your distribution plan from these comparisons. We also discussed the future of online video for content marketers.

Where do today’s video platforms excel? Where do they fall short?

Which platforms make the most sense for your business? Here are the top contenders:

• Unsurprisingly, the market leader is YouTube, with more than 1 billion unique visitors and 4 billion hours of video watched monthly.

• In 2012, more than 675 million people tuned in to Vimeo, another popular option for content marketers. The platform currently has 14 million members.

• Brightcove has outlasted much of the competition, boasting 6,300 customers in 60 countries. Its video player loads 3.2 billion times a month.

Let’s take a look through the similarities and differences of these top platforms, and see where Eric feels each one excels — and where each one drops the ball — from a video content perspective.

CMI’s video channel on YouTube

Quality
Investing in high quality video content could be a waste if your video platform doesn’t support it. If you embed a video on your website, for example, will it run in HD mode, or only in SD?

YouTube falls short in video quality, dropping to lower resolutions when bandwidth isn’t available. The best options for a consistent, high-quality stream are Vimeo and Brightcove.

Eric says: “Vimeo plays in 720p HD, maintaining integrity and quality for every view. Brightcove does adjust quality based on bandwidth — but it never drops into SD, which means the viewer never gets a grainy picture.”

Searchability
Searchability is essential if the goal of your video content is to draw in leads.

Chances are you’ve been sucked into the black hole that is YouTube. That’s because its video curation skills are second to none. YouTube also dominates results when it comes to organic search through Google and other engines.

Eric says: ”YouTube’s Google tie gives it top ranking in searchability. It’s optimized and gives you tools to narrow down your target audience even further. An organic audience spending hours on the site increases the chances that a potential viewer will stumble on your video.”

Embedding
Embedding is an important feature to look at if hosting a video directly on your website is a priority over inbound marketing.

The quality of your video impacts the quality of your website. Therefore, maintaining a high-quality stream is a priority for embedded video. That counts out YouTube’s schizophrenic SD-HD vibe.

YouTube also suggests related content that might not be specific to your brand — increasing the likelihood that your visitor will bounce.

Eric says: ”For a high-quality video embed, Vimeo is the way to go, especially if you aren’t dealing with a large quantity of videos.”

Customizability & control
Building your own content network? You’ll need a platform with strong customization and control options if video is to be a dominant piece of your content marketing.

Brightcove is the top contender for large quantities of video. It gives you the ability to add your own pre- or post-roll ads and personalize your video player skin, among other customization features.

Eric says: “Vimeo is restrictive, and YouTube gives you no control over pre-roll. Brightcove is your best bet if control is a priority.”

Investment
There’s no harm in using a free platform like YouTube, right? Still, you’ll have to shell out a few bucks if you need the functionality of Vimeo or Brightcove. (NOTE: Vimeo does have a free option, but it’s limited.)

Think Vimeo or Brightcove make the most sense for your brand? Loosen that vice grip on your video budget. Go for quality.

Eric says: ”YouTube is a service — but Vimeo and Brightcove are solutions. If you need the functionality, make the investment.”

Analytics
The rush to big data excellence means having strong analytics capture for video, too. Pretty much every network we’ve mentioned thus far has a platform for tracking your analytics.

Limelight Networks is a notable video platform for analytics collection, especially for content marketers. It weaves into the ongoing narrative, helping you understand how video plays into the working parts of your content marketing efforts.

Eric says: “Understanding the impact of video goes deeper than it ever has before. You must be able to track video’s impact on your bottom line.”

Niche functionality
YouTube, Vimeo, and Brightcove are all blanket platforms, covering the spectrum of industries and purposes. Evaluating video networks with a more specific purpose can help you target your content.

Take Xavy, for example. The quickly expanding video network focuses exclusively on videos of industry leaders speaking at top conferences, helping leaders get exposure on one end and keeping professionals up to date on industry trends on the other.

Eric says: ”There’s nothing more powerful for video than finding a niche delivery system. Networks like Xavy give you a sure-fire way to engage your audience directly.”

CMI videos on Brightcove

What goals define the platform that fits your content marketing?

Each video channel has its strengths and weaknesses. Your choice depends on what you value most in a video platform, and what your specific video content needs are.

Take a good, hard look at your content plan before you evaluate channels. Here are a few questions to help you determine your priorities and make better decisions when choosing the best video content platform:

• Are you shelling out cash for high quality production or using your computer camera?
• How large is your library of videos?
• Will the larger file sizes and resolution requirements for HD video overwhelm your server and storage capabilities?
• Are you primarily using videos for inbound marketing or converting leads?
• Are you managing your own video network? Do you need access to pre- and post-roll footage?
• Is brand control a priority? Are you worried about videos being paired with unsafe content?

Already have a solid grasp on your current video strategy? Well, then let’s take a brief look at what’s on the horizon for video content:

What does the future of online video look like?

Video can be one of the most compelling forms of content marketing — if you do it right. Cisco predicts online video users to reach 1.5 billion by 2016. There’s no doubt it’s a powerful channel for connecting brands with their audience members.

According to Steve Rotter, Brightcove‘s VP of Marketing, the rapid growth of online video has done much to snuff out smaller video platforms.

“I think the market has matured to a point where only the strong have survived. Like most emerging technology segments, the smaller players just can’t keep up, so they have a few options. You can get bought like (Limelight-acquired cloud player) Delve, go out of business, or try to dig deep into a small industry niche, like video training.”

Existing video platforms that are deeply entrenched in the market have a head start on technology, too. According to Eric Leslie, “A major challenge facing video content producers is that video is still evolving. Bandwidth is increasing, and resolution is getting crisper. The technology could look pretty different in a year.”

Among the developments Eric says to watch for is high-efficiency video coding (HEVC), also known as H.265. “Pretty soon, a 10-minute video could take 10 seconds to load.”

The next wave of high-resolution video is on the horizon, as well, in the form of 4K. Video producers are already shooting with 4K cameras, and television manufacturers have begun to roll out new models that are equipped to handle this level of quality. “It’s only a matter of time before 4K really starts to hit the web,” he says.

We’ll see new platforms and new approaches, according to Eric, but providers like YouTube, Vimeo, and Brightcove aren’t going anywhere for a while.

Join the conversation

Which video platforms does your brand use? Share them with us in the comments.

For more help on selecting the best technologies for your content marketing efforts, read CMI’s eGuide, How to Choose Content Marketing Technology.

Let’s review:

Real-time: Does your content take advantage of current trends and relevant news stories? Oreo created a memorable brand moment with its spontaneous — and perfectly-timed — delivery of the tweet, “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark,” during an unexpected blackout in the middle of Super Bowl XLVII. The image was retweeted more than 10,000 times and received free press from nearly every media company on the planet.

While Oreo might have lucked out by capturing lightning in a bottle, the underlying lesson is clear: Brands can gain a competitive edge if they create content off the back of popular culture or industry news. But what you may not be aware of is that Oreo had the real-time staffing and approval structure already in place from its 100 days of Oreo campaign. The point: Real-time doesn’t just happen overnight.

Fact-driven: Regardless of the point of view you express, the content you develop must be based on fact. Just like in grade school, when we had to cite the sources we used in our history reports, leveraging credible statistics and information is essential to creating authoritative, meaningful content.

Almost every media company employs a fact-checker… someone whose sole responsibility is to make sure what they are saying is 100 percent correct. If even one piece of content you release is factually inaccurate, the social web will be relentless in its attacks on your brand. Your job is to set the necessary processes in place to ensure this never happens.

Visual: In late 2011, Skyword, a content marketing platform, performed an analysis on all of its content, and found that blog posts and articles that included images performed 94 percent better than those without images in the same category. Why does this happen? According to research conducted by 3M, 90 percent of transmitted information in the human brain is visual in nature, and visual content gets processed 60,000 times faster than the written word.

Image via Skyword.com

So visual design is critical, even in text-based content, and should be a part of every one of your content marketing efforts.

Efficient: When we first started posting our daily blog posts at CMI, all tasks were handled by just two people: Michele Linn and myself. We did the best with the resources we had. Now, almost four years later, Michele leads our strategy, Jodi Harris manages our daily content, Lisa Higgs proofs and cross-checks our content, Tracy Gold reviews all of our headlines and keywords, and Mike Murray edits our metadata for search engine optimization.

Over the years, we’ve been able to refine the process, bringing in experts to oversee key areas, so that we are able to manage our resources and processes as efficiently as possible.

Curated: Pawan Deshpande, CEO of Curata, defines content curation as, “the practice of finding, organizing, and sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific topic, rather than [marketers] solely creating all their content themselves.” Even the smartest media companies in the world, such as The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Mashable, produce stories that leverage other people’s content. Your job, like that of a museum curator, is to unearth the best content on the planet in your niche, so that your museum doesn’t close down for a lack of visitors.

A handy checklist

Keeping the above criteria in mind, I’ve developed a checklist of considerations that will help ensure that all five are accounted for in every content product you create:

• Have you designated someone in your organization to be responsible for monitoring industry or popular news related to your business?
• Have you implemented a process for delivering critical industry information to your organization’s lead content creator?
• Do you currently employ a fact checker for your content? If not, who has been put in charge of proofreading your content and ensuring its accuracy?
• Have you developed a plan for image selection as part of your content creation process?
• Are you making sure to incorporate those images into every piece of online content you create?
• Are at least three people on your team checking and reviewing each piece of content before it gets published?
• Is your blog content being checked against a prioritized list of keywords that your division or organization is looking to rank for?
• Has someone in your organization been assigned the responsibility of integrating curated content along with your original content?
• Do you have a “hit list” of sites that you regularly check for new opportunities to curate content?

Remember, content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. It is an ongoing process — not a “one-and-done” campaign. Make sure your content marketing operations include elements of the above five points so that your readers will actually engage in the content you spend so much time producing.

Joe Pulizzi’s latest book, “Epic Content Marketing,” will be released in September 2013. You can preorder it now on Amazon.com. 

Cover image via Bigstock

At that event, we met with dozens of new technology companies that were either making their debut or would soon formally introduce themselves to the many attendees focused on the practice of content marketing.

As we began to dig into some of these companies, and understand the real-world problems they solved for enterprises big and small, we discovered that they were indeed different. And, as the second Content Marketing World approached in 2012, we saw even more new technologies — and new demand for tools specific to the practice of content marketing. But, we thought, surely this was a space already being covered by someone.

Yet to our surprise, when we looked around, we discovered that no one had really done an adequate job of stratifying the market for enterprise buyers of this technology. And those buyers, along with agencies, interested venture capital firms, and even some of the technology companies themselves, were coming to us and asking, “What’s the difference between X and Y solutions, and what challenges do they really solve?” Not only were we unable to point them to the right answer, we couldn’t even point them to a resonant resource that might have the answer.

So, we decided that we would take the reins, spend the time to research the space, and try to provide a pragmatic map of these technologies.

Starting with traditional technologies

Ultimately, software tools are meant to make it easier to facilitate some part of a process that is difficult to execute by other means. And, in our experience, if you can map your process to the stages outlined below, it becomes easier to identify gaps — and, perhaps, a solution that can help fill those gaps.

In our book, “Managing Content Marketing,” Joe Pulizzi and I discuss the internal content marketing process. While it’s certainly no revolutionary content map, it’s as good a model as any in describing the major components of a successful content marketing approach.

We speak to four steps:

1. Create, Edit, and Manage: To create content for content marketing, a company needs to assemble a team, develop a work flow that makes sense, establish the rules everyone will play by, and agree to follow a predetermined game plan.

2. Aggregate, Curate, and Optimize: In this step, the company aligns content across a larger narrative; pulls content in from disparate locations and teams; curates it to provide a consolidated, distinct point of view; and optimizes it for various channels.

3. Promote, Converse, and Listen: Here, the company stays focused, managing inbound conversations and publishing outbound content. It understands that it has to promote content through traditional marketing methods, as well as socialize it within communities.

4. Measure, Analyze, and Learn: During this phase, the company measures and analyzes data to understand how the content is changing or enhancing conversion rates, engagement, loyalty, or other KPIs and, ultimately, consumer behavior.

Taking these categories a step further

As an exercise, we took these four steps and started to map existing technology solutions to them. As you might expect, many of the well-known solutions fit neatly into one of the steps.

For example:

• The Create, Edit, and Manage stage included all of the modern web content management systems (WCMS) and blogging solutions, along with file-sharing technologies such as Dropbox, Box, etc.
• The Aggregate, Curate, and Optimize stage included classic content optimization, testing, and personalization tools such as Adobe Test & Target, Optimost, and Monetate.
• The Promote, Converse, and Listen stage included social channels, as well as enterprise listening tools such as Radian6 and Attensity.
• The Measure, Analyze, and Learn stage included many web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Webtrends, and Adobe SiteCatalyst.

However, we began to notice that some of the newer, disruptive solutions fit somewhere “in between” — in the spaces where the “classic,” enterprise-focused tools (WCMS, content optimization, marketing automation, and analytics tools) weren’t flexible, fast, or robust enough to meet the demands of new, adaptive content marketing processes. Figure 1, below, depicts these “overlap” spaces.

We then took the newer technology solutions, mapped them into the overlap areas, and grouped them as follows:

Content collaboration tools — where Create, Edit, and Manage overlaps with Aggregate, Curate, and Optimize. These tools facilitate content editorial work flow, empower the enterprise to manage teams (either external or internal), and enable collaboration on content for content marketing purposes.

Curation and conversation tools — where Aggregate, Curate, and Optimize overlaps with Promote, Converse, and Listen. These tools help to promote, publish, and aggregate content in meaningful ways; in many cases, they also help manage the content optimization process by using social signals, and can even facilitate some level of unified content conversation.

Social content analytics tools — where Promote, Converse, and Listen meets Measure, Analyze, and Learn. These tools help to maintain relevance in conversation, while also providing insight into what we should be talking about — from specific niche social channel analytics, to semantic processing of social media conversations.

Engagement automation tools — where Measure, Analyze, and Learn comes back around to overlap with Create, Edit, and Manage. Beyond classic marketing automation, many of these tools not only have the ability to manage some form of content, but they can do so from the point of view of helping the marketer “optimize” content for engagement and conversion purposes.

Figure 1

Is this the right way to map these technologies? Well, the answer is a most definite “maybe.” Given the fast-moving and disruptive nature of this market, and the number of solutions that are actually overlapping one another, this is the best way in which we’ve been able to make sense of the current landscape.

Want to learn more?

To help you better understand content collaboration tools, I recently developed a 49-page guide based on hour-long briefings with key vendors in this space. To get an inside look at this space and these tools, download Content Collaboration Tools: An Analysis of 13 Technology Solutions in a Disruptive Marketplace.

Cover image via Bigstock

Content marketing usurps SEO…

Content marketing has killed SEO…

Content marketing overtakes SEO…

The word “versus” often appears between these two purported rivals.

Shoot me now.

Or, wait just a minute and shoot me after you’ve read (and have disagreed with) my strong point of view on the hyper-hyped topic du jour that’s come to be a showdown between content marketing and SEO. 

From where I sit, it’s a ridiculous argument.

Though the topic is often (and shamefully) broached by writers who actually understand marketing strategy, it seems little more than a gimmick to get readers to click on a blog post. At best, what they get from the read is another lesson on the power of content marketing.

If this is an unpopular opinion, I have two things to say:

• So be it.
• Having an unpopular opinion is a powerful way to polarize the audience and win favor with those in your camp.

Content marketing and SEO do not compete with each other

The “Content marketing vs. SEO” battle opportunists are so eager to pit the two against each other. They want you to pick a side.

The implication seems to be that, to be smart about your digital marketing spend, you need to choose to hire one type of specialist over the other. Maybe you have $3,000 to allocate per month. The dilemma: Do you put it into content marketing or into SEO?

I can only make sense of this if the SEO effort in contention here is of the black hat variety. In other words, if SEO wins your dollars, it would go into hiring a shop to go on a voracious back-link-building mission. This was indeed a booming, yet questionable, business for years. Today, it’s unethical and ineffective — dangerous even. Search engines penalize the practitioners they find guilty of these crimes.

Let’s cast aside the shady practice of building links by exchanging dollars (or favors, or link farming, or any other nonsense that will no longer fly, thanks to Google’s Penguin initiatives and the like). You’re left with no competition. There are no rivals here, and there’s nothing left to debate.

True online marketing professionals will recognize that both content marketing and SEO are star players in an enterprise-focused marketing strategy. If your team has a void in one area or the other (or both), you need to fill it — end of story. SEO experts need not fear the extinction of their craft. Their roles will remain vital to brand marketing because they know better than anyone that effective and ethical SEO can’t happen without content to be optimized.

You could make the case that SEO is content marketing

We create content to support our marketing objectives. If we’re doing this wisely, a vital part of our execution strategies should be focused on optimizations that will increase the probability that our content will be discovered via search.

As I see it, saying SEO and content are two separate marketing tactics is akin to saying headlines and copy are foes. How preposterous is that? You write headlines to get people to read copy. You then optimize your online content to get people to discover it.

In my opinion, SEO, or search engine optimization, is a misnomer anyway. It seems to suggest you optimize the search engine. Clearly, you cannot and do not. You optimize online content.

“Content” optimization — now there’s a term I could live with. Seems like a happy and harmonious marriage of the two marketing disciplines.

It’s time to think holistically

In “The Mindset that Makes Online Marketing Work,” from MarketingLand, Copyblogger’s Brian Clark writes:

“The struggle many face with online marketing is a misguided impulse to put various tactics into separate boxes instead of seeing each as an aspect of one overarching strategic process.”

Brian adds:

“To this day, I see people referring to content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization as three different things — as if each is a tactic that can get you there alone.

“The smart way to practice effective online marketing is to treat social media and search engine results as aspects of a holistic strategy that centers around compelling content.”

You can’t cast a vote for content that succeeds in a vacuum. You can create and publish content across multiple, strategic platforms. You can repurpose it from materials created by other functional disciplines within your organization. You can share it via numerous social media channels…

And if you want to maximize its marketing power and potential benefit to your business, you damn well better optimize it.

For more guidance on how to do this, check out the following CMI posts:

• 12 Tips for Keyword Selection to Guide Your Content Marketing SEO
• How to Optimize Content When You Don’t Know Jack about SEO
• Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy with 8 Keyword Tracking Tips

Looking to learn even more about the emerging roles that content marketing plays in the digital landscape? Don’t miss out on the groundbreaking discussions that will take place at Content Marketing World 2013. 

Cover image via Bigstock

When I engage with a client, I focus on 5 things:

• Why: Why do you do what you do?
• Who: Who are your audiences (beyond simple demographics)?
• What: What stories can you tell that create engagement?
• How: How do we tell your story? What tactics can we use?
• Where: Where do you need to be, both online and offline?

Nine out of 10 times, when I begin working with a client, they are already focusing on how and where. And why not? It’s the fun part. It’s tangible and measurable, and it’s where the action is. My job is to pull them back in and focus on the why, who, and what.

While it may be more theoretical than actionable, figuring out the essence of a brand is critical to a content marketing strategy. How can we know what tactic to employ if we don’t yet understand our personas and how they choose to consume content? And how can we know where to be until we identify our tactics?

Once we get through the why, who, and what, we can focus once again on how and where. However, that’s often when panic sets in.

It’s relatively easy to manage something like a brand’s Facebook page or Twitter account before fully understanding why, who, and what. There are few goals or objectives required, and little to measure. But once there is a strategy in place, we can determine what kinds of content need to be produced, as well as what platforms need to be managed. Who is going to create, publish and manage all of this content? Who is going to be responsible for ROI? Who is going to be accountable? In a strategic content marketing plan, these are the questions that beg for answers.

It’s at this point that my clients typically say, “Ummm… we don’t have the resources to do all of this.” And that, my friend, is what I like to call the “Reality Bites Moment.” It’s that moment when clients realize that they don’t think they possess the time, money, or skills to pull off a content marketing strategy successfully. But they almost always do, in spite of themselves — they just need to take a step back before they freak out!

It’s easy and fun to blue sky with a consultant; coming up with all kinds of cool ways to engage audiences. “Sure, let’s create a YouTube channel! How about Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest? Why not? I know… let’s create an infographic every week! Hey, how about a contest? An eBook? An email campaign? A fun meme with cats?”

The response: “Aiiieeeee! How much more content do we need to create?!?!”

As Joe Pulizzi, CMI’s fearless leader, says, “It’s not about more, more, more.” In fact, he recently asserted that he is done with “more.”

“The more the better” is happening all the time, in companies big and small. They are not fully realizing their content marketing strategies because they do not possess the skill sets to execute on them. So all that great energy; the promise of all those awesome ideas… all lying dormant without being fulfilled.

I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes it’s the consultant who gets the client all worked up with new and exciting ideas, only to let the client down once reality sets in.

This needs to change.

The skill set imperative

We have to start identifying skill sets way earlier in the process. I have experienced the Reality Bites Moment too many times. It’s a demoralizing situation to be faced with, like when a parent says, “Hey let’s go to Disneyland!” and five minutes later says, “Just kidding.” It can be crushing, and it can kill the creative process.

How do we change this frustrating cycle? I recently figured out a potential solution, and it’s actually kind of simple:

Assess internal skill sets at the beginning of the content marketing process

I used to start my engagements by asking my clients why they do what they do. Now, I open by asking, “Who in the company can write?” I focus on writing, because whether you choose blogs, white papers, articles, email newsletters, or eBooks, you’re going to need writers.

In May of 2012, the CMI consultants were asked, “What are the essential skills for content marketing teams?” Literally all of us said, “Good writing skills.”

That’s where I start, but then I go on to ask more questions:

• Who has video experience? Filming? Editing? Sound? Lighting?
• Do you have designers on staff?
• Is anyone on your team experienced at managing an online community?
• Who has event planning experience?
• Who are your best presenters?
• Does anyone have experience with any of the following:
  • Email programs?
  • CRM?
  • CMS?
  • Google Analytics?

This may feel like I am jumping ahead to tactics, but I am merely getting a feel for what the client can handle. Clients’ answers to these questions will influence the content marketing strategy we put together. The challenge is to not let these questions lead us to a discussion of tactics. This is a simple exercise to identify internal skills and potential content development team members once the why, who, and what are figured out.

Not every company is as fortunate as Coca-Cola and Volkswagen, which have content budgets and resources that seem to be virtually unlimited. Regardless, by identifying internal skill sets from the get-go, just about any company can approach the how and where with confidence, because they know they will be able to deliver.

It’s time to say good-bye to those Reality Bites Moments, and hello to, “Let’s Do This!”

CMI Consultant Michael Weiss will be sharing more of his insight on content marketing strategies at Content Marketing World 2013. Register today!

Cover image via Bigstock

Meet Kelvin Doe, otherwise known as DJ Focus. Kelvin is a 15-year-old boy from Sierra Leone who wanted to be a DJ so badly that he decided to build his own radio station from electronics scraps he found in trash. If you haven’t seen Kelvin’s story, I recommend you watch it now. (It’s well worth the 10 minutes.)

Inspirational stories work

Kelvin Doe’s inspirational story has brought him global recognition: He’s spoken at TEDxTeen, appeared on CNN and NBC, and been featured on Huffington Post. Most recently, Kelvin was named one of the most creative people of 2013 by “Fast Company” magazine. Indeed, Kelvin’s ability to share his personal experience opened up a world of possibilities that he would likely never have had access to.

But Kelvin isn’t the only one who gained new opportunities by sharing his story. MIT’s Visiting Practitioners Program and YouTube channel, Thnkr — both of which supported Kelvin as he began his journey of discovery — have turned the experience into a shining example of how branded storytelling can connect with and engage audiences.

The B2B content marketing struggle

B2B content marketers can often feel overwhelmed by the challenge of creating relevant brand content that meets their audience’s needs, let alone trying to make those stories meaningful in a real-life setting. But in today’s online universe, it’s never been easier to find a story that can inspire — you just have to know what to look for.

A brand’s missed opportunity

TE Connectivity is a global brand. But unless you’re an electrical engineer, you’ve probably never heard of them. The company makes more than 500,000 different electronic connectors, which can be used in virtually any device known to man. Despite this universal applicability, TE Connectivity is, in essence, involved in a pretty boring business: the business of selling highly technical parts to electrical engineers.

The company’s tagline is, “Every connection counts.” (I’m sure its marketing team is aware of the double entendre there.) Obviously, its connectors must be reliable, fast, and productive. But what about the human connections they make?

The power of connections

Kelvin’s story is full of connections (literally and figuratively). Kelvin connects problems with solutions. He connects parts he’s foraged from discarded appliances with homemade batteries to power his radio equipment. He was fortunate enough to be connected with David Sengeh, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab, who encouraged Kelvin to explore his curiosity. In turn, David connected Kelvin with the Visiting Practitioners Program at MIT — an opportunity very few people are afforded. Kelvin embodies the idea that every connection counts — and can be worthy of sharing with others.

If TE connectivity really believes that “every connection counts,” why hasn’t it gotten more involved with people like Kelvin — people who are driven to learn and discover new solutions (technological or otherwise)?

Finding opportunities

Kelvin’s connections and his innate curiosity aren’t unique. There are hundreds of other stories you can find online of children and teenagers trying to solve problems by building and creating new things. (Check out this video about a kid building a nuclear fusion reactor, or this one about a 13-year old making a wall-climbing vacuum suit.)

This is what engineers do. TE connectivity has the opportunity to grab hold of the viral potential of stories like Kelvin’s and turn it into something special — content that forges new connections for its business.

What if…

What if TE Connectivity created a series highlighting one child like Kelvin every single month? What if it invited professional engineers to participate in the program by sponsoring and mentoring the children it highlights? What if TE Connectivity took its tagline less literally and more figuratively? Don’t you think more engineers would think about TE connectivity more often in their daily lives? Don’t you believe TE Connectivity would be more relevant to more engineers who are working on projects that require the products it sells?

Ask yourself…

What inspirational stories have you let pass by instead of grabbing hold of them to create content relevant to your audience? What if you spent more time looking for the kind of content that taps into the emotion behind your business? What if you got more involved in exploring the lives your products and services touch?

Looking for more ideas on how to create inspiring stories for your brand? Read Andrew Davis’ book, “Brandscaping: Unleashing the Power of Partnerships.” 

Modern content discoverability is about leveraging all digital media channels for maximum coordinated and integrated exposure and reach. While it’s possible to use each in isolation, combining them with others strengthens their impact and creates added value for consumers. Delivering your content isn’t just about ensuring that it’s viewed. It’s about placing it where consumers have occasion to interact with it in their preferred environment, and then share it with friends. 

Branded content can take many forms: blog posts and sponsored articles; brand stories and videos; photos; animated GIFs; webinars; white papers… you know the drill. So long as the content you’re offering is smart, unique, strong in point-of-view, relevant, and adaptable, a host of channels and content strategies stand at the ready to help activate and engage the users you seek.

Social media 

After placing your content on your owned media properties (e.g., your brand site, mobile site, email newsletter, etc.) and arranging for paid placements, like search and display ads, the obvious next step is to target social media. You probably already have a presence on sites like Facebook and Twitter, but do you have a YouTube channel? A Tumblr page? Instagram and Pinterest accounts? Leverage all of these by reformatting your content to fit each unique set of platform specifications, and turn a brand message that’s already available elsewhere into something unique that can draw consumer attention.

For example, if you’re promoting an online video, grab a few frames to create an animated GIF that you can post to Tumblr. Snap some still shots behind the scenes at your video shoot and turn them into a Pinterest page linking to the video itself.

Additionally, if your content is interesting and provides value to the viewer, he or she is likely to be interested in what went into making it. Publishing bonus material like this can garner just as much attention as the original content, and double or triple your potential for shares.

Social discovery sites 

So much of being “connected” online is about community, and the concept of social discovery is explicitly intended to help internet users provide one another with some digital direction. Sites that curate content from around the web have always been prime resources for users, but they’re also useful for brands, as they allow you to submit your work for inclusion in their ever-evolving collections of great digital projects.

Among the best options for upping your social discovery quotient are Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Digg. You can submit a link to your content at each one by completing a brief online form (though you’ll have to set up a free account with the sites first).

Blogs 

You might have a blog of your own on which you place your branded content, but it’s also a good idea to reach out to third-party bloggers to tap into new user bases.

Canadian apparel brand Roots was recently featured in a blog post on fashion and arts blog Textstyles.ca, in which the blogger visited the brand’s factory. The post focused on the craftsmanship and heritage of Roots products, and showcased the factory through photography and brand history facts.

Bloggers are constantly looking for fresh, intriguing content, and many will be open to a pitch of this nature — particularly if you’re willing to provide exclusive photographs or an interview. Just be sure you have a unique story to tell, and that the blogger’s voice, the blog’s theme, and its user base don’t clash with your brand image or campaign objectives.

Award competitions 

For branded content that’s particularly visual, such as microsites and videos, consider submitting your company’s work to an award competition.

Many digital media contests now offer multiple branded content categories — including the Content Marketing Awards, Appy Awards, the OMMA Awards, the W3 Awards, and the Webby Awards. But take care when planning your entry efforts: These kinds of competitions can come with long lead times, and by the time you find out whether you’ve won, it’s possible your content will have lost some of its momentum.

In the interim, focus on “site of the day” competitions, like the one found on DesignLicks, or the UK-based Awwwards and Favourite Website Awards. Most submissions require a small entry fee, but being showcased as a feature project can deliver decent exposure — and lead to media coverage, along with an influx of new shares.

Brand newsrooms 

One of the newer trends in branded content distribution is the concept of “social newsrooms” that represent an online hub for all things related to your brand. These aren’t to be confused with social command centers or “war rooms,” the likes of which Gatorade and Oreo have been known to employ.

Social newsrooms aren’t the physical locales from which you manage your social media accounts, but rather a resource for the press; think of them as souped-up digital media press kits devoted to your brand. You can build your own, or enlist the help of a company like Cision, which offers a customizable social newsroom product.

For example, international fashion brand H&M has a social newsroom that delivers everything a member of the media could possibly need to know about the company. Integrated into the brand’s main website, its newsroom page provides links to media mentions, corporate news, a global calendar of events, press contacts by country, and quick company facts.

By assembling all of this information in one place, brands can point reporters to their latest and greatest content, rather than relying on them to seek it out on their own. H&M, for example, links to a Fashion Update autumn preview that includes product shots and a branded video. If you can get this kind of digital material into the hands of journalists, they’ll do the rest by bringing it to your customers.

Creating branded content that strikes a positive chord with consumers is only half of the digital media success equation. Don’t overlook the value of a strategic plan that will help them discover it.

Looking for more tips for getting your content found across multiple channels? Read CMI’s Ultimate eBook: 100 Content Marketing Examples.

Cover image via Bigstock 

The bespoke opportunity was part of the expansion of Pearson International Airport — Canada’s largest. The Greater Toronto Airport Authority (GTAA), the facility’s owner, had bet its future on this expansion to turn Pearson into an international gateway. UMA was bidding to design the “ground side” — the approach roads, parking, and other facilities.

UMA’s office manager told me that the deciding factor in his firm’s getting the job was that its proposal included the CVs of three highly skilled professionals — world-renowned thought leaders in the niche field of airport design. Having these professionals listed in UMA’s proposal reassured the airport authority that the project would benefit from world-class expertise.

This meant that the livelihoods of dozens of UMA’s engineers, landscape architects, lighting designers, and others — who did the less-skilled but essential work over the next five years — resulted from the reputation of just three key professionals.

Strategic sales don’t depend on search results

But how does a self-proclaimed “expert” in an area such as airport design get accepted as such by others? It needs to go well beyond a CV with a title that reads “Airport Expert.” That expertise has to be demonstrated, and this is where B2B content marketing comes in.

But not in the way conventional content marketing wisdom would have it. That wisdom says that if your organization has enough content online, a prospective client conducting an online search will find it, and will (hopefully) be impressed by your organization’s mastery of its subject matter. That works in many consumer products and services, but it doesn’t necessarily apply to big-ticket B2B transactions like multimillion dollar engineering projects.

To see why “getting found” online is not an important objective in large, strategic B2B sales like these, consider how a client like the airport authority would come to accept that UMA’s airport specialists had the capabilities to succeed with the project. Did the president of GTAA sit down at a Google search box and enter a term like, “excellent airport designer” or “awesome airport access road layout“?

Probably not. That’s because the GTAA president’s job depends, in part, on knowing how to find an answer to the question, “Who’s at the top of this field?” Subject searches are relevant for a businessperson choosing a photocopier or other small-ticket item. But this isn’t necessarily the case for a major, bet-your-career decision like choosing the right firm to lead a high-cost, multi-year project.

Working with the “complex” part of complex sales, not against it

Does this mean that UMA’s thought leaders could depend on their connections in order to land this kind of project? No. Content that drives thought leadership plays a huge role in the strategic B2B sales process — not so much for getting found, but rather for making your company more attractive to potential customers who are already aware of you. Here’s why.

Any major complex sale involves convincing a wide range of stakeholders that the decisions being made are in the interests of all. In the case of Pearson airport redevelopment, that included the federal government (which regulates air transport in Canada), the Province of Ontario (which regulates ground transportation), and the government leaders of several cities in the area. Some of the biggest stakeholders that needed to be convinced were the airlines, freight carriers, restaurant operators, and retailers whose rent and landing fees would form much of the airport’s income.

Virtually all large sales like these are complex — whether it’s an airline deciding on its next multi-plane order, a gas utility choosing a contractor to lay a pipeline, or a hospital deciding on an MRI system. The job of the salesperson or sales team involved in these complex sales is to understand the needs and priorities of all those stakeholders, and then convince them that the proposed solution would meet as many needs as possible. Even if the decision is ultimately up to one person to make, that individual knows that many people will have to live with the results of the decision.

In the Pearson Airport example, the GTAA’s management team had to convince all stakeholders that the project would be in good hands with UMA. This “convincing” process goes well beyond a good letter of reference. It requires demonstrating the knowledge, insight, and expertise your company claims to have — something that the thought leadership content you produce can achieve handily.

Most of my clients are like UMA in that they deal in complex sales, and they find that demonstrating their thought leadership is essential to gaining credibility. But I don’t think the goal of my B2B content marketing strategies is to help them get found online. Rather, my mission is to help businesses look more appealing to prospective clients than all the other companies on its consideration list.

What kinds of content demonstrate thought leadership? There are many, but three formats stand out, in particular.

1. Academic and professional journal publishing: Much of the heavy lifting in advancing professional fields, such as medicine, engineering, consulting, and law, comes through academic and professional journals. Even though these publications may be read only by a tiny readership that mainly consists of fellow professionals, getting published in peer-reviewed journals is one of the most effective ways to demonstrate thought leadership.

This rarified world is changing quickly, though, and many professionals cannot wait for the leisurely, months-long peer review process often required by journals to publish their ideas. Fortunately, niche industries are moving toward posting content in blog form, with blog readers’ comments serving as an acceptable peer review process. These comments go well beyond the value of a Google+ “+1″ or a “Like” on Facebook. The professionals who post their thoughts are staking their reputations on how accepted and valuable their views and comments are in their industry.

2. Publishing on client-facing media outlets: “I don’t write articles. Only papers,” one business professional told me recently. He saw little need to get his ideas into media that are read by potential clients. But I think that publishing your firm’s insights and ideas on accessible media, such as trade magazines and websites, well-regarded blogs, and other relevant professional outlets is an important way to demonstrate that your firm is credible and can offer quality solutions.

3. Public speaking opportunities: Being invited to present a paper at a professional conference is a public acknowledgement of your company’s thought leadership, to the extent that many professionals invest a significant amount of time in developing presentations and convincing relevant conference planners to add them to a speaking roster.

In addition to professional and academic conferences, some industry association luncheons, breakfasts, and other less formal events can be worthwhile speaking opportunities, as well. For example, webinars are becoming increasingly popular for reaching narrow, niche markets — and as a bonus, your webinar presentation can be archived online for later use in your content marketing efforts.

Indeed, search engine optimization still has an important role to play in the marketing of high-end professional firms. But for most of my clients, who have expertise in niche fields like remediation of contaminated soil, managing stakeholder relations for planned wind farms, and climate-change adaptation for cities, it’s not about “getting found.” It’s about “looking good” and “looking credible” to clients that are assessing the expertise of potential service providers. In many cases, it’s also about convincing others of the wisdom of choosing a particular provider. Having quality, credible thought leadership content is essential to making that happen.

Looking for proof of the power of thought leadership content? Get a first-hand view by attending the leading conference for the content marketing industry: Content Marketing World 2013. 

Your content editors can then turn the resulting audio (or video) and transcripts into multiple content marketing pieces (e.g., blog posts, white papers, etc.). Or, if the recorded content is high quality, you can even use it in its original format as the basis of a podcast. Even if your CEO isn’t available to be interviewed and is unwilling/unable to write an article, ask if he or she would be willing to answer a few questions via an email.

In other words, don’t block the content marketing process by trying to force your executives and staff members into doing something they aren’t comfortable with — there are plenty of other ways to generate effective content marketing.

For example, when you’re at industry events, be sure to capture photos and video. Then, you can splice and dice the footage with other pieces of content you have created (or curated).

Another option is to just sit down with the person and have an informal conversation. If, say, you have a product manager who is camera shy, or doesn’t feel like she can write 500 words on a particular topic, take her to lunch, ask her to answer a few questions, and then record or take notes on her responses. Again, the resulting content can be leveraged in various formats.

Help them tell stories

When talking with executives about writing and creating content, you have to begin by simply teaching them what the act of “writing” fundamentally is: a process for translating the ideas in your head into words that can be shared with others. As the famed sportswriter Red Smith used to delicately put it, all you have to do is “sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

Of course the real magic of turning ideas into stories (or anything worth reading) happens in the editing process. Relieve your team of their worries by assuring them that the copy will be “polished up” during editing. Then get them rolling by offering these two tips:

• Write it out: Just write blind — get all of your ideas out. Writers are usually surprised by how much structure and genuine goodness comes out by just opening up and not letting their mental “editor” get in the way. Tell your prospective contributors to just spend half an hour typing out their thoughts without restricting them in any way.
• Storyboard it out: If they’re having trouble opening up or getting the ideas to flow, ask them to visualize what they want to say, and then write some key words, phrases, or concepts onto sticky notes. They can even draw some of their thoughts, if that’s helpful for them. This is a particularly useful technique for organizing ideas for use in longer-form content, like white papers or live presentations (mind mapping may help as well).

Using free writing to solve writer’s block

I had an outstanding conversation a few years back with Mark Levy (who, among other things, is author of ”Accidental Genius“).

Mark gave me a crash course in something called free writing. Free writing, also called stream-of-consciousness writing, is a technique where you write for a set period of time without regard for spelling, or even topic. Mark uses this technique with his clients to unearth the raw content at the heart of a creator.

From my quick conversation with Mark and some of my own research, I learned that free writing is a staple of creative writing programs around the world. According to Natalie Goldberg, author of the “True Secret of Writing,” the rules of free writing include:

• Give yourself a time limit. Write for a set period and then stop.
• Keep your hand moving until the time is up. Do not pause to stare into space or to read what you’ve written. Write quickly, but you don’t need to hurry.
• Pay no attention to grammar, spelling, punctuation, neatness, or style. Nobody else needs to read what you produce.
• If you get off the topic, or run out of ideas, keep writing anyway. If necessary, write nonsense or whatever comes into your head, or simply scribble; just do anything that will keep your hand moving.
• If you feel bored or uncomfortable as you’re writing, ask yourself what’s bothering you, and write about that.
• When the time is up, look over what you’ve written, and mark passages that contain ideas or phrases that might be worth keeping or elaborating on in a subsequent free-writing session.

I recently took my first stab at free writing, giving myself a five-minute period to think about the idea of integrating content into the marketing process. Here is (a cleaned-up version of) what I came up with:

• Problems with integrating content into marketing plan
• How to measure content marketing as part of the overall marketing plan?
• How do I integrate social media as part of the marketing plan?
• What tactics work the best, depending on the buying cycle?
• What internal resources are needed for content marketing effectiveness?
• How do I tie in listening through social media with new content topics?
• What department should oversee the content process?
• How do I get the sales team to help develop content?
• How much freedom should employees have as content spokespeople for our brands?
• When should I outsource vs. insource content marketing? Is there an assessment?
• What’s the difference between outsourcing $25 articles and $3,000 articles? Is there a difference?
• How do I educate my CMO on the benefits of content marketing?
• What if our CMO wants to sell too much in our content?
• Should we start a blog?
• How actively do we need to participate on other sites?
• Do we participate on our competitors’ content sites?
• What about content curation?
• When do we decide whether to develop content ourselves or curate it?
• How do I communicate what we are doing with our content across the enterprise?
• Is there a worksheet that will help me construct my content marketing plan?
• Is print still relevant in content marketing?
• What’s the minimum amount I need to segment my customers regarding content?
• Do I need buyer personas? For all my buyers?

What I gained as a result of this exercise is more than 20 possible topics for future blog articles. I’m sure I didn’t do it perfectly, but it was a great start.

So, the next time you, or your key content providers, get writer’s block, try this free-writing exercise. It could be helpful for customer service, sales, engineering, or any other customer-facing staff member.

Help employees become aware of content opportunities

At one of the technology companies CMI has worked with, much of the customer service process took place through email. When we did an initial content analysis, we realized that many of the conversations taking place through direct customer email could easily be turned into blog and article content. It took only one customer service rep to take notice of this before the entire organization started to look for content opportunities as part of their everyday business interactions. Now, their customer service reps and sales reps are more routinely prepared to develop their emails into a FAQ for their website or to expand upon them to create blog posts.

In my experience, sometimes getting an outside perspective on this process can really help the marketing department get pointed in the right direction… or sometimes it takes someone from the outside to back up an employee’s efforts to get C-level execs to open their eyes to the power of content marketing.

In summary

According to our latest content marketing research, B2B marketers list “producing enough content” as the greatest of their content marketing challenges. At CMI, we have consulted with well over 50 of the leading brands from around the world. At each one, the perception was that they had a lack of content material. That was never the case — they always had plenty of fodder for content, it just wasn’t always in story form.

The key is to capture raw content wherever stories are happening in your organization, in whatever ways you can. Then work with editors, outside freelancers, or content marketing agencies to align it with your content marketing strategy and shape it into something truly compelling.

Joe Pulizzi’s latest book, “Epic Content Marketing,” will be released in September 2013. You can preorder it now on Amazon.com. 

Cover image via Bigstock

“Great content meets two criteria: It’s useful and it’s interesting.”

Simple, yet profound. Sonia also gave us a few examples to illustrate her point. Notice how each has an advantage and disadvantage for building traffic:

• LOLcats: Good for social media; bad for SEO. Interesting, useless content might be entertaining, but it won’t build credibility. People love to share cat pictures, but kittens don’t usually rank high.
• Wikipedia: Good for SEO; bad for social media. Useful, boring content may be informative, but it won’t keep your readers’ attention. Search engines love informative content, but when’s the last time you tweeted a Wikipedia page?

Great content both informs and entertains. It’s shareable and ranks well.

Excitement, expectations, and the Kano Model

The importance of interest and usefulness goes far beyond content. Ever heard of the Kano Model? It’s a usability tool used to connect requirements to customer satisfaction. It’s typically applied to products, business models, and websites, but we can also apply it to content marketing efforts.

The Kano Model, depicted in the chart above, shows us that some features meet basic expectations (usefulness) and others generate excitement (interest). This is what Sonia was talking about. The effort we put into our content pushes us over to the right side of the chart. But some features of our content are there just to meet readers’ expectations (the lower curved line), while other features of our content add excitement, delighting our readers (the upper curved line). We can use this model to evaluate the value of our content, and improve it:

Interest: How to delight your readers

At best, your writing is inspired. This means that, at the very least, it’s original and written in your own voice. If you enjoyed writing it, your audience will likely enjoy reading it. But if you find it’s lacking in the “wow” factor, try adding one or more of these excitement generators:

• Unique perspective
• Strong opinions and/or emotions
• Humor/kittens
• Storytelling
• Compelling visuals/video
• Unexpected connections

A brief note about unexpected connections: Connecting the message to a theme can make a dry topic gush with flavor. Not only does the use of a thematic metaphor help content to be understood more easily, it makes it easier to create, as well.

Example: Take Nick Haas’ blog post, Web Design Techniques: Jean Claude Van Damme‘s School for Web Designers.” Nick’s topic meets our site visitors’ expectations for information (web design techniques), but it’s the theme he used that our readers took delight in: an unexpected connection to the martial arts film star, Jean Claude Van Damme.

That theme also unlocked a source of motivation for Nick, as a content creator: “The article became much easier to write when I connected web design with something that I loved — ’80s martial arts actors/films. It was an instant jolt of inspiration.”

Utility: How to meet your readers’ expectations

When it’s at its best, utility-focused writing gives readers clear instructions for solving an important problem. At a minimum, it’s focused on the reader (rather than on your business), and it helps them address their challenges by providing practical advice. The “utility” of the article is its practical value; it’s the answer to readers’ ever-present question: “What’s in it for me?” To create great content, make sure you meet your audience’s basic expectations — starting with addressing three key considerations:

• Relevance: Does the post answer a question your audience frequently asks?
• Accuracy: Is the information in the article correct? Is it spell-checked? Are references cited?
• Evidence: Does the article support its own assertions with evidence? Quotes, statistics and examples address this. 

A brief note about length: Always try to use short words, sentences, and paragraphs in your content, but you don’t necessarily have to limit yourself to writing short posts. Each post should be as long as it needs to be in order to convey your message (and not a word longer).

So that’s the secret to creating great content: Help your readers in delightful and useful ways (thanks Sonia!). If your content at least accomplishes these two goals, it will be more likely to be read, be shared, rank well, get commented on, and inspire customer action.

For more secrets to better content marketing, join the CMI team at Content Marketing World 2013, September 9–11 in Cleveland, Ohio.

PPC campaigns provide useful data that can help you create more effective content marketing — i.e., improving the impact of your messaging and increasing conversions — by answering questions such as:

• Which parts of the country or world are most interested in our stuff?
• What are our most effective offers?
• What is the most effective way to phrase an offer?
• Who, exactly, is interested in our offers?
• How do prospects talk about our products, services, and industry?

How a PPC campaign works

Here’s a brief overview of the process involved in conducting a Google AdWords or Bing Ads campaign:

1. Conduct keyword research: Suppose you want to advertise packaging products. The first step is to identify a broad range of keywords potential customers might use in search queries for your type of service — for example, “buy packaging products,” “national packaging contracts,” “packaging supplier,” etc.

2. Create the campaign structure: After you assemble your keyword laundry list, it’s time to analyze the data, looking in particular for thematic patterns. From this comes the creation of ad groups, which are clusters of keywords around a particular theme. Three ad groups for a packaging campaign could be “packaging products supplier,” “packaging designer,” and “low-price packaging.”

3. Create the ad and landing page experience: It’s important to shape the offers and content for PPC ads and landing pages to fit the target audience of the ad group. For instance, the “packaging products supplier” ad group target would be purchasing managers in midsize and large firms, whereas the “packaging designer” ad group target would be in-house marketers or packaging engineers.

4. Create a split test for each ad in every ad group: When you are ready to launch your PPC campaign, it’s advisable to split test (aka A/B test) from the start, so that you have the data you need to continually make improvements. The main variables you will likely want to test include:

• The offer — e.g., “Free consultation” vs. “Free merchandise”
• The call to action — e.g., “Call now!” vs. “Click here!”
• Credibility — e.g., “Since 1996″ vs. “BBB accredited”
• Ad title — e.g., “Solve Packaging Problems” vs. “Low-price Packaging”
• Display URLs — customized URLs sometimes boost click-through rates (CTRs)
• Price — e.g., “$25/each” vs. “10% off”

5. Configure campaign settings: Campaign managers control the time of day ads display, where ads display geographically, in what language ads display, and other factors. All forms associated with the campaign’s landing pages should be tested to make sure they are intuitive and function properly.

6. Collect data: Depending on the size of the campaign, the first round of data collection can be anywhere from a few days to several weeks. So as not to change tactics or strategy prematurely, it’s important to be patient and wait for a critical mass of information.

7. Review data, and adjust the campaign: As you learn which keywords are generating the best CTRs and conversion rates, eliminate or pause low-performing phrases to improve the visibility of those star performers.

Connecting PPC campaigns to content marketing programs

Suppose you’ve been running a PPC campaign for packaging products for several months. Here are some things to look for in your results which, in turn, can be used to increase the success of your content marketing program.

Geography: Are there any parts of the country where demand is particularly high? If so, reach out to blogs, websites, and print publications that serve those geographic regions, enabling you to target brand building in areas where it will do the most good. In addition, target online press releases to those regions.

On the flip side, if there are regions where PPC response is low, a strong content marketing push could help build brand awareness, laying the groundwork for a more successful PPC campaign in the future.

Audience: If your PPC campaign converts a lot of in-house designers but very few purchasing managers, cultivate that design audience by creating new content — and repurposing old content — to emphasize the design strengths of your business. Also reach out to new publishing outlets (such as trade publications, websites, or blogs that you haven’t approached before) that cater to the industrial design niche. 

Conversion: Several points about conversion are worth mentioning: 

• If people are lining up to take advantage of a free consultation but not responding to a discounted price, for example, try testing the better performing offer in your sales collateral, on your company site, in the footer of your company’s blog, etc., to see if your findings are consistent.

• Communication should flow the other way, too. Depending on how an organization is structured, PPC campaigns can exist in something of a vacuum. If content marketers are aware of offers that perform well on a company’s website or blog, they should advise the PPC campaign manager so those offers can be tested.

• A PPC landing page frequently includes secondary offers, such as free downloads. Pieces of content that generate the most downloads can be repurposed, given more exposure, or otherwise built upon for use on other content platforms.

• A situation that often comes up in PPC landing page development is when the campaign manager says something like, “It sure would be great if we could offer content about our company’s ‘X’ service as a download…” By staying connected to the PPC campaign, content marketers can discover important new content opportunities.

Messaging: If an ad titled “Solve Packaging Problems” outperforms “Low-price Packaging,” you have data to support a messaging approach that emphasizes solution selling over price — proof that you can use to inform your content approach, or justify content decisions to get executive buy-in. Intuitively, content marketers may gravitate to solution selling anyway, but having supporting data always helps, especially when there’s internal resistance.

Messaging strategy gets more interesting in situations where “Price” substantially outperforms “Solutions,” or some other counterintuitive theme. Here, PPC can be very useful in terms of challenging assumptions, or alerting us to words and phrases customers like to use that we haven’t paid much attention to.

Context: Of course, there’s a caveat here. Users who click on a PPC ad may differ in intent (or in other ways) from those who click on organic search results, as well as from those who discover a firm’s content through other channels, such as social media. Making across-the-board changes to messaging strategy based on PPC data could be an overreaction.

Most PPC advertising is geared to people who are pretty far along in the buying cycle, and are ready to take action. Back to the “Price” versus “Solutions” illustration, it stands to reason that price becomes more of an issue the closer a person gets to making a purchase. Visitors to a website or blog may be early on in the buying cycle, or not in a buying mode at all. Thus, PPC data may suggest a price-centered offer will be highly effective on the site, but not that the firm’s value proposition should center on price.

Over to you 

Share your experience with the CMI community. Have you used PPC to enhance your content marketing activities? If so, what have you learned?

You’ll find more tips for creating effective content by leveraging complementary marketing techniques at Content Marketing World 2013.

Cover image credit: ©kentoh, via Fotolia.com

Probably very few of you answered “a major financial services firm” — but that’s exactly how Citi delivers relevant content to one of its many audience segments. And it all takes place over LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is already a powerful content marketing platform. “LinkedIn Today” renewed the social network’s push into thought leadership through content. The company acquired SlideShare in 2012 and Pulse only a few months ago. And according to company reps, more neat stuff is on the way for content marketers.

Little by little, the social network for professionals is becoming a content creation hub. This has major implications for content marketers, especially those of you in the B2B content space.

LinkedIn is a platform with stunning access to data, which makes it a potent solution for delivering personalized content to your audience segments. I spoke with Mike Weir, LinkedIn’s Global Head of Category Development for the technology industry, about best practices for audience segmentation and how LinkedIn makes it simple for content marketers to deliver personalized experiences.

How to create a personalization plan

Personalized content begs for strong audience segmentation. Of course, there’s more to it than that.

“Marketers don’t always approach personalization comprehensively these days,” Mike explains. “There are lots of challenges. What channels are your target audiences using? What should your tone be on each channel? What type of content should you deliver? How do you reach the exact person, not just a nameless user, IP address or cookie? Delivering the right content to the right person is a complex process.”

How do you start your personalization plan on the right foot? Mike laid out the following four steps.

1. Find out who they are: Extensive research helps reveal what makes your audience members tick. Your buyer personas make that data actionable.

If you aren’t already creating buyer personas, now is the time to get started. You’ll need to create custom content for each persona to deliver a personalized experience.

Mike suggests these five segmentation factors for content marketers:

• Geography: Location is everything — especially when it comes to addressing unique audience members.

• Seniority: The C-level has different objectives and challenges than their teams, in the same way that every consumer is different. The content you deliver to them should mirror what they care about.

• Function: What roles does your customer play in his company? What about his family? His community?

• Industry: Targeting different industries? Segmenting by industry is a pretty obvious task.

• Company size: From small business to enterprise organizations, company size matters when you create content.

Once you have a high-level view of your segments, start listening to what they’re saying to get more specifics on each one.

2. Listen to what they have to say: Listening to discussions on social media is today’s most powerful research tool for content creation. On LinkedIn, active “groups” are gold mines of information about each of your segments.

“Social listening tools* simplify how you monitor topics over potential distribution channels,” Mike explains. “This is your number one tool for finding your potential customer’s challenges and addressing them with content.”

(*Tools for monitoring social media include Sprout Social or HootSuite, for example.)

3. Create segment-specific content: Use your buyer personas to create a content plan for each segment. This part of the process takes a look at what each audience segment is talking about — and what they aren’t talking about but might find interesting.

Building out a content plan that touches each point in the decision-making process is critical. Making a decision could look very different for different types of customers, so a personalized strategy gives your content more weight.

4. Form a distribution plan: With your segments in hand, reevaluate your distribution channels. Are you approaching them with your audience segments in mind?

Here’s a hypothetical: A B2B company targets professional services firms. Legal and engineering audience segments are interested in very different types of content. The problem: They’re using general channels to blast out content specific to both. As a result, the company is encroaching on what could be a highly personalized experience.

As a distribution channel, LinkedIn makes this kind of segmentation simpler than some of us realize.

How to use LinkedIn to deliver personalized content

You’re probably using LinkedIn as a virtual resume. But are you harnessing the network’s reach for content marketing?

LinkedIn’s first-party data source is unrivaled in the professional world. Users opt in, thus offering up the data necessary for a strong personalized experience. And it’s only getting more effective.

“Right now, we work with brands in three areas to help them build relationships via their content,” Mike says. “We’re debuting new tools for content marketers in the future, too.”

Below are three ways LinkedIn works with brands to promote content marketing:

1. Leveraging brand pages and native ads: First, LinkedIn features what Mike calls the “standard content marketing approach.” Marketers focus on building a following for their company page. Sharing content from that brand page beams it to your followers’ news feeds. The best part: You can segment different pieces of content based on persona.

“Getting company page followers is an opt-in process,” Mike says. “By building your company page, content marketers can deliver personalized content to receptive audience segments.”

Marketers can also speed up follower acquisition, if they don’t mind parting with a few bucks. LinkedIn has its own native ad program coming soon — sponsored content, with handpicked content that will appear in targeted members’ news feeds.

Using this approach, HP grew its company page followers by more than 300,000 members in less than two months. The campaign targeted specific IT decision makers; its resulting followers are 2.5 times more likely to recommend HP solutions and, as a result of hyper-targeting CXOs, have become one of the most engaged audiences for targeted status updates.

CMI says: LinkedIn is a ripe playground for B2B content. Consider this your invitation to spend some serious time optimizing your brand page.

2. Taking part in the conversation: Not everyone considers the conversations they have in LinkedIn groups to be “content marketing.” But that’s exactly what it is — providing helpful content directly to an audience member without imposing a sales message.

“Participating in the conversation is a really rich part of the LinkedIn experience,” Mike explains. “Owning an active, authoritative group for your target audience can pay off in even bigger ways. Your clients and prospective clients appreciate the value you provide to them, especially when you don’t do a hard sell.”

CMI says: The content you create in LinkedIn Groups is essential to your content creation plan — both in its own right and as an inspiration for longer-form content. Groups are already segmented, helping you engage people with a highly relevant message.

3. Creating personalized social experiences: LinkedIn APIs have uncovered a world of uses for creating personalized social experiences. Just ask PwC Netherlands: The global consulting firm worked with LinkedIn to create a successful professional relationship game based on a user’s LinkedIn network.

“With the APIs, businesses use LinkedIn as the source for engaging people through their own channels,” Mike says. “Personalized social experiences allow technology companies to provide unique insights and engagement opportunities for key decision makers.”

(For less technical readers: APIs create data streams from LinkedIn to your own programs or websites. Essentially, you have the ability to create your own app using data from LinkedIn.)

In another case, a major software company set its sights on big data. Using LinkedIn’s APIs, it created a “name tag analyzer.” The program generates a “true business title” for visitors after they sign in through LinkedIn. Each profile is rich in data, and all of a visitor’s professional experience gets fed into the program. Algorithmic analysis of that experience returns a new business title — one that’s truer than those applied by employers, in many cases.

CMI says: LinkedIn imposes few limitations on content marketers. Extending personalization beyond the walls of the professional network is a realistic goal that you can make happen with LinkedIn APIs.

Ask LinkedIn

Have questions about how you can get better traction out of your content marketing through LinkedIn? Ask Mike Weir for his advice in the comments, below.

Join CMI and host LinkedIn as they present the Content Marketing World Tech Summit, September 12, 2013 in Cleveland, Ohio. 

A decade later, DreamForce is one of the most successful user conferences (and, I’d still argue, content marketing) ever. You can say Benioff is a lot of things, but afraid to make a bold move is not one of them. In what will be the largest acquisition in the history of his company, Salesforce.com will purchase interactive marketing hub ExactTarget for about $2.5 billion. For those keeping score, that’s $33.75 per share — or about a 53 percent premium on ExactTarget’s stock price as of yesterday. Oh, and it’s a little less than 10 times the company’s total revenue in 2012. Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that Marc wanted ExactTarget.

This complements the company’s purchase of Buddy Media last year which, at the time, was a big purchase at $745 million. ExactTarget will be Salesforce.com’s 11th acquisition (that I’m aware of) in just over 24 months. For a little perspective, let’s just look at the last 10 companies it acquired, and what they do:

• Radian6: Social content monitoring
• Assistly/Desk.com: Customer support service
• Model Metrics: Services for developing social and mobile strategies
• Rypple/Work.com: Employee collaboration metrics
• Stypi: Content and document collaboration
• Buddy Media: Social content and analytics
• ChoicePass: Corporate perks and employee rewards
• Thinkfuse: Email and project reports for internal communications
• GoInstant: Co-browsing of content for assistance and concierge services
• Clipboard: Clipping and sharing content

What can we conclude? Well, what jumps out to me is that over the last two years, Salesforce.com has spent more than $3 billion to really develop two areas: employee engagement/collaboration, and a full suite of external marketing software. With some exceptions (I’d argue that it still doesn’t have a viable web content management system), all of it strikes me as Salesforce.com’s understanding that employees must be empowered to collaborate about customer relationships, and that content-driven marketing strategies are driving business results both internally and externally.

A positive step toward CMO/CIO alignment

In the company’s acquisition announcement, Benioff quotes the (now too often mentioned) prediction by Gartner that, within the next three years, the CMO will spend more on technology than the CIO. He continues by saying “The addition of ExactTarget makes Salesforce the starting place for every company and puts Salesforce.com in the pole position to capture this opportunity.”

Belabored racing metaphor aside, I don’t think that either one of those things are necessarily true at this point. I’ve gone on record before as saying that if the CMO spends more than the CIO, then we should all say “uh-oh.” At CMI, our experience is that savvy CMOs and CIOs are starting to actually align their technology strategies and purchases, rather than compete for budget. This is an absolute must if an enterprise is going to manage consumer engagement. The CMO must create, manage, and optimize content and story through every digital touch point. And the CIO must connect the technology and acquire the data that will optimize the experiences across all of them.

This is why I think the ExactTarget acquisition could be another positive step toward this alignment. If executed well, Salesforce.com has an opportunity to connect the dots of customer engagement and collect the data — from the tippy-top awareness part of the funnel all the way down to brand evangelism.

But they’re not alone. Marketo (which I honestly thought would be Salesforce.com’s next acquisition) debuted an $80 million IPO just last month and will now almost certainly be hungry. Oracle paid $871 million for Eloqua and has been working on aligning content and marketing software for some time. And IBM has been quietly gobbling up marketing and content related software for the last two years (e.g., Unica and CoreMetrics).

Who will win? As I said, it will all come down to execution. Salesforce.com now has a whole mess of people, technology, and cultures to integrate and unify into one big happy suite of collaboration, customer, content, and marketing goodness. Salesforce.com has a bit of a better record than Oracle or IBM on that score, but we marketers shouldn’t underestimate the complexity of pulling all those pieces together.

Who’s next? Watch the “content marketing disrupters”

The other thing to watch is the disruption that’s currently happening across all manner of content and marketing software. As the big companies get bigger and more complex, there are smaller content marketing-specific solutions that are wedging themselves into the hearts and minds of the enterprise marketer. Just as Salesforce.com did back in 1999 when it disrupted giant companies like Siebel, small, focused start-ups have the potential to offer faster, more agile ways of handling some of the content marketing approach. We’re starting to really cover these technologies at CMI, and will be offering our first research report on content collaboration tools here in the coming weeks.

And, on a final, more personal note, we simply couldn’t be happier for the folks over at ExactTarget. They, as well as many of their voluminous alumni, have been friends of CMI since our very humble beginnings. They are a class act through and through — and we wish them well as part of the Salesforce.com suite of marketing solutions.

For more perspectives on how the latest industry news affects content marketing, register today for Content Marketing World 2013. 

Brand marketing

More and more, marketing teams need someone who can manage all the digital assets they generate, including brand content. Just ask Scott Brinker, Co-Founder and CTO at Ion Interactive and evangelist for marketing technologists, who recently asserted that, “It makes sense for marketing to have people in the ranks [who] deeply understand technology and can help with strategy; help other marketers in the department to leverage technology to maximum advantage.”

As businesses strive to keep up with the competition — and their use of the latest digital marketing tools — technology products and solutions have begun to eat up more and more of their marketing budgets. Therefore, marketing leadership needs to empower someone to govern those products; someone who can understand how those products align with the company’s overarching marketing mission and can intelligently discuss both the technology and marketing sides of the equation. Though a CMT should collaborate closely with a company’s IT team, it is absolutely a distinct role, with distinct responsibilities. Enter the emerging role of chief marketing technologist (CMT) — an essential part of any successful brand marketing team.

While companies can approach this role in different ways — and designate it using many different job titles — the important thing is to appoint one person to the job of leading technological change as it relates to the marketing department.

Responsibilities of a CMT

Whatever title you give it, according to Brinker, the person who fills this role should be responsible for three critical tech-related functions within an organization:

1. Advice: The CMT must advise the chief marketing officer about the strategic operations of technology and collaborate to identify technology solutions that will help achieve the organization’s marketing mission. The CMT should be the point person for continually evolving and improving the company’s use of technologies, systems, and innovations as they relate to marketing.
2. Operations: The CMT should serve as the senior manager of the marketing technology stack, including selecting technology solutions, integrating them into existing systems and processes, and providing support for their use by the marketing team.
3. Education: The CMT must continually educate marketing team members on the latest technologies in order to raise their level of expertise, as well as their understanding of how creative and technology can best work together.

Recommended skills and capabilities

Whether you’re focused on business-to-consumer or business-to-business; a large, multinational corporation or a small mom-and-pop boutique store, any organization with a significant digital marketing presence should consider putting a chief marketing technologist — or its equivalent — in place. For example, smaller companies might not have the resources to staff this role as a separate position, but they can still designate one member of the team to be responsible for the technology considerations involved in brand marketing.

Similarly, the specific responsibilities of a CMT will likely vary by industry and by individual company goals. For example, a consumer-facing retail operation might require expertise in e-commerce, where a B2B company might require competency in marketing automation, demand generation, and lead nurturing.

But regardless of your company’s particular size, industry, or focus, there are some critical skills you should look for in any potential candidate for the role of chief marketing technologist:

• Depth of technological experience: The person who fills this role should have hands-on experience in working with technology — e.g., having worked in software development, as an IT analyst, etc. In addition, this person should have experience in and a solid understanding of the challenges involved in technology management, such as vetting vendors and selecting and implementing technology solutions.
• Depth of marketing experience: Potential CMT candidates should also have a clear understanding of your organization’s marketing mission, and a passion for contributing to it through the strategic use of technology. Brinker himself feels particularly strongly about this point, asserting: “This is why the collaboration between IT and marketing isn’t enough. No matter how skilled or willing the IT team is, you need someone who is really excited about using technology in marketing and knows how to blend the two.”
• Depth of management experience: A potential CMT should also have solid general management skills, because on a fundamental level, the chief marketing technologist’s core responsibility is to manage change. Because brand marketing strategies and techniques are continually evolving, a CMT must be adept at ushering a team and its processes through the changes it will inevitably encounter.

The CMT in action

One company that is leveraging the CMT role successfully is Kimberly Clark. The company’s marketing and IT departments are highly collaborative, in part, because of  Global Head of Marketing Technology, Mayur Gupta, who believes strongly in the value of the role he plays in his organization.

In his words, marketing technologists are not “just the enablers of an idea or a step that comes once the box has been incepted and designed. For me, a marketing technology is part creative, part strategy, part technology.”

He recognizes that the challenge for marketers lies outside the core technology. As he told Scott Brinker in an interview in early 2013, “There are too many shiny disco balls out there… I think many marketing organizations are sucking things in like a vacuum — a tendency to pick up every shiny object out there: big data, mobile first, predictive modeling, and so on. The challenge is a lack of connected thinking that brings all these different pieces together in a cohesive and well-knit machinery.”

There are a lot of technology products available across the marketing landscape. And it can be overwhelming to understand how to choose, integrate, and implement the right ones. That’s where a chief marketing technologist comes in handy.

We are living in a digital world and marketing technology is a strategy, not a tactic. Will your marketing department go along for the ride, or drive change by integrating marketing and technology seamlessly?

For more guidance on selecting and implementing the right technologies for your brand marketing goals, read CMI’s eGuide: How to Choose Technology that Drives Better Content Marketing Results.

Cover image via Bigstock

To that end, we wanted to provide a refresher on the most popular templates and checklists shared by the CMI team and our guest contributors. Some of these are “oldies but goodies” that we included in the first list, and others are new. All are intended to simplify some part of the content marketing process — and all can be customized to your particular needs.

Buyer-focused resources

Buyer persona template: The first rule of content marketing is that whatever you create must be relevant to your audience. Here are tips on how to create a buyer persona:

Content mapping template: If you sell something with a complex sales cycle, you’ll need to map your content requirements to stages in the buying cycle.

Content and process organization

Content marketing team and workflow checklist: You can’t create a successful content marketing program if you don’t have the right skills, resources, and experience on hand to support your efforts. Learn more about the essential roles and recommended processes for building your team and workflow plan.

Editorial calendar template: To keep all of your content projects planned and organized, you’ll likely want to develop an editorial calendar. This template will serve as a great starting point.

Content kick-off checklist: For a content project to succeed, all stakeholders — from the client to your content creators — need to be on the same page. We suggest answering these 15 questions before you start any project.

Content request template: Have too many content ideas, or too many requests from across your organization? Use this checklist to help you prioritize your projects, or those being developed by your team.

Content technology questionnaire: Are you considering a technology purchase to simplify your content processes? This checklist includes 14 questions to ask to make sure you select a solution that will meet your unique content marketing needs.

Creativity and design

Readability checklist: Not all websites are created equal. Here’s a checklist to follow for designing pages that are clear and readable, and can be easily navigated by your audience.

Killer web content template: If you are creating web content, use this template to help you make sure you’re driving action on each page.

Creating valuable content checklist: As you work through all of your content ideas, keep these key considerations in mind to ensure that you will be providing value to your audience.

Title evaluation scorecard: The importance of a great title for your content efforts shouldn’t be underestimated. This checklist walks you through the essentials for creating relevant, engaging headlines that will draw readers in.

Keyword selection checklist: While quality content rules, you shouldn’t ignore SEO. Here are 12 questions to ask to make sure you are targeting the most relevant keywords for your business.

Publication and promotion

Content publication checklist: Once you’re ready to share your content with the world, be sure to review these key steps that will help you prepare your publication for optimal reach, engagement, and ROI.

Content distribution template: Even after you’ve published, your job is not done. You need to market your content, and this template will walk you through the need-to-know basics.

Blog post promotion checklist: If you are promoting a blog post, there are lots of things you can do to position it for success. Check out our most recent list of tips to help get you started (you can also go deeper by reading our original post on the topic).

Localization checklist: If your content is targeted to audiences in different global markets, consider this checklist of tips and considerations for localizing the content you’ve created.

Content marketing success checklist: Of course, you will want to see which of your content efforts are performing best, so you can continue to deliver the information your audience wants. This checklist walks you through how to measure content marketing success.

If there are templates and checklists you have personally used in your content marketing efforts, please tell us about them in the comments. And if there are others you would like to see, let us know that as well!

Editor’s note: You can also check out these templates our readers have suggested:

• The Triangle of Relevance: Angie Schottmuller shares a content strategy principle incorporating three angles – business interest, user interest, and time significance – to maximize relevance and magnetize content, creating user action.

For more tools and ideas that will help facilitate all your content marketing efforts, read CMI’s Content Marketing Playbook.

Cover image via Bigstock 

“

“The more plates The Amazing Brando spins, the greater the applause. Until… Oh no! Quora just crashed to the floor! And Pinterest is beginning to look wobbly! 

“The audience gasps as Brando manages to set YouTube spinning again with a hurried “unboxing” video on his smartphone. They clap as a few quick @replies save Twitter for a few more spins. And then LinkedIn crashes to the floor. No longer impressed, the audience wonders when the clowns will be back.” 

OK, I think I’ve stretched the analogy enough. Yet many businesses still spin plates by tackling too many social media content networks without the time and resources to do so effectively.

Does your business really need to be on six, seven or eight social networks? Really? The more networks you use, the less effective you’re likely to be. Instead of amplifying your content, you may be killing it.

Before you can reap genuine benefits from a network, you’ll need to put in many hours of building and nurturing an audience. Thousands of followers won’t appear overnight just because your new eBook is ready to “go viral.”

You need to earn the necessary status, trust, and authority-attracting followers along the way, before your carefully cultivated audience will happily share and interact with your content in meaningful numbers. But this takes time and effort — you’ll have to share, talk, and participate on their terms, their topics, and their content. Then, multiply that effort by each network your brand decides to use.

Having an audience on one network might give you a head start on another, but not by much. Being “big on Twitter” won’t help when you join that industry LinkedIn group. You’re back to square one.

No wonder I get “stabby” when some simplistic marketing wünderkind blogs about how social media marketing is free and easy. Time costs, even when it’s your own. Content costs, even if you produce it yourself.

There is no one-size-fits-all

It might seem more efficient to create one piece of content and then use it across all your social networks — spinning many plates with a single push. Many brands attempt this, posting the same white paper URL or even the same carefully scripted, generic update to all channels.

By doing so, you’re short-changing both your social media content and the various audiences you’ve cultivated in each network. Not only do different social networks suit different content types and formats; the demographics, expectations and interests of the audiences may differ, as well.

Is your typical YouTube follower interested in the same content as someone subscribed to your Pinterest boards?

A half-hour video might fail on Twitter because it’s such a rapid-fire, short-form medium. But share the same video to Facebook and your followers may be more willing to give it the time and attention.

Instead of trying a one-format-fits-all approach, reinvent your content with each network in mind. Break out key information and display it in the most suitable format — an article for the blog; a video for YouTube; an infographic for Pinterest; a slideshow for SlideShare (and by extension, LinkedIn), and so on.

Tailoring your content strategy for each network means more production time, more budget, more planning. But by designing each piece of social media content to suit the strengths of your chosen networks, you’ll achieve better results.

Choose your networks wisely

The recent Edison Research report, The Social Habit 2012, included plenty of stats demonstrating the dominance of Facebook:

• One in three social media users now actively follows brands.
• 79 percent of them do so on Facebook.
• 47 percent also identified Facebook as the network with the most influence on their purchasing decisions — far ahead of any other network.

But despite the hype, Facebook is not the default choice for social media marketers. Such general stats, encompassing every vertical and every demographic, mean absolutely nothing when it comes to what’s right for your business, your customers, and your social media content strategy.

So whenever a client or a manager approaches me with, “We want a Facebook page,” I die a little inside. It’s an answer to a question that hasn’t been asked. Hey, it may even be the right answer. But who’s to know until the right questions are asked, like:

• Who are you trying to reach, and how do they use this network?
• What content types are you trying to distribute? Is this network the best way to do so or are there more effective channels?
• What action do you want people to take? (Hint: “liking” your page is a pretty low goal to set. You’ve motivated a noncommittal action that took less than a second. Then what?)

The wrong network will erode resources and attention from those that already are working well for you. And once adopted, if results from the new network are disappointing, there will no doubt be pressure from above to divert more time and resources to get that plate spinning.

Choose your plates wisely, and spin them well. And only spin more plates when you have the time, resources (people), and budget to do so without so much as a wobble or a chip.

For more guidance on leveraging the power of social media communities with your content efforts, read “Capturing Community,” by Michael Silverman.

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to CMI’squarterly magazine.

Cover image via Bigstock

When I used to sell custom publishing services for large B2B brands, I always asked the above question before signing a contract, because the answer was the most critical element of the final agreement. The client’s response revealed everything about how they intended to measure the content project we were about to create for them.

That’s the exact question I want you to ask yourself when you think of content marketing measurement.

And whatever your answer may be, before you start on that path, keep this message from CMI lead consultant Michael Weiss in mind:

“There is no magic silver bullet. Remember, this is marketing and it is organic — it takes time. Traditional advertising is very hard to measure. Content marketing is totally measurable, but it takes time to get real data. Unless you are willing to launch a program for at least 6 months, there is no reason to do anything. You need time to gather data!”

Patience is key. Jodi Navta, VP of Marketing and Communications for Coyote Logistics, puts it simply: “If your timetable isn’t at least 6 months (and that’s even a stretch), just go about and buy paid media.”

Remember, once you start a content marketing strategy or program, you’ll never stop. Content is a promise to your customers — make sure you don’t break it!

What the C-level wants to know about content marketing

Never show an analytics report to your CXO (In this case, CXO refers to the senior executive in charge. This could be the CEO, COO, CMO, etc.). They don’t care about all the details, and will likely end up asking questions that will simply waste your time. When it comes to your content marketing measurement and ROI, your CXO only cares about three things:

• Is the content driving sales?
• Is the content saving costs?
• Is the content making our customers happier, thus helping with retention?

If the reports you show the CXO aren’t answering these types of questions, why show them anything at all? Content marketing is all about developing content that maintains or changes a behavior. That’s your focus.

Return on objective

Sales lift, impact, and retention are just a few of the key measurements for any return-on-objective (ROO) program. (Note: I like to use ROO instead of ROI [return on investment] because it focuses content marketers on the real objectives.) Sometimes ROO can be determined with one metric, while other times four or five are needed to show an impact on your organization’s business goals.

ROO measurements come in all shapes and sizes, and usually include multiple items to give you the complete answer to your question. The important aspect to remember is you aren’t measuring just for the sake of measurement. The tools and tactics below are used to directly determine what a project’s objectives should be. If you keep that in mind, you’ll get your ROO.

Here are a few measurement initiatives to get you started:

• Tracking sales lift of those who receive the content program vs. those who do not (my favorite)
• Tracking conversions for online content products or email subscriptions and measuring new or increased sales from that group
• Online readership studies to determine the impact of the content project, as well as the acquisition of customer informational needs and trends (e.g., are readers making the desired behaviors?)
• Measuring engagement (time spent) through online research or by using analytic measures on eNewsletter or web portal products
• Pre-/post-awareness studies to measure the overall impact of the program

The Content Marketing Pyramid

Robert Rose and I have been working on a “Content Marketing Pyramid” for measurement for quite some time (and detail it in our book, “Managing Content Marketing“). In short, our pyramid includes three separate sections:

• Primary content indicators: Primary indicators are the types of measurements that your CXO wants to know about (e.g., sales, costs savings, retention rates).
• Secondary content indicators: Secondary indicators are the types of measurements that help make the case for primary indicators (e.g., lead quality, lead quantity, shorter sales cycles).
• User indicators: These are the types of measurements that the content “doers” need to look at to help drive the secondary indicators (e.g., web traffic, “likes,” page views, search rankings).

It may be easier to create an analytics pyramid for each of the goals you are trying to achieve. Everything you measure needs to start with an objective, such as:

• Build brand awareness or reinforcement
• Create more effective lead conversion and nurturing
• Increase customer conversion
• Customer upsell or cross-sell
• Create subscribers to our content

So let’s say you’re putting together an initiative to generate more leads for your company. Here is how your pyramid might look:

 Step 1: Segment your pyramid: Segment your pyramid into three divided lines. The bottom, widest part of the pyramid is where your user indicators belong. These are audience-based metrics that are meant to measure activity. You will slice, dice, add, subtract, and change these metrics on a frequent basis.

Your secondary indicators should be located on the second level of the pyramid. These will be metrics that you associate with team members, as well as specific processes that help you reach your goals. These are generally what we think of as “short-term goals.”

At the top of the pyramid are your primary indicators — or key performance indicators (KPIs) — of your goal. These metrics will be very few in number and will comprise the dashboard that you present to your manager or CXO. These metrics rarely change, if ever, and are fed by the insights, interpretations, and data gathered from your lower-pyramid measurements (as well as from any gut feelings you have). The goals themselves are what you should be reporting and nothing more.

Step 2: Map the segments: In this example, the goal is to “increase the number of converted leads by 10 percent without raising costs,” and you’ve created a new instructional blog to help you accomplish this goal.

There are a few ways you can get to that number. You can either improve the conversion rate of the existing number of leads by 10 percent, or you can increase the actual number of leads by a percentage so that the number of converted leads naturally goes up by 10 percent.

So to build your primary indicators, you’ll only want a handful of numbers in that top dashboard, such as:

• Number of converted leads by week/month/quarter
• Total cost per converted lead by week/month/quarter

Those two numbers are the only KPIs (for that particular goal) that will matter to your CXO.

For your secondary indicators, you may want to monitor a number of metrics; these will give you great insights and help your team improve the process in order to reach your goals. Examples include:

• Email list subscribers vs. goal
• Total number of leads by week/month/quarter
• Incremental leads from the new blog
• Lead source (e.g., organic search, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Lastly, you have your user indicators at the bottom. These are the day-to-day metrics that will help you understand and get the insight you need to improve the processes related to your secondary indicators — i.e., the ones you will want to show the ongoing content creators within your organization. Examples include:

• Number of visitors to the blog
• New visitors vs. returning visitors
• Page views on the blog
• Number of blog comments
• Blog subscriptions
• Conversion rate from subscribers to leads
• Number of shares through social media (most shared posts)
• SEO metrics for keywords
• Twitter followers
• Facebook likes
• Social media reports (both internal and external)
• Blog comments and responses (qualitative)
• Most popular blog content/category
• Persona measurement (i.e., showing if you are attracting your targeted personas)

The purpose of these metrics is to help improve your process. If you find that you’re putting a lot of time into Facebook but are not getting any visitors or subscribers out of it, you can alter your strategy and experiment with other social networks.

Bringing the levels of the pyramid together

If you spend the time to do this the right way, you will have a lot of tools to answer some extraordinarily complex questions about your content marketing, as well as your overall marketing strategy. You may find some interesting things, for example:

• Social media channels are producing the most qualified leads
• Email subscribers stay longer as customers than non-subscribers
• You’re attracting way more of “Danny” (i.e., Persona One), but “Suzie” (Persona Two) makes up a much higher percentage of your qualified leads.

And this is where you’ll earn your keep. Once you can show certain trends with your content, then you can start to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.

Portions of this post were taken from “Managing Content Marketing,” a CMI book written by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi.

Cover image via Bigstock

“What’s so new about content marketing? It’s just what good marketers have always done.”

This is one of the content marketing backlash arguments that I’ve talked about here on CMI and on my company’s blog, but I think it’s worth drilling down into this one a bit further. 

Of course, the “nothing new here” brigade has a point: Content has always been an important part of many marketing plans (generally the better ones). But clearly, something unique is going on here.

Somewhere along the line, something changed to turn that “little thing we’ve always done” into this big, voracious thing that’s eating up every budget. Something had to have happened to release the beast we now know as content marketing.

So what was this catalyst? (Insert drum roll… add cymbal crash!)

The internet happened. 

And just as the internet changed old-school marketing into the data-devouring digital discipline we all practice today, it also transformed old-school content marketing into a completely new animal. And it’s this new species that everyone is getting so excited about.

What hasn’t changed 

Content marketing in the digital era still has a lot in common with “The Furrow” magazine that John Deere first published in 1895.

• It’s still about packaging up your expertise to help your prospects do their jobs more successfully.

• It’s still about suppressing the product-flogging urge so you can talk with prospects about things they care about.

• Ultimately, it still puts buyers and their needs first, above the needs of the brand and its marketers.

We recognize all these traits as much in “The Furrow” of 1895 as we do in Silverpop‘s latest infographic or (shameless plug) Velocity’s own fabulous firehose of fun.

So if the internet didn’t change the fundamental aspects of content marketing, what did it change?

Pretty much everything else.

Before the internet, content was one of marketers’ sharpest arrows. Now, in the digital era (i.e., the era of the self-educating buyer), it’s got the precision and power of a nuclear weapon.

Next-generation content marketing 

Digital has changed the way we research, create, target, distribute, promote, and measure our content marketing efforts in many ways, including:

• Research: We use search and social media to instantly research topics, as well as to survey what’s already out there.
• Creation: Content used to be all print-based (other than what was created for in-person events). Now, most of the action is centered on digital content — like eBooks, blog posts, videos, graphics, SlideShares, Prezis, and podcasts.
• Targeting: We use digital tools and insights to segment our messaging by categories like products, personas, buying stages, and interests — we can even narrow the audience field down to a “segment of one,” if we so choose.
• Distribution: We’re not licking stamps anymore. Instead, we’re linking, emailing, uploading, embedding, and streaming our brand stories. And we’re no longer solely in charge of who receives our messages — or when and how they find them: Our content is being discovered via highly specific searches conducted by people we’ve never even thought about targeting. Not to mention it’s being consumed on laptops, smartphones, tablets, and even (if your last name happens to be Le Muir, Scoble, or Kawasaki) on the inside of eyeglass lenses.
• Promotion: As marketers, we’ve gone far beyond broadcast mode: We’re sharing content on Twitter, in LinkedIn groups, in Google+ circles, and on Facebook pages. We’re using it in lead nurturing flows, drip campaigns, in triggered behavioral shots, and in dozens of other innovative ways.
• Measurement: We immerse ourselves in the data produced in Google Analytics, marketing automation tools, and CRM dashboards. We measure everything that can be measured (and then some), and use the insight we receive to sharpen our strategies and tighten our tactics for our next efforts.

The bottom line here is that what’s being practiced today is not your grandmother’s content marketing — it’s fast, fluid, targeted, transparent, interactive, intelligent, visual, visceral, and virtual content marketing.

Before the internet:

• Our content took months to research and produce
• It was expensive
• It only reached people we knew
• It took weeks to get there
• We never knew if it had arrived, much less got read
• If it got shared, it was likely only among a handful of people (though we had no way of knowing that, for sure, because…)
• We didn’t have any way to quantify what impact it made
• Or whether it was worth the investment
• So, content efforts were given little or no budget

Today, content marketing can be instant, low-cost, highly targeted, easily discovered, cheaply distributed, widely promoted, and tracked to within an inch of its life. We can monitor each piece from ideation all the way to revenue, and quantify the returns with a measure of certainty.

What used to seem like a pretty good idea is now being recognized as the indispensable core of most marketing programs. The internet made that happen, and now it’s up to us to keep it moving forward.

And that, my friends, is what’s so new about content marketing.

For more insight on the past, present, and future of content marketing, register to attend Content Marketing World 2013, taking place on September 9 – 11 in Cleveland, Ohio.

Cover image via Bigstock

My Little Pony fan art on Tumblr

By now, you’ve probably heard all about Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr and what this might mean for branded content marketing. Naturally, the internet company’s prime objective is to monetize the popular blogging and social networking platform, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has discussed plans to keep advertising “tasteful and seamless.”

Regardless of what happens to the newly acquired platform from an advertising and financial standpoint, Tumblr will surely place a priority on retaining its viability as a content channel through which brands can tell a story and connect with consumers. That’s what Tumblr’s all about: It’s a place to showcase content, and a place to share it. It’s a virtual display case for creative types, and an ever-expanding catalogue of visual art. Tumblr’s users know good photos, animated GIFs, and blog posts when they see them, and won’t hesitate to broadcast your content far and wide — if you can master the platform to ensure your branded work is what they’re looking for.

Here are three pointers for producing successful content marketing efforts on Tumblr:

1. Choose your format wisely

Back in February, during New York’s Social Media Week, Tumblr hosted a master class on using its platform to tell brand stories (you can watch it in its entirety here). According to Tumblr’s Brand Strategist, Alexis Kaplan, photos are the most popular content on the site, followed by animated GIFs, text, and video. She also hinted that Tumblr expects audio to be big this year.

This is information that content marketers can use to their advantage. If you have a choice between promoting a branded photo and a video, you might consider posting the photo to Tumblr and using the video somewhere else. Another option is to recycle content you already have into something that’s more likely to resonate with Tumblr users, such as compiling a few frames from a video to create an original animated GIF. Consider which content formats your Tumblr followers are most likely to engage with and share. Remember, the content they seek out on this platform isn’t necessarily the same stuff you’re using on Facebook or YouTube.

2. Follow your fans, and share their content

Following your consumers is an important courtesy that shows your brand is listening and appreciates what they have to say. Yet, many brands shy away from this practice, for various reasons. For example, on a site like Twitter, where counts are posted for all to see, it can look a little suspicious when follower and following numbers are neck and neck. Some might see this and question the brand’s value and credibility, thinking it may have garnered an audience entirely through follow-backs instead of through the quality and value of its Twitter content.

On Tumblr, the issue of whether or not to follow back isn’t of much concern because Tumblr’s default setting doesn’t display following counts (though there are some themes and widgets that allow you to publicize them). This means brands can — and should — follow back without having to worry about public perceptions about its numbers. It’s a good way to get to know your followers, as well as to expose yourself to their content, which might be something you can use as part of your overarching content strategy. Allowing consumers to freely create drawings, GIFs, and other re-imaginings of your products on Tumblr can help foster a sense of community, and it also provides an outlet for them to publicly voice their passion for your brand (the same kind of positive impact that comes from reblogging customers’ posts on other platforms).

One brand that’s experiencing Tumblr success by leveraging fan content is the HBO series “Game of Thrones.” It maintains an open call for creations on its Tumblr page, and the quality of the submissions it receives is simply stunning. Entries represent content that the marketers behind “Game of Thrones” can promote through its other social media outlets, including Facebook and Twitter. To further engage its followers, the brand also runs contests that solicit more specific formats, like a Season 3 poster design, and offers the chance to win prize packs.

3. Make content that incites an emotional response 

The beauty of working with a visually stimulating platform like Tumblr is that it’s sometimes easier to incite an emotional response with photography and video than with words. Visual content is memorable, and thus it has a high potential to spread virally.

According to a “Journal of Marketing Research” article, called What Makes Online Content Viral?, content that invokes a “high-arousal emotion” like awe or amusement is more likely to be shared than one that simply makes users feel content (sadness-inducing content, though it counts as high-arousal, is better left untouched). The report also notes that users are less likely to blog about “useful,” commentary-driven content than they are about emotional stories.

One way to employ high-arousal emotions is to tap into your customer’s inner child. For its part, Disney invited a handful of photographers to visit its theme parks and document their experiences. They weren’t given much direction beyond shooting “what they’d like to see captured,” and some of the photographers used nothing more than an iPhone or an iPad to capture their images. The results became The Looking Glass Tumblr, which I’d be willing to bet elicits fond childhood memories in just about anyone who’s ever been to a Disney Park.

The General Mills Tumblr, meanwhile, showcases some amazing DIY arts and crafts projects that were created from cereal boxes (and, in some cases, the cereal itself). With the help of photo-based instructions, this successful content marketing approach served to bring out the kid in this kid-friendly brand’s followers.

If your brand’s personality doesn’t lend itself to whimsy, you can also try something more dramatic. For example, the Adidas Football Tumblr is divided into albums of photos that are heavy on victory-related imagery. The brand’s page even comes with its own heart-thumping audio soundtrack.

The months to come will bring changes to Tumblr advertising, but what isn’t likely to change is the vital role Tumblr can play in your brand’s successful content marketing strategy. Use it wisely, use it often, and use it well.

Learn more ways to take strategic advantage of the latest trends in content marketing by attending Content Marketing World 2013.

I find myself abstracting this passion in my work life. Five years ago, during a recruiting lunch, as I was selling my now dear friend and content junkie, David Patton, on a groundbreaking role as editor-in-chief of Waggener Edstrom, I described myself as a person who relished pushing big rocks up big hills. Without missing a beat, he asked if I knew I was a masochist. I knew he had the job right then and there.

No surprise that I recently found myself in the middle of a new marketing Stonehenge. This time the basalt was the role of content in social sales — as defined by the engagement cycle that social media enables for marketing and sales teams (an illustration of this is the moment when a sales person gets a lead and goes directly to LinkedIn to find out more and connect). And perhaps an even bigger climb I had to tackle was what happens with marketers and sales teams when we use social media content to engage and nurture our customers and potential customers.

What are the implications of content in social sales? 

There are plenty of definitions flying about for social sales, social media content marketing, and engagement. To put it simply, your customers want to be in the driver’s seat. They want you to add value for them. So your content strategy should focus on becoming the destination for that engagement.

If engagement is the goal line of our content creation, then social sales is the home stretch. By harnessing the right conversation and providing the right content value to the right people on the right platform at the right time, you will ultimately reach that sales summit.

Let me be clear, content marketers: You are responsible for converting leads to sales, not just for generating content. In fact, you’re a key player in the social sales process.

When it comes to social sales, the space between marketing and sales collapses. Read on for a mini case study of the social sales process.

When content marketing and social sales collide 

I learned this lesson when preparing to launch PaperShare, a content publishing engine. We planned to use our product to market… our product. The experience was one of those moments in a marketer’s life when you realize you’re walking around with rocks in your shoes, and you don’t know where or how you got them, but wow, they are an obvious and painful symptom of being on the bleeding edge.

We had our launch strategy. We had created our content — in this case, a white paper about using content for lead generation. We understood our audiences, and targeted an outlet for the white paper where we knew that audience would be. We had also established our metrics: Since we were launching the company, we needed awareness; but we also wanted leads and, ultimately, adoption of the PaperShare platform. With all our plans in place, we were ready to go live.

After publishing, a landing page was generated for audiences to click-through to. There, readers could view an image of the white paper, existing social commentary about the actual piece of content, and a quick value proposition overview. We utilized PaperShare’s social log-in functionality in front of the piece of content to ensure that we captured all reads as actual leads (vs. a web form that might experience high drop-off rates). And then we held our breath and waited…

This is what we found:

The good news: 40 to 45 percent of readers clicked through using social log-in — unheard of returns. Because each piece of content had been socially amplified, we received a 10 percent lift in additional views from the initial readers’ social networks, and with additional views of related content and the new followers our content created, we gained 610 opportunities for engagement through a two-day placement. We were living the promise of social sales: harnessing content at the center, along with the amplification and contextual power of social media, to establish leads and buzz, then creating an engagement zone for follow up.

Enter the rocks of uncertainty, as we then experienced a prime example of the collapse in the roles of marketing and sales: All this opportunity lay before us, but we still had questions, like who follows up next? What is the next best action? What was the call to action for content? Can you ask a user to download a 30-day trial just because they’ve read your white paper? In the old model, we would have tossed the leads over the fence to the sales team. But these leads had made their intentions loud and clear: They simply wanted to engage with the valuable content we provided. Somehow, a call-to-action invitation to “get started today” seemed like it would have dismissed the value of the vehicle that had brought the lead in the door in the first place. 

The power of sitting with the sales team

And so we found ourselves sitting with the sales team, creating a leads strategy centered on content and driven by the intersection of marketing and sales. In trying to determine how best to proceed, we realized that each viewer of the white paper would be at different points in their sales engagement, so the only logical answer was, “It depends.” Because we now knew who the leads were, we were able to identify other actions they then took (or had taken previously). And together, using that knowledge, we built a pattern of engagement against action and interest, bucketing the leads into different categories of interest.

The PaperShare platform allowed us to identify usage patterns — which pieces of content they had read; what the broad themes were for social conversations sparked by that content; trends in engagement by industry, title, or role; who the most qualified leads were; and what information was deemed most valuable by these readers. Through social follow-up, we were also able to determine which of our personas was most resonant against each of the leads.

I was struck by how closely interrelated the questions were. Sales and marketing were not two separate teams with two separate work streams any longer. Instead, we were creating a social sales strategy from the ground up — imagining a new architecture for engagement.

What we learned from the rocks in our shoes:

• Content doesn’t end at creation, curation, or distribution. It ends after that lead has been identified, nurtured, and has finally taken a sales action. That’s the last mile.
• The social sales playbook requires thoughtful evaluation of the outcomes desired and the processes necessary to get there. Before you publish.
• During the engagement cycle, the space between marketing and sales collapses. Embrace it.

I’d love to hear what you’re learning and what tips you have for your social sales playbook. We’ll keep sharing what we’ve learned.

If you’re looking for more insight on the integration of sales and content processes, you won’t want to miss Content Marketing World 2013. Early-bird pricing is only available until May 31, so register today! 

Cover image via Bigstock

Relevance, plus…

In addition to their solid advice on how to create successful content marketing projects, the books that follow share several key characteristics:

1. Relevance: Each offers specialized information that can significantly enhance a content marketer’s efficiency and effectiveness.
2. Structure: In addition to conveying valuable information, each reflects the importance of a structured approach to organizing and sharing information. Content marketers can apply these examples to all types of projects, including eBooks, reports, and white papers.
3. Visual communications: Most of this year’s crop of content marketing books reflect the importance of using simple hand-drawn (as opposed to formal — i.e., art director-created) visuals and graphics for engaging, communicating, and simplifying.

1. The structure used by “superachievers”

Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield‘s “The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well,” reflects the important role that structure plays in making big projects feasible by breaking them into a series of tasks.

In this case, the goal was to interview 30 superachievers and ask them to share — in their own words — how they achieved their success.

Unlike most interview-based books, “The Art of Doing” doesn’t include the full text of each interview. Instead, each of the 30 chapters focuses on the 10 most important takeaways contributed by each superachiever. This is followed by an easily scanned list of information about the subject’s signature achievement, plus a second list about the field in general.

2. Record-keeping: Never miss a storytelling moment

Mike Rohde‘s “The Sketchnote Handbook: The Illustrated Guide to Visual Note Taking” is a must-read for content marketers who dislike taking notes, but who recognize the importance of documenting meetings and information-filled events (like this year’s Content Marketing World conference).

Even if you think you have lousy handwriting and no artistic experience, with Michael Rohde’s help, for the first time you’ll likely find yourself enjoying the act of taking notes at meetings and events.

The author’s aggressive blogging about his book paved the way for its immediate success. (The first printing quickly sold out, requiring an immediate second printing.) While writing the book, Mike kept his prospective readers informed with chapter-by-chapter excerpts and graphics… as discussed here, with links to the each of the blog posts.

3. Illustrating a hallmark of content marketing success

For years, Michael Port‘s “Book Yourself Solid” has been a best-selling guide to marketing success for self-employed professionals. But the latest version, “Book Yourself Solid Illustrated” is significantly better.

Michael partnered with a visual strategist, Jocelyn Wallace, who took a 90,000 word manuscript and breathed new life into the ideas with 800 pictures and workbook exercises. Each two-page spread clarifies Michael’s advice and invites readers to take advantage of his process by systematically completing his steps for service business success.

“Book Yourself Solid Illustrated” sets new standards for using design to differentiate, organize, and add value to an information-filled “how-to” book.

4. Envision stronger teamwork and partnerships

Rather than being a solo effort, content marketing success usually involves collaboration with clients, management, vendors, and freelancers. That’s why David Sibbet’s ”Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation, & High Performance” is an important book for content marketers within client corporations, the agencies that serve them, and freelance vendors, alike.

The third in David Sibbet’s series, “Visual Teams” is an in-depth review of the role that graphics, and graphic templates, can play in facilitating information sharing and encouraging collaboration. The numerous examples, captions, lists, and sidebars present new ways for content marketers to deal with everyday collaboration tasks.

5. Go from writer to content marketing entrepreneur

Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch‘s “APE: Author – Publisher – Entrepreneur: How to Publish a Book,” has relevance far beyond writing and self-publishing a book.

It offers significant value for businesses or self-employed professionals who want to publish a premium book and sell it using online channels like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Barnes & Noble.

I’ve been a fan of premium books ever since I wrote “The Aldus Guide for Basic Design,” which established Aldus PageMaker (later acquired by Adobe) as the premium desktop publishing software program.

“APE” is a deep exploration, extensively documented guide to the steps involved in writing, publishing, and profiting from printed books and eBooks.

Even if you’re not interested in publishing a book, the book teaches valuable lessons on navigating the options involved in creating and leveraging short, inexpensive ($2.99) premium reports and user guides — powerful tools for attracting qualified prospects and boosting buyer satisfaction.

6. Content marketing success, by design

Bruce Hanington and Bella Martin‘s “Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions” has a lot to offer all content marketers, not just graphic designers. This is because, one way or another, design thinking can enhance every aspect of content marketing.

Design-inspired best practices, habits, and approaches to problem solving can recharge your ability to plan, write, and manage all types of content marketing tasks, from writing and publishing to conversions.

The “Universal Methods of Design” also provides a case study in creating an efficient structure for organizing and presenting a complex topic. The book’s consistent text formatting and layout for each of the 100 ideas may suggest the solution you’re looking for to publish a premium book, create a series of white papers, or syndicate your message over time through multiple blog posts and media outposts.

7. “White Papers for Dummies”

Gordon Graham‘s “White Papers for Dummies” is an example of the “… for Dummies” series at its best, combining “everyman” positioning and tightly organized, short, straightforward chapters written by a first-rate author with extensive subject area experience.

Any content marketer looking for a structured approach to creating white papers — or eBooks and reports that are structured like white papers — will benefit from its step-by-step organization.

One of the book’s features that demonstrate Gordon Graham’s extensive experience, derived from preparing over 600 white papers, is his continuing emphasis on planning and marketing white papers. And, if you’re a freelancer, there’s lots of advice about how to position and price your white paper marketing services.

Insert your favorite book here!

If you know of other recently published books that have important lessons to teach your fellow content marketers, please share their titles with me, below, as comments! Likewise, if you’ve read one of the above books, please share your opinions and takeaways. (I’m also interested in your suggestions for other books you’d like me to review.)

Join Roger C. Parker as he shares more tips for successful content marketing in his presentation at Content Marketing World 2013.

Too many content marketers seem to struggle with building a consistent audience. Indeed, some publish content that becomes a big hit — it drives engagement,  it gets shared, and it delivers new leads. However, many of these efforts don’t produce successful results on a dependable and repeatable basis.

Fortunately, I believe I’ve found a potential solution to this problem: One key to consistent growth lies in building a consistent format for your content, and using it to make an appointment with your audience members that they won’t want to miss.

Welcome to the Man Cave

Every single Friday, (yes, every single one), I wake up and check my Facebook feed. As I scroll through the mundane posts from friends and family around the world, one entry always draws my attention: “This Week at the Man Cave.”

How does the Man Cave work?

My favorite Friday Facebook post features a black-and-white picture of a man holding up a sign with a single, handwritten word on it. The image always draws me in, and I’ve come to eagerly anticipate its arrival each week.

Moreover, the provocative Facebook photo is always captioned with a (short) story that explains the significance of the picture and its associated word. It’s always a personal, emotional story, and it always makes me think. Though the posts are brief, they make a powerful impact.

Click to enlarge

So, who’s behind the Man Cave?

Some of you may know Joseph Kalinowski. JK, as he’s often referred to, is the talented designer and creative director behind the Content Marketing Institute’s brand. (Not to be confused with the “other” Content Marketing Institute Joe who’s known for his insane love of the color orange.)

JK isn’t selling anything. But if he were, I’d buy it. Through his content, I’ve developed a relationship with JK’s personal brand, and I’ve come to anticipate his weekly contribution to my social feeds. On those rare occasions when he skips a Friday (like April 19 — not that I’m keeping track), I find myself disappointed by the lack of fresh Man Cave content. Without even knowing it, JK’s content formula has become a weekly appointment for me — a dependable and engaging experience that I voluntarily seek out as part of my regular routine.

Does the Man Cave deliver results?

Though I’ll admit that this is by no means a scientific analysis, from a content marketing standpoint, JK’s Man Cave posts do display many of the hallmarks of social success: Man Cave posts are “liked” far more often than JK’s other Facebook posts (no offense, JK). His weekly feature also receives far more comments and is shared far more often than his other content. If JK were creating the Man Cave on behalf of a product or service, there’s little doubt in my mind that he’d have a brand content victory on his hands.

Why does the Man Cave work?

The Man Cave works for three simple reasons:

1. A smart hook: JK has used a visual marker (the black-and-white photo and a handwritten word) to trigger my weekly anticipation for his written content.
2. An appointment: JK has set an appointment that Facebook fans like me look forward to attending. Consciously or not, we’ve come to expect a Man Cave post every single week, and we deliberately seek it out.
3. Consistent delivery: JK delivers on the promise of his Man Cave posts week in and week out, and he doesn’t stray from the formula that has brought his success.

Ask yourself…

What are you doing to build a consistent, reliable, and valuable relationship with your existing audience? What formula would you use to create eagerly anticipated content on a regular basis? How would you publish content that your audience of fans, followers, and friends thinks of as “can’t-miss” opportunities to engage with your brand?

Want more ideas on how content can help build a powerful brand? Read Andrew Davis’ book, “Brandscaping: Unleashing the Power of Partnerships.” 

That’s why I’ve put together this short list of questions that will help you gauge how good a job you are (or aren’t) doing of crowdsourcing your content creation efforts. If you can’t answer yes to all of them, chances are that you’re missing out on a few opportunities for easy wins.

1. Are you soliciting and (more importantly) leveraging comments?

Every piece of content you create shouldn’t just allow for commenting — it should be actively encouraging it (click here for some tips on how to do so). Not only are comments an indication of engagement, which signal to readers that your content is worthwhile, but they are also a valuable source of raw input. For example, any time you get substantive comments, consider doing the following:

• Go back to the commenter with the follow-up questions: Between the original comments and any additional input you get, you may be inspired with ideas for creating a completely new piece of content. At the very least, you will walk away with a new idea or point of view, which is always helpful as you brainstorm future content creation ideas.

• If your commenters express different viewpoints than yours, draw them out and engage them in a debate. The resulting material could be great fodder for a podcast or video chat in which you explore the topic from multiple angles. Doing so will produce interesting content that will likely spawn even more comments.

• Wherever appropriate, repurpose comments as quotes or testimonials. Depending on the source, they could lend some credibility to other projects that you’re working on.

Another option to consider is simply putting a question out into the ether and allowing the answers and comments that come back to populate the body of a blog or social media post. If you’ve posed a really provocative question and do a good job of getting it out in front of people with strong opinions, you might receive enough crowdsourced material to develop an entire piece of content from start to finish. It doesn’t get much easier than that!

2. Are you engaging your audience with surveys and polls? 

These days, myriad survey tools are available to help you reach out to your audience and get feedback. One of my favorites is PollDaddy, which is easy to use and can be directly integrated into WordPress. The advantage of using survey tools and plug-ins is that not only are you creating another way for people to engage with your content, you are also gathering useful data in the process, which can ultimately be turned into more content.

For example, if you are publishing a series of articles about a common topic, consider adding a question or two at the end of each one. After the series is complete, you will have a bunch of data that you can then leverage into new content pieces. A tool that I’ve found to be particularly effective for this is TechValidate. Not only does it help you create surveys, it also automatically creates charts and graphs for you based on the responses you receive.

By embedding a survey about boards of directors into a recent OpenView newsletter, we were able to gather enough data to put together an infographic. The result was a visually compelling piece of content that allowed our audience to compare their opinions to those of their peers — it was a huge success, and the resulting content virtually created itself.

3. Are you working with industry influencers?

Working with industry influencers and leveraging their expertise and thought leadership is a great way to amplify your content strategy. For example, consider co-opting influential business professionals to write original posts for your site, to participate in your videos and podcasts, or simply to help distribute your content throughout their own followers.

The trick to finding and successfully working with influencers is to have an engagement strategy in place. Typically, developing such a strategy requires four steps:

• Identify the experts that your buyers are being influenced by: You can use a bit of online research — like checking out blogs, looking at social media activity, and comparing Klout scores — to find out who’s leading the most relevant conversations in your industry, and determine whether your target audience is listening to them.

• Establish initial contact with those influencers, perhaps by following them online or posting a comment to some of their content. The idea is just to make them aware that you exist.

• Pitching the influencer on your value proposition: Make sure you communicate the benefits that creating content for your site will provide to them — such as exposure to a broader audience, or the opportunity to create content in a different format than what they are already producing.

• Reduce the chance that they will turn you down by making the process of working with you as easy as possible. For example, you could offer to interview them and draft content on their behalf, so that you’re getting their ideas but aren’t asking for too much of their time.

4. Are you taking full advantage of social media?

Ok, you may be thinking yes, of course, I’m using social media. But to be clear, simply having social sharing tools embedded into your site isn’t the same as actively crowdsourcing your content creation and promotion through an effective social media strategy. The fact of the matter is that if you have good content and do social media well, everything you create should have the potential to go viral — meaning that others will voluntarily share your content for you.

When I use social media to promote a piece of content, one thing I keep in mind is how important it is to reach out to my audience multiple times — so I don’t risk my message being overlooked. For example, I rely on social scheduling tools like HootSuite or Buffer to send out each of my tweets multiple times, at varying intervals. Typically, I schedule four tweets to go out eight hours apart so that I’m covering a variety of time zones. And, provided the particular piece of content is on an evergreen topic, I may even schedule it to be sent out several more times over the next few months, maximizing the chances of my followers seeing it.

There are lots of ways that crowdsourcing your content creation and promotion efforts can make your job easier — not to mention more effective. What tactics are you using? What were your results? Who knows? Maybe some of the comments you contribute below will make their way into a future post!

Looking for more content creation ideas and inspiration? Join Kevin Cain, and dozens of other content marketing experts, at Content Marketing World 2013, taking place in Cleveland, Ohio on September 9–11. 

Cover image via Bigstock

“Education is the most powerful weapon to change the world.”

I truly believe in this. I also believe that the brands that place a priority on educating their prospects and customers through the creation of remarkable content are wisely choosing the road less traveled.

Think about this truth: Our customers don’t care about our products or services; they care about themselves. If we buy into this, then we must also accept that the majority of the information we produce for marketing purposes cannot be about ourselves. Our content must be based on fulfilling our customers’ needs and interests, so that they come to build a trusted and emotional connection with our brands.

If you get a chance, take a look at this interview that CMI’s Chief Strategist, Robert Rose, conducted with Coca-Cola’s resident content marketing expert Jonathan Mildenhall. In it, Jonathan said something quite profound: “If I can fill up the emotional level of the brand [Coca-Cola], then I have to trade on it less and less.”

Isn’t that the key? Yes, at the end of the day, our content needs to help us sell more, lower expenses, or create happier customers. Our customers know this, and our content marketing strategies are built around achieving these goals. But the more we educate them or entertain them, the more they don’t mind being sold to.

So if we want to change our world through content marketing, we need to distinguish ourselves as the leading educational voices for our industry. No excuses.

Here are a few examples of companies that are successfully working this educational angle. I’m sharing them with the hope that they will inspire you to do the same for your own customers and prospects. 

IBM

IBM’s “CityOne”

In IBM’s “Sim City”-style business simulation game, “CityOne,” players are challenged to solve problems in four key areas — banking, retail, energy, and water. Each scenario offers opportunities to understand the real-world implications of business decision-making.

Since its launch in 2010, “CityOne” has racked up over 20,000 players from more than 130 countries, proving simulation gaming/gamification may be a powerful new content initiative that can engage, educate, and influence. 

Indium

Seventeen engineers from Indium have discovered content gold with their “From One Engineer to Another” blog. Through it, they produce valuable content and videos and answer questions about a variety of engineering topics (e.g., how to set up and operate the Indium sulfamate plating bath). Even if you don’t know what that means, you can appreciate what they are striving for: bringing ideas to life through interactive conversations. According to Indium’s marketing director, the company has seen a 600 percent jump in leads since the launch of the blog. 

Intuit

Intuit Labs

Intuit Labs is an open collaboration platform that asks entrepreneurs to help solve the company’s latest product challenges — and rewards winners with cash. Intuit designs challenges for both code-writing techies and tech-challenged entrepreneurs, serving as a great way to foster innovation and engagement while gathering user-generated content, as well. 

Zenith Infotech

MSPtv is an educational community for managed service providers. The steady flow of useful content on the community, which includes podcasts, webinars, videos, and other content formats, helps resellers position and troubleshoot their products, allowing Zenith Infotech to educate customers in a new, interactive way. 

P&G & NBC

Life Goes Strong

On Life Goes Strong, an online community for baby boomers, Procter & Gamble provides content relevant for this audience in a variety of forms including articles, Q&As with experts, blogs, and polls. 

General Electric

GE is using its Ecomagination site to familiarize consumers with different aspects of its business by discussing science and innovation and embracing great challenges for ideas that will better our future. With a mix of bright visuals, videos, and cutting-edge articles, it’s a go-to site for anyone interested in the latest environmental issues, serving as a “forum for fresh thinking and conversation around clean technology and sustainable infrastructure.” 

General Mills

General Mills’ Tablespoon

General Mills’ Tablespoon is an attractive, interactive community for people who are passionate about food and entertaining. The site gathers the best of the best, and uses a clean categorization technique for its content, splitting it up by topics that matter most to its core audience, like Quick Dishes, Taste for Adventure, and Rock UR Party. Depending on the type of cook they are or event they’re hosting, these categories help users find content quickly and easily in a more innovative way than traditional websites. And, with help from its newsletter, readers can also stay in the know on the latest recipes and inspirations. 

Roberts & Durkee Law Firm

Epic content solves problems. Even so-called “boring” brands can take advantage of the opportunity to share information that improves customers’ lives or helps them to do their jobs better. For example, in 2008, Roberts & Durkee, a Miami law firm, used content marketing to become the de facto consumer advocate for victims of the Chinese drywall problem that hit the U.S. market toward the middle of the decade. The firm created a website/blog called Chinese Drywall Problem to help thousands of Florida homeowners whose homes were built with toxic drywall. This content strategy established Roberts & Durkee as an expert in litigation for Chinese drywall problems and resulted in tremendous business opportunities for the firm. 

Sherwin-Williams

Sherwin-Williams’ “STIR” magazine

“STIR” magazine for iPad targets a very specific audience that includes interior designers, architects, and people who are simply passionate about decorating their homes. The digital magazine combines high-quality articles, videos, interactive tools, blogs, events, and “chatter” (comments from Sherwin-Williams’ social sites) into a comprehensive resource for consumers seeking design ideas, inspirations, problem-solving tips, and more. 

NLB

NLB, the largest Slovenian bank, wanted to break the mold of cold, distant financial institutions and get closer to its customers and prospects. To do this, NLB launched Financial Advice, a new content marketing project that uses a mix of digital media and live customer engagement to reposition it in the financial market. In addition to a new web portal, a print magazine, and an iPad app, NLB also opened a new branch in the capital city of Ljubljana, where its customers can get free personal financial advice, pick up free coffee, read educational materials, and stick around for daily presentations on personal finance. 

Agilent

Agilent’s Puppet Chemistry

Agilent Technologies produces measurement instruments that help scientists, researchers, and engineers measure variables in chemical analysis, life sciences, and electronics. Going completely against type, Agilent resisted the typical dry technicalities in favor of creating content that was truly unexpected: a video puppet show. This technique proved to be highly successful for Agilent, increasing traffic to its website and encouraging more prospects to click through in search of more information.

Liberty Mutual

Liberty Mutual uses content to help associate its brand with “responsible thinking, preparation, and doing the right thing.” Its site, The Responsibility Project, tackles issues pertaining to ethics, politics, and economics (and much more) to support its theme of “being responsible” in all aspects of your life. The site features interactive polls, videos, articles, and a blog — all of which communicate minimally about the company’s products and services. The effort demonstrates how good content that serves a broader purpose is often much more effective than promotional content. 

Lauren Luke

Lauren Luke videos

In 2007, Lauren Luke began selling makeup products on eBay in an effort to subsidize her modest day job as a taxi dispatcher in Newcastle, England. In an effort to improve her eBay sales, Lauren began creating practical makeup application videos and distributed them on YouTube. Five years later, Lauren has her own brand of makeup (distributed exclusively by Sephora), she has a series of teen books called “Lauren Luke Looks,” and she’s built a bigger brand than Estee Lauder on YouTube. Most impressively, Lauren Luke hasn’t spent a dime on traditional advertising. 

Google

ZMOT, or the “Zero Moment of Truth,” is a phrase used to define the key activities online consumers take before making a decision to purchase. Google developed ZMOT as multiple eBooks, research reports, and videos about the changing nature of consumer purchase patterns. Today, this research is quoted in almost every online presentation given around the world. 

RCI

RCI’s “Endless Vacation” for iPad

RCI, the largest timeshare vacation network in the world, has embraced the future of content marketing by focusing on creating the great content that its readers want — helping the brand take a leadership position in the travel category, in the process. What was once a custom-published magazine available only in print, RCI’s “Endless Vacation” has moved beyond the boundaries of glossy paper and onto the iPad. The application allows readers to dive deeply into its travel expertise through interactive articles, photo galleries, alternate covers (just shake it!), panoramas, and more. 

Caterpillar

The Caterpillar online community is an online forum where professionals who work with Caterpillar equipment and engines can exchange information, find answers, and get expert advice from their peers. 

Society of Fire Protection Engineers

“Fire Protection Engineering” magazine

“Fire Protection Engineering” magazine is the official publication of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (a 60+-year-old society with over 4,000 members dedicated to the practice of fire protection engineering). The key to success for the mag? Using content that’s been vetted by an editorial advisory board, which is a surefire way to align messages across multiple online, print, and in-person initiatives. Take a tip from the SFP and have people on your board who are either readers of your magazine or members of your association to make sure you’re hitting the mark. Readers of FPE magazine can find all the latest articles online in an easy-to-read list or get the print version, depending on their reading preferences.

For more inspiring examples of educational and informative content, read CMI’s Ultimate eBook: 100 Content Marketing Examples. 

Cover image via Bigstock

Though content creation can seem daunting, there are many easy ways to make the content marketing process easier. Not only are a variety of tools available to help inspire fresh concepts, but there are also some hassle-free methods that businesses in any industry can take advantage of — simply by tapping into the power of some of the websites you are probably already using every day.

Recently, I was presenting at the Western Association of Convention and Visitor Bureaus conference on ways to research content topics that will appeal to a business’ online audience. I walked the audience through the following steps to help them come up with fresh ideas for content creation.

Get grand ideas through Google

By simply entering a keyword phrase into a search engine, businesses can gain audience insight and use it to generate new content.

For example, pull up one of the most popular websites in the world: Google. Type in a keyword phrase that is relevant to your business, and wait for the Google Suggest results to roll in. In the example below, I focused on the travel industry, and chose “visiting the Grand Canyon” as my keyword phrase. Notice how, when I started to type “visit the grand…” Google automatically offered some suggestions, based on commonly searched terms. These auto-fill terms are perfect starter recommendations for content ideas, as Google users will see very similar results when they search for information on a potential trip to the Grand Canyon.

Next, take a look at the “related searches” suggestions Google offers on its search engine results pages (SERPs). In this example, the options presented can be categorized into two obvious themes. The first is visiting from nearby locations like Las Vegas or Phoenix, and the other is based on visiting in a given month of the year. Taking a cue from these results, hotels, restaurants, or other hospitality-related businesses in the Grand Canyon area might consider creating a 12-part content series that highlights the benefits of visiting the Grand Canyon during each month of the year. Because these results appear as a Suggested Search on Google, you can assume that your prospects and customers are likely searching for information like this.

Use YouTube to share the industry experience you have

After discussing Google, I walked the audience through a similar content development method using YouTube. In the image below, notice the intent of the searches, and note that the resulting suggestions were different on YouTube than the ones that turned up on Google.

From this example, we can tell people are wondering about Grand Canyon tours and the skywalk. If you’re a Grand Canyon business, the easiest thing to do might be to create a piece of content that’s optimized for such searches and embed a relevant video from YouTube (assuming the video you choose wasn’t created or branded by your competitor). If you have the right resources, you could also consider creating a unique video that describes each tour in detail, or you could film interviews with some of the local guides that take tourists on these excursions.

Yahoo Answers for content based on your customers’ questions

My third example focused on Yahoo Answers — an interest-based Q&A site. There, I searched “visit the Grand Canyon” and found more than 410 questions related to a search of this exact term.

Some of these questions were:

• What is the best way to visit the Grand Canyon from Las Vegas?
• What activities are there to do while visiting the Grand Canyon?
• We have three days to visit the Grand Canyon from Las Vegas. What is the best way to do it?
• We are visiting the Grand Canyon for two days and want to stay close but in a place that is not too touristy. What are your suggestions?

Notice the types of questions being asked? These would make great topics for your content, as they are each fairly specific and are obviously of interest to potential tourists. Local businesses in the Grand Canyon area could also consider blogging their answers, using the questions themselves as the post titles. Doing this gives your business an advantage when it comes to ranking for these long-tail searches, as well as for driving traffic to your blog.

Through Yahoo Answers questions, we observe a commonality with the Google suggest searches found in the previous example. People seem to be very interested in the term, “visit the Grand Canyon from Las Vegas.” However, when I searched for that phrase on Google, there is only one piece of content directly addressing that question — and so it ranks at No. 1. If your business is related to the Grand Canyon or is located near it, why not write an article using that exact title? You might be surprised how quickly you make it to the top-ranking result.

Through these steps, I was able to convey to my conference audience that finding ideas for truly awesome content creation doesn’t have to be difficult, no matter what industry you are in. With just a few quick searches, I turned up more than 15 content ideas. Though these methods are a great starting point for your content creation efforts, there are several other tools you might find useful for inspiring ideas. Here are some more of my favorites:

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

All online research starts with keywords, which makes keyword research an essential first step in content development. The Google AdWords: Keyword Tool is one of the best free keyword research tools available, as it is tied directly to Google AdWords. Though it does use search frequency data from Google, the numbers are estimates, so it’s better to use this tool to confirm your other keyword findings than as the only research method you use.

The Google AdWords tool can tell you which keywords are searched more (or less) than others based on broad, exact, or phrase-match volumes, contingent on the settings you set. Also, you can choose to see either local (U.S.) or global data, which is crucial for geo-specific businesses.

Quora

Quora is a Q&A site that is similar to Yahoo Answers. Though it hasn’t been around as long as Yahoo’s platform, it is growing more popular at a rapid rate, and already has a very engaged community. The site also features more in-depth questions than other Q&A sites, and the quality of the answers provided seems higher, as well. These benefits make it an excellent resource for researching useful content topics, based on the questions being discussed that are relevant to your industry.

LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn is best known as a professional social media site where people can connect with colleagues, share content, and even look for employment opportunities. Additionally, users can participate in group discussions, sharing information and ideas about their industry, personal interests, and more. All of these engaging conversations make LinkedIn groups a gold mine for content development research.

These group discussions display industry insight that may not be available elsewhere. By reading these discussions in industry groups, you’ll be able to gather frequently asked questions, uncover industry trends, and even identify sentiment toward specific products or services — information that is invaluable for content creators who are looking for content ideas that will serve their customers’ needs.

Your customers

Speaking of customers, if you aren’t already asking yours what they would like to learn from your company or know about your business, start doing so now. Interview them to learn what they think of the content you provide. What content topics and formats do they prefer? Where do they hang out online? Get their opinions on the areas they think you’ve covered well in your content, as well as the areas where they think you are falling short. Consider sending out surveys like this every few months to keep your content development ideas on track.

This is where your content can truly shine. By providing content that your current customers would like to consume, you can assume prospective customers will get something out of the content, as well. Also, once you know what types of content customers enjoy (blog posts, images, videos, infographics, etc.), you can be sure you are presenting your content in the most compelling and engaging ways.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many resources available to help you think of new ideas for your content marketing projects. Whether you decide to start with the Google or YouTube suggest method, Yahoo Answers or any of the other tools listed here, you will end up with a plethora of content concepts. Whatever you do, you can be sure a lack of ideas won’t be the reason you aren’t producing enough content.

What is your favorite content development research method or tool? How have you used it to create compelling content? Let me know in the comments section below.

For more inspiration and ideas that can help you meet your content creation challenges, check out CMI’s Ultimate eBook: 100 Content Marketing Examples. 

Cover image via Bigstock.

It would be easy to shrug our shoulders and dismiss them as annoying gremlins that mysteriously move from one spot to the next. But the reality is that rankings are based on sophisticated — and often proprietary technologies — and will therefore vary among the search engine results pages (SERPs) of different search tools. Geography (influenced by IP addresses) and personalization (including anonymous cookies that track browsing history) will also continue to make an impact.

Take heart: If the success of your content marketing strategy is in any way dependent on your search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine rankings, there are plenty of tools and tactics available that might merit your time and effort to explore.

Here are eight ways I check keyword rankings as a part of an overall SEO-focused content marketing strategy:

1. WebCEO

This software product is my main source for keyword rankings. With WebCEO, I can quickly see rankings for the main search engines and look at the data from different angles, including history over months and how many keywords are ranking for the same page (the home page often supports the most keywords). Incidentally, if other products I use show significantly different results, I will often manually adjust the rankings here before delivering reports on a content marketing strategy’s SEO success.

Here are a few examples of analytics you can determine through WebCEO:

2. SEOmoz Pro

It’s easy to add keywords to a campaign and get a sense of rankings over time. SEOmoz offers automated reports, which can be very helpful when analyzing whether your content marketing strategy is moving in the right direction, from an SEO perspective.

Here is an overview of this reporting tool:

3. SheerSEO

I turn to SheerSEO all of the time while testing out potential keywords to pursue as part of a company’s marketing strategy. Plus, I can look at the historical performance of that keyword, to see if it is likely to remain valuable, or if its current popularity is an anomaly. In particular with SheerSEO, I appreciate the fact that the tool includes a view of the top 200 rankings on Google. It’s nice to know whether a keyword is ranking No. 5 or No. 150.

4. SEMrush

Though you don’t have the same level of control over your keywords that you do with other services, SEMrush does provide an incredible amount of information (including competitive research) based on the more than 90 million keywords that it monitors in its database. Depending on the popularity of your website, SEMrush will have a decent selection of the keywords that you care about. The rankings aren’t in real-time — they are based on a recent average, but this is just fine if you are looking to get a general sense, or want to compare those results to what you’re seeing elsewhere.

5. Browser extensions

If you are looking for some desktop apps that can give you a quick snapshot of your search performance, try checking your rankings using tools like the SEO SERP Workbench (Chrome extension) or Rank Checker from SEO Book.

6. iPhone/Mobile

I use my iPhone more than you might think to spot-check rankings for my clients. Normally, I’ll tap into the office’s WiFi network, but if you disable that connection, you can also see results that aren’t tied to the business’ IP address.

7. Friends

On some occasions, I’ll ask a friend or colleague to conduct a quick keyword search, so I can compare my results with theirs. To avoid being seen as a pest, I’ll rotate the list of people I send each request to, which also helps me include the perspectives of people from different locations.

8. Search engine spot checks

Believe it or not, I often check rankings simply by going to search engines like Google (still the most popular search engine, by far). Yet, the results you turn up there should be taken with a grain of salt because search engines seem to provide one thing I don’t want to include in my keyword analyses — the dreaded personalized results, which can bias rankings for certain terms. As a work-around, when I check rankings on Google, I make sure I’m not logged into my Google account, and I disable my browsing history. (Google has a 90-second video that explains how it tracks browser history, and how to disable it.)

Bonus recommendations and advice

• If you’re going to monitor your keyword rankings, I recommend that you keep your analyses to a minimum (once a month). Rankings can fluctuate frequently, and you often can’t make a content or source code change that affects rankings that quickly (it depends in part on when the page is set to be cached by search engines). Whether you look at ranking data daily, weekly or monthly, track conversion metrics as well (whether it’s for a B2B white paper download or B2C e-commerce). Improved search engine rankings may help drive relevant organic traffic that generates conversions for the best ROI.
• People rush to track rankings because it’s a simple way to see how efforts are progressing (at least they think it’s easy). But even a No. 1 ranking on Google or Bing will be absolutely meaningless if no one in your target audience is searching for that term. So make sure you are checking rankings for appropriate keyword phrases that support your overall SEO strategy. Be flexible with the keywords you choose to pursue over the long term (you may need to set aside some keywords and introduce new ones).
• Search volume and traffic can drop off during different times of the year. So even if your analysis tells you that your business is ranking highly for a particular keyword, seasonality is worth noting, and monitoring on an ongoing basis is a good idea.
• Some companies want to be No. 1 for a keyword phrase that internet searchers use only 40 times a month, while others go to the other extreme, insisting that they want their website to be among the top positions for a keyword phrase that people search for 100,000 times a month. Regardless of how many (or how few) searches are being conducted around a given keyword, the most critical questions you need to ask are 1) whether it is relevant to your content marketing goals, and 2) whether the content is of sufficient quality and value to merit pulling off the top ranking. In addition, every content strategy must factor in the value of your current content, the content you are looking to develop in the future, and the potential both offer for increasing inbound links, leads, and engagement. If your website is weak in any of those areas, that top ranking you are hoping for may not be within your sights anytime soon.

How do you keep a pulse on your keyword rankings, and how do the results fit into your content strategy? Let us know by sharing your experience in the comments.

For more strategic insight on using SEO to optimize your content marketing efforts, join Mike Murray for his presentation at Content Marketing World 2013. Early-bird pricing is available for a limited time, so register today!

Cover image via Bigstock

With the recent expansion of his role at Motorola, Conrado accepted an opportunity to speak to Chief Content Officer magazine (a publication from CMI) about the reasons marketers must work comfortably across multiple departmental environments. 

CCO: Given the extent that technology drives budget and decision-making, is it imperative that the head of marketing for a company like Motorola have a technical background? How do you see this role as being more than just a manager of people?

Conrado: There are two sides to a CMO. One is the role as a general manager, and the other is as a marketing technologist. More and more, technology enablers and solutions drive marketing strategies. Feeling comfortable with technology [will be] a key driver for marketers, going forward.

Marketers struggle to understand to what extent IT drives marketing, especially when marketing and IT are two distinct departments. Who should drive IT discussions/decisions as they relate to content marketing?

One of marketing’s primary strengths is that we’re customer-facing, which is why we should drive these decisions. Sixty percent of a customer’s brand content consumption happens before they engage with a company, and marketing needs to continually evaluate this. Distribution is technology driven, which enables you to position customers to your specific sites and sales channels. You need to base the analytics on the customer personas, what company they’re from, their roles, and what’s relevant. Marketing needs a technology ecosystem that can empower this, plus content testing and personalization so you better appreciate what’s generating action.

CCO: How do you actually go about breaking down the barriers between marketing and IT? What mechanisms have you put in place to ensure there is collaboration?

Conrado: An analyst from Gartner told me that just over one-third of CIOs report directly to a CEO. That means two-thirds report through another function. If it’s under operations, the CIO’s focus will be supply chain and distribution channels. Under the CFO, it will be costs. But under the CMO, the CIO will focus on systems of engagement and the customer while providing a holistic view on how the IT function can be a strategic differentiator for the company. That’s the emphasis we wanted for technology.

A few years back, our CIO and I carved out part of the IT staff to focus on marketing and sales. That was our starting point — to have an IT staff that honed in on customers and our systems of engagement.

Fast-forward 18 months, and we had a digital team and an IT team that focused on marketing. The CIO and I agreed that we’d be more efficient and effective with a single structure that reported into marketing with a dotted line into IT. That gave the team a better ability to architect solutions, select vendors, and build the system. That move took us into a hybrid environment.

As of January, the CIO now reports within my group. There are two ways marketing benefits from this. First, we have 22,000 employees worldwide, and IT systems make it easier to identify our internal experts and bring visibility to them. Second, marketing benefits from improved knowledge and content management. We focus a lot of our marketing and IT efforts on systems of engagement (i.e., anything that interacts with a customer, from a single portal for channel partners to systems for direct sales). We see IT as a strategic differentiator and, if we do it right, a revenue generator.

CCO: With [so many] people publishing globally, how do you ensure they [are working] in concert with a unified corporate story, yet are still preserving the individuality of regions and vertical markets?

Conrado: We have key verticals, and each breaks into three pillars for our content strategy — thought leadership, demand generation, and sales enablement. We spent a great deal of time talking to marketing and sales so they understood it. Then we rolled out a consistent platform on a global basis, and regional teams added to it, both by vertical and country. Our focus isn’t on cost savings. It’s on better alignment and creating additional value for our customers and our sales teams. 

CCO: Following on that, what [is] your strategy with brand content?

Conrado: We start with the customer and make everything relevant to them. Because we do solutions-based marketing, we have to know customer personas very well, understand their drivers and challenges, and make all of our brand content speak to that. Customers look to Motorola to deliver a point of view on major trends.

We also look at how to deliver content to our teams based on their customers, the channels they use, what content they consume, and how they consume it. Our deep integration with IT enables marketing to tailor brand content to the buyer we’re talking to during a specific engagement.

CCO: How do you see content marketing affecting your channel marketing?

Conrado: We look at content that the channels can personalize, similar to a direct sales team. We create it with involvement from sales, marketing, and product marketing. Instead of collateral of the past, we’re elevating our sales teams to trusted advisers with a distinct point of view. Our customers view us as the expert.

We spend time training sales teams on products, but it’s just as important that they’re fluent with our point of view and can tailor conversations to any level within our customer’s organization. The more complex the solution, the more important our point of view. Customers have complimented us for taking the story of “why change” to a point where everyone gets it.

CCO: What’s the thing that you worry about most, whether it’s because you haven’t mastered it, don’t know enough about it, or feel the company isn’t doing it well?

Conrado: There are two things, and we’re still working on them. One is our ability to leverage content creators around the world more effectively. The demand for content will increase, and we have to have real-time visibility into what’s being created. The other area is inbound marketing. If you do outbound well, then inbound will work well. Testing in real time and across multiple variables is the next challenge.

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our quarterly magazine. 

There’s a big difference between creating branded content and building a content brand. Branded content is egocentric brand marketing. Developing a content brand takes an audience-first approach to business storytelling that builds a loyal audience. Deloitte Debates is branded content (notice how the brand is in the title of the content). Will it Blend? is a content brand (see how there’s no mention of the Blendtec brand in the title?). The most successful business storytellers build content brands — not branded content. Instead of thinking like a marketer, try thinking like a television producer.

The marketing cookie guy

Myles Bristowe thinks like a television executive. He doesn’t have a television show, or even a regularly scheduled video program on YouTube. But he does have a content brand — he’s the “marketing cookie guy.”

Myles is the CMO of CommCreative and the president of the Boston chapter of the American Marketing Association. But I didn’t know any of that before I built a relationship with his content brand. Let me explain.

Send in your fortune

Every weekday, Myles posts an article branded as Today’s Marketing Cookie on his company’s blog. People from around the world send him photos of fortunes they find in fortune cookies. Each day, Myles reflects on a fortune and connects it to a marketing lesson. He also includes a picture and brief bio of the person who submitted the fortune that he’s been inspired by (a perfect example of using brandscaping to leverage the audiences of others).

Myles has set himself up with a simple challenge, and it works. I know exactly what to expect every time I receive his weekly recap: five intelligent blog posts that leverage fortune cookie aphorisms to teach me a marketing lesson.

Marketing cookies deliver results

Since Myles started writing Today’s Marketing Cookie, traffic to his blog has increased 924 percent. More importantly, Myles’ content brand has helped him build a powerful list of 3,500 loyal subscribers.

I’ve recommended Myles’ content to other marketing professionals because it’s so easy to understand. His content brand is easy to share. It’s intriguing and interesting. It’s a twist on the all-too-familiar and inconsistent marketing advice you get on other corporate blogs. Myles leverages his content brand to elevate his advice above the noise of commodity content.

Myles’ content is so easy to share, more than 29,000 people have passed it along via Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn (if he was to buy that traffic at an average of $2.50 a click, he would have had to shell out more than $120K).

The super-cool fold of the week!

Myles isn’t the only smart marketer creating powerful content brands and thinking like a TV producer. There’s also Trish Witkowski’s really awesome 60-Second Super-cool Fold of the Week! FoldFactory sells software plug-ins and folding templates for designers working on printed marketing materials. So obviously, they’re interested in showing people what kind of creative folded printed materials are being created every day. Take a look at Trish’s video:

Delivered every week

Every single week (for over two years), Trish has created an episode for her 1,500 subscribers on YouTube. She’s built a relationship with her audience members, who’ve come to expect her content  to arrive on a regular basis. This year, she’ll surpass 200 videos uploaded to YouTube. Even on Fold Factory’s website home page, visitors are invited to “sign up for ‘Fold of the Week.’”

She also has a really great content “hook” (a clever twist designed to ensnare and entrap her audience). Did you read her T-shirt in the video above? Every single week, she wears a different funny shirt, like “I brake for Folds,” or “Fold it your way,” or  ”Folding speaks louder than words.” Everyone in the printing industry now knows Trish as the “folding expert.”

How to get over yourself

Moving your business storytelling away from branded content and turning it into a content brand also moves your content from a marketing expense to a content asset. It allows you to treat your content as a product: a product that can drive revenue in its own right (not to mention drive sales). For example, Trish’s videos have opened the doors to additional revenue streams based solely on the brand status as the folding expert, which she’s earned through her weekly series. She conducts workshops (which also drive revenue); she’s even been hired as a spokesperson (wearing her funny T-shirts) for other related brands in the marketplace.

Treating your content as a brand in-and-of-itself, turns your marketing expenses into financial assets. Tell that to your CFO.

What if…

What if you turned a fortune into a relevant lesson for your audience every day? What if you created a “Super Cool ______ of The Week” series? What would your content brand look like?

Want to build a content brand in an afternoon? I’m lucky enough to have been invited to host a workshop at Content Marketing World this September. If you’re interested in building your own content brand in an afternoon, check out this three-hour workshop: Launch a Killer Content Brand in an Afternoon.

Big Data is the massive amounts of data that are being created every minute. 

Let’s think about the amount of data that is created on social media channels alone. According to an infographic from Domo, every minute 100,000 tweets are sent, 347 new blogs are posted on WordPress, 48 hours of video are loaded to YouTube, and more than 680,000 pieces of content are shared on Facebook. In addition, data from your website analytics, CRM, and marketing automation tools also add up to Big Data. In fact, according to IBM, we are creating an astounding 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day.

Indeed, data are coming from your customers and prospects at an incredible rate. But what does this mean for your content marketing strategy?

All of this raw data could lead to valuable insight about what types of content and topics are most engaging to your target audience.

Doing your research 

Before considering how Big Data can help your content marketing strategy, it is important to first understand what problems you are trying to solve. To get to the answers, start by asking yourself some key questions, like:

• What are your overall goals for your content marketing program?
• What drives your customers and prospects when it comes to consuming and engaging with your content?
• What topics and pain points are most critical to your personas?
• What content has garnered the highest conversions?
• What about which content is driving the most awareness?

By taking a step back and figuring out what problem you are looking to solve with Big Data, you’ll be in a better position to orchestrate your content marketing strategy with a Big Data approach in mind.

Knowing what’s important 

Once you have an understanding of the possibilities with data, it is easy to get caught up with everything that you can do. Instead of thinking about mining every single tweet your customers and prospects send, think about what data could help to inform your content strategy. In addition, for smaller teams or those with fewer content resources on hand, it is also important to consider what types of data sources you’ll easily have access to. Remember, Big Data doesn’t have to mean analyzing every single byte of data to derive value.

Let’s take a look at three common content marketing goals and discuss how to incorporate a slice of Big Data into your program.

1. Building awareness: Many small- to medium-sized companies employ various content marketing tactics to build a thought leadership strategy aimed at getting more people to talk about their offerings. If you have a goal to increase awareness through content marketing, important metrics for you to track include:

• Website traffic
• Branded search
• Your social media following
• Social media shares
• Your number of social media mentions
• Your number of influencer mentions
• The number of back-links you are receiving from your content efforts
• Where your traffic is coming from
• Your overall visibility

There are several free tools available to help you track and monitor your progress against these metrics, including Google Analytics, Google Alerts, HootSuite, and others. It is easy to get caught up in the numbers and reporting, so consider tasking an intern to build and create these reports for you on a monthly or quarterly basis.

2. Driving conversions: Content marketing is also used to help drive conversions and speed along your buyer’s journey. If one of your goals is to drive conversions, you’ll want to map out and measure how long your prospects are staying in a given stage, as well as track what content they are downloading, consuming, and abandoning. You’ll also want to focus on identifying your best performing content by tracking downloads, views, and open and click-through rates, so you can determine what types and formats of content you should be creating more of.

Most of this data can be uncovered using your website analytics tools and marketing automation or email marketing platforms. Recently at the SiriusDecisions Summit, Tom Berger Director of Internet Marketing at Iron Mountain, and Mary D’Altari, Director of Account Services at Ion Interactive recommended breaking down your conversions into two buckets: Macro (chat, sales, premium content downloads) and Micro (click a link, click a CTA, social shares, view additional content) during a session on big testing.

3. Retaining customers: Building a loyal following of brand subscribers is something that many content marketers strive for. If you have a goal to retain customers and create evangelists, you’ll want to measure your subscriber base and consumption metrics, like click-through rates, time on site, and overall satisfaction.

Have you taken a Big Data approach to content marketing? I’d love to hear your story.

For more insights on how a data-driven approach can help you take your content marketing to the next level, attend our Big Data session at Content Marketing World 2013.

Cover image by JD Hancock, via Flickr Creative Commons.

As marketers we are traditionally trained to repeat our single-minded proposition until consumers buy whatever it is that we’re marketing. In an effort to get our features and benefits across, we often lose sight of what’s actually valuable to our audience. Great content marketing turns a mirror on the audience.

That’s why earlier this year we created a cartoon series for Intuit focused on the world of professional tax preparers. Rather than simply illustrate the features and benefits of QuickBooks, we designed the series to commiserate with tax season headaches. One cartoon called, “How To Tell It’s April 15th” showed an error display of the office printer: “Toner Life End, You’re All Out, And The Stores Are Closed. Bwah Ha Ha Ha Ha!”

Image via Intuit.

We took this series a step further and invited tax professionals to share some of their tax preparation horror stories. The winning story was memorialized in a cartoon, showing a 5-year old pushing the off button on the computer to get her dad’s attention, losing all of his tax preparation work. The winner received a framed print of the cartoon, capturing the story and recognition from fellow tax preparers who shared the series because it reflected their world. 

Image via Intuit.

The cartoon series struck a chord because it wasn’t overtly about QuickBooks. It was about the audience of professional tax preparers.

As software developer Kathy Sierra says, “It does not matter how awesome your product is or your presentation or your post. Your awesome thing matters ONLY to the extent that it serves the user’s ability to be a little more awesome.”

Start-up fashion brand Betabrand built its company on the premise of making its audience awesome through content publishing. The company describes its brand as “One percent fashion, 99 percent fiction.” Every article of clothing comes with talking points to make the wearer more awesome. For example, for Thanksgiving, Betabrand introduced Gluttony Pants, with extra buttons to create more space in the waist over the course of a Thanksgiving meal. (The pants come with their own napkin!)

To channel the awesomeness of its supporters, Betabrand redesigned its website around its audience of “Model Citizens.” The company invited customers to send pictures of themselves doing something awesome with their clothes. Every entry received a special link on the site, as if they were the stars of the Betabrand website. Betabrand evolved so that the website was no longer about the products; it was about its Model Citizens.

Image via Betabrand Model Citizen.

Betabrand knew it wasn’t enough to sell pants made of disco-ball material. It needed someone from the audience to be so inspired that he would sky dive into the annual Burning Man festival wearing those pants, and then share the awesomeness with the world from the Model Citizen website.

In content marketing, we need to focus less on how awesome we are and more on making our customers more awesome. We need to treat publishing as a privilege.

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our quarterly magazine.

Over the past month of speeches and appearances, I’ve heard two questions more often than any others:

1. When consumers finally tire of ads on the web (i.e., pre-roll, roadblock ads, basic banners), what will brands do?
2. Once all brands have started embracing content marketing, what happens then?

What’s interesting is that the answers to these two questions go hand in hand.

When the ads are gone

I’m convinced that there will come a point in my lifetime (I’m 40) when interruptive online ads will no longer be tolerated by consumers. Already, there are millions around the world who sign up and pay for Adblock Plus, and millions more who have installed Google’s Pop-up blocker. One way or another, it won’t be long before online ads go away altogether.

Like it or not, the future of online advertising for brands will involve content in some way — entertaining and/or useful content creation in text, audio, and/ or visual forms. We are already seeing this in native advertising, where advertising spots are transforming into some form of relevant or entertaining content (hopefully). But this is just the start of the massive content marketing trend on the horizon. When it arrives, here are some of the things I see coming with it:

Sponsored content will come of age: Extremely useful or entertaining content created by media companies will soon be offered exclusively through their key partners. This basically means that if consumers want their content, they’ll have to engage (in some manner) with its sponsor. A great example of this is Mother Nature Network. Nearly all of its major content categories are sponsored. For example, its Fitness & Well-Being category (pictured below) is sponsored by Coca-Cola. It integrates a native advertising unit that features Coke content from the brand’s “Coming Together” fitness program.

The content will become the “sell:” Red Bull’s Media House develops as much content as some traditional media companies do. Importantly, almost none of that content involves talking about energy drinks — rather, its content creation is completely focused on targeting readers’ interests (like a media company does). Procter & Gamble has done this with Home Made Simple. AMEX has done this with its OPEN forum. OpenView Venture Partners has done this with its OpenView Labs.

In other words, most brands will finally realize that focusing on their products and services in the majority of their content will get them nowhere, and they will finally succumb to investing in creating meaningful content that people truly want to engage in.

When all brands embrace content marketing

My answer to the question of what happens when all organizations do content marketing? “Well, we are already there!”

Every piece of content marketing research, in both the B2B and B2C sectors, finds that approximately nine in 10 marketers employ some form of content marketing. This means that content marketing strategies that were quite effective in the recent past will need to be changed.

Case in point: Marcus Sheridan’s “answer all customer questions on fiberglass pools” marketing strategy worked for him and River Pools & Spas because no one else was doing it at the time. He was truly the first in that industry, and dominated because of it. The same happened to us at CMI, as we and Copyblogger were two of the first to answer marketers’ questions around content marketing.

So, what happens next? Robert Rose believes that brands will need to find their differentiating story to stand out from the competition. In his most recent CMI blog post, Robert stated that only “thoughtful planning and a strong focus on creating differentiating, remarkable content that communicates from a strong point of view will be what separates the rare from the commodity.”

This means that simply answering questions is no longer going to be enough to cut through the clutter.

Once everyone is creating content, what do we do, then?

Even though content marketing has been around for hundreds of years, we are at the beginning of an industry revolution. Those organizations that make a true investment in content marketing strategy and processes will have a clear competitive advantage. As that happens, here are some areas to think about:

Strategy: Yes, 90 percent of businesses produce some form of content marketing, but less than 10 percent have an integrated content strategy. If your organization is among this majority, it’s time to set yourself apart. Start by determining what each of your buyer personas would say is the differentiating value you provide, and use those traits as the basis of your content marketing mission statement. Why will your customers and prospects look to your content for meaning and value? Don’t create any more content until you know the answer to this, from both your customers’ perspective and your own.

Point of view: Does your content sound just like your competitors’? Does it sound like the trade magazine in your industry? If so, you have a problem. Make sure the content you create has a unique point of view that only you can provide. Tell the story differently.

Amazingly useful or entertaining: Do these attributes describe the content you create? If not, think about how you can serve as a true and trusted resource for you customers. Remember, your customers have tons of amazing content at their disposal to help them make buying decisions, so your content must communicate the benefits that come with choosing to engage with yours.

Audience development: Since the dawn of media, the circulation department has been critical in making sure the right audiences were being reached. It was this department’s responsibility to make sure key buyers “opted-in” to receive communications (both print and online) from the media organization.

Do you have someone in your organization focused on both audience acquisition and audience retention? Yes, most of our organizations have marketers focused on acquiring leads to feed into our nurturing programs; but are we really thinking about this in terms of our content strategies? Having someone in the organization truly focused on your subscription efforts will become critical.

What is the key takeaway from all this? Simple: We are seeing marketing departments transform into true publishing operations. Advertising, as we know it in the digital form, will change, sooner rather than later. Brands need to make changes to adjust to this, and those that take this seriously now will have a significant competitive advantage in the future.

Want to learn more about content creation strategies that will give your business a competitive edge? Don’t miss Content Marketing World 2013. Register by May 31 to take advantage of early-bird pricing. 

Cover image via Bigstock

“The Lean Startup,” by author and entrepreneur Eric Ries, introduced “lean” methodology, which uses science to help entrepreneurs match their products with a target audience quickly and cost-efficiently. The approach is iterative — it consists of repeating a process and shaping it with feedback until you reach an intended goal.

Lean marketers push campaigns live before they’re “perfect,” learn from the data that results, and use that knowledge to make improvements in their next campaign. Essentially, the model promotes learning as you go, saving time and resources in the process.

Some marketers already practice lean content marketing — whether they know it or not. Fundamentally, it’s a more structured approach to shaping content through experimentation. Still, looking at effective content marketing through the lens of lean methodology is particularly intriguing.

Everyone wants to cut the fat from their work flows. The good news is that applying lean methodology to your content marketing efforts is pretty easy to do.

What is lean content marketing?

Lean content marketing is an iterative approach to refining topics, length, and other elements of content to land stronger leads and more customers.

Lean methodology follows the “build-measure-learn” feedback loop. To stay lean, content marketers would create or curate content; collect data on that content; and use the resulting data to shape future pieces of content. As you can see in the chart below, lean startup and content cycles benefit from similar feedback loops — both involve iterating and perfecting as you go.

View the full presentation, “More Impact with Less Time and Resources: Content Marketing the Lean Content Way,” here.

Repeating this process weeds out lower-value topics in favor of those that will result in more conversions. For example, lean content marketers might collect data that justifies an investment on an eBook or webinar, but argues against the creation of more expensive content, like video.

“Lean content marketing is about measuring the impact of content and refining it, rather than just flopping around,” explains Arabella Santiago, Director of Marketing and Communications at Scoop.it. Her company is a leading proponent of lean content marketing.

As a concrete example, Arabella points to nonprofit marketing expert Beth Kanter, a Scoop.it power user who curates nonprofit content.

Using lean methodology, she narrows down the most popular ideas in curated content for use in her original content — including her books. Through her curation efforts, she learns what her audience is most interested in reading about, and then structures her next wave of content with this information in mind.

What about your brand? How can you create leaner content?

The lean content workout

Lean content marketing isn’t just for startups. Even the largest enterprise organizations can benefit from a lean approach.

Looking to practice quick, high-impact marketing using fewer resources? Lose that content bloat with this six-step “workout” program:

1. Define your pain points: Offering solutions to your audience’s biggest challenges is exactly what all of your content should be trying to accomplish. Too often, content marketers rely on guesswork, or their own industry experience, to define these pain points. A “leaner” approach would be to interview actual customers rather than relying on anecdotal evidence.

Lean content marketing is all about taking that next step to uncover data that can be “scientifically proven.” Treat your customers’ pain points as a hypothesis, and then survey them to confirm your theory — the resulting data you gather will prove whether your hypothesis was true or false.

A content marketer with a CRM software company, for example, might present a hypothesis this way: “Our potential customers are struggling with low user adoption on their current CRM.” The implication is that creating content around this topic will drive more members of your target audience into the sales funnel.

You can’t truly know that this is a real pain point for all of your potential customers unless you test that assertion.

2. Start small: Now, it’s time to build content around your hypothesis. Lean is all about creating high-impact content using fewer resources — which means it’s best to start small.

Short-form content can range from social media posts to shorter blog posts (like those that Seth Godin writes) — even to normal length blog posts, depending on your content model. It’s all about bouncing that idea off of the audience so you can collect and analyze their responses.

Here’s where content curation comes in especially handy. Someone else has already taken the time to create testable content. Using that content to see how your audience responds is a low-cost way to start small and scale up.

Rally up a series of strong posts on CRM user adoption — challenges, solutions, and the like — and push them out through a curation platform or social media. Keep a keen eye on how your followers react.

3. Measure audience engagement: Audience engagement metrics — like social shares, “likes,” retweets, and bounce rates — help inform you on whether or not your content is drawing readers in.

For these measurements, you should define benchmarks that tell you whether or not your content is engaging your readers. Use your past experience to define those benchmarks — for example, focus on the performance of a particularly hot piece of content you created that hooked three newsletter sign-ups or 40+ social shares. Many content marketers do this already. But it bears repeating that the data is telling you something. Listen to it.

But creating lean content is about much more than audience engagement. You also need to consider what impact it produces in terms of your business goals.

4. Measure bottom-line impact: So many content marketers are missing this extra step: Find out which content actually converts visitors into new customers.

It’s easy to get tied up in the surface value of your content — how much traffic it draws and how many comments it gets, for example. But in the end, it’s all about what drives desired actions; how your content affected those who converted, and those who walked. One converted customer is so much more valuable than 100 people who comment and split.

Define benchmarks specific to new business to help you test that assertion. They don’t have to be as ambitious as landing a new client. Maybe they focus simply on lead capture. However you measure this, make sure your reader is taking that next step into the sales funnel.

Your first round of experimentation is complete. So what’s next?

5. Push your next iteration: If you’ve proven your hypothesis true, it’s time to move onto the next iteration. Create longer content, like a 400-word blog post. Take the same approach you used for your micro- or curated content, this time taking a more detailed look at why your potential client’s CRM might experience low user adoption.

Don’t move on to an eBook or a webinar just yet. Think of this next piece of content as a stepping-stone to longer pieces.

6. Establish a feedback loop: Repeat the process as many times as it takes, working your way up to longer-form content pieces. As you create, test, and iterate, you’ll come to learn which formats are producing the most effective content results for your business.

BONUS: Test old content, too: If you’re already putting resources into repurposing your older content, go through this process to maximize the value of it. Content that’s still relevant and represents your hypothesis hastens testing, instead of forcing you to spend time on new content. This cuts more bloat.

Looking for more information on this approach? Check out this great resource on lean content marketing. In addition to addressing individual pieces of content, author Liam Gooding discusses lean content strategy on a higher level.

How do you keep your content lean?

Some content marketers may already be taking a lean approach to their content efforts. If you are among them, please share your tips and stories with us in the comments.

For more innovative approaches to more effective content marketing, register for Content Marketing World 2013. 

Cover image via Bigstock

As I dig in, I’ve been working on a maturity model for an optimal content marketing approach. While I plan to share those ideas in a future post, one theme I keep coming back to is that, independent of the approach, a successful content marketing strategy requires placing a priority on remarkable content over everything else.

Evolve or fail — there is no “try”

Just like the concept of content marketing itself, the idea of using “information” as an increasingly important way to compete is not new. As far back as 1959, Peter Drucker talked about the importance of “knowledge workers.” As an example of this, consider that the cost to produce an automobile is 40 percent materials and 25 percent labor. On the other hand, the cost to produce a silicon chip is about 1 percent materials, 10 percent labor, and about 70 percent information.

Our access to information has evolved — it’s more readily accessible now than in any previous moment in history. (We’re even wearing access to information as an eyeglass accessory.) And, it’s not just content marketing causing the glut of information — indeed we are all publishing more content and information to the web than ever before. According to EMC’s 2012 Digital Universe study, it’s predicted that we will publish and replicate 40 zettabyes of data by the year 2020, including white papers, infographics, Facebook posts, pictures of food, and on and on. How much is that? It’s 57 times the amount of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth.

And that’s the key to what we need to know about content marketing: Whether you believe the discipline is real, hype, or simply a meta tag for something marketers have been doing all along, there is (at this point) no dispute that ALL companies are evolving and creating content to drive business results.

The novelty is wearing off, and as I said in my disillusionment piece:

It is the practice of marketing, on the whole, that is in the process of evolving, and content marketing is but one approach that factors into the entirety of this fundamental change.

So if (and it’s a big IF) we are differentiating in our business by using a combination of owned, earned, and paid content to drive results, our competitors are, too. And as our process of marketing changes, so too must our content creators.

Content creators and the commodity of facts

Yes, it might be important today to create content that answers all the questions that may be brought up when using your products or services. But when all of your competitors have answered those same questions, and all of the “how-to” sites have leached on to your topic to answer them, as well, your giant, informative FAQ becomes nothing more than a bushel of corn, lined up against all the other bushels of corn, battling for relevance in a flat market.

But what can’t be taken away is your distinct point of view; your differentiating story; i.e., the unique way you synthesize myriad facts into meaningful insight. Great content marketing will only come from a distinct and remarkable point of view. In short, if you can take the content in your content marketing approach and put your competitor’s logo on the top, you need to rethink your plan.

The rarity of “remarkable”

Today, CMOs are faced with a huge, disruptive challenge: The promised power of using accumulated information (aka “big data”) has the potential to become an extraordinarily important aspect to creating a competitive advantage for businesses (Drucker lives!). But the value proposition of data has evolved. For the CMO, it isn’t the data itself that will provide the competitive edge, nor is it the technology used to accumulate it. Only the combination of advancing questions, meaningful insight, and applied creativity will derive value from data — big or small.

Success in content marketing — and marketing on the whole — will come from our ability to render meaning. I wrote another post that talked about a new role that I envision being critical for business, called the “Manager of Meaning.” What this means, from a content marketing perspective, is that thoughtful planning and a strong focus on creating differentiating, remarkable content that communicates from a strong point of view will be what separates the rare from the commodity.

What does this mean for content marketing in the short term? It means that as we build the business case for content marketing, we must first ask three basic questions, starting with “why?“:

• Why is this content important to our customers?
• What value will they derive from it?
• How will it differentiate us?

That’s how content marketing agencies will add value for clients. That’s how, as content marketers, we will distinguish our brands’ value. And, that’s how we, as an industry, will ultimately continue to use content as a powerful means to drive business results.

Robert will share more of his insight on the future of content creation at Content Marketing World 2013. Register now to attend — early-bird pricing ends May 31.

Cover image via Bigstock

“Any insight on how small B2B companies plan on solving the problems listed? Would be curious to understand what they see as potential solutions versus a larger enterprise.”

Andy’s question inspired us to take a closer look at some of the content marketing challenges faced by North American B2B marketers who work at small businesses (companies with 10 – 99 employees), as compared to their peers at enterprise organizations (companies with more than 1,000 employees). We’ll also share some insights on ways content marketers can address these issues — regardless of the size of the organization they work for. 

1. Engagement

In general, both groups are similarly challenged with producing the kind of content that engages — and it is the top challenge for enterprise companies. In a way, I think it’s encouraging to see this as a top challenge, as it shows that marketers are focusing on the value of quality over quantity. And, there is good reason why engaging content matters: Customers and prospects who engage with content are more likely to reach out or initiate a relationship with your organization.

Ideas: Engaging content means different things to different people, so you’ll need to start out by determining your organization’s definition of “engagement” — and what metric(s) you can use to measure it. For instance, as Joe Pulizzi discussed in his recent post on the building blocks of content marketing strategy, we at CMI know our email subscribers are more likely than our other readers to sign up for our events, so “email subscriptions” is an engagement metric we focus on.

(For more on how to define, produce, and measure engaging content, check out our eBook, “Your Kick-Start Guide to Engaging Content.”)

2. Quantity

While small businesses cite producing enough content as their top challenge, it’s an issue that concerns the majority of content marketers across all business types that we’ve researched.

Idea: One solution is to simply realize that more is not better. This applies to small and large businesses, alike. That said, if you really do need to produce more content, here are three ideas our CMI consultants suggested in a video roundtable on challenges facing B2B marketers:

• Reuse content at the beginning and end of the sales funnel: This suggestion applies to any businesses that have a long sales cycle.
• Curate content: Instead of producing new content, share existing content — created by your organization or by others in your industry. This strategy can be used by businesses of any size.
• Produce evergreen content: I love Ardath Albee‘s quote from the video above: “I think the reasons that we change subject matters and create new content is because we as marketers get bored. We’ve said it; we’ve heard this before: ‘Let’s create something new.’ We don’t need to.” Again, instead of focusing on pumping out more new content, create a body of evergreen content that you can update, as needed. As a bonus, you may be able to curate content in a way that makes it more useful/gives it new life.

3. Integration

Not surprisingly, enterprise organizations are far more challenged with lack of integration across marketing than their small-business counterparts. As more people, products, and geographies become involved — producing integrated content can get pretty complicated.

Ideas: Large organizations like SAP, SAS, Kelly Services, and Intel have complex B2B marketing programs. At last year’s Content Marketing World, we had the pleasure of sitting down with key individuals from these teams to talk about how they manage the process of content marketing. There aren’t any shortcuts — and it involves a lot of work — but there are ways to create efficiencies to minimize the burdens.

While the following ideas will be most useful for enterprise organizations, smaller businesses can also use some of these approaches:

• Elizabeth Gaines from SAP talked about how her company has content account managers who are plugged into all of the field marketing teams and geographies.
• Pam Didner talked about Intel’s editorial planning process. Her team has an editorial calendar that they create a year in advance, and adjust throughout the year, as necessary. She then presents it to the various stakeholders across her organization (even though for her that means presenting that calendar 30 times).
• Kelly LeVoyer and Waynette Tubbs shared that everyone at SAS contributes to one large plan. They also make sure everyone knows the roles assigned to each team — and what KPIs they are being measured on — which, they have found, helps the content marketing plan come together much more cohesively.
• Michael Kirsten from Kelly Services says that he spends at least 30 percent of his time on intra- and inter-organizational communication.

4. Budget

It may seem surprising that enterprise marketers are more challenged with lack of budget than small businesses are, as they likely have more to spend overall. But, enterprise marketers also likely need to go through more internal channels to get budget approval, which may explain why a larger percentage of them feel this is an issue.

Another possible explanation is that lack of budget is just a perceived issue with some enterprise marketers who wished they had more money to work with. In contrast, small business marketers may be more accustomed to having to be resourceful in their content efforts.

Ideas: The root cause of budget issues could be lack of buy-in (see point #5, below): If management has not yet bought into the value provided by content marketing, it will be all the more difficult to get the necessary budgetary support. If this is the case, presenting information on return on investment can help justify the costs.

Kapost and Eloqua developed an eBook, Content Marketing ROI, that compares the cost of content marketing to PPC; it’s a great read if you are struggling with this issue. The eBook breaks costs down for both midsize and large companies.

5. Buy-in

This is an interesting challenge, as more enterprise marketers find themselves contending with a lack of executive buy-in, yet more small business marketers consider it to be their primary challenge.

Ideas: If you are struggling with getting buy-in, there are two posts I suggest you read: 2 Foolproof Methods for Getting Content Marketing Buy-In and Getting Buy-In for Your Content Marketing: A 3-Point Process. There is some overlap in the ideas, but here are the highlights:

• Really understand – and be able to articulate – the value of content marketing.
• Do a pilot program and report on key metrics, such as immediate gains (e.g. social followers), social rankings, back-links and leads/sales.
• Play on fear. What is the competition doing that you are not? What does your management care about most?

6. Variety

While a good portion of both small and enterprise marketers are challenged with producing a variety of content, not many consider this to be their biggest challenge. I personally consider this to be a good sign, as marketers should be focusing more of their efforts on producing content that engages, and on achieving measurable results, than on the formats their content is delivered on.

Ideas: That said, producing original content takes time, so there is no reason not to create efficiencies by repurposing the content you already have. Check out 5 Great Starting Points for a Content Recycling Program and 23 Ways to Leverage a Blog Post for Content Marketing Success to get more specific ideas on how to reimagine your content across a variety of formats.

7. Measurement

Our research is conducted annually, and this year is the first time we asked if content marketing measurement was a challenge. Truthfully, we expected this number to be higher, but, as Jay Baer aptly surmised in our B2B measurement roundtable:

“If you, as an organization, are measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing with something so rudimentary as website traffic, then I guess in your own land you are measuring content. Is website traffic the optimal way to measure the effectiveness of content? No, absolutely not. I think there’s a delta between what people think they should be measuring and what they actually should be measuring.”

Ideas: If you are struggling with measurement, take a look at our online how-to guide that walks you through fundamentals and provides specific suggestions on what you should measure. But if you only have time to view one resource, make it the eBook, A Field Guide to the Four Types of Content Marketing Metrics, in which you’ll learn about the best metrics to monitor for consumption, sharing, lead generation, and sales.

8. Training

Approximately one-third of both small-business and enterprise marketers feel they lack the appropriate knowledge, training, and resources to execute content marketing well. Considering that this field is quickly evolving, and there is no silver bullet, this is not surprising.

Ideas: I know this is a shameless plug, but if you are in need of training, there is no better event than Content Marketing World, which will be taking place in Cleveland from September 9 – 11. CMI’s entire mission is to provide training and education (through our blog posts, magazine, webinars, and more), so if you have a question about content marketing, I’d love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments, and I’ll see what I can do to help and/or we’ll cover it in a future blog post.

9. Professionals

While finding trained content marketing professionals is not a key challenge for many marketers, it is still a concern — particularly for enterprise companies.

Ideas: Another shameless plug (sorry!) but CMI has a fantastic group of consultants led by Robert Rose that help companies with their content marketing programs. If you are a large organization, you may also want to consider hiring a content marketing agency. If so, see what Joe Pulizzi had to say as he explained the 4 Truths About Content Marketing Agencies, and take a look at Doug Kessler’s advice on how to get the best results with your agency in his post, 4 Truths About Content Marketing Clients. If you have a smaller budget, or are only looking for a single writer for your content, consider hiring a journalist.

Are there other content marketing challenges you are facing? Or do you have other suggestions for those facing these issues? Let me know in the comments.

For more advice and ideas on how to address your greatest content marketing challenges, register to attend Content Marketing World. Early-bird rates are in effect until May 31, 2013.

According to an Econsultancy and Adobe trend report, marketers see mobile optimization as the number one opportunity in 2013; yet they struggle with executing on an effective mobile content strategy. And while there are plenty of great studies out there that portend mobile’s takeover of the web, there’s not much information about the best (and worst) approaches to publishing content that is mobile-friendly. Obviously, mobile is a whole new ball game. So how do we play? 

To get you started, here is a list of five easy ways to deliver effective content experiences on mobile platforms. Using real life examples, from McDonalds’ use of responsive design to Oreo’s awesome real-time and video campaigns, there is plenty of useful advice to be gleaned from how the pros publish content on mobile.

#1: Make your content readable on mobile

This one sounds like a no-brainer, but too many businesses are simply failing to make their content accessible on the small screen. One eye-opening study suggested 98 percent of small and medium business websites were not ready for mobile. You know the feeling: You’re browsing the web on your smartphone, only to come to the brick wall of an impossible-to-read website — or worse, you encounter a big alert that tries to force you to download an app.

The obvious solution here is to make your site fit for tablet and smartphone reading. One of the most popular tactics for doing this is with a responsively designed website. Responsive web design simply means building your site (whether it’s a blog or an e-commerce platform) with flexibility for all devices in mind. So when a user with a smartphone comes to your site, the objects on the screen will automatically adjust to fit the screen. You build once, and it fits nicely on all devices, from PCs to tablets and smartphones.

Example from the pros: When McDonalds Canada put out its Your Questions campaign, it knew a huge portion of readers would be accessing the interactive microsite from handheld devices. So the company made the whole thing responsive to automatically adjust the screen no matter what device customers choose to view the content on.

Takeaway: The result of a responsive web design means you just build once and can provide visitors with an easily usable content experience.

#2: Make your site feel like a mobile site

Despite responsive design’s huge benefit to marketers, an incredible mobile reading experience is so much more than simply making your content fit on a smaller screen. Doing that sometimes feels like putting a radio show on the television — the content is all there, but you are missing out on something.

Mobile is an entirely new medium and it comes with a unique way for people to interact with content. It’s all about touch, swipe, and that feeling of a full-screen, laid-back experience — simulating the “couch surfing” vibe. This is why some content publishers opt for creating a social magazine-style experience, in the spirit of Flipboard, to deliver content to mobile users in the most dynamic way possible.

The benefit of this approach is huge. Aside from providing a more familiar and enjoyable reading experience, your readers tend to view more pages, and spend far more time with your content compared with other websites that were built with click and scroll in mind.

An added benefit to this approach is that marketers are given a natural way to show full-screen ads and/or call-to-action widgets. So, for instance, in between your full-screen articles, you can sneak in a white paper download CTA or a newsletter sign-up request without interrupting the experience.

Example from the pros: “The Toronto Star,” one of North America’s largest newspapers, built a great mobile-first, immersive experience for its tablet audience. It created a totally swipeable, full-screen magazine web app, which makes it incredibly easy for visitors to swipe to the next story, much like they would turn a printed page to keep reading. 

Takeaway: Boost page views and time spent on your blog or content site with a built-for-touch, laid-back reading experience.

#3: Create custom, mobile-only assets

As you start to notice more of your readers are on mobile, another strong tactic is to build something just for them. In contrast to optimizing an existing web property, customized mobile assets are all about putting together a stand-alone content experience the user can only access through a smartphone or a tablet device.

Many brands are using this tactic to curate diverse content assets from around the web into a single, compelling mobile product. It’s a surefire way to give readers a valuable reading experience, while at the same time unifying all your efforts (e.g., all your social feeds, video, and blog content can be rolled up into one awesome experience), and potentially driving them to discover more content they otherwise might have missed.

Example from the pros:

“The Economist’s” Electionism: When the U.S. presidential elections were just starting to heat up in 2011, “The Economist” wanted to do something special for its growing tablet readership. The publisher built Electionism, a mobile-only app that leveraged its editorial content on the U.S. election, social feeds, and a curated news section from across the web. 

Softchoice: Softchoice is a leading B2B technology provider, as well as a group of laser-sharp content marketers. The company recently put out a tablet and smartphone app that packaged all its various content assets into a single, unified reading experience. 

Takeaway: Assemble a custom mobile-online experience to drive more content discovery and build better relationships with mobile readers.

#4: Go for web, not native (most of the time)

Three years after the iPad’s release, publishers are slowly starting to realize Apple’s App Store is not always the best place to publish content. Apps have a modern, cool factor, and many content creators rushed out of the gate to go build one. Unfortunately, apps also cost a lot of money and time to produce, and at the end of the day, they don’t always provide what readers want, as evidenced by a few tragic results.

When an app is only available through the App Store, it requires several steps for users to access it. Do you really need to put up that much friction between your story and a user’s enjoyment of it? The answer is pretty obvious. And the numbers speak for themselves: Twice as many mobile news readers prefer browsers over apps.

This is why a rock star caliber mobile content marketer often goes with a web app, or optimized website, instead of investing time and money on building a closed-off native app. With the advanced web technologies available, the user experience can be made to be indistinguishable from that of a slick native app. In addition, a leading benefit of building for the web is that all your SEO efforts and existing social traffic continues to contribute to your mobile visits.

Just one caveat: In some cases, you might want to create something a little beefier than a simple reading app. Content marketing can come in many forms, and it’s not always just text and videos. In those cases, using the more robust technology platform of native apps, as well as relying on the great exposure of an app store, might be a highly visible way to launch your branded app.

Example from the pros: “Financial Times” was the first major publisher to shirk Apple’s App Store (and 30 percent revenue cut) and go right to creating a web app, which it built using the mobile-friendly HTML5 markup language.

Native apps: Volkswagen wanted to do something big to launch one of its newest cars: It wanted to build a native app for iOS. Now that’s classy! And it probably couldn’t have executed its content idea at the required level of quality if the brand had chosen to go with a web app rather than one that was designed specifically to optimize the mobile experience.

Takeaway: Most mobile content marketing is better served from the web — but if you are building a big tool or game, you may want to “go native.”

#5: Get on the hot mobile social networks

From Vine to Instagram, a number of social media sites are emerging that focus primarily on the mobile channel. And they are gaining members by the millions — members who are just waiting to be entertained by great brand content. Search out where your audience might be hanging out on mobile, find their favorite apps, and start entertaining, educating, and bringing your brand there.

Not only do these apps give you a great way to show the fun side of your brand, but they also can provide an easy way to curate or share content that keeps brand conversations flowing during those times when you are working to create more substantial content pieces.

Examples from the pros: By now, you might have heard of Oreo’s display of genius “real-time” marketing at the Super Bowl by hammering out a single, perfectly timed Twitter pic during the blackout. But this isn’t the only time the cookie maker has stood out as an exemplary mobile content marketer. As you’ll see below, Oreo has an incredible knack for entertaining and building its brand on mobile social networks. For example, Oreo has a great Vine feed packed with tons of helpful and funny videos, including the one below, which shows how to make an Oreo kebab.

“The Wolverine” movie made history and the first ever movie trailer on Vine, a little video social network that you might have heard of. Watch the full 6 seconds of it:
Embed code: <iframe class=”vine-embed” src=”https://vine.co/v/bDExaiMjJ1F/embed/simple” width=”480″ height=”480″ frameborder=”0″></iframe><script async src=”//platform.vine.co/static/scripts/embed.js” charset=”utf-8″></script> 

GE’s also got an exceptional Instagram feed that showcases beauty shots of big, heavy machines. As its follower count shows, people love it.

Takeaway: Popular mobile apps can be your ticket to publishing content that entertains and connects the audience to your brand. 

For more shining examples of branded content that works across multiple platforms, read CMI’s Ultimate eBook: 100 Content Marketing Examples. 

Health-related research

To understand the issue, let’s look at one of the top disorder-focused communities. Diabetes-related content sites are among the most active online health hubs because of the staggering number of people diagnosed with the disease: more than 370 million worldwide. For big pharmaceutical companies, these sites represent a tremendous opportunity, as well as potential risk. Patients are the most wary consumers, and health care companies must build a content strategy that ensures online engagement is absolutely credible
and trustworthy.

Roche Diagnostics, maker of Accu-Chek insulin pumps and blood glucose testing devices, is extremely conscious of its position and responsibility in the diabetes community — both due to the sensitivity of working in a highly regulated industry as well as the desire to position its brand as a valued resource. Jim Lefevere, Director of Global Marketing, explains, “We must not be self-serving, but be here to provide better information, education, and value to people so that they can take better care of themselves and live better, healthier, and longer lives.”

Offering trusted content is also essential to prevent a backlash. The diabetes community — like most other socially driven online communities — is protective when it comes to inappropriate content. A contributor or vendor stating unlikely claims or being in any way promotional will be shut out of the conversation and lose respect with associated negative sentiment/reputation scores. Marketers need to be especially conscious of their role within the ecosystem, and look to influence, inspire, and educate audiences where the value is appropriate — and steer clear where their opinion isn’t warranted.

So how should marketers approach a content strategy for an online health care community and ensure that content is credible, relevant, and supportive of the organization’s objectives? Here are a couple ideas:

The customer journey of trust

Online engagement is usually modeled in relation to the customers’ journey. When creating this life cycle journey, consider your “degrees of trust” for content categories at each stage.

For example, a diabetes care provider may consider the customer life cycle to be:

• Symptom
• Diagnosis
• Treatment
• Use
• Renewal

Now think about how these life cycle stages affect each of your target audience segments, and consider the classifications of content that each of these roles would find most beneficial at each step.

Now consider which content categories would be regarded as credible when submitted by your organization. (Examples of these are shaded in orange in the graphic above). A provider of diabetes insulin pumps, for example, can credibly supply usage instructions and renewal offers to sufferers and caregivers, and supply early-stage research (ideally independent) to all audience roles. This is somewhat simplified, but it starts to define trust categories of content that could be sourced directly from providers.

A layered content strategy

Many health care organizations are adept at creating, optimizing, and disseminating personalized content to specific targets. Yet, social media has changed the landscape in so many ways, and in health care, in particular, it elevates the role bloggers and other online influencers play in the information value chain.

A patient is highly influenced by these independent players when weighing treatment options and purchase decisions. While it is not entirely credible for a health care provider to provide, for example, a product comparison, a layered content strategy can enable a third party to supply information indirectly on your behalf.

Be very conscious about how to approach and engage with third parties, however. Bloggers are obliged, sometimes required, to be transparent about their associations with health care companies. (Advertisers be aware — in the United States, the Federal Trade Commission published new guidelines in March 2013 requiring clearer disclosures in digital advertising.)

Using a matrix similar to the one shown above, identify the high-value, redistributable information you can supply to bloggers and influencers. Providing industry research, market tests, treatment tips (e.g., diabetes recipes) or VIP access to in-house product experts are ways to earn the respect of influencers. Don’t forget to layer your content depending on the number of levels of direct and indirect distributors.

Bottom line: Always be cognizant of your organization’s overriding role and ability to maintain trust. This principle is never more applicable than in health care.

If you want to learn more about content marketing in the healthcare industry, join us for the Content Marketing World Health Summit on September 12 in Cleveland, Ohio.

This article originally appeared in the May 2012 issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our quarterly magazine.  

Cover image via Bigstock

This means better content, better technology, and a high demand for content marketers — particularly those who are staying ahead of the following trends:

Future content trends

Much larger content marketing budgets: As we’ve seen year after year, content marketing budgets have continued to rise. In fact, 71 percent of brands plan to increase the content marketing budget in 2013, according to a survey by Econsultancy and Responsys. As content marketing has such great potential to provide brand value, I think we’re going to see that trend continue for many years to come.

More insourcing; more contribution: The most successful content marketers already understand the importance of insourcing content. By empowering every employee to write for your brand, you can cost effectively create large amounts of expert-level content. Examples of successful content insourcing have come from businesses like Zendesk, which turns its customer service questions into content marketing, as well as from less tech-focused industries like Marcus Sheridan’s client, U.S. Waterproofing, which rose quickly through Google’s search rankings by insourcing its content efforts.

Rich media content will gain popularity, and will expand into longer formats: As time goes on, content marketers are going to make content richer and richer. More pictures. More video. We’re going to put more value into every article. Want proof? Consider the words of Sharon Flaherty, Head of Content and PR at Confused.com: “It’s a bit old-fashioned now to just have an article. People expect their content to be a bit more interactive these days, so sometimes we use multimedia to add value to a piece of content, or an article.”

Content will bleed into parts of paid marketing: Related-content engine Outbrain is the perfect example of how content marketing can spill into paid marketing. Instead of using ads, which turn people off, the platform offers relevant articles, and companies pay for that traffic. Ads will become more than just sales messages — they’ll have to offer valuable content that’s worth clicking on in order to gain the audience’s attention.

The future of content marketing technology

Better content management systems will mean more competition in the content game: “In 10 years’ time, CMS will have evolved to be content production and distribution platforms,” says Steve Parks, Managing Director at Wunderroot.

“On the production side, there will be user-friendly development of text, audio, image, data, or video content. On the distribution side, there will be quick, easy, and templated repurposing of content to different platforms — from web to mobile to TV or even print systems. This approach will provide better flexibility and future-proofing [of content efforts]. The CMS will provide better integration with other systems. But above all, in 10 years’ time, most content systems will be open source,” he says.

If CMS become easier to use and more integrated with other technologies, content marketing processes will become easier to manage, which will allow for greater sophistication in the content being created. However, if even those who are less tech savvy will have content-rich websites, there’ll be more content competition out there.

More widespread and more mature marketing automation: “As marketing automation becomes more widely understood, it will be purchased by less sophisticated companies.” says Raab Associates marketing technologist David Raab.

In a decade’s time, marketing automation will be much more widespread and widely understood. So there’ll be lots more opportunities for consultants who can install marketing automation systems.

As for the more experienced marketers, marketing automation technology itself will likely grow much more sophisticated, as well. This will mean content creation based on insights from big data will become necessary, as will ultra-personalized sites, according to cloud consultancy firm Traction.

Better analytics will increase understanding of the true value of content: Analytics software will only get better over the next decade, which will lead to a greater emphasis on tracking consumers’ behavior on how they interact with content. It will become essential that we determine solid data on issues like how much one article contributed to a buying decision, how impactful a video was on YouTube, or how well a white paper drove conversions.

Future analytics will be able to use complex algorithms that can give us a dollar value for every piece of content. The closer we get to that stage, the easier it will be for us to justify (and increase) our content marketing budgets.

Future key players in content marketing

The rise of the content superstar: As audiences and companies become hungrier for really valuable content, there’ll be a huge premium attached to the work of marketers who can consistently create excellent content. I predict that this will evolve to the stage where great content creators become known as real superstars.

Copywriters with powerful imaginations (like Barry Feldman) would fall into this category, as would somebody like Marcus Taylor, who knows how to leverage big brands’ audiences with content. In fact, Marcus talked about this at a Distilled meetup (scroll halfway down that article to read about how he got retweeted by EMI and other big brands).

The death of content mills: High-quality content isn’t going to come from a “sweatshop” writer working for peanuts. As Google becomes more and more sophisticated, its algorithms will likely be able to eliminate articles of low quality and value from search results, so only high quality content will display. In my opinion, this signals the impending demise of content farms — or at least the ultra-cheap, ultra-poor-quality ones.

Computers will self write data-driven articles: Automated Insights is a company that uses artificial intelligence to sift through data, identify patterns, and create content that has the characteristics of human-written content. Brands that produce content on topics like sporting event results or fluctuations in housing prices can benefit from this computerized system, as these pieces are often created from pure data that has been formulated into an article. The cost efficiency alone means that publishers looking for inexpensive ways to produce more content will likely buy into this trend.

The rise of the marketing technologist: “Within 10 years, I expect that marketing technology should be fully assimilated into marketing,” says Scott Brinker, who is known for his Chief Marketing Technologist blog. “There really won’t be any aspect of marketing that isn’t powered by some kind of software. We’ll go through some awkward teenage years first to find our identity as technology-powered marketers, but by 2023, I believe we’ll be past the angst of that transformation,” he says.

Scott also believes there will be three types of marketers in the future, with each categorization dependent on the marketer’s level of technical proficiency:

• Effectively, everyone in marketing will be technically savvy, at least to the degree of being able to apply technology in smart ways throughout their day-to-day activities.
• There will be a role for the “master coordinator of marketing technology,” which Brinker believes will report primarily into the marketing department. This role could go by many names.
• Then there will be many marketing technology specialists with engineering backgrounds who will wield code and data to help create remarkable customer experiences.

The rise of hybrid marketers: At present, there’s huge demand for people who have well-rounded marketing skills, and this demand will grow commensurately with the increasing sophistication of technology. A single person who has a wide range of skills will be able to take on many roles at once, where in the past, these roles may have required the work of several people — an effect PR 20/20 coined the term “hybrid marketers” to describe:

“Hybrid marketing professionals are trained to deliver services across search, mobile, social, content, analytics, web, PR, and email marketing. They provide integrated solutions that used to require multiple agencies and consultants.”

What does all this mean for you?

Will all of the above things happen? No one knows for sure — in 10 years’ time, unforeseen factors could change the content marketing game beyond all recognition. But it wouldn’t be surprising if many of these predictions did come true.

In terms of preparing for content marketing careers of the future, specialization is definitely the way to go. By 2023, perhaps you’ll be a content insourcing consultant, a content superstar, a marketing technology brainiac, or a hybrid marketer. Or maybe you will own a business that specializes in providing expertise in one of these areas.

Whatever your future in content marketing holds, the value of our industry hasn’t been fully realized or understood yet. At present, I reckon we’re only at the tip of the iceberg, but it looks like growth and new opportunities are definitely in the forecast.

What do you think? What do you think content marketing will be like in 10 years’ time? Would you disagree with any of these thoughts? Let’s talk about it in the comments below!

For more expert views on the trends that are likely to impact the future of our industry, register to attend Content Marketing World 2013. 

Image courtesy of Marco Raaphorst under a Creative Commons License