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

There are a number of reasons for this, including the fact that this whole content marketing thing, even though hundreds of years old, is still relatively new to us marketers. After all, who told us that we’d actually have to be content publishers at some point in our career? 

While each of us has our own challenges that we need to bear and break through, here are a few particularly troubling ones that have been on my mind: 

1. Your content is all about you: Remember, customers don’t care about you; they care about themselves and their problems. We often forget that point when we describe how wonderful our widget is (which no one cares about).

2. Your fear of failing paralyzes you: Taking chances with your content and experimenting a bit reveals the possibilities for your content marketing, and uncovers new and valuable customer stories.

3. You’re setting the bar too low: Your content marketing should be the best in your industry — better than all your competition, and better than the media and the other publishers in your space. How can you be the most trusted expert in your industry if your content marketing doesn’t reflect these high standards?

4. You’re not sourcing correctly: The majority of brands outsource some portion of the content marketing process. Don’t be afraid to find internal content champions — as well as outside journalists, writers, and content agencies — to help you tell your story.

5. You operate in silos: Are you telling different stories across your efforts in PR, corporate communications, social media, email marketing, etc.? Do all your departments follow a consistent corporate story line? Epic content marketing means that your company is telling a consistent story.

6. You don’t seek out discomfort: In his book, “Linchpin,” Seth Godin states that if we don’t consistently step out of our comfort area, then we are doomed to the status quo. Do something completely unexpected with your content from time to time.

7. You do not have calls to action: Every piece of content should have a call to action. If it doesn’t, at least recognize this, and consider the real purpose behind why you developed the content.

8. You are too focused on one particular channel: Stop thinking “email newsletter” or “Facebook.” Think about the problem you are solving for your customer. Then tell that story in different ways  — and tell it everywhere your customers go to seek authoritative information.

9. Your content isn’t owned: Someone in your organization (possibly you) must take ownership of the content marketing plan.

10. Your C-level doesn’t buy in: Organizations without C-level buy-in are three times more likely to fail at content marketing.

11. You are not niche enough: You need to be the leading expert in the world in your niche. Pick a content area that is both meaningful to your business and attainable and create content around that subject.

12. Your team’s too slow: As much as I hate to say it, speed beats perfection in most cases. Figure out a streamlined process for your storytelling.

13. You execute inconsistently: Your content marketing is a promise to your customers. Think about the morning paper (if you receive it): When it doesn’t come on time, how upset are you? You need to have the same mindset with your content marketing. Distribute content consistently and ON TIME.

I’m sure you’ve just thought of a few more reasons that are holding you back. Whatever the reason, nothing is insurmountable. What’s great about where we are as an industry is that there are so many amazing case studies and industry leaders helping us get to the next level. Identify your key challenges, tackle them, and move on to tell your story. You can do it!

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 

To help answer those questions, here’s a roundup of some of the ways automotive companies have used visuals to enhance their online content marketing efforts, and some tips on how your brand can follow their lead:

1. Post pretty product images on social media 

German automaker Volkswagen regularly posts attractive pictures of its vehicles — both on showroom floors and out in the world. People like pictures, and attractive images give them something to like and respond to. Here’s a recent post of a car in winter, with the Volkswagen logo imprinted in the snow beside it:

Facebook.com/Volkswagen

Volkswagen’s lesson for content marketers: On Facebook (and Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and other image-centric social sites, for that matter), the name of the game is visual stimulation. Post images of your products in real-life scenarios; show your products being used by your target audience; create artistic renderings of your products, like sketches or paintings or even 3D installations. Your customers don’t all use your products in the same way, so don’t be afraid to get creative in how you show off those products and their benefits.

2. Create video content that doesn’t overtly mention your brand name 

If you’ve seen the fantastic automotive features discussed in the GoFurther car commercial, you may have noticed something was missing: any overt mention of the brand behind it. Only by going to the GoFurther site, as the commercial suggests, would you be sure the video was created to promote the Ford brand.

This decision was an intentional one, says Matt VanDyke, Director of U.S. Market Communications for Ford. “As soon as people see the badges, they jump to conclusions about the brand,” he said. So Ford made a slick, stylish promotional video about its cars, and left its name out.

Ford GoFurther.com

Ford’s lesson for content marketers: Video is a medium that isn’t limited by reality — only by the extent of your imagination, so don’t be afraid to think outside the box when you are creating video content. Your concept doesn’t have to focus on the usual product shots and stats. Instead, find a way to tell a unique story that counteracts existing stereotypes and preconceptions about your brand. Remember: Seeing is believing, so use your video to let your consumers see the way you want them to perceive your brand.

3. Design custom infographics 

What makes infographics so valuable is the way they communicate large amounts of information clearly and quickly. When well-designed, infographics can be an attractive and memorable way to create engaging content.

For example, check out Nissan’s Cost of a Road Trip infographic, which breaks down the cost of cross-country road travel for eight different vehicles (and shows that the Nissan Altima 38 had the best performance).

Image via Nissan

What you can learn from Nissan: Communicating information to your audience involves more than just words on a screen. Look for ways to highlight key data or key takeaways in your content with a visual representation. A custom infographic will catch more attention than plain text will, and it will be more memorable and easily shareable, as well.

4. Ask your audience to contribute 

From Instagram to Facebook, brands today are engaging their fans by asking them to create user-generated content.

For example, at its First Car Story site, Subaru invites brand fans to share stories about their first cars; on its Facebook page, Zipcar regularly asks fans not only for ideas and feedback, but also for relevant pictures; and on Instagram, Toyota uses the hashtag #letsgoplaces to curate content that promotes its cars. The beauty of involving your audience members in content creation is that it provides them with creative opportunities to participate in your brand while expanding your content’s reach at the same time.

Facebook.com/Zipcar

What you can do to draw customer involvement: Offer personalized opportunities for fans to express their love of your brand through social media (or even on your website) in unique, visual ways. Try creating a Facebook challenge that asks fans to post photos of themselves interacting with your brand. Or, consider launching an Instagram campaign with a certain hashtag and invite followers to play along. You might even start a website, like Subaru did, and build it from the submissions that come in.

5. Pin more than your products 

On visually-focused social site Pinterest, Volvo has pinned images of the exciting places its consumers have driven to. Honda devoted an entire Pinterest board to brand fans Monsters Calling Home – the brand helped the indie band get a gig on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” In addition to dedicated Pinterest boards for each of its car models, Chrysler created the Imported from Detroit board to show its love for the Motor City.

What can you pin?: Of course you should pin your products, but no need to stop there. Take the lead from other auto brands and pin other content, too — think about your brand, what defines it, what it stands for, etc., and look for ways to turn those factors into Pinterest boards or Instagram pages. This not only makes your brand more interesting and relatable, it also enhances your brand persona in the minds of your consumers.

Your thoughts

What do you think? Can you come up with ways to incorporate these visual content marketing ideas into your online strategies? What, if any, of these ideas are you already using — and what results have you seen? What other ideas do you have for incorporating images into online content? We’d like to hear from you.

For more inspiration on visual ways to enhance your brand’s content, read CMI’s Ultimate eBook: 100 Content Marketing Examples. 

Cover image via Bigstock

In this second post, we focus on executing your video content strategy, maximizing impact, measuring results, and ensuring that you create sustainable campaigns that add long-term value to your organization. 

Step 1: Execution

Now that you’ve completed the planning stages for your video content campaign, including defining the objectives, target market, video style, length, and tone, it’s time you got the ball rolling and produced your first video. But what steps do you need to take?

The first thing you do is take your overall campaign and break it down into single, discrete messages, and hold yourself to one per video, where possible.

You then craft a storyboard around that message, with core components including:

• An attention-grabbing introduction/ initial characterization/ scene setting
• A setup/ problem/ challenge
• An action/ journey/ discovery
• A resolution/ punch line/ solution
• A call to action

With the core message laid out and a storyboard in place, it’s time to call in the professionals to help shape and refine them, and get you toward the finished product.

So who you gonna call? No, not “Ghostbusters.” As with many things, the answer is, it depends.

If you’re going to produce animation, you don’t need to hire a film crew, but you do need an animator or design studio; for customer testimonials you may not need a voiceover, but you will need one for a whiteboard illustration.

In general, you’re most likely to need some combination of the following services:

• A scriptwriter
• A studio/ animator/ film crew
• A voiceover/ interviewer
• Music and sound effects
• An editor

At this point, we’re hoping you have a well-crafted, well-targeted, high-impact video that delivers your brand message to the right market. Brilliant! Let’s go home and watch the leads and $$$ roll in, shall we?

Well, not quite. We’re only half way there at this point. Now we have this awesome video, it is time to get it properly distributed, encourage people to watch and share it, maximize its impact, and measure our success.

Step 2: Choose the right distribution channels

When considering how to get your video content out to the right audiences, you need to consider a few options. The obvious one is to place it on your own website. This should be done of course, but this alone is not enough — unless you already have a very high volume of traffic from your target market. Even then, it has its limitations, as you need to encourage new visitors, not just existing ones, to view your videos.

A second option is YouTube, which is a great free option to put your video content in front of potentially hundreds of millions of viewers. It seems like a no-brainer, but again, there are some limitations. The ability to own your conversion funnel and tailor the way you capture leads is critical to the effectiveness of your campaign, particularly if you’re trying to drive sales and define a high-quality pipeline of prospects. Unfortunately the tools to achieve this are not available on YouTube.

Therefore, you need to look for a more focused, business-centric distribution channel that gives you more control over how you capture leads, encourage direct sales, and represent your brand around the video.

You should also consider how many companies block YouTube because of its non-work related content (a point explained, in detail, by Magnet Video).

There are also the pre-roll adverts you have to consider. Do you want your audience clicking off of your videos before they’ve even begun, or having half their attention span taken up before your content kicks in?

Ideally, what you should be looking for is a hub where executives go to specifically educate themselves about new developments in their industry, watch business videos, and build connections in their market. There are probably some options specific to your industry, but cross-industry platforms that may work for you include BrightTalk, SlideShare, and Xavy.

Step 3: Encourage people to watch your videos

Once your video content has been sent out into the world through the right distribution channels, the next step is to encourage people to watch them, and this can be broken down into three distinct parts:

1. Use SEO to help people find you on your chosen channels
2. Tell them why they should watch it
3. Offer social proof to overcome their skepticism

Let’s tackle each one in turn…

> SEO: Help viewers find your videos: The core components for getting your video found via SEO are pretty straightforward:

• Title: Make sure your title contains the keywords from your core messaging, placing the more important words towards the beginning. Keep it to 60 characters or less if you are placing it on YouTube. Also include keywords in your filename (also known as the meta-title). To find the appropriate keywords, you can use the YouTube keyword tool, Google Trends, the Google Adwords keyword tool or any one of a number of proprietary tools.
• Metadata: Because search engines can’t crawl the actual content of the video, you need to give them a helping hand, and create a description that contains your keywords. Only 55 to 70 characters will typically be displayed on YouTube, but you can write longer descriptions than that.
• Tags: Tag the video properly, again with your keywords.
• Additional text: Use additional text around your video if it’s embedded on your site, or a distribution channel that allows you to customize the real estate around your video. This helps search engines to find it and display it correctly in their results.
• Use a video site map: Even better, create a specific video site map so you can explicitly tell the search engines where and what your videos are. There’s a very useful guide to video sitemaps for major hosting platforms here.
• Choose the right thumbnails: Having the right image as your thumbnail could have a huge impact on click-throughs, so ensure that you use the best one, and test to see if it can be improved.
• Links: Again, like normal SEO, the number of links that point to your video (on YouTube or elsewhere) will help drive up its rankings across search engines.
• User behavior: Late in 2012, YouTube overhauled the basics of its ranking algorithm to specifically focus on engagement — measured by the time a viewer spends watching your video, rather than simply the number of views it gets. So consider these two things: Don’t mislead people about the content, or they’ll simply click off of it straight away and you gain very little; and make sure your content is good all the way through, and not just packed into the first 15 seconds. Comments, “likes,” and shares will all help your overall ranking, too. 

> Tell them why they should watch it: One of the keys to getting people to watch your video is providing enough information to help them decide its relevance to them.

As highlighted in an interesting blog post by John Bottom in his blog, Base One:

“People skim-read headlines. This is the big problem: Video is a format that you cannot skim-read. The busy user has to quickly assess whether they will gain from investing their time in a piece of content. Expecting a busy person to choose a 10-minute video over a piece of text/image they can scan in seconds? Forget it.”

To combat this problem you need to provide a really good, accurate synopsis.

For example, think about bullet-pointing the top three benefits they will receive from watching your video, or summarizing the plot points if it has a narrative, or giving a run-down of speakers if it is a highlight reel… you get the picture.

Even better, consider getting the whole video transcribed so that they have a text version to skim if they prefer. This will also help if they are in a situation where they can’t watch a video. Giving them the content in text form will ensure they still take away the message, and if they enjoyed it, then there’s every chance they’ll return to watch the actual video when they can. 

> Utilize social proof: Even if you’ve tagged it appropriately and provided a fantastic synopsis, you can still face skepticism from a potential viewer. After all, why should they take your word for it?

This is where the idea of social proof comes in, as you can use “likes,” number of views, vote rankings, comments or any combination of the above to show them that others found it useful. As they see a groundswell of support for the content, they will be more likely to trust it as a useful source of information. 

Step 4: Help it spread virally

Once you’ve convinced someone to watch your video(s), the next stage is to encourage them to send it around their network, creating a viral effect that could considerably reduce your own marketing costs, and increase the number of views. So, how can you achieve the “holy grail” of a viral video?

I’ve broken this down into three main areas to consider:

If you don’t ask, you don’t get: Don’t be coy about asking your viewers to share your videos with their networks, particularly if your end objective is brand building, education, or some other purpose that needs wide distribution and isn’t necessarily about creating inbound leads or sales. Make it your call to action: “Enjoyed this? Then share it with your network” is all you need, just to prompt them to pass it on. 

Make it easy for them: Make it as easy to share, download or embed your video as possible. Ensure wherever you host it, including on your own site, that you provide quick share buttons to LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and Facebook, as well as via email. Let them download it so they can watch it offline and show it to anyone they’re with, even when they’re not online. Let them embed it on their own site, and then their audience will be able to find it, too. You may also want any comments to show up in their social feeds. 

Content is king: It may be one of the most over-used clichés in marketing, but that doesn’t make it any less valid. What your video contains will ultimately be the key ingredient to whether it is found, watched, and shared with others.

However, if we’re specifically talking about how to get a viewer to share a video, then there are five main themes that will be most effective: 

• Controversy: Controversy can simply be going against the established wisdom of your industry by making bold statements, but however you deliver it, controversy always courts interest and spreads fast. As an example, below is a pretty controversial video from Kixeye that picked up a lot of press coverage and viewers:

• Humor: Everyone needs a little light relief during their 9 to 5, and people love to share humorous videos with friends and colleagues. A well-crafted and delivered video that makes your audience laugh will go a long way, literally. Unfortunately, genuinely funny is perhaps the hardest of all these suggestions to do well, so make sure you test it quite widely before doing a “general release,” otherwise you’ll end up with people laughing at you, not with you. Check out this series of videos from Kinaxis that does “humor with a message” well.
• Surprise/novelty: Anything out of the ordinary or remarkable will always get people sharing, just so they can be the ones who helped everyone else “discover” it. Anything that could get you asking questions, thinking differently, or feeling inspired would fall into this category. The RSA series of whiteboard sketches is a good example of thoughtful, interesting videos, as are most of the videos on TED.com.
• Utility: If your videos help executives with a specific problem, give advice, or explore future trends, they are likely to be shared with their colleagues who face similar challenges. Sharing a useful video is an easy way to be helpful to others, and it will likely increase your stature as a thought leader in that particular area, too. Most videos on Xavy provide a good example of this.
• Ego: People love to share videos that feature themselves. Interviews, talking heads and montages are all good ways to capture third parties, who are then more likely to share them with their friends and colleagues. Awards videos would also be good for this purpose. Be somewhat wary of this approach, though, because if the content isn’t very good, then it won’t spread much beyond that first degree of separation. 

Step 5: Optimize for conversions

So once you’ve got people watching your videos, how do you make the most of it to achieve your objectives?

If you want the viewer to take an action other than sharing the video with their network, you need to optimize for conversions.

Here is how you can do that:

• Include a call to action: So many videos don’t include a call to action, so they miss the whole point of existing. Make sure yours has a call to action, and make sure it’s in line with your original purpose. If you want leads, ask for their info; if you want sales, ask them to buy; if you want a dialogue, ask them to comment.
• Keep it simple: If your video has a single message, then it’s easier and clearer to ask for a decisive action from the viewer.
• Measure: Ensure that you measure where viewer numbers drop off, and either cut the video length down to that point, or at least place relevant calls for action before the drop-off points.
• Make it easy: Surround your video with calls to action so viewers can just click on a link, fill out the form next to it, or hit the share buttons. Make sure the actions are placed around the video, as well as in the video, so that they are simple to use.
• Make it interactive: With a service like Mozilla’s Popcorn you can now make your videos interactive in the actual video frame, so experiment with how that affects your call to action. 
• Give options: You might only ask for one action, but you could offer more than one way to accomplish it. Some people hate web forms and would prefer to email, while others prefer to phone in. Don’t confuse them by giving 10 options, but instead, give two or three that you know are the most-used communication channels for your customers.
• Incentivize: Give viewers some immediate incentive to share their details with you or to buy now — an exclusive white paper, a time-bound discount, a prize draw — to help nudge them over the edge into action. 
• Experiment: Don’t just put up your video and calls to action and leave it — experiment. Web copywriters are obsessive about testing the impact of their words, their positioning, their surroundings, and even their color or font to optimize conversions. You should try different things too, and see what works best. 

Step 6: Maximize your video’s impact

Now that you have your video content campaign ready, you’ll want to ensure that it has the maximum impact. This means you should consider three main ways to enhance its impact on your overall B2B marketing strategy:

• Make it part of a multichannel campaign with white papers, research, blogging, etc., so that there are multiple touch points and media that executives can engage with. Not everyone loves video, so having a transcript of it is a good idea. Similarly, it’s probably good to offer a white paper around it, as that remains one of the most popular forms of B2B content marketing around. Proprietary research and data, blogs, and podcasts are all also highly ranked for engagement by the business viewer, and effectiveness by B2B marketers.
• Try to time your campaigns around your events calendar. Release your videos in the month leading up to the event, so they help create buzz and build awareness before you get there. It may also help customers to become more familiar with your brand, and to feel like they understand your company before they meet with you or your reps at the show. It’s also a good idea to capture video at the event and release it afterwards. Capture interviews at your stand (remember — ego), create a time-lapse video showing the buzz around your stand, or create a montage of the event’s best moments. It’s likely that the organizer will want to help you distribute that last video, and you want to be in front of his or her audience.
• Don’t rely on YouTube as your only distribution channel. Get it up on your own website, and definitely consider business-specific content portals, where executives go to watch professional content, and it will be easier to get your content discovered by the right people. 

Step 7: Analyze the results

Measuring success will ultimately come down to what your original purpose is, and what you decided the outcome should be, but here are four common examples:

• Sales and revenue: In theory, this should be the No. 1 outcome for any commercial company. So how do you analyze the performance of a video when your outcome is to generate more sales and revenue? You can do something like this:

Let’s say the video cost you $1,000 and you got 20,000 views. That cost you 5 cents a view.

If you converted 5 percent into a lead, then it cost you $1 per lead.

Let’s say 70 percent of those leads are time wasters or gave you bad data; so you’re left with a cost of $3.33 per lead.

Then maybe your sales team converts 10 percent of those leads into a sale, so each sale cost you $33.33.

Let’s say each sale is worth $500 to you over a customer lifetime (which is a very small amount in B2B sales). Then the ROI of the campaign is 1,400 percent.

Not a bad return on investment at all

• Leads: Perhaps you’re not judging your marketing team based on the ability of the sales team to convert the leads, but rather on the effectiveness of your videos in generating them in the first place. How should we measure the success of this?
  There are a number of options. You could look at the total number of leads a video generates vs. some other form of marketing. (There should usually be a comparison made, as your job is to see not just how effective a marketing channel is, but how much more effective it is than other channels, so you can make smart decisions on where to allocate your finite resources.)You could look at quality of leads (taking it one step further down the sales funnel); man-hours to leads generated to see how time-efficient they are; or you could measure what types of leads they generate vs. other channels (e.g., are they more senior, or from a particular vertical).

My suggestion is to keep it focused on the money, at least in the first instance; i.e., how much are you spending per quality lead versus other forms of marketing?

So it would look something like this: 

Let’s take the same number from above for the video, and assume that Channel B is a white paper.

The white paper costs $700 to produce and generates 500 downloads, of which 30 percent again have the correct data and are deemed to be worthwhile contacting by the sales team. This makes each quality lead worth $4.66, which is more expensive than your quality leads per video. Your video also has the added benefit of generating all of that exposure to 20,000 viewers, which is hard to achieve for a white paper.

Therefore in this hypothetical example you may consider spending a larger portion of your content marketing budget on video, supplemented by white papers, to ensure that you’re maximizing the effectiveness of each marketing dollar.

• Market engagement: Perhaps your purpose was not to generate leads, but to create a conversation around your products and brand, and get engaged with your market. How can you measure this? There are three reasonably simple ways: 

1. The first is to take the total number of views and find out the average length of a view, so that you have some measure of viewers’ engagement in the content.
2. The second is to compare how many mentions your brand (or product) gets before, and then after, the video has been released, across the media channels you watch. What is the new total number? What is the percent increase? Can you measure the sentiment? How often is it being tweeted and retweeted, or quoted in the press as part of an ongoing conversation? Has it actually generated a debate?
3. Finally, you might look at how many comments it has generated on your own site or other distribution channels that you’ve used, to gauge whether it has been successful at generating a conversational response.

• Brand awareness: You may care most about brand awareness, in which case you’ll have four main metrics to measure:

1. Total number of views: How many people are actually watching your videos?
2. Number of shares: How often are people sharing it, and with how many people? This is worth diving into deeper. Don’t just look at how many times it’s been shared, but look at who is sharing it (i.e., are there 10 people sharing it, but they have tens of thousands of Twitter followers; or are there 100 people sharing it with little impact beyond their immediate network of 100 followers?).
3. Number of mentions: Similar to the engagement metric above, how often is your brand or product now mentioned online, across forums and in groups, via Twitter, and on blogs? You’ll want a special social media monitoring tool to get this measurement, but it’s worth it if this is your core objective.
4. Brand recollection: A classic market research technique. How many people are familiar with your brand before, and then after, your campaign? 

Step 8: Bring it all together, and repeat

Just like you can’t hope to create one product and reap the rewards forever, it’s the same for your video content campaigns. What was fresh last month won’t be next month, so you need to keep repeating the process, each time learning and getting better at it as you measure and refine your output.

My suggestion would be to aim for something new at least once every month, and base your campaigns on quarterly or four-monthly cycles. So for example, you may plan to produce four videos, all based on brand awareness, which will be released once a month for the first four months of the year (perhaps in the run-up to a major trade show). Then, the next four months will be focused on a lead generation post-event, again with a new video released each month. Finally, with brand recognition, leads, and a whole lot of marketing data and metrics in your pocket, the final four months might push towards sales, with your videos specifically created to target those most likely to buy.

Good luck in your video marketing endeavors, and please keep an eye out for our upcoming eBook, which covers the processes described here, and in our earlier post, in greater detail. If you’d like to add anything to the steps, think we’ve missed anything, or have a case study you’d like to share, please contact us, or leave a comment, below.

Looking for more best practices to help you execute on your content marketing strategy? Read CMI’s Content Marketing Playbook. 

According to an Altimeter Group report, The Converged Media Imperative, agencies and brands need help (a lot of help) understanding and navigating the new landscape.

The first and most basic problem

Longstanding organizational silos divide marketing organizations, making them poorly prepared to deploy a desperately needed integrated media strategy. “A brand may consider its Facebook page owned media because the brand controls it and adds their own content to the page,” explains Rebecca Lieb, Digital Advertising and Media Analyst for Altimeter, and co-author of the report. “At the same time, Facebook is paid media because you’re advertising on it or paying for an enhanced page. And Facebook is also earned media because anyone can contribute comments, upload photos, and join a discussion.”

So is Facebook a social media responsibility? PR? Content? And does your staff communicate effectively in your organization to drive an integrated approach?

Lieb goes on to explain that media convergence is evident across all manner of platforms and channels — not just the “biggies” marketers talk about most often. For instance:

• Native advertising from companies like OneSpot redefines the concept of ad units, delivering sponsored content “in-stream” with editorial content or within rich-media ads.
• Bazaarvoice offers brands the chance to collect and leverage customer reviews, using customer-generated content (i.e., earned media) and repackaging it in ads (i.e., paid media) or aggregating it on their own website (i.e., owned media).
• The New York Times’ new media product for brands, called Ricochet, allows brands to publicize earned media in a controlled environment. If Gucci, for example, promotes a story from The New York Times on one of its media channels, visitors clicking the URL enter a controlled environment, free of competing ads, on The New York Times site.

As Lieb explains, “Products like Ricochet are calling for new skills sets. Who buys it? PR will say, ‘We don’t buy media.’ Then who? In the late 1990s, the lament of digital was, ‘We’re balkanized and siloed.’ Fast forward 15 years and we are seeing the same degrees of balkanization in digital.”

Other issues marketers face with converged media

Lieb also points to other critical hurdles marketers face when trying to respond to the converged media imperative:

• First, the rapid proliferation of technology feels overwhelming to marketers, who struggle to figure out whether an integrated digital marketing suite or one-off purchases of best-in-class tools makes the most sense. (Check out these 14 questions to ask when choosing technology.)
• Heads of social media are on the front lines of listening to and engaging with customers, but they often don’t have the authority or influence to drive strategic decision-making for the brand.
• Many marketing organizations still believe agencies should lead with the “big idea.”

“Agencies used to determine the creative idea for a campaign because it was the most expensive element,” says Lieb. “In a sense, agencies were the boss of everything. In this incredibly iterative, reactive environment, we find what drives the creative train is owned media. Creating, experimenting, and listening with owned media — and using those findings to inform paid media.”

Understanding the basics of convergence

So what’s driving media convergence at such a high rate? Content. Specifically, socially powered, technology-juiced content.

Social-powered content has become marketers’ new darling; yet, at the same time, paid media (in particular online display ads) are increasingly called into question. As Jay Samit, a digital media innovator, recently tweeted, “5.3 trillion online ads shown in 2012 & I have yet to click on one. More likely to be hit by a meteor.”

But more than just falling out of favor, the concept of the “ad” has changed. When PandoDaily, a Silicon Valley blog, asked Kirk Cheyfitz, CEO of Story Worldwide, to name the best online ads of 2012, he wrote a post, ”The Best Online Ads of 2012 Weren’t Ads.” Explains Cheyfitz, “My picks were not paid units sitting between content. They were the content. And they were unpaid. Prime example: Felix Baumgartner and the plunge to earth. How right on for Red Bull is jumping out of a space capsule? It was a great story, but it wasn’t a paid unit — and yet it got tens of millions of viewers and more juice for Red Bull than an ad could have received. It’s the present and the future of advertising. And that’s why content specialists need to understand advertising and what it does.”

In fact, Cheyfitz claims social content is a new ad unit:

“The conversations that used to be started by mass media have now become mass media. The conversation is the thing itself of advertising. Social content is the most powerful because (a.) research shows messages from peers are more impactful than messages directly from brands, and (b.) sharing increases reach while decreasing cost-per-impression. All this means every serious advertiser must rethink their strategy from top to bottom.”

Social is now advertising, but social is also earned media. Owned media is sometimes an ad when it’s native. Then again, it can also turn into earned. You get the picture.

Amidst all this, brand marketers are struggling to maintain an “always on,” iterative approach to media. They’re moving away from top-down campaign thinking in favor of an integrated corporate storytelling approach that iterates constantly, leverages technology effectively, operates at scale, and tells such a great story it competes effectively against all the other choices your audience has before it.

David Germano, Vice President of Empower MediaMarketing’s content marketing practice, Magnetic Content Studios, and former general manager of ManoftheHouse.com (a joint venture between BBDO’s Proximity and Procter & Gamble) puts it this way: “Technology allows consumers to control the ‘what, when and how’ of media, and so brands have to create content consumers want. It puts brands in the position of having to create brand-agnostic stories. The question today is not, ‘Is the media paid, earned or owned?‘ The question is, ‘Should I buy the media, or create it?‘ And many marketers aren’t comfortable with that yet.”

The converged media imperative

Why are they not comfortable? Well first, it’s because it’s proven to be hellishly hard. It’s uncomfortable because it requires a new way of working — requiring new team members, new areas of expertise, new technology, and new strategy. And all of it at prairie dog speed.

Explains Germano, “Brands are being asked to embrace convergence, to be more fluid, more 24/7. Marketers are told to create multiple assets, publish in real time, and iterate constantly. This is absolutely challenging most marketing organizations.”

But for brands and agencies alike, an integrated media strategy — regardless of paid, earned, or owned — is a brand imperative. Explains Lieb, “As consumers, we know we are on this dynamic journey. The world is a virtual Times Square of brand impressions. But if there’s not congruence [among] paid, earned, and owned media, the brand experience will be fragmented. That means you have to get all these disparate digital players around the table and talking the same language — because consumers are not differentiating between all the different channels.”

To set out, brands must reach a better understanding of what converged media is and what it means for their marketing strategy. And they must ensure their organizational structure supports, rather than hinders, a converged media approach. Marketers must stop letting “paid, earned, and owned” define the conversation, and instead focus on understanding where their customers are and what they prefer. As Cheyfitz explains, “When there were four channels, opening a meeting by summarizing your channel strategy made sense. When you have 40,000 channels, it makes no sense. While you’re talking about it, more channels will be invented. The real questions are, ‘Where will I find my audience? Who do I want to talk to? And what are their media habits?‘ ”

Impact on agencies

Just as brand marketers are racing to reinvent themselves, so too are agencies under pressure to adapt. Based on our research, top areas of concern among agencies include:

Competition from all sides: Ad agencies are taking on broader expertise in content, digital, and analytics. And content agencies, PR firms, and social media agencies are expanding and encroaching on ad agency territory. Says Altimeter Group’s Rebecca Lieb, “All these media changes are threatening to the agency model because it’s no longer all about paid media. And social media agencies and PR agencies are making a go at ad agencies’ business. Just think of the dust-up related to Samsung’s promoted tweet by the Associated Press — brokered by Edelman. Larger PR shops see lots of opportunities. The gloves are coming off.”

Ensuring media transparency: The growing interest in brand journalism, native advertising, and “sponsored stories” comes with risk, explains Empower MediaMarketing’s David Germano. “Conceptually, convergence makes sense. But without transparency, it won’t help our industry. That’s the big risk. I don’t blame journalists for saying, ‘You’re going to corrupt the system.’ There are those agencies (and brands) that are managing convergence irresponsibly. If transparency is not part of your model, you don’t have a long-term hand. There’s a self-policing nature to all this. In fact, it’s become a sport to figure out which brands are behaving poorly. “The Atlantic“case was figured out quickly. Same with the AP/Samsung-sponsored tweets. You can’t pull the wool over people’s eyes. If you sacrifice the long-term relationship with your audience because of some ham-fisted execution, you’re not doing anyone any favors.”

Intra-agency cooperation: Increasingly, brands are asking their agencies to put rivalry aside and collaborate more effectively. Converged media requires an integrated approach, meaning multiple agencies need to operate from the same playbook. Says James Meyer, CEO of corporate publishing agency, Imagination Publishing, “General Mills, one of our clients, has multiple agencies — branding, advertising, and social. We find ourselves collaborating with the others, getting on calls with two or more agencies at a time. The lead agency may provide overall branding or an ad campaign, and the rest of us take that lead and use it to formulate a content creation plan. By the same token, we will take our own insights from the social media space, and bring it to the lead agency. What we see on the ground may inform a shift in thinking different from what the lead agency is currently addressing.”

Recruiting marketing generalists: Agencies used to be on the hunt for creatives. These days we hear agencies say they struggle to hire talented generalists. Lest you think that means someone who dabbles in many areas but masters none, think again. The new marketing generalist understands at a functional level multiple disciplines — including marketing technology, social, content strategy, corporate storytelling, and SEO. And they must be comfortable moving quickly, adapting, and taking risks. Says Germano, “Coming from an agency, I have to hire generalists — people who understand the relationship between display, social, and search. And I’m looking for talent that can tell a story, publish it to a WordPress platform, and know how to promote and distribute that story.”

The number of content agencies is on the rise. To find agencies operating in this space, check out CMI’s Agency Listings. 

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

What I love about the data from our latest study, B2B Small Business Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budget, and Trends – North America, sponsored by Outbrain, is that we can see some striking differences in how small businesses use content marketing compared with their enterprise marketing peers (i.e., companies with 1,000+ employees). Take a look at a few of the highlights:

Small business marketers spend more of their budgets on content marketing

B2B small business marketers allocate 31 percent of their budgets to content marketing, and 57 percent say they are planning to increase this amount. Their B2B enterprise peers, on the other hand, allocate 24 percent, with 46 percent of respondents saying they plan to increase their spends.

Small business marketers use fewer content marketing tactics

B2B small business marketers reportedly use an average of 12 content marketing tactics, whereas their enterprise peers use 16. And even though small business marketers say that in-person events top their list of most effective content marketing tactics, events are not among those they use most often, instead favoring social media – other than blogs (86 percent); articles on their website (82 percent); and eNewsletters (81 percent).

The study also found that B2B small business marketers use videos less often than their enterprise peers do (73 percent vs. 87 percent), but use blogs more often (76 percent vs. 70 percent). Also, in terms of effectiveness, B2B small businesses have more confidence in books (55 percent vs. 35 percent) and blogs (60 percent vs. 46 percent) than their enterprise peers do.

They use more social media platforms to distribute content

B2B small business marketers use an average of five social media platforms, whereas their enterprise peers use four. As for which platforms they prefer, small business marketers use LinkedIn (83 percent) most often, with Twitter (81 percent) and Facebook (80 percent) following closely behind. Their enterprise peers, on the other hand, use Facebook most often (80 percent), followed by Twitter (76 percent) and YouTube (74 percent).

More than half create their own content in-house

Just 39 percent of B2B small business marketers outsource content creation, compared with 65 percent of their enterprise peers who rely on outsourcing.

They are challenged with keeping up with the high demand for content

Producing enough content is the greatest content challenge B2B small business marketers say they face, whereas their enterprise peers cite producing the kind of content that engages as their top content concern.

Just 34 percent believe they are effective at content marketing

Like their enterprise peers (32 percent), B2B small business marketers struggle with their effectiveness at content marketing. However, small business marketers appear to believe that continued investment in content marketing will ultimately pay off: Forty-six percent of those who rate their organizations as least effective at content marketing are nevertheless planning to increase their content marketing budgets over the next 12 months.

Want to learn more? Download the full report for additional insight and answers to questions like:

• What goals do B2B small business marketers have for content marketing?
• How do they measure content marketing success?
• How are they tailoring their content?
• What are the notable characteristics of a best-in-class B2B small business content marketer?

What do you think about these results? Are our findings consistent with your content marketing experiences? Let us know in the comments!

To learn more about how small businesses approach content marketing, register for the Small Biz Summit being held at Content Marketing World on September 12, 2013 in Cleveland.

My company, Localist, creates online event calendars to serve a wide variety of organizations, and we’ve seen firsthand how our customers capitalize on events as a source of content. Being data enthusiasts, we wanted numbers to attach to what we’re seeing. We recently surveyed users of more than 40 of our customers’ calendars to ask them about how they interact with the calendar, and how they find out about the latest events. Their answers drove our point home: Focus on transforming events into content to build your brand and drive engagement before, during, and after your events.

You can download the full results here, but we’ve pulled out some key statistics in this post. Note that the survey was performed at higher education institutions, but the lessons apply to any organization.

1. Blend in-person and online components of your events 

Events offer a great opportunity to connect your online content marketing strategy to offline, in-person interactions. Start by giving your events a prominent place online. Our survey respondents certainly value being able to access information about events online: As you can see in the chart below, 68 percent said the online event calendar was one of the most useful features of our website.

Survey question: What are the most useful features of our website?

In addition, be sure to engage prospective event attendees online before they arrive at the offline event, and after they leave. In our survey, events were the most popular type of content on Facebook, and second most popular on Twitter. For example, you can create content such as:

• Blogs
• Press releases
• Social media posts
• Online activities or contests where the experience continues on-site
• Twitter hashtags that encourage attendees to live-tweet the event or post photos on Instagram

On the flip side, it’s also important to give your online outposts a prominent presence at your events. For example, during the event, you can:

• Display a live social media feed in a prominent location
• Include website and social media URLs on any swag or giveaways
• Announce the URL of your online event calendar, so people know where to look for information on your next event

Remember: Your online content begets offline content, and vice versa. So cross-promotion is a win-win for all aspects of your content marketing plan.

2. Keep conversations going before, during, and after events 

Events are built on social interactions, so logically it follows that people would want to talk about events with other people who plan on attending. In fact, 53 percent of our survey takers said being able to leave comments on online event listings was important to them.

Organizations strive to create memorable events that will prompt attendees to keep the conversation going. Because offline interactions have more staying power in peoples’ memories than a brief online exchange, creating powerful event-related content gives your audience reasons to stay engaged with your business long after an event has ended.

To use this to your advantage, encourage attendees to leave reviews on your online event calendar, blog about their experience, and even post pictures of the event on their own social networks. And, if you are seeing a lot of organic conversations taking place around your events, you can harness that enthusiasm by featuring key attendee posts, photos, and/or reviews on your blog or event site.

3. Create engaging emails about events 

Do you struggle to send out emails or newsletters that people actually open, rather than relegate to the dark depths of their email trash? Here’s some encouragement that your efforts aren’t being wasted: Among our survey respondents, 82 percent said they want email reminders for events they’re interested in attending. 

Survey question: How important is it that you can receive reminders for events you’re interested in?

In addition, 59 percent reported that they would like to learn about events via an email newsletter. By giving event details a prominent spot in your email content, you’ll benefit from better open rates and more engaged email recipients. You can then direct your readers to other event-related content, such as blog posts, hashtags, or your event calendar, for more details.

4. Treat event listings themselves as content 

Don’t leave event listings out of your content marketing strategy. Posting event listings on an online event calendar provides a marketing “two-fer,” because the event listing can serve as content that can be just as valuable as the content delivered at the actual event.

Let’s look at a college events calendar as an example. While current students may enjoy attending on-campus events, prospective students may be interested to see that there is a rich variety and robust quantity of events listed. For instance, our survey found that 62 percent of current students said they visited the college’s website to research the local social scene before deciding to attend the school. By applying content marketing best practices to event listings, colleges can make themselves seem more interesting, engaging, and appealing to these prospective students.

Similarly, businesses can employ the same strategy: Communicating key highlights of your organization’s culture and goals through event listings can help you attract prospective leads and customers. Start treating event listings just as you would any other important piece of content:

• Optimize them for search by including all the juicy details
• Share them as announcements across multiple platforms
• Get creative with your content design to make each listing robust and interesting to look through

5. Create robust, image-rich event listings 

You wouldn’t haphazardly publish a blog post without ensuring that it had interesting content, a title that will hook readers in, and great visuals, right? Event listings should receive the same content marketing care and consideration.

Let’s take photos, for example. You may already know the power images wield. They correlate with double the number of page views, help sites rank higher in search results, and get shared more often than content that doesn’t have a visual component. Well, event listings are the perfect place to showcase interesting images along with your captivating content.

Go ahead and get creative with event descriptions and details. Maybe even throw a video in there. According to our survey, 61 percent of respondents want to see informative and engaging details included in event-related content. And when the event is over, you can update your web and social media content with pictures of attendees and their activities, to extend the conversation and start to generate excitement for your next event.

6. Optimize event listings for SEO 

Featuring fresh, dynamic, and updated content in your listings will certainly appeal to peoples’ inherent desire to stay on top of relevant events. But it can also help boost your business’ rankings for relevant industry searches, as well:

People often share links to event listings on their own sites or social media accounts, which will help you increase back-links on your site and demonstrate your site’s popularity to search engines. Keeping your online events calendar chock full of fresh content will help you easily grow the number of pages on your website. In addition, creating unique meta titles and meta descriptions for each event listing will help you rank higher for keywords your attendees and target audience are searching for.

7. Embrace user-generated content in event listings 

One way to step up audience engagement with your content marketing is to encourage user-generated content, as people often feel more connected to your organization and your events when they are given the opportunity to submit their own content. In fact, 60 percent of our survey respondents felt it was important to add their own events and opinions on event calendars. Moreover, it fosters a sense of belonging that can translate into increased page views, engagement, and event attendance.

8. Deliver on-the-go event content with an app 

With the rising ownership of smartphones, delivering content that’s targeted to and formatted for mobile use is more essential than ever. Our survey takers certainly recognize the importance of this strategy, as 78 percent of them said they were interested in accessing event details through a mobile calendar app.

Survey question: What features would you want in a mobile calendar app?

When creating event listing content for the mobile audience, be sure to incorporate responsive design techniques that optimize the experience regardless of the device it’s viewed on. Or, by offering your events calendar content through a dedicated app (like this one, created by Flirt Interactive for Content Marketing World 2013), you can focus your content marketing strategy on the specifics of engaging mobile users.

With these eight ideas in your marketing arsenal, you should be well-equipped to transform your events into powerful content marketing. It won’t be long before your online events calendar turns into your best (non)secret content marketing weapon.

Has your business started turning events into great content? We’d love for you to comment and share your thoughts and ideas.

See more examples of content marketing in action at live events by registering to attend Content Marketing World 2013, September 9–11 in Cleveland, Ohio.

From this unlikely pairing came little programs that, when viewed together, make up an episodic web series, or webisode. Webisodes share some of the attributes of each of their media parents; yet they also bring a whole new generation of brand storytelling opportunities to life. It’s this pedigreed combination of the web and television that some big brands are experimenting with as a way to provide distinctive and uniquely engaging content to consumers.

As one of the most engaging forms of branded content, the episodic web series has a lot of appeal. For example, just like a TV miniseries or a series of books, a good web TV series can help forge an ongoing relationship with target consumers: Once viewers have been drawn in by the entertainment value of a webisode, they’re likely to stick around to see what happens next — and to visit related YouTube channels, Facebook pages, or other touch points that are part of your branded environment. They’ll get to know your brand a little better. They may even start to like it more than they realized.

There are other benefits, too. Web series are less expensive to produce than a traditional television show; yet, thanks to advances in streaming technology, they are just as convenient and enjoyable to watch. Webisodes have also opened doors to successful new methods of marketing — ones that don’t need to resort to banging the consumer over the head with a brand’s message.

Credit writer and film producer Scott Zakarin for launching the webisode trend. Back in 1995, Zakarin created an interactive web series called “The Spot,” a drama, akin to prime-time series like “Melrose Place.” He invited advertisers to sponsor the show — and many were intrigued enough to give it a shot, including K-Swiss and Toyota.

Scott Zakarin, creator of “The Spot”

Today’s web series aren’t so different than “The Spot,” with one notable exception: Many of them are now created by the brands themselves, rather than by traditional television producers. Instead of seeking out sponsorship opportunities in existing programs, brand marketers are developing series of their own in the hope that they can woo audiences with great content that increases brand loyalty and, ultimately, sales.

Here are a few more recent examples of brands that are finding success with webisodes:

A look at fashion blogging

In April of this year, online fashion community Lookbook.nu launched “Lookbook: The Series.” Touted as an urban fairy tale about a fashion blogger and a photographer, the independently produced web series lives on the Lookbook website, where its 3 million unique monthly visitors can return again and again to view the latest episodes.

“We knew early on [that] video was going to be an important part of the online fashion landscape, and felt that to tell the story of fashion blogging in an original, fun, stylized way, we had to go in the opposite direction and create a scripted content series,” says Huan Nguyen, head of Brand Partnerships at Lookbook. “That approach has allowed us to offer our fans something totally different than the fashion video content out there and, in the long run, gives us many options on how to further develop the content.”

While the episodes were clearly devised to promote the Lookbook brand itself, the site also sells pre-roll ad space and adjacent display units. For example, Episode 3 is being sponsored by Victoria Secret brand Pink.

“Lookbook: The Series”

On the road to innovation

On the surface, it may seem that there’s little palpable connection between cars and food (aside, perhaps, from drive-throughs). We can, however, trace a path from auto brand Toyota to appealing lifestyle content, thanks to its latest foray into webisodes: “Appetite for Life.”

Back for a second season on MSN.com, “Appetite for Life” is a series of five-minute webisodes that feature celebrity chef and TV host Andrew Zimmern. The show mirrors the eating-on-the-road format of Zimmern’s successful Travel Channel shows, following him as he travels in a Toyota Prius to meet with other chefs and foodie friends around the country.

On “Appetite for Life,” Zimmern’s mission is to find “forward-thinking foods,” and in doing so, he provides insight into current culinary trends. Herein lies the content hook: Consumers get entertaining, exclusive content and get to spend time with an established TV star. And while viewers may already be accustomed to seeing auto brands aligned with reality TV (Toyota is also a long-time sponsor of “Top Chef”), the information they receive in the form of entertainment far outweighs the overt presence of a saleable product every time.

Though Toyota receives the lion’s share of content voice, as the show’s sole sponsor, “Appetite for Life” sweetened the pot for viewers by partnering with nonprofit organization Feeding America, and encouraging online donations among the show’s viewers.

“Appetite for Life”

Inside a unique romance

If you didn’t catch Intel and Toshiba’s “The Beauty Inside” when it launched late last year, you’ve been missing out. This project combines the art of an online film with the content marketing power of episodic series and the reach and engagement value of social media.

“The Beauty Inside” is about a man named Alex who wakes up every day of his life in a different body. Between the prominent logos and the organic product placement of the film (for example, Alex uses his Toshiba laptop to create a video diary of his shifting physical identity), there’s no overlooking the show’s branding components. Yet consumers don’t seem to mind, as Intel and Toshiba have done two vital things right: They produced a series of superlative quality, and they cast fans as the various faces of Alex — an engaging way to boost engagement and participation among fans of both the brands and the series.

Split into six episodes that were distributed across multiple channels — including a microsite, a Facebook page, and a custom YouTube channel — the show was developed by Intel and Toshiba as a follow-up to their 2011 social media film experience, “Inside.” While the innovative “Inside” certainly generated its share of buzz, “The Beauty Inside” has received wider exposure as a branded content effort, and was recently nominated for a Webby Award.

“The Beauty Inside”

3 essential tips for creating branded webisodes

Focus on story: Webisode fans (or brand consumers, for that matter) don’t want to spend their time online viewing extended commercials. So businesses that are interested in producing webisodes will need to create compelling characters and build them around a plot that will resonate with viewers outside the context of your brand. Start by selecting a genre (romance, mystery, horror, and so on), and work from there. You can’t have a successful web series without an enticing story that makes sense to consumers, whether they’re familiar with your brand or not.

Integrate value — not just branding: The characters in Lookbook’s web series drop hints on how best to use the site; Toshiba and Intel film tugged at viewers’ heartstrings; “Appetite for Life” informs viewers about the latest food trends. Whether the value in your series is emotional or more tangible (i.e., something consumers can use), it must have meaning and impact or improve their lives in some way. While consumers don’t necessarily expect this from traditional TV, if you hope to capture consumers’ attention with your branded webisodes, you’ll need to offer them something unique — something they can’t get from other entertainment formats.

Tie in social media: On the MSN microsite for “Appetite for Life,” viewers are invited to submit their favorite food pairings to an Instagram gallery and connect with the show through Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. “Lookbook: The Series” is on Facebook and Twitter too, and promotes sharing through Tumblr, StumbleUpon, and Google+. Even if you aren’t tying social media into the series itself (something “The Beauty Inside” does by posting Alex’s video diaries to YouTube), make sure to use a strong call to action, to remind viewers to share their love of your webisodes through their favorite social channels — often all it takes to trigger a desired action or conversion is a gentle push in the right direction.

For marketers enticed by the idea of producing their own branded content, an episodic web series could be a perfect fit. It’s original, it’s alluring, and it has staying power (one fan on “The Beauty Inside” Facebook page begged Intel and Toshiba to release the series as a DVD). This iteration of web-based television is growing up — and quickly coming into its own.

For more ideas that add innovation and creative inspiration to your branded content efforts, read the CMI book, “Bold Brand,” by Josh Miles. 

Cover image via Bigstock.

Now, 15 years later, I’ve seen all sides of this little, booming industry, and it has afforded me a bit of perspective. We’ve come so far, and yet there is still so much to be accomplished.

Here are some of the things we (at CMI) have learned along the way. I hope you find one or two helpful nuggets of wisdom in here.

1. There is no silver bullet

Regardless of what anyone says, there is no silver bullet when it comes to content marketing strategy. So many marketers are looking for the perfect dashboard, system, process, and distribution plan for their content marketing. It simply doesn’t exist. We’ve worked with hundreds of small and large brands around the world, and only one thing has been consistent: Every plan we developed was different. Why? It’s simple: The mixture of communicating what your business offers, delivering on your customers’ informational needs, and sharing your own corporate story is impossible to duplicate —  the output from your particular blend of attributes and goals should always be different and unique.

As Don Schultz, the father of integrated marketing, has always professed, competitors can copy everything about what you do… your pricing, your product, where you promote it… but they can’t copy exactly how you will communicate.

2. You can play offense or defense

One of my favorite basketball players of all time is Julius “Dr. J” Erving. I’ve heard many interviews in which Dr. J talks about two ways to look at basketball offense: You can impose your will on the defense, or you can take what the defense gives you. Dr. J always chose to exert his own will, and that worked for him (quite well, in fact). LeBron James, on the other hand, usually takes what the defense gives him, which is why he racks up so many assists.

Both strategies can be effective. At CMI, we decided to exert our will with the term “content marketing.” In 2007, we popped onto the scene and started using the term like it had been around for years. Through lots of planning, strategy, and luck, it worked, and now content marketing is the defacto term for our industry. (Incidentally, HubSpot did the same thing with “inbound marketing.”)

But imposing your will is just one way to do it. You could also choose to ride the waves of others and pick your sweet spot. A great example of this is Social Media Examiner. When it launched in 2009, many thought it was late to the party… but it rode the social media wave and executed a content marketing strategy second to none, growing into one of the most-trafficked B2B marketing sites on the planet.

3. Content marketing is the great equalizer

“David vs. Goliath” is alive and well in content marketing. Large budgets don’t always win; actually, the smaller players usually come out on top because they are equipped to move more agilely and quickly than their larger competition. For instance, CMI had a smaller budget than almost every marketing media company on the planet, yet we came out on top through focus and hard work. I’ve never seen a bigger company move faster than a smaller organization. OpenView Venture Partners is, relatively speaking, a small VC company compared to its peers. On the web, though, it dominates.

4. You don’t have to be on all platforms

In many cases, it’s smart to weave your story onto multiple platforms. It’s entirely possible to have a killer webinar series, amazing blog, outstanding video program, and cutting-edge digital magazine all at the same time.

But there is another way. You may decide to focus and work to dominate one platform. How about a killer podcast series? What about an amazing print newsletter? Maybe a blog is just the platform for you.

Yes, you construct your strategy before choosing your channels, but don’t feel obligated to be active on every channel that your customer uses. The international travel magazine, Monocle, has just a print magazine. No iPad version. No Facebook page. It works for the magazine and its readers.

Sometimes simple and focused is better.

5. Subscribers rule

If I have one regret as a content marketer, it’s that I didn’t focus early enough on generating subscribers. It took us years of experimenting, but we finally found our “Moneyball number:” the subscriber. We’ve found that once someone is a subscriber, they do different things than non-subscribers that lead to more revenue for us. Instead of converting from content to an immediate sales opportunity, we’ve found that converting from content to more content is the best way (for us). (For more on subscribers, please check out these outstanding reports from ExactTarget — a great example of content marketing, as well.)

6. The smaller the niche the better, but being distinct is a must

Content marketing works best when you target a very specific group of people with a very specific story. The smaller the niche you choose, the better. Think about it this way: In what content area can you become the leading expert in the world? If you can name five organizations or people already focusing on that area, you may want to start telling a different story, rather than just telling the same one in an incrementally better way.

7. Public speaking fans the flames

Public speaking is almost always overlooked in content distribution strategies. Yet, few tactics spread your message as effectively and powerfully as having a compelling speaker share inspirational stories about your brand around the globe. Look at the greatest content creators out there — such as SAP, Kraft, and Cisco Systems. Each of these organizations has multiple people out sharing their stories in public industry forums.

Find and groom storytellers in your organization, and start working on getting speaking opportunities for them at industry events. When you do, share these public speaking tips with them.

8. With a solid strategy, content can be as easy as shooting big fish in a small barrel

Over the past year, I’ve spoken to more than 5,000 marketers about content marketing. Easily, fewer than 10 percent of these people had developed a documented content strategy. I’m serious.

That is why we are seeing so much horrible content out there. Marketers are filling buckets (channels) without clearly thinking about why they should be doing so.

Simply put, if you develop even a simple strategy for your content marketing, and give some thought to how that strategy should integrate with the rest of your marketing plan, you can, and probably will, dominate. While everyone else is lost in the woods, you’ll already be on the path to greatness.

9. Coordination is critical

About a year ago, I met with the email marketing manager for a large travel company. She was responsible for sending millions of emails a day — some sales-focused and some educational — to their database. I wondered how she coordinated her content activity with their social media content creation, so I asked her. She told me that she had yet to meet the person who oversees content in social media, but she planned on doing so soon.

Unfortunately, this is the rule, rather than the exception, in most organizations.

We don’t know what the structure of marketing departments will look like the future, but for right now, collaboration and coordination is key. For example, SAS holds weekly meetings with the key content ambassadors from the different silos. Lattice Engines uses enterprise social networking service Yammer to coordinate work across multiple teams. Find what works for you, but you’ll find that a little coordination on the front end will save you a ton of time and resources.

10. Content marketing works with — not against — other initiatives

This is essential, so let me repeat it: Content marketing works best when it’s conceived as an integral part of your marketing initiatives, rather than having to function in isolation. So many people out there feel it’s an either/or scenario. It’s not. You don’t necessarily stop advertising because you are launching a content platform like Procter & Gamble’s Home Made Simple or American Express’ Open Forum. In fact, those are two great examples of how paid promotion can expand the reach of epic content.

Content marketing is like butter: It makes all your marketing recipes come out that much better.

For more strategic advice on content marketing best practices, read “Managing Content Marketing” by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi.

Microformats are small inserts of code that make it possible to create meta data, which can be understood by machines to help pre-populate data on media sources like Facebook and Google. This allows marketers to optimize their branded content and offer richer website content experiences to those who are exposed to them on social networks.

In his iconic presentation, “The Awesome Power of Microformats,” Kevin Lawver said that with microformats, “You can create more consistent content. You can share your microformat with content providers, ensuring that you’ll get content in the right format [and] you don’t need to DO anything to that content before you present it to users.”

This gives publishers the potential to maintain control over their content’s visibility and message long after they have hit the publish button by establishing a standard for the way social media networks will display that content. Search engines have also gotten in on the act, using their own microformats to display rich snippets in search engine results pages (SERPs) and incorporate semantic search elements, such as Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Google Authorship and rel=”author”

What it does: As you may have heard a million times, search engines have begun to display authorship within SERPs, helping marketers to improve their click-through rates (CTRs) and, potentially, get better rankings from Google.

Using the link relation attribute tag, rel=”author” within a link tells search engines that the page is authored by a particular person, thus allowing their Google Authorship status to display in SERPs. In addition, should the fabled AuthorRank verification someday come to pass, this signature should also enable enhanced search rankings for the author.

How to use it: Implementation of Google Authorship ranges from the breathtakingly simple to the needlessly difficult. But the best process I’ve found is to use a signature (similar to the one that I am using in my bio for this post) signalling the Google+ page of the author, like so:

If you don’t know your Google+ page identity (i.e., the long string of numbers in the URL above), just sign into your Google account, and click on View Profile in the drop-down menu next to your profile picture in the upper right-hand corner — your ID number will appear in the URL of the profile page that opens.

(For those who are interested in learning more advanced methods, I’d highly recommend checking out Steve Morgan’s slides and screencast.)

rel=”publisher”

What it does: The tag rel=”publisher” is a slightly different beast than its rel=”author” cousin. Though this code also functions within Google’s search environment, it uses a completely different format for meta-content delivery.

rel=”publisher” creates a rich code snippet that displays marketing content and information drawn from a content creator’s Google+ network. Businesses can benefit from this as it allows them to own more of the search space surrounding their brands.

A rich snippet, like the example above, shows searchers your social activity and allows them to click through to follow you as part of their search experience.

How to use it: Implementation of rel=”publisher” is a pretty straightforward affair. It is a simple meta tag that sits within the <head> section of your website’s HTML code. Simply add <link href=”Google+ URL” rel=”publisher”> to the <head> code of your home page. Again, in place of “Google+ URL” above, you would include your own Google profile page URL.

Below is an example of how we have implemented the tag at Box UK:

Though there is still some debate around whether this tag should be a site-wide addition, the home page should be sufficient for our purposes of branding SERPs.

Twitter cards

What they do: Twitter introduced its Twitter card format last year, allowing brands and publishers to enhance the expanded tweets Twitter creates for their content (similar to the way Open Graph tags provide content creators with the ability to determine what their posts and pages will look like when shared on Facebook).

A recent study by Omoii found that Twitter cards users experienced increases in both click-through rates and engagement (in the form of retweets) with their content: Click-through rates from tweet to post averaged 3 percent with Twitter cards (compared to 1.6 percent without), and engagement rate increased from 27 percent of tweets to 59 percent.

By providing richer data within the content you distribute across your social networks, you can better “sell” that content to the end user in a more scalable manner than ever before.

How to use it: To sign up, follow the three steps noted on Twitter’s developer site:

1. Review the documentation for the type of card you want to implement.
2. Add the pertinent meta tags to your page.
3. Put your URLs into the validator tool to check for errors and request to be approved.

It may take a few weeks to be verified by Twitter, but it is getting faster all the time.

Facebook Open Graph

What it does: When a Facebook user “likes” or shares the URL for a piece of content on Facebook, its Open Graph protocol takes that data and uses it to create the title, description, image, and other attributes that comprise the structured information displayed about that page. This is pulled from the page from information set within the <head> code that defines what each data point should be.

Facebook’s Open Graph is probably the most useful mark-up for social sharing, not only because a billion pieces of content are shared every day via Facebook’s Open Graph, but also because Twitter and Google+ both default to Open Graph data when their own specific tags aren’t being used.

How to use it: For content marketers who use WordPress, the brilliant Yoast WordPress SEO plug-in allows you to implement both Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Cards in a very user-friendly manner. But for those of you whose content publishing efforts rely on hard coding, the process for implementing Open Graph is a bit more complex and may be best left to your webmaster or IT department (though the tech-savvy among you can check out Alex Moss’ post, and take a look at the documentation from Facebook for additional guidance).

Once you are up and running, you can check that you have implemented the mark-up correctly by using a program like the OG debugger to pull up any issues with the code.

How are you managing your brand’s message online? Have you taken microformats on board? I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions in the comments below.

For more tips on implementing the latest optimization tips in your content marketing efforts, read CMI’s Content Marketing Playbook.

Cover image via Bigstock

But developing valuable content from an event requires a ton of  content planning — especially when it comes to producing video content. Yet, it’s worth the extra effort because video footage can result in lasting, memorable, and easily shareable takeaways for event attendees.

Great video content is damn hard to create — particularly for those who don’t have much production experience. Hiring an expert is often the best way to produce high quality content without having to wrestle with the technical details on your own. But even if your video content plan involves outsourcing the work, it helps to have an approach in mind for your event-based video content before you (or your selected vendor) jump in.

I recently spoke with Eric Leslie, President of OnScene Productions and the man behind the lens at events like Content Marketing World. He shared the five most powerful lessons that he’s learned through his years of experience in video production.

Lesson 1: To extend the value of your footage, make your content evergreen

It’s easy to fall into a timing trap when you’re filming an event. Maybe you want to showcase the fun that attendees had in order to attract more audience members to next year’s event. Or maybe you feel the videos you produce will need context from the event in order to provide value (e.g., “Here’s what happened at this event on this date”).

“For many organizations, that first instinct is to do an event recap video,” Eric explains. “If you take that approach, you time-stamp your content. You give your audience the details, including when the video was created. The problem is that the web moves so fast your videos are dated in a matter of months.”

Your audience is eager to learn about the things that are happening next. So even if your content still provides value five years down the road, your audience will likely dismiss it as being too old to still be relevant. So, how do you create video content from event footage that people will still talk about and get value from two or three years down the road?

The solution: Create a content plan for your videos that eliminates the need to time-stamp your footage yet still extends the shelf life of your footage online:

“We’ll do things like asking a keynote speaker to summarize her presentation, talking directly to the camera,” Eric says. “You condense the presentation into this two-minute video, overlaying visuals of the actual conference speech. The piece is no longer just about the event — it’s about the valuable, longer lasting content that came out of the event.”

Example: Eric interviewed a few marketers and created this video about influencer marketing, which is an evergreen topic in content marketing.

Lesson 2: Don’t miss a prime opportunity to tell a story

Does your event video content plan center on collecting raw footage from presentations or networking sessions? If so, you may be missing the point: The most successful videos tell compelling stories.

Sure, how-to videos have their place. That talk that got a standing ovation? It makes sense to share it with audience members who weren’t lucky enough to attend. But the real bang for your buck — the truly powerful content — lies in video that shows, rather than telling.

So how do you make your event footage tell a story?

The solution: Sit your customers down, and let them talk to the camera.

“You have all your customers in one place, convened to talk about your products and industry trends,” Eric says. “We’re talking about a prime opportunity to collect testimonials. Sit them down in front of the camera, and ask them how your products help them do their jobs better.”

Everyone has a story. It’s your job to take the opportunity to collect those stories and add them to your content arsenal.

Example: One challenge content marketers have is managing the entire process. CMI invited a few brand marketers to participate in a roundtable, in which they discussed what’s working — and where they are still being challenged.

Lesson 3: Put great minds together and they’ll repay you with great footage

Candid participants make the best subjects for event video. But without a more specific context, how do you find strong themes to tie candid footage together into segments?

Eric elaborates: “Event marketers often ask, ‘How do we create content that has more purpose to it?’ It helps to have a plan going in so you can manufacture an environment with the potential to catch lightning in a bottle.”

How do you ensure that candid footage has a clear purpose?

The solution: Put customers and experts together for a roundtable, throw in a moderator, and watch your video come to life.

Organizing a roundtable of experts or customers is a great way to capture explosive content. Focus the discussion around a thought leadership topic (such as “the future of the industry” or “your daily challenges”). Encourage roundtable participants to share stories and experience, but appoint a moderator to make sure the conversation stays on track, and your result will be valuable, evergreen video content. An added bonus is that at an industry or customer event, you already have plenty of potential participants on hand all in one place, so you don’t need to spend additional budget on flying them across the country to take part in your videos — an advantage that you can’t afford to pass up.

Example: CMI works with several consultants. At last year’s Content Marketing World conference, CMI filmed those consultants as they gathered to discuss recent CMI research on content marketing trends. The ensuing roundtable discussion on B2B content marketing research was broken into five segments (and posts), each focusing on a specific topic.

Lesson 4: Produce video content for the event — not just from it

People love fresh content. We’re always looking for that new video to share with friends and contacts. And if you can debut that content exclusively, your audience will be more compelled to share it.

So how do you create ultra-fresh, exclusive content related to your event?

The solution: Create video content in advance for use during the event, and incorporate some on-site footage or B-roll to add the fresh factor.

“We’ll create a ‘thank you’ video from tech support because they couldn’t make it to the conference, for example,” Eric explains. “We’ll run that the first day. We’ll also get some footage of a CEO talking about the state of the industry and his vision for the future. Overlay visuals of people interacting at the conference, and you have a timely piece of content.”

The real-time turnaround helps with the event experience, giving attendees the opportunity to see themselves on the big screen. This approach also takes the need to stay evergreen into account. You can also repurpose your footage across various online channels by using the visuals you filmed at of the event in a new context.

Example: Below is a video Eric created with some highlights from Content Marketing World 2012, which was included in a CMI blog post as a wrap-up that posted during the event.

Lesson 5: If you want high-quality video content, be prepared to go the extra mile

Today, everyone’s a critic. Your audience consumes so much video that, in a way, they’re experts on video quality.

The truth is that your audience can tell the difference between half-assed content and video that goes all the way. Done poorly, your video can even have the opposite of your intended effect, alienating your audience by seeming lazy.

Low-quality video usually derives from an overloaded video team — or in some cases, an individual.

“When I got started, it was a one-man show,” Eric says. “Of course you’re going to make mistakes filming an entire event by yourself — I’ve worked from 7 a.m. until 3 a.m. I’ve missed footage… and you don’t get any do-overs.”

How do you make sure you get your event videos right?

The solution: Do it right, or don’t do it at all.

One of the biggest mistakes event marketers make is skimping on the budget. If you don’t pay for quality, then you won’t get it.

“If you want to do it right, make the investment,” Eric says. And he’s right: You get what you pay for. Why would you accept anything less than the highest quality content?

Bonus lesson: Experiment, but have a plan

I also talked with Michele Linn, who oversees the content at CMI, including the videos they capture at CMW. She has been working with Eric since the first CMW event in 2011, and they are currently making plans for this year’s Content Marketing World event in September. One of the recommendations she has is to be as detailed with your planning as possible. “Last year, my goal was to capture a lot of video footage at CMW so we could use it throughout the year. While this seemed like a good idea in theory, it proved to be very difficult to manage. So, this year we are being very specific about what types of video we will capture and are placing specific deadlines for each piece. This helps both Eric and me plan much better.”

The solution: Have a plan, but be flexible. Even though plans are crucial, Michele stresses that it’s an evolving process. “It’s been enjoyable working with Eric because he’s been open to trying different formats. While the first year we captured short videos, we expanded into roundtables last year, which were longer-form pieces. These pieces performed well, and we’ll be focused on that format, as well as some new possibilities, this year.”

In addition to having a specific content plan about what videos to create and when they will be delivered, Michele also suggests transcribing all of the video footage so it can easily be edited. Even if you do not use all footage in video form, you can use it in text format or read it to be inspired with other ideas.

Share your story

Have success or horror stories from recording video at an event? We would love to hear about them in the comments.

Looking for a great opportunity to create event-based video content using the ideas in this post? Register today to attend Content Marketing World 2013. 

Look inside first

As Joe pointed out, one of the expanding areas of responsibility is human resources (HR) and internal marketing. But many companies fall short on doing a good job of communicating with their own employees, let alone extending their brand storytelling to those they hope to recruit.

If our primary goal is to own content niches, online and off, then we have to enable employees to help tell our brand story. It’s true, customers have relationships with people, not brands. Thus, content marketing has a tremendous opportunity to ensure that customer-facing staff members understand what makes their company unique.

Employees are more than brand ambassadors; they’re promise keepers. They’re the ones who have to bring to life the promises we make in our content programs, lead-nurturing campaigns, PR efforts, and the brand storytelling efforts we distribute through all marketing channels.

If we thought of supporting HR as a way to recruit the best people to deliver on our brand promises, would we be more proactive in working with them?

In order to have the right people on hand to tell the right brand story, we have to find and hire those “right people.” That means sharing our companies’ value and perspective consistently across all channels — not just to reach customers, but to reach prospective employees, as well. We need to consider the HR perspective when we work on top-of-funnel awareness. The stories that matter to customers also matter to the rock stars we want to recruit, and should include ideas such as culture, leadership, challenge, and growth.

To make this easy, think of the content marketing hourglass (shown above) that Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi describe in their book, “Managing Content Marketing,” as a way to connect with and retain employees. There needs to be a well-thought out process that identifies the right kind of people (personas), defines their potential role within the organization (segmentation), and understands how to nurture them and convert them to employees.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Many employers think of the process of converting a recruit to an employee the same as the conversion of a girlfriend/boyfriend to a wife/husband — once they sign on the dotted line, the romance goes away, and they’re left on their own to deal with everyday life.

Create tangible expressions of your story

Happy, long marriages prevail when both sides understand the importance of communication and teamwork in how they create their story together.

Motorola Solutions serves as an example of how to do it right. In January 2011, Motorola split into two companies — B2B brand Motorola Solutions and consumer-facing Motorola Mobility (which was subsequently purchased by Google). Leadership had prepared for the separation for more than two years — on one Friday, employees went home as employees of one company, and on the following Monday, they returned to two separate businesses.

Over that weekend, Motorola Solutions physically rebranded 30 of its facilities worldwide, so when employees walked in, they saw evidence of their new brand story already coming to life. The company spent the rest of 2011 integrating the brand promise into the culture of the company and helping employees understand how to tell it to the outside world.

It’s not unusual for a company’s story to lack credibility with employees. If your story accurately reflects your company as it stands today, then employees will more easily engage in telling it. And if you’re trying to change the story you tell, then employees will need tangible evidence of that change — recruitment, recognition, rewards — before they begin to believe. Marketing needs to help them feel proud to represent their employers — because we need them to tell our story as a cohesive, unified team.

Protect your investments

Why should a customer do business with a company when even its own employees can’t explain what makes it different? And if the experience that customers have when interacting with your employees doesn’t match up with the stories you are telling, it won’t matter how much you invest in external marketing efforts to project a positive brand image.

We talk about consistency in channels when reaching customers, yet we turn around and talk to employees with a glut of homogeneous messages.

Back to Joe and Robert’s hourglass, I urge the content marketing industry to lead the charge on getting creative about engaging with employees in order to move them from satisfied to brand evangelists. Will a company intranet and an annual town hall meeting cut it? We live in an instant, real-time world, and it may be time to consider enterprise social network tools such as Yammer and Socialcast. Even Google+ supports internal hangouts and allows people to post only within their organizations. Companies that have nontraditional, hard-to-reach employees — like healthcare organizations, oil rig workers, or tech teams — have begun to develop bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies, so employees can connect using their mobile device of choice.

Creating alignment is hard work, and it’s time consuming. But it’s critical that we get employees excited about our story. They have to believe it because, ultimately, they’re the ones who will be sharing it.

Now, tell us your story. How do you recruit and engage employees so you can create promise keepers?

Learn more about the practices content marketers should be following to advance our industry by attending Carla Johnson‘s presentation at Content Marketing World 2013.  

Cover image ©2013 Spider Trainers. Used with permission.

I used to manage a large creative team, and on a regular basis we had to generate ideas for content marketing projects. Content marketing is driven by fantastic concepts, so if you work in this field you’re very likely to spend a lot of time doing the same.

Like most organizations, brainstorms were our primary means of creating content ideas. Generally we found what we were looking for, but occasionally we would come up against a brick wall and find ourselves completely unable to generate a great concept for a specific project. 

I like to call this situation “creative hell,” where the pressure to find a content idea collides with your ability to generate one. Whenever we reached this point, the creative juices stopped flowing, and each of us experienced various levels of exhaustion, frustration, and defeat.

Why creative hell exists

Creative hell exists for one very simple reason: We are all imperfect.

Your company may be full of creative people bursting with fun content creation ideas; yet sometimes, for whatever reason, inspiration will be elusive and you’ll find yourself struggling to think of new ideas. But when you’ve committed to content marketing, you know you will need to persevere until you break out of creative hell. Here are six steps that will help you do just that.

Step 1: Walk away

If you are currently in the middle of a marathon brainstorm that’s lasted two hours or more, do yourself a favor: Stand up and walk out of the room.

In my experience, the best content brainstorms last 30 to 45 minutes, and anything over an hour is unproductive. So give yourself some space, think about something aside from the task at hand and get away from the people you’ve been working with. Come back later with a fresh mind and some perspective, and try again.

Step 2: Lighten the mood

Brainstorming is meant to be fun, and you will get your best results when the room is full of positive energy and creativity. Provide a supportive environment and participants will lose their fear and inhibitions and will be more likely to share their ideas. And the more people are willing to contribute, the more productive your brainstorm session is likely to be.

However, even a positive environment can get tense when the pressure is on to create content; and if the creative juices just aren’t flowing, you may notice participants getting frustrated, quiet, and sullen. To keep the mood light, go ahead and change the tone in the room: Bring in a treat (for some reason I’ve found croissants always work), watch a silly video on YouTube together, or move the meeting outside if it’s a sunny day. A happy brainstorm is a productive brainstorm.

Step 3: Search for inspiration

The internet is full of content. Some of it is wonderful, some of it is horrible, and the vast majority falls somewhere in between. There’s absolutely no shame in using this body of work to your advantage, so try this simple exercise:

• Find three pieces of great content that are in some way related to your content creation project.
• Find three pieces of stupendously awful content that are similarly related to your project.
• As a team, write down one factor that makes each awesome piece incredible, and one factor that makes each bad piece horrific.

You’ll be left with three factors that lead to great content, and three that make you want to cause physical damage to yourself. Now apply this to your own subject matter, and find ways to incorporate the things you love into one idea, while eschewing what you hate.

Step 4: Call for help

Even the most creative people need help from time to time, and you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for it. If you’ve tried everything and still can’t think of a good idea, it’s time to get more people involved. Go to your boss, another department, your significant other, your friends, your parents… anyone who will listen to you. Great ideas can come from unlikely sources, and there’s no telling what your network might come up with.

Beyond that, the act of explaining your creative problem to outsiders will help you gain perspective — an invaluable vantage point when you’ve gotten too close to a subject. Taking a step back and explaining what’s going on to someone else can help you find your way back to creative productivity.

Step 5: Examine your process

If your work involves consistently creating content ideas, then you need to develop a process to manage that task. It will help you achieve consistent results and ensure that brainstorm sessions are as efficient and productive as possible.

Your content creation process will likely vary according to the size and type of organization you work in, but at a minimum, it should include these basics:

• Setting a goal: Determine the objectives of the project and communicate them to the group.
• Analysis: Determine the type of content that is likely to achieve the project’s goals (this can include competitor analysis, audience analysis etc.).
• Determining your media: Select the media (blog posts, infographics, etc.) for your content ideas, based on how practical it will be to produce them given the resources available (time, budget, etc.).
• Brainstorming: Generate ideas with a group of at least three people for no more than an hour at a time.
• Testing: Sample potential ideas with members of the audience, coworkers, friends, etc., and note their reactions to help you determine which ideas are more likely to receive a favorable response from your target audience.

If you aren’t getting the results you desire from your ideation process, it may be time to make some changes to one or more of these components. Let’s take the goal-setting stage as an example. The purpose of this stage is to ensure that every potential idea coming out of your brainstorm fulfills the project’s core objectives. If the ideas you are generating don’t pass this test, look to give goal setting greater emphasis when you re-start your brainstorm.

Examine every stage of your process in this way and see what changes you may need to help focus everyone’s thinking on the right content ideas — not just any content ideas. Don’t be afraid to switch things up — sometimes the tiniest procedural changes can improve the tone of your entire brainstorm.

Step 6: Persevere

At the end of the day there is no surefire way to break free from creative hell. The only respite is to find that perfect idea and no amount of croissants or procedural changes can magically procure it for you. The simple solution is to persevere — keep your patience and keep working until you find what you’re looking for.

On the bright side, inspiration is often just around the corner. In my experience the really great ideas take work, and sometimes you need to suffer a bit for them: There’s no better feeling than emerging from the depths of creative hell with a truly fantastic idea.

Want more ideas to help get your content creation juices flowing? Read CMI’s Content Marketing Playbook. 

For example, during the day, we use expressions such as “core competencies” (meaning: “what we’re good at“), “best of breed” (are we talking about show dogs?), and “ideate” (as opposed to “think?”).

After work, those of us who are parents attend school meetings, where educators tell us (with straight faces) that we must improve “enrichment processes to elevate engagement structures.” Translated from jargon into English (you know, the language we send our kids to school to learn to use properly and clearly), this means: “We need to do a better job of keeping our kids interested in class.”

I’ve even taken part in a lively debate over whether content marketers, too, are guilty of resorting to jargon to describe what we do, in an attempt to mystify work that is (let’s face it) not exactly as complex as quantum physics. 

At our firm, we recently ran a radio campaign that poked gentle fun at the abundance of jargon clutter that muddles messaging within the tech industry (our target market). Take the ubiquitous use of the phrase, “the cloud.” Depending upon which tech type you’re chatting with, the cloud is nothing more than the internet and/or an internal network that your company oversees. Calling it “the cloud,” however, seems little more than an attempt to make it sound lofty and mysterious. (I loved it when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison famously dismissed the term as “complete gibberish.”)

Think of the truly powerful content and marketing campaigns — the instant classics we still talk about. Did a single one establish a powerful bond with audiences through jargon? Dodge Ram earned raves for its “So God Made a Farmer” Super Bowl ad, with the late Paul Harvey‘s words so brilliantly describing the farmer tending to a dying colt, and refusing to “cut corners” as he plowed. It forged a powerful, emotional bond with viewers, projecting a dedication to the principles of integrity and commitment — the exact message you want to hear from an auto manufacturer. The same could be said for Chrysler’s Super Bowl ad from 2011, which featured rap artist Eminem and forged a memorable association between the company’s vehicles and the resilience of hardscrabble Detroit through the honest, simple phrasing of its core message: “This is what we do.”

Still, opinions on jargon overall remain fiercely divided. On the one side, jargon-philes stuff their content marketing with enough arcane, manufactured twaddle to fill a landfill. On the other, diehard defenders of the English language self-righteously insist on banning any and all jargon-speak and buzzwords.

The veteran journalist in me leans more toward the latter side of this equation; but my inner content marketing director realizes that “zero tolerance” isn’t realistic. In coming up with on-point messaging for our clients, there are a number of jargony-sounding terms that are commonly accepted within the tech/B2B community and serve a useful purpose. “Highly scalable,” for example, may sound like babbling nonsense to a lay person. But to a marketer, it clearly conveys an essential quality for tech solutions that serve today’s ever-expanding enterprises.

But even those of us who reluctantly turn to jargon as an occasional, yet necessary evil will admit that, sometimes, we go a bit overboard — and other times, we go way overboard. So much so that Forbes recently produced an amusing, March Madness-styled bracket competition for the all-time most annoying business jargon.

Image via Forbes.com

You can’t create powerful content on a foundation of jargon

To avoid self-parody, many content marketing folks will coax clients into at least minimizing the presence of jargon in the content they create, explaining that an excess of it will bury and/or confuse the message. In fact, Sarah Skerik, PR Newswire’s Vice President of Social Media, even contends that creating jargon-filled content is a risky move, strategy-wise. For starters, she says, it hurts SEO because users search for terms that reflect the way people speak. Skerik also makes the case that these phrases are boring and can hurt a business’ credibility, which damages its content’s potential to earn page views and a strong following amongst users.

She makes a fairly compelling case, to which I’ll add the following arguments that have convinced some of my content marketing peers:

• Jargon overload implies you don’t know your topic as well as you should: That’s right. The overuse of jargon and worn buzzwords is a crutch; a convenient Get Out of Jail Free card played when you really don’t have a knowledgeable command of your topic. Like Avis, successful content marketers “try harder” by taking on often-exhaustive research and (gently) pushing the client to demystify the subject at hand.

• It conveys you have nothing new to say: When you send a press release, post a blog, write an ad, and/or submit an executive-bylined article packed with empty, trite phrases, it immediately tells the target audience that you have no fresh insights to offer. So why would they want to read it, much less share it via social media?

• It means you’re playing it too safe: Look, we all know that not every client is cut out to play the contrarian; some company cultures overtly discourage it. But give me a client who’s eager to stir some waves by making well-reasoned statements that challenge conventional wisdom, and I’ll know I have the potential to craft a very impactful piece. When we’re resigned to “just keep it safe,” we resort to lots of jargon to make the content sound smarter than it really is.

• Because a lot of this stuff is “made up”: OK, time for my “emperor has no clothes” moment. Here’s a revelation: The vast majority of jargony language and buzzwords are pretty much made up by folks out there seeking to emerge as the Next Great Guru of their respective industries. The problem is that this sort of manufactured, pasteurized, and processed speech tends to get passed along eagerly by disciples, and often achieves universal, unchallenged acceptance. As communicators, we should politely call out the sheer ridiculousness of some of these terms before they have a chance to spread like avian flu.

However, winning over our content marketing colleagues will only go so far in addressing the problem if our clients aren’t also buying in. To address that goal, I’ve gathered a few thoughts from other content marketers:

• Take baby steps: As I wrote in a recent CMI post, Beth Tomkiw, Executive Vice President and Chief Creative Officer at McMurry/TMG, seeks out talented pros who bring serious journalism chops to the table. She feels it’s a great way for creating content that actually says something, while skillfully avoiding empty, tired terminology. Suffice to say, journalists generally “get” this need.

As for the jargon-dropping client? That’s a different story. So it’s best to gradually build up trust over time, Tomkiw says.

To get there, she hires journalists whose bylines have graced the same industry publications which the client reads — and would like to get placed in: “When you’ve proven to them that you are hiring the very best writers who absolutely understand their ‘space,’ you establish instant credibility,” Tomkiw says. “They respect you, and will buy into your recommendations to strip away the arcane and focus on making a real connection through honest language.” Clearly, the formula works. Tomkiw has lead her custom-content company to multiple, prestigious awards, most recently the Gold Pearl from the Custom Content Council for best overall editorial of the year, for Amtrak’s Arrive magazine. (Full disclosure: I previously served as a regular Arrive cover story contributor.)

• Get down to business: If you’re dealing with successful client executives, why not convince them through giants in their field? A tech client could be persuaded by presenting examples of the signature direct, accessible style of the late Steve Jobs. (Just try finding a shred of jargon in his famous 2005 Stanford graduation speech.) Susan Weiner, who produces content marketing for investment companies, also cites one of the true icons in this space: Warren Buffett. “I tell them no one accuses Buffet of being unsophisticated or boring,” she says. “But he uses plain English.”

• Go cold turkey: Nadine Keller boldly urges clients to stop using trite terminology in their daily conversations: “If you don’t use it on the inside, you won’t on the outside,” explains Keller, who runs Precision Sales Coaching, a sales/marketing coaching and training firm. “I’ll host workshops in which we ask attendees to identify three examples of the jargon they use, and replace them. It gets a lot of laughs, and we’ll award a prize to whomever comes up with the best examples.”

• Define and conquer: Quintain Marketing CEO Kathleen Booth strives for a “meet you halfway” approach. She often encourages her engineering/construction clients to post a glossary of frequently used terms with definitions on their websites, should they insist upon using them. “We’ll use keyword research tool analysis, as well, to pinpoint what terms the desired audience is using,” Booth says. “Or we’ll search discussion groups and show when a word or phrase isn’t being used in discussing the company’s products or services.”

• Offer teachable moments: Dow Media Group Founder/President Leigh Dow convinces clients by appealing to their inner teacher, as audiences often consume content as a learning tool. Staying with this analogy, think of jargon as the ineffective professor who frustrated you by speaking in what seemed to be a foreign language. “Instead of going this route, demonstrate to them the impact of pieces or blogs that are more instructional in nature,” Dow says. “Show them how using ‘real’ examples really helps make a connection, especially if it’s highly relatable. Instead of relying solely on an esoteric unit of measurement, for example, we’ll compare something described in micrometers as ‘having a certain thickness of human hair.’”

• Emphasize bottom-line thinking: Ultimately, you can win the jargon argument by starting at the end, rather than the beginning. “We drive toward getting the client to determine what they want people to do with their message,” says Joanne Y. Cleaver, President of Wilson-Taylor Associates. “Do they want them to buy something? Or understand something better? Focus on intended effect and then back it up with simple steps. What does the audience need to understand to respond as you hope? What do you have to say that’s so important that they must know it? This is how you drill down to a core, compelling message which invokes action.”

So before you reach for jargon when you create content, ask yourself questions like, “What message am I trying to communicate here?” “Will my target audience find it both relatable and compelling, or am I resorting to jargon as a crutch because I don’t honestly know what I’m attempting to say?” Or, even worse, “Am I inventing made-up language to create what can be promptly dismissed as pseudo science?”

If the answer to that last question is “yes,” then you’ll risk allowing jargon overload to defeat the purpose of the content by undermining the messaging campaign. An influential teacher inspires desired outcomes from students (i.e., acquired knowledge) by demystifying the unknown. As content marketing professionals, we should push ourselves — and our clients — toward this same standard.

For more content creation ideas that don’t rely on jargon to convey a message, read CMI’s Ultimate eGuide: 100 Content Marketing Examples. 

Cover image via Bigstock

In general, the research is directly on target with what CMI is seeing with the clients we work with in an advisory capacity. It also aligns well with our annual B2B and B2C content marketing research. Here are the key takeaways I think are most interesting for enterprise content marketers today.

Marketing is siloed

Content responsibility and oversight tends to be both reactive and highly fragmented, as illustrated below in the figure below. This highly typical diagram portrays how one major retail brand divides up content responsibilities between divisions that are not necessarily interconnected or in regular communication with one another. This fragmented approach leads to inconsistent messaging; huge variations in voice, tone, brand and messaging; and an inconsistent customer experience. The channel divisions themselves tend to be ad hoc, assigned primarily on the basis of hand-raising rather than any overarching content strategy.

Image via Altimeter Group on Flickr

CMI’s take: Rebecca speaks to the siloed nature of marketing, which is something I recently covered a bit in my post on getting beyond the disillusionment of content marketing. To add a bit more context, most enterprise marketing groups we talk with are more frustrated with the process than they are with the content or the people. In our experience, many organizations believe they have the content and capability to create great content in narrow pockets. But, they lack confidence in their ability to align with and scale to the level they need to be at from a process standpoint.

There is more than one model to develop content

The overwhelming majority of organizations don’t have content divisions in their organizational charts. Very few have staff with the word ‘content’ or ‘editor’ in their title. Only nine of the brands interviewed for this report have made explicit content hires (i.e., titles such as ‘editor,’ or those that contain the word ‘content’).

To align and enable efficient, coordinated, cost-effective, and strategic content strategy, creation, and production, companies/brands must organize for content. Band-Aid solutions neither scale nor will work, except in the very short term.

Yet, creating a content department and bringing on costly senior talent are not always immediately feasible. Altimeter Group has identified the following enterprise models for governing the orchestration of content within organizations. The model any enterprise selects is determined by many factors — ranging from budget to the types and volume of content produced — which is why it’s important to stress these models are not hierarchical. Rather, each affords a more systematic, cohesive, and strategic approach to content marketing than what is provided by the current “adhocracy” models prevalent in most organizations.

Image via Altimeter Group on Flickr

CMI’s take: The Altimeter research accurately suggests a few models that all have their pros and cons. Our experience is that many successful enterprises “find” their appropriate model — as opposed to “constructing” it. For companies that take content marketing seriously, they experiment a lot. Traditional marketing roles are modified, new roles are created, and processes that start out as “pockets” of excellence are often codified later. For example, the social team may be having regular editorial meetings, keeping a calendar, aligning with the marketing strategy, and so forth, but the rest of the marketing team has no idea this is going on.

Finding your way (rather than constructing it) can be chaotic, but it’s also a productive method of getting to something that scales. Creating a “Content Center of Excellence,” which is one of the models identified by Altimeter, is ultimately a way for enterprise-wide management to recognize that content is a strategic asset that deserves to be managed as such. Once this is recognized, the actual governance and reporting structure can more easily be achieved.

Brands need to organize content marketing at both a tactical and strategic level

Organizing for content is both a strategic and tactical undertaking. Businesses that fail to seriously evaluate how and where content fits strategically and operationally within their organizations will suffer in the short term as they strive to continue to create content without cohesion. They will be at a greater disadvantage in the months and years ahead, as content demands accelerate in terms of owned content and converged content hybrids in social media and advertising.

CMI’s take: Taking both a tactical and strategic view is, again, definitely one of the best practices that we see — and it’s one of the biggest things that gets “fixed” when organizations build a newer, more holistic content marketing plan. Strategy and plan come first, as these are arguably the most important pieces. Joe Pulizzi touched on this in his post, 4 Truths About Content Marketing Agencies, and it’s something that agencies are now (hopefully) starting to build into their methodologies.

Training for content marketing is key

Organizations interviewed for this report don’t have formal training programs dedicated to content staff. Rather, they hire experience (journalists, and also videographers, designers, etc.). Another model is to train outside of marketing, teaching sales, product, and customer groups how to recognize stories and write in the brand voice.

CMI’s take: As the Altimeter research suggests, if an organization wants to create content on a consistent basis, one of the essential elements it needs to consider is training. We couldn’t agree more. At CMI, we’ve recently merged consulting and training because we recognize how tightly integrated a training program becomes, not only for individual practitioners, but also for the business itself. For many enterprises, content marketing is a new muscle, and as such, there are needs for initial training of groups, individual training for practitioners, and ongoing coaching to help it respond to changes in the marketplace.

Creating a process and model around content marketing is something that is evolving. I’d love to hear what model you are using or what questions you have. What has your experience been? Let me know in the comments.

For more information on how to structure your organization to manage content marketing, download CMI’s Content Marketing Framework: 7 Building Blocks to Success.

OpenView Labs

I average about three speeches a week revolving around the topic of content marketing. At every one of those events I ask, “How many of you have a documented content marketing strategy?” That answer has never been more than 20 percent, and usually just a few hands are raised.

Think about that for a minute. Content creation and distribution is booming. We’ve never seen brands more active in developing content to attract and retain customers. Our latest research tells us that more than one in every four marketing dollars is spent on a content marketing initiative. Yet, almost no one has a concrete strategy for the deployment of those content assets.

(I’m virtually shaking my head.)

“Creating more content” was cited as the biggest challenge for content marketers in 2013. But without a content strategy of some kind, you simply don’t know if that’s true. How can more content fix your problem when you have no concrete plan? It’s like building a house with no architectural plans.

So, we are going back to basics here. Expert content marketers with defined and working strategies can skip this article. For the other 90 percent of you, all I ask is that you start thinking about some of the steps below before creating any more content.

1. Start with “why”

With content marketing, there are a number of possible business goals you can have. A few to consider are:

• Lead conversion and nurturing: How you define a lead will vary; but from a content marketing perspective, a lead is when you have (through the exchange of engaging content) encouraged someone to give up enough information about themselves that you now have permission to “market” to them. This can include signing up for a “demo,” registering for an event, subscribing to your eNewsletter, or gaining access to your resource center. Once you have the prospect’s permission, you can use content to help move them through the buying cycle.
• Customer loyalty/retention: Just like you have a planned lead nurturing process to turn prospects into customers, you also need a planned customer retention strategy. If your ultimate goal is to turn customers into passionate subscribers who share your stories, this area needs major attention. Options may be a customer eNewsletter or printed newsletter, a print or tablet magazine, daily or weekly blog content, or possibly a user event or webinar series.
• Customer up-sell: Why stop communicating with prospects once they become customers? Instead, communicate with them more frequently (certainly not in a creepy way) and engage them with additional value. Customer up-sell and customer retention goals can work hand-in-hand.
• Passionate subscribers: If you can successfully move customers to this stage, you have really accomplished something. Content — and especially content generated by satisfied customers — can be one of the most powerful ways to reach any business goal. This is when content marketing starts to work for you exponentially. For example, CMI has over 40,000 active subscribers to our daily or weekly content. Those people have “opted-in” to our content and have given us the permission to market to them. The majority of our revenue sources come from that subscriber base. The moment we started focusing on subscription as a key content marketing goal is when our business started to take off.

The key takeaway

The return on any one of the above objectives must have direct impact on one of these areas:

1. Revenue
2. Lower expenses
3. Happier customers

If your goal is to increase search engine rankings, you have to continue that path to help show one of these three behaviors or, honestly, you’ll never get taken seriously by senior management.

The most effective way to look at this is to ask, “How are customers and prospects who engage in my content different from those who don’t?” At CMI, we know a subscriber is more likely to sign up for one of our events, which is a key revenue source for us. More subscribers of a similar type equals more revenue for us. It’s just math at that point. Subscribers also share more of our content to others, which helps increase our search rankings and helps more people become aware of what we do through social media. CMI’s “Moneyball“ number for content marketing revolves around passionate subscribers. What’s your number?

2. Build your audience persona

If we are thinking and acting like media companies and publishers, everything we do with our content marketing begins and ends with our audience. If we do not understand the wants and needs of our audience, there is no way we can be successful with our content.

Most of the time, we think that our content audiences are the same as our buying audiences. For example, John Deere distributes “The Furrow” magazine to farmers.  These farmers are the same people who buy John Deere equipment. But this isn’t always the case.

Let’s use a university as another example. A university has many audiences — some are buyers, some are influencers, some are stakeholders. The first, and most likely audience is students. But then you have the parents, who help support and fund the students. Then you have alumni. Don’t forget about the teachers. What about local, state, and federal government? Depending on the goal of your content program, you could target dozens of different audiences.

So before you start any content program, you need to have a clear understanding of who the audience is and, ultimately, what you want them to do.

What do you need to know about your audience to build the right persona? The easiest way to find out is by asking the following questions:

1. Who are they? How do they spend their average day?
2. What are their needs? This is not “why they need our product or service,” but what are their informational needs and pain points as they relates to the stories you will tell.
3. Why do they care about us? Remember, the persona most likely doesn’t care about your products or services, so it’s the information provided to them that will make them care, or grab their attention.

Your audience persona doesn’t have to be perfect, but it needs to be detailed enough so that your content creators have a clear understanding of who they are engaging.

Two amazing resources are Adele Revella’s Buyer Persona Institute (Adele is conducting an amazing workshop on buyer personas at Content Marketing World in September), and Up Close & Persona from Ardath Albee (a CMI Consultant) and MLT Creative. I recommend using each one to help you better define the audience for your content.

3. Define the mission

“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.” — Herbert B. Swope, American Journalist

Once you are grounded in the “why” and “who” of your content marketing, you can get laser-focused on your content marketing mission. For you old-school publishers, this is your editorial mission statement. All great media companies have one. If you are going to be a publisher of epic content, you need one too.

Your mission statement, at this point, has nothing to do with the products and services you sell — it’s all about the informational needs of your persona, and should include:

• The core audience target
• What will be delivered to the audience
• The outcome for the audience

Let’s look at OpenView Labs, the content platform for OpenView Venture Partners, a venture capital company located in Boston. Their content marketing mission statement looks something like this:

• Core audience target: entrepreneurs looking to take their business to the next level through additional funding
• What will be delivered to the audience: useful information, advice, insights, resources, and inspiration
• The outcome for the audience: growing their businesses

Through this mission, OpenView positions itself as the trusted expert in its industry (like a media company), and when its subscribers are looking for accessing funding options, they turn to OpenView first.

What do you do with it?

Not only does the content marketing mission statement provide the basis for your content strategy moving forward, using it is instrumental to your entire content creation process:

• Post it: Include the mission statement where it can easily be found by your audience. The best place to put it is anywhere you develop non-product oriented content for your customers, such as your blog site, Facebook page, or main content site (like an AMEX Open Forum).
• Spread it: Make sure everyone involved in your content marketing process has the mission statement. Encourage them to print it out and pin it up on the wall. This includes giving it to employees involved in the content creation process, as well as any agency partners or freelancers you may be using. So often, content creators in a company are not aware of the overall content mission. Make sure you don’t let that happen.
• The litmus test: Use the mission statement to decide what content you will and won’t create. Often, bad judgments in content creation can be avoided by running it against your mission statement first.

This is just the beginning

Most content marketing programs have fuzzy goals, ill-defined audiences, and lack consideration of the audience’s pain points during the content creation process. Following the above guidelines means these problems won’t apply to your business any longer.

There are so many more aspects to building a sound content marketing strategy, but keeping a keen focus on your “whys,” your personas, and your mission will point you in the right direction.

Want more guidance on producing the precise forms of content your audience wants? Download CMI’s Content Marketing Framework: 7 Building Blocks to Success. 

Here are a few relevant findings from respected industry reports and trends to back up this claim: 

Research firm and reviews publisher, Software Advice, recently found in their 2012 B2B Demand Generation Benchmark Survey that video was the second most popular type of content used across channels.

In another study, B2B Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends — North America carried out jointly by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute, it was found that video had the largest increase of any content marketing tactic in 2012, jumping by 70 percent from an already hot 54 percent increase in 2011.

Findings from Searchmetrics could partly help to explain this trend. They found that, of all content included in Google’s general search listings, video appeared most frequently, being displayed in over 70 percent of search results.

Perhaps more importantly than its impact on SEO are the results video has had in generating the desired response from target markets.

A study from the Web Video Marketing Council and Flimp Media suggests that the use of video embedded in an email is a powerful tool, with 88 percent reporting that email with integrated video improves campaign performance, 76 percent acknowledging that it generates high click-through rates, and 72 percent believing that their prospective clients are more likely to buy after viewing video content sent via an email.

CMI’s B2B Content Marketing Report also illustrates that a significant majority of B2B marketers — 58 percent — believes that video is an effective form of B2B marketing.

So if you believe the reports and buy into the reasons why video can be such an effective marketing channel for B2B marketers, let’s look at how you can make it happen — and how to achieve amazing results with it.

We begin with the preparation phase: the tasks involved in building your strategy for creating video marketing efforts that will get a response from your viewers and, ultimately, help transform them into satisfied customers. (In our next post, we will follow on this foundation with processes for executing on this strategy.)

Step 1: Define your purpose

Firstly, let’s look at why you need to define a purpose before you create your first content marketing video campaign:

• Reason 1: A defined purpose will save you money, because you can create very specific, targeted videos with simpler messages. Your videos will be shorter and easier to digest, and you won’t need to spend money on creative ways to appeal to “everybody” all at once.
• Reason 2: With more crafted and targeted messages, you’re more likely to see a response that gives you a return on your investment, as it will resonate more effectively with the customers who actually want/need your product or service.
• Reason 3: Getting your video found by your potential customers will be cheaper and easier to achieve than a catch-all video, too. Rather than competing against big-budget competitors to have your video ranked for broad search terms (which are expensive to bid on in Google Adwords), you can focus on the more cost-effective long-tail terms that better match the video’s content.

Hopefully those three reasons are good enough for us to move on and talk about achieving this clarity of purpose, which prompts the question, “What do we mean by purpose anyway?” Well, it actually means a couple of things…

First, what response are you trying achieve, and what metrics will you use to judge if you have achieved it (i.e., what will tell you that the video has been a success)? There are myriad different purposes you may want your videos for, including:

• To make a sale
• To generate an inbound lead
• To position your brand or build brand awareness
• To demonstrate a new product or service
• To educate a market
• To entertain

Once you’ve decided what outcome you’re striving for (and how its success will be measured), the second purpose you need to define is what audiences are you trying to reach. (This is directly related to the first list.)

For example, there is no point in trying to make a video that appeals to junior executives with no purchasing power if you’re trying to clinch a sale, or to create a video to educate the market if the landscape is generally well known amongst decision makers.

Some questions to keep in mind about your target:

• Are they senior decision-makers, mid-level influencers, or observers who may be making decisions five years hence?
• Do they speak your industry language (e.g., a techie to a techie), or are you trying to reach a different type of executive who may not be so familiar with your industry jargon (e.g., a results-driven sales outsourcing company trying to reach a new, creative, product-obsessed market), or someone not in your industry at all (e.g., a government regulator)?
• Do they care more about numbers and metrics, or vision and aspiration; details vs. big picture; process vs. creativity; layers of bureaucracy vs. flat structure, etc.?

The best way to come up with an answer to this second question is to imagine you’re having a conversation with your “perfect customer” at a trade show. How do you greet them, what do you talk to them about, and in what manner? This is roughly how your video should address that same “perfect customer.”

So now that you have your purpose — a measurable outcome plus a target market — it’s time to pick the right kind of video to appeal to that segment and put a swing in your metrics barometer.

Step 2: Pick the right video type for your purpose

There are nearly as many types of video as there are purposes, which is great because it means you can usually find a pretty close fit between the finished video and your desired outcome. However, it does provide you with a somewhat complex web of choices. Here are just a few of them:

• Animated/cartoon
• Whiteboard/illustration
• Time-lapse
• Talking head(s)
• Interview
• Presentation
• Montage
• On-location/at-event
• Behind-the-scenes/documentary
• Product demo
• Case study

Then you have to think about the tone:

• Corporate or creative
• Market leader or new entrant
• Humorous or serious
• Collaborative or competitive
• Traditional or irreverent
• Formal or informal
• Technical or colloquial

Then there are the finishing touches to think about:

• Subtitles
• Background music
• Voiceover
• Interactive technology
• Length

Of course, these lists go on (and on, and on…), so that’s why it’s so useful to know your purpose first — from there, you can more easily eliminate the styles and tones that definitely won’t fit, and concentrate on those that will. (We’ll talk more about tone and personality in Step 4.)

Deciding on the right video format

When choosing the format of your video, think about your existing brand and the brands of your major clients:

• Is your existing website cartoonish, like Hipmunk, Mailchimp, and Team Treehouse?
• Or does it focus on ease of use and design aesthetic, like Heroku, Dropbox, and Square?
• Maybe it’s designed to show thought leadership, like Accenture, KPMG, and McKinsey & Co.?
• Perhaps it’s more utilitarian and full of information on features and benefits, like 37Signals, Leads Explorer, and Hubspot?
• Or heavy on testimonials to inspire trust and credibility, like Balsamiq and Badgeville?

Once you’ve thought about this, the above list starts to get more manageable: The first set of companies would do well to stick with animation; the second, a time-lapse video; the third group, an interview or presentation; the fourth group may go with the whiteboard or product demo; and the final group, talking heads or case studies.

One assumes that your website is optimized to appeal to your customer base, but it’s worth pausing for a moment and looking at your five highest-priority target customers and seeing if the style of their corporate communications are similar to yours. If not, how will you resonate with them?

With your purpose in mind, and a style of video chosen to suit that purpose and the existing style of your online brand, it’s time now to look at the choice of video length.  

Step 3: Let’s talk length

Everyone knows length is important, but no one can agree what the perfect length is.

According to the graph below, taken from Forbes Insight’s report, Video in the C-Suite, the majority of executives prefer three- to five-minute videos, while only 9 percent prefer longer than five minutes, and 36 percent still prefer videos that are one to three minutes in length.

Chart reprinted with permission from Forbes Insight.

A quick search on YouTube and Google finds that most B2B videos with hits in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, tend to be 90–120 seconds in length.

However, that only goes to prove that they’re popular in general; it doesn’t show whether they were effective at achieving the desired outcome within their targeted market.

My suggestion on finding the right video length is that the length should be a function of your stated purpose.

You can’t really provide thought leadership in 90 seconds, so you’ll need videos closer in length to those found on a site like TED‘s, which are often up to 18 minutes long. That may be pushing it for many brands, but certainly a target range of 8 to 12 minutes is a good estimate for these kinds of videos. However, you wouldn’t want a product demo to run for 10 minutes, when you can communicate the key features in 90 seconds.

Humor can be achieved in 30 seconds or less, while gravitas or educational content may take longer. Testimonials can be 10-seconds long, whereas case studies may have more impact if they include sufficient details, so they might need to run longer — between two and five minutes.

At this point it’s best to approximate your video length depending on purpose (outcome and audience) and the complexity of the message; then, measure and refine according to the actual results, as there is no golden rule.

However if you’re an absolute stickler for golden rules and have no time or budget to experiment, it seems your best bet would be to create videos two to five minutes in length, and you shouldn’t go too far wrong.

Now that we’ve agreed length isn’t everything, we need to consider brand personality, and how your videos will reflect your brand’s values.

Step 4: Just be yourself

With a video type chosen, and a target length decided upon, it’s time to start thinking about the content of the video — particularly about how you want to portray your brand.

There is one simple, golden rule for this decision — be yourself.

You don’t want any major incongruity between your existing brand and the content of your video. This needs to play into the narrative you develop, how the script is written, and what your call to action is.

Bringing together steps two to four, lets look at some hypothetical examples:

Example 1: New Horizon Sales

New Horizon Sales is a start-up trying to prove that its new 3D Claytronic sales reps are the future of the direct sales industry. Its purpose is to educate the market on a brand new, untested technology, and to do so it will need to reach the highest-level executives, regulators, and sales directors.

To achieve this, the company may choose a series of documentary-style videos showcasing its Claytronic sales reps out in the field, with each video focused on one of its key advantages, such as effectiveness or reduced costs. Each video should run between three and five minutes, due to the need for a narrative to be established and the key educational points to be conveyed.

To measure its success, the company would run a market survey before and after the launch of the video campaign, to measure awareness of, and attitudes towards, its new technology amongst its target market, as well as how many inbound enquiries it generates. The call to action could be as simple as, “Learn more about the future.”

Example 2: Big Data Corp.

Big Data Corp., a fast-growing SME in the competitive “big data and analytics” space, is trying to establish its solution as being the most advanced in the market, supported by the most talented team.

Its purpose is to position its brand as thought leaders, targeting data scientists and strategic executives at FTSE 500 firms, and to generate leads for its sales team to follow up with.

To achieve this, the company could focus on proving its technical competence by producing videos of its talks at industry conferences and interviews with happy customers and its lead product developers. These may run between 10 and 15 minutes in length, as big-picture topics are being explored and the company will need to prove its depth of knowledge and technical proficiency.

Each video would have a strong call to action, and have buttons next to it, allowing viewers to download white papers, or contact a product rep.

Success would be measured by the number of leads generated, and a market research survey would also be helpful to gauge how the company is comparatively viewed against its competitors in terms of innovation and thought leadership, before and after the video campaign.

Example 3: BadAss Software

BadAss Software is a software company vying for the business of freelancers, to help with its accountancy, CRM, and invoicing needs. Its purpose is to generate direct sales from very small companies and freelancers.

To achieve this, the company may choose a more irreverent tone delivered via cartoons that make fun of more expensive/corporate software, and should end each video with a specific call to action — for instance, a free trial, or perhaps even giving customers the chance to star in a future cartoon as a caricature of themselves, for the best case studies submitted after their software trial period.

Video length is probably 90–120 seconds to capture to attention of freelancers juggling multiple tasks, with just one feature delivered per video. Success is measured by the increase in sales, and by how many times the video offer code is used to claim a free trial.

Conclusion and next steps

Now that we have an idea of how purpose combines with the basics of video type, tone, and length, our next post will outline the steps for executing on your video content marketing plan. Stay tuned…

For more tips on video content marketing best practices, read CMI’s eGuide on creating content.

If you’re going to create valuable content for your target audience, and you’re going to stick to a format, you must have a hook. Formats give your content structure; a hook gives it character. A hook is, quite simply, a unique content concept that is designed to ensnare and trap your unsuspecting audience into consuming and sharing your content.

Hooks enable your audience to build a relationship with your content each time it’s delivered. A twist on a familiar structure is what makes your content unique, but a hook is what gets people to talk about it.

Example: Devin Graham creates valuable video content

Photographer and storyteller Devin Graham creates energetic extreme sports music videos. That’s how I’d describe his hook. If you think mountain biking is extreme, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen Devin’s “huge bike jump into a pond” music video. Like snowboarding? Maybe you should experiment with saltboarding — that’s snowboarding pulled by ATVs on the salt flats in the desert. Like rock climbing? Check out his video about the world’s largest rope swing.

Devin releases a new extreme music video every week, so he’s got frequency down. His production value is phenomenal, and the substance of his music videos is consistently good. Quality? Check. His videos speak to a young, hip, male audience, and every content choice he makes — from the music he uses in his videos to the extreme experiments he chooses to shoot — directly appeals to this target audience. Want proof? in just over a year, his video content has generated 300 weekly subscribers and have been viewed more than 56 million times.

So, Devin is relevant, and he’s got a format that’s working for him — music videos. Though these brand attributes themselves aren’t particularly notable in the world of video, his unique hook sets his content apart from others on the crowded YouTube landscape.

The water jet pack

In early 2011, as Devin was getting his YouTube channel up and running, he happened on a mediocre marketing video for an extreme product he knew his audience would love. The product was called the JetLev R200. Check out the brand’s marketing video:

Devin approached the JetLev team about featuring its product in one of his signature music videos. Moreover, he offered to create this video content for free (all the company had to do was pay for his travel to Florida, where the company was based, and let him play around with their product).

“They were skeptical at first,” Devin remembers. “They imagined my YouTube channel was just a bunch of kids. The JetLev costs more than $100,000, which is a lot, if you’re hoping these kids are going to save up their allowance to buy one. I told them that, yes, my videos attract a lot of younger consumers, but those consumers have parents, and their parents have money.”

The brand agreed to have Devin come down and create a video showcasing the JetLev R200, and the end results were spectacular. Go ahead, see for yourself:

Through this unique hook, Devin’s video content managed to capture not only what a JetLev R200 is, but also the fun and excitement it generates for those lucky enough to ride one. More importantly, it helped build a memorable association between the JetLev brand and the engaging, visceral experiences depicted in all of Devin’s videos.

The results

Within a few weeks, the JetLev extreme music video had been viewed by more than 1 million people, attracting a wide range of JetLev’s target market of male viewers between the ages of 18 to 55. The JetLev team sent Devin an email describing a few more of the positive effects the video had on their business: Devin’s video had generated many more serious customer inquiries than even a four-minute piece that aired on several FOX television stations around the country had. When compared to the quick, one-time exposure JetLev received from FOX, Devin’s video kept generating interest: By August, the video had been viewed by 2 million people; by November, its views reached 3 million, and by July 2012, 5.4 million viewers had watched Devin’s Water Jet Pack video and were talking about it. That one piece of video content now has 9,100 comments and counting. Who’s watching that FOX news story today?

Powerful partnerships with a hook!

Devin’s channel is successful for one major reason: He’s got a hook that his audience loves. But the partnership between Devin and JetLev worked as a duet — a simple brandscape. Devin got access to a $100,000 piece of equipment few people had ever seen, and JetLev got awesome branded video content that successfully drove demand.

What if…

You created content with a smart hook like Devin’s? How would you twist your content to make it unique?

Devin’s JetLev story is just one of the many lessons marketers can learn about valuable content, how to create it, and who we can partner with to be more successful. Want more details on the JetLev video and its content marketing impact? Dive into Andrew Davis’ book, “Brandscaping: Unleashing the Power of Partnerships.”

Of course, Joe is right: Many “content marketing agencies” are just old-school marketing agencies with a shiny new label. And, tellingly, there wasn’t much squealing or protesting responses from the agency community. (I guess we all read it and thought, “You nailed it, Joe. Those pretenders are making us real guys look bad.“)

But, while criticizing agencies is like shooting big fish in a small barrel (low barriers to entry means our average performance is shockingly low), I thought it was important to turn the tables a bit and look at this issue from the other side.

So here are my own thoughts on the issue, compiled as four truths about content marketing clients. If you’re a client-side marketer, rest assured: I don’t mean you — I mean those clueless guys in the office across the way.

Most importantly, if you’re one of Velocity‘s cherished clients, this has nothing whatsoever to do with you. You’re brilliant, you look fabulous, and you are in very capable hands.

So here’s my list. Does any of this hit home?

1. Most clients see content marketing as a tactical, tick-the-box exercise

“Damn. We need content. Go get some content. It says here it has to ‘map to personas and buying stages,’ so let’s do a matrix and make sure we’ve got content in every box.”

If agencies are failing to create solid content marketing strategies, it’s often because clients come to them with short-sighted, tactical briefs. Yes, it’s our job to transform those briefs into strategic gold, but that’s hard to do if the client is in panic mode.

Marketers need to stop seeing content as a flavorless fluid to be pumped around their marketing machine. Instead, they need to see it as the only way to engage with prospects early enough to shape the purchase process. That means it’s a strategic asset, not just a box in a matrix.

The lesson for agencies: Marketing is a service business, and you need to give the clients what they want. But it’s also your job to get them to want the right things. If a given client fails to accept your advice time and time again, you need to find a new approach — or a new client. Don’t blame the client if you become stuck in the “Land of Tactics.” It’s your job to reach the higher ground — and then pull the client along to meet you there by any means necessary.

2. Too many content marketing clients don’t understand their own business

A lot of content marketers — especially, but far from exclusively, in B2B companies — aren’t really professional marketers at all. They kind of backed into marketing via sales or some administrative or operational role.

Real content marketers know their own market, business, products, and customers inside out. It’s a lot easier to get great work from an agency if you know the themes, topics, and issues that drive your prospects — and if you’ve actually met some customers.

But too many brand-side content marketers are really just process people. They know how to manage a project and hope that the agency will fill in the Siberia-sized blanks.

That can be okay — agencies have had to get good at creating our own briefs and mining our own input — but it’s far, far better if there’s a professional marketer at the table with us who knows her stuff.

The lesson for agencies: When you do find skilled content marketers, bend over backwards to make them embarrassingly successful. You can invest thousands of hours trying to turn a process wonk into a content marketer and never really get there. Better to find and invest in the ones who produce great work — and recognize it when they see it produced by others.

3. Most content marketing clients hide from accountability

Businesses invest in content marketing to make money. But far too many content marketers stop far short of discussing revenue metrics.

They pack their slide decks with all the vanity metrics in the book and are surprised when their sales people or board members yawn and answer their emails during review sessions.

This is the era of accountability. If you’re still taking out your tap shoes when it’s time to talk money, you’ll soon be tapping off into the sunset.

The lesson for agencies: Work hard to connect your work to revenue — even if the client is reticent about it. Put in the time to align your programs with your sales teams’ goals right up front. Get them to agree on the definition of a sales-ready lead, and make sure that’s what you’re delivering. Use lead nurturing, marketing automation, and CRM integration to prove your programs are generating revenue. Remember: Money talks; bullshit walks.

4. Most content marketers have a weak power base

As a result of points two and three above, most content marketers don’t have a lot of power and influence in their own companies. They haven’t earned it.

But content marketing demands more than old-school marketing. It means you have to champion this new model and become the main catalyst of change in your organization, if that’s what it takes.

If you want to tie your content marketing efforts to revenue (as I’m sure you do), you need to get the sales team on board. If you want to earn some runway for your content program, you’ll need buy-in from above. And if you want your content to be packed with authentic value, you’ll need the product guys to invest their time.

In short, content marketing success often requires a cultural change within an organization — and top marketers are the ideal people to lead the charge. But they need to assert themselves, make the business case, and get other team members on board to reach their goals, and that takes power — or at least respect.

The lesson for agencies: You can play a hugely important role in helping your clients rise to the challenges of cultural change; but not if you ignore the issue and hope that they can earn all that power and lead all that change by themselves. Together, you can attack the change management challenge, instead of becoming the victim of it. The need to sell in content marketing shouldn’t be viewed as a barrier to you doing your job — it is your job.

The bottom line

There’s never been a better time to be a marketer — and content marketing is probably the biggest, most exciting opportunity of all.

As Joe pointed out in his post, there are thousands of agencies out there that will offer to help your business on its branded content journey. And unfortunately, it’s true that many of them don’t know their asses from their elbows.

But this is your brand and your company. You get the agency you deserve. So get your act together, and deserve the very best of the bunch.

For more guidance on selecting marketing partners who can put sound content processes in place for your business, read “Managing Content Marketing” by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi. 

But first, what is Tumblr?

Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform launched in 2007. Its users have created over 44 billion total posts between about 98 million blogs, according to the service. One of the primary features of Tumblr is the “reblog” function, which allows users to copy a piece of content over to their own blog and share it with their own followers (similar to Pinterest’s “repin” function). Users can like a post, reblog it, or reblog it with their own commentary.

Wait — reblog? Does that mean duplicating content?

Yes, Tumblr was created entirely around the idea of duplicate content, a fact which has led to its massive popularity, as well as causing it to lose Google ranking power in the past — before its adoption of “nofollow” tags on links. Links from Tumblr to your website will not pass ranking power, but if you have your link attached to a trending post, it will certainly bring you traffic.

Tumblr has found its place in the social arena as a primarily image-centric social network. It’s unlikely that you will see large chunks of text gaining traction on Tumblr — that’s just not how it works. But the advantage of this is that you don’t need to be concerned with duplicate content; just stick to images, videos, and occasional short snippets of text that pack punch and power.

Once you adapt to this new format, Tumblr can be a powerful content creation (and content curation) tool that increases engagement, website traffic, and inbound leads.

Here are six tips that will help you get started with content marketing on Tumblr.

1. Customize the look

Your Tumblr page is an extension of your brand, so it needs to be set up as conscientiously as you would any other social outpost — i.e., so that its look, feel, and messaging are consistent and in alignment with your overall brand strategy and goals. Even if you aren’t a design expert, Tumblr pages can be easily customized using free and premium themes. But if you do have a designer or user-experience pro at your disposal, custom HTML and CSS codes can also be implemented.

Brands like Kate Spade, IBM, and the 92^nd Street Y community center in New York have all customized their Tumblr themes to align with their overall brand message. For example, Kate Spade’s landing page displays 14 posts at once, looking much like a Polaroid picture collage, while the 92^nd Street Y took a much simpler route, displaying just a small logo and a single post at the top of its page.

2. Pick a target community, and stick with it

Tumblr is all about small, tight-knit niche communities. To start out, it’s best to pick one or two specific topics related to your brand and create all your content around that proposed theme. Focusing on a few brand-relevant topics will help your brand connect with audiences that are specifically interested in the subjects that you have selected to be associated with your products or services.

To connect with engaged Tumblr communities, always be sure to tag your posts with a few relevant topics. For example, an SEO company would likely tag their Tumblr posts with “SEO,” and possibly “design,” since it’s relatable to the brand, as well as being a top Tumblr topic.

Exploring popular Tumblr tags is a great way to investigate new and emerging trends that are capturing attention on the network. But, as a general rule, the “LOL” tag for humorous content consistently hits the top of the list, as does content related to fashion, art, and media. So if you create content that helps associate your brand with any of these tags, you can give your Tumblr page a distinct advantage.

You might also want to take a look at your competitors’ Tumblr pages to see what types of tags they are using, as well as the types of content they are posting — and how it’s performing.

When you are ready to go deeper into Tumblr strategy, you can search for Tumblr blogs by industry using dedicated Tumblr directories, like this one from Higher Ed Social Media. Searching this list will reveal education industry-related Tumblr accounts from universities, online colleges, and various college departments.

3. Tell an informal story through imagery

The most reblogged posts on Tumblr are those that evoke emotion. But they also tend to be informal. Think of a brand-relevant theme or story that you can tell through the content you create and post on Tumblr. Because of the flexibility that the channel offers, your stories can stick to one running theme, or you can switch them up by the day, by the week, or even on a monthly basis. By varying your stories, you can increase the likelihood that your content will be found by new audiences — or keep existing audience interest fresh and engaged.

For example, Target utilizes Tumblr to promote its fashion and beauty product lines. One of its major themes is, “It’s Time.” The company consistently uses this overarching theme to showcase different outfits and accessories, but to make posts more unique, it varies the “It’s Time” tagline it uses for different looks — e.g., “It’s Time for Lovely Lace” or “It’s Time for Pretty Pastels.” Each post includes a photo of the look, the tagline, a short, descriptive caption, and links to buy each item.

4. Make your mark

A tip for increasing referral traffic from your Tumblr posts is to watermark them with links back to your Tumblr page and your website. This way if users haven’t yet subscribed to your Tumblr page but have found your post while exploring other Tumblr pages, or through the news feed, they can still click on the links in your original post.

The Village Voice watermarks its posts by including a strong visual and a link to the actual content on its website. That way, each time the story gets reblogged, readers can click on the link to learn more about the visual.

5. Post multiple times per day

Just like Twitter, Tumblr is a fast-paced environment. It is perfectly acceptable to post more than once per day — as long as your content is relevant and meaningful. However, unlike Twitter, the content life cycle is a lot less limited: Engagement on Tumblr can build over time, as posts make their way through the site’s various online communities. So, if your content is tagged properly, your posts can continue to receive “likes,” comments, and reblogs days, weeks, and even months after you share it.

6. Give a sneak peak of longer blog posts

As I mentioned earlier, Tumblr is not the best outlet for long-form blog posts, since content success on the platform relies heavily on visuals and short snippets of text. However, you can create Tumblr posts to promote or give a sneak preview of content that you will be hosting on your other channels, such as your website or your blog. To do this, select the most interesting aspect of your blog entry or news article to use as your Tumblr post, include a link to the corresponding blog or website, and post it on your Tumblr page.

In the example below, the Huffington Post used a screen capture with a short caption to encourage readers to access the full article on the Huffington Post website. The headline is intriguing and might convince Tumblr users to click through for a longer version of the post, driving traffic to huffingtonpost.com.

Need a little more inspiration?

If you’re still unsure if Tumblr is right for your brand, or if you need a little inspiration, here are five additional brands that are successfully using Tumblr for content marketing. Take a look at their pages, and see if you can identify the themes, stories, and tactics they use to create branded content on their pages.

• Coca-Cola
• Disney
• The Standard Hotel
• ModCloth
• Whole Foods

For more examples of how brands are creating content on the latest social media channels, read CMI’s Ultimate eBook: 100 Content Marketing Examples. 

The rise of memes, infographics, and videos in content marketing means you most likely already understand the need for effective content marketing visuals to aid brand storytelling. But, are you just as informed about what makes visual content effective? How do you make sure your images help to drive actions, rather than just conveying information? And how can you create visual content that challenges your audience to do something different, instead of just saying they “like” it?

Old brain decision-making

The part of the brain that causes someone to change a habit or move away from the status quo is the “old brain,” sometimes referred to as the “lizard brain.” The old brain has very specific requirements your message must meet:

• The old brain doesn’t have the capacity for language, so it needs pictures to help it wake up and decide to do something different.
• At the same time, the old brain is a very basic mechanism — like an on/off switch — so your pictures need to be very simple.
• Also, you must remember, the old brain is a component of your brain’s survival mechanism, so your visuals need to make the status quo feel “unsafe” to that survival instinct in order to make it receptive to your message of change.

Three recommendations for your visuals

Remember these three critical components (the three Cs, if you will) for creating effective visual content that has power and purpose:

Context: Your prospect needs to see their current status quo as unsafe, so, your picture can depict the gaps and deficiencies in its current state that makes it unsustainable, thus requiring a new approach. People respond when they are in deficit, so you have to first set a context that creates a sense of urgency to change. Don’t just show your solution and describe why it’s great and expect them to leap at the new opportunity.

Contrast: Your image should show a clear contrast between the status quo solution and what you are offering. Contrast is required to help the brain determine the virtues of your solution and make a decision. There is no value perceived if there is no contrast.

Depict this “to and from” by showing, specifically, how your new approach can help to fill the gaps and overcome the deficiencies of the existing solution. The best visuals put the current situation, and its problems, literally side by side with the proposed alternative and its remedies so the contrast is clear and value can be visually discerned.

Concrete: Simple, concrete visuals tell your prospect’s old brain that an alternative solution exists and offers benefits, while complex and abstract visuals confuse the brain and paralyze it from making a decision. By using illustrative imagery like numbers, arrows, stick figures, shapes, and icons, you are translating a potentially complicated concept into an approachable, understandable option, which helps to ease the decision-making process.

For example, this Motorola LTE for Showcase video was designed to introduce a new approach for handling critical “data” used by first responders in emergency situations, and it functions as an excellent example of how the three Cs can work in tandem to tell an effective visual story. To get an idea of how you might incorporate the components of context, contrast, and concrete information into your next visual content project, ask yourself the following questions as you watch the video:

Context questions: How does the video tell a visual story about why an institution needs to take another look at how they are handling “mission critical” data? And, how does it position the status quo approach as being “unsafe”?

Contrast questions: How does the video portray the “to and from” — showing the status quo approach in contrast to an alternative approach? How does it visually create contrast that highlights the virtues and value of the alternative? The difference and choice becomes viscerally clear with a simple visual to highlight the vices of the “from” scenario and the virtues of the “to” option.

Concrete questions: How does the video make a very complicated concept appear reasonable and doable? Where are there links between the proposed alternative to something familiar and successful to make the change request appear simple?

To see how well you recognized the three Cs, read on for the corresponding answers:

Context answers: Traditionally, first responders use a private network for their voice communications, but public networks were used for their data, such as video and photographs. To communicate the urgency of their changing over to a private network for both data and voice, the video portrays the status quo approach as being unsafe — i.e., because first responders’ data is co-mingled with the public’s data, important emergency communications may be put at risk if those public networks become compromised.

Contrast answers: The video shows a clear contrast between the chaos and concerns created by the public network and the protection and peace-of-mind provided by the private network alternative. The difference and choice becomes viscerally clear with a simple visual to highlight the vices of the “from” scenario and the virtues of the “to” option.

Concrete answers: The video uses a simple, hand-drawn visual story to describe the complexities involved in data communications, first responder information requirements, and the pros and cons of public versus private networks. It also makes a link between the proposed alternative to something very familiar and successful to make the change request appear reasonable and simple.

Next time you are creating visual content for your marketing campaigns, remember the three Cs and you’ll be on your way to more effective and successful interactions with your prospects.

For more tips on improving your storytelling techniques, check out CMI’s Content Marketing Playbook. 

The biggest challenge in content creation

Previously, the biggest challenge was to create engaging content. Now the biggest challenge — at least, according to 29 percent of B2B marketers surveyed in recent CMI research — is simply creating enough content to satisfy business needs. There are certainly ways of addressing this challenge, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that more content creation is the same as better content creation. However, even if you take the “less is more” approach to content marketing, you’ll likely still be plagued with requests.

Here are some tips on how to say no to content creation requests, in order to keep the quality bar high.

Meeting the demand: urgent vs. important

Developing a content calendar that has the flexibility to include some unexpected activities that add value and are in keeping with the business goals and objectives is a smart way to set your content strategy in motion. But what happens when you receive desperate or last minute requests to create content that doesn’t fit in your content plan? What is the difference between important content and urgently needed content?

This old phrase comes to mind: “Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

This is where you need to learn the art of saying no to content requests that simply don’t fit within your overall business objectives, that aren’t clear enough in their intention, or that are simply requested too late in your publication cycle for you to be able to do a good job with them. Here are some tricks you can use to minimize the false-urgent request — and optimize your processes to accommodate the truly urgent ones.

Introducing the content request form

To help prioritize your content requests, consider developing a content request form that you share across all departments that might be asking you for content. Often requestors only have a vague idea of what their needs are when they ask for content to be created. The request form helps them drill down to their most essential needs — which will help you identify possible ways to incorporate them into your existing content plan, or to minimize the revision process so that you can free up time in your schedule to produce additional content. Moreover, the improved communication facilitated by the form helps you produce content that is more targeted, more appropriate, and better able to deliver the kind of results its requestor expects. Marketers also would be wise to use the form themselves, to help flesh out and prioritize their own ideas for content creation.

It’s essential for your organization to have a content marketing mission statement — and for everyone who submits requests to know what this is. For instance, CMI’s mission is to advance the practice of content marketing. If you receive content requests that do not support your mission, it may not be worth your effort and time.

Keep your content request form short — one page at the most, if possible. Here are some questions you should include:

• What is your idea/need?: Keep it brief, and give the content idea/need a catchy title as soon as possible. It’s likely that your content piece will be known by this name, moving forward — at least internally — regardless of what the final title actually is.
• What research have you already done on this topic?: Ask requestors to list three sources of research they have already done. Doing this provides two main benefits: First, requestors may already have sources in mind that they would not otherwise have thought to share; and second, it reminds the requestor that the writing process involves research too, which makes for better content.
• How long do you think it will take to produce?: Often, requestors misunderstand the process and the amount of work involved in creating content. Asking this question provides an opportunity to educate requestors, and starts the negotiation process so both sides can come to an agreement on the expected deadline.
• How many leads do you expect this piece will produce?: This is particularly helpful for requests that come from sales. Not all content should be expected to generate leads — especially if it’s educational content that sits at the top of the funnel. But if your requestor does have an answer in mind, so much the better to set the right expectations.
• How much will the content cost to produce?: When calculating the content’s production costs, make sure the requestor is including budget expectations for design and layout costs, as well as printing costs (if applicable) and the writer’s time.
• Which core business objectives does this fit with?: While it’s great to have content that is fun, or interesting, or engaging, it should also align with business objectives — particularly if the content is being expected to meet key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Where does it fit within the sales funnel?: Content designed to be used at different stages of the sales funnel should be promoted in different ways. Moreover, the key messages and the level of product (or service) information will differ. It helps to know up front what purpose the content is meant to serve.
• What will the impact be if it’s not produced?: What will happen if you cannot fulfill the request? Will the world end, will it critically affect a campaign, or will their boss just be unimpressed? This question helps establish whether a given request is for need-to-have content, or would simply be nice-to-have.
• How will you commit to sharing this content with a wider audience?: A piece of content is only valuable if it is consumed and shared. This question lets requestors know that they will be encouraged to spread the word about the content across their own social networks — after all, hopefully they’ll be proud of the final piece and will want to share it, as well.

How to get the most value from the content creation form

• Work with requestors when they fill out a form for the first time. Help them understand what is involved in creating the content, and identify where it should and can be used. For example, they may want to create a white paper when the content would actually be more appropriate for a blog. Explaining the whys and hows in advance not only helps educate your colleagues, but it also helps them understand the value of your expertise and role in the organization.
• Use it as a reference doc. That way, everyone knows what to expect of the final content. It keeps you all on the same page, literally.

Prioritize, but don’t dismiss urgent requests — if they provide value

When it comes to “urgent” requests from other parts of the business that demand content resources, the key is to keep ego and emotion out of it. At the end of the day, content creation is a business function that should help get clear, trustworthy, and valuable messages out to customers and prospects. Don’t dismiss a request just because you’re having a tiff with that employee, or your business groups have differing objectives.

Sometimes there’s value in pulling a content rabbit out of a hat to meet an urgent need — not only does it make you a valuable content creation resource, it also builds cross-functional relationships. And, you never know, it might even result in that huge sale that keeps your content team in work — and in demand — for another year, while boosting your reputation: a win-win situation.

For more helpful tools to optimize your content creation processes, read CMI’s Content Marketing Playbook.

Cover image via Bigstock.

What’s the future of content?

Now, think about the dynamics of our industry in terms of content creation:

• Epic content is an asset. One story can be developed into multiple content assets, which can generate traffic and interest for years, if not decades. Most importantly, great content is the main driver for developing an audience — the greatest asset of all.
• Regardless of what the economy does, or how your overall marketing spend changes, great content rises to the top and can continue to fuel your business.
• Once an audience is created, an organization can generate cash from that content by selling products and services directly, or by selling access to its audience (in the form of advertising, sponsorship, or affiliate sales).

So think about it this way: What if our primary goal in marketing is now to own content niches online; to build out our content assets to grow and maintain our audiences and subscribers?

As Robert Rose says, “In many businesses (especially in B2B), the marketing department is an order-taking, tactical function that runs on the hamster-wheel of demand generation, trying to keep up with “client” orders for new collateral, press releases, case studies and, at times, marketing-qualified leads (MQLs).” If our new call to arms is around creating and growing owned audiences, it’s clear that our marketing skill sets may be, well, a bit out of date.

The new roles of content marketing

While there is no perfect structure for a marketing organization, it’s apparent that we are starting to see marketing departments transform themselves into publishing organizations. And with that transformation comes a shift in the key business roles that marketers must now fill. Don’t think of the list below as new job titles, per se, but rather as the core competencies that need to be accounted for across the enterprise:

Chief Content Officer

This is your content ambassador, also known as an organization’s chief storyteller. This person should be responsible for setting the overall editorial/content marketing mission statement and integrating that throughout the enterprise. As every silo (PR, email, social, search, etc.) starts to create and curate content, it is the CCO’s responsibility to make sure that the stories remain consistent and make sense to the audience(s). The CCO must also continually receive feedback from all other players so that the mission statement continues to reflect your organization’s goals and metrics for success.

Managing Editor

Half storyteller and half project manager, the managing editor executes the content plan on behalf of the CCO. Whereas the CCO focuses on strategy, the managing editor’s job is all execution, working with the roles below to make the stories come alive (including tone, style guides, and content scheduling).

Chief Listening Officer

The role of the CLO will be to function as “air-traffic control” for social media and your other content channels. This person should be there to listen to the groups, maintain the conversation, and to route (and/or notify) the appropriate team members who can engage in appropriate conversations (customer service, sales, marketing, etc.). For the content marketing process, this function should serve as the gravitational center of your “listening posts, which your organization will need to establish so that you can always be ready to react and adapt to subscribers’ evolving needs. Hopefully, as your content starts to create reactions among your communities, the CLO can then route important feedback to the CCO, so that the chief storyteller can modify the content plan on an ongoing basis.

Director of Audience

This person should be charged with monitoring your audience/buyer personas, making sure all content creators are intimately familiar with their characteristics, their passion triggers, and what actions you want them to take. The Director of Audience should also be responsible for building subscription assets (direct mail lists, email lists, social media subscriptions) that can grow and be segmented as your content mission matures and expands.

First Responder

This person’s role is the make the content work better for the organization. That means taking the current assets and optimizing those assets for increased engagement. This includes tweaking and monitoring blog post titles, working on image enhancement to optimize sharing and working directly with the channel master to figure out what kind of content resonates best in a particular channel.

HR for Marketing

As every employee and stakeholder becomes a more integral part of the marketing process, it will be increasingly necessary for marketing to work closely with human resources to make sure that employees understand their roles in the marketing process and to help your organization leverage your employees’ audiences without creating conflicts or confusion.

Channel Master

Wherever your content is headed (social media, email, mobile, print, in-person, etc.), the channel master will be responsible for getting the most out of each channel. What works best on SlideShare? When should we send our emails, and how frequently? What’s the appropriate ratio of owned vs. curated content your business should distribute on Twitter? Who is keeping track of mobile strategy and execution? Your team will look to the Channel Master for these, and other, answers.

Chief Technologist

As marketing and information technology continue to merge, there will be a need for at least one (maybe more) individual whose sole purpose is to leverage the proper use of these technologies into the content marketing process. The person in this role will be responsible for staying on top of these ever-increasing changes as they relate to the storytelling process — from calendaring and approvals to marketing automation, freelancer integration, and emerging technologies.

Influencer Relations

The role formerly known as media relations will evolve into that of a manager of influencers. This person’s responsibilities should include developing your “hit list” of influencers, maintaining direct relationships with them, and integrating them into your marketing process in the most impactful ways.

Freelancer and Agency Relations

As content demands continue to evolve (and increase), your organization’s reliance on freelance talent and other external content vendors will grow as well. Organizations will need to cultivate their own “expert” content teams and networks, and it will be this person’s job to negotiate rates and responsibilities so that all members of your team are united in their work on behalf of your marketing program.

Lead Trainer

In marketing’s evolution, one person will need to be responsible for making sure your team receives ongoing training and education. I’ve personally been involved with education programs from Dell, SAP, and Ernst & Young, and have observed how critically important they are to the success of the enterprise.

ROO (Return-on-Objective) Chief

This person will be responsible for ensuring that there is an ongoing return on marketing objectives, and for communicating to all teams why your business is developing content assets in the first place.

Yes, we are selling products and services, but the way in which we do that is changing faster than we ever anticipated. This means focusing on content as an asset — which, in turn, means that our marketing departments will continue to evolve. Putting the above roles in place now will help make sure the rest of your enterprise is prepared to evolve right along with them.

What additional roles are you seeing emerge on the content marketing landscape?

For more insight on emerging trends that are impacting the content industry, register now to attend Content Marketing World 2013.

Cover image via Bigstock

As we did last time, let’s imagine that you’re the managing partner of a boutique urban planning firm and you’ve just made a key hire, “Alice,” who is an expert in the field of high-rise residential design. As part of your marketing efforts to increase brand awareness, one of your goals is to raise Alice’s thought leadership profile in the urban planning community. So from a content marketing perspective, you are looking for ways to gain the greatest possible benefit from a speech she’s been booked to deliver at an upcoming industry conference.

How can you do this? The operative word here is “leverage.” Like other aspects of content marketing, a big part of success is in finding ways to deliver your information in various formats, across various platforms, to ensure you are accommodating the informational needs and preferred consumption patterns of those in your target market.

Spoken word to text

The first step is to record Alice’s presentation when she delivers it at the conference. If the conference organizers aren’t already audio- or video-recording all of the sessions at the event, you might be able to arrange to have Alice wear a lavalier microphone on stage, which you can connect to your own digital recorder (I like to use iTalk on my iPhone) to capture her words.

One reason an audio recording is important is that you can have it transcribed through any number of means (most of which are relatively cost-effective) so that you have easy access to the full presentation in a text format. Once the presentation is in text form, it’s easy to repackage the original content into various written content formats, like white papers, articles, or blog posts. Keep in mind that the transcription may need some editing in order to optimize its quality (what sounds good verbally doesn’t always work well on the screen or page), but this is likely a whole lot easier and more convenient than trying to take detailed notes during Alice’s conference session — not to mention it’s probably cheaper than having to send an additional staff person to attend the event.

In addition to speed and convenience, capturing presentations helps your company bring more of its team members into the content creation process. For example, some people (like Alice) feel more comfortable with public speaking than they do with writing. Others may have a busy speaking schedule that makes it difficult for them to find the time to put their great insight down on paper. Rather than putting more work — and more stress —on their shoulders, this process lets your public figures go with their strengths (talking) and still provides you with a way to share their expertise.

Another way you can repurpose the content from these audio files is to offer them as podcasts — either in their entirety or by editing them down into multiple, shorter bits. To do this, you can use a service like SoundCloud (an audio equivalent of YouTube), which allows you to embed the podcasts on your website or your blog, or share them across your other content channels. I recommend you post the original text transcription along with the audio files, so that the keywords it contains can help this content to be discovered through search engines.

Spoken word to video

If you are able to capture Alice’s presentation on video, you have even more options at your disposal for leveraging her content. However, you will need to be sure that you plan your use of this video content thoughtfully — while it may be easy to engage an audience during an hour-long live presentation, it’s probably a stretch that your audience will have the same attention span outside of the conference setting.

As with audio content, here I recommend breaking a video down into its most relevant highlights — in chunks of three to four minutes, at the most. A video of this length can also be repurposed as a demo reel for Alice, which you can then send to other conference organizers as a testament to her insight and her ability to engage an audience.

Another benefit of this video content is that it helps promote Alice as someone with whom clients will want to work. If your video content helps demonstrate how adept she is at explaining complex issues clearly, or that she has a unique perspective on your industry, there is a greater chance that prospective clients will approach her (as an extension of your organization) to help them meet their business needs.

Here, as with an audio file, a transcription posted along with the video will help the content get found by search engines — and also make the information more versatile, as it meets the needs of reading-oriented people.

A few technical details here on capturing video from presentations: If your firm is doing the recording of a presentation, make sure you aren’t relying on your camera’s microphone — it will pick up too much ambient noise during the session, room tone and not enough of the speaker. A wireless microphone, synced to a pickup on the camera, will produce much better sound — which you can then use as a separate audio file.

Spoken word to graphics

Alice’s speech can also be a rich source of visual content. For example, you can repurpose her slide deck as a stand-alone product, such as a SlideShare presentation or an infographic, or by posting it on Alice’s LinkedIn profile, or the LinkedIn page for your organization.

When breaking these slides up for use in other content formats, make sure you include any additional explanations or details that may be necessary to provide clarity — as you don’t want the presentation’s message to get lost when it’s delivered outside of the context of the live event. Diagrams, photographs, and other images may be helpful for this purpose, and they can help break up any long blocks of text that come from transcription of lengthy or detailed presentations.

Conclusion

Leveraging a speech in all these ways can help your firm support Alice in her business development efforts, and help her build her professional profile as a thought leader at the same time. With these easy-to-implement techniques, you can create multiple forms of content based on Alice’s industry insight — without detracting from the time she needs to spend on working with paying clients.

Looking for a live event with plenty of content marketing insight from renowned thought leaders? Register to attend this year’s Content Marketing World, which will take place on September 9-11, 2013, in Cleveland, Ohio.

Cover image courtesy of Carl Friesen

For example, how often do you find yourself referring to the marketing personas you built several years ago — personas that were based on assumptions you once made about your audience and its buying habits? Now think about whether your company has the same goals, challenges, and position in the industry as you did then? The answer is most likely no.

Whether your content marketing program is targeted to B2B or B2C audiences, one thing will ring true when it comes to old assumptions: Your audience, like your strategy, could be undergoing its own continual shifts, evolutions, and transformations, as well.

As one of the most vital elements in CMI’s Content Marketing Framework, developing both your internal and external audience personas is critical to determining:

• What kind of content you need to create
• What tone, style, and delivery strategies (and more) you need to develop
• What topics and targets you should focus on to help continually grow your business
• Who needs to be “in the know” on your projects (both now, and in the future)

As discussed in the Framework, it’s important to regularly update your personas to reflect shifting audience trends, as well as to account for adjustments you are making to your overall business goals and strategies. So what are some things you can do to keep your profiles fresh, accurate and, for lack of a better term, “alive”?

1. Move your personas from the strategy bin to the drawing board

One temptation marketers face is to immortalize their audience personas as the “end all, be all” of their current stage along the content marketing journey. However, as with anything you file away at the bottom of your to-do list, you run the risk that your personas may grow stagnant and stale while you are busy tending to more “high-priority” tasks.

The goal here should be to make persona development a part of everything you do, day-in and day-out. As a recent article by Mark Evertz stated, it’s time to “put the person back in personas.”

Make it clear to your team that, while your audience personas can be mapped to different stages in your sales cycle, or to various types of content you are producing, they are serving little valuable purpose if they are static, inflexible, or automatically applied to every piece of content you create. And with this in mind, before you start your next content project, try going back to the drawing board with your personas, looking closely at whether each one still accurately reflects your target audience’s current life situation and purchasing needs.

For example, over the past 12 months, residents of certain Northeast regions of the U.S. have seen their fair share of weather-induced trauma. Though hurricanes and blizzards may be more common in other parts of the country, these regions were faced with natural disasters — and their itinerant dangers — that they’d never experienced before. As a result, many individuals — and businesses — were left with damaged property, long periods of power outages, and other unexpected situations to deal with.

Now, say you have created a B2B buyer persona for a small business owner. They are likely to have limited time and resources available to start with, but if they operate in the Northeast, they may now be faced with new worries about how to prepare financially, and physically, to rebuild, as well as to prepare their business for the possibility of future storms. Their current concerns may include looking for new insurance policies, implementing new employee safety procedures, storm preparation proceedings, and more.

That buyer persona’s stressors not only increased, but have shifted as well — perhaps closer to (or further away from) the services you provide. Unexpectedly, your well-crafted persona may no longer apply, and now needs to be updated to reflect these shifting priorities.

To do this, start by carefully considering how this persona’s needs have changed, and how you may want to adjust your messaging, content formats, and content delivery strategies, as a result. Ask yourself questions, like:

• What content do I have that could help quell their growing concerns?
• Is now really the right time to send that white paper, or is another form of outreach more appropriate?
• Should I shift my content plan to include messaging that addresses those new stressors?
• Considering all that has likely been added to their plates, would my audience members appreciate it if I were to provide shorter pieces of content that take up less of their time?

2. Prioritize direct conversations

Whether your target audience is internal or external will impact how often you should “check in” on their needs (e.g., internal changes of leadership, or external shifts in consumer buying behaviors). Regardless, it’s always important to take the time to talk to actual consumers — just as you probably did while creating the personas in the first place! Let those people know that you’re just as interested in learning what they may need now as you were when you last spoke with them.

I like to be very scheduled (so this might not work for everyone), so I typically create a calendar reminder every few months to “check in” with a representative of each of my personas — whether it be via a quick chat or email, or by browsing through community comments and sentiment. This process generally takes me 15 to 30 minutes, tops.

You may want to compile the data you gather into a dynamic document (like a Google Drive spreadsheet) to keep track of these conversations and note any shifts you observe, as I have done in the sample chart, below:

You may also want to “check in” on your listening posts to characterize current community sentiment surrounding your business — and the factors that may be affecting that sentiment. For example, I recently noticed that a normally active, engaged member of one of my social communities hadn’t posted in a while. I asked myself why? Did her job situation change? Was she no longer using Facebook? Had she become disgruntled with the company that the community focused on? Was this an isolated incident, or were other community members also dropping out of the conversation?

Executing a quick community poll is one way you can gain insight into the reasons for shifts that you observe, and there are many other tactics you can use, as well. Regardless of your chosen method, be sure to craft your inquiry to gather the data that will be most essential to your persona development efforts. Ask simple questions, such as “What kind of information are you looking for from us here?” or “How often are you likely to check in on our page?” or “What are your top concerns right now as a buyer?” If you do this regularly enough, you’ll likely notice that the answers have shifted over time, and it’s these shifts that should be informing your persona updates.

3. Visualize your audience (and keep those mental pictures updated!)

A while back, Barbra Gago wrote a post for CMI — 4 Questions Answered about Buyer Personas — in which she shared an excellent tip for adding a human touch to your personas:  

“To help people relate to your personas, add images, and give names to your buyer profiles. Assigning a name to the persona helps everyone on the team think of this buyer as a real person, not just a piece of business.”

Image credit: Bigstock

Her ideas for putting a “face” to your personas — and for keeping those faces top-of-mind throughout your day-to-day operations — really struck a chord with me. Try to find a way to visually display photos of members of your audience, so that you can look at them as you develop your content. For example, consider posting pictures on a shared office corkboard or a cubicle wall in your workspace; or place them in a photo gallery that can be used as a screensaver on your computer. Seeing these faces as you work will remind you that not all of your audience members are alike; and that each one can be affected by changes that will impact the content you should deliver to them.

Another tip? Use photos of actual audience members, if possible. Take snapshots or screenshots of your community members, or of existing buyers (first asking for their permission, of course) and post them in a prominent place in your workspace. These can, and will, serve as a constant reminder that your personas aren’t just fictional composites — they represent real people for whom you are creating your content.

So how about you? What are you doing to ensure your audience personas are kept up to date? And what ideas do you have for making them a living, breathing part of your content processes? I’d love for you to share your thoughts in the comments below.

For more guidance on keeping your content strategies as fresh, accurate and updated as possible, check out “Managing Content Marketing” by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi.

Cover image via Bigstock

As with most new approaches (think social media, or cloud services, or “big data”), we have seen clearly thought-out practices being evangelized right alongside the short-sighted strategies of trend-obsessed hangers-on. 

Naturally, this is resulting in ample frustration in our industry. You can see it in the conversations that are happening — the hype-posts; the content-marketing-is-overhyped counterpoint posts; the complete backlash posts; the sighing-in-disappointment posts — everywhere the trend is clear: Content marketing is now staring down a “Valley of Disillusionment.”

Send in the hype (too late — it’s already here)

If you’re not familiar with Gartner’s Hype Cycle, it’s basically a method of looking at the adoption of innovation.

First, there is a “Technology Trigger” — a breakthrough that provides early conceptual stories and gets significant coverage. I think we can all agree that we’ve heard enough about the Amex Open Network, BlendTec, and Red Bull efforts to recognize this trigger in action.

Then, there is the “Peak of Inflated Expectations.” Early success from innovative risk-takers is celebrated, and failures are disregarded as coming from those that aren’t “truly understanding the innovation.” The innovation then becomes “the new black,” where everybody’s doing it, but nobody is getting any results. Our latest 2013 Research found this in spades.

I believe we’re past this point, and are now entering “The Trough of Disillusionment.”

The Trough of Disillusionment is where the backlash begins, the “gold rush” and diffusion of the solution reaches its peak, and practitioners are left to succeed or fail.

But it’s also here that the real progress begins. As more cases start to really succeed, the innovation then ascends into the “Slope of Enlightenment,” where it becomes more widely understood and second- and third-generation “solutions” start to get deployed. The cycle eventually culminates at the “Plateau of Productivity,” where mainstream adoption really starts to take off.

So, as those who passionately believe that “content” is a truly worthy innovation, how do we help to move it forward?

Stop painting over the agency sign (even if we are one)

I recently wrote a post that asked the question, When Did Marketing Become IT? In it, I observed that — whether self-inflicted or based on the fact that the C-Suite doesn’t grok marketing (a sentiment I hear far too often, frankly) — the phrase, “we’re an internal agency” is just nuts.

In many businesses (especially in B2B), the marketing department is an order-taking, tactical function that runs on the hamster-wheel of demand generation, trying to keep up with “client” orders for new collateral, press releases, case studies and, at times, marketing-qualified leads (MQL’s). And when that structure proves unproductive, the business simply moves people in and out, puts a new person in charge of the “agency,” and expects different results.

The same holds true on the agency side. Every one of the types of agencies that Joe listed in his post are going through some kind of business model disruption. But, many are reacting by merely putting a new kind of buzz-flavored coating on the old model. Not surprisingly, it’s not working.

In its most recent annual report on the state of marketing, the CMO Council found that only 12 percent of respondents view their agency partners as “extremely valuable.” And nearly half (47 percent) characterized their agencies as being average, underperforming, or not producing at all. Gack!

Wow, what a set of downers, right? Content marketing is in a state of disillusionment, the C-Suite has no faith in marketing’s ability to deliver, and marketers have no faith in their agencies. So how can we even hope to get content marketing into the mix?

Disrupt, or be disrupted

Today’s successful business strategy (whether you’re an agency or a brand) is about how quickly and efficiently you can adapt to conditions in your market. Look no further than an article that ran last week in Ad Age: Pepsi, thirsty for change, is now experimenting with new agency models at Omnicom — where teams are curated across business units and are then assembled (practically in real time) to manage a particular campaign. It’s evidence of both sides being willing to adapt in their efforts to improve results.

Content marketing is an approach; a marketing practice that is infused into everything else we may do as marketers. This is vitally important to understand, because 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.

Yet, I passionately believe that great content is at the heart of this broader shift. So, ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether a given strategy specifically resides in marketing’s domain or not (though I believe it should). Giving content a strategic seat at the business strategy table can be a unifying force internally — and a differentiating force externally. If your agency (internally or externally) is the agent of that change, you are setting yourself apart. In other words, you win.

So, what does that mean?

It means that, regardless of whether we consider ourselves a content marketing agency or an internal marketing department, deploying a successful content marketing effort for “clients” includes a few requisite points of view:

• It starts with our ability to create a plan to infuse the approach and the practices of content marketing into the changing culture of the organization. It gives content a central and strategic seat at the table. As Joe says in his recent post, “Be wary of a campaign or program. There is one thing that’s certain with any campaign: It has an end date. Not so with successful content marketing.”

• Content strategy is different than content marketing — and here I mean content strategy more broadly, not just content marketing planning. The required skills for content strategy and content marketing are very different from one another, and a great content strategist is worth his/her weight in gold. Whether you’re an agency or an internal team, knowing this (and staffing for it) is critical.

• The process must be infused into both our new and traditional methods. The approach of content marketing benefits from paid media, and it is amplified by earned media (and vice versa).

At CMI, our goal is nothing short of advancing the practice of content marketing. We want to make the Trough of Disillusionment as shallow and short as possible. We want to set every agency, brand, and practitioner on the path to “enlightenment,” destined to reach the Plateau of Productivity.

To that end, if you work at an agency that is interested in building its content marketing practice — and you’re planning to head to Cleveland for Content Marketing World — I hope you’ll join me, the incomparable Jay Baer, and the multitalented Paul Roetzer for a pre-conference workshop called, Building/Growing Your Content Agency/Consultancy.

Every day, I get more and more excited about the opportunities that abound in this field. And I’m actually happy we’ve reached the place where we are right now — it’s an exciting position to be in, and it’s where the real progress starts to take shape. It reminds me of a quote by Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Let’s go play.

These are among the data findings from our newest Content Marketing Institute report, B2B Enterprise Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budget, and Trends — North America, sponsored by Marketo. This study reports on the practices of enterprise marketers and draws comparisons against B2B marketers overall.

Here are some highlights of the key insights you can find in the report:

Enterprise marketers use an average of 16 content marketing tactics

The top three most widely adopted content marketing tactics are videos (87 percent), website articles (86 percent), and in-person events (85 percent). B2B enterprise marketers use all tactics more frequently than their B2B peers overall do. Like those peers, they find in-person events to be the most effective tactic.

They use an average of four social media platforms, with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube being the most popular

B2B enterprise marketers use Facebook (80 percent) as often as their B2B peers overall do; however, they use YouTube more often (74 percent vs. 61 percent), and Twitter and LinkedIn less often (76 percent vs. 80 percent, and 71 percent vs. 83 percent, respectively).

Nearly half plan to increase their content marketing budgets

Forty-six percent of B2B enterprise marketers plan to increase the amount of budget they allocate to content marketing over the next 12 months, compared with 52 percent of their B2B peers overall.

Sixty-five percent outsource content creation

B2B enterprise marketers outsource content creation more frequently than their B2B peers overall do (65 percent vs. 43 percent).

Their biggest challenge is producing the kind of content that engages

While their B2B peers overall cite producing enough content as their biggest challenge, B2B enterprise marketers are more challenged with producing content that engages. They also are three-times more likely than their B2B peers overall to be challenged with a lack of integration across marketing.

Just 32 percent believe they are effective or very effective at content marketing

Like their B2B peers overall (36 percent), enterprise marketers struggle with their effectiveness at content marketing. However, B2B marketers across companies of all sizes appear to believe that continued investment in content marketing will pay off: Approximately half of those who rate their organizations as least effective are planning to increase their content marketing spend by nearly as much as their more successful peers are.

Want to learn more? Download our full report to get answers to questions like:

• What goals do B2B enterprise marketers have for content marketing?
• How do they measure content marketing success?
• How do they tailor their content?
• What does the profile of a best-in-class B2B enterprise content marketer look like?

What do you think of the findings? Are they consistent with what you are experiencing? Let us know in the comments!

Special thanks to MarketingProfs for their participation in the annual survey on content marketing and the overall B2B North America comparisons made here.

When one blogger created a forum-based community for her readers, nearly 16,000 readers signed up for her community in the first day alone. That community still thrives nearly four years later.

Now, revisiting “Capturing Community” on its one-year anniversary, it begs retelling:

Blogger Heather Armstrong is no stranger to the power of community. She’s built a healthy following on Dooce.com, a website she started in 2001.

A few years into her professional blogging career, she shifted some of her focus away from finding new readers. It was high time she invested in her existing audience.

With the help of XOXCO‘s Ben Brown, Heather evaluated the potential of her website’s community. According to Ben:

“We took a look at her traffic data and found some compelling insights: More than a quarter of Dooce’s traffic was made up of repeat visitors, some of whom visited hundreds of times per new post.”

Heather and Ben realized that Dooce’s loyal readers were begging for a home. They came often to read comments and find out if new content had been posted. They wanted to be a bigger part of the experience. They craved a share in the ownership, an insider’s identity. Up until that point, they’d simply been lurking, like vagrants searching for a place to stay.

The community was alive. It demanded a voice.

“But let’s not forget why that community formed in the first place,” Ben explained. “It came together on the strength of Heather’s writing voice. One of the first goals we identified in building the Dooce community was to maintain a clear dichotomy, where Heather’s editorial content wouldn’t have to compete with the community’s discussions at large.”

To maintain the integrity of the blog, Ben and Heather chose to build the community features around questions and answers. That way, Dooce members could initiate conversations, and other readers wandering the site aimlessly, looking for new content, could contribute answers. Whatever end of the discussion you landed on, the sensation of being an “insider” and a contributor to Dooce was present.

A new tab labeled Community appeared on the top navigation, and the new features officially launched.

Within the first day, nearly 16,000 loyal readers signed up for the Dooce community — an indicator that the community was already present, almost supernaturally, and was hungry for the interaction in which it could now engage.

“Dooce is another clear example of what my experience building communities has taught me: Don’t try to create something from scratch that doesn’t exist,” Ben says. “Find the community that already exists, and provide those people with the infrastructure to interact with one another.”

Takeaways for content marketers

Dooce’s new forums did more than just establish a tighter-knit community. They also became a rich source of user-generated content.

Done right, your community can both create rabid brand loyalists and become a free source of new content. All you need is the right approach.

Here are four tips for adding a community to your existing website.

1. Listen to the data: Your data will tell you whether or not you’re ready for a community. That’s how Dooce predicted success before it undertook its project.

Data to review include:

• Repeat visitors: What percent of visitors have visited your site in the recent past? Dooce saw that a quarter of its traffic represented repeat visitors — a compelling reason to give them more to do when they visit.

• Number of visits: When you’ve isolated your repeat visitors, build an even more persuasive business case by measuring how many times loyal readers visit over a defined period of time.

Reach out directly to loyal visitors you’ve already identified to find out if they’d participate in a more concrete community.

2. Stay consistent with your brand: You understand the importance of staying consistent with your brand in all that you do. But it bears repeating here.

Dooce implemented its Q&A format with its audience in mind. The Dooce community became a huge success as a result.

Reach out to audience members to find out where they interact most often on the web. (LinkedIn? Twitter? A niche community site like American Express OPEN Forum?) Find out what they like and dislike about its format. Create something better than what they already use and your audience will flock to it.

3. Add only what begs adding: Inspiring community interaction requires a neat and simple approach. If adding a bunch of new features seems overwhelming for you, it’s probably overwhelming for your visitors, too.

Dooce only added a forum with a Q&A format, demonstrating a clear purpose for interaction. That way, it was simpler to direct engagement without telling the audience how to use it.

The Dooce Q&A format is easy to use, easy to digest, and easy to react to. The simplicity of the forum begs for user interaction and contribution.

You can shout at your audience about how to use your community features until your lungs give out. But in the end, you’ll only end up insulting and alienating them. By keeping your interaction features simple, you can show your readers how they should use them.

4. Separate community features from editorial content: As Ben Brown mentioned, Dooce built a sustainable, rabid readership on editorial content. Chances are, that’s how you’ve built yours, too.

A community is not meant to replace that. Therefore, it’s important to keep a wall between your editorial content and your community interaction features.

The Dooce community exists on a different page than the editorial blog, making the community user-friendly and focused.

In the beginning, you don’t want to distract your audience from the content they came to your site to consume in the first place. Your community may surpass your editorial content down the road. But for now, stick with what your audience knows and loves and make community features an added value.

Get more practical advice on creating content that can be used to build engaged communities in Michael’s book, “Capturing Community: How to Build, Manage and Market Your Online Community.” And to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the book’s release, you can download a free Kindle version on Amazon through April 19th, 2013.

In particular, mind maps are one form of visual content you should consider adding to your blog. They typically consist of a central topic with branches containing key words and concepts radiating out in all directions. Remember the hierarchical outlines you did in primary school? Mind maps are a visual version of them. 

Mind maps are growing in popularity because they match the way our brains work — by association. They enable us to translate our thinking into a more tangible form, so we can expand upon our ideas, refine them, and use them to get things done. They are also powerful ways to communicate ideas and concepts to others.

Within the context of a blog, mind maps represent distinctive content objects that command attention and get readers thinking. The position of topics and subtopics conveys both meaning and context; these visual communication tools can be embellished with images, icons, and other supporting information to further increase their value. When converted into images, they can be shared on a variety of social media channels. This makes them an ideal form of visual, shareable content that you should consider adding to your repertoire.

Here are 5 ways in which you can employ mind maps to create more powerful blog content:

1. Resource maps

Create a collection of resources on a topic that’s of interest to your readers, with links to web pages where they can learn more. This type of map image includes a set of links embedded in it, so that when readers click on a topic, their browser takes them to the corresponding web page. Here is an example:

Mind-mapping experts, developers, and resources on Google+

Note that the topics in the image displayed in this blog post do not contain links; that’s because WordPress will only allow you to assign one URL to each image. You need to click on the image, which will take you to a separate HTML page that contains the hot-spotted version.

This type of interactive mind map can be created in two steps:

1. Create your visual map in your favorite mind-mapping program and export it as an image file.
2. Open it in an image editing program that allows you to create hot spots and add links to them (my program of choice is Adobe Fireworks).

If you don’t want to manipulate an image, you can simply generate a jpeg, gif, or png image of your mind map — sans links — and then include the links and resource descriptions in the body of your blog post, as I’ve done here:

LinkedIn groups for visual thinkers and mind mappers

2. Solicit reader feedback on an info product idea 

One product development technique that bloggers are starting to use is crowdsourcing: posting an early prototype of an information product on your blog to solicit reader feedback on it. You can present a mind map that showcases the topics and issues you plan to cover in your info product, and the sequence in which you plan to do so.

Doesn’t this potentially expose you to rip-off artists, who may try to use your outline to beat you to the punch? Technology guru Guy Kawasaki, in his new Kindle book “APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur,” describes how he posted an early outline of it online and asked for feedback. He says the input he got was so valuable that it was well worth the risk. He also believes it resulted in higher book sales, because so many people felt a sense of “ownership” in the book when it was published.

3. Create a small collection of quotes or life lessons 

Using this technique, you can copy and paste favorite quotes or life lessons from someone you admire into a mind map. This takes a list of fairly mundane, text-based pieces of information and transforms it into something beautiful and inspiring.

Be sure to include an iconic image of the person as part of the central topic — especially if your subject is someone famous. This will create significantly more visual interest than a text-only central topic. Then export your mind map as an image, as described in the first technique.

This approach creates a content object that has lots of “legs” compared to a simple text list of 8 to 10 quotes or life lessons. You can post your map image to Pinterest and Instagram, share it on your personal or business Facebook page, refer to it in a Twitter post, and much more. Here are several examples:

10 life lessons from Albert Einstein

21 vital life lessons from Steve Jobs — in visual form

Apple’s “Think Different” manifesto as a mind map

4. Communicate information more clearly to your readers 

Dissect an idea into its essential elements in a blog post, and use a mind map to visually support your analysis. This is an excellent way to expose your thinking to your readers in a colorful, impactful way.

Mind maps do an outstanding job of showing the relationships between your ideas — much more clearly than text only. First-level topics give your readers the bigger picture — the major parts of the idea about which you’re writing. “Child” topics branching off of them show the next level of detail. Their sequence, when read in a clockwise direction, gives your readers an intuitive grasp of how all of the pieces fit together. Here are several examples:

8 ways in which you can use mind-mapping software to manage your blog

Starting a new blog? Start with a mind map

One consumer product company, Nestlé, has adapted the idea of a mind map to help consumers make healthier choices about the foods they’re buying, which it calls the Nutritional Compass. As the company explains on its Nutritional Compass web page, “The compass has always been treated as an essential navigation tool. It helps you know where you stand, decide where you want to go and find your way ahead.” By connecting the traditional table of nutritional information with more specific details on the food’s nutritional benefits and a tip on how to make healthier choices, Nestlé says the Nutritional Compass makes it easier for consumers to make more informed choices about the foods that families eat.

Nestle’s Nutritional Compass

5. Visually explain a simple process 

Although many mind maps are radial in design, with topics facing in all directions, they don’t have to be. You can create a right-facing mind map to visualize a simple business process. In this type of visual map, the timeline goes from top to bottom. In other words, the topic at the top is the first step in the process; the second one is the next step, and so forth. You can learn more about this technique here:

How to mind map a simple process

Tips for incorporating mind maps into your blog posts

If you decide to give one or more of these techniques a try, here are some tips to keep in mind:

If you don’t currently own mind-mapping software, Xmind and MindMaple are well-designed, easy to use, free programs that you can use to get started.

• The default setting of most mind-mapping software programs is to produce a simple black-and-white visual map. Explore your program’s settings to see what you need to do in order to add color to your mind map. Some programs include themes that you can apply to your maps to do this quickly. I like to use NovaMind to quickly generate maps with a rainbow of topic colors, using one of its built-in themes. Otherwise, you can color topics manually to meet your needs using your program’s topic formatting options.

• Use larger fonts in your mind map (14 points or more), so when you export it and resize it to fit within the layout of your blog, the text will still be readable.

• Most mind-mapping programs generate visual maps that are taller than they are wide. Plan to do some experimenting with positioning of topics and the distance between them to make your mind map more vertically compact. This will ensure that your readers can see both the map image and the first paragraph or two of your blog post “above the fold” (within the first screen-full of information).

• Each of these techniques requires that you export your visual map from your mind-mapping program to an image file, which you must then resize and crop to fit your blog’s layout. For best results, I recommend exporting to tiff, bmp, or png image formats, because they retain the greatest amount of image data. Exporting to jpeg or gif are not recommended, because these are compressed image formats that may appear jaggy when resized.

• When you’re formatting map images for your blog, create two sizes: One to fit within the standard layout of your blog and a second, larger image that readers can view to see more detail. For example, when I add such a map image to one of my blog posts, I generate one image that is 600 pixels wide (the full width of blog posts in the WordPress template I use); it appears along with my blog post. Within the WordPress image settings, I then link to a large version (900-1200 pixels wide) that will be displayed when the reader clicks on the smaller one. Be sure to include some wording in your blog posts that instructs your readers about this functionality — otherwise they may not realize it’s there.

• Consider adding your name, company, email address, and logo to your map image in an unobtrusive way. Why? Because of the growing popularity of image-oriented social media channels like Pinterest and Instagram, it’s likely that your most compelling map images will be shared by others in places outside of your blog. This will ensure that people who see your map image will know who created it — and may visit your blog to access more of your innovative thinking.

• Limit your mind maps to the high-level details of your blog topic. Too much information crammed into a visual map may make it hard to read and understand. If you must share something more complex with your readers, provide a simplified image of your mind map with the topics collapsed within a blog post, and link it to a PDF file that displays a more detailed version of it.

For more great tips on how to improve your blog content, read The Ultimate Guide to Blogging. 

You may be wondering why, but this trend has been happening for years now. In the search for “content gold,” providers of marketing services have been “heading west,” as more brands continue their move toward creating owned media programs and establishing content marketing dominance.

The fight for content

The battle royale to establish or increase budgets for content development and distribution is being fought by both the usual suspects and the uninitiated in our industry, including:

• Pure content marketing agencies, formerly known as custom publishers
• Advertising agencies that have a new-found appreciation for branded storytelling outside of media placement
• Traditional media companies that either have editorial teams or full content divisions dedicated to working on editorial and branded content projects
• PR organizations that are starting to focus less on placement and more on owned channels
• Direct marketing agencies that are moving from “offer-focused” to “engagement-focused” content
• SEO companies that are shelving the SEO business in response to Google Panda and Penguin updates
• Social media agencies that are realizing that it’s not the channel, but what goes into the channel that counts
• Web content and user experience agencies that are moving away from solely technical website production, audits, and analysis to advise on multichannel content
• Digital agencies that are pairing interactive services with consistent content production
• Research organizations showcasing industry experts and thought leaders for strategic content and consulting assignments

These agencies and more are battling for content marketing dollars from brands… some with legitimate budgets and some with a pile of Monopoly money trying to figure out the secret to social media success.

Whatever your feeling is on who owns the rightful mantle of  ”content marketing agency” really doesn’t matter. The truth is that thousands of agencies formerly touting any one or a number of the above banners are now trying to “ride the wave” to content marketing salvation.

Reality bites

Brands have it tough. We receive multiple calls, emails, and inquiries each day at the Content Marketing Institute asking for content help… from strategy to blog posts, visual content, content distribution, integration, hiring, research, and everything else under the sun. Here’s what we’ve learned: There is good help out there, but it’s hard to tell the partners from the posers.

Below you’ll find some truths about content marketing agencies, and how smart brands should view the outsourced marketing services provider of the present.

“A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” — Steve Jobs

1. Most content marketing agencies don’t market with content

I hear it all the time: the “shoemaker’s shoes” conundrum. Agencies of all kinds have a long history of producing advertising and marketing programs for clients, while forgetting to market themselves. No clearer examples of this exist than with content marketing.

Marketing services organizations are notorious for focusing on sales-led marketing programs, where cold calls and sales relationships rule. Whether a lack of resources or a lack of patience is cited as the reason, agencies that offer content marketing services very rarely produce epic content that attracts and helps to retain their own customer base.

Excellent content marketing examples, such as Imagination’s Orange magazine, Pace’s research reports, BrandPoint’s blog, or Story Worldwide’s PostAdvertising.com seem to be the exception, and not the rule (disclosure: these agencies are all CMI clients).

The lesson for brands: Before you hire any content marketing agency, ask to see the work they’ve performed — on their own behalf. Take a deep dive into all of their content. Is it truly great content, or is it “me too” blog content that you can find anywhere?

2. Most SEO agencies don’t know jack about content marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an incredibly important top-of-the-funnel tactic. As Google gets smarter, it’s almost impossible to game the system. Today, getting found through search engines has more to do with amazing online storytelling than most anything else.

I had a recent conversation with an SEO executive team, and they were seriously contemplating taking the entire company in a new direction… to content marketing. Why? Their reasoning was (besides pure SEO budgets drying up) that the value they used to provide to customers (which used to be immense) simply wasn’t there anymore.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of SEO agencies are in the same position. I’ve seen a few — such as TopRank Online Marketing and Vertical Measures — make this transition incredibly well. Others have simply put the “content marketing” moniker on their SEO content production service and called it content marketing. Yes, they’ve added such services as infographics creation, video production, and blog content creation, but content production is only one small part of the content marketing process. Strategic planning aspects of mission statement creation, audience persona gathering, internal content integration, and measurement outside of content consumption metrics are often absent.

The lesson for brands: A holistic content marketing strategy includes up-front planning and multiple goals, which in turn must bring in non-digital channels (such as print and in-person vehicles). SEO is just one very small part that covers a few marketing objectives. Make sure your content marketing strategy goes beyond top-funnel considerations.

3. Most agencies are less concerned about strategy than they are about execution

Want to hear a dirty little secret that content agencies subscribe to?

“Give away the strategy to get the execution.”

I was guilty of this many times. I would give away whatever strategic insight I needed to in order to win the content project. It was the ultimate “value add.” Why? Planning lasts just a short time, while execution can last forever. The thinking was that giving up the planning guidance for free could result in a content project contract (like producing a serial blog, custom magazine, or video series) that may last for years or more.

Like it or not, strategy and planning weren’t viewed as a useful service to customers, but rather as a closing strategy to get the execution business. This also meant that the majority of internal talent went to execution, not strategy.

And today? This is exactly the reason why so many brands are struggling to find solid strategic partners for content planning, while content execution increasingly is becoming a commodity.

And the worst part? I’ve never seen a content planning document from an agency that recommended less content or (God forbid) stopping the content program altogether (which is sometimes the correct remedy).

The lesson for brands: Regardless of whether you hired an agency to just do content execution, you must ask for a sample of an executable content marketing strategy from them, as well. You at least need to see if they understand the strategic argument for — and more importantly, against — content creation. There may be a time for producing less content, but without strategic guidance, the answer will always be more (and this is just short-sighted).

4. Most agencies still see content marketing as a campaign

Content marketing is not a campaign — it’s an approach, a philosophy, and a business strategy.

Similarly, a viral video — and its resultant success or failure — is not content marketing. A campaign is not content marketing. A campaign can be the result of a content marketing approach, but in and of itself, it is not content marketing. In other words, releasing the long form of a 30-second advertisement is not a content marketing approach — it’s just a clever form of advertising.

Most agencies aren’t built for consistent, long-form content creation and distribution. They’re built for speed; for great creative that makes an immediate (hopefully) impact. Compare this to what it takes to create content marketing efforts like  Procter & Gamble’s HomeMadeSimple or AMEX’s Open Forum: day in-day out content planning, production, and evolution over a long period of time, with the goal of attracting and/or retaining customers.

The lesson for brands: Be wary of any agency pitching you a “campaign” over a “program.” There is one thing that’s certain with any campaign: It has an end date. Not so with content marketing.

A review

Even though content marketing is 100+ years old, we are in the middle of a revolution. Total consumer control, combined with an absence of technology barriers for brands, has resulted in a content marketing renaissance. At the same time, it has forced marketing service providers to alter their business models, and their sales speak, to include editorial-based content creation.

While, overall, this is good for the industry, it has created a confusion of what true content marketing is — and what the practice of content marketing can look like for both agencies and brands.

And now you know. Good luck!

For more need-to-know details on what content marketing is — and what it isn’t — register to attend Content Marketing World 2013. If you are an agency, consider attending the workshop on Building/Growing your Content Marketing Agency/Consultancy to learn best processes for selling your content marketing services.

Cover image via Bigstock.

Here are three major problems that must be overcome before your clients can create content that not only captures attention, but also holds that attention and uses this engagement to convert customers. 

1. An unclear definition of quality: If I had a dime for every blog post that advised firms to create quality content, I could outspend the federal government. But, if I had a dime for every post that defines quality content and clearly explains how  to create it… well, I’d have trouble affording a daily cup of coffee. If we don’t understand what quality is, how can we produce it?
2. Content indifference: For the vast majority of small and midsize firms, it’s all they can do to keep up with the day-to-day work flow. Few have the luxury of on-staff writers. On top of that, many such firms are sales-driven, so coaxing a marketing story out of them can be like pulling teeth — and at times, more painful.
3. Poor content creation processes: Agencies like to complain about clients in regard to this point; but truth be told, we don’t always do a very good job of helping clients through the content production process.

Our agency has been working hard on our own efforts to overcome these barriers to quality, so here I’ll share what we’ve learned, as well as a few techniques that have been helping us improve our results. 

What is quality content? 

I’m sure those of you in the CMI community have many insights on this question (and I hope you will share them in the comments section, below), but for the purposes of this post, here’s my simple, three-part definition.

1. Quality content is user-oriented and engaging: Brands like to talk about themselves, but customers mainly want to know how firms can solve their problems and make their lives easier. It’s not enough to stress benefits over features; the business must show that it has a thorough understanding of its customers’ needs by developing the ability to “write in their shoes.” Critical corollaries of this principle include content that…

• is jargon-free: Since customers aren’t necessarily in your industry, they don’t want to decipher your lingo in order to understand your offerings.
• is written in an appropriate style and voice: If your customers are large financial investors, a certain degree of elegance is required in your communications, while if you are looking to reach people who work in more of a blue-collar industry, straightforward and to-the-point language is likely the way to go.
• stimulates a response: When you overhear someone speaking about one of your favorite hobbies, it’s likely that your first impulse is to engage in the conversation — or at least feel like you could. The discussion has struck a chord and piqued your curiosity, making the interaction more personally relevant and potentially rewarding to you.
• is properly structured: It’s not just what you say; it’s what you display. Key, high-level points should be stated briefly at the beginning of your content, and supporting details should be added below (or on lower-hierarchy pages) for customers who are interested enough to get the whole story. (For more tips on structuring your content, I recommend you follow best practices for web typography and usability.)

2. Quality content has a business purpose: A popular theme in content marketing is storytelling. I’m all for telling stories, but every story needs one thing: a point. The point of a business story is to persuade a customer to take action. It might be a hard action, like placing an order, or a soft action, like downloading a PDF. But, on the whole, customers visiting a business site have a business purpose in mind, and they expect to be engaged in a business conversation. If your clients fail to meet that expectation in favor of simply creating content for entertainment value, consumers may get the joke, but they certainly won’t take them seriously when it comes to becoming customers. 

3. Quality content is easy to find and share: More customers will see the great content you’ve written on behalf of your client if they are able to run across it on Google or on one of their social networks. So be aware that there’s a basket-full of writing techniques out there that can increase the reach of your client’s content.

These basically fall into two categories: 

• SEO: By optimizing content your client has created, you make it easier for Google to find it, rank it, and display it in customers’ relevant searches. Don’t let anybody fool you into thinking SEO is no longer important in our social media-focused world — it is essential, now more than ever.
• Social optimization: Speaking of social media… when it comes to SEO, content marketers are likely familiar with meta tags — title tags, html header tags (H1, H2, etc.), description tags, etc. — written elements that are not seen in your content itself, but that can have a major impact on its popularity and findability. Think of the composition of tweets, Facebook shares, Google+ shares, and the like as social media equivalents of SEO meta elements — off-page content that enhances your ability to get your quality content in the hands of those who want it. 

How to overcome content indifference 

As an agency or service provider, you probably aren’t in a position to demand that your client hire a professional writer or take a class in marketing. However, before you dive into your next project, you can offer a bit of coaching to set the wheels of quality content creation in motion.

For starters, walk the client through the above definition and parameters of quality content. As content marketers, we should never assume that what we know is common knowledge. If clients are unsure what quality content is, or have a faulty understanding, they won’t know what information to supply so you can write the right stuff.

In terms of process, start by laying out a definition up front that establishes a standard against which all draft content can be evaluated. The extra work you do in advance here will prove invaluable as the project unfolds by speeding up edits and revisions, and by keeping edits focused on issues that matter — rather than tangential problems that do nothing but cause delays.

A second preparatory step is to communicate the business value of quality content. It’s not enough for clients to understand what quality content is; they must understand why it’s necessary to invest time and money in creating it. Here are some points you can use to convince your clients that quality content will help them communicate their business’ value:

• It elevates the brand: Great content gives people a great impression of your company. It contributes to a prospect’s decision on whether or not to do business with you.
• It increases brand awareness: SEO-friendly and social-friendly content gets seen by more people who may interested in what you sell.
• It helps generate leads and referrals: With more people able to find your content, and with your content designed to stimulate action, you’ll have more opportunities to make sales. Plus, your sales team can use your site content to assist in the sales process, which can sometimes make the difference.
• It increases customer loyalty: When your content conveys that you understand your customers and appreciate their problems, you build trust and confidence. More importantly, you make it harder for a competitor to lure your customers away.
• It differentiates your business in a powerful way: Customers and prospects continually check you — and your competitors — out online. If your site content is comparatively lame, what does that do to your lead generation and customer retention? People naturally gravitate to businesses that offer superior content experiences. 

Tips for a better content creation process 

We’re always tweaking our web development process; on the content front, we’ve implemented several things that are making our content creation tasks easier — and our outcomes stronger. Here are three content creation tips that have helped our efforts tremendously:

1. Interview managers, sales reps, and client customers: As a writer, I love talking to managers because they give me context and perspective. I love talking to sales reps because they give me pitching points that work. And I love talking to clients’ customers because they show me the gaps between what a firm thinks it’s selling and what people are actually buying. A lot of work? Perhaps, but quality content is like quality anything: You get out what you put in. Taking this step accomplishes two things: First, you are able to write with great confidence; second, you have a strong position from which to rebut negative feedback, such as, “My brother-in-law tried your product and didn’t like it.“ 

2. Give content creators everything they need to get started: Whether a project will feature 10 pages of content or 300, we try to give writers the thorough guidance they need to produce meaningful messages. Much of the information we provide requires input from the client, but gathering it should not be overly burdensome. That information includes: 

• Meta titles for each page
• Primary and secondary keyword phrases for each page
• A wireframe that outlines the word count and layout for every page of content — for both regular text and conversion elements
• A description of the target audience segment for each page or section of content
• Two or three key points for every piece of content being developed
• Links to source materials for each page of content (wherever possible), so that writers can spend their time writing rather than researching
• A sketched-out story narrative (where relevant) 

3. Prep clients for edits and keep editorial conversations focused: The worst way to start the editing process is to dump 100 pages of content on the client and wait for a reaction. One problem is that clients wait until the last minute: A day before the content is set to launch, they finally get around to reviewing everything and become hysterical when it isn’t to their liking. Another thing that often happens is that they edit the wrong things for the wrong reasons, such as taking out customer-oriented keywords and replacing them with industry jargon. To avoid these train wrecks: 

• Give clients three to five pages of content to review early in the project. This gives you and the client a chance to feel each other out on how the editing will flow, and enables you and the client to get comfortable with the writing style before you proceed with creating content for the full project.
• Let your customers know exactly what type of feedback you are looking to receive from them. For instance: 

1.  Is the content factually correct?
2.  Does the style suit your customers?
3.  If not, why not?
4.  What do you like most about this page?

• Let customers know what type of feedback you do not want to receive. In particular, we like to remind customers why keyword phrases are used in certain ways, and why typography and layouts were structured the way they were.

Three examples of quality content technique in action 

1. Social optimization: The Google+ post below, from CMI, illustrates effective social optimization:

 Notice CMI tags various Google+ community members to get this post on their radar and encourage them to share it across their own networks. It also uses a meta description and post description that build interest and give people a reason to read the post.

2. Wireframing for writers: Here’s part of a wireframe that our writers have used when composing quality site content. (Note that we had our client approve this wireframe before it went to the writer.)

Writers should be given some latitude in adhering to the wireframe, but even so, having this as a reference point allows them to focus on writing rather than agonizing over structure. In addition, wireframes make it much easier to write consistently across the many sections of a content project.

3. Spectacular content: For an outstanding example of engaging, user-oriented website content, check out Duluth Trading Co. Here’s its page on Buck Naked Underwear (be sure to check out the Learn More links):

The amazing thing about this site is that after a quick scan, you easily picture the type of customer who loves Duluth Trading — the high-quality, high value content makes it crystal clear. 

Over to you

We want to hear your thoughts on this topic. Feel free to post a comment below with your answers to these questions (or with questions of your own):

• What’s your definition of quality site content?
• What are your recommendations for working with clients to produce quality site content?
• What examples do you have of site content done right? (Feel free to give yourself a plug!)

Learn more processes you can use to promote quality content creation among your clients by joining the conversations taking place at Content Marketing World 2013.

“Skyfall” at the London Olympics

As the content marketing specialist for USB Memory Direct, it’s my responsibility to improve our brand identity, discover new niche audiences, communicate the value of our services, and generate new leads.

But occasionally, I find that I’ve gone through so many different content marketing strategies and projects that I’ve completely run out of new ideas. Maybe it’s “marketer’s block” or just a common burnout, but there are times when I feel as though I’ve tried everything.

During these periods, I find it helpful to look at businesses outside of our industry for inspiration.

I seek out notable ad campaigns, brands, product launches, and marketing strategies that seem to be very effective with their customers, and from there, I try to ask myself how I could adapt that strategy for use in my own industry. I’m constantly surprised by where I’ve found some of the most unique tactics being implemented.

However, my conscience always makes me wonder whether or not this is stealing. Am I stealing if I “copy” someone else’s marketing strategy? What about if I’m emulating the contests, product campaigns, and strategic partnership models that I see other businesses using? Should this make me feel like a big, fat phony who steals creative marketing ideas?

When I have these nagging thoughts, I consider the words of Isaac Newton, who once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Thousands of successful companies throughout the years have improved their marketing strategies by taking a good idea and making it great. Sure there’s a big difference between copyright infringement and putting your own creative spin on an idea, but the principle is the same. Your own strategic thinking will only go so far before you may have to look elsewhere for ideas. The trick is to fuse the various tactics that you encounter into your own industry and improve on them as you go.

Through my research, I’ve discovered three marketing strategies from top-tier brands that I could apply to my own content strategy. When going through these ideas, it’s important to ask yourself how you can adapt strategies like these and make them unique to your own brand. But first, let’s take a look at what not to do.

JC Penny copies Target’s “shops” campaign

Late last year, JC Penny decided to roll out an interesting strategy that was going to “revolutionize” the customer experience. The idea was to redesign its stores into a sort of “faux main street” that had different sections covering distinct clothing brands, like Levi’s and Liz Claiborne.

The only problem was that Target had released a similar ad campaign, titled, “Introducing The Shops at Target,” way back in January 2012.

This Target ad also featured casual shoppers walking through a “faux main street” and stopping at shops that featured its clothing brands. It’s one thing to make an idea your own, but it’s quite another to just copy your competitor as a way to keep up with them.

Let’s take a look at another example.

The “Apple Syndrome”

Whether you like the company or not, you can’t deny that Apple has built one of the strongest brands on the planet. What makes its brand so captivating is how it’s presented to customers. You’ll hear about how Apple delivers an “experience,” instead of just products. Through its marketing and content strategy, the company has constructed some of the most successful packaging, retail stores, and customer relationships imaginable. But what’s just as interesting is the trouble its competitors have gone through to seem more “Apple-like” in their content marketing efforts.

Microsoft recently released a number of its own retail stores to help promote its Windows phones and Surface tablets. But when I visited one of these stores for the first time, I had to do a double-take. Does this look strangely familiar to you?

From the light wooden tables and white walls to how the employees dressed in blue shirts, it’s pretty clear that Microsoft wants to be just like Apple. The company really must have done its homework, because it felt just like being in an Apple Store. But that’s just the problem: Apple was the first brand on my mind when I entered the Microsoft store — not exactly a shining example of a unique branding experience, or customer experience, now is it?

From these examples, you can see that direct copying isn’t always a good thing. The key is to look at the core of what the strategy represents and then find a way to make it — clearly and unmistakably — your own.

Let’s take a look at three core ideas that can be used as the foundation of a unique content marketing strategy.

1. Build on your successes

Amazon prides itself on being the number one e-commerce retailer. When you think of “online shopping,” Amazon is usually the first brand that comes to mind. Part of the reason it’s had so much success is because of the content options it offers on its website.

Over the years, Amazon has continually introduced new tools — like customer reviews, a five-star product rating system, and related product recommendations — that made customers’ buying experiences quicker, easier, and more rewarding. Moreover, the company kept these tools in play even when it introduced new or updated features, thus building on a successful customer experience, rather than completely revamping it with each site update.

You can follow this same path for your content strategy: Determine the most effective content components you’ve implemented and build on them. Think about what has been most successful for driving consumer interest and conversions. Whatever those features may be, make sure you keep them part of your overall strategy as you test out new possibilities. For example, if your most successful content marketing tactic to date has been email blasts, don’t suddenly abandon them completely in favor of social media outreach.

2. Create a path for your customers to follow

In most large department stores, you can quickly find what you need without having to look through all the departments first. In theory, this speeds up the customer shopping experience, which makes the customer happy, right? But is that really the right goal for a retail brand to have? Do stores want customers in and out as quickly as possible, or do they want them to stick around and see everything the store has to offer, whether or not it was what they came in to buy?

In contrast, IKEA provides one of the most unique shopping experiences around: Its stores are designed to lead customers through all of its departments so that they experience the store in its entirety, picking up a few extra sales along the way.

In your own marketing strategy, think about how you can create a unique path for your customers to follow through the buying process. This could mean creating a strong landing page that all of your content marketing efforts lead to, or redesigning the navigation on your website so that customers can easily find more of the content you offer there. The point is to set your content on a path that you want your customers to follow — even if it’s not the path that they may have envisioned on their own. Take them on a storytelling journey, and make sure you reward them at the end of it with valuable information they need.

3. Team up with another brand

The latest James Bond film, “Skyfall,” grossed more than $1 billion at the global box office. Part of its great success had a lot to do with its marketing — ads for the film were everywhere on television and in movie theaters alike. But the real success in its strategy came from teaming up with other brands.

“Skyfall” partnered with several big-tier brands throughout its promotional campaign, and each of them contributed heavily to the level of exposure that the film received internationally. Most notable, from a content marketing perspective, was its collaboration with the London Olympics. The partnership resulted in a memorable opening ceremony stunt (starring the Queen of England, no less) that tied the James Bond brand story into the real-world excitement of the Olympic games

The partnership efforts that were part of “Skyfall’s” marketing strategy helped it become one of the biggest movie blockbusters of all time. For your own content marketing strategy, think about what brands you could possibly team up with to tell a compelling story within — and outside of — your industry. Celebrity endorsements are always good and attract a lot of attention, but think deeper. How can you reach out to new niche audiences while expanding the possibilities of your own brand? The potential here for ideas is limitless.

For more content strategy examples you can take from big-brand successes, read CMI’s Ultimate eBook: 100 Content Marketing Examples.

Money.

Specifically, they discussed ways that marketers who are keen on content strategies can win the backing they need — and the budgetary support they need — to proceed with a plan.

The result was more insights than we thought we could cram in 30 minutes — like an Imelda Marcos-sized closet of content marketing persuasion.

The content marketing context 

Early this year, my company kicked off a series of conversations with some of our content marketing heroes, who gathered to discuss a hot topic. This installment of the Content Marketing Hangouts featured Joe Chernov, Michael Brenner, and Ardath Albee, with Velocity’s Stan Woods as host.

The 9 nuggets that generate content marketing investment 

Without further ado, here are the highlights of our experts’ recommendations (with a direct quote, its source, the context, and a time-stamp, for easy access):

1. “I got started with content marketing by seeing it as a PR hack. Content was a Trojan horse for communications.” — Joe Chernov

Joe describes how he got started in content marketing via PR, and his discovery that old techniques were not working because people were not interested in engaging with the latest press release about a product or new hire (6:06).

2. “The real problem at a large corporation isn’t to get funding to do something new, but to get people to stop doing what isn’t working.” — Michael Brenner

Michael shares one of the early challenges that people in companies like his (SAP) find in getting started with content marketing (10:10).

3. “Don’t force the organization into making a false choice between the marketing they’re already doing and the marketing you want to see them doing.” — Joe Chernov

Joe describes how a strategic investment in content should be able to lift a company’s investments in all other areas of marketing, thus making it much easier to buy into (10:47).

4. “One of the things I see a lot is that people can’t get their heads wrapped around the change in terminology.”  — Ardath Albee

Ardath describes how content marketers need to adopt the terminology of conventional marketers in order to set a common context, and effect change from there (12:37).

5. “The way to sell content marketing at the pilot stage is by attaching some vanity metrics to it, so you can show that it worked; there was a cause and an effect.” — Joe Chernov

Joe offers marketers a way to get their projects going without building the massive ROI case — though he’s quick to add that an ROI case must eventually be built and delivered on (17:35).

6. “What I was able to show to instill fear in the minds of our executives was the number of conversations that were happening around our solution areas that we weren’t involved in, at all.” — Michael Brenner

Michael describes how, by demonstrating SAP’s lack of presence in conversations about big data, SAP leaders who were eager for growth in data opened themselves up to new ideas (18:30).

7. “What we were able to do was develop content programs in parallel with more conventional programs, then show how we generated greater return engagement.” — Ardath Albee

Ardath shares how you can win the day for content marketing, not by generating an absolute take-up, but rather by beating comparable investments (19:53).

8. “If you have a good foundation, good personas, a good strategy, and realistic expectations, you can make enough of a point in a three-month pilot to get an extension.” — Ardath Albee

Here, Ardath describes how businesses struggling within the quarterly revenue cycle can manage to get funding for a content strategy (24:00).

9. “One of the reasons why many companies struggle to adopt content marketing is that they don’t know where to put it.” — Joe Chernov

Joe observes that many companies don’t know where to fit content marketing within their organization, vis-à-vis the web team, PR, demand gen, social, etc. (25:12).

How many of you have used these techniques to win budget? Have any successes to share, or pitfalls that you can help your fellow content marketers to avoid? Let me know in the comments.

For more tips on getting the support you need to bring content marketing to your organization, read “Managing Content Marketing,” by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi.

CMI lead strategiest, Robert Rose, spoke with a group of enterprise marketers to ask them how they’re resolving “the differences between the conversational nature of social and the governance model behind content.” The question of producing mutual benefit that was raised stems from the observation that content management systems perform poorly for social media management, and vice versa.

The marketers in the video all brought excellent perspectives to the table. Thanks to Merrilyn Datta, Ken Trammel, Tom Gerace, and Amanda Nelson for participating. (See more from this roundtable in the video below, and learn about the 14 critical questions to ask about content marketing technology.)

Content Marketing Institute Technology Roundtable Series – Part II from Content Marketing Institute on Vimeo.

To maintain a healthy relationship between the two teams, some marketers look at social as the creation of micro-content. Yet, others might see this as limiting, considering how the rules of content engagement differ from those of social engagement across various channels.

Below are four ideas on how to create common ground between your social media and content marketing strategies.

1. Link the conversation back to your content

Sure, you’re sharing your content through your social media channels. But, are you embracing the other ways blogs, pictures, videos, and the like can enrich the conversation?

Consider these three additional ways to connect your content engagement efforts to your social conversations.

• Measure content’s social impact: Collecting data on where traffic to your content comes from is one element of analytics. But what about looking at the response happening on social media channels themselves? What are people saying about your content on Twitter? Measurement often goes beyond the walls of your content library itself.

• Offer a more comprehensive answer: Social media has its limitations. For one, most social channels won’t supply enough room to answer a complex question. For questions where you feel social media has boxed you in, pointing towards a piece of content with the answer is a welcome option.

• Search for a clue: Some say search is dying; others say it’s doing just fine. Whatever camp you fall into, there’s no denying that some people turn to social media to find answers. Seeding social media with links to your content and associated descriptions is another frontier in search.

Take action: Post links to a piece of content more than once, trying different intros and measuring how each one performs.

2. Use community as an umbrella for engagement and content

Amanda Nelson of Salesforce explains how her organization ties engagement and content together into a unified perspective:

For us, community is the umbrella within our organization. Under community is engagement and content. We really see it all as one thing. You can’t have a community without content, and you can’t have a community without engagement.

A “community” mindset puts the bigger picture of social media and content marketing into perspective. From this angle, it’s easier to:

• Consider how user-generated content can play into your content marketing strategy.

• Put faces on members of your audience and build a more accurate profile of your customers, thereby helping you create stronger content.

• See how members of your community are connecting with each other and explore how those relationships impact your brand.

• Test how the community responds to micro-content over social media and use that response data to shape more successful long-form content.

Take action: Find new ways to fuel your content marketing by sourcing content from your community via social media channels. Identify contributors, then test different conversational prompts to see which ones get the best reactions.

3. Write as a discipline of both

At the heart of every successful tweet is a penchant for written communication (just as is the case for every successful white paper). Writers who excel at both social media and content marketing are tremendous assets that should be leveraged. (Yes, I just high-fived myself, and I don’t care who saw it.)

Ken Trammel of Caterpillar explains the concept:

The people that have to carry on a conversation… That’s a tough job. You have to have a certain skill set. We keep wanting… to pull our engineering people into [content creation] because they’re subject matter experts and they have so much to give. But they’re not conversationalists.

Writing is a skill that social media managers need just as badly as content marketers do. Consider hiring professional writers for both positions.

This might seem counterintuitive for content marketers trying to get more members of the organization to contribute to social media and content initiatives. More staff involvement means time saved, right?

Wrong. Social media’s timeliness can result in PR nightmares. And that blog post from your CIO on enterprise app development? It’ll take you hours to decipher and untangle before it’s ready to post.

Skilled writers make everything easier. They create and analyze each bit of micro-content over social media channels for tact. They transform the eight hours your CIO spent painstakingly crafting his article into a two-hour interview and drafting session that simplifies the topic for the reader.

Strong writing skills form the basis for common ground between social media and content marketing.

Take action: Ask for portfolios when hiring for marketing and social media spots on your team. Give special consideration to candidates who can demonstrate strong writing skills.

4. Avoid the “chicken or egg” scenario

For content marketers, it’s easy to see social media as a channel for promoting content. You can get lost in the mindset that you’re the one supplying the content that sparks the conversation. Therefore, content is the genesis and the fuel.

On the other hand, isn’t social media a source of content enrichment in its own right? It’s an idea repository.

• Through discussion, social media channels often unearth topics around which your audience craves more content.

• You can search social media to find trending topics people talk about outside of what your brand is saying and create content that adds to those conversations.

• Recruiting guest bloggers (or potential writing hires) whose vision aligns with that of your brand is simpler when you can find, research, and contact them all from the same platform.

Thinking of engagement and content as the chicken and the egg misses the point entirely — that the two feed their own cycle of prosperity. There’s nothing one-sided about their relationship. They need each other. They make each other better. Some would call their love affair epic.

Take action: Start asking your social media team what they can do for you. Put together a plan specifically focused on gathering intelligence you can use to make your content better.

Weigh in

Does your organization bring a unique perspective to the relationship between social media and content marketing? Share it with us in the comments.

Want to take part in conversations like this that set the stage for better content operations? Register now to attend Content Marketing World 2013, September 9–11 in Cleveland, Ohio. 

A branded photo gif on Tumblr.

Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social media site that allows the sharing of all types of branded content including links, music, photos, quotes, text, and video.

Virtually everything on the platform can be customized to match a brand’s image, including colors, themes, and HTML coding.

Quantcast reports that the site is most popular with 18- to 34-year-olds, college-educated with no kids, earning up to $50,000 per year, and of Hispanic or Asian background. According to the same data, Tumblr generates high levels of engagement among its users, with 40 percent of visitors accounting for 85 percent of traffic.

Comscore confirms that Tumblr is the No. 2 social platform — right behind Facebook — in terms of visitor engagement. Moreover, Tumblr is highly popular among internet users and is ranked by Quantcast as one of the top 15 sites in the United States, making it an excellent platform for branded content efforts.

Creating and promoting Tumblr content

Despite Tumblr’s popularity, content marketers need to carefully consider certain issues prior to incorporating Tumblr into their content marketing strategy. Your target audience (or at least an economically viable segment) should already be using Tumblr in order to establish meaningful engagement. And though brands may be able to repurpose existing material for use on this platform, providing the type of content this audience wants is no easy task. But, as a general rule, visually appealing and easily consumed content performs best with this audience; thus, content formats that involve photography, design, and other creative endeavors typically do well.

Before building your branded content strategy for Tumblr, get a feeling for what works by visiting some popular Tumblr blogs. The 100 Best Tumblrs of All Time, 30 Must-See Tumblr Blogs, and The Best Tumblr Blogs of 2011 provide a good overview. You’ll notice content that is short and sweet generally works best. While there is quite a bit of original content on the platform, plenty of Tumblrs reblog other people’s content, often adding their own opinions to give it a unique perspective, which makes it an excellent vehicle for putting your brand’s spin on relevant, curated content that will appeal to your audience.

Beyond creating and curating content, brands will also need to promote their Tumblr blog throughout the Tumblr community (as well as across their other content outposts). Commenting, “liking,” and reblogging are three ways to gain exposure within the Tumblr community. Just like a regular blog, commenting builds relationships and provides a link back to your Tumblr blog, and “liking” and reblogging posts also put a link at the bottom of that post to your Tumblr blog (along with your profile photo). All three events allow other Tumblr visitors to discover your content. Tagging photos in your posts also helps visitors to find your blog when they conduct a Tumblr search.

In some respects, a Tumblr blog can also be promoted just as you would a traditional blog — such as by optimizing your posts for SEO by creating custom URLs, using the “alt” attribute on photos, optimizing page titles and meta-descriptions, and creating and submitting a site map to Google.

Successful branded content efforts on Tumblr

Newsweek

Newsweek was one of the first major media outlets to actively employ Tumblr in its marketing strategy. The publication typically posts just a handful of stories every day, in an easily digestible and Tumblr-friendly way. It appeals to a specific market segment of Newsweek’s audience that prefers consuming information in an alternative way.

This post, with over 46,000 notes, provides social proof that what they are doing works.

Whole Foods Market

Whole Foods Market customers aren’t just buying organic food; they’re buying a way of living. The company uses Tumblr as an extension of its online magazine Dark Rye, telling stories of regular people creating sustainable lifestyles. While the online magazine publishes monthly, the Tumblr blog operates on a daily schedule. A photo of a box of brassicas, a video on baking bread, and a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald are just some of the curated content that can be found on this blog.

It’s an eclectic mix and it works, as shown by the more than 17,000 Tumblr visitors who “liked” this one post. What’s not to like about that? By repurposing existing content and curating other material, Whole Foods Market uses Tumblr to continually build its brand and reinforce its sustainable living persona.

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is a ubiquitous brand whose image is ingrained into the lives of virtually every North American. So pervasive is the Coke brand that there are professionals, organizations, websites, and events dedicated to Coca-Cola paraphernalia. Coca-Cola’s Tumblr blog is a virtual collection of all things Coke. It’s a mass of curated content containing animated gifs, artwork, photographs, and videos. Everything about the blog, including the colors and text, works in harmony to reinforce the company’s brand.

Although more than 19,000 visitor notes for this post are social proof that this works, it’s not easy to please the fickle. Many posts have only hundreds of likes, comments, or reblogs, while some have as few as a handful. Despite this, it serves as a great repository of Coke odds and ends, providing a wonderful attraction for the curious.

Carefully research Tumblr’s audience before committing to any branded content marketing strategy. Brands need to provide high-quality and visually oriented materials, either original or curated, in order to gain significant audience on this platform. Tastes of Tumblr visitors can be fickle, so allow sufficient time to properly measure results.

Looking for ideas on other innovative platforms to create and distribute branded content? Read the CMI Book, “Bold Brand,” by Josh Myles.

Cover image via Jetset Studios on Tumblr

The beauty of UGC is that it provides a win-win situation for both sides: Brands get to develop a deeper engagement with their audience by creating a platform where their consumers can gather and socialize (that they can control and monitor) and, in turn, consumers get exclusive access to products and services — which they can boast about to their friends.

The bonus for brands comes when consumers take their engagement a step further, by sharing their brand ambassador status with their peers on social media channels. In a world where people rely on recommendations from friends, this endorsement is invaluable, not to mention it helps brands continually release fresh, powerful content that boosts natural SEO rankings and reaches new audiences.

All the big brands are doing it (Nike’s Fuelband is a classic example), and many of them are doing it so well that their efforts are driving stronger consumer relationships, increased fan endorsements — on social media channels and beyond — and increased returns on their content marketing investments.

For inspiration, take a look at five examples of powerful content that brands are using to bring users into their marketing efforts:

1. Own the Weekend 

The British newspaper The Guardian (4 million unique visitors per day), chose to engage with its users by challenging them to “Own the Weekend.” It invited its trade partners and readers to do “something cool” at the weekend, take a picture of it that included its “We Own the Weekend” slogan, and tweet it to the Guardian with the hashtag, #owntheweekend for the chance to win an iPad Mini.

The content-based campaign generated hundreds of responses like the one in the example above and increased engagement with its media partners (not to mention its endorsement by British actor Hugh Grant was featured in a promo on the Own the Weekend site). 

2. The Best Job in the World

When the Australian Tourist Board had AUD$1 million to play with, it leveraged the power of content to tap into the public’s desire to escape the rat race and do something extraordinary.

The Board created a contest where the prize was a six-month position as caretaker of an island in an Australian paradise — for a jaw-dropping salary of AUD $150,000. All applicants needed to do was create a one-minute video explaining why they should be given the job.

The results: $368 million in earned worldwide media coverage, and more than 34,000 video applications were uploaded onto the campaign’s website and on YouTube, providing an independent promotion for the Great Barrier Reef and Queensland that was viewed by more than 8.6 million people. The winner, a 34-year-old British charity events organizer, gave more than 100 media interviews in the first 24 hours after he won the contest. By the end of his term as caretaker, he’d given more than 450 media interviews and posted numerous blogs, photos, video diaries and tweets — all of which helped escalate Queensland Australia’s position as a tourist destination that rivals the Caribbean or Greek Islands.

3. The Fiesta Movement

Take 100 influential bloggers, give them each a car and a video camera, send them monthly challenges, and ask them to blog about their experiences. The result — in addition to gaining 6.2 million YouTube views, 750,000 Flickr views, and 40 million Twitter impressions — was that it introduced the Ford Fiesta to a new generation of American consumers and earned a record 6,000 pre-orders and a total of 23,000 units sold.

This is was the plan created by automotive giant Ford‘s Head of Social Media, Scott Monty, in 2009. Fast forward to today and the campaign is being given a new lease on life: The 2014 Fiesta Movement will launch the newest Fiesta. The latest agents will create content on their own social pages and as they gain momentum and followers the best content will be featured on Ford’s own Fiesta Movement site. Every Instagram image, video produced and any of the blogs written by the selected “agents” will form the backbone of the Fiesta’s ad campaign, in what Ford is claiming to be its first ever entirely “user-generated content” campaign.

4. The Art of the Trench

The brainchild of creative director Christopher Bailey, the Art of the Trench campaign propelled Burberry’s ailing “staid/old fashioned” image to one of the hottest fashion labels in the world.

With the help of professional fashion photographers, a celebrated fashion photo blogger and the public, the British luxury fashion house, Burberry, underwent a total image revamp. It took UGC to the streets with a simple mission: to show real, fashionable people wearing the brand’s trench coat and looking fantastic in it.

Fashionistas and photographers alike were asked to pose in the coat and upload their photos onto the site, where the Burberry marketing team featured a selection from the best of the bunch. All participants and viewers of the site could comment on and share photos on social media. The hundreds of pictures (which, in the first 6 months, generated 7 million views) that were submitted could be browsed by categories such as weather, color, style, gender, or popularity. The use of social networking and digital media brought Burberry to the minds of a younger audience, brought new consumers and brand enthusiasts to the brand, and re-established its presence as a “cool, be-seen-in, must-have brand” among the fickle fashion set.

5. Linx Space Academy:

The slogan for deodorant brand, Lynx — ”Leave a man, come back a hero,” has been compelling enough to entice hundreds of people to apply for a chance-of-a-lifetime ticket to travel into outer space. This big budget, big idea asked wannabe astronauts to sign up, create a profile, and explain why they wanted to go to space. The multimedia campaign has generated national news stories on television, radio, and in newsprint, as well as garnering tremendous support online. Through this content effort, Lynx has created a powerful content platform for user participation, which includes a leaderboard and the ability for fans to vote for their favorite entries.

5 ways to make powerful user-generated content work for you

While we don’t all have the budgets, or the cachet, that these sexy brands have to work with, the techniques they used can be inexpensively leveraged to enhance user engagement for any business. To this point, here are five examples of user-generated content campaigns that can be achieved on a smaller budget:

1. Video-based “vox pop“: Using this popular, “voice of the people” crowdsourced content technique, content marketers can take to the streets with a camera to interview willing passers-by on their opinions on your product/service. Christian Aid did just that at a recent youth festival in the UK, with an aim of engaging a younger audience and finding out what motivates them. In its interviews, the foundation asked festival-goers, “What do you want to do when you’re older?” Their filmed responses provided useful market research data — and great content for its site.
2. Photo competitions: These are not just reserved for “sexy” industries, like travel, entertainment, and leisure. For example, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a British not-for-profit, organization, challenged photographers to document their experience of poverty in the UK — for a prize of £500 worth of camera equipment and a weekend-long photography course.
3. Pinterest: Marketers are clambering all over each other to create distinctive, powerful content on this trendy visual social media channel. One way content creators can use this platform to promote travel-related businesses (or other companies) is to create a Pinterest board for a specific location. Ask readers to add their own favorite places, restaurants, secret hideaways, or other things your list may have missed for a chance to win a prize — such as a free trip to that destination.
4. Discussion forums: Give your followers a chance to engage with you, and each other. For little cost, you can create a discussion platform that sits as an add-on onto your site (which you can monitor through your CMS). It’s a fantastic way of listening to their needs, wants, and complaints, and presents opportunities for you to address their concerns and exceed their customer service expectations.
5. Internal communications: While not every business has the funds to introduce an internal (Twitter-like) “Chatter” stream for sending ideas to the CMO like Coca-Cola did, there are many ways that content can enable your staff to engage with you and endorse your products and services. For example, try running an internal competition across all departments of your organization to gather ideas, then reward employees who came up with the best ones, and put one into play. This not only incentivizes your workforce to create branded content ideas, but it demonstrates how your business values their opinions and ideas.

Looking for more inspiration on leveraging the power of your fans in your content efforts? Read CMI’s Ultimate eGuide: 100 Content Marketing Examples. 

Jyske Bank has created one of the most high-tech, in-house television production studios in Denmark. In fact, the company refers to itself as both a bank and a media company. Jyskebank.tv produces amazing financial programming, as well as compelling stories that the bank believes are relevant to its core audience of younger consumers and small enterprises.

Jyske’s brand content program is made up of two key values:

1. Remaining true to the organization’s guiding vision, which it calls “Our Foundations“
2. Telling good stories

In addition, every piece of content the company shares is embeddable or sharable on other sites. Because of this “sharing” philosophy, 80 percent of Jyske’s content is viewed, not on its website or owned channels, but rather on outside sources, according to the company.

Historically, this level of open content sharing has opened up some revolutionary opportunities for businesses. But it’s a risky move for any large corporation, let alone a bank.

Instead of paying for multiple, traditional sponsorships like most banks and corporate brands do, Jyske works with businesses that are interested in leveraging its media expertise. This means that instead of outlaying cash, organizations propose media partnership opportunities to Jyske — an attractive option due to the credibility and reach the bank’s content program has helped it to build.

Both the World Mobile Congress and the Cannes Lions Festival has approached Jyske to take part in this unique relationship, offering Jyske access to logo placements and exclusive interviews that they had previously reserved for media companies — strong evidence that with reach and a loyal audience comes great opportunity.

And this type of sharing doesn’t stop with the bank’s external customers. Every Friday morning, Jyske holds a live, full-access television program available to every employee. This type of internal training shepherds its core vision of being open and honest with all people.

Jyske doesn’t have to buy media attention — it owns its media, and spreads it in innovative ways that its competitors should be aspiring to compete with.

(Hat tip to Michael Buckley from King Content for the example.)

Looking for more inspiration from businesses that are approaching content marketing in unique ways? Read CMI’s Ultimate eBook: 100 Content Marketing Examples. 

Your content strategy should help draw parallels between what’s important to customers and what your brand stands for; it enables marketing teams to create more relevant content based on what your brand is comfortable talking about (and what it’s not comfortable talking about). And it provides opportunities for your employees, partners, and customer service reps to be a part of your story, too.

If you are ready to upgrade your content strategy — or create one from scratch — here are 3 considerations that will help keep your business in line with current content marketing best practices. 

1. Move past the content marketing mainstream

Content marketing is more than just fodder for SEO; it’s more than tweeting out a cool photo in real-time during the Super Bowl Halftime Show, and it’s so much more than an infographic that blesses your site with a multitude of back-links. Content must be emotional, tell a story, and aim to impact consumers’ behavior, attitudes, or perception of your brand. And, while search is certainly important, your brand story encompasses much more than what you write on your blog or website.

Everything you do in marketing, online and offline, must align with your brand narrative. So, yes, blog content, videos, status updates, tweets, photos, and even press releases are important. But so is the story you tell through your employees, customers, and partners as well as through your paid media initiatives. This is why you must develop your content strategy before you start marketing it.

Red Bull is a great example of a company that executes its content strategy flawlessly across all forms of media — paid, earned, and owned — in a unique, non-mainstream way. Red Bull Stratos was not only an epic event that placed Red Bull at the center of “space” conversations everywhere, but it also proved, once again, that when Red Bull executes a campaign, it goes all in. Content marketing is surely a small piece of the marketing puzzle here, but it is the strategy that keeps these conversations alive, even today.

2. Develop a compelling content narrative

Your content narrative must different from the brand pillars and positioning statements that comprise your brand narrative. In most cases, your brand narrative will not impact consumer behavior when shared in its purest form, as today’s consumers ignore brand messaging. Instead, your content narrative should translate the tenets of your brand narrative into a story that demonstrates how your business relates to its consumers.

To craft this content narrative, consider the inputs it should include:

• Brand pillars/Corporate positioning: These are the key elements that you can take from your brand narrative to inform your content narrative.
• What issues are important to your brand (e.g., its politics, sustainability practices, social causes, etc.)?
• How is your brand perceived by the media: What do they say when they write about your brand?
• How is your brand perceived by your community: How has your community reacted to your current content offerings?
• Fan interests: What are your fans interested in, outside of their support of/interest in your brand?
• Historical content performance: What basic performance data have you compiled to show which of your content efforts are working and which aren’t? Examples can include basic engagement metrics (i.e., “likes,” comments, shares, retweets, etc.) or post-level reach (potential impression) numbers.
• Search behavior: What keywords or terms are consumers using when they conduct a search on your brand and its competitors?
• Customers’ pain points: What support issues are your customers most concerned about, and how can your brand help address these challenges?

The output resulting from these considerations will help you craft a content strategy that can scale and produce content that can have a strong, positive impact on customer behavior — whether it’s selling more products, repositioning your company in its industry, or raising your company’s profile and its public perception.

As much as the content narrative is important, it’s equally important to decide how you want to execute it and in which channels. A stellar content strategy will help you determine the different content themes and prioritize the types, ideal frequency, and most effective distribution channels for your content.

For example, the template below shows five possible content themes — all with different distribution frequency percentages — as well as the core channels this content strategy should be executed through. The percentages are just examples, but for the most part, you should plan on talking more about your customers than yourself. Also, it’s important to note that every brand is different, so the content themes you choose should be unique to your brand, its goals, and the industries it operates within.

Here is one way a content strategy can play out with the above themes. Assume you are an electric car manufacturer and your content narrative is all about “making electric cars cool to own,” fighting the negative stereotype that they aren’t “cool.” Your content may look like the following; with the content in the shaded boxes meant to be shared in the corresponding channels shown in the template above:

• Marketing and events: The content would revolve around new product launches, new dealership openings, and promotions; and would only be shared in the shaded channels (blog posts, press releases, tweets, videos, etc.).
• Customer stories: This content would amplify customer success stories and product recommendations, specifically highlighting the “cool factor” of the cars and car owners.
• Customer support: This content would focus on product recalls and common support issues; one example could be a series of videos with a very “cool and hip” customer support agent discussing the issues and providing solutions.
• Curation from third-party sources: This content would be curated from third parties, and may include reports, articles, or blog posts that align with your brand’s content strategy.
• Real-time news: You may want to consider leveraging the news cycle to create real-time content, though this will depend on how flexible your content strategy is. 

3. Think like a media company

“Every company is a media company.” This is what Tom Foremski, publisher of tech blog Silicon Valley Watcher has been saying for years now. And though I agree in concept, I also believe that marketers are still struggling to realize this potential in their organizations.

In addition to delivering a content strategy, here are six steps that can help brands transition themselves into publishers:

1      Establish a centralized editorial team: The core team should consist of marketing, public relations, customer support, IT, and product/brand representatives. This ensures that the many key stakeholders in your organization will all have a say when it comes to delivering your content strategy, internally and externally.

2      Assign the roles and responsibilities of your contributors: Contributors can include customers, partners, and employees. If you work for a large, multinational organization you will have to assign regional editors who will be responsible for approving/editing content submitted by the contributors.

3      Build content ideation, creation, approval, and distribution workflows: Controls should be established to ensure content is being shared externally at the right time, in the right channel and to the right customers. Many content marketing platforms have work flows that allow you to assign controls so that content contributors can’t publish directly to a channel; rather, they must go through a series of approvals first.

4      Create a real-time listening station: Also known as social business command centers, these “stations” should be used to respond to and engage with customers through your content efforts, as well as to capitalize on the latest internal and external trends related to your brand. Listening stations are usually powered by technology platforms like Radian6 and display visual data about your brand (i.e., share of voice, reach, engagement, and community growth).

5      Define your converged media: Partner with your paid media team and work through various models that can take your organic content and amplify it through paid media (i.e., triggers that will take Facebook posts and turn them into promoted posts). In this case, a trigger can be “average number of engaged users” on any given status update. Once the engagement hits that number, a decision will have to be made to push that organic update into sponsored content channels.

6      Invest in the right technology: Many tools and services are on the market that can facilitate your organization’s evolution into a media company. For planning and ideation, consider using Kapost, Compendium, or Contently. For content creation, approval, and distribution management, try Sprinklr, Spredfast, Expion, or Hootsuite Enterprise (full disclosure: Hootsuite Enterprise is an Edelman Client), all of which have built in work flows and approval processes. And, for real-time content optimization, you may want to check out SocialFlow.

For more tips on planning for content marketing success, read CMI’s eGuide on Developing a Content Marketing Strategy. 

However, you may be sitting on a goldmine of epic content just waiting to be harnessed: your internal workforce. There is no substitute for the knowledge of subject-matter experts within your organization, but the challenge is transforming them into prolific writers. If you are serious about instituting a successful company-wide blogging initiative, here is a guide to help you get started.

Define your goals

Before approaching any employees about contributing to the corporate blog, the marketing department must first define its goals for publishing blog content on the web. Are you hoping to drive traffic and conversions? Share thought-leadership and improve your brand reputation? Will your blog be a mechanism for educating your current customers or a means to drive lead generation? What are your reader personas? It’s important to align the corporate blog with the business objectives of the marketing department, and to understand the audience you are writing for.

Create a topic model

Hopefully, your marketing department has already created a topic model that illustrates the areas of focus for your epic content marketing plans. If not, the early stages of a company-wide blogging initiative are a great time to make one.

A topic model is a visual representation of all potential subjects your authors can write about. Start with the core of your business and work outward into all of the potential sub-categories related to your industry. For employees who struggle with generating blog post ideas, this model will come in handy. It will also allow your marketing team to home in on the goals of the corporate blog, in general.

Train your employees

It’s likely that members of your marketing team understand the tenets of effective blogging. However, content marketing may be a new concept to the non-marketers within your organization — those employees on the services, managerial, and operational side. Invest in creating and administering a robust training program for those subject-matter experts who aren’t yet pro bloggers with the goal of teaching them best practices. Here are six sample training sessions you can use to get started:

1. Ideation/topic generation: Focus on the process of researching and generating epic blog topic ideas that will solve common problems within your industry and its customer community.

2. Blog titles: There are tried-and-true formulas for blog titles that win. Have your budding authors write 10 to 20 blog titles and discuss which would be most effective, and why.

3. Blog structure: In this session, outline the components of an effective blog post: the introduction, body, and conclusion. Your authors can use a simple body structure, such as:

• “tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em
• then, tell ‘em
• then conclude by summarizing what you told ‘em

4. Tone and style: Consider bringing in a professional copywriter, journalist, or creative writer to teach this session. Remember that effective storytelling has its place, even in a corporate blog. Your authors need to understand how to make their posts engaging and impactful.

5. Content governance: Explaining the rules and regulations that every blog post should follow will prevent extensive editing on first drafts. Will all the words in blog titles be capitalized? What kind of language is tolerable in the body of articles? This is your time to establish a standard that all of your blog posts will follow.

6. Repurposing: Content repurposing can take a lot of pressure off of your authors to create original content from scratch. Teach them how to lean on existing content like emails, internal documents, and sales/marketing collateral for new blog posts.

Even though attending your training program will take folks away from their work for a short period of time, it will pay dividends in the form of high-quality content.

Give employees freedom

Some employees may consider blogging to be a welcome break among their day-to-day tasks. Those who aren’t natural writers, however, may struggle to share their knowledge in a way that provides value to the marketing team.

• Encourage them to write about what they are passionate about: Doling out pre-defined assignments and mandated article subjects can squash creativity and make your employees feel as if they’re just fulfilling another job task. Provide your employees with a topic model, but encourage them to draw parallels between those topics and their own personal interests or hobbies.
• Be flexible on when they can write: Asking your employees to do their blog writing during off-hours can immediately turn them off to the idea of contributing to the corporate blog. It’s important for managers to recognize the positive impact that blogging will have on the business — even if it means the loss of an hour or two of productivity per week. While setting aside scheduled blog writing times may increase collaboration, it may not be compatible with workloads and deadlines.
• Set goals, roles, and expectations: Be clear about what you expect from your authors. How long should blog posts be? How often do you expect submissions? Who will be editing posts and providing feedback prior to publication? Will the author add calls-to-action, or will the editor? Who will make the final publishing decisions? Consider appointing a “blog czar” who can be the point person on delegating tasks, communicating and enforcing policies, and preventing production bottlenecks.

Being prepared for any issues or setbacks, and establishing how your marketing team will respond is critical to the success of any internal content production initiative.

Promote their personal brands

Some companies shy away from touting the personal brands of their employees through their corporate marketing efforts. While a single corporate brand message can be powerful, having many active and respected individual employee brands can have a multiplier effect on promoting your content. By taking an active role in building the reputation and visibility of an employee’s personal brand, their rise to fame can pay dividends to your company for years.

• Establish Google Authorship: AuthorRank isn’t here yet, but you can future-proof your content by establishing Google Authorship now. Establishing authorship has tangible benefits today in the form of author rich snippets, which can improve click-through rates from the search engine results pages (SERPs).

• Include author bios on-page: While your employees don’t need a robust author bio at the end of their posts to establish Google Authorship, providing them with an opportunity to display their experience and business achievements in their posts can help incentivize them to take ownership of their content. Let them choose their own photograph and write their own personalized bio, and don’t prohibit the inclusion of their personal social media profiles.
• Social media optimization: Include social sharing buttons that make it easy for website visitors to share blog content. Be sure to program Twitter share buttons in such a way that the author’s @username will automatically be included when others tweet their posts. This will increase their social exposure and transform all of your authors into natural promoters.

Appealing to the ego is a great way to get your authors excited about blogging regularly. After all, who doesn’t like to see their own face online?

Share feedback and reward achievements

This is your chance to tie blogging efforts directly to business objectives and encourage your team’s bloggers by sharing metrics that can boost their confidence. Let your authors know how much traffic, shares, and conversions their posts are generating using these tools and techniques:

• Set up author stats (using Google Webmaster Tools Labs): Author Stats is a feature of Google Webmaster Tools that shows you how often content with established authorship appears in Google SERPs. The feature can be found in the “Labs” section. Author Stats reports are a quick morale builder, as they show the tangible, quantifiable results of your team’s blogging efforts. To make sure credit is given where it’s due, each writer or author should set up a report through his or her individual Google account. 

• Track authors through Google Analytics: SEOmoz has an awesome tutorial on its blog for setting up custom variables and reports in Google Analytics that will show you at-a-glance who your top performing bloggers are by traffic, where visitors are coming from, and what they do after reading a blog article.
• Give out awards: Consider investing in framed certificates or even trophies to bestow upon authors who excel at driving traffic to your blog. Recurring company meetings are a great time to hand out awards, allowing your authors to be recognized by all of their peers. Here are a few sample reward categories:

• Blogger of the Year
• Most Improved Blogger
• Most Social Shares
• Most Views
• Most Unique Views
• Most Conversions
• Best Title
• Most Prolific Blogger

Summary

If you train your employees, give them the freedom to express themselves within set guidelines, promote their personal brands, and celebrate their achievements, you’ll quickly find that they will become obsessed with the success of their own posts, addicted to the publicity, and genuinely concerned with the business impact of their blogging efforts.

For more insight on how to produce better corporate blogs, read CMI’s Ultimate Guide to Blogging. 

The Content Marketing Institute is excited to publish B2B Software Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budget, and Trends — North America, sponsored by International Data Group (IDG). This report, which reveals how business-to-business (B2B) software marketers replied to questions on our most recent survey on B2B content marketing, shows that this group — in many ways — has embraced content marketing with more gusto than any other industry we’ve studied.

For example, nearly all software marketers (99 percent) are now using content marketing. They use more tactics (14) than their B2B peers overall (12) and they use those tactics with greater frequency. Here are some of the other key insights:

Software marketers prioritize their goals differently than their B2B content marketing peers do

Lead generation, thought leadership, and lead management/nurturing are more important goals for software marketers than they are for their B2B peers, who generally cite brand awareness and customer acquisition as their top goals.

They measure content marketing success differently

While website traffic is an important measurement tool for software marketers, it is not as important to them as sales lead quality. Their B2B content marketing peers, on the other hand, rate website traffic as their number one metric.

They are on par with their peers in terms of social media use (even though they don’t rate it as being very effective)

Social media (excluding blogs) is the content marketing tactic that software marketers use most, as is the case with their B2B peers. However, just 39 percent of software marketers (and 49 percent of their B2B peers) believe it is effective. Software marketers say webinars/webcasts are the most effective content marketing tactic, while their B2B peers cite in-person events as most effective.

They use an average of five social media platforms

Like their B2B content marketing peers overall, software marketers reported an average usage of five social media platforms to distribute content. They use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and SlideShare more often than their B2B peers do, and Google+ and Pinterest less often.

Fifty-three percent will increase their content marketing spend

On average, software marketers allocate 29 percent of their total budget to content marketing (their peers allocate 33 percent). Slightly over half of software marketers are planning to increase this amount over the next 12 months — a figure that is in line with the amounts we see marketers in other industries investing.

Producing enough content is a challenge

Like most other content marketers, the two biggest challenges software marketers face are producing enough content and producing the kind of content that engages.

While most other challenges are similar to those experienced by their B2B peers, software marketers do struggle more often with lack of integration across marketing: 36 percent of them say this is a challenge, compared with 25 percent of their peers across all industries.

Special thanks to MarketingProfs for their participation in the annual survey on content marketing and the overall B2B North America comparisons made here.

Want to learn more? Download our full report to get answers to more questions, such as:

• How effective do software marketers think they are at content marketing?
• How often do they outsource content creation?
• How do they tailor their content?
• What does the profile of a best-in-class software content marketer look like?

Are our findings consistent with what you are experiencing? Let us know in the comments!

For more insights on content marketing in the software industry, register for the Content Marketing World Tech Summit being held September 12, 2013 in Cleveland, Ohio.

Even though the company is no longer Junta42, we still have a soft spot for the number 42. So, to celebrate our anniversary, we couldn’t resist bringing you 42 of our favorite posts from the past six years. This list is a combination of the posts that have had the most traffic and shares, the ones members of the CMI team find themselves emailing most often, and some gems from our super-smart contributors that we think everyone should know about.

You can view the Slideshare below with quotes and tweets from each post or browse the list below.

Definitions and basics

The History of Content Marketing [Infographic] – Corporate Storytelling is Not New: For all of those people out there who complain that content marketing is not new, we agree! This infographic depicts the 100+ year history of content marketing. (What is new, though, is people trying to figure out how content marketing should work within other types of marketing — and within their organizations.)

24 Top Content Marketing Questions Answered in Less than 140 Characters: I’d venture a good guess that this post from Joe Pulizzi answers some of the questions you have about content marketing.

The 7 Business Goals of Content Marketing: Inbound Marketing Isn’t Enough: This post from Joe Pulizzi outlines the seven goals that content marketing can help you achieve during the sales process. 

First Things First — Content Strategy Before Social Strategy: While you may be tempted to jump into your social media strategy, you need a content plan before you can do this. Patricia Redsicker explains why.

Content Marketing: The Fallacy that More is Better: When the industry first started talking about content marketing, there was a perception that more is better. If you still believe this to be true, think again.

Framework

Last week, we published The CMI Content Marketing Framework: 7 Building Blocks to Success. This white paper outlines the seven non-linear steps of the content marketing process. While we have online how-to guides that provide more specifics on each step, this is the CliffsNotes version of what you need to know:

Why You Need a Content Marketing Mission Statement: If there is one thing you need in content marketing, it’s a solid mission statement. Joe Pulizzi shares what this is and how to craft one.

Getting Buy-In for Your Content Marketing: A 3-Point Process: If you are like 22 percent of B2B marketers and 21 percent of B2C marketers, you are challenged with getting buy-in from executives for content marketing. Joe Griffin shares tips on how to do just that.

How to Justify the Cost of Content Marketing: This useful reference from Eloqua and Kapost breaks down how the cost of content marketing compares with the cost of a PPC campaign.

Developing a Buyer Persona? Avoid these 4 Common Mistakes: Once you have justified your plan, you need to focus on your audience. Adele Revella shares the “dos and don’ts” of building buyer personas.

Content Marketing Strategy: 3 Experts on Tapping Influencers: While you may be focused on your customers, don’t forget your influencers. Amanda Maksymiw, Leslie Reiser, and Waynette Tubbs share their suggestions.

Brand Storytelling: 10 Steps to Start Your Content Marketing Hero’s Journey: You’ve heard of the importance of creating your brand’s story, right? Sounds great, but how do you actually do it? Robert Rose walks you through the specifics.

7 Steps to Creating Your Content Marketing Channel Plan: Once you know your audience and story, you need to decide where you want to tell your story. Joe Pulizzi shares the essentials on taking this important step.

58 Social Media Ideas to Inspire Your Content Marketing: If you feel overwhelmed by all of the various social media channels you could use, you are not alone. This handy eBook looks at 14 channels, and provides quick tips for each one — and an example of a company that is leveraging it well.

12 Tips for Keyword Selection to Guide Your Content Marketing SEO: Part of your distribution strategy is optimization. This post from Mike Murray walks you through the basics of choosing the right keywords in your content.

The Essential Guide for Meta Descriptions that Will Get You Found Online: Brad Shorr shares what you need to know about these powerful SEO tools.

Planning Your Content Marketing Team: Critical Positions and Salary Info: Of course, you need the right team in place to execute your content marketing plan. This post will help you with pulling that team together.

Chief Content Officer Job Description Sample Template: When Junta42 was founded six years ago, finding someone with the role of CCO was pretty rare. Now, it’s becoming much more common. This post explains what this role entails, and what it takes to excel in it.

Can B2B Marketers Become Content Whisperers?: In content marketing, listening is just as important as talking — if not more so. Ardath Albee shares ideas on how you can become a better listener.

14 Sources for Content Curation Inspiration: Content curation is an increasingly important part of content marketing. Pawan Deshpande offers 14 third-party sources you should know about when you are ready to “listen” as part of your content curation (or creation) strategy.

8 KPIs Your Content Marketing Measurement Should Include: Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean that you should. Neil Bhapkar shares what you really need to keep track of.

A Field Guide to the 4 Types of Content Marketing Metrics #eBook: Jay Baer is one of the most sought-after speakers and bloggers in the content marketing industry. Here he shares some insights from his popular Content Marketing World 2012 session on content marketing measurement.

Content ideas

Even though content marketing isn’t new, people are always asking what to write about. While we have countless posts on this topic, here are some favorites:

12 Months of Content Marketing Ideas for Slideshare: While this popular post from Roger C. Parker shares insights on what you can cover on Slideshare, his ideas can be used for many channels.

42 Content Marketing Ideas for 2013: This was widely shared, as it’s chock full of good ideas you can use when planning your content marketing efforts.

21 Types of Content We Crave: This popular post from Scott Aughtmon shares the type of content that people in any industry desire.

How to Create an Idea Dashboard to Track Your Favorite Content Ideas: Need to bring all of these great ideas together? Use this handy idea from Roger C. Parker.

Examples

Along the same idea, marketers are always looking for examples of companies that are executing content marketing strategies in successful, innovative ways. Here are some of our best compilations and examples of compelling content:

7 Tricks Content Marketing Trendsetters Can Teach You for 2013: In our 2013 content marketing research, we asked respondents to write in those organizations that they felt are doing content marketing well. Here are examples and lessons learned from some of the most-mentioned brands, presented by Mark Sherbin.

5 Content Strategies for Boring Brands: If you are thinking, “These ideas are great for exciting brands, but what about me?” this post from Patricia Redsicker is for you.

100 Inspirational, Educational, and Just-Plain-Cool Content Marketing Examples: That’s right — 100 compelling content marketing examples, all in one spot.

Content Marketing Playbook 2011: 42 Free Ways to Connect with Customers: This eBook looks at 42 tactics you can use with your content marketing program, and offers details on when to use each one — and when you shouldn’t.

How Your Content Marketing Can Ignite a Movement: In this moving example, Andrew Davis inspires content marketers to think about how their brands can be part of something bigger.

Other favorites

Of course, marketers are always wondering how to plan for, create, and distribute various tactics. While we have quite literally hundreds of posts on this topic, here are a handful of our favorites:

10 Must-Have Templates for Content Marketers: This has been our most popular post of all time.

Checklist: 15 Questions to Answer Before Starting a Content Marketing Project: Clare McDermott shares a useful list of questions that will get your team members all on the same page.

Why Content Marketers Need to Be Involved in Website Redesigns: Even though consumers are using multiple channels, your website is likely still your hub. Here’s why you need to be involved in the process of making it look good right from the beginning.

12 Things to Do After You’ve Written a New Blog Post: Brody Dorland shares tips on how to distribute your blog posts, yet his ideas can be applied to many types of content. For even more ideas, check out Brody’s 7 NEW Things to Do After You’ve Written a New Blog Post.

21 Things to Do to Help Your Infographic Go Viral: Infographics are hot. If you want yours to break through the clutter, follow this advice from Andrianes Pinantoan.

Creating Valuable Content: An Essential Checklist: Ahava Leibtag shares five core attributes of useful content, and provides a handy checklist you can use to see if yours is measuring up.

5 Steps to Creating an Effective Content Mix: Kathy Hanbury walks you through a process that strikes the right balance between being informative and being entertaining while also supporting a larger company strategy.

17 Techie Shortcuts for Content Marketing: Jodi Harris shares 17 content-related tools you can use when you are strapped for time.

One final thought

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and not quite sure what to do, you’re not alone. Part of the fun (really!) of content marketing is trying new things… and seeing what works and what doesn’t. I leave you with this video from some very smart content marketers who admit that they are still learning, as well. They also provide ideas on how they make their process better, which really is half the battle. Thanks to Amanda Nelson, Curt Porritt, Heather Meza, Leslie Reiser, Kelly LeVoyer and Brenda Spiering for sharing your ideas and inspirations with us.

How to improve your content marketing strategy from Content Marketing Institute on Vimeo.

As this list shows, more than anything else, CMI is a community — one that would not be here without you, our readers. A sincere thanks for your continued support, and a request that you let us know what questions you’d like us to help you answer in future posts. Or, if you have a favorite post that we have not included, let us know in the comments.

Cover image via Bigstock.

The key to generating high quality content on a consistent basis is to create a structure for your content offering.  (Editor’s note: Click the link to tweet.)

With content creation, the goal is to have a lot of the heavy lifting finished before you ever sit down to start producing it. To this end, it’s useful to think like an old-fashioned magazine editor whose publication is based around editorial events, regular columns, and departments. 

While at the heart of building an effective editorial calendar, this preparation is challenging when you are first starting out. To facilitate a smoother editorial process, it helps to plan in terms of two-week or four-week intervals (I call this the “CliffsNotes” Editorial Calendar).

Here are the five steps to rock star-caliber content creation:

1. Determine the major business events and holidays that structure your promotional calendar: Generally these occasions don’t change from year-to-year:

• Incorporate these overarching themes, events (including conferences), and holidays into your content calendar.
• Create hooks around which you can build content that highlights your company’s related promotions.

2. Establish a set of columns that will appear on a regular basis: By laying out a series of ongoing themes, you can build a publishing cycle with built-in momentum:

• Set a consistent publication schedule: Each column should appear consistently on the same day every week, every two weeks, or every four weeks — depending on your chosen schedule. The goal is to train your audience to know when to look for these theme-related content pieces.
• Brainstorm your series of columns: Here are five options every business can use to come up with great ideas for column-based content:
  • Form a column around a specific topic or theme: One person should consistently write these articles, and whenever possible, that writer should be a well-known expert in the field you’ve chosen to cover. For example, I wrote a column for ClickZ on Actionable Analysis. While the content varied, every article was built on the theme of how to measure results from marketing efforts.
  • Answer customer questions: These articles are easy to structure, since you’re responding to your prospects’ top issues. Further, members of your sales, customer service, or marketing team can write the answers. This strategy offers the additional benefit of giving you an opportunity to link to your product.
  • Create entertaining educational content that is related to your offerings: Think of this as a show-and-tell for your products. Use “how-tos,” photos, videos or other content formats that have been found to be most useful for your particular customer base and their informational needs.
  • Make your customers the stars of your content: Gather customers’ stories related to their satisfaction with your products. This is a great option for content, and it can be created using text, images, and/or videos.
  • Put your employees on stage: Create a regular feature where you interview your staff, encouraging them to share a behind-the-scenes view of your company’s background and training.

3. Balance your original content with curated content, gathered from outside sources: Show your audience that you’re on top of the latest news and information on your industry:

• Provide readers with a regularly curated offering (a blog post, daily eNewsletter, a Facebook post, etc.) of the must-read news and trends relating to your field.
• Add your perspective to the curated content: This helps readers to understand the latest trends in your industry — and why they need to be paying attention to them.

4. Expand your content marketing offering with quality guest posts: Allow others to contribute useful information to your content offerings:

• Develop a set of guest posting guidelines: Be very specific about the type of content that you’ll accept, who owns the rights to it, and the acceptance process.
• Appoint an editor to select, edit, and monitor content: To ensure that the content you solicit will be on target for your audience and aligned with your editorial mission.

5. Monitor your competitors’ content offerings to gather topics you may have missed: Don’t underestimate the utility of staying abreast of what others in your category are discussing. It can give you ideas for article topics you may never have thought of.

The key to creating amazing content on a continuous basis is to establish a structure that helps you do the heavy lifting of crafting information before you ever sit down to write. 

What tricks do you use to produce attention getting content every time? What challenges do you have when doing it?

Don’t miss Heidi Cohen’s presentation at Content Marketing World 2013, September 9-11 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register now to attend. 

Cover image via Flickr Creative Commons 

The answer to that question is complicated. You’ve doubted the power of marketing technology suites in the past because they were often also cobbled together, composed of acquisitions that didn’t seem to make sense as an integrated feature set. Why would you buy a suite if the one you’ve created independently could be just as effective?

Now, enterprise brands are racing to debut the first true marketing suite. We’ve discussed acquisitions by Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce in-depth over the beginning of 2013. Some tech suites are market-ready; others are still in production. But it looks like everyone will have a viable solution in the coming months.

Starting to reevaluate your software platforms? Whether you’re considering purchasing a suite or working with specialized vendors, the video below, and the list of questions that follows, could help you make the right content marketing technology decisions for your brand. A big thanks to Merrilyn Datta, Ken Trammel, Tom Gerace, Amanda Nelson and Robert Rose for participating in the conversation and sharing their insights.

Content Marketing Institute Technology Roundtable Series – Part I from Content Marketing Institute on Vimeo.

1. Is it easy to use?

We’ve reached a development stage in business software that values intuitiveness over throngs of features. As such, your marketing software should enable you to cut IT out of the equation, to a certain degree.

Marketing teams must have direct control over their properties — no matter what their levels of tech expertise are. Technology should be easy to use, including features like:

• Drag-and-drop layout
• Simple text editing
• Configurable role designations for team members
• Quick-reference asset management (pictures, videos, etc.)

Find out if the software you are considering requires training — and if the vendor offers it for free. Make sure support resources like documentation, forums, phone and email, and account managers are part of the package, as well.

2. Does it identify silos while allowing them to work together?

Enterprise content marketers must be able to work efficiently across the marketing department. The key is a technology platform that understands and segments marketing disciplines and strategies while empowering teams to share data and content.

Marketing technology should make clear distinctions between areas like:

• Social media
• Automation
• Editorial
• Content management
• Email
• Lead-gen
• Customer relationship management

Silos are useful in that they name and categorize a piece of the marketing puzzle. (That’s why we find content marketing to be such a useful phrase.) But they should always work together.

3. Is data at the heart of the software?

You’ll hear it again and again and again: From here on out, marketing is a science. Data drives the scientific process, proving whether your audience is ignoring or latching on to your message.

If your software can’t measure results, find another platform.

In general, marketing software should measure things like:

• The effectiveness of content, campaigns, and strategies
• Bottlenecks in your marketing
• Areas that excite your audience
• Who customers are (on some level)
• Where customers are in the sales funnel
• What factors are most likely to convert leads

This year, data is more important than ever. Make sure you’re well equipped to handle the explosion of data to come over the next decade.

4. Does it integrate easily with other software?

Vendors tend to box out the competition. But integration is more important than ever. It empowers you to work with more specialized vendors when the situation calls for it.

Suites do their best to be one-size-fits-all solutions. But your business sometimes calls for something different. Sometimes, you need to work with a specialized vendor.

As new techniques hit the market, having the ability to adapt quickly by working with specialized vendors that supply them is a huge benefit for your marketing plan. (Native advertising, for example, probably isn’t a capability you’ll find in most suites.) Chances are the brand behind your suite isn’t going to develop that functionality just because a small group of customers ask for it.

But an open stance on integration empowers marketers to stay agile and innovate on the fly. The suite that opens itself to smaller vendors (and app developers, in some cases) expands its appeal.

5. Is editorial workflow management a priority for the vendor?

As content marketers, editorial workflow management is near and dear to our hearts. Yet many of us still use publishing platforms that aren’t as user-friendly as newer solutions on the market are.

Specialized editorial workflow management platforms, like Kapost (a CMI partner), have made managing editorial staff a much simpler process. But not every vendor will spend time perfecting its editorial platform.

Editorial workflow management should include capabilities like:

• Editorial calendar
• Project management tools
• Author identification and byline tagging
• Simple formatting
• Edit tracking
• Version control
• Post tagging

A powerful editorial workflow management system is the content marketer’s best friend. Cover your bases, especially if you’re evaluating a marketing suite.

6. Is there room for offline marketing?

What’s going on with your brand beyond the walls of your browser? Tying offline marketing to what you’re doing digitally is tough, but not impossible. With increasingly accurate data analysis, you can’t afford to miss out on the customer that converts after picking up a white paper at a trade show.

As a marketer, it can be easy to get caught up in the digital aspect of your job. Find a software platform that helps your organization focus on the entire picture.

7. Is it listening for your brand?

What are people saying about you?

Tracking your brand requires more than Google Alerts (although that’s a start). Social media monitoring is another huge aspect of digital brand management. Tracking your brand’s signal helps the marketing department find conversations and offer timely responses.

It’s also important for finding where your content ends up across the web. Without it, it’s a lot tougher to track where leads and customers originate.

In a suite, brand monitoring comes into play across just about every aspect of your outreach. It represents a way to seek out marketing opportunities that are just begging for your brand’s two cents.

8. Can you use it to manage advertising?

Don’t leave advertising out of the equation. Ad strategy falls under the umbrella of brand control. Therefore, it should work closely with your other content marketing initiatives.

Even if advertising isn’t your job, it’s a function of the marketing department. A truly comprehensive content marketing suite comes equipped with simple features for managing ad placements.

9. Does it make device optimization a no-brainer?

You’re not a designer, nor is it likely that you have time to spend on optimizing web pages for a multitude of devices. How can the software you choose make the process easier?

Tablets are now more trafficked than mobile devices, with higher average order rates to boot. And both of these devices are stealing serious mindshare from laptops and desktops, the devices marketers used to put first.

As a result, your marketing software shouldn’t discriminate against presentation styles. It should include simple resources for setting screen displays or designing responsively.

10. How difficult is collaboration?

Communication across the enterprise can be tricky. Does your marketing software make it easier?

Collaboration among different teams is what makes a truly integrated suite useful. It combines data analysis, content control and delivery, and asset management with project management.

The right content marketing technology should make collaboration simple in ways like:

• Tracking actions taken by other team members
• Chatting on the page in real time
• Assigning tasks and campaigns
• Sharing pieces of content (like data)
• Simple sharing of assets
• The ability to designate roles

Without easy ways to collaborate, a marketing platform falls flat.

11. What kind of reputation does the company/software have?

Simply put, you want a software partner you can trust.

Today’s plethora of online reviews is usually enough to help you do your legwork before you invest in a technology partner. Checking with colleagues and peers also helps.

Actively seeking answers that don’t already exist online can help, too. Ask about vendor and software reputations through services like Quora and LinkedIn Groups. It doesn’t hurt to search websites like Ripoff Report and the Better Business Bureau, too, for possible listings on the company you’re researching.

12. How have other companies used the software?

What kind of potential does the platform hold? Does the platform have a lot of users? Have any major brands put their trust in the software?

Here, you want to dig up case studies. Start with any you find on the vendor’s website. Search for success stories you can find in the media, too. Figure out exactly what kind of success organizations like yours have had with the platform.

13. What costs are involved?

Tally up everything, including less tangible costs, to get a full picture of your investment. Costs may include:

• Setup and licensing fees
• Training
• Content migration from an old platform
• Custom development
• Broken contracts with previous vendors

Figuring out what you’ve invested is a crucial step in calculating your ROI.

14. Who will it make happy, and who will it piss off?

Will introducing new software make you more friends than it will enemies?

It’s always important to consider the politics of introducing a new technology to an entire department. If content is your focus, for example, you may end up favoring a platform with a strong editorial workflow manager. As a result, a dedicated email marketing specialist may find her portion of the software to be lacking.

Always consider the compromises a new software platform may force internally. After all, there’s no such thing as a perfect piece of software.

Weigh In

What other questions are missing from this list? Share them with us in the comments.

For more tips to help you make smart purchasing decisions, read CMI’s eGuide: How to Choose Content Marketing Technology. 

Kraft Foods has over 1 million people who request and pay to receive its print magazine, Kraft Food & Family.

OpenView Venture Partners now has approximately 20,000 business owners and CEOs who have requested a subscription to its weekly eNewsletter.

Two individuals known as Smosh started developing and distributing videos on YouTube back in 2005. Eight years later, Smosh runs the most popular YouTube channel, with 8 million subscribers.

Copyblogger sells software to bloggers. Kraft is one of the largest food companies in the world. OpenView is a venture capital company. Smosh is a comedy network. Even though their businesses couldn’t be any more different, they share a business model imperative: Subscription is key to a successful content marketing plan.

The forgotten goal of subscription

I’ve talked with dozens of marketers over the last month about their content marketing programs. While collecting email addresses is often cited as an important priority, rarely do I find a content marketer who talks about generating subscribers as key to achieving their content marketing goals.

This is a major problem.

If a prospect appreciates and values your content in some way, the next and easiest behavior for them to take is to affirm that they want more of that great content.

Begin with the end in mind

In 2008, the Content Marketing Institute was just a year old. We had a few thousand subscribers to our weekly eNewsletter, which was sent out each Friday. As we were becoming more sophisticated with our marketing, we decided to do an analysis of our subscribers.

What we found both surprised and delighted us. The average CMI subscriber:

• Was more likely to attend our events and purchase our products
• Was more likely to share our content with their networks
• Closed three times faster than a non-subscriber, once he or she had entered our sales process (for our consulting service).

We had the goals of brand awareness, lead generation, and thought leadership — just like your organization most likely does (see all the available content marketing goals in this content marketing research). But what we didn’t realize until this analysis was that we could accomplish a number of marketing goals through the one, unified goal of subscription.

We found that by developing epic content marketing on a consistent basis, we were creating better customers for our business, as well as accomplishing a number of marketing goals.

Our understanding of the value of our subscribers transformed our little business that was just surviving into a thriving and growing brand. Yes, it’s that important.

The digital footprint

In 2009, I had the pleasure of hearing Dan McCarthy speak, then CEO of Network Communications and now a partner with DeSilva & Phillips, a leading media investment bank. Fittingly, Dan spoke about the changing mentality of his media company and how it had expanded its definition of subscription.

Subscription, for most media companies, is better known as circulation. The circulation of a magazine or newsletter is what you can sell against. For example, our magazine, Chief Content Officer, is delivered to 22,000 marketing executives every quarter. This reach of 22,000 is what we charge our sponsors for (which generally calculates to around $7,000 per full-page advertisement). If we only had an audience of 10,000, we would have to charge much less for a full page of advertising.

Dan said that his media company was evolving away from this mentality and focusing on offering subscriptions around the places where customers were hanging out — known as the digital footprint.

Owned subscription sources (i.e., print and email) are still primary because we can actually own the data from those channels. Secondary subscription sources, such as Twitter followers or YouTube subscribers, are important as well; but since that data is owned by those companies (and not ours), we can’t place as high an emphasis on those.

The point is this: You are your own media company. As a media company, you need to focus on your subscription channels in order to deliver on your marketing goals. And the only thing that keeps those subscription channels growing and vibrant is consistent amounts of epic content.

Some tips to drive subscription:

1. Make content-for-content offers: As readers are engaging in your content, be sure you have a clear offer that takes your content to the next level. This means offering a valued eBook, research report, or white paper, in exchange for subscribing to your email list. You’ll see that we do this on the upper right hand corner of this page.
2. Pop-ups work: As much as I loathe pop-ups or pop-overs as a reader, I LOVE them as a content marketer. We use Pippity as our pop-over service, where we offer an eBook on 100 Content Marketing Examples. Over 50 percent of our daily sign-ups come from Pippity (Pippity also integrates nicely with WordPress).
3. Focus: So many companies want to throw 100 offers in front of their readers. Don’t confuse the issue. If your goal is subscription, that should be your main (and only) call to action.

Once you focus on subscription as your goal, make it a priority to find out what makes a subscriber different to your business than a non-subscriber. Once you find that little piece of secret sauce, everything will start coming together for your top-of-the-funnel content marketing program.

For more tips on creating an epic content marketing plan, register to attend Content Marketing World, September 9-11, 2013. Early-bird pricing is available until March 31.

Marketing claims, offers, and promotions often require certain disclosures to be in compliance with FTC regulations. To clarify when disclosures need to be made, the Commission released its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsement and Testimonials in Advertising in late 2009. These guides focused on emerging digital channels (social networks and blogs, in particular) being leveraged in word-of-mouth marketing campaigns and promotional programs. This directly affected blogger outreach, along with sponsored, employee, affiliate, advocate, and influencer programs run on every platform. 

The Commission recently issued another round of revised guidance to content producers about when disclosures need to be made, as well as how they need to be made in the context of new digital communications platforms, where adding legal information can be particularly challenging to do in under 140 characters.

Personal and business communications have been greatly impacted by shifts in social and mobile channels since May, 2000, when the Commission released its first Dot Com Disclosures report to address specific marketing challenges and needs in these key areas. Given these colossal changes, those who produce marketing content now need to think about disclosure not only in the context of the post or web page that it is displayed on, but also in content-promotion messages posted on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

Don’t worry — disclosure doesn’t need to be complicated or take away from your marketing message. However, it does need to be clear, conspicuous, and unavoidable, so that the content you produce communicates transparently with your audience.

Read on for details on what you need to know about the latest disclosure rules.

What disclosure means for content producers 

As a content producer, you need to understand the nuances of every platform you’re using to engage consumers, which also means that you need to understand how to effectively disclose important information (such as partnerships, sponsored posts, etc.) with your readers on everything from Twitter and Facebook to Google+ and Pinterest. Disclosing information can be as simple as saying what you mean, clearly stating that a post is sponsored, or that affiliate links generate commission payments — so long as your statements are clear and you ensure that your readers will see them.

Now I know that disclosure is probably not the first thing you think about when publishing or sponsoring content, but I’m willing to bet that trust and transparency with your audience are things that you take seriously. If this is the case, the FTC’s update likely has a more significant impact on your business than you may realize. 

What content marketers need to know about disclosure 

1. Disclosure standards: The FTC has drawn a hard line, and it’s time for companies to get serious about disclosures. The overall rules are largely unchanged, but now they’ve been put in context of the modern marketing landscape, including social and mobile.

2. Say what you mean: Marketers can no longer rely on hacks and ad-hoc solutions — such as generic links and vague hashtags like #SPON — to make disclosures. Disclosures need to be written in clear, plain language that consumers can easily understand and should be placed as close as possible to the claim they refer to in your content.

3. Space constraints: Technological restrictions on space, the design of certain social media tools, or the size of a given advertisement in a small screen or window — none of these exempt advertisers from making required disclosures and notices on the platforms mentioned above.

For example, if a disclosure is required for a space-constrained ad — such as a tweet or status update — it should be made each time the ad is posted. Don’t assume that consumers will see your posts in sequential order. If the disclosure doesn’t fit, the FTC says the ad should be changed to include the disclosure, or that particular media platform should not be used. 

4. Hyperlink dos and don’ts: Disclosures should not be buried behind a hyperlink when they can be written out and displayed in context. In situations where a hyperlink is unavoidable (such as in space-constrained formats like Twitter), it should be labeled as clearly as possible and used in such a way as to maximize the chance that the consumer will actually click through to the full disclosure information.

5. Design factors: Disclosures must be responsive and account for device limitations (such as screen size), as well as for technological constraints (e.g., with mouse-overs, pop-ups, or PDFs that may not function as intended in all contexts).

6. Other considerations: Disclosures have to be present across any device and platform (across all media) that a consumer may use to view a marketer’s ad or content marketing effort. Don’t forget that there are also other use cases (e.g., contests and promotions), requirements (e.g., reasonable monitoring), and challenges (e.g., cross-platform syndication) that must be taken into consideration when disclosing information via digital platforms.

The net effect

At the end of the day, the net impression of your content or ad matters more than anything else. To cover your bases, make sure that it will be obvious to your readers that you are making a conspicuous disclosure within your message. And if a hyperlink is necessary to ensure that your full legal language gets shared, make sure it is unmistakably visible on the page and clearly labeled in such a way that the reader will understand that the link leads to a detailed disclosure.

The good news is that developing and applying disclosure best practices doesn’t have to be difficult or stand in the way of your content marketing messages. When it comes to disclosures, all you need to do is think about what requirements exist, come up with a plan, and make sure you communicate your disclosures clearly and consistently.

For more information on using content marketing in clear, compelling, and transparent ways, register now to attend Content Marketing World 2013.

Cover image via Shutterstock

Like its written counterpart, the best video content marketing campaign is not about you. Instead, it’s “brought to us by you.” So actually, it’s all about your audience members and addressing their deepest aspirations in order to educate, inspire, and even entertain them. 

If you are looking to stay top-of-mind with your audience in order to increase your influence with its members, here are some keys for getting yourself out of the way and, in doing so, leaving a memorable impression. That’s just what Cisco did in its series of short films, “My Networked Life.”

Step 1: Identify the audience for your video content

The first step in any video content marketing campaign is to clearly identify your audience. A company or organization generally has many touch points with different stakeholders, which makes it important to figure out which segment of your audience you most want to engage with your campaign. This enables you to focus your efforts and to communicate with increased clarity.

In Cisco’s case, its audience includes tech players, investors, entrepreneurs, engineers, and others. For My Networked Life, Cisco decided that it specifically wanted to focus on chief information officers (CIOs).

Step 2: Figure out what your audience cares about

Once you’ve identified your audience, the next step is to decide what type of content your audience will find inspiring, informative, or enjoyable. This requires that you probe into what your audience really cares about. What keeps them up at night or inspires them to get out of bed each morning?

In Cisco’s case, the company decided that what keeps CIOs up at night is this question: “How can I anticipate the needs of the future workforce?” The implications of this are significant; if CIOs can get it right, they will give their company a competitive advantage when it comes to recruiting the best people and building the best teams. Cisco identified this aspiration, then set out to create content that illuminated it in exciting ways.

Step 3: Create video content that aligns with your audience’s cares

Next up, create content that appeals to your audience’s aspirations. The key here is to get in the mode of producing something that will be a gift to your audience. Think of your favorite magazine. Do the articles leave you wondering what the magazine is trying to sell you? Not likely. They probably leave you feeling like you have just received a gift — of education, inspiration, insight, or entertainment.

In Cisco’s case, in order to align with CIOs in a meaningful way, Cisco traveled the world, from India to Brazil, Canada to South Africa, to capture stories of how young people live, work, and engage with technology today. The idea was to appeal to CIOs by offering them intimate, thoughtful, detailed insight into what they could expect from the next-generation workforce.

Cisco found a way to connect with its audience of technology decision makers by capturing how 20- to 30-year-olds across the globe are exploring new ways of working and being accessible. The series brought CIOs into the homes and lives of these young people, and provided a first-hand view of their experiences.

How did this video content speak to Cisco’s goals and communicate the ways technology can impact audiences around the world? Consider the words of one participant, Shilo Shiv Suleman, from Bangalore, India: “I’m allowed to be a digital gypsy of sorts… My office can become a small little grove under a giant banyan tree.”

Step 4: Resist the urge to make a cameo appearance

The more editorial a video content marketing campaign is, the more successful it will be. In turn, the more it gets tinged with a promotional impression, the less effective it will be.

Here’s a simple gut check: Watch the film. Does it make you wonder what they are trying to sell you (promotional red flag!) or do you enjoy it as a gift (editorial check)?

Don’t plant images of your product in the video, and don’t put your logo at the front of the film. The best place for your brand in video marketing is at the end, using a simple, elegant, and understated credit, like: Brought to you by [your name]. That creates an aha! moment for the audience, which will likely forge a connection between their sense of gratitude and your business. It will also make them more likely to engage with the next episode in the series. And even if viewers are not in your target audience, to the extent that the piece is produced in an editorial way, they will be more likely to share it with their friends and social graph — people who may be your target.

In the end, Cisco’s campaign was produced as a gift to its audience, rather than as a direct promotion. By offering insight and encouraging thought, discussion, and dialogue in the tech community, it functioned to build the Cisco brand powerfully and elegantly. So next time you approach video content marketing, consider what your audience really cares about and what films you can produce to connect with them along those deepest aspirations. And remember: Keep yourself out of the way.

For more case studies from brands that have produced innovative “gift” content for their audiences, read CMI’s Ultimate eBook: 100 Content Marketing Examples.

This post was co-written by CMI’s Strategist in Residence, Robert Rose.

Regardless of whether you are exploring the feasibility of content marketing or have already developed a cohesive strategy, you probably want to better understand the precise forms of content that your specific audience wants to connect with.

There are no “silver bullets” or one-size-fits-all plans that apply to every organization. However, there are some core, common elements across successful content marketing programs. At CMI, we’ve been blessed to work with some amazing brands to help them operationalize the process of content marketing. We’ve learned so much from this practical experience, and have begun to recognize some interesting patterns — patterns that form a “chain,” if you will, that can increase the likelihood of content marketing success.

While we’ve seen many of the principles from our book, Managing Content Marketing, put into practice in exciting ways, it is only recently that we’ve really been able to identify these common elements and compile them into a cohesive framework.

In this white paper, The CMI Content Marketing Framework: 7 Building Blocks to Success, we share the best practices and principles we’ve learned from the aforementioned experiences.

In Managing Content Marketing, we explored — in great detail — the practical steps companies can take to create, organize, and optimize their content marketing programs. We also included resources, tools, methodologies, and more — all packaged like a “manual,” if you will. However, for the CMI Content Marketing Framework, our goal is much simpler: It’s a chance to provide a high-level view of the core elements we believe will make any content marketing program a success.

In this white paper you’ll learn:

• What questions your content marketing strategy (i.e., “plan“) should answer
• How to engage your audience early, and often, throughout your journey
• The importance of unveiling your brand stories as a way to communicate your company’s passion and purpose
• How to determine which channels will best meet your specific needs
• Methods for turning your content strategy into action, with some concrete processes and resources you can use
• Why listening to the conversation is so crucial (with some simple tips)
• How to develop meaningful — and sustainable — measurement processes that will support your content efforts throughout the long haul.

We hope you use this framework as the springboard for your own content marketing plans: Whether you are new to the journey, or looking to revisit and improve current programs, incorporating each element in this framework will help keep you on the path to success.

Please let us know your thoughts in the comments. Do you follow a similar process? Is there anything missing?

Now your budgets are all but spent, your writers have put down their pencils, your CEO is looking at you and wondering why the traffic graph doesn’t look like a hockey stick, and you’re left with a heap of stale and uninteresting text on a website or on your social media channels that no one cares about. What are you going to do?

You could go into denial and pretend that everything is going to work out… eventually. Or, you could scrap the whole “content for content’s sake” concept altogether, go back to the drawing board, and produce new, compelling content that people will actually give a damn about.

It seems like every SEO on the planet is taking up the “content marketing” banner in this post-Penguin, post-Panda, algorithm-shifting world. The problem is that now you have too many authors pumping out reams of content without the slightest clue on how to develop something with any spark.

Well, fear not! If you’re struggling to come up with ideas for your new content marketing strategy, you can apply a simple four-step development process that just about guarantees someone is going to care about what you have to say. It takes the frustrating creative process and all the “will people like this?” nail biting out of the picture and just about guarantees you’ll create something shareworthy.

When you’re finished with the process, not only will you have something you already know someone will enjoy reading, but you also will have something that someone is probably going to share on their own social media channels.

Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1: Identify your targets

Your first mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify the people with the loudest voices in your market. If you want your content to go places on the internet, you need to convince people with established audiences to share it with their followers. If you can get those people to share your stuff, chances are their audience is going to start sharing it too, creating a ripple effect.

There are a ton of ways to go about sifting through people’s social profiles, but here’s the one that’s worked for me: Followerwonk.

Followerwonk is an app owned by SEOmoz that spits out incredibly useful Twitter analytics. You can use these analytics to explore Twitter’s social graph, pinpoint potential influencers in your market, and learn about their social behavior.

Let’s walk through the process together for finding a target influencer for the “Content Marketing” niche.

1. Go to Followerwonk’s “Search Twitter bios” tab: You don’t have to sign up for the full service to use most of its features, but if you do have a SEOmoz membership, all features are included.
2. Search for your priority keywords: In our case, let’s type “content marketing” into the search field and hit “Do it.”
3. Now you have a list of people who have some variation of “content marketing” in their Twitter bio. Sort them by the metrics you think are important to establish social reach, and pick a few of the top profiles as your targets.For our purposes, let’s just sort by “Social Authority.” It’s an easy metric that SEOmoz recently added, and it gives you a rough estimate of a profile’s influential activity on Twitter.

Pro tip: Try to find people with high social authority and a high volume of tweets. If they’re avid tweeters, they’re likely to avidly share content across their social media channels, and it will be easier to figure out what they most often talk about in the next steps.

1. Select your target: You want someone who is active, has a large enough following, and ideally shares links in his tweets that aren’t just his own content.Let’s pick Brian Clark @copyblogger for this exercise. He has a high social authority score (68), likes to talk a lot (21,252 tweets), and has a massive follower count (129,909). If we can make something he’ll share, we’ll be golden.
2. Rinse and repeat until you have a list of at least 10 targets.

Step 2: Figure out what they like to talk about

Okay, you’ve got your targets. Now it’s time to figure out what each one likes to talk about. To do this you’re going to have to analyze their tweets, blog, and any other social media channels they’re on. You can do this manually by following them and reading the backlogs for a while, or you can use a tool like Tweet Archivist or Foller.me.

Here’s what you’re looking for when you run your analysis of a target’s tweets:

• Who do they talk to regularly? Consider these people for future targeting.
• What websites do they share most often? Go to those websites and see what the content looks like.
• When do they usually tweet? This will come in handy later.
• What type of content do they most often tweet about? Do they go to conferences and tweet panels? Do they tweet about videos they’ve seen?

Your analysis should enable you to start developing a personality profile for your target.

Here’s what mine looks like for Brian:

He lives in Boulder, works for Copyblogger.com, and likes to talk to people like @bgardner, @monaicaledell, and @tribalblog about topics like web design, copywriting, tech conventions, and film. He’s likely to share insightful article content that helps him and his audiences learn more about how to succeed as a blogger (which is also what he blogs about). He’s also most likely to tweet between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. Central.

Pro tip: Once you know your target’s likes and dislikes, strike up a conversation with them about something they’re interested in. Send out a few @mentions sharing useful stuff you’ve found on other people’s sites and ask them to check it out. Reply with good answers to any questions they may ask the twitterverse. Engage with them on any level you can while you’re creating the content because establishing a relationship early on will set you up for success after the content is created.

Step 3: Create something they’ll talk about

The trick to building something your target influencer will talk about is finding those interesting convergences in his areas of interest. For Brian, maybe an article like “How Pat Flynn Used his Blog to Get a Job in the Film Industry” or “How Bloggers Could Learn a Thing or Two about Promotion from this Year’s Oscars!” would get his attention.

Use all of your research to hone in on topics that sound like something your targets would share. If you find that your target loves to share videos but doesn’t really share articles, don’t spend your time making an article for him.

Above all, stress substance over style. Your content needs to be unique and valuable. Don’t just look at the last 10 things your target shared and copy those. Add your own insights, put your own spin on them, and make sure you’re offering something worthwhile.

Step 4: Tell them about what you created

Your shiny new piece of content has finally been built, and it’s a perfect amalgamation of everything your targets love. It’s sitting on your site, just waiting to be read and spread like a wildfire. There’s just one more step: You have to let your targets know you created something.

Chances are, your targets don’t visit your website every day (or ever). You need to make them aware of your new content.

Here’s what you can do:

Don’t just send out an @mention and expect them to reciprocate. You need to prime them. Before you even mention the content you created, you need to prove that you’re not just some selfish jerk who is only interested in self promotion. Start out by sharing other people’s content with them, sending them your own ideas about the stuff they’re interested in, and trying to strike up interesting conversations with them. In other words, try to sincerely be helpful to them.

Keep in mind that influencers are more than a microphone to amplify your content — they’re real people with their own agendas, desires, and motivations. Only after they’ve warmed up to you a little bit and you’ve gone back and forth with a handful of twitter volleys, should you reach out to share your own content with them.

Then, to help get their attention, tell them about how they inspired the creation of it, and let them know how valuable you’ve found their insight to be. Do not ask them for links; do not ask them to share it with their audience. Simply tell them you’re trying to get the word out about something you created, which was inspired by them. If they find it valuable enough, they’ll share it — without your even having to ask.

Profit!

If all goes well, by the end of this process you’ll have at least one shiny new piece of content on your website that’s perfectly primed for earning valuable shares. Build all of your content this way, and not only will you have volumes of compelling content for your target audience, you’ll also be building valuable relationships for you and your business.

Furthermore, you’ll improve consumer confidence in your brand, you’ll start to be seen as an authoritative content provider in your niche, you’ll start the organic search traffic snowball rolling, and your social engagement metrics will go through the roof.

Now that’s content with a spark!

Want more tips on leveraging influential members of your social graph to give your content marketing strategy an edge? Read the CMI book, “Capturing Community” by Michael Silverman.

Cover image via Veer.com

To account for the absences, some glaring, I created a “Top Women in Content” Twitter list. But that was an ersatz solution. We needed the real thing, another batch of must-follow women in content marketing. 

Looking back at last year’s post, I realize that I traded one “club” for another. The overwhelming majority of the women listed were business-to-business content marketers. They created content to attract new leads, and convert them into customers.  ”Demand generation,” despite its obvious importance to any company, is just one function of content marketing. Others include user experience, public relations, and branding.

To that end, this year’s list includes professionals who might not fit the “classic” funnel-driven definition of content marketing. Instead, it’s comprised of women for whom content is an inseparable component of their professional, and often personal, lives. It’s a list of women who not only produce epic content, but also live it.

Some of the names will be familiar to nearly everyone in marketing circles — stars like Mary Meeker, Nilofer Merchant, and Brandee Barker — while others fly well below the radar. For example, when Jenny Karn ran client services at JESS3, her clients (myself included) earned notoriety, yet she remained in the shadows. I hope this list shines a light on behind-the-curtain difference-makers like Jenny, while simultaneously highlighting the content chops of the Mary Meekers of the world.

Click around in the LookBook above to see all 20.

Lastly, this is by no means a definitive list. It’s a collection of women who inspire me. Women who, when they present at a conference, cause me to clear my calendar for that hour. Although many wouldn’t even consider themselves content marketers, they remain professionals whom I wish I were a little more like. And here they are:

1. Sonia Simone: An embarrassing oversight in last year’s list, Sonia cofounded and runs Copyblogger — arguably one of the most influential content marketing blogs in the industry.
2. Sarah Hofstetter: Remember Oreo’s famous real-time “You can still dunk in the dark” tweet? That was Sarah’s firm, 360i, where she’s also the Executive Sponsor of the Oreo account.
3. Jennifer Burnham: Few get the concept of “helpful” content more than Salesforce.com’s Jennifer Burnham. Her “Blueprint of the Perfect Post” series is the very definition of content as a service.
4. Brandee Barker: Facebook’s original PR leader, Brandee serves on the board of Somaly Mam Foundation, a role that overlaps with major film and print content. She’s also an early contributor to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In movement.
5. Carmen Hill: Carmen’s exceptional content strategy work earned her employer, Babcock & Jenkins, an Orange Award at last year’s Content Marketing World.
6. Jiashan Wu: Visual content wins, and as designer and strategist for creative firm XOlator, Jiashan delivers can’t-be-ignored creative. She’s also won a Clio award.
7. Nicole D’Alonzo: When not running social media at a major beauty brand, Nicole is publishing a “ridiculously awesome” daily email for bold women.
8. Nisha Chittal: Nisha leads social strategy for Travel Channel, and doubles as a prolific contributor to Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine, and Jezebel.
9. Pamela Vaughan: Pamela runs the HubSpot blog, which boasts 1 million monthly uniques and 150,000 subscribers, and it generates about 10,000 new leads a month.
10. Kristina Halvorson: Author, blogger, strategist, speaker, entrepreneur. She’s one of the most consistently reliable voices on the topic of content marketing.
11. Jenny Karn: You might not have heard of Jenny, but you have heard of her previous JESS3 clients: Google Politics, Eloqua, MindJet. All are widely applauded for their content marketing programs.
12. Lindsay Bell: Lindsay is a former television producer, top blogger, and content strategist. A content marketing “triple threat.”
13. Kate Lee: As Medium‘s Director of content, Kate (a former literary agent) is responsible for helping Evan Williams’ new blogging platform finally democratize content discovery.
14. Royce Abrams: Warby Parker‘s Marketing Supervisor has created passionate fans not only by offering a disruptive product and service, but also by creating content-driven experiences for their audience.
15. Mary Meeker: Every year, Mary publishes a massive, 100+ slide deck on digital trends, and every year more and more people anxiously await the arrival of her data leviathan.
16. Nilofer Merchant: A multi-channel content star (TED2013 speaker, Harvard Business Review writer, #SocialEra author, and more), Nilofer also created a $200 million go-to-market strategy for VMWare.
17. Samantha Starmer: It’s easy to forget the value of UX in content. But user experience rock star Samantha Tarmer never has.
18. Margot Bloomstein: According to influencer search engine LittleBird, Margot is one of the three most influential women on the topic of content marketing. Her work at Appropriate speaks for itself.
19. Clare McDermott: A marketer-turned-accountant-turned-content-marketer, Clare McDermott also edits Chief Content Officer Magazine.
20. Julia Hutchison: Dubbed “Europe’s queen of content,” Julia is the head of content marketing for Group FMG.

Now let’s hear from you. Were there any surprises on this year’s list? Any glaring absences? Add your suggestions and I’ll update the Twitter list.

Joe Chernov is one of the many influential content marketers speaking at Content Marketing World 2013 in Cleveland, Ohio, September 9–12. Register today. 

Cover image via Bigstock

Leap Motion’s controller

Consumer technology evolves quickly, and it’s difficult for marketers to keep up. But falling behind the times can be crippling, especially for content marketers. It pays to stay informed on consumer technology and keep your eyes open for the next distribution channel threatening to steal the attention of your audience.

A handful of groundbreaking shifts could seriously alter the way we currently go about content marketing. To keep pace with these shifts, here are three consumer tech trends that should be on your radar.

We’re interfacing with the web like never before

Devices are beginning to move us away from our traditional browsing experience in extraordinary ways. And we’re not just talking about tablets.

How we browse the web may be markedly different in the next two or three years, and these three technologies are leading the charge:

• Google Glass: Augmented reality gets the Google treatment with Google Glass, a voice-activated pair of glasses that presents information on a simulated browser screen.

• Android automation: Yep, it’s Google again. Announced in 2011, Android@Home brings remote control and automation to household tasks like turning on your air conditioner from the road.

• Gesture-based interface: Since the arrival of Kinect for Xbox 360, gesture-based interface has become a reality. Companies like Leap Motion are already putting the concept to market for screen-based devices. (Think Minority Report-style screen manipulation.)

New operating systems like Ubuntu Mobile and Firefox OS are promising alternatives to iOS, Android, and Windows — and the operating system is another area that could impact how we deliver content.

What might it mean for content marketers?

While it isn’t yet clear how exactly these shifts will impact content delivery, you can bet there will be roles for content marketers on all of these fronts. But radically different presentation formats may require a completely different approach to content creation and delivery.

Spending too much time trying to understand these devices before they hit the market (or hit their strides) may be risky because a competing technology can swoop through in a second and render these early iterations useless. However, at least a general understanding of what’s happening on the market with these technologies is crucial for every kind of marketer.

Television may soon lose its content dominance

All right, so here’s the deal: TV isn’t dead — at least not yet.

At this year’s Adobe Summit, NBC’s Julie DeTraglia spoke on the network’s Olympic experiment, where it coupled its televised content with digital content. According to her, the web broadcast didn’t cannibalize the television audience as some expected. Instead, many viewers watched both to keep their eyes on more than one event.

Still, the most viewed video online was one that didn’t air on television: this flop dive by Germany’s Stephan Feck. And let’s not forget that the Olympics are a big-budget, one-of-a-kind testing ground for how television and digital work together, so not every business can afford to conduct high-profile content experiments like these.

Not to mention, large-scale efforts like these aren’t always effective benchmarks of the television industry’s overall health.

What may matter more to content marketers is the high rate of growth of video on the web, the numbers that web-only shows like Netflix’s House of Cards generated, and the fact that major online brands like Huffington Post are starting their own web-based television networks. Also particularly interesting is how the on-demand experience is being incorporated into television.

Whether we need different screen sizes to accomplish different tasks is a moot point. The real question is whether or not we will soon need a cable box, a computer, and a minicomputer to power each screen, and it’s a question that’s been on the minds of consumers and brands alike.

What might this mean for content marketers?

It could mean more competition for your customers’ already short attention spans. It could also mean more opportunities for partnerships, and new avenues of distribution.

A television industry that works more closely with web publishers holds huge potential for marketers and advertisers alike. We’ve already seen the upsides with Hulu, a video publishing network that combines full-length television shows with the short videos the web has bred for years.

As I said, TV is certainly not dead yet. But the trend of web networks publishing original content portends the power a major television network might have if it were to abandon stubborn cable monopolies in favor of focusing on the web as a distribution channel.

Consumers automatically track data on their daily activities

Gamification — the practice of using game mechanics to bolster user engagement — is a hot term these days. But, more importantly, it’s also a data goldmine.

We’ve seen public opt-in data tracking before with communities like Foursquare. And we’ve also seen it used on a more intimate classroom level, as Khan Academy does. These examples, though successful, typically require people to interface with a device in order to report on their activities and track their influence and impact.

However, other companies are on their way to reducing this hurdle. For example, brands like Fitbit (a portfolio of health and fitness tracking tools) and HAPIfork (an electronic fork) are tapping into the daily routines of health enthusiasts, collecting data that can be used in a wide range of applications. The differentiator here is the automation factor — i.e., these devices and mobile apps are set-and-forget. They don’t require a conscious decision by the user.

According to John Battelle of Federated Media, every human being on earth will create almost 600 gigabytes of data this year, and he predicts that next year, that number will double. Expect much of that data to be collected through automated processes, most of which won’t even require people to interact with their devices on an ongoing basis.

What might it mean for content marketers?

It means lots and lots of consistently updated data will be available on your audience. It also means more comprehensive data sets that span longer periods of time, instead of data recorded when consumers are prompted or are “in the mood” to record their activities.

Set-and-forget data collection takes the initiative out of the hands of the consumer. Consider the fitness example, for instance. A device or application that automatically records exercise when a user begins an activity doesn’t rely on that user remembering to activate it every time he or she goes out for a run. That data could be crucial to analyzing your audience’s behavior (in real-life scenarios, rather than self-reported ones) and creating content that will be more attractive to that audience.

What are we missing?

Any fascinating or noteworthy consumer tech you think could have a major impact on your content marketing strategy? Share it with us in the comments.

To get the scoop on more cutting-edge trends that impact content marketing, register now to attend Content Marketing World 2013, September 9-11. 

Our daily blog content deserves the lion’s share of credit for our results. For the past year, we have published one blog post per day, seven days a week, every day of the year. That’s 365 total pieces of content — and 300 of those pieces of content have come from our community.

Going back in time

In May of 2010, we had the crazy idea of launching CMI. With minimal resources and budget, we looked at all our available options to create content. After examining the competitive landscape and audience need (our audience is marketing managers and directors in mostly enterprise organizations), we believed there was an opportunity for daily, instructional posts about the practice of content marketing.

We started with a budget of $6,000 per month to cover five posts per week (we didn’t start weekend posting until 2012). Those funds needed to cover raw content costs, editing costs, proofreading, uploading into our WordPress content management system, and any images for individual posts. It goes without saying, but it wasn’t much to work with.

The only feasible way we (Michele Linn — our Content Director — and I) thought we could make this work was to reach out to external experts for contributions (without paying them) in exchange for promoting them on our site.

The influencer list

Luckily, we had a head start with a strategic influencer list. We defined influencers as bloggers, competitors, or media organizations that were creating content of interest to our target audience. We actually rated our influencer list quarterly in something called the Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs.

Initially, this list was made up of influencers we found by tracking keywords (like “content marketing”) in Google Alerts, authors in industry trade publications, those who were talking about the topic on Twitter, and other bloggers that we just found interesting. Although the main list included 42 people, there was a secondary database of more than 300 people whom we tracked in one way or another.

Getting the attention of influencers

As influencers, these people are fairly important to our industry. They generally have “real” jobs, and are also extremely active on social networks, spending their time sharing content and blogging. Getting on their radar is not easy, so to get their attention, we gave away “content gifts.” We did this in a few different ways:

Social Media 4-1-1: Originally coined by Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping, Social Media 4-1-1 is a sharing system that enables a company to get greater visibility with social influencers. Here’s how it works:

For every six pieces of content shared via social media (think Twitter for example):

• Four should be pieces of content from your influencer target that are also relevant to your audience. This means that 67 percent of the time you are sharing content that is not yours, and calling attention to content from your influencer group.
• One piece should be original, educational content that you have created.
• One piece should be sales-related — like a coupon, product notice, press release, or some other piece of content that no one will likely pay attention to.

While the numbers don’t have to be exact, it’s the philosophy that makes this work. When you share influencer content, they notice. And you share this content without asking for anything in return (so that when you do need something someday, those influencers are more likely to say yes).

Big content gifts: As we were tracking our “top content marketing bloggers” list, we decided that we could get better visibility with influencers by actually ranking the influencers and sharing it out to the masses. This was an incredible success.

We hired an outside research expert to put together a methodology of how to rank the top bloggers, looking at areas like consistency, style, helpfulness, originality, and Google Pagerank. Then, each quarter, we would publicize this list, showcase the top 10, send out a press release, and try to blow it out across the industry. Needless to say, the top 10 (as well as the honored top 42) loved the list. Not only did most of this influencer group share the list with their audiences, approximately half of the top 42 influencers placed our widget (with their personal rank) on their home pages, linking back to our site. So not only did we earn a chance to build long-term relationships with these influencers, we received credible links and traffic, as well.

In addition to the top bloggers list, we started to put together large educational eBooks showcasing the influencers’ work. For example, in 2009, and again in 2011, we launched the Content Marketing Playbook. The Playbook included over 50 case studies about content marketing, with many coming directly from our influencers — incidentally, we made sure to note in the Playbook which examples came from which influencers.

When we released the Playbook and let the influencers know about it, those we highlighted eagerly shared the content with their audiences.

Back to the blog

As we didn’t have the resources to pay for raw, educational content about content marketing, we knew exactly where we needed to turn: our influencers. When we announced the original CMI blog, the first group we reached out to was our database of social influencers. Dozens of these influencers were more than happy to help us out, as we had been promoting them for years without ever asking for anything in return.

Michele Linn served as our Content Editor, organizing the editorial calendar and discussing potential topics with each of the influencers. It was Michele’s job to heavily edit the influencer content we received. Yes, most of them were already pretty decent writers, but we wanted their content to really shine. Why? We believed that if we presented them as true rock stars on our site, with amazingly helpful content, the influencers would be more likely to share the content with their audiences. This was critical because, at the time, we had very little reach and following online… we needed to leverage their networks in order for us to build our network. (For more on how this works, see this post on Scott Stratten’s Third Circle of Sharing.)

From the amount of social sharing done by our network of influencers, we started to see positive traffic patterns almost immediately. That, in turn, led to more social sharing… and some amazing SEO results. The CMI blog platform has enabled us to launch multiple events, a magazine, two webinars per month, and every other revenue-generating activity we have.

My hope is that you can steal this idea for your business and make it work for you. Good luck!

For more ideas on how to use innovators and influencers in your social communities to build your brand value, read the CMI book, Capturing Community, by Michael Silverman. 

Cover image via Bigstock.

We conducted a YouTube video study of the Top 100 brands from Interbrand’s 2012 Best Global Brands. After analyzing 200,000 business videos across 1,270 YouTube channels, we discovered more than 50 percent had fewer than 1,000 views. ROI fail.

Enter the YouTube nation

First, let’s look at the facts. Our study of Interbrand’s Top 100 shows YouTube video production in that cohort increased from 4,760 videos per month to 7,175 per month, with an aggregate production value of more than $4.3 billion.

The research also shows that brands — including Coca-Cola and Toyota — are not just creating effective YouTube channels, they’re also embedding YouTube videos on their own websites. In fact, 61 of the Top 100 brands now embed YouTube videos on their websites (further blurring the lines between digital channels). We’re also noticing more diverse video methods and styles. Intel, for one, effectively combines both professionally produced content with user-generated content.

So how is it that brands are investing so much in online video, but are reaching so few followers? Is it a content issue? Maybe, but after analyzing millions of videos, we think it’s a content marketing issue. Specifically, the top 100 brands — along with the rest of the YouTube ecosystem — are burning their online video budgets on video production, while ignoring an equally important element: video content marketing.

YouTube and online video content marketing

Assigning a few tags and a brief description to a YouTube video is not enough to allow your business to say, “We do video content marketing.” The truth is, marketing your online videos takes as much effort and finesse as making them. We’ve discovered four critical elements of an effective video content marketing strategy on YouTube:

1. Produce lots of diverse content on YouTube: The best YouTube content marketers produce more content. Using our online video grader, we found the top quartile of YouTube marketers had an average of 181 videos, while the bottom had 29. Equally interesting is that better marketers produced assets with a far broader distribution of video lengths, ranging from 30 seconds to 20 minutes, on average.

Pixability’s Online Video Grader.

Online video performance isn’t just about views; it’s about audience and engagement. The Online Video Grader we use looks at four separate, yet interrelated areas that determine how well an organization is leveraging online video and YouTube:

• Website score
• Search engine score
• YouTube score
• Social media score

The grader analyzes numerous attributes under each area, as well.

As an example of brands that successfully leverage video, consider Nintendo — which has one of the top-ranking channels on YouTube. Not only does the company produce great content, but it produces lots of it as well, giving subscribers and other interested parties a reason to return.

Great video content + many videos = more subscribers + higher SEO rankings.

2. Integrate YouTube and web content: The most effective video marketing programs create a symbiotic relationship between their two owned media platforms: their YouTube channel and their website. Consistent branding and YouTube channel customization occur in 63 percent of the most effective business-oriented YouTube channels. Furthermore, 61 percent also embed their YouTube content on their website. Keep in mind, YouTube automatically compensates for diverse devices — which is particularly important for mobile and tablet viewing.

A YouTube embed is not just web content — it’s very important (Google-wise) web content. Consider the example below from Newegg.com, a rich tech gear site that nicely integrates YouTube video to increase both its search results and product sales.

Embed YouTube videos on website to drive CTA and search.

3.  Engage your community with YouTube: Audiences are about 10 times more likely to engage, embed, share, and comment on video content than blogs or related social posts. Understand that YouTube is not just an online video repository; it’s also a powerful social media platform. Engagement is a critical part of earned media that allows brands to engage back, a critical method for driving views and action.

For example, Old Spice lit up its brand through a YouTube campaign that delivered videos in response to community feedback. The community responded by extensive sharing and video embeds. The result? Increased sales. By how much? 107 percent!

YouTube + social media = full community engagement.

4.  Embrace YouTube advertising: Paid media is a critical part of effective video content marketing. YouTube TrueView ads are not the same as Google’s AdWords. Our experience demonstrates YouTube advertising can deliver 10 times the click-through rates when compared with traditional AdWords and video ad networks. It delivers results through diverse hyper-targeting options: contextual, behavioral, geo, retargeting and search. The key is that you need to experiment.

YouTube advertising is meant to drive both engagement and calls to action. Increased engagement leads to increased sharing, which leads to increased and sustained long-term views and social interaction. For example, Pixability uses YouTube ads to promote its campaigns, such as the book launch for “Video Marketing for Dummies.”

YouTube ads result in sustained increased organic traffic (& business).

YouTube is no longer just a nice-to-have marketing platform. It’s a must-have video content marketing engine. More importantly, YouTube and online video respond very positively to effective, actionable and well-targeted video content marketing.

Video providers

If you are looking to produce videos, here are 10 companies to check out:

• Brightcove: Video-hosting platform for media and marketing
• Cisco Show and Share: Webcasting & video-sharing application
• KnowledgeVision: Online video presentation software
• Limelight Networks: Video distribution & tracking platform
• Magnify: Video curation
• Me!Box Media: Video lead generation
• Ooyala: Cross-device video analytics & monetization
• Pixability: Video & YouTube marketing company
• Vimeo: Video-based social networking
• VMIX: Video content management system

This article originally appeared in the February 2013 issue of Chief Content Officer magazine. Subscribe to receive your free copy.

They just need to like you.

Here, I’ll offer tips on how you can create and use branded content to convey the personality of your company — the people who work there; the ideas you live by; the sense of fun and vitality you bring to work; your core values. In addition, I’ll share some examples of how companies, from giants like IBM to much smaller companies (like my own) have used culture-related brand content to compete successfully in the market. 

The big party

Picture going to a party full of people you haven’t met — for example, an industry gathering where you have the opportunity to connect with potential clients or business partners. What’s the first thing you do when you meet someone there?

What you probably don’t say is, “Hi, I’m Mitch and I work for OmniCore. We make the world’s best flat screen core sampler detectors for the mining industry. Would you like to see my catalog?”

Sounds ridiculous, right? And yet that’s exactly what most websites do when you first arrive on their home pages. They immediately start trying to pound in why they are so great; but from the customer’s perspective, this is often just annoying.

A better approach would be to start the conversation just as you would at an actual party: Introduce yourself in a friendly way; talk about things you’re interested in; learn more about the people you’re talking with; tell a joke; find common ground. If there is good chemistry, you will like them and they will like you. Then, if the time is right, business might come up, and you may uncover opportunities to work together. Ideally, this is how the web works in the age of social media and content.

Grow your business without pitching

At my company, we used to have a website that was focused on selling what we do; our sales were decent, but not spectacular. In December 2012, we took a different approach, launching a new site that featured a company culture video front and center on our About Us page, rather than our usual sales pitch.

By the end of January, we landed more new business than we had in all of 2012. Nowhere in our video do we say we are better than anyone else. We don’t even say what we do for clients (we leave that for other parts of the website). Instead, we feature our employees and our office, and ask a series of questions that, over the course of a few minutes, convey the feel of our company, the great people, the sense of fun and irreverence — in short, the things that drive us. When we met with prospective clients for the first time, they had already “met” us through the video — and found that they liked us.

Another example of this comes from IBM — a company that recognized early on that it needed to convey its culture to the world in order to win over customers and attract the best and brightest employees. This particular web video of theirs blew me away:

Designed to demonstrate the company’s commitment to diversity, the video goes much deeper than the usual HR drivel. Any prospective customer watching this would be more inclined to like IBM — and to buy from them. No sales pitch required.

7 tips for creating culture content that works

1. Research: Identify the top things about your company culture that employees and current customers really like. When I say “team,” I don’t just mean senior management, but rather your entire staff. This is a valuable process that often uncovers fascinating aspects of a company that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Speaking with customers is equally valuable to this process. You might find, for example, that customers particularly appreciate how much your salespeople really listen to their needs. Or you might find that customers love visiting your office because of the fun vibe. Everything you find is food for thought that can lead to creative ideas.

2. Analyze, and reach a consensus: Cross-reference what you hear from staff and customers and find the top 3 to 5 attributes of your culture that most people like.

3. Get creative: Pull together a group of creative-minded people on your staff (or include an outside firm) to come up with creative content ideas for your website that can convey your culture in an engaging way. This can take the form of videos, podcasts, infographics, quizzes — anything that helps prospective customers understand your culture without involving a sales pitch. The goal is to build your cultural attributes into the story in a way that feels organic, not forced. Perhaps, as in the case of the IBM video above, there’s a piece of your company history that has never been shared with outsiders — something that will illuminate one or more of your core values. Your task is to get this on camera, or into the design of your content, in a way that engages people on the web.

4. Integrate your ideas: No piece of content is an island — it’s always part of a larger experience or conversation. So you’ll need to look closely at the user experience for your website and determine the best place to include culture content for optimal benefit. For example, if your primary goal is to bring in more business, you might create a video to use on your About Us page. If you’re in hiring mode and need to attract the best and brightest employees, maybe there’s content that would be a good fit for your Careers page.

But regardless of where you place the content, be mindful of the other content around it: Do the pieces work together to tell your larger story? In my company’s culture video, we never talked about what services we provide for our clients. But all that information is easy to find with one click on our About Us page.

5. Test: I’m not a fan of focus groups for testing creative, but it never hurts to run the nearly finished culture content by a few people you trust, both inside and outside the company. If they love it, run with it. If not, ask them how they think it can be improved.

6. Set goals, and measure success: Any content strategy should start with defining the goals of the particular piece of content, and outlining the metrics you’ll use to determine its success. It can be quantitative (e.g., how many outside blogs picked up and shared your content) or qualitative (e.g., what was the anecdotal feedback from customers who saw your content?). Be sure to use analytics tools when applicable to get a complete picture of how people are interacting with the content on your site.

7. Keep plugging away: As with any publishing platform, your website should be continuously refreshed with new culture-related branded content that tells your story in different ways. Over time, you’ll find some content is a hit, and some is not. The key is to keep publishing and maintain momentum. Over the long haul, you will build brand awareness, win new business, and attract and retain the best employees to fuel company growth.

The way people gather and digest information about your company has evolved rapidly over the past few years, driven by social media and the ability to publish in-depth, engaging branded content online. Today’s consumers demand more than just superficial “messaging” packaged in gloss. They want to know who you are, what drives you, and if they can relate to your business and its values. They want to like you. Culture-related content can help make this happen, and it keeps working 24/7 on your web channels without having to waste money on a media buy.

Interested in more tips for creating content that promotes your company’s values and culture? Read the CMI book, “Bold Brands” by Josh Miles. 

Calls to action are integral in creating a link between your content and conversion. They should be core to your content marketing strategy and exist in different forms throughout your site, as well as across its external properties, such as social media accounts.

You’ve likely examined the different ways you can incorporate best practices for calls to action within your site, but did you know that every single piece of content you publish can — and should — contain a call to action?

Without bombarding your audience with “Buy Nows!” and “Click Heres!” you can easily capture attention, drive action, engage audiences, and keep them coming back for more.

Put your audience front and center

People love to see their name in print. They also like to know that brands or organizations they engage with appreciate their interactions and, hopefully in turn, will grant them their loyalty.

Turn your audience into brand ambassadors by creating engaging content that invites their input and gives them a platform to share their opinions — not just in the comments section.

Put their responses to your content front and center, by either grabbing them from your social properties to showcase them using tools like Storify or by writing a post about a hot topic that asks them to submit their own relevant content for you to publish.

There is a diverse list of types of engaging content you can create — why not have your audience help you?

Asking for their thoughts and opinions is a non-invasive way to invite your audience to participate in your brand, and it also provides you with insight into how they view you and your industry, which you can use to inform future adjustments to your content strategy.

This extends your reach beyond just your site — to online and even offline communities your audience participates in and wants to share their contributions with — and costs your brand absolutely nothing.

Make your audience members feel like winners

Who doesn’t love to be a winner? Make your audience members all feel like winners with gamification of content that rewards them for reading, engaging with, and returning to your brand’s content outposts. This tactic also gives you a way to incentivize your audience to provide you with additional information, including contact information.

WordPress has several gamification plug-ins that award badges and even points, which you can use to thank your audience members for their responses and support. For example, if you’re running a special promotion or series, you can set up Easter eggs for readers to discover, a scavenger hunt to keep them tapped into your campaign on a long-term basis, or create a contest that lets them “unlock” special content if they correctly answer questions about your business.

While earning badges is fun, getting a deal is even better. You can consider making the points your audience earns through your content redeemable for a discount on your product or services — which might be just what your audience members need to nudge them toward making a purchase or intrigue them into exploring what you have to offer.

Give a little to get a lot

Create “extras” to go along with your content, such as downloadable eBooks or embeddable infographics, that your audience members can access only if they tweet about the offer or fill out a contact form.

Many brands offer eBooks or extra information in exchange for filling out a lead form, but if these extras are accompanied by a full blog post, they become much more valuable and responsive to your audience’s needs.

For example, if you’re writing a blog post about a new feature of your product, include a downloadable tutorial that demonstrates how to use this feature, step by step. This cuts down on the technical details you need to include in your post, which makes it more likely to hold readers’ interest. It also allows your audience members to share the post, download the tutorial, or do both without bogging them down with details before they are ready for them.

Conclusion

People love free stuff, and if your content is always good and your “extras” are unique and relevant, audiences will likely take notice of how your brand goes above and beyond to meet their needs and interests — and will return to engage with your business again and again.

Although these tactics may not seem like outright calls to action, they can certainly drive conversion by turning your audience members into your clients/consumers and, eventually, into brand ambassadors who are invested in helping you extend your reach and impact.

For more great tips on making your content more engaging and impactful, register to attend Content Marketing World 2013, taking place on September 9–11 in Cleveland, Ohio. 

Cover image via Bigstock

The webinar generated 55 questions from our intrigued, interested, and extremely intelligent audience. We only got to four or five of those questions in the time allotted, so I offered to answer some of the questions that we were not addressed.

Here goes:

Question from Kimberly C:
How do you develop ideas about the content you want to produce? (I have a children’s book that’s about a dog, and the only video I have is the dog running around catching a frisbee.)

Answer:
Kimberly, I’d imagine you’re working with an illustrator for your kid’s book. The great thing about creating video today is that it doesn’t have to be created in a camera. You can use tools like ScreenFlow or, even better, VideoScribe (from Sparkol) to create an animated video using the characters and even the story from your book. Go give it a shot. It’s awesome. Below is a video my friend Ashley Acker created for her business:

Question from Eileen R:

What can you offer to marketers in higher education who need to produce compelling video with limited resources?

Answer:
Eileen, video is a “show me, don’t tell me” medium. This means I really believe in creating content that’s designed for the medium itself. There are lots of great online tools that can help you create compelling video at extremely low cost to help illustrate ideas, concepts, or even presentations in compelling ways. (See the question above for an idea or two.) I’d suggest you record some audio from a compelling professor (even on an iPhone) and then animate and illustrate the concept using Sparkol’s video scribe. I’ve even used Skitch (for Evernote) and Screenflow to create my own animations (as you can see in the example below).

Question from Brad H:
Thinking about this in large companies… who should own/quarterback this effort?

Answer:
Brad, good question. I think it depends on the organization, but generally, I think your head of marketing should own the idea and vision for creating content that drives demand for the products and services you sell.

Question from Nathan M:
For B2B resellers, when you say don’t just focus on getting your company name out there, how do you balance that with efforts to brand yourself? (Like when people search Google for “walmart tv.”)

Answer:
This is a tough one. Here’s my general rule of thumb: If you want to raise awareness, buy advertising. If you want to drive demand for the products and services you sell, create valuable content. Brands have to get over themselves if they really want to drive sales. Consumers live in a world where they are bombarded by brands hundreds of times a day. Authentic content cuts through that clutter and has the power to inspire consumers to buy things they never considered before. Think about inspiring consumers first. If your product is the best on the market, they’ll buy yours anyway. (If it’s not the best in the marketplace — fix your product first.)

Question from Alex B:
Does it always have to be new content, or can you curate content as we do in other media?

Answer:
Alex, you can certainly curate content created elsewhere and be successful in building an audience that drives new business. Think about HubSpot TV, or even =3 by Ray William Johnson on YouTube. (Warning — his content is NOT family- or work-friendly.) Curating content and giving it your context can build a powerful audience. (Sign up for Dave Pell’s Next Draft email for an amazing example of curated content.)

Question from David W:
Video sounds great. Any suggestions for affordable video tools, resources, or vendors for a small start-up (in the conference organization business)?

Answer:
David, there are some wonderful resources for creating great video content. (I suggest you get to know Steve Garfield, who wrote a book called Get Seen. He’s really smart and has great video creation advice.) But, in short, if you’re in the event and conference business, you MUST start streaming your content live from the venue. You’ll drive online interest for your events that will increase attendance and interest in the long term. Look into Livestream and Ustream, and start expanding the reach (and the brand) for the events you’re creating.

Question from John Paul M:
When moving your content in a new direction, do you have any tips as to how to increase traffic without alienating your existing traffic? Or, is there a certain amount of sacrificing that has to go on?

Answer:
John, you should always focus on driving a valuable opt-in audience. I believe in focusing on high-quality audiences of influencers and “prosumers” instead of having a large audience that’s too broad to make a big impact. Quality over quantity. Imagine that your content is an email that’s distributed every week. Those who unsubscribe are telling you that your content is not valuable. Those who stay on love what you’re doing and will share it with others. If you’re changing gears, you may want to consider segmenting your audience with multiple content concepts designed to reach and inspire each of them in a different way. Remember, quality over quantity. (Say it again with me.)

Question from Steve B:
How do live internet radio broadcasts find their success in a 51 percent video audience?

Answer:

Steve, I’m not sure what the number refers to (sorry). But I believe in something I call media modality. This means that content can be created and delivered to target the mode the consumer is in. If I’m in my car, I listen to an audio book. If I’m at home I can read it. (That’s media modality.) I believe live internet radio plays into this phenomenon. I listen to live internet radio programming when I’m doing work at my desk — I can’t watch a video because I’m already visually engaged in my work. Target your audience with a specific type of media designed to own a specific part of their day by understanding what else they’re doing. (If you’d like an example of this, listen to the audio intro of my book, Brandscaping.) 

Question from Dan V:

If you have a great “brandscaping” video show for the internet, and you want to reach large advertisers, what is the best way to find the person in these big marketing departments who “care” about content marketing?

Answer:
Dan, it actually doesn’t matter if they ‘care’ about content marketing (to be honest.) Let’s assume you’re already creating content that will drive demand for the products the brand sells. All you have to do is prove the power of your content to drive even one new sale. If you can, then that’s your sales pitch: “Hey, I’d like to expand my audience, create more content, and drive more business for your company — are you interested?” I can’t think of any brand that won’t take that meeting. Remember, it’s not about what you’re doing; it’s about your ability to create content that drives demand.

Question from Kieran S:
Are there any guides to video budgets? How much should a company set aside?

Answer:
This is a tough one. Here’s what I start with when we’re talking about a more professional production: $1,000 per minute of final video. (So a 4-minute video should start at $4K.) Here’s the thing: There are so many great, cost effective ways to create great video content, I think you need to get creative about how you produce it. I’ve created video with my iPhone for free that’s really compelling and works. Don’t start with a budget. Instead, start with a great idea and then start creating content — whatever your budget. You’ll be successful if the content is good! (Check out Lauren Luke’s make-up tutorials on YouTube for a great example of this.)

Question from LeCharles L:

How could one “convince” companies that are struggling, due to the critical situation in Spain, to use and/or focus on content marketing to enhance sales? What approach would you recommend?

Answer:
LeCharles — great question. Content marketing can be much more cost effective than advertising. If you have clients who are spending money advertising on traditional media channels, invite them to divert 20 percent of that budget to creating content they own. Content that will drive demand for the products they sell. Essentially, don’t try and convince them to spend more marketing dollars, convince them to shift their money from advertising to content. You’ll be far more successful, and they’ll be far happier. Hope that helps. For more, here is one eBook that compares the cost of content marketing and PPC.

You can register for upcoming CMI webinars or view the recordings. And for more answers on the best ways to use content marketing in your branding efforts, read Drew Davis’ book, “Brandscaping.” 

They have a website but they’ve never really paid much attention to SEO and they’re certainly not going to give you any money to engage in this newfangled “content marketing” the kids are talking about.

What do you do?

Well, believe it or not, it’s actually perfectly feasible to run a (basic) content marketing campaign on zero budget.

Don’t expect the results to be earth-shattering and remember you will need access to a strong writer to get the great guest posting spots that will form the backbone of your efforts.

However, with these five free tools you will be able to run a shoestring campaign that will demonstrate proof of concept to those holding the purse strings, allowing you to make a strong pitch for the kind of budget you deserve.

1. BuzzStream

Best known as a paid-for blogger outreach management system, BuzzStream also offers a range of free tools.

The most useful of these is the Link Building Query Generator: All you have to do is fill in a few straightforward bits of information and you’re presented with a huge list of potential search terms, which can then be used to look for blogging opportunities.

Essentially, the tool makes use of Google operator searches and the fact it produces a large number of potential queries means you’ll never be short of inspiration.

Sorting through page upon page of manual results can be slow going, so read on to discover the best way to handle the data these searches will produce.

2. The SEOmoz toolbar

Anyone who has spent a bit of time working on professional link building projects will know just how useful all of SEOmoz’s tools are.

But even if you can’t afford the subscription fee for the full package, you need the free SEOmoz toolbar in your life. When installed, it displays the domain authority and page authority of any site returned in a Google search.

For the prospective guest blogger, a high DA in particular is a sign that it is worth approaching a site for a link.

It’s a much more nuanced measurement of site quality than PageRank, a metric which has far less significance than it once did. PR can give you a decent guide to a site’s overall quality, but make sure you check its DA to get a fuller picture.

Tip: If you want to see the DA and PA for a particular page, simply paste the URL into Google and the toolbar will do the rest. Unlike the free version of Open Site Explorer, you are not limited to three uses per day with this method.

3. Google Docs

Hardly the most thrilling of tools you’ll use for guest posting, but having somewhere to keep track of all your efforts is vital.

Obviously if you’ve got Microsoft Excel that works just as well, but if you need a free equivalent then Google Docs is your first port of call.

So what can you do with it?

Well, first off, you can use it in conjunction with the two tools mentioned above.

First, set Google to return 100 search results, generate a search query using BuzzStream, run it and then export the data into a CSV file using the SEOmoz toolbar.

Open that file using Google Docs and you then have 100 prospects that you can evaluate based on site quality and DA.

If you’re a more advanced user of Google Docs you can use a free BuzzStream tool to extract the domains from your list of URLs, export the new list to a CSV and then pull the data into a Google Docs pivot table in order to remove any duplicates.

Spending a bit of time learning various functions and the formulas you can build from them will allow you to unleash the full potential on Google Docs, but even before you reach that stage you should find it useful for keeping track of who you’ve contacted and who you still need to contact.

Tip: Plenty of people have already done amazing things with Google Docs, so try searches like “Google Docs SEO tools” to see if you can find something which meets your needs.

Reverse engineering these documents is a great way to learn what you can do through clever use of formulas.

4. Social Crawlytics

Of course guest posting isn’t just about getting links – it’s also about generating traffic, and what better way to ensure your post will be getting an audience than by investigating a prospect’s history of social sharing?

The quickest way to do this is manually – a glance at their Twitter and Facebook stats should tell you what you need to know.

Remember though, it’s not just about followers and fans – remember to check for regular interactions, i.e., posts being retweeted or “liked.”

Once you’ve found a site that has a good following, you can use Social Crawlytics to help you craft the perfect guest post. The tool crawls a site and identifies the most shared articles, allowing you to create a piece of content perfectly suited to that site’s audience.

Look at the structure of the most-shared pieces and the topics they cover and then pitch something which will complement these posts.

If you do it right, the article will get plenty of visitors and the site owner will be keen to have you write for them again, increasing the chances of your site getting good referral traffic.

Tip: If your company has a blog of its own, you can use these methods to direct your internal content strategy as well.

If that blog is maintained by someone other than you, introducing them to Social Crawlytics could gain you an ally in your push to establish content marketing as an integral part of the company’s strategy.

5. Followerwonk

Recently acquired by SEOmoz, Followerwonk is an excellent tool for finding social influencers operating in the same niche as you.

And, with a little bit of magic, you can narrow the search down to find people who have websites, turning it into a guest blog prospecting tool.

Rather than searching for a blog and hoping it has a good social media presence, this method allows you to find someone who has a good social media presence and a blog.

Simply type your keyword into the main search box, then click “more options” and use a domain extension such as “.com” in the URL box. Carry out your search, and you’re presented with a list of people and details about their social media following.

As always, you’ll want to assess the sites to see if they’re worth contacting, and remember it’s possible to buy Twitter followers, so don’t be taken in by high numbers – always check interaction levels as you want to guest post for someone with an engaged audience.

The tool now includes a social engagement metric, but it always helps to cast your eyes over something to see what you think of it.

Again, look through the account to see how many retweets and replies someone is getting, if it’s none or very few, then your post isn’t going to get a good level of exposure so you can leave them off the list of people to contact.

The next step

Once you’ve built up a list of promising sites using the methods detailed above, you can start pitching guest posts to the owners and, with a bit of effort, you should start getting articles on sites that have highly engaged audience members who are interested in what you have to say.

The upshot of this is greater brand visibility and increased traffic to your site as people click through the link in your author biography to see what else you have to offer.

If you’re not sure about how to go about pitching or creating content, there are plenty of great articles out there offering actionable advice, so make sure you read them.

Reaping the rewards

If all goes well, you should quickly build up a list of good links that are passing traffic to your site — if they’re converting into sales, that’s even better.

Take the relevant data from Google Analytics, create a presentation and dazzle your bosses with it.

By showing them proof that what you’re doing delivers tangible results, you should be able to secure the budget needed to expand your content marketing efforts.

How to Run a Content Marketing Campaign with Zero Budget

Image via Shutterstock.com

Vine is a new short video app available for iProducts only (but that we expect will get an inevitable Android birth in the near future). You can use it to share a maximum of six seconds of video footage on Facebook, Twitter, or Vine’s native social network. What makes it a really powerful app is the ability to splice together bits of nonconsecutive video content to create a montage.

Brands seemed to jump on the trendy new app almost as quickly as consumers did. Vines appear inside a tweet, which means you don’t have to redirect your viewers to another website. If you have a major Twitter presence, that in-tweet experience offers a great way to engage and differentiate your brand in a sea of branded micro-content.

Looking for some ideas to add Vine to your content marketing arsenal? Here are six tips that make it easy to jump onboard.

1. Show off your brand

What’s more powerful than an elevator pitch? A six-second video that shows your brand, products or services in action.

We like it short and sweet these days, and we don’t want the pitch. It’s much more convincing to show what you do than to tell people about it.

Product-oriented Vines are especially powerful for B2C brands. You might show a woman wearing your new line of warm gloves out on a snowy day, for example.

Consumers aren’t the only ones with an opportunity to show off. Maybe you have some representatives speaking at SXSW. Or you’ve walked into Google’s offices for a partner meeting and you want to show off your clout to your clients.

Pick the approach that’s best for your audience and show them how it’s done.

Urban Outfitters

Popular clothing and accessory brand Urban Outfitters took to Vine almost immediately, sharing the short video clips over Twitter. The company uses Vine to showcase seasonal lines (like this one for St. Patrick’s Day).

Urban Outfitters also features great novelty gifts and accessories, some of which are well suited for Vine. (Check out this great bobblehead Vine based on AMC’s The Walking Dead, for example.)

Oh NO, bobble walkers!! #thewalkingdead vine.co/v/bXdVlFtDavX

— Urban Outfitters (@UrbanOutfitters) March 4, 2013

2. Send a message to your customers

Have a news announcement, a quick tip or a cause with which you’re aligning your brand? Choose to send that message through a Vine. Vines are more engaging and interactive than text. Sending messages through the short video service gives messages more impact, in some cases putting a face on your brand to help connect with your audience on a more personal level.

Sonar

A social start-up called Sonar recently shared the news via Vine that it received funding through a new set of investors.

Welcome aboard to our new investors, team @bingfund! ow.ly/i89Nz World’s first announcement via @vineapp: vine.co/v/bXZa5BQj7e2

— Sonar (@sonar) February 28, 2013

3. Encourage your fans to contribute

There’s no more powerful way to generate content on a budget than recruiting your customers to help out.

Vine is trendy, which means plenty of iPhone-equipped consumers are already interacting through the app. Give them a prompt and watch their creative juices start flowing.

Motivate customers to contribute through contests or come up with inspiring ideas that will excite audience members into participating. Or simply reach out to readers, asking them to submit Vines around a specific idea that gels with your brand.

The Cavendish London

The Cavendish Hotel in London created a Valentine’s Day contest (#ValentineVine) encouraging followers to create a romantic Vine. The winning Vine contributor won an overnight stay at the hotel. Here is the winner.

Reuniting long lost sole mates #Valentinevine @cavendish_hotel vine.co/v/bvH96B9QhHd

— Chris Lovell (@CjLovell) February 11, 2013

4. Leverage existing video content.

Have some video content sitting around and collecting dust? Vine’s a good way to re-leverage that content. Use Vine to create short previews that link back to longer videos, for example.

Existing content can be used in other ways, too. Creating a six-second short that neatly sums up a brand message, sourced from existing video content, could be a useful tactic. However you apply your existing video content, Vine is a great tool to change how you promote that content on Twitter for the better.

New York Rangers

The NHL started the season with an image problem because of the lockout. But now that the shortened season is underway, the New York Rangers organization is making the most of it to showcase its marketing chops.

So far, the Rangers have used Vine to feature a winning shootout goal; the team celebrating a win; and the process of preparing the stadium for hockey following a Knicks game, among other Rangers-themed Vines.

#Nashty and #CaptainCally score in the shootout to give #NYR the win! vine.co/v/bHWJ9EjBMrO

— New York Rangers (@NYRangers) March 4, 2013

5. Become a journalist

Attending an event your customers might find interesting? Report back in digestible visual chunks with Vine. Vines became a popular form of brand journalism at this year’s SXSW, where brands and brand representatives took video footage of presentations, concerts and other cool tidbits of the gigantic Austin event.

Fender Guitars

SXSW is known for more than its presentations on interactive marketing and technology. Throughout the event, Fender tweeted Vines of different bands gigging, including this Vine of Thurston Moore’s new band.

Thurston Moore of @thesonicyouth showcases new band @waterloorecords #sxsw vine.co/v/bdqlJduVqV3

— Fender® [Guitars] (@Fender) March 13, 2013

6. Explain a concept

Like much of your content marketing, Vine can also be used as a teaching or informational tool. It can help further flesh out a concept as a visual aid to complement text or stand alone as its own tip. After all, some concepts just are easier to understand visually. Even if your concept isn’t specifically meant for visual digestion, you can always find creative and unique ways to use Vine to demonstrate.

Ogilvy PR (London)

The Ogilvy staff in London put together a pretty cool looping Vine that demonstrates Twitter’s new ad API and what it means for content marketing.

What does #Twitter‘s ad API mean for #PR? ogilvyprlondon.com/news/2013/marc…… vine.co/v/bwx69TuLtr0

— Ogilvy PR/London (@OgilvyPRLondon) March 11, 2013

How are you using Vines?

Doing something cool with your Vines? Share your story with us in the comments.

As our recent content marketing research has found, 22 percent of North American B2B marketers and 21 percent of B2C marketers are challenged with getting executive buy-in. 

Robert Rose, lead author of Managing Content Marketing, makes the argument that the content marketing business case takes on the same components as a proper business plan.

1. What’s the Need? What do you hope to accomplish with your content marketing?
2. How Big of a Need Is It? Is the need big enough to build an entire plan around?
3. What’s the business model? How does it work? What do you have to do?
4. What’s Your Differentiating Value? Why is this initiative more important that other things you’re spending resources on?
5. What are the risks? What’s in the way of success – or what happens if you fail?

But sometimes, even though we may do everything right in making our business case, buy-in is still hard to come by.

Throughout my years in content marketing, I’ve seen two methods work the best when it comes to getting buy-in for new content marketing projects or additional budget for content marketing activities.

The Pilot

As most people know, before a television show is signed on by a network, a pilot is produced. A pilot is a sampling of what’s to come, and gives the network executives enough consumer feedback to know whether more episodes should be produced.

If you present your content marketing plan as a pilot, you’ll immediately see the key decision makers let their guard down. It’s not as much of a commitment as a full-blown content marketing strategy.  But as you sell the Content Marketing Pilot, be sure to include the following:

• The length of the Pilot – should be at least six months.
• The overall goal of the Pilot…or how the business will be different after the Pilot.
• Agreed-upon metrics that, if you hit, will enable you to move forward with “more episodes.” This could be an increase in leads, more subscriptions, shorter time to close business, an increase in “quality” leads…just to name a few.

Fear

When all else fails, fear can work as well or better than a rational argument. For the “fear” plan to work, you have to do some research up front on your competition. Pick the leading content marketer in your field and determine:

• How many subscribers (email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) do they have to their content versus yours?
• How do they rank in key search terms versus your rankings?
• A comparison of social sharing
• Positive, online word-of-mouth (check Twitter for this one)
• Recruitment activities (are they landing the best talent?)

These are just a few. The key here is to determine what’s of critical importance to the lead decision maker toward buy-in. Clearly show how the competitor is using certain content strategies that are leaving you (and your content) in the dust.

I’ve seen this work dozens of times to perfection when rational arguments are simply ignored. So, if the Pilot idea doesn’t work, give the fear tactic a go.

Want to learn more about getting executive buy-in? Read Managing Content Marketing by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi.

All of the above activities serve to get enough content to put online. However, the goal of B2B content marketing is to put quality content in front of your audience. Therefore, it’s not always reliable to simply post it to Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn and hope that your audience tunes in. The best way to get it in front of your audience is to get your content in their social feeds. 

Image via: Elevate Inc.

And this is where you can rely on help from people who have it in their best interests to help spread your content online. Each of the following types of people listed have a vested interest in helping distribute your B2B content to their audiences — people whom you might not be able to reach otherwise.

1. Employees

Great companies are made up of great people. More often than not, these people have the best interests of the company at heart, since an increase in the company’s market position or sales directly conveys status and opportunity on the employees.

In addition, although it’s not part of their job description, it’s not a big favor to ask them to help share company content. As long as you’re producing high-quality content that makes them proud of the company they work for and reflects a professional status onto them, they will be happy to share it with their friends, family, and professional networks. Don’t forget that when someone is sharing content online, they are leveraging the credibility of the publishing source and that being given a sense of purpose is a primary motivator of employees.

By giving employees great content to share online, you’re not only increasing the brand awareness of the company, but you’re helping the employees build their own brands online, as well.

2. Bloggers

Good content marketers are always aware of who maintains blogs dedicated to their industry. These blogs are not only a great source of ideas for what topics and kinds of content you might produce yourself, but it’s also a list of people who are very likely to be interested in re-sharing your content.

Anyone who maintains a publishing presence online and has an audience who regularly reads them is under constant pressure to share quality content, whether original or curated. Bloggers who are thought leaders in their area always want to be aware of any quality content that will be of value to their audience. If your company has the means, you could follow the influencer model put in place by IBM, although it’s very possible to put in place an effective strategy without an increase in budget.

By providing industry bloggers with your content, you’re giving them high quality material to share with their audience, which will help reinforce their thought leader status.

3. Clients 

Your clients (as long as they’re happy with your business) are natural spokespeople on behalf of your brand and can be extremely valuable in your B2B content distribution efforts. Similar to employees, it’s in their best interests to share your best content, albeit for different reasons. And developing client advocacy is one of the leading priorities for CMOs globally.

If a customer has bought your product or service, it’s reassuring to them and their colleagues to know that you’re producing quality content that demonstrates that you have expertise in your field. It’s natural for clients to want to re-share your content with their networks and peers, as this also conveys professional status upon them and their decision to make a purchase based on your expertise.

By providing clients with your content, you’re reinforcing their belief in your product or service and helping to bolster their own status among peers and colleagues. 

Image via: Elevate Inc.

Conclusion

Creating quality B2B content is difficult enough without the added complexity of effective distribution. Make it easy for employees, industry bloggers and clients to share your work with their online networks so you can maximize your distribution and brand awareness with each piece of quality content you produce. Whether you use email lists or specialized influencer marketing tools, make sure these three turbochargers know when you’re putting high-quality content online, and make it easy for them to share it.

You can learn more about how to tap influencers to improve your content marketing strategy by watching this quick video.

The newly launched Facebook Graph Search allows members of the world’s largest social network to find content through their Facebook social connections. As Facebook Graph Search evolves, CMOs and their teams should ensure visibility in both Graph Search and users’ news feeds by sharing engaging content with their audiences. Moreover, employing a holistic social strategy and active community management are increasingly essential to succeeding on Facebook in a Graph Search-enabled world.  

What is Graph Search?

Launched in limited beta in January 2013, Graph Search allows Facebook users to examine relationships with trillions of objects, currently focusing on a subset of content within its ecosystem: people, photos, places, and interests. With Graph Search, Facebook users make queries by combining phrases to find content shared on Facebook:

• People: “friends who live in my hometown,” “people who like things I like,” “people who like soccer in New York City”
• Photos: “photos of my friends in Los Angeles,” “photos of Nike,” “photos I like”
• Places: “restaurants in Los Angeles,” “restaurants my friends in New York like,” “countries my friends have visited”
• Interest: “music my friends like,” “movies liked by people who like movies I like,” “books read by my family,” “videos of TV shows my friends like”

Graph Search results are indexed (in order of relevancy) based on the strength of the relationship with one’s social network connections. The stronger the relationship between a person or a page, the more likely that content is deemed relevant and is displayed in search results. For example, if you are seeking new music and several of the people you engage with on a daily basis like the band “Radiohead,” the name “Radiohead” will appear in the results. Graph Search results are also “privacy-aware” and will only display content that has been shared with the user conducting the search, alongside objects that have been publicly shared.

As the product evolves, Graph Search has great potential to change the way we use the web to search and share engaging content.

Implications for content marketing and social media

Since Graph Search results are based on personal connections, brands must focus on fostering deeper connections with their fans through a holistic social strategy and active community management.

Connections are fueled by engagements such as a fan “liking” a brand’s Facebook page, liking/commenting/sharing branded content, publishing user generated content (UGC) that tags the brand, checking in, and other similar actions. The more actions a user takes with the brand, the stronger the connection and the more likely that a brand’s fans and friends of fans will see the brand’s content in their Graph Search results.

And what fuels engagement? Content.

Now more than ever, it’s essential that brands create and publish compelling content that resonates with a specific audience and is formatted to increase engagement on the Facebook platform, ultimately leading to more visibility, discoverability, and purchases through Graph Search. While Graph Search is in Beta, brands can begin to take steps to help their content index in Graph Search. 

Six key considerations

1. Publish, and publish often: A brand’s editorial calendars should include a variety of formats, including photos and videos, to engage each audience. Note that photos and videos must be posted directly to the Facebook platform, rather than via links to third-party sites, such as YouTube.
2. Include keyword rich tags and descriptions that reflect the linguistic behaviors of the audience to increase the likelihood of appearing in a user’s Graph Search results.
3. Include the location where photos and videos are taken to index for results in a particular city.
4. If your brand’s post has a physical location associated with it, create or update Facebook pages that refer to your local area with your address and contact information.
5. Consider contests or promotions that encourage users to submit photos and videos, and tag your brand in their submissions, further increasing the potential connections between your brand and the Facebook audience.
6. Ensure that the About section of your brand‘s Facebook Page is optimized with the relevant names, categories, and descriptions.

In short: create content that is useful, usable, visible, desirable, and engaging — the cornerstones of building a socially-connected brand.

What’s next?

Facebook Graph Search has potential. If Facebook can get users to adopt the new functionality, and if Facebook can enrich personalized results, we may see Graph Search start to own local search over the likes of Google Local, Trip Advisor, and Yelp. Such an advance would make Graph Search an important source of content marketing for retailers that have local branches.

But for now, CMOs and their teams should continue to focus on generating authentic connections with their audiences through conversation and engaging content to ensure visibility in both Graph Search and a user’s news feed. 

Looking for more tips on leveraging the latest social media trends to create engaging content? Read CMI Books’ “Capturing Community” by Michael Silverman. 

• Short projects, like articles and blog posts
• Longer projects, like books and eBooks, reports, white papers, and YouTube videos.

The formula provides a framework for events like podcasts and speeches. It can also save you time and frustration when you’re facing an unexpected deadline, like a last-minute speech or presentation.

Step 1: Pick a number

Start by picking a number! The number will provide you with a structure for picking a title, choosing and organizing your ideas, and finishing your project as efficiently as possible.

How big a number should you choose?

Here are some tips for choosing numbers:

• Small numbers promise easy, simple steps to success. Often, the best content marketing projects are based on relatively small numbers like 3, 7, or 10. Small numbers succeed because they promise to simplify complex tasks by breaking them into simple steps, i.e., 4 Steps to Skydiving Success.
• Large numbers promise selection and value. Large numbers, i.e., 99 or 101, appear to offer more value. Out of 100 ideas, for example, there’s a good chance that, at least, one or two of the ideas will make a difference in solving a problem or achieving a goal. (In addition, when you’re writing about 99 or 101 ideas, you don’t have to write as much about each topic!)

The number you choose doesn’t have anything to do with the length of your project. There are hundreds of 3-step books, and there are hundreds of 99-tip blog posts.

In addition to helping you focus your content creation ideas and write your project, numbers also help your readers. Each number provides a “landmark” that helps readers track their progress through your content and get a feeling of progress.

Step 2: Select a topic

Next, select a central theme, or topic, for your content marketing project.

Topics are containers. They’re categories of facts, ideas, or suggestions you can use to identify, organize, and package your message.

Topics are powerful because they encourage you to focus on specifics, rather than abstractions or generalities. This helps you get ready to start writing.

When you start to write a blog post about “The 6 Keys to Content Marketing Success,” for example, the number and the topic immediately focus your attention on the next step—i.e., identifying the 6 keys needed for success.

As a result, you know what you have to do (i.e., simply make a list of the 6 keys so you can define them and describe their relevance). This is much easier to do than staring at a cursor blinking in an empty screen.

What type of topics work best?

In general, topics for content marketing fall into a few basic categories. These include positives, negatives, and trends.

Positives describe topics that help your market solve problems or succeed, including:

• Habits
• Resources
• Shortcuts
• Tips

Negatives describe topics your market should avoid or watch out for, including:

• Challenges
• Mistakes
• Obstacles
• Symptoms

Topics can also include descriptions, like:

• Attributes
• Characteristics
• Traits
• Trends

Step 3: Add a modifier

Finally, add a modifier to add specificity and emotion to the number and the category.

There are several ways modifiers can add impact to your content marketing project. Modifiers help you:

• Target a specific market segment. Simply list the primary characteristic in your marketing persona, i.e., 7 Investment Opportunities for Self-Employed Professionals.
• Address a specific challenge or goal. 10-Step Makeover Program for Underperforming Landing Pages.

Modifiers can also add urgency, causing your clients and prospects to resonate in anticipation of your content ideas. Watch how a simple modifier can build a bridge between an abstract topic and your reader’s specific situation:

• Before. 10 Questions to Ask Before Writing a Speech
• After. 10 Questions to Ask Before Writing Your Next Speech

There’s no urgency to “writing a speech.” But, adding “your next” reminds everyone that it’s best to be prepared in case they’re asked to deliver a speech.

Learning from best-selling books

Learning from Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People offers an excellent example of the power of modifiers to take a good title and make it a best-selling great title:

• Remove the number and the topic. As a title, Highly Effective People may accurately describe what the book is about, but it doesn’t describe the author’s perspective or what readers will learn.
• Take away just the number and The Habits of Highly Effective People is significantly weakened. This is because there’s no context or frame of reference. The lack of specificity doesn’t communicate the fact that the author has selected the best habits. You also don’t know how much you’re going to have to read.
• Delete the modifier and see what happens. The 7 Habits of People is unlikely to have sold millions of copies….even if the contents were exactly the same as in the best-selling version.
• Shorten the modifier and you also significantly weaken the title. The 7 Habits of Effective People describes without inspiring. It fails to engage, or resonate. But, adding just one word, Highly, transforms Effective People into a goal all readers can identify with and aspire to.

Tips for completing your project

Once you’ve picked a number, selected a topic, and added a modifier, you’ve chosen a title for your content marketing project. You’re ready to open a new file and get down to the actual content creation.

Start by assembling a list of the topics — the challenges, essentials, keys, mistakes, requirements, shortcuts, or trends — that you’re going to include.

• Start on paper. Consider stepping away from your computer and working by hand. I enjoy creating my initial lists on yellow lined pads, using a felt tip marker. This can be done in a “fresh” location. Later, when I enter my handwritten list on my computer, new ideas will occur to me.
• Put your software to work. Use your software’s automatic numbering feature to track the number of ideas. This is especially important when you’re reorganizing your list. With auto-numbering, there’s less chance you’ll skip, or duplicate, a number. Plus, you can sort your list to make sure you haven’t duplicated a topic.
• Unusual numbers. Brands can be established on unusual numbers, like the popular 42 Rules book series. An unusual number can also indicate selectivity, i.e., 58 Social Media Tips for Content Marketing. The “58” implies credibility — there’s no “fluff” added to reach a specific number.  101 can be more popular than 100, and so can 99 (which promises less reading!) Another popular choice is 140, i.e., #Book_Title_Tweet: 140 Bite-Sized Ideas for Compelling Article, Book, and Event Titles.
• Create a mini-template for each topic. Identify the key ideas you want to discuss for each topic. For example, you might begin by briefly describing each idea, tip, or best practice, followed by its relevance. Provide an example or two, then conclude with a suggestion on where to learn more. Knowing how you’re going to treat each topic speeds your writing and helps readers recognize and remember more of your ideas.
• Write out of order. Once you identify the different topics you’re going to write about, start by writing the easiest topic first — regardless of where it will appear in the final article or blog post. Use the easily-written topics to help you build momentum, always important when writing.
• Leave time for editing. After you’ve finished the first draft, put it aside temporarily — ideally overnight. Always edit from a fresh perspective. Avoid proofing your project on the screen of your computer. Instead, edit from a printed page. Share your project with coworkers who will be more likely to identify the types of errors, like missing words, you may overlook.

Indeed, one of the biggest benefits of a writing formula is that, by saving time at the beginning of a project, you can invest the saved time in additional editing plus spending more time promoting your content using more social media resources.

Expanding what you’ve written

Always “slice and dice” your content. After running a successful article or blog post that summarizes the 10 Best Practices for Increasing Landing Page Conversions, for example, consider writing a separate article or blog posts offering detailed ideas, examples, and tips for implementing each best practice.

Later, after you’ve finished the 10 in-depth blog posts, you can compile them into an eBook, auto-responder series, SlideShare presentation, report, or white paper.

What’s your favorite way to turn ideas into content? Do you use a similar 3-step process to convert ideas into content? Share your comments and suggestions below!

Speakers and Adobe representatives had a whole lot to say about the state of digital marketing. Here are five of the most important takeaways. 

Big data is on fire. Predictive marketing is on the horizon.

Throughout the conference, the talk of the town was data — and for good reason.

Big data’s plethora of applications includes marketing, and tech vendors are taking the plunge. Data is what makes the gold standard of marketing execution possible: delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. It reveals the identity of unknown web visitors in real-time. And it tells us what’s working and, more often, what isn’t.

We can drill deeper into data, analyze larger quantities of it, and do all of this faster than ever before. Put it all together and you get a sturdy basis for predictive marketing.

Predictive marketing happens when you analyze large amounts of data to identify the audience segments you’re most likely to convert. eWeek explains the problem it solves:

…Traditionally marketers have relied on a cumbersome, time-consuming process that requires crunching large quantities of data over weeks or months to help them identify high-value audiences. The complexity and expense of this approach has led some marketers to bypass the use of data analysis altogether and end up defining audiences based on opinions or assumptions.

In essence, predictive marketing takes the guesswork out of finding the right audience for your content.

Why should content marketers care?

Brands that use predictive marketing will be light-years ahead of the crowd. It’s tough to win the attention of your audience when your competitor can predict who wants what and when they’re most receptive.

With predictive marketing, marketers can literally put a number on the value of each different piece of content. You can tailor your content to answer questions that you can actually prove your audience is asking. It makes experimentation so much more valuable, giving you the tools to create an explosive content marketing strategy.

Predictive marketing wasn’t the only data-driven disruptor at the event.

Twitter’s Bluefin Labs acquisition is mostly about data. Okay, maybe a little about multichannel engagement.

Just one month ago, Twitter announced it would acquire Bluefin Labs, an organization that mines data on what viewers say about television shows and companies. The acquisition was made with two areas in mind: data and multichannel engagement.

Adam Bain, Twitter’s president of global revenue, joined Federated Media’s John Battelle onstage for one of the keynote presentations, where he revealed that 400 million tweets flow through Twitter daily.

But he didn’t stop there. According to Bain:

• On average, people follow six or more brands on Twitter.
• Seeded by retailers, beta “sponsored tweet” ads sometimes saw as much as double-digit engagement percentages.
• The same program registered an average 22 percent lift in brand recall among exposed users versus non-exposed users.

A strong analytical start, Twitter snagged Bluefin to help bolster its own data collection, a task that has fallen primarily to third-party developers.

But there were other reasons for the acquisition. Bain detailed the UK launch of the movie Prometheus, where tweets created after the first commercial break were featured in the next one as social proof in near real-time.

Why should content marketers care?

From a data perspective, Twitter will create a richer reporting experience for analyzing and optimizing native ads (a term Bain tried to distance himself from while discussing sponsored tweets). More content marketers can put Twitter to work for paid content promotion.

Looking at the acquisition through the Prometheus lens, Twitter is creating a stronger basis for multichannel engagement, embracing its natural link with television. Content marketers may have an easier time of connecting content campaigns to social media.

Speaking of channels, here comes a new device shake-up.

Tablets now top smartphones in global website traffic.

Tablet adoption is miniscule compared to how many of us own smartphones. But tablet owners are doing a lot more web browsing on their devices than the rest of us.

According to Adobe Digital Index, tablet browsing has a 1 percent advantage on smartphones in terms of global website traffic — tablets with an 8 percent share and mobile devices with 7 percent. The information came from analyzing a staggering 100 billion visits to 1,000+ websites worldwide.

Perhaps even more impressive is the tablet’s average spend per order. Tablets beat out average mobile order size by 54 percent. What’s even more impressive is that tablets surpassed the average order size for desktop/laptop users by 19 percent!

Why should content marketers care?

The rise of the tablet, coupled with disruptive technology like Google Glass, means we’re developing content for a host of presentation styles. This reinforces the dire need for marketers to keep content free and flexible.

A strong system for managing content is important here. It makes a great case for responsive design or a software platform that doesn’t require much effort to design for different devices on the fly.

Let’s take a step back for a second. Did your jaw drop at Adobe’s ability to analyze 100 billion website visits? This is partly thanks to its market share. Now, the company also has the technology.

Adobe’s products offer more than just PDF creation and doctored photographs of Michael Jordan and me high-fiving.

As it turns out, Adobe has one of the most comprehensive marketing software suites available on the market. In fact, over the past 18 months, Adobe spent $2.5 billion acquiring marketing technology.

The Adobe Marketing Cloud is composed of five main products: Analytics, Target, Social, Experience Manager and Media Optimizer. The solutions work together to ease how marketing teams complement each other across the enterprise. (It isn’t limited to the enterprise, though it looks like that’s where it plays nicest.)

Experience Manager is the tool that’s most relevant to content marketers, including a simple publisher that lets anyone in the organization upload content without fussing over formatting, layout, and other pesky details. It works together with other tools in the suite to measure campaigns across all of your distribution channels.

And it’s very, very intuitive.

Why should content marketers care?

The landscape of digital marketing is undergoing vast change. At the Summit, enterprise marketers testified about working in silos — how social, content, brand, and product marketing and PR teams work independently, discouraging a sharing culture.

Adobe Marketing Cloud attempts to address the communication problem between communications teams. Specialized vendors — your organization may work with dozens — are afraid to talk about these problems. In the age of big data, you must adapt or fall behind. And that’s why…

Marketers must start looking at the bigger picture, but as the sum of its parts.

Marketing functions in silos because that’s the way it has grown up. And it’s only become more complex since communications went digital.

These silos created one of marketing’s greatest contemporary challenges: How do we connect every piece of marketing across the enterprise? How do we share resources and information in a way that allows us to be consistent to our brand?

We must be able to see the bigger picture, whether we’re creating content or defining the direction of the brand.

Why should content marketers care?

When we create content, we must consider how it will impact other marketers with other responsibilities within the organization. At the same time, we can’t be afraid to ask what our colleagues can do for us. This requires communication and collaboration. But it also requires the tools that make them easy.

Content marketing is important, but it’s only part of the equation. We must find ways to share insights and encourage collaboration across marketing teams.

Were you there?

Did you make it to the Adobe Summit? Share with us what you learned in the comments.

The premier study — Content Marketing in the UK: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends — conducted by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and the Direct Marketing Association UK (DMA), shows that marketers in the UK are planning to increase their content marketing budgets more over the next 12 months than their North American and Australian peers are. UK marketers also use more content marketing tactics than their international peers do, and rate themselves as more effective at content marketing.

Other key highlights from the research report, which includes more comparisons with North America and Australia, include:

Nearly all UK B2C marketers have adopted content marketing

While 94 percent of UK marketers (overall) are using content marketing, 97 percent of UK B2C marketers have adopted it, compared with 95 percent of their B2B peers. Furthermore:

• More UK B2C marketers use content marketing than their North American (86 percent) and Australian (89 percent) B2C peers do.
• This trend is opposite of what we see in North America and Australia, where B2B marketers use content marketing more often than their B2C peers do.

Overall, 64 percent of UK marketers are increasing content marketing budgets

On average, 27 percent of marketing budgets in the UK are allocated to content marketing. However, 64 percent say they will increase the amount they allocate to content marketing over the next 12 months (compared with 54 percent in North America and 61 percent in Australia).

• More UK B2B marketers (72 percent) than UK B2C marketers (45 percent) plan to increase their content marketing budget.
• Even the UK marketers that rate their efforts as least effective plan to make significant investments in content marketing, with 71 percent saying they will increase spend.

When compared with their international peers, UK marketers rate themselves higher in terms of effectiveness

Thirty-nine percent of UK marketers rank themselves as “effective” or “very effective” at content marketing. By contrast, 37 percent of North American and 29 percent of Australian marketers rate themselves the same way.

Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are the most popular social platforms
Overall, UK content marketers use an average of four social media platforms, the same number that most of their international peers use (the exception is North American B2B marketers, who use five).

UK B2B marketers use LinkedIn (87 percent) the most, while their B2C peers use Facebook (91 percent) the most.

UK marketers face similar challenges as their international peers, most notably producing enough content and producing engaging content

Twenty-one percent of UK marketers say producing enough content is their biggest challenge. And while UK B2C marketers are less challenged with producing enough content than their B2B peers are, they are more challenged in every other area cited below:

Want to learn more? Download our full report to get answers to more questions:

• What goals and metrics do UK marketers use?
• What percentage of UK marketers tailor content?
• Do UK marketers outsource content creation or keep it in-house?
• What does the profile of a best-in-class UK content marketer look like?

NOTE: Special thanks to the Press Association for their assistance as a survey distribution partner.

What do you think of the findings? Are they consistent with what you are experiencing? Let us know in the comments!

It can be tempting to aim for everybody — particularly for mass-market brands. I’ve been in brand discussions where the target market was identified by writing all possible prospects on a white board as if we were cold-calling customers rather than trying to connect with them. Yet that broad approach can lead to a split personality that appeals to no one.

Your target market is not the same as anyone who could conceivably buy your product. A target market is deliberately exclusive. That niche focus is what gives your message teeth. It is what compels consumers to identify with your brand. It is what gives you insight to speak to them so clearly. 

At Marketoon Studios, we develop cartoon series for brands with hyper-targeted audiences. For example, for Guidance Software, we create a weekly series for a market most people have never even heard of: e-discovery professionals.

E-discovery, an emerging field within legal IT services, describes how lawyers exchange electronic files in litigation. If you’re not part of the e-discovery community (and chances are, you’re not), you probably won’t understand most of the cartoons we’ve developed. But among those working in that industry, these cartoons are prized and have been highly shared.

Last year, I traveled to the LegalTech e-discovery trade show, and the Guidance Software booth was mobbed by fans who wanted cartoon prints to take to their offices and hang on their walls. That level of content engagement comes from the power of speaking to a niche audience.

We’ve created cartoon campaigns for audiences as niche and varied as database administrators, certified public accountants, HR professionals, in-app media buyers, and British secondary school teachers. Each campaign was deliberately exclusive. That’s what made it resonate.

The same holds true for any form of content marketing. The more focused the content, the better it will stick.

Sailor Jerry gets this. The rum brand recently held a marketing event in Brooklyn that was deliberately exclusive.

For fans willing to get a Sailor Jerry tattoo permanently tattooed on their skin, the company rewarded them with a shot of Sailor Jerry. While this campaign was clearly not for everyone, 200 people lined up at a tattoo parlor in the rain to take advantage of this offer. One Sailor Jerry fan named Sebastian said, “I’m in love with Sailor Jerry. All I drink is Sailor Jerry. You know what, a lot of people don’t really understand, and I don’t expect them to because Sailor Jerry is mine.”

Sebastian’s comment is a wonderful articulation of what a brand can mean to a true fan. These are the types of advocates we need to inspire. It is better to be deeply meaningful to a few than to aim for the majority and get lost in the clutter. In content marketing, preach to the choir. The choir will show up every Sunday, and will evangelize your sermon to others.

This article originally appeared in the February 2013 issue of Chief Content Officer magazine. Subscribe to receive your free copy.

While this revolution has been great for the companies capitalizing on the concept, it’s a mixed blessing for marketers themselves.

Because these days everybody (and their assistant) says they can do what you’ve been doing long before anyone ever heard of content marketing: writing, editing, designing, illustrating, producing, convincing, strategizing — communicating!

That’s why the Content Marketing Institute and ContentWise have created the Content Marketing Awards amid the chaos of a burgeoning business, to separate the major-leaguers from the me-toos. The Content Marketing Awards are a combination of two esteemed awards programs, the Magnum Opus Awards, honoring the very best in content projects, and CMI’s Orange Awards, honoring the best people and agencies in the business.  We have decided to bring the program together under one “content marketing awards” banner.

No matter how thoroughly a marketer understands the concept of content marketing, he or she must be able to make or at least oversee the making of videos that stir hearts, publications that provoke thought, messages that communicate with consumers, and campaigns that start sustainable conversations.

Enter the Content Marketing Awards and show that — unlike others who are hanging onto the bouncing bandwagon — you know the difference between flash and taste in design, glibness and substance in writing, klutzy and subtle in editing, cute and communicative in photography, and silly and strategic in video.

Honestly, the industry needs this.  We have seen content marketing become fuzzy at times, and made into something it’s not by outside forces.  This is all in the natural progression of a growing industry.  Showcasing the best that the industry can offer, both projects and agencies, will help us get to where we need to go.

So please,  enter the Content Marketing Awards, and let your colleagues know the program is available to them. The call for entries closes on May 17.

Like last year, we will be highlighting the winners at Content Marketing World 2013 in September.  I hope to see you there.

• How do you keep all departments on  the same page?
• How do you find a way to harness all of the collective content and knowledge?

As Pam Didner says (and as anyone who works in this industry would agree), “There’s no shortcut in terms of deploying content marketing.”

The Content Marketing Process Roundtable from Content Marketing Institute on Vimeo.

In this video, Kelly LeVoyer (Director, Marketing Editorial; SAS), Kevin Cain (Director of Content Strategy; OpenView Venture Partners), Pam Didner (Global Integrated Marketing Manager; Intel Corporation), Waynette Tubbs (Manager, Marketing Editorial; SAS), Elizabeth Gaines (Senior Director; SAP Global Marketing), and Michael Kirsten (Senior Manager, Global Content; Kelly Services) share their challenges and ideas for managing content marketing across their often complex and highly-matrixed organizations.

Here are my favorite insights from each person in the group. As there are no silver bullets in this industry, and no one right way to do everything, I’m also posing questions to you, our readers, to see how you manage all of this content in your organizations. I’d love to get your thoughts in the comments.

We curate a lot of content, and we also try to take very much of an educational approach; so we’re always trying to get content out there that’s going to be very informational in nature; very instructional, so that our portfolio companies are constantly learning and looking to us as a thought leader and an expert. —Kevin Cain

Question: What is the mix of content curation vs. orignal content creation in your organization?

We recently established content account managers whose role is to make sure that they are plugged in to all of those field marketing teams and all the local geographical teams to make sure that they are surfacing the right content and bringing it to the forefront. It’s a new role for us, and it helps in a highly-matrixed organization like we have at SAP. — Elizabeth Gaines

Question: Does your company have a person to bring all of the content together?

It may sound stupid, but it’s communication. I spend right now at least 30 percent of [my] time with communicating with the different kind of stakeholders and thinking about who I need to think of. — Michael Kirsten

Question: How much time do you spend on communication? Do you have any tips to making this easier or more effective?

We will do the whole annual editorial planning literally a quarter before the next year starts, and then in May we’ll do a second half year adjustment if necessary… For example, the editorial calendar that we’ve created for 2013, we just completed that in September; like I said, a quarter ahead. Do you know how many times I actually presented the same presentation? 30 times. — Pam Didner

Question: Who do you share your editorial calendar with, and how to you make sure the right people have access?

We’ve come together with our field marketing counterparts… and we’ve said, ‘We’re not going to have individual plans for each of those. We’re all going to contribute to the same plan,‘ and it’s a huge, massive ugly spreadsheet, but it works. — Kelly LeVoyer

Question: Do you manage via a spreadsheet or some other way? If so, do you store it in a shared folder? If not, how do you keep everyone on the same page?

One of the things that we did to build the plan is you have to sit down with one another and say, ‘What is it you do every day, what do you get credit for, what do you get measured on, how can I understand what your role is? You need to understand what my role is so that we understand how to build this plan well.’ We had been working together for years, and when we sat down to understand what my role is, what your role is, the content came together so much better. — Waynette Tubbs

Question: What suggestions do you have for getting everyone from across departments to get on the same page? Is there anything else from the video that caught your attention? Or are there additional suggestions you would add? Please let us know in the comments.

For more expert insight on best practices for managing the content marketing process, register to attend Content Marketing World 2013. 

Let’s face it, while investment banks, asset managers, and other financial service providers are ahead of the curve in some ways, when it comes to content marketing, that’s rarely the case. Not only is the industry dealing with such heady topics as derivatives clearing and credit default swaps, it’s also hemmed in by an overwhelming array of complex and continuously evolving regulations. 

As a result of these and other factors, financial service providers often fail to build and execute dynamic content marketing programs. Instead, they frequently rely on tried-and-true, but far less creative, tactics. Cue the deluge of exceedingly dry white papers and webinars, and the direct mail magazines that often just wind up in the trash.

To be clear, the problem isn’t a lack of effort, and it’s certainly not a lack of high-quality content. Instead, it’s the way the industry seemingly operates under the misconception that its heavy regulatory burdens both preclude and exempt it from taking a creative approach to content. Remember, those regulations are predominantly focused on what’s being said, not the style and delivery of the message.

Another problem is a palpable anxiety about the unknown that clearly stifles innovation and discourages a clear point of view. This is, in large part, why so much financial content rides the fence, and why so many companies are only just beginning to dip their toes into social media, a realm fraught with uncertainties: What if no one responds to our tweets? Or worse, what if they do?

Fortunately, some companies are forging ahead and beginning to take a more innovative approach to content.

Credit Suisse 

Take Credit Suisse, for example. The bank’s digital magazine, The Financialist, offers insights into breaking news, as well as in-depth reporting on the issues, trends, and ideas it sees driving the markets and the economy. The site provides a combination of original feature stories, informative visuals, and carefully curated third-party content. It works because it’s a legitimate financial news site rather than a bank’s thinly veiled attempt to make its website look like one.

Sun Life Financial 

Sun Life Financial’s Brighter Life serves as a place to share ideas about money, health, and family. Its financial content includes a variety of timely articles and videos with tips and tools for personal finance and retirement planning, among other topics. Sun Life has created a true community that’s targeted at families and, by wisely integrating a variety of other topics that families care about, makes the site a destination for a much broader audience. (For more about this content marketing effort, read our interview with SunLife.ca’s editor, Brenda Spiering.)

Putnam Investments 

Bob Reynold’s blog, The Retirement Savings Challenge, is impressive because he is unafraid to tackle an array of complex issues. The CEO of Putnam Investments doesn’t simply articulate the challenges facing a graying population of baby boomers, he actually takes on retirement policy as it comes down from Capitol Hill. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Reynolds offers up a definitive, and at times controversial, point of view.

So the answer is yes, the financial services industry can and eventually will measure up in content marketing if it thinks outside of the regulatory box and reinvents the ways it delivers its messages to resonate in the 21st century. Bring on the infographics and viral videos, the social media campaigns and blogs. It may just be a matter of taking a few risks, which in an industry as skittish and scrutinized as financial services, is no small feat.

If you are in the financial industry, join us for the Content Marketing World Financial Summit on September 12 in Cleveland, Ohio.

This article originally appeared in the February 2013 issue of Chief Content Officer magazine. Subscribe to receive your free copy.

OpenView Venture Partners is a Content Marketing Institute benefactor. 

Cover image via Bigstock

Before we say goodbye, here are our favorite tweets from Wednesday’s sessions. You can also:

• Read what others are writing about CMW Sydney.
• Follow us on Twitter using #CMWorld during the event for event updates, articles and speaker information.
• Visit Facebook for photos and some behind-the-scenes footage of Content Marketing World Sydney.

A huge and sincere THANK YOU to everyone we met, especially those who were avid tweeters.

Keynotes

How Kraft Foods Mines Consumer Insights to Create Content that’s Always Spot On, Right Now, and Never Ever Boring
Julie Fleischer

Kraft Foods have a million subscribers to their *paid* print magazine Food & Family: @jfly at #cmworld Ppl will pay for GOOD branded content
(via @kimota)

Twice as many people renew their @Kraft mag subscription than other mag in the US. Proof point for successful #contentmarketing #cmworld
(via @michelle_ryan0)

#cmworld generating content that consumers find useful means more page impressions, more repeat visits, fewer ad dollars #contentmktg
(via @castlefordmedia)

4 types of content: entertainment, utility, information and community. Find where your brand has credibility – Fleischer from Kraft.#cmworld
(via @MarketingMag)

4 Titans of #ContentMarketing – Insightful, Charisma, Velocity and Timing: Julie Fleischer – Kraft Foods #cmworld
(via @Gareth_Lathey)

“Brands like to do what they’ve always done” – one of the biggest hurdles to funding content marketing #kraftfoods #cmworld
(via @PabloChappo)

Inside Social Media and Content Direct from The Voice Australia
Faustina Agolley

Going out on a limb and giving viewers what they want first & foremost is the guiding principle for
The Voice @faustinathefuzz at#cmworld
(via @BlueChip_Comm)

The Voice discovered they got more Twitter activity when they included avatars of the live tweets displayed on broadcast.#CMWorld
(via @Globalocopywrite)

3 simple guidelines from @faustinathefuzz with #social 1) have a conversation 2) you have to listen
3) be there in real time#cmworld
(via @Castlefordmedia)

People want information and they want it NOW. Even if it’s a teaser, timing is
essential! @faustinathefuzz #cmworld
(via @VanessaVeo)

@TheVoiceAU Delivers #content to viewers 24/7. #social tv on demand is the future of
tv @Faustinathefuzz #CMWorld
(via @King_Content)

@Faustinathefuzz by far most glamourous speaker #cmworld No
offence! @juntajoe @ToddWheatland @Jaybaer @Robert_Rosehttp://yfrog.com/h8adtpyj
(via @AideenMcDonald)

@TheVoiceAU offers social media mentoring to its contestants to protect them and help amplify them#cmworld
(via @venessapaech)

Content strategy track

The Commercial Business Models of Content Marketing
Vanessa Stoykov

Put 30% of your budget into content marketing and measure the results – easier than trying to find new budgets says @ceovanessa #cmworld
(via @AideenMcDonald)

Build it and they will come … but you need to keep reaching out to the audiences and be patient #cmworld @ceovanessa @evotv
(via @AideenMcDonald)

Always bring people back to your website for the fullest, most optimal experience. Allow tendrils, but love your hub! #cmworld
(via @venessapaech)

Excessive planning amplifies failure. Agile content helps cushion impact. #cmworld
(via @venessapaech)

Transcribing all video content helps with risk mitigation and delivers more content (also adds cost layer) #cmworld
(via @venessapaech)

Content Engagement: The Key to a Winning Content Marketing Strategy
Ayal Steiner

@Outbrain @juststeiner when there is search, there is intent. Therefore it is an area to consider for paid traffic #cmworld
(via @AideenMcDonald)

Hope is not a plan @juststeiner #cmworld
(via @VanessaVeo)

Get your title length from 60-100 characters to get more click through says @juststeiner @Outbrain #cmworld yfrog.com/h6wmurtjj
(via @AideenMcDonald)

Time of day counts. See when people are engaging with what content to decide what to send out and when, says @juststeiner at #cmworld
(via @BlueChip_Comm)

Big Image = first impression, white space = quite space, paragraph is less than 5 line, more links (recommendation), …… #CMWorld
(via @infibility)

Nice chart by @juststeiner shows 10 day trend desktop (b) vs tablet (g) vs mobile (r) content consumed #cmworld pic.twitter.com/qTq5SgIEim
(via @MarkVozzo)

Define what you want to achieve and decide the appropriate channels before setting SMART KPIs #cmworld yfrog.com/escn1euj
(via @AideenMcDonald)

Integrating Content Marketing Into Your Existing Marketing Efforts
Robert Rose

First rule of content marketing: it doesn’t compete with your other marketing efforts. If done well, it only makes it better #cmworld
(via @BlueChip_Comm)

Make this your new marketing funnel @Robert_Rose#cmworld Do not stop once you have achieved the customer yfrog.com/h7apbjatj
(via @AideenMcDonald)

“The long tail of search is dead, dead, DEAD!” so says @Robert_Rose at #cmworld
(via @kimota)

Content marketing allows you to create defenders of a brand. It takes you further than just a transaction#brand advocates #cmworld
(via @michelle_ryan0)

“Anyone who is married has at least told one story that has converted one other person!” We can all tell stories. @Robert_Rose #cmworld
(via @kimota)

I agree with @Robert_Rose that companies need to tell stories that are remarkable #cmworldpic.twitter.com/rQCu3RtEzu
(via @MarkVozzo)

How to Build a Dynamic Content Strategy
Chris McWilliams

If you’re relying on something to go viral then you may be waiting some time, says @Mac_Content So best to keep at it just in case #cmworld
(via @BlueChip_Comm)

“Nobody has a monopoly on great ideas” Great quote from Barni Evansshared by @Mac_Content #cmworld
(via @cmicontent)

Don’t fear simplicity. Sometimes the best content is simple. If it hits your audiences where they live, it works. #cmworld
(via @BlueChip_Comm)

Apps of questionable taste didn’t work so well for Sportsbet BUT they learned from the experience – it’s part of the process #cmworld
(via @BlueChip_Comm)

Wrap up an old Irish saying: ‘May your journey be a successful one!’ spoken in Irish by Sportsbet’s Mac_Content at #cmworld
(via @BlueChip_Comm)

Social media and search track

10 Tips to Build an Audience with Content Marketing — Lessons from the Nightclub Dance Floor
Jonathan Crossfield

Nice, I love this analogy by @kimota: A nightclub floorplan to a content marketing plan #cmworld http://t.co/LuZRiOlwGt
(via @MarkVozzo)

Daleks on the door, K9 behind the bar? @Kimota gives solid insights from the nightclub to #contentmarketing #cmworld
(via @Gareth_Lathey)

“@Kimota: In 2012, Pinterest delivered 190m impressions to the Kraft Food website! @jfly #cmworld” holy smoke!
(via @MattLawton)

Outstanding speech by Jonathan Crossfield @kimota at #cmworld. Amazing similarities between being a DJ and social media.
(via @Rich_Ryan76)

@Kimota thanks for the brilliant insights at #cmworld Everything broken down in easy to understand analogies #truestoryteller
(via @DavidLyall)

Leveraging Celebrities and Influencers to Drive Your Blogging
Emma Cornwell, Holly Brisley and Tom Williams

NRMA uses celebritie (Tom Williams is in the house!) and influencers to change perceptions of brand and attract younger audience. #CMWorld
(via @Globalocopywrite)

NRMA now talking to 30K more < 40s than before thanks to productive relationships with influencers. Diversify the conversation #cmworld
(via @venessapaech)

Giving celebrities permission to socially broadcast on your behalf gives people a 360 degree experience ~ Tom Williams #cmworld
(via @venessapaech)

Emma Cornwell discusses the power of celebrity content on @live4au with @tomwilliams70 and @hollybrisley #CMWorld #cmworld
(via @King_Content)

10 Email Content Strategies You Need to Be Using Now
Jeff Rohrs

@jkrohrs kicking off his preso on how email & content marketing go hand-in-hand #cmworld @ Sheraton on… http://t.co/K9d96VnU1e
(via @ryan_bonnici)

@jkrohrs superbly rankling the ‘email is dead’ line. Nothing but linkbait. In fact, our channels are exploding, not dying. #cmworld
(via @venessapaech)

Email has gone up in user preference for receiving opt in marketing messages. People don’t take a break from email @jkrohs #cmworld
(Via @copywritemattrs)

@Jkrohrs shows us the explosion of marketing tactics we now have to manage/consider #cmworld http://t.co/qWRjFu59iV
(via @DanielOysten)

Mobile wrld has “showrooming” where ppl shop w/phones in stores but prchase elswhre. Content is key to combat this. @jkrohrs from #cmworld
(via @Joderama)

ABBA > Always Be Building Audiences – @jkrohrs #cmworld
(via @ExactTargetAus)

Visual Storytelling: Slideshare and Video to Drive Leads and Sales
Todd Wheatland

@ToddWheatland up to talk about visual storytelling! Yes, lets make communication more visual to drive engagement #cmworld
(via @AideenMcDonald)

We like to share stuff that makes us look cool and we want content that is easy to consume on the go. So go make it. @ToddWheatland #cmworld
(Via @copywritemattrs)

@ToddWheatland says search engines will continue to access the social layer. #cmworld
(via @Globalocopywrite)

We have literally taken TVs off the wall and put them in our pockets says @ToddWheatland #cmworld
(via @AideenMcDonald)

“5 yrs ago the pressure on B2B marketers to entertain was low. Now we all need to engage more on an emotional level” @ToddWheatland #cmworld
(via @kimota)

Content mullet strategy – business at the front, party at the back to gain eyeballs…it’s not really sustainable. @ToddWheatland #cmworld
(Via @VanessaVeo)

Average B2B videos is now 45-90 secs #cmworld #videoblogging
(Via @TCconsultancy)

As one of the largest sporting organizations in Australia, the AFL recently took the radical step of creating AFL Media — a separate business unit that operates on a 100 percent owned media model. It has created waves Down Under (especially with the traditional media organizations), but provides some great lessons about the power of compelling content to attract and retain loyal fans. Here are five that can be applied to your business:

1. Storytelling is at the heart of content marketing

No matter the company or the communication goals, every brand has a story. And telling that story in a compelling and engaging way should form the crux of all the content you’re producing. People have been telling stories since the beginning of time, and though the formats may have changed, our desire to connect with others through sharing stories remains.

2. Create opportunities for content

Although a major sporting code is unlikely to run out of content ideas, AFL Media has created the opportunity for content in perpetuity by developing itsvery own algorithm to rank every player in the league. Each week, this ranking system drives unique content about the leading players and key match-ups that the traditional media players can’t provide.

3. Determine your content “dead zones”

It’s not about posting content all the time. AFL Media quickly realized that content it was publishing on Wednesdays fell into a “dead zone.” Readers were no longer engaging with content about the previous weekend’s games, and it was too early to capture their attention about the upcoming round. It’s different with every brand, but trust your analytics and make sure you’re posting content when your audience is most engaged.

4. Tell it, warts and all

It’s important to Pinkney (as an award-winning journalist) that AFL Media produces genuine news content that conveys “the real story,” — even if it doesn’t paint the AFL in a very promising light. Whether it be drug scandals or a pay cut for the CEO, unless fans can trust AFL Media to give them credible information, they’ll go elsewhere.

Though this level of honesty might not get past marketing directors in all companies, it’s important to remember that transparency with audiences builds trust and engagement.

5. Try, test, discard if necessary

One of the many benefits of digital media is how easy it is to change and adapt. Some tactics will work for some brands and audiences, and others won’t. Perhaps Pinkney’s best piece of advice was to be brave — to at least try an idea, see if it works, and if it doesn’t, simply try something else.

You can also:

• Read what others are writing about CMW Sydney.
• Follow us on Twitter using #CMWorld during the event for event updates, articles and speaker information.
• Visit Facebook for photos and some behind-the-scenes footage of Content Marketing World Sydney.

Keynotes

Opening Keynote
Joe Pulizzi

85% of corporations with blogs have five or fewer blog posts! @juntajoe. A lot of room for improvement #cmworld
(via @michelle_ryan0)

Marketers need to get out of a campaign mentality. Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. @juntajoe #cmworld
(via Belinda Weaver @copywritemattrs)

Stop filling buckets with #content, focus on what’s going to work for your customers & for your biz @juntajoe #CMWorld
(via King Content @king_content)

More is not better. Work out your strategy first @juntajoe #CMWorld
(via Jonathan Crossfield @kimota)

Youtility: Why Smart Companies Are Helping, Not Selling
Jay Baer

Good tip from @jaybaer, http://linktally.com  shows sharing metrics on any URL in a flash. #CMWorld
(via Sarah Mitchell @globalcopywrite)

The closer the customer gets to the buying stage, the more specific the content can become. @jaybaer #cmworld
(Via Jonathan Crossfield @Kimota)

“Only when we’ve exhausted all opportunities to educate ourselves do we reach out to another person” @jaybaer #cmworld
(Via Jonathan Crossfield @Kimota)

Closing Keynote
Ray Kloss

The website is dying, says @Ray_Kloss.  85% of SAP web traffic from mobile devices – and hey, try that from an Android device! #cmworld
(via BlueChip Comm @BlueChip_Comm)

Design thinking to unleash the customers @ray_kloss #cmworld look fwd to slides!!!
(via Gareth Lathey @Gareth_Lathey)

Design thinking methodology is being applied to SAP Marketing. Nice diagram by @ray_kloss #cmworld
(Via Mark Vozzo @MarkVozzo)

So much out of the box thinking from @ray_kloss at #cmworld His disruption model & thinking heralds some radical marketing change #cmworld
(via BlueChip Comm @BlueChip_Comm)

If you want to keep ahead, keep your head up. Focus on possibilities and building imagination. @ray_kloss #designthinking #cmworld
(via Belinda Weaver @copywritemattrs)

B2B track

How to Dominate Your B2B Niche with a Multi-Author Blog
Joe Pulizzi and Jodi Harris

To get your influencer strategy rolling, you have to give – lots – before you receive: @juntajoe #cmworld
(via Jonathan Crossfield ‏@kimota)

Think about who might best contribute to your blog: experts, customers, employees and so on, says @joderama at #cmworld
(via BlueChip Comm @BlueChip_Comm)

Create your own list of 10-15 industry influencers. Share their content. Give to receive. #cmworld #videoblogging
(via Ray Brown ‏@RayBrown99)

Make sure yr editorial roles & processes are crystal clear, says @joderama at #cmworld Content director, content manager, digital assistant
(via BlueChip Comm ‏@BlueChip_Comm)

Behind the Scenes: American Express Content Marketing
Robin James Patrick

What’s success & what’s failure? You need to define your goals & constantly check your #content and ROI against them. AMEX RBJ #CMWorld
(via King Content @king_content)

Robert Patrick (AMEX) says ‘you have to give marketers the license to fail’ that was their approach wth http://www.openforum.com #cmworld
(via Mark Vozzo ‏@MarkVozzo)

AMEX: You must be comfortable to live in beta, we’re not launching utopia – a nice way to say nothing is ever completed. #CMWorld
(via Sarah Mitchell ‏@globalcopywrite)

Amex don’t get involved when they experience social media backlash. Right or wrong? #CMWorld
(via Michelle G ‏@michellegwriter)

The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing Measurement (ROI)
Jay Baer

The goal is not to be good at content – the goal is to be good at business, shown through content #cmworld
(via Michelle Ryan ‏@michelle_ryan0)

To boost sharing, remove friction. “Encourage theft. Give your ideas handles. Find ways to allow ppl to steal your stuff.” @jaybaer #cmworld
(via Jonathan Crossfield ‏@kimota)

Be a digital dandelion! That means spreading your content across multiple channels, not just your own website @jaybaer #cmworld
(via Kye Mackey @KyeMackey)

High consumption of your content should result in more questions! Don’t stop measuring at consumption. Ever. @jaybaer #cmworld
(via Belinda Weaver ‏@copywritemattrs)

If you do one thing in the next 6 months, become an expert in Google analytics #CMWorld @jaybaer
(via Michelle G @michellegwriter)

Measuring content is not hard, but it IS complicated. You need the right tools and to think it through #cmworld
(via BlueChip Comm @BlueChip_Comm)

Magical software that solves the metrics conundrum does not, and will never, exist. Focus on finding your equation. #cmworld
(via Venessa Paech ‏@venessapaech)

“The reason we care about Facebook “likes” so much is because it’s public. Psychology drives this more than business” @jaybaer #cmworld #cm
(via Cim Smith ‏@Cimonetta)

Transforming your BtoB Brand into a Content Machine
Todd Wheatland

Lack of resources should be NO BARRIER to content marketing success. On the contrary, many strategies eg blogging no upfront cost #cmworld
(via BlueChip Comm ‏@BlueChip_Comm)

#cmworld using your staff to author or introduce content can create a stronger bond with the company #contentmktg
(via Castleford Media ‏@castlefordmedia)

It takes years to get where a business like Kelly is with content marketing says @ToddWheatland #cmworld
(via Aideen McDonald ‏@AideenMcDonald)

Do a content audit first. You may find you already have some of the content you need. Then plan to fill the gaps. #cmworld
(via Jonathan Crossfield ‏@Kimota)

#LinkedIn is the one company you need to get your head around within content marketing @ToddWheatland #cmworld
(via Aideen McDonald ‏@AideenMcDonald)

Don’t let your thought leadership work get mistaken for brochureware. Define a strong visual identity @ToddWheatland #cmworld
(via Belinda Weaver ‏@copywritemattrs)

B2C track

Content Success: Putting Your Customer First with Content Marketing
Jo Shapland and Fegus Stoddart

Find your ‘white space’ – where and what is the zone that you can drill down and add tangible value.  #CMWorldpic.twitter.com/4YPHX5GdyX
(via Venessa Paech @venessapaech)

JNJNews Johnson & Johnson are one of the best examples of consumer #contentmarketing - 29m mums/mnth visit the site #cmworld
(via Aideen McDonald ‏@AideenMcDonald)

Map competitor strengths and weaknesses around content and community pic.twitter.com/VGcu47oTsU
(via Venessa Paech @venessapaech)

#cmworld – Content should reflect the customer journey – whether rational, emotional, explorative or a combination #contentmktg
(via Castleford Media @castlefordmedia)

If you’re looking for a long term relationship with your customers, content marketing is a long term solution #cmworld
(via Aideen McDonald ‏@AideenMcDonald)

#CMWorld Content + community has given Woolies 3 x membership growth, decreased churn, increased referrals, engagement & frequency
(via Venessa Paech @venessapaech)

Find a key customer segment, set up a targeted content marketing plan, engage customers, and increase sales
(via Aideen McDonald ‏@AideenMcDonald)

#CMWorld Woolies very clear about editorial vs. sponsored content. Disclaimed. Credibility must be maintained to nurture trust and exchange.
(via Venessa Paech @venessapaech)

Creating Fans with Content Strategies Using All Channels
Matt Pinkney

Understand your traffic flow and tailor your content accordingly #afl #cmworld
(via King Content @king_content)

Design is massively important for #AFL. Bring in a designer as soon as story is determined #cmworld

Telling the stories warts and all, key to trust for afl media.#CMWorld
(via Brad Smith @BradleyASmith)

Know the exact minute, hours and days your audience engages with you most @AFLMedia #CMWorld
(via King Content @king_content)

“Try test and discard if necessary”- content marketing principle from afl media head of content #cmworld
(via King Content @king_content)

194% audience growth on app platforms #aflmedia #cmworld
(via King Content @king_content)

#cmworld we are encouraging our reporters to use vine to cover breaking news – @MattPinkney #aflmedia
(via Ryan Northover @RyanNorthover)

Content Marketing: An Agency’s Perspective
Karl Bates

Karl Bates (Mccann): We know longer have the choice. The audience is no longer passive. We need to deliver killer #content. #CMWorld
(via King Content @king_content)

Don’t think like a marketer, think like internet says Karl Bates #cmworld

Create content worth sharing. That’s where most people fall down says Karl Bates.

Be brave and trust your instincts. Safe is not always the best option. #dumbwaystodie

Make your content an experience instead of selling says Karl Bates #cmworld

You need to adapt and respond quickly. Even once content is out, your job is not done. Karl Bates at #cmworld

Partnerships and Co-Creation as Key to Content Marketing
Kate Vale

97% of businesses say music can strengthen their brand. Yet most don’t invest in determining the sounds of their brand.
(via Venessa Paech @venessapaech)

Kate Vale from Spotify thinks ‘music strategies’ will become more common in next few years.
(via Venessa Paech @venessapaech)

Aussies take note “@juntajoe: Spotify is becoming what MySpace should have evolved into. Social sharing platform for music lovers.
(via Michelle Ryan @michelle_ryan0)

“More than 50% of all activity on social revolves around #music says Kate Vale @Spotify
(via Cim Smith @cimonetta)

Spotify uses partnered pop-up events offline to create memorable experiences and fuel deeper connections #cmworld
(via Venessa Paech @venessapaech)

If you were able to join us at CMW, let us know what we missed in the comments. And, see you tomorrow!

Online workers comprise one of the fastest growing segments of our economy. In fact, there are nearly 400,000 writers on oDesk alone, not to mention other virtual marketplaces like Elance or Guru.com. This rapid growth is being fueled by many factors, a major cause being convenience for the employer. We all know how much of a headache it can be to hire a full-time employee, particularly in terms of paperwork, multiple interviews, recruiting costs, and risk. Hiring online workers minimizes such issues. In fact, a recent study found that hiring online workers typically takes less than three days total (compared to 24 days for on-premise workers). 

So if building a team of online writers has so many potential benefits to your organization, what’s the best way to tap into the virtual workforce?

Here are four secrets that will make the process easier:

Secret 1: Stop thinking like it’s 2003 

Specialize, specialize, specialize. Thanks to the virtual marketplace, you’re now able to match your content creation needs to the skill sets of millions of contractors. Start by identifying the structural needs of your specific content development activities (those that are not adequately covered by your existing staff).

When building content plans for my clients, I typically start by considering the following “categories”:

• General web content, such as products, features and benefits, company-focused information, etc.
• Blog / blog categories, including content that is educational, timely, news, technical, industry-related, etc.
• Downloadable content / assets, such as white papers, brochures, case studies, eBooks, or checklists.
• Email content, like newsletters, product-related mailers, call-to-action blasts, lead nurturing, autoresponders, etc.
• Social & microblogging content that is aimed at engagement, industry focused, and/or company specific.
• PR materials, such as press releases or event-related content.

Next, it is important to begin identifying specific needs you have in each category. Start by compiling these needs into a matrix that matches your content generation processes to your human resource vacancies. I’ve created a sample matrix that you can use, below.

For purposes of this article, let’s imagine that we’ve identified some holes in our blogging team, specifically for a new client in the software industry. The client needs three blog articles written per month: one technical, one about company happenings, and one educational. Here’s what this portion of the matrix looks like after assessing needs.

Secret 2: Systematically scour the virtual world for the right fit(s)  

Now that we’ve identified the client’s needs, it’s time to initiate the recruiting process on virtual marketplaces, such as oDesk or Elance.

Here are specific steps to follow:

1. Begin with a well-written explanation of needs: Focus on defining what your company actually needs. In doing so, you also create a pretty nice job description. Given our previous example, here’s an explanation for our “technical” writer:

We are seeking a technical writer to routinely produce content for a client’s blog. The ideal candidate would meet the following qualifications: 

• Proven background as a technical writer, specifically relating to software
• Ability to take abstract concepts and assemble them into a cohesive article
• Pays close attention to details
• Willingness to understand client’s software, from a technical standpoint
• Commitment to quality assurance
• Basic understanding of search engine optimization principles
• Willing to sign an NDA (nondisclosure agreement)
• Accepting of a “pay-per-article” arrangement 

2. Utilize filters to “drill down” into specific skill sets and indicators: Using a marketplace like oDesk affords you a wealth of recruiting tools and filtering options traditionally reserved to only the largest headhunting firms. As some filters are more important than others, here’s how I use each filter to find the perfect candidate:

• Feedback score: I typically don’t consider hiring anyone with less than four stars. The rare exception to this would be if I identify a new online worker who has not yet established a rating. I say rare because it is risky.  Hiring someone with no feedback can be scarier than someone with bad feedback.
• Hourly rate: I’d expect to pay more for a technical writer than someone who is managing my tweets. It’s simple supply and demand: The more specialized the need, the more you should expect to budget.
• Tests taken / passed: Often overlooked by virtual employers, I actually view this as an important indicator. If a contractor has taken the time to pass relevant skill tests, it becomes easier to compare your staffing options. For our technical writer, I’d want to make sure my finalists score well on the oDesk test for technical writing.
• Number of hours / projects worked: Similar to feedback rating, this helps determine how successful (and, in turn, how skilled) a prospective writer has been in the virtual marketplace. Lots of contracts and projects indicate the contractor is serious and valued.

3. Pre-interview and interview best practices: The previous two steps will substantially narrow your candidate pool. However, you still may have a dozen or more seemingly qualified people to evaluate. Should you interview them all? My short answer is no. The virtual marketplace offers additional methods for zeroing in on the best fit(s) for your content team. I prefer narrowing the list further, such that only two to three candidates receive interview requests. Here’s how:

• Pre-interview: First, take a look at candidate portfolios and examples of their work. For most writing roles, you can get a good feel by simply going through previous pieces they’ve written. oDesk’s portfolio feature makes it easy to evaluate a contractor’s past work. Below is a screenshot of what my portfolio looks like. Each project can be clicked and reviewed individually, further streamlining the evaluation process.

• Interview: Once you have narrowed your list down to two or three highly qualified candidates, it’s time to hold interviews. I could probably talk for hours about the dos and don’ts of interviewing for your virtual marketing team. However, it may be more beneficial to give you a few tools for facilitating the interview process. Here are three of my favorites:

• Skype: In the virtual workforce, most interviews are conducted via Skype. The face-to-face video option provides some semblance of a “traditional” working relationship. It also helps you gauge body language and other nonverbal communication during the interview process. (You can download Skype for free.)

• JobOn.com: Don’t have time to hold real interviews? No problem! JobOn.com offers a unique service in which applicants can, as their motto goes, “apply by video.” Instead of hosting a Skype video call, applicants record themselves answering your desired interview questions. You can review their answers when you have time. (Learn more at JobOn.com.)

• Applicant tracking systems: There are many cloud-based applicant tracking systems available. I’d recommend using an ATS when you begin recruiting across multiple virtual marketplaces. Zoho offers a free edition of its ATS, which seems to get the job done.

Secret 3: Date before you get married  

My wife and I dated for several years before we decided to get married. When hiring online workers to your virtual content team, I believe you should do a little “dating” too. I’m not saying go to extremes here; I’m simply saying you should be cautious before you allow new writers into your “inner circle.” That’s one of the beautiful things about the virtual workforce: You don’t have to commit to a lot of up-front risk with new team members.

To start the dating process, let your new writers prove they mean business by working on a test project. For example, offer a competitive fixed-price budget to your new writers. Let the finalists “compete” to see whose writing style is the best fit for your needs. Be sure to set clear expectations and deadlines on the test project.

Upon the completion of the test project, your goal should be to objectively assess expectations to results:

• Overall, did the writer meet or exceed your expectations?
• Can you realistically picture this writer creating content for one of your clients?
• Did the writer follow all requirements of the project (deadlines, content specs, etc.)?

If you cannot answer yes to all of the previous questions, it may be a warning sign that this person isn’t a good fit for your team.

Secret 4: Match skills, needs, and budgets 

The net result of the previous three secrets should culminate in a rock-solid virtual content team. Use your matrix (identified in Secret 1) as a living document. As team members leave or join your team, update the matrix to ensure no gaping holes exist. Continuously recruit using the secrets outlined in this article.

In addition to continuous recruitment, it is important to keep your existing team happy, thus reducing turnover. Below are a few additional tips for keeping a cohesive virtual content team:

Tips for keeping a cohesive virtual content team 

• Set clear delegation guidance: How will you delegate new writing assignments to your team? Are you going to use a project management tool like BaseCamp or FreedCamp? Or will you use something a bit more basic like Google Drive? Make sure your team knows how you will delegate to them to reduce confusion. 

• Avoid billing and payment friction: Luckily, if you hire via oDesk, most billing issues are avoided thanks to its time tracking software. However, if you’re paying writers via PayPal or wire transfer, you’ll need to come up with a standard billing and invoicing system. 

• Identify your “virtual liaison:” The virtual liaison is typically an in-house employee whose job is to help bridge the gap between in-house and outsourced workers. Most companies who have successfully implemented blended teams use a virtual liaison. 

• Foster open communication: Communication will help you avoid a lot of issues that occur when managing virtual teams. Make sure you over-communicate and avoid sending contractors the wrong signals (even if you don’t mean to).

Your clients have a growing demand for excellent content. How will you choose to accommodate their requests? The virtual workforce stands ready to support your needs. Take the first step toward building your virtual content team and achieving scalable growth. You’ll thank me later.

For more tips on putting an effective content marketing team together, read “Managing Content Marketing” by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi. 

All have the same goals: attracting high-quality students, recruiting great faculty and staff, encouraging alumni to make donations to support school programs, and building up the school’s brand recognition and reputation.

In order to stand out from their many competitors, it’s essential to focus on content marketing, making use of both traditional and digital strategies. Here are some effective tactics and outstanding examples of university content marketing. 

Create an alumni magazine — either online or offline

Colleges were some of the earliest adopters of content marketing: Harvard University, for instance, has published its alumni magazine since 1898. Today, hundreds of schools publish alumni magazines on an annual or quarterly basis. The articles serve to share stories of faculty members’ groundbreaking research, spotlight alums’ unique career paths, share innovative educational programs, and delve into more complex feature stories about education.

Alumni magazines can be powerful tools for connecting to a broader audience: A 2010 survey from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education found that 58 percent of alums feel that such magazines strengthen their personal connections to universities.

For some colleges, the cost of producing and distributing a print magazine was a barrier. Now, schools can replace or supplement print distribution with online distribution, particularly for current students and younger alums, who tend to do more of their reading online. If you don’t have the budget to hire a dedicated alumni magazine editor, consider using a content marketing agency, which can coordinate efforts with your in-house communications team.

For colleges looking to convert an existing magazine, a simple PDF will suffice, but for an improved user experience that allows readers to turn pages online, consider using an online magazine publishing tool, such as issuu.

USC publication on issuu

Build segmented online content hubs to appeal to each audience

Most colleges have a section of their websites dedicated to news about the school — but in order to build an audience online, focus on providing engaging content that will appeal to each of your defined audiences through dedicated content hubs.

For example, Colby College, a highly selective liberal arts school in Waterville, Maine, has a separate site, Inside Colby, billed as “for students, by students.” Current students use the site to blog about their on-campus experiences and share essays, videos, photos, podcasts, and other glimpses of life on campus. Although the portal is aimed at existing students, its content is public and can serve as a powerful draw for recruiting new students.

InsideColby

For alumni, you can build an online portal where former students can reconnect on private message boards; read articles and view multimedia features about their professors and fellow graduates; and read curated news relevant to their field of study. Offer a subscription to an online newsletter that will point them to the latest content regarding notable alumni news and innovative programs at the school — and be sure to include options for online donations, so that it’s as easy as a click of a button to support the school.

Spotlight day-to-day life at the school through social media

Social media platforms — particularly Twitter and Facebook — can help you stay connected with your base on a day-to-day basis, and will give you opportunities to build stronger relationships with your community.

Depending on the size of your university, it’s likely that you’ll want to create Twitter and Facebook accounts for a variety of departments, such as the admissions department, the athletics department, and the alumni center, as well as for specific programs, such as the law school or business school.

Get the program directors involved in using these platforms to share real-time updates, link to department news, and interact with the students, and don’t forget to come up with a clear set of social media communication guidelines. On your website, it can also be helpful to create a “social media map” that shares links to all of the school’s social media accounts for easy following, as Duke University does.

Duke University social media

Develop a mobile app that combines functionality with compelling content

While a mobile app is by no means a required part of a university’s content marketing plan, it can be highly effective: After all, two-thirds of Americans use mobile devices to connect to the Internet, so by building a mobile app, you can give them the best possible user experience.

Some schools are using such apps to great effect: For instance, MIT’s free mobile app features a real-time shuttle tracker, a searchable campus map, and a feed of the latest news from the school. Brown University’s Brown Alumni Connect offers features such as a searchable alumni directory, news stories about Brown alumni, and alumni and faculty video clips. Many mobile apps also include an online donation button to simplify the transaction process.

MIT’s mobile app

With mobile apps, there’s no need to create app-specific content — it’s about presenting your library of content in a mobile-friendly way that will make people more likely to engage with it.

If you’ve been involved in content marketing for a university, we’d love to hear your input — what are the most effective strategies you’ve found for engaging your audience through content?

For more inspirational ideas on how to use content marketing to meet any communication challenge, read CMI’s Ultimate eBook: 100 Content Marketing Examples. 

Cover image via Flickr

Well, I had the opportunity a few days ago to read this post courtesy of Doug Kessler at Velocity Partners (UK). Frankly, this post is a keeper. All of the issues that marketers and business owners bring up about the term and practice of content marketing are covered by Doug in this piece. This is exactly the type of content that is going to continue to push us forward as an industry. Doug: My sincere thanks.

Enjoy the post!  — Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute

If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, we’re due for a MASSIVE backlash against content marketing.

It’s already started. More and more bloggers are finally getting fed up with all the hype and are pushing back. A recent post by Neil Hopkins (Interacter) is a case in point. It’s called “Content marketing is nothing more than the Emperor’s new clothes,” which pretty much sums up what most of the new batch of whistleblowers are so mad about.

It’s not the thing itself that is getting everyone so upset, it’s the hype.

This is a weird moment for me because I tend to be the guy who likes to stick a pin in the over-inflated. I’m a card-carrying hater and I especially enjoy hating the very things that everybody else has agreed to love. Group-think triggers my aversion to anything resembling a Nuremberg Rally, Red Scare, Witch Hunt or Chelsea Football crowd. So it’s distinctly uncomfortable to find myself riding on a bandwagon when the people throwing rotten tomatoes at it look so much like me.

In his post, Neil trots out the Google Trends graph showing the dramatic increase in mentions of the term ‘content marketing.’ If you’ve ever seen a hockey stick, you’ll recognise it. He also brings in the CMI’s definition of content marketing and the Wikipedia history.  His conclusion: “Every time I hear the phrase ‘Content Marketing,’ I want to scream until I puke.” (Given the Google chart, it’s a mystery how poor Neil keeps any food down at all).

So even though I have to suppress an urge to join the hecklers, I am a content marketer and I feel I ought to defend the discipline. With that in mind, here’s a summary of the arguments I’ve heard against content marketing. In each case, I hope to show that the argument is not with content marketing at all: it’s with some other obnoxious phenomenon that has attached itself to our fair art.

So here are the main objections:

“Content marketing is not new.”

No, it’s not. Wikipedia (and Joe Pulizzi) traces it back to the John Deere magazine, The Furrow, published in 1895 (I’m sure that wasn’t the first example but it’s often cited as such and I can’t be arsed to track down an earlier one).

The first piece of content marketing I ever noticed was the excellent “Power of the Written Word” campaign by International Paper in the ’80s. (1980s, wise guy). (You can download the PDFs from Lawrence Berstein’s post on the Info Marketing blog).  So I’m well aware it’s not a new thing.

But did anyone ever say it was new? What’s new is that now it has a name and the name has gone viral in an especially annoying way for those of us who do it for a living.

Of course content marketing is not new. But the web and social media have given it a whole new life. Now anyone can play. And that’s kind of new.

“Content marketing is over-hyped.”

Of course it is. Nothing has all the magical powers that the Cult of CM attributes to it. But is that the fault of the discipline?

If hype rendered its object worthless, then Madonna would be washing dishes in a New Jersey diner. It’s not HER fault that a zillion zombies decided all at once to accept unchallenged the reported sightings of her talent. Okay, bad example. That is her fault.

But it’s not content marketing’s fault that it’s become the buzzword-du-jour for marketers everywhere.

The Internet itself was said to be over-hyped during the bubble days. As it turns out, all that hyperbole turned out to be understatement. The Internet really did change everything. Despite the hype not because of it.

So, yes, content marketing is over-hyped. But that will settle down when the next big thing comes along. (My money’s on Slinkies.) (They WALK. DOWN. STAIRS.).

“Content marketing is a stupid name.”

Yeah, it really is. ‘Content’ is a dumb word. It means something like ‘that which is in a container.’ Really helpful.

But once you get over that part, ‘content marketing’ is kind of descriptive. It’s marketing that uses content instead of just babble about product features.

So a new name will no-doubt come along. ‘Cloud’ used to be ‘Software-as-a-Service,’ which used to be ‘Application Service Provision’ — the thing didn’t go away, it just burned through a few names.

“Content marketing is just another word for marketing.”

Well, not really. There is plenty of marketing that is not content marketing. Only the loosest definition of content marketing would include the movie billboard, perfume ad or “10% Off for Valentine’s Day!” email shot.

Just before screaming until he puked, Neil Hopkins said that, “Every bit of tat given away by brands at trade shows or consumer sampling sessions could be termed content marketing.” No, Neil, that would be termed ‘bad marketing.’

Content marketing is a specific discipline within the wide, tawdry pageant that is marketing. It’s just eating up more and more of the budget (because it works).

I admit that the prospect of ‘content-free’ marketing is not a pretty one, but I’ll rest my case on this one.

“Content marketing is a fad.”

This kind of goes with the ‘over-hyped’ objection but it’s a bit different because it implies that content marketing will, one day soon, go away.

I really can’t see that happening.

What I can see happening is that content marketing will become the price of entry in most markets rather than the differentiator it is today. So it will become much harder to use content to leap out of the similarly-content-spewing pack. We moaned about this in our recent Slideshare rant called, “Crap: why the biggest threat to content marketing is content marketing.”

But we never concluded that content marketing will die.

How could using your expertise to help your prospects do their jobs ever be a bad idea?

No, it’s here to stay — it’ll just mature from ‘Shiny New Idea’ to ‘Marketing Staple.’

“Content marketing is a lie.”

This one does worry me. Especially because the only place I’ve ever heard this argument is in my own head.

Content marketing is a lie because it pretends that there isn’t a hidden agenda when there is one: to sell stuff. The content in content marketing tries hard to sound neutral. To make like Fox News and pretend to be ‘Fair and Balanced’ (pause for guffaw). But it isn’t. It’s selling a world view that was designed to lead the reader to the door of the brand that produced the content.

Ouch.

Okay, here’s my dignity-saving post-rationalisation: The best content marketing does not hide its agenda. It’s totally open about it. It just puts aside its sales agenda for long enough to bring some genuine value to the target audience (in the hope that prospects will like you more because of it).

This touches on the fear that dare not speak its name: the fear that we’re all really just in the business of producing advertorials. Or infomercials (pause to run off and shower). But for now, I’ll overcome this objection with the well-worn rebuttal, “I know you are but what am I?” backed up by a chorus of “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.” (A sing-song so annoying it always triggers a hunt for a handy stick or stone.)

So that’s my defense against the inevitable, predictably shrill, Content Marketing Backlash.

The haters aren’t really rejecting content marketing. They’re rejecting blind hype, crappy names, bad content marketing and ignorance of marketing history. All worthy of approbation, if not hate. But nothing to do with the responsible, professional, humble practice of content marketing.

A sampling of the recent Backlash posts

Not all are anti-CM, but they do share a suspicion that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be:

Interacter’s “Emperor’s New Clothes” post.

Positive Marketing, Why content marketing sucks.: ”Longer term, Content Marketing, as we know it today is doomed. As always with marketing, differentiation, authenticity and innovation will win out.”  (This suggests that you must choose to make great products or do content marketing. But they’re not mutually exclusive. Do both.)

Geoff Livigstone, Customer experience trumps content marketing: Geoff says, “As a primary strategy content marketing is over-hyped. Instead, brands should focus on customer experience marketing.” (Feels like a buzzword-for-buzzword swap to me…)

And Geoff again with The Content Marketing Debate: ”Content marketing puts a new name on an old discipline, making it more accessible to other professions… In 10 years, I’m sure it will be called something else.” (In 10 years, bacon will be called something else.)

 15 Buzzwords to Stop Using by Veronica Maria Jarsky on Marketing Profs — guess who appears on the list.

Laura Ramos on the Forrester blog: Which comes first, content marketing or thought leadership?: ”Four key trends converging on business-to-business marketers are driving interest in, and failure with, content marketing.” (Good points, actually.)

Christopher S. Penn, How to Fix the Sad State of Content Marketing: ”Content marketing. It was the darling of the marketing world in 2012, but it’s fallen on hard times lately.”  (I should fall on such hard times.)

Stephen Downes of the QBrand Blog posted The trouble with content marketing: ”Content marketing” is not a new kind of marketing. At best, it’s about some new communication tools; at worst, it’s putting the cart before the horse.” He also says content marketing is emphatically not a strategy. (Not sure about that — but I always get confused between strategies and tactics.)

Tom Albrighton, An honest look at content marketing: ”It’s strange to see something you’ve been doing for aeons suddenly trumpeted as the Next Big Thing.”

Learn more about what content marketing is — and what it isn’t — from Doug Kessler when he presents at Content Marketing World, September 9–12, 2013. Register now to reserve your spot. 

Image via Shutterstock.com

There are no hard-and-fast rules for developing your brand’s stories, but you can go back and look at classic storytelling and structure as a helpful map to guide you. For example, the classic “hero’s journey” from Joseph Campbell’s, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, outlines what he calls the “monomyth” — which is a pattern that many believe can be found in almost every narrative around the world. 

Campbell’s point is that storytelling across time shares a fundamental structure and can be summarized into this journey. Later, in 1992, screenwriter and story consultant Christopher Vogler took Campbell’s structure, modernized it for today’s audiences, and reduced it to 12 stages in his book, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers. This made the stages much more approachable for today’s writers — and is now mandatory reading for any novel or screenwriter. Vogler’s hero’s journey is this: 

There are ways to use this hero’s journey to develop your own pillars of content — your own stories. In Managing Content Marketing, Joe and I reduced Vogler’s stages to 10 steps for developing your content marketing brand journey. But before I jump in to explain those 10 steps, know that this is just a framework, not a “to-do” list or a template. The structure is meant to provide a platform to help you to develop a way to tell your story, or maybe to discover what’s missing from your existing story. It’s not a template for the story — this is an important distinction, because your story will be unique to you, your brand, and the experience you are trying to create.

Step 1: The conventional market

This is your brand’s world — and as you brainstorm your pillars of content, you should know and be able to define the conventional:

• What does your market look like?
• Where are your competitors situated?
• Why do they currently identify with your brand?

Step 2: The challenge

This is your big “What if?“:

• What if XYZ were actually true?
• What would the world look like if you could actually realize that “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” (BHAG) that you’ve set out for your brand?
• What is the call to adventure for your product?
• What’s the big promise?
• Why hasn’t this been done?
• Why haven’t you done it yet?
• What’s the pain that the conventional market feels now?
• What will you need to add to your story to let your audience know what will be left behind?
• Are you conflicted about this?
• What will be the effect of this change on your existing brand?
• Who in your company (or outside of it) can help you take this adventure?
• Who will provide guidance for your brand as it makes this journey? Is it you? Is it your CEO? Or, do you even have that person? Is it more than one person? Can you get someone external for this?
• Will you need to conjure an imaginary character to act as your sage or mentor?
• Who can stand in front of the world and credibly tell your audience that you are going on this journey together?

Step 3: The rejection of the challenge

Step 4: Appointment of the sage

Step 5: Crossing into the unfamiliar

This is where you burn the ships so that you can’t go back. Ultimately, in your content marketing, your brand must take a definitive point of view that is differentiated — and it will cross into your new “what if?” idea. This is the unknown — and it’s what you are exploring:

• How will you communicate this crossing into this new idea — this new adventure?
• How will you lead your audience into this new unknown with you?

Step 6: Map the road of challenges

Part of this step is unknown to you as an author, but you can use it to determine how you’ll gather friends. Or maybe you’ll take a strong point of view that may actually create enemies, or controversy:

• Who will your brand align with?
• How can they help you move forward?
• What tests to your brand’s legitimacy will it face in the unknown?
• Who will be the naysayers?
• What tests and challenges can you plan for?
• What skills will your brand need to address?

Step 7: The final challenge

As your brand faces these challenges, attracts and aligns with friends, and establishes a differentiated point of view, it should establish itself as differentiated — as a leader:

• What will it ultimately achieve?
• What learned skills (or attributes) will your organization take into the final challenge?
• What will that final challenge be?

This is the culmination of your brand story. In the larger sense, you may never want your brand’s (your hero’s) story to end. And this content marketing campaign may be but one episode in your story. But this final challenge is what you have to overcome to get to the possibility of the “what if?“…

Step 8: Looking back

Take a look back at the ordinary world. Your brand is different now. How do you show that differentiation?

Step 9: The final renewal

Your brand’s story is never going to end, and you are now ready to continue on your journey. But you may encounter new, formidable challenges now that you are a changed entity: 

• What ambush could — or will — your brand face now that it is different?
• What will the competition say about you now — and how do you continue?

Step 10: The celebration

This is you realizing the dream. Celebrating. It’s the final part of your story. 

There you have it — the structure. It can be used across one small content marketing initiative — or across an entire strategy of content marketing across the enterprise. Changing the level of hero from product, to brand, to service can make it more interesting, and enables you to explore ever more creative “webs” of stories among them.

This story structure — which is inherently linear — can also help you structure your content into a story map. The story map helps to organize your pieces of content across a timeline. It compels you to think of your content pieces as “chapters” or “scenes,” and can help reveal the gaps. It may resemble a high-level editorial calendar — but is structured with a focus on telling your complete brand story as you continue along your content development process.

Want to learn more about brand storytelling? Catch Robert Rose’s workshop, “Content Marketing 201: Building Stories that Sell” at Content Marketing World Sydney on March 4. To register for the event, use promo code CMI200 to save $200 when registering (Note: The workshop has an additional cost.)

This piece was excerpted and edited from ”Managing Content Marketing“ by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi.

CCO spoke with Wilson about why narrowcasting works in the noisy environment, what it takes to create a successful content marketing program for the complex B2B sales cycle, and why quality matters. 

CCO: Tell me about narrowcasting and how it relates to content marketing.

MW: Narrowcasting is about narrowly defining an audience and engaging them in a discussion with which they can emotionally and emotively connect. For complex B2B sales, you want to target decision-makers and their influencers, and create a self-referring community.

With narrowcasting, my rule of thumb is to narrow the audience to about 10,000 people who look similar. Ten thousand is a nice round number, and it’s cost efficient. You can physically and digitally communicate with them. You can target with them on platforms and still have the beginnings of an intimate conversation through social media, over the phone, or through an online community — as long as they’re passionate about the topic you’re talking to them about.

Before I came to Avaya, I did a lot of work in software, and one of the sectors we targeted was the financial industry. We began to slice this group by type of financial institution, size, role within the organization and location. When it came to location, a light bulb went off, and we realized we could target in cool ways. There are three geographic centers globally for the financial industry — New York, London and Tokyo. We focused on New York.

Our approach was to blanket this group from the time they rolled out of bed until the end of the day. We had articles in the magazines and papers they read while they drank their morning coffee. As they commuted to work, we had ads at the station and on the specific platforms that had trains to the financial district. We had ads inside the train cars and on the urban panels in the subway when they left the station.

We knew what buildings they worked in, and we had ads on the electronic panels in the elevator banks and in the publications inside their offices. We also integrated this with online and digital content, search, newsletters targeted specifically for this group, annual guides, and eBooks that focused on thought leadership.

We essentially did a full-court press for three years, and the results were phenomenal. We started this around a product launch, and it became the fastest growing and biggest market segment in the company’s portfolio. This product launch was the most successful in the company’s history.

We knew we really “made it” when we started to get a second round of pickup. Our ads appeared in the background of other people’s ads. There was an ad for the TV series Weeds. It shows a woman walking down the street in New York City, and in the background was one of our ads. 

What made you head down this road?

In the 1990s, there was a lot of talk about database marketing and one-to-one marketing. There was a promise made at the time that we, as marketing professionals, didn’t deliver on. As automation and digital platforms improved, we could engage in a fundamentally different way. We could also measure how a broadcasting message didn’t work, and the effectiveness of narrowcasting became clear.

Marketers began making the shift once they looked at the quality of leads they were getting from “spray-and-pray” broadcast-type programs. Initially, things looked good. But when they followed leads into the sales funnel, what looked good at first glance didn’t produce results.

In the classic marketing funnel, we’ve gotten better at the top with narrowcasting. And at each level down, we keep getting better and better at making investments and getting better returns. In the end, narrowcasting helps marketers get rid of content spillage. Money that used to be spent reaching a broad audience is now better spent communicating more frequently with a narrow target audience. You have the opportunity to really engage with the right group of people. 

How does this affect content strategy?

It boils down to segment, segment, segment. You have to think about your audience, and narrowly define and understand them. Sometimes marketers don’t invest enough time getting to know their audience and they should. You have to understand them more to target them well.

At Avaya, for example, one of groups we target is contact center businesses. We know who these customers are, down to their job titles. To build our audience, we get lists of people with these titles using LinkedIn or Dunn & Bradstreet. Once we know our audience, we know what drives them. Then it’s time to research and create a thoughtful, provocative point of view that they’ll understand and that sounds credible coming from us.

I think marketers skimp on segmenting because there’s a focus on generating activity; you don’t get credit for something that’s well thought out. There’s a perverse incentive to reward people for activity rather than the right answer. If you show a good segmentation strategy, it gets underappreciated for what that means for a marketing strategy. It’s hard to segment a market well.

What’s another B2B brand that does narrowcasting well?

IBM and Symantec. Symantec is good about having a steady communication around webcasts, forums, and communities to engage, and other assets they’ve created. They are like a machine, creating high-quality content and proactively engaging with an audience that self-selects to receive it.

IBM creates high-quality assets, too. The IBM Global CEO Study was excellent. It’s primary research and not marketing-speak. It’s a unique point of view with data that backs up a well-made argument.

What do you say to the marketer who thinks technology and data can overcome hurdles you think can be answered with narrowcasting?

Technology and data can help in building and executing a program. That said, the most important step does not involve technology or data. It’s about understanding a unique market segment that is self-referencing. The second most important step is having something compelling to say to this segment. Once you have these first two steps solidified, then technology and data can help.

We use Compile because it monitors the discussions in the audiences we care about (e.g., what people like, what don’t they like). It allows us to be smarter with our editorial calendar, the types of media we use and for what channels.

Marketing technologies are great, and have been around long enough to have a tested, standardized way of using them. For content marketing, I like more flexible tools that drive informed creativity, because when it comes to content, you want a message that’s interesting. 

This article originally appeared in the February 2013 issue of Chief Content Officer magazine. Subscribe to receive your free copy.

As a result, many marketers are turning toward content curation, the practice of finding, organizing, and sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific topic, rather than solely creating all their content themselves. In the past few years, there has been a lot of chatter about content curation, and its applications in content marketing. Yet, despite all the buzz, it’s hard to visualize and understand the best practices for brands that are looking to implement the technique.

Successful examples of content curation

Earlier this month, my company, Curata, released a Content Curation Look Book full of visually compelling, real-world examples of content curation at work. Here’s a quick overview of some of the more interesting applications we’ve found, along with some takeaways that you can use to begin curating content for your brands.

FedEx

Tip: Curation can add credibility to your corporation’s perspective on an issue by demonstrating that others who have no vested interest in your company still share your views. With curation, you are not republishing the content; rather, you’re providing additional sources and commentary on why these other publishers are in agreement with your position.

A few years ago, FedEx established a site called Brown Bailout to advocate against the granting of bailout funds through the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that was making its way through Congress. During the economic downturn, FedEx competitor UPS was lobbying to get this bill passed.

Rather than creating all its own original content espousing its objections to the bailout, FedEx systematically curated news content from prestigious media publications like The Washington Times and The National Review that agreed with its perspective, which ultimately added more credibility to its position. The website includes editorial content that provides perspective and clarity around some of the concerns regarding the policy. Along with the original content located in the blog, the website captures the flow of information across publications around the topic at hand to provide additional support and perspective to the issue. This type of curation not only provides additional credibility to the political position but also creates a destination for news associated with the topic.

Intel

Tip: Curation responsibilities do not have to solely fall on your content or marketing teams. In fact, crowdsourcing curation can make content marketing more inclusive, participatory, and yield better, more interesting products.

As a branding initiative, earlier this year, Intel launched a digital magazine called iQ (formerly featured here on CMI). Intel employs an intelligent algorithm that is used in a process that collectively crowdsourced (meaning the content was created by a crowd of employees, tagged with a hashtag, and then picked up by the algorithm created by Intel) the curated content  — with the help of Intel employees.

Intel’s process scours myriad social channels, delivering the content it discovers to the attention of the site’s editorial staff, which collectively decides what should be featured on the site. The whole process surfaces up content through several layers of filtering — based on freshness, relevancy, shares, clicks, employee interaction, and uniqueness — in order to present content that is grabbing attention across the social web. Lastly, it’s presented in a colorful, mesmerizing touch-optimized interface that allows readers to quickly browse content by category, or view a river of upcoming content.

The Color Association of the United States

Tip: You don’t have to limit curation to just text content. If your audience responds to other forms of media such as images, videos or audio, consider curating that as well.

The Color Association of the United States caters to anyone interested in color, such as colorists, designers, marketers, and product developers who are interfacing with color, as well as other individuals who want to stay current on technology, news, and their competition as it relates to color. CAUSnow’s mission is to discuss current color trends and be known as the destination for color resources. The content curated on this site can be a broad range, but has to include an image with a prominent color theme or use. With a broad audience, The Color Association’s site, CAUSnow, focuses on cutting through the online color clutter, providing a one-stop shop of color-related content — particularly compelling visual images, which can “support making color-conscious decisions.” Through the use of curated content, the Color Association can stay on top of the latest trends.

The Oregon Wine Board

Tip: There is an opportunity for curation for every imaginable topic — even a somewhat obscure interest like enthusiasts of wine made in Oregon. If there’s no single, authoritative destination for your market, it may be a topic that’s ripe for curation (pun intended).

Some sites just need to be savored. The Oregon Wine Board was looking for a way to regularly engage with local wineries and industry professionals through content. By curating content focused on the local wine scene, the Oregon Wine Board was able to build a robust daily newsletter for its members that features articles on everything from tasting events to the region’s wine growing history. The Oregon Wine Board’s mission is to provide their reading audience with industry news related to the burgeoning wine scene in Oregon — they are and will continue to be the premier destination for all things Oregon-wine related. The daily dose keeps readers coming back to drink in more every day, according to Oregon Wine Board Director of Communications, Charles Humble: “Since launching our Oregon Wine Newsroom, we are regularly syndicated by Google as a trusted news source. We have a small staff, and this is something we could never have accomplished without curation. Our members are thrilled with the results.”

These four case studies are some of the many successful examples of content curation. By having content curation involved in your company’s overall marketing plan, your company can save time, money and resources. Without it, your company’s content marketers will be suffering from burnout. Content curation is the only way to go.

If you want to learn more, join us at Content Marketing World Sydney. Use Promo code CMI200 to save $200 when registering.

I’ll admit: I’m a B2B gal, and I’ve always considered B2B content marketing to be more complex because there can be so many people involved in purchasing decisions, and the sales cycles can be quite long — sometimes requiring extensive lead nurturing programs. And, don’t forget the interactions that marketing and sales need to have.

But, as I had the pleasure of sitting in on this roundtable conversation with Craig Waller, Robert Rose and Michael Weiss, I realized how insanely complex B2C also is, because of the sheer number of people you need to get to “sing from the same page.”

That said, this is a great discussion about content marketing for anyone in B2B or B2C. In it, you’ll hear what the biggest differences are between B2B and B2C marketers based on the content marketing benchmarks, budgets and trends research. You’ll also get perspective on why print is so important for B2B.

Content Marketing B2C Roundtable Discussion from Content Marketing Institute on Vimeo.

I would love for you to weigh in: What do you think are the biggest differences between B2B and B2C content marketing? And, more importantly, in what scenarios is it important for us to understand their nuances?

Hear more insight on B2C content marketing from thought leaders like these at Content Marketing World 2013. Register now, so you don’t miss out!

The results from the research are interesting, especially when you compare Australian content marketing practices to those in North America. Here are some of the key findings:

Australians have embraced content marketing more so than their North American peers have

Overall, 96 percent of Australian marketers use content marketing:

• Australian business-to-business (B2B) marketers (98 percent) use content marketing more often than their North American B2B peers (91 percent) do.
• Australian business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers (89 percent) use content marketing more often than their North American B2C peers (86 percent) do.

Australian marketers use an average of 12 content marketing tactics

Both B2B and B2C marketers in Australia use an average of 12 content marketing tactics. As is the case in North America:

• Australian B2C marketers use more mobile apps, mobile content, and print magazines/newsletters than their B2B peers do.
• Australian B2B marketers use more case studies, white papers, webinars/webcasts, and research reports than their B2C peers do.