The Muppets are back! The new Muppets Movie starring Jason Segel comes out this Thanksgiving.
You might now know this, but the Muppets’ comeback has been a long time brewing…and, of course, content marketing is at the heart of the efforts.
As corporate marketers, we can learn a lot from their recent efforts to get back on the map. As we know, content marketing can be very complex, and we often forget to do those things that are most important. Let’s take a look.
Expanding Your Net
Since announcing the new movie back in 2008, various Muppets have been seen on SNL, Nightline, and many others. This has driven awareness, not only about the movie, but that the Muppets are indeed back to forgotten audiences and even new audiences from around the globe.
What should you do? Guest blogging, guest webinars, blog commenting and speaking at partner events is necessary for your content marketing efforts to work. Think of this as activating your content. Showing your thought leadership expertise to outside audiences is critical. And regardless of what other pundits say, you really have to market your content marketing.
Larger Content Packages
In the Content Marketing Institute’s most recent study (to be out shortly), 65% of businesses have a blog. That’s great, right? The problem is, we get so fixated on regular, SEO-driven content that we forget about the larger content packages that will make a significant impact on your customers and prospects.
In 2009, the Muppets released The Diva Code: Miss Piggy on Life, Love and 10,000 Idiotic Things that Men Frogs Do to raving reviews. This was an excellent strategy to a specific buyer persona, Moms with small kids.
Where’s your big content package? It could be a research report, a book, an executive guide, a series of short novels…whatever. Point is that, depending on the buying cycle, larger content packages, such as a book, can make all the difference in moving people through the content marketing funnel (more on the content marketing funnel in my new book – Managing Content Marketing). If you are positioning yourself as the leading expert in a certain niche area, you must have a piece of content that defines you and your business. Unfortunately, most businesses just don’t do this, relying on the smaller bytes of content.
Laser Focus on Your Expertise Area
The Muppets are all about parodies. They came back with a vengeance in this area with their rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody leveraging YouTube (now at over 24 million views).
What are you the leading expert in the world at? You need to put your stick in the ground and clearly take a leadership position on and around your expertise area. The best content marketers in the world focus on a key phrase or idea and hammer that home. We use content marketing. Hubspot has inbound marketing. David Meerman Scott is all about “Real-Time” and/or “New Rules”. GoToMeeting uses Workshifting.
What’s your content mission? Are you laser focused on it, or are you distracted with all those SEO keywords you are chasing?
Don’t Get Distracted
This is not rocket science folks…but in my experience, most businesses don’t do these three simple things. Make sure as you plan for 2012, you make sure you are sharing the wealth (use outside media channels with your content), reimagine your content into packages for different persona groups and get laser-focused on your core content mission, just like a trade magazine would.
