You can’t always get what you want

Don’t assume prospects are willing to provide their information just because you’re delivering a meaty report or white paper. Buyers don’t only base their decision to provide contact information on the value of the content you provide. Rather, they more often are concerned about holding vendors at arm’s length until they’re far along in their buying decision process (which helps explain why 70 percent of tech purchases are at the RFP stage by the time the vendor knows about the opportunity).

Consider these findings from TechTarget’s report, “When Worlds Converge:Similarities in Brand Reception and Media Consumption of IT and Personal Technology Buyers. Of the 3,269 IT buyers surveyed, 43 percent said they were somewhat willing and 42 percent were very willing to share their contact information when they are ready to make a purchase. However, while 53 percent of respondents were somewhat willing to provide those details in exchange for “expert or editorial information,” only 19 percent were very willing to do so in the same scenario.

Add to this the fact that separate research (sponsored by Janrain and conducted by Blue Research in October 2011) uncovered that 88 percent of consumers admitted to having given incorrect profile information on registration forms. It’s no wonder that Sirius Decisions found that 10 to 25 percent of all prospect records contain critical data errors. 

Source: When Worlds Converge: Similarities in Brand Reception and Media Consumption of IT and Personal Technology Buyers

In fact, when IT buyers click to download your content, much like their consumer counterparts, the majority don’t want the vendor to contact them as a result. 

Source: When Worlds Converge: Similarities in Brand Reception and Media Consumption of IT and Personal Technology Buyers

Is it any wonder that 38 percent of these respondents give their personal email address (e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.), rather than their business address when registering for vendor information? In cases where registration is required but they’re not ready to talk to a vendor, IT buyers do all they can to maintain control over interactions. In fact, 71 percent of the IT buyers surveyed refuse to provide their business account so as not to get inundated with messages. 

Source: When Worlds Converge: Similarities in Brand Reception and Media Consumption of IT and Personal Technology Buyers

Keep it short and sweet

So how can you collect the information you need to start engaging and determining whether or not someone is truly a prospective customer? Ideally you build up the information using progressive profiling, rather than hitting  someone with a 10- or 15-field registration form from the get-go. With this approach, you pre-populate the form with the information you’ve already gathered about the prospect, and collect incremental information during each successive interaction. You can also augment the information you gather with data from third-party providers such as JigSaw or ZoomInfo. By minimizing the burden on the site visitor, you increase the chances of collecting information.

According to a MarketingSherpa case study, HP trimmed its confusing 15-field monster of a registration form to five essential fields. It also collected visitors’ IP addresses and email domain names to cross-reference them with third-party data. The results speak for themselves: The new form yielded a 40 percent conversion rate — an increase of 186 percent — among visitors from HP’s support pages.

Tap into social sign-on

Another option is to reduce the need for forms. Social sign-on allows site visitors to use the information from their profiles on social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, and Twitter to fill out your registration form. According to the Blue Research study mentioned earlier, 77 percent of those surveyed feel social login should be offered. (And 54 percent may leave a website if asked to register the traditional way).

A few vendors offering solutions enabling social sign-on:

• Gigya (support for 25+ “identity providers”)
• Janrain (support for 20+ social networks and email providers)
• OneAll.com (connect with 20+ social networks)
• Pluck Social Sign On (support for Facebook only)
• React.com (supports 10 social networks)

Test your forms and formulate a strategy

The problem many organizations run into when debating the registration form issue is that they are basing their arguments and decisions on gut instinct. Instead, approach registration from a strategic, analytical perspective, just as you do with your landing pages and emails. Run a test of your forms with a different number of fields and measure the results. Marketo, a company offering marketing automation software, did just that and found that the longer the form, the lower the conversion rate and the higher the cost-per-lead (see the table below). 

Source: http://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/internet-marketing-strategy/lead-generation-testing-form-field-length-reduces-cost-per-lead-by-10-66.html

Ultimately, the registration information you request should logically relate to the content that people are accessing on your site. In other words, map out the buyer’s purchase process and how your content fits at each stage. Then determine which bits of information you can reasonably request at each stage. 

As you can see in the mapping scenario above, there will be times you provide content for free (i.e., no registration required). But that doesn’t mean you’ll have no idea who is visiting your site and checking out your content. Many marketing automation systems support anonymous site visitor tracking, enabling you to tie a visitor to an IP address, which can then be cross-referenced against the WHOIS database for the site owner’s name. netFactor, eTrigue, and VisiStat also provide visitor-tracking solutions.

Remember, by making it easy for prospects and customers to access the information they need, you will deliver an experience that stands out — and could very well factor into the final purchase decision.

What suggestions can you offer to reduce friction in the lead-generation and nurturing processes? 

If developing your online persona is something you have yet to master, read on for four helpful steps to get you started.

Step 1: Develop a persona and create profiles across the web 

A great tip for getting started is to find and own one primary trait that makes you unique. For example, for CMI’s Joe Pulizzi, it is the color orange. Orange is part of nearly everything Joe does, from his websites to his social media presence to his wardrobe. It is part of his signature brand. So if you can, think about something you can use to trademark yourself and incorporate that into each and every one of your online profiles.

Speaking of profiles, if you haven’t already developed yours on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and About.me, get started today. You may even consider setting up your own website or personal blog, as Ann Handley and Joe Chernov have done. 

Step 2: Engage with influencers about your topic

As I have written about in the past, there are several types of influencers for every industry. When building your personal brand, the key point is that you should have a set of 10 to 20 influencers that you are targeting in order to extend the reach of your content and personal brand.

You can identify your influencers by doing some online research, or by asking your prospects and customers who they rely on for advice and information.

Once you have a list of influencers you are targeting, you can keep track of them using a spreadsheet, a customized CRM system, or even using lists on Twitter (thanks to Joe Chernov for this tip!). Then, start engaging with your influencers by commenting on their content and sharing it through your social media profiles.

Step 3: Create compelling content around a certain topic

For content marketers, this tip should be a no-brainer: Remember to focus on your target audience’s interests, issues, and needs in order to create interesting, engaging content that will be useful to them. 

When starting out, it makes sense to focus on a narrow set of topics and develop yourself as the thought leader in that space. For example, Joe Pulizzi has had success doing so about content marketing, and Mike Stelzner has done this with social media.

When you have your topics nailed down, you are ready to start writing. An easy type of content to start with is blogging, but don’t rule out video, podcasts, eBooks, or articles — anything that will give you a forum for your insight and help you establish yourself as an expert that people can turn to for advice and information about your chosen topics.  

Step 4: Share your content to increase the influence of your brand

Once you have created a body of content, be sure to share it in where those in need can find it. Naturally, this includes making sure to post it on your personal and company blogs (and Brody Dorland’s 12 easy but thorough steps to increase the reach of your blog posts can give you some ideas for getting started). But you should also be identifying opportunities to spread your influence outside of your immediate circle.

Options for this can include guest blogging on an influencer’s site, contributing guest articles to a popular publication (online or print) within your space, submitting yourself for speaking engagements, and attending meetings and events within your areas of interest/expertise. If you do attend events, don’t miss the opportunity to create additional content while you are on-site, as well. Filming videos, posting session recaps, and offering to interview other participants are great ways to maximize your exposure at busy, crowded conferences and conventions, which can go a long way toward getting your brand persona into the industry limelight. 

What are some content related personal branding tips you have mastered?

Image credit: Mike Kolbrener

While this is a great practice for marketers who may struggle to find the time, resources, or budget to create the volume of content they need, it’s a challenging undertaking, to say the least. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to distributing content, as different groups will choose to engage with your assets in different ways, often depending on which social platform they are using. This means you must be constantly tweaking your approach, and messages, to meet your audience’s changing needs without compromising your style or integrity.

As an example, take a look at how my team recently marketed a webinar across four different social channels. 

Background

For a period of eight weeks, we promoted an educational webinar about the latest best practices for online lead generation. The promotions began with a targeted email campaign, a press release, and various announcements on social sites. As the event drew closer, and in the time immediately after the event, we wanted to keep audiences engaged (especially those unable to attend) by socially sharing information and real-time updates, as demonstrated below: 

LinkedIn

The LinkedIn community is a goldmine of influencers and other audiences craving educational content, particularly for B2B marketers. It’s also a place for people to gather and share ideas, best practices, and challenges with others in their industries or job roles. In general, marketers tend to do more content sharing and less self-promotion on this platform, so as not to jeopardize their reputation or deter their audience.

In addition to announcing the event on two groups I am an active member of, we also communicated how members of our own LinkedIn group could get involved, such as by submitting questions prior to the event or by following the event hashtag on Twitter. We also posted poll questions, so group members who would not be able to join the webinar could still provide their feedback, and shared the output from the webinar after it had ended.

Here are a few of our sample messages:

How to follow the event in real time:

Extending the webinar’s poll to LinkedIn group members:

Sharing the webinar output with LinkedIn group members:

Twitter

Twitter is a great tool for promoting content because you can broadcast messages quickly to a very broad audience. We used Twitter to promote the webinar event, announce speakers, and encourage people to submit their questions prior to the event.

Because the Twitter community is so vast, messages can be a bit more brief and informal than on LinkedIn groups. You can also leverage the “live Tweet” concept to share information, in real time, by using a well-communicated hashtag, which we found to be quite valuable. Using a hashtag, you can provide snippets of information, or “teasers”, to engage your community and encourage those outside your group to tune in and hear what they might be missing. Check out a few examples below:

Facebook

Our audience is not as active on Facebook as it is on Twitter or LinkedIn, but we still use this platform to share photos and articles and have discussions. The tone we use is similar to what we use for our LinkedIn group, but with a conversational style that fits in with conversations throughout the Facebook community.

Our Facebook posts ended up being somewhat of a blend of the Twitter and LinkedIn posts, as you can see from the examples below:

Blog Posts

Blogs are an incredible and, some would argue, essential content marketing tool (to learn more about why, check out this post by Joe Pulizzi, called 6 Steps to Successful Blogging).

Instead of providing a recap of the entire webinar on our blog, we chose to focus on the Q&A portion of the event. Why? People can go and view the webinar at any time; but what we wanted to demonstrate was how valuable the thoughts and opinions of our viewers were. By addressing their specific questions, rather than just highlighting our own webinar content, we were able to communicate how valuable we felt the audience’s contributions were:

What are some ways you’ve distributed content across multiple social sites? In what ways have you altered your messages to suit those different groups? Share your experiences in the comments section below.

Image courtesy of opportplanet via Flickr

The strange thing with all this is that the solution to creating compelling content is so obvious: Use stories and storytelling. Stories are how we convey our deepest emotions and talk about the things we value the most. Everyone has a story to tell. I believe stories are the most effective vehicle to drive the heart of a message to the heart of an audience.  Exploring these stories should be at the core of every organization’s content marketing strategy.

Now let me ask you this: Do you think that you or your business is in touch with its own stories? And can they be told in a way that connects them with their audience in this hyper-connected world? Chances are this might not be the case if you have trouble answering any of the following questions:

• What story really defines you?
• How does your story fit with the heart of your organization?
• How is your story emotionally engaging to your audience?
• Can your audiences retell your story?
• In what ways can they develop trust in your story and act upon it?

Believe me, I know how challenging it can be to produce smart, highly targeted, and truly innovative stories. So allow me to bring all my trials and errors from my own storytelling experiences together in one simple storytelling principle: Only create content that can be regarded as a little gift to your community. It is this type of content that can be used to help you reconnect with your audience and gain (or regain) trust. I like to call this The New Trade.

Trade is generally considered to be an exchange of currency for goods and services, but this is only one way to think of it. Basically, trade is anything that you can acquire by giving up something else. In this sense, information sharing can be considered a trade. But within the New Trade, you do not necessarily have to give up something. You can share something — like information or a story — for free, making it what we commonly call a “gift.”

Making your content a gift

What do I mean by gift content in this context?

• It doesn’t try to sell anything or provide “empty calories” that just waste people’s time.
• It is offered for free.
• It makes your story part of your audience’s story.
• It makes your story emotionally engaging.

Sharing your content in the form of a human story gives others more reason to care about you. And don’t forget — the impression you make will depend on how much you reveal about yourself.

Most marketing content rarely connects with an audience

You know why? Because it doesn’t make them feel anything. People connect with a story when they “feel” your story is credible and when they understand where your messages are coming from. They will make your story their own if they can identify with the elements within the story, respond to the narrative emotionally, and have it serve their interests and agendas.

What helps great content to spread is how compelling and inspiring the message is, not how it slants toward positioning your company as the only one to buy from. Content should make connections. I’ll go even further than that. Content follows connection. First, you need to engage, build rapport, and make your audience trust you.  Pure information or marketing messages do not make that happen. If you communicate in facts and figures, you are communicating “brain to brain. ”  To be a successful storyteller, you need to communicate human to human, heart to heart, and emotion to emotion.

Over the last years, I have tried to walk the talk myself, and here are some of the ways I have been telling my story:

• Archiving dozens of blog posts, and their comments, for my audience to use as a resource.
• Sharing 3-5 posts by other writers every day on Twitter
• Initiating regular discussions with my network on LinkedIn
• Sharing presentations via Slideshare and Prezi
• Sharing all the research I did for my book, “No Story, No Fans,” on Delicious

In telling my stories on all these channels, I’ve shown my audience that I am not a faceless “box house,” simply taking orders blindly and shipping thoughtlessly. I have demonstrated that I am passionate about what I do and how I do it. My stories have given me (and my company) a human face that shows I care. And from the reactions I have gotten, I can tell my stories have become little gifts to the people in my professional network.

Creating your story

So what are the main considerations for creating content that will be perceived as a gift to your audience? Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help you choose your focus, design your story, and bring your content from deadly boring to emotionally engaging:

• What was your inspiration for starting your business? What ignited your passion? Did you have an “ah-ha!” moment that drove you in your current direction?
• Have you ever faced rejection? Did you start your business from the ground up? Achieve success against the odds?
• Who helped you along the way? Who was your first customer? When did you clinch that initial big client or order that catapulted you from mom-and-pop shop to having multiple outlets? When was it clear you had built something special?
• What was your first big break? What moved you from the “small pond” to the “big pond?”
• Is there a non-profit organization or cause that your business supports in a big way? What does it mean to you? To your brand?

Telling your story

And once you’ve created emotionally engaging stories, you have to connect those stories to your audience and their interests. Here is what I believe is important:

• Use your story to emotionally engage people enough to keep them reading or watching. Ideally, they must care about the central character, deeply relate to what he or she is going through, and want to see the character solve the problem.
• Demonstrate that you truly care about others by addressing their relevant pain points or connecting your story to issues that they will be familiar with.
• Encourage your audience to share their stories, and pay attention to them. Your story may not be important to other people, but your efforts to help promote their story will be. Whenever possible, use your content to provide opportunities for your audience to comment or provide their own ideas.
• Remember the universal truth: Nobody wants to be sold, but everyone wants to be helped. Create content that answers your audience’s questions, provides them with answers and solutions or demonstrates how your offerings can help them in their every day lives.
• Build trust. Honesty among people is important, but trust is critical for marketers to gain audience support. So make sure your story demonstrates why you are worthy of your audience’s trust.

So what’s your story? What other elements or features do you think are important to create emotionally engaging content? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Believe me. I know.  I run content marketing, and I have the blisters to prove it.

If you were to ask me and my counterparts in other companies what our top challenge is the answer would be easy: Producing enough content. The public’s demand for more, coupled with the ephemeral nature of social media distribution, is a brutal one-two punch for those in the trade. Monday’s torrent of attention can become little more than a trickle by Tuesday.

But as I learned in high school wrestling, for every move there’s a counter move. The antidote to content’s short half-life may  not be producing more, but rather keeping the window of consumption open longer for the content you do produce. Here are five practical tips for extending the life of your marketing content.

1. Stagger your distribution

Remember, you don’t only control production; you also own distribution. Because social media is constantly moving, it’s important to distribute and re-distribute to maximize the number of people exposed to your work.

Start by sharing a new piece of content on an exclusive basis with your customers, advocates, and prospects. You may even include a short form to capture a little extra profile information on those who access it. Let them enjoy the privilege of exclusivity for a few days.

Then go public. Here are some ideas:

• Post the resource to SlideShare, and use the embed code to display the content on your blog. Now you can track views, shares, favorites, and comments all in one place.
• Tweet links to the post a couple of times per day for a few days; then, once every other day for the next week or so. Vary the timing to make sure you are sharing during business hours worldwide.
• Post to Facebook and encourage your fans to comment on a specific aspect of the content.
• Layer use the asset to answer highly relevant questions on Q&A sites like Quora and Focus, as well as on targeted LinkedIn Groups. You can even tweet your answers pointing your audience back to the source questions.

2. Use your “re-imagination”

The term  reimagine is lifted out of  Content Rules, by Ann Handley and CC Chapman, and it basically means finding compelling new ways to package your existing content. There are any number of ways in which you can reimagine the content you create; but the concept itself is the content marketing equivalent of “write once read many.” For example:

• Have a bunch of blog posts that share a common theme? Why not roll ‘em all up into an eBook on that topic?
• Maybe you have an eBook that digs deep into a particular subject? You can break out key lines to use for tweets and key chapters to use as blog posts.

Whatever content you have on hand, chances are it can be broken down or recombined to create a way to message on an additional platform without having to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.

3. Serialize your story

In their bestseller, Switch, the brothers Heath encourage anyone seeking to drive change to identify “bright spots,” or small victories, and then replicate the successes. The same idea can be applied to your content marketing program.

Have you created a video, eBook, white paper, infographic, podcast, or webinar that worked especially well? Do it again, but with a twist  like focusing on a new vertical market or a new demographic group. Then do it once more but with a different twist. Next thing you know, you’ve created a content series. The benefit is that you don’t have to come up with a fresh idea each time; you simply have to iterate on what has already proven effective.

4. Annualize and update

Like serializing content, updating successful pieces annually is another way to get more mileage out of your production. Technology has accelerated the pace of change across most industries, so what was relevant and accurate information one year, may have lost some of its punch or even be completely outdated the next. Yearly updates provide marketers with an ideal opportunity to materially enhance content that has served their audience well in the past without having to start over from square one.

5. Use what others discard

Take a page from the “nose to tail” dining movement and use all versions — even those you might once have discarded — in your content marketing efforts. Publishing the scraps on your cutting room floor provides you with an opportunity to tell the back story behind your content successes.

For example, when my partner Jesse Thomas blogged for Forbes about the making of an infographic, he used nine rejected versions of The Content Grid v2 infographic to tell his story. Nine. It was the detritus — not the finished product — that made his story so powerful.

These are just five tips, but I am sure there are more. What am I missing? Are there additional techniques you’ve used to create more “staying power” for your content?

These changing economics raise many concerns and high among them is the question: Who or what will fund the production of content?  The demand for content is as high as it has ever been, and despite the onset of user-generated content, demand for quality, professionally-produced content remains strong. If the economics of online are going to fundamentally reshape the revenue potential of media publishers, where will the money come from to pay for professionally-produced content?

The answer could come from the segment where content production is really booming: content marketing. Marketers are finding that the old tactics do not apply into today’s world. Instead of focusing on the sales process on how marketers convince prospects to buy, they are finding they need to think about the buying process and how customers decide on what to buy. And to insert themselves into that buying process, marketers are finding that creating authentic content that solves customers’ problems and answers customer questions (and does not necessarily promote the marketer’s offering) is a most effective approach.

As a result, marketers are moving budgets into content marketing and building entire content marketing operations by staffing them with experienced editorial professionals. In fact, in this tough economic period, marketers are actually increasing their content production budgets. These content marketing dollars could represent the future of how content gets funded. The reason for this is that content marketers are able to extract a much larger financial return for content than publishers can.

Let’s compare some media publishers with some of these new content marketers and dig into the different economics for each. Specifically, we’ll compare the average revenue per unique visitor, or ARPU, that each can generate. Media publishers typically do so through running ads. Content marketers, on the other hand, generate revenue by converting visitors to paying customers.

Case studies: Media publisher versus content marketer

Weight Watchers has a tremendous content marketing operation. It produces high volumes of content about dieting and exercise, most of which avoids any mention of Weight Watchers itself. Let’s compare it with a site like Fitness Magazine, which has similar content for a similar audience.

Fitness likely generates around a $6.50 effective CPM for the ads that it runs, a blended rate for its direct-sold and remnant inventory that is consistent with industry averages. Assuming that three ads are run on each page and that the average visitor visits five pages, Fitness would have an ARPU of about $0.10.

Weight Watchers, on the other hand, does not run ads, but tries to convert visitors into becoming paying customers. Given its $194 price point and a conservative 2 percent conversion assumption, the ARPU for Weight Watchers is $4. What we see here is a 40X ARPU difference between the media publisher and the content marketer.

Other comparisons yield similar results. Linux Magazine is a tech site providing content to programmers and system administrators. Given the higher CPMs in the tech industry, its ARPU likely is around $0.15. Rackspace is a major provider of web hosting, and it has a content marketing operation serving programmer and administrator audiences. At a $100/ month price point and 2 percent conversion, its ARPU is $24, an over 100X difference.

Curbed is a highly successful site providing real estate content with a likely ARPU around $0.15. Redfin provides discounted real estate services and blogs regularly about content relevant to home buyers. On a $300,000 house, Redfin would earn its 1.5 percent, or $4500, putting its ARPU at hundreds of times of Curbed’s even at the most conservative conversion rates.

Why content marketers can spend more

The specifics, of course, vary by industry, publication, and business. But overwhelmingly, the analysis indicates that content marketers have much larger incentives to spend on content, as the economic value they receive per site visitor is much larger than that of a media publisher. If an article attracts 2,500 readers, the marketer would be willing to pay many times more than the publisher for the result. Consequently, as content marketing continues to grow, marketers could provide the funding needed to produce the content to meet the audience’s demand.

Content marketers rely on authentic content

Many react to this possibility by becoming alarmed that content now could be produced by marketers (who are motivated by their specific business interests) instead of by publishers (whose objective is to inform their audiences). There are a few reasons, however, that diminish these concerns. First, in the new media world, nobody simply receives distribution, they have to earn it. If Rackspace, for example, produces content that is not informative and helpful or  simply promotes itself, it will not win any links, any retweets, or any Facebook likes, and it will not gain an audience. Content marketers realize that the need to provide authentic, relevant, helpful, and fair content is necessary to attract visitors.

Furthermore, media publishers are not going away. Again, the circumstances vary by segment and by publication, but publishers are adjusting to the economic changes and are finding new ways to generate revenue and structure their costs. Publishers will still produce content, and they will continue with the current trend of aggregating and curating content on their chosen topics. In fact, as more content gets produced by marketers, publishers will play the critical role of curating and spotlighting the great content as well as criticizing the unfair and partial content that marketers may produce.

The great changes that the publishing industry is wrestling with bring into question how quality content will be paid for, and signs point to the fact that marketers will increasingly foot the bill, as they are able to extract better economic returns per site visitor. While in many ways this appears to be a great change, the reality is that marketers have always footed the bill for content through their ad dollars.

What has changed now is distribution. The complexities and costs of print distribution used to mean that only specialized publishers could distribute content. As the Internet has made distribution open to all with simple, inexpensive web publishing, marketers are simply moving up the distribution chain. As these changes continue to evolve, great content will continue to be paid for, published, and consumed.

Image from Sunshinecity via Flickr.

That’s exactly what we learned during a panel discussion on strategies and tactics to get found, which took place on Day 2 of Content Marketing World. Experts included:

• Lisa LaCour, VP of Marketing for Outbrain
• Amy Laskin, Content Strategy Director for Ogilvy
• Michael Pranikoff, Global Director – Emerging Media for PRNewswire
• Michael Marzec, President of Smart Business Content Marketing

Marzec held true to the rock and roll theme for the event, leading the discussion with a clever twist. Here are the key takeaways for those of you who were unable to join the chat.

The stairway to content heaven

How can companies create great content and, more importantly, how can companies make it easily found?

• Do research on your target audience to truly understand their interests and issues, in addition to understanding what they find engaging and how they prefer to receive information.
• To create great content, marketers must listen to their audiences and create what they are yearning for, rather than to simply paying attention to search engines. More simply put, engaging content often speaks to the interests or issues your audience faces.
• Include distinct calls to action in your content, and design your content to inspire your audience to take the action you want them to take.

I still haven’t found what I am looking for

With the Google Panda update, some companies have experienced changes in their search rankings. What does this mean for content marketers?

• Don’t forget search engine basics! Ensure pages have titles, tags, and keywords.
• Incorporate multimedia content types and a solid linking strategy within your written content to add opportunities for engagement.
• Use your customers’ language rather than speaking in your corporate goobledygook.
• Create and release videos and images with keyword-rich descriptions.

Poker Facebook

Should we be on Facebook? How do you get value from Facebook?

• Decide what your voice is going to be on Facebook. More often than not it will be different from the voice on your corporate site because it is a more personal platform.
• Set guidelines around what is on-message and what is inappropriate.
• Determine how often you will post and what time of day you will listen and post updates or content.
• Remember most people are on Facebook because they want to be on Facebook. Keep this in mind, and try to engage your audience on your page rather than solely directing them back to your corporate site or blog.
• Lastly, not every company needs a Facebook presence! Always keep your audience in mind – if they are not on Facebook, you shouldn’t be either.

Let’s stay together

What about communities? Is it possible for B2B and B2C companies to build and foster communities for their target audiences?

• It’s not just about Facebook. There’s Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and a slew of other social networking sites. Be sure to create a presence on the sites where your customers and prospects hang out.
• Create your own networking groups or communities centered around issues or pain points rather than creating a group for your company.
• Tweak your message so that it fits in with the channel, as channels have their personalities too!
• Reach out to influencers within your community. See if it makes sense to contribute guest blogs to their sites so that you can begin developing a relationship with their audience, as well as your own.
• Again, develop a solid linking strategy across your communities so that you are driving traffic back to your site.

Before the panel discussion ended with a Q&A session, Laskin offered some valuable advice for those looking to develop and distribute content, comparing the task to creating one hit wonders. Many music artists became famous with just one song. Take a step back in your strategy and FOCUS on the few things that matter (hint: your customers’ and prospects’ point of view) and nail them.

What did you think of the discussion? What other questions do you still have about content distribution?

Killer Storytelling Techniques Learned From Hollywood

Robert Rose, Chief Strategist for Content Marketing Institute, applies classic storytelling structure to content marketing. Ask yourself: What business am I in? What story do I really want to tell? You have to differentiate yourself from others, not be incrementally better or just be a sequel to another story.

Here’s how you can think about your story:

Act I

Ordinary world

• Movies: Dorothy imagining life over the rainbow
• Marketing: What is the conventional market? How does the world work today for your product or service?

Call to action/challenge

• Marketing: What if the world was different? What business are we really in?
• Refusal of the call
• Movies: Luke Skywalker wanting to stay home on the farm
• Marketing: What happens if we don’t succeed with this goal? What is at risk?

Find a mentor

• Movies: Yoda
• Marketing: Who will help us tell this story? Internally? Externally?

Act II

Cross the threshold

• Marketing: How can we understand and map the challenge we face?
• Deal with tests and challenges and gather allies
• Movies: Dorothy on the way to the Emerald City
• Marketing: Who can we reach out to and what story elements do we want to share? Bloggers, partners, doubters?
• Face the ordeal
• Marketing: What do we need to make the world believe in our “what if”?

Act III

The reward

• Movies: The magic speech, usually in the rain, like at the end of Four Weddings and a Funeral
• Marketing: How can we bring friends and customers along on this journey? Can we use customer testimonials? How can we make the world believe? How can we celebrate that we won?

15 paid and free ideas to distribute your content

Barbra Gago, Director of Strategy for Left Brain DGA, reminds us that we have to consider distribution along with content and strategy, and think about how and when the audience consumes our content.

Manual distribution options:

• Websites — A primary way for a steady flow of content
• Blogs
• Social media — such as updating LinkedIn status, posting articles, etc.
• Comment threads — use content from blogs and white papers to answer questions or make comments
• Discussion forums
• Document sharing, like Google Docs or Slideshare
• E-signatures
• Email — enable social sharing of content
• Events — virtual events are gaining traction
• Multi-media sites, like YouTube or Flickr
• Mobile applications

Community distribution options

• Company newsflashes within an organization
• Influencers or bloggers — select a few and continue engagement over time, commenting on their blogs, sharing content, etc.
• Public relations — press releases are still a good tool and have longer life online
• Social bookmarking and social news sites to allow people to share with own network and community
• Partners — leveraging these relationships doesn’t always have to be strategic and formal

Automated distribution options

• Widgets
• E-newsletters that pull in RSS feeds from your blog
• Lead nurturing — mapping content to specific stages of the purchase process

How your content impacts your career and your brand

“What about strengthening your personal brand with content,” asked Bernie Borges, CEO for Find and Convert. We use these strategies for our companies and clients, so why not apply them to our careers?

1. Think like a triathlete. 75 percent of all triathletes are amateurs, people like us with jobs and families but they find time to train for these events

• Set written goals
• Get a coach
• Find an accountability partner
• Attend events
• Develop a routine
• Work on your technique
• Make a commitment

2. Develop your personal brand. Figure out what you want to be known for.

• Become a mini-rock star. If you can get 100-200 people to follow you based on what you want to be known for, that is fantastic.
• Give yourself permission to build personal brand. Fear of failure or not knowing how to do it is the No. 1 obstacle.
• Be who you aspire to be. Do it today, don’t wait until someone taps you on the shoulder and tells you that you should do it.

3. Commit to at least two content assets. One will rise to the top as your primary source of content in your career.

4. Become a stalker. Follow people you like and engage with them.

5. Be a storyteller.

There are many benefits of using content in your career:

• Stand out
• Climb the ladder you are trying to climb
• Gain notoriety and recognition

This week, they answer the question, “What technology excites you most as a content marketer?”

Easy: Email is the most underappreciated tool in the Content Marketer’s Arsenal.  Here are five amazing uses of email that almost no one is using: Email as content. Every day in every organization on earth, people send one off emails that explain the business, solve a problem, introduce a new concept etc.  With some minor tweaking, many of these ‘throw away’ emails can be imported to the kind of content that wins search, gets shared and is discoverable pretty much forever. Email marketing. This is close to the above, but more about newsletters.  Most email marketing is never indexed.  It sits in a silo, gets sent, then dies.  Pushing your email marketing content into your blogs gives you a terrific foundation for SEO. Email to solicit content. A lot of User Generated Content (UGC) strategies are based on hope. Email is the tool that makes things happen. Triggered emails to your customers asking specific questions, promoting contests, and encouraging the right kind of content are outstanding ways to get a constant flow of relevant content. Email to promote sharing. Sending triggered emails to the people who contribute content are sure fire ways to encourage sharing. Making it special (‘Dude, we just featured your story on our site!’)  and putting big Facebook buttons in the email are great ways to help drive traffic back to your content. Pulling email content from your blogs and other content marketing sources.  We have talked about ‘relevance’ in terms of email marketing for years.   Why has this been so elusive?  It’s not the technology,  it’s not the  lack of customer data … it’s the lack of content. Blogs are full of great content and are a terrific place to pull relevant content from. I’m sure there are others, but these are five almost painless, almost free ways to use email to boost your content marketing efforts. - Chris Baggott

Right now, I’m excited about any technology that makes it easy for marketers to extend their messages into various channels. We’re experimenting with dlvr.it at the moment, and we’re happy with the results so far.- Alison Bolen (@alisonbolen)

Video and the continued ease to film and post in near real timehas me excited. This allows for content to be created and shared from almost anywhere, and that has endless possibilities.- C.C. Chapman (@cc_chapman)

SlideShare excites me most as a content marketer. The network attracts a professional audience and can be a hub for dialogue. Pro accounts are affordable, “brandable,” and supply deep analytics.  But most importantly: SlideShare can be used for lead capture. The company’s LeadShare tool allows publishers to insert a form into their SlideShare-hosted content. The fields and form placement can be customized, and Eloqua plug-in allows leads captured in SlideShare to auto-populate the demand generation database. For me, SlideShare is where social media and demand converge. It may just be the most important social outpost for content marketers.- Joe Chernov (@jchernov)

I’m closely watching new developments in the interactive e-book market. For example, the iPad version of Al Gore’s “Our Choice” produced by Push Pop Press is amazing. As the ability to create multimedia apps powered by touch-screen interfaces becomes as easy as desktop publishing, can you imagine what the boring old whitepaper will evolve into? Or fully interactive articles and blog posts that allow people to dig in as far as they choose, all the way to a product demo or a multimedia sales page. Really fascinating stuff coming right around the corner thanks to mobile technology.- Brian Clark (@copyblogger)

Content curation technologies are changing the way marketers generate content to help their brands.  Creating great content helps marketers build their brand, establish thought leadership and develop a sustainable flow of qualified inbound leads. Content curation is helping the way marketers produce, organize and share a continuous volume of high quality content using very few resources. Today’s curation tools help marketers focus more of their time on industry insights and analysis and less time on the block-and-tackle of content creation, organization and distribution.- Pawan Deshpande (@TweetsFromPawan)

Right now I’m really excited about technologies like Chartbeat and Newsbeat.  Watching users interact with the site in real time is addictive and highly useful.  Content marketers should be thinking about ways to harness that kind of data into real time decisions about different types of content to highlight based on popularity throughout the day.- Ahava Leibtag (@ahaval)

Content curation is one of the keys to building online communities of customers with shared interests.  When you combine content curation and community platforms with recommendation engines, the end users’ experience improves significantly. Customers keep coming back. My vote for one of the most exciting technologies goes to recommendation engines. Can’t wait to see more of them in B2B marketing.- Susan McKittrick (@ssmck)

There is no doubt that the tablet revolution is the most exciting technology development for the content marketer.  Gartner is projecting that there will be close to 500 million tablets out there by 2015.  We are all after higher levels of engagement, and we are seeing this platform deliver a greater depth of time spent with content (especially multi-dimensional content) and interactions across all channels.- Clyde Miles (@clydemiles)

Engage121 is incredibly exciting as a social media distribution dashboard. Distribution of content using social media and other tools is a critical piece in making the content marketing puzzle work optimally for your business, and the folks at Chicago-based Engage121 are way ahead of the curve in terms of providing content marketers with a way to easily distribute their content, respond to and talk with the audience that receives it, and then drill down to real ROI based metrics related to retail foot traffic and spikes in sales. They also have really unique tools in place that help brands who might sit in heavily regulated industries.- Nate Riggs (@nateriggs)

I recommend HubSpot to integrate and track marketing activities in inbound marketing campaigns.The HubSpot system enables content marketers to improve content effectiveness by providing the tools to: Publish blog posts and identify the most popular and engaging content through analytics. Monitor keyword popularity, search engine rankings and website traffic to identify popular topics and content opportunities. Capture and nurture leads with content through dedicated landing pages, emails and lead-nurturing campaigns. Create tracking URLs, which can be used in enewsletters and other content pieces, to determine what type of content drives traffic to your website. Auto-publish content to social media profiles. - Paul Roetzer (@paulroetzer)

It’s still pretty underground, but I think this thing called the Internet has a lot of potential. I definitely recommend people check it out.The problem is, as a content marketer, ALL technology excites me. I think technology’s in very dangerous hands with marketers. We love shiny new things, and in just a few short years we’ve managed to find so many of them that we no longer have time left to brush our teeth. That’s good for dentists, but terrible for marketing. And with each new technology, we can create new ways of measuring it to keep one step ahead of those nasty ROI hawks. Click-thrus not holding up? Impressions are so much more relevant. Newsletter subscribers plateaued? It’s all social these days anyway. A big part of why we love technology is it gives us new places to hide.- Todd Wheatland (@ToddWheatland)

Good old fashioned video. I think the popularity of video marketing is going to continue to grow. Zappos is doing it right with video of each product that brings the product to life. You see the product in action, gives it 3 dimensions and someone is telling you about the product. I think it brings shopping online to a whole new level. Another example is a much smaller company using video to sell TV replacement parts.- Arnie Kuenn (@ArnieK)

What other technologies excite you as a content marketer? Let us know in the comments below!

First, what is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is nothing new. For years, companies have been engaging with the people and groups that their target audience looks to for information. Back in the day, companies practiced traditional PR and built relationships with a few key reporters in their space. But with the shift toward online interaction, a new generation of influencers has come upon us.

Influencers come in all shapes and sizes, such as editors, bloggers, venture capitalists, academics, trade associations and consultants. Yet one thing remains consistent — if you build successful relationships with your key influencers, over time they will be essential to marketing your company and products.

Why think about influencer marketing AND content marketing?

Often, it’s necessary for content marketing and influencer marketing to work together. In a way, they feed off one another.

Many companies engage in content marketing to build thought leadership and generate brand awareness. Working with influencers as part of your content strategy can help you achieve these goals, more quickly and effectively. By engaging in ongoing conversations with key bloggers, reporters and other influencers, they will be more apt to share your content and refer to you as a thought leader in the space. As a result, you may notice an increase in traffic to your website as well as a boost in inbound leads.

Here are some steps to help you get started:

Step 1: Identify 10-20 target influencers

There are several types of influencers for every industry, and each industry can have different criteria for what makes a person influential. So when determining influential members of your business’s community, first consider the people, sites, and services that your customers and prospects rely on for information. What blogs and online publications do they read? Where do they hang out online and offline? Who are the established thought leaders in the space? If you have no idea, consider conducting a brief survey with your customers and prospects to get first-hand insight. Sample questions for such a survey could include both open-ended and guided queries:

• Open-Ended: Do you read any blogs related to (industry/pain point)? If so, what are they?
• Guided: Please select your top sources for information from the following: (include a list).

Step 2: Get to know your influencers

Some may forget to dedicate the right amount of time to this step, but it is important. Before you reach out to your key influencers, it is essential to do your homework. Read their work, connect with them on social networks, and understand as much as possible about their points of view before initiating a conversation.

Often, business influencers realize they play this important role and will provide their own guidelines for reaching out to them. Trust me, if you follow their rules or instructions you will get better results. In general, many bloggers and reporters appreciate short, succinct pitches and dislike technical jargon and general goobledygook,  so keep this in mind when trying to connect with a potential influencer.  I recently shared 22 tips from tech bloggers and reporters on my firm’s blog.

Step 3: Engage with your influencers

Once you have an understanding of what makes your influencers tick, get on their radar with some outbound activities. Share their content with your audience or start posting supportive comments on their published works. You can also interact with your influencers on social channels. For example, sharing and retweeting their content and comments to your networks can help forge a connection and will indicate that you appreciate their perspective. If possible, you can even choose to reach out directly to your influencers and request a bit of their time to chat about their interests and issues first-hand.

Step 4: Creating the pitch

Now that you have been closely following your influencers, you should have plenty of ideas of what to pitch to them, right? If not, scan their recent articles and blog posts to determine topics that they like to write about. If you are still stuck, here are some general ideas I have seen work in the past:

• Share a customer success story. Influencers typically don’t want to hear about how great a company is from the CMO’s perspective; instead, they want to hear from the customers.
• Notice a trend in the space? Take a viewpoint and send along your thoughts to an influencer to hear their stance.
• Spread your news. Some influencers still love to cover standard news — quarterly revenue/sales numbers, new product launches, key additions to your team, etc. Just keep it interesting.

Step 5: Review and repeat

Influencer marketing doesn’t stop after the first pitch. Building relationships with influencers takes time and the ability to withstand rejection. And not every pitch will go over smoothly. You have to remember that other companies are reaching out to the same influencers and touting their products as well. You may hear “no, not interested,” or you may hear nothing at all. It is important to be persistent and incorporate any feedback you get into your influencer program moving forward.

If you keep up with the above steps, you should begin to notice a change within your influencer database. Over time, your influencers will begin to take note of your company or brand and will be sharing your content  and recommending you  to their followers.

How have you incorporated influencer marketing into your content program?