There are certain basic steps successful content marketers follow to create content, as well as questions to answer before beginning any campaign:

1. Branding/messaging: Who are you, and what do you represent and offer? What do you need to say? How can you provide value to your customers?
2. User profiles or personas: Who are you trying to reach? What do they care about? Where and across what channels do they consume content?
3. Define the campaign: What types of content are best for these users? How will you distribute it so there is a cohesive user experience across all components of the campaign?

Great content has basic building blocks

Just as successful professionals and companies share similar traits, so do great content marketing campaigns. In fact, upon comparison, I’ve found that they all have four important elements, which I describe as the Four “Is“:

1. Inform: Before you tell customers about your product, you must let them know you’re out there. That’s the basics of content marketing, but content marketing campaigns have to go farther and reach more deeply to engage and keep customers coming back for more.

   Content Marketing Institute does this better than anyone. Through daily emails, engaging eBooks, and valuable white papers, its content creators churn and burn on important digital and marketing issues of the day. Even when the topic presented on a given day isn’t relevant to your job, or you haven’t needed to consider a challenge that’s being discussed, by joining the CMI community, you’re an informed customer. Remember, an educated consumer is our best customer.

2. Instruct: It’s your job as the content marketer to explain your product to your customers. In as many ways as you can, see yourself as a teacher, patiently walking customers through each part of the buying cycle.

   Neiman Marcus understands that women are confused about fashion, so it sends out an email every Tuesday with the latest style tips. Of course, there are links to buy those items, but it makes me feel good to know that when I pick up that yellow blouse, I’m in the know about what fashionable people are buying and wearing.

3. Inspire: Creating an emotional connection with customers is vital in today’s marketplace as competition flies at you from every direction. With so many good causes to be a part of, how can you truly inspire others?

   One blog I follow is called Lil’ Blue Boo. The blog chronicles the life of Ashley, a young mother who is fighting cancer but is still able to make gorgeous handmade children’s clothing — and shine her positive attitude onto the world. It’s a great example of how everyday struggles can inspire us; but, more importantly, it demonstrates how real stories hook us in, ignite our curiosity, and keep us returning day after day, week after week. Ashley may be ill, but she’s clear — you can get ideas, recipes, and tips from her, and you can also buy from her advertised vendors and from her clothing store. She’s running a business, and it’s mind-blowingly inspirational to share in her positive attitude and strong belief in the future.

4. Initiate: In this great big world, where few of us even know all of our immediate neighbors by name, it’s important to make your customers feel part of a community.

   Gwyneth Paltrow does a great job of this (go ahead, roll your eyes) with her GOOP newsletter. She recently did two newsletters about getting ready for a photo shoot and preparing for the Oscars. By pulling you into her glamorous world, she makes you feel like she is one of your best girlfriends — which makes you more likely to open the next GOOP newsletter.

Get in front of people

Distribution is critical to a great content marketing campaign. If you defined your earlier three questions well, you’ll know what you need to about where, when and how your users consume your content. Make sure you create the right types and distribute across the right channels.

Success builds upon success

Once you’ve had a successful content marketing campaign, you’ll keep having them.  DNA keeps replicating: Make sure you inform, instruct, inspire, and initiate your customers and you’ll have chain after chain of great content marketing campaigns.

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

Today’s digital infographics trend represents an evolutionary step in the development of visualization tools. By incorporating stunning images, 3-D representations, and interactive features, infographics can provide a tremendous amount of information in creative, engaging ways. 

Infographics integrated into websites, presentations, and advertising can be extremely powerful tools for marketers, who typically need to deliver key messages quickly and memorably. But marketers must be sure that their infographics do more than display cool visuals. To efficiently and effectively transmit information, infographics must follow the same rules that govern other forms of marketing content, from brochures and customer success stories to videos and blog posts. In a nutshell, here are the most important rules to follow.

1. Tell a story

To communicate the meaning of data, infographics must tell a compelling story. Before producing the art for an infographic, designers should work with other content creators to determine which patterns and trends should be represented. The team should then define how the data will be presented so that the design communicates the essentials of the story’s message without overloading audiences with too much information.

Example: Instagram: From Zero to a Billion by Visual.ly.

Visual.ly does a splendid job of telling a story about the popular photo sharing app company Instagram. The use of visuals to help readers follow company milestones makes this infographic effective, as it quickly documents the meteoric rise of Instagram from inception to its recent acquisition by Facebook.

2. Communicate complex data simply

The best marketing infographics often boil complex ideas down to their simplest forms. They show trends and demonstrate the relationships between data by using easily understood design elements. With this in mind, designers should eliminate any elements that do not directly contribute to the understanding of the story. It’s also just as important for infographics creators to use words sparingly — let the data and graphics do the talking.

Example: China: The World’s Largest Online Population by Statista. 

Image via Statista. 

Industry growth statistics can often be very dry and difficult to comprehend. But Statista does a good job of easily communicating China’s online population growth by choosing key statistics that tell China’s story and then using graphical visualization to put those numbers in perspective. A key example of this is Statista’s comparison of China’s online shoppers to those of the rest of the world. 

3. Facilitate sharing

To make the most of infographics, make sure they are sharable. For web-based infographics, authors should optimize their sites with tools that allow viewers to post, tweet, e-mail, or otherwise share these content-rich visuals with friends and colleagues. In many cases, implementing these tools can be as simple as installing a web plug-in or deploying the correct sharing codes most social media platforms provide. 

Example: AddThis

AddThis is one of many social sharing WordPress plug-ins designed for simple implementation. In addition to sharing functions, AddThis also provides content engagement reports to webmasters. Other useful sharing tools include GetSocial and ShareThis.

Infographics will become an increasingly vital part of marketing arsenals as marketers gain access to larger data sets — and adopt design tools that can help transform raw data into captivating visuals. But applying basic content creation rules will be just as important to ensure that infographics look good and convey a captivating wealth of information to target audiences.

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook on 100 content marketing examples.

Before examining how you can use photographs to expand your content marketing offering, let’s look at the usage of each of the hottest new photography sites.

Pinterest has experienced exceptional growth, passing both Tumblr and Flickr in February 2012 with 23.7 million unique U.S. visitors (according to Nielsen).

Tumblr was last year’s breakthrough social media site no one had heard of, since most of its users were under 25 according to comScore. According to Tumblr CEO David Karp, the site has 50 million blogs and about 4.5 billion impressions a week. 

7 ways to use photographs in your content marketing mix

Photographs are worth more than a thousand words for content marketers. They’re eye-candy that draws readers in. Here are seven ways to incorporate photographs into your content marketing mix and some questions to help you create an effective photography offering:

1. Make your products into stars. Go beyond basic product shots used on websites and in catalogs. Display your products in the context of how they’re used in real life. Entice viewers to want to have them.

• Questions to answer: How can we show off our products? How can we make our offering more visually appealing?

2. Tell your organization’s story. Use photographs to give prospects, customers, and the public a sense of your firm’s history and physical location.

• Questions to answer: Does your organization have photographs showing your founders or interesting history about your firm or its location? How can these stories be used to make our brand, products, and company more memorable?

3. Enhance your brand. For many organizations, this means going beyond your traditional brand guidelines. It requires thinking about a 360-degree brand that social media requires.

• Questions to answer: How will your brand appear in photographs? What type of backgrounds will you have? How will your employees dress? What type of photographs will you use?

4. Show a human face. Quite literally, photographs show who’s behind your brand and your organization.

• Questions to answer: When using photographs in your content marketing, who will represent your brand? Is it a senior executive, a customer-facing employee, or a brand spokesman? How will they dress (business attire or t-shirts with your firm’s logo)? Think Best Buy employees in their blue shirts, or Progressive Insurance’s Flo and her white outfit.

5. Educate viewers to use your product. Photographs show customers how to use your products in lieu of videos or as a supplement to other instructions. Think beauty products or cooking, where customers can see the interim process.

• Questions to answer: Who will represent your brand? What location will be used? Will customers appear in the photographs? Do you have release forms?

6. Broadcast the news. Show your product is part of, or participates in, current trending topics, such as the Romney campaign’s Etch-A-Sketch moment.

• Questions to answer: Is this news positive or negative for our firm? Who do we want to represent our organization as our spokesperson in this situation? Do they have the appropriate PR training, clothes, and products?

7. Invite customers and the public to share product and brand related photos. Photographs make great user-generated content since it’s relatively low risk for contributors to create and submit them. All they need to do is to hold up their smartphones.

• Questions to answer: What guidelines are needed for these photographs? Does the customer have the rights to the photograph?

Humans are visual beings, which explains one of the reasons why we’re attracted to photographs. As a marketer, ensure photography (or images in general) is an integral part of your content offering. Photos help achieve your marketing objectives and extend readers’ engagement with your content. 

Do you have any other recommendations for how photographs can be integrated into your content marketing? If so, let us know what they are.

Image credit

Web analytics is often the go-to resource for measuring content quality and understanding user behavior. But it’s also a great resource for evaluating user needs, including the content that users find desirable and valuable. It fact, users tell us what they like every time they visit our website. We just have to stop and listen.

Here are a number of ways web analytics can help you discover what content topics your readers care about.

1. Blog categories and tags

An effective website navigation scheme not only improves usability but also supports content analysis. Using a topic-driven navigation, you can gain insight into which topics are most popular and, thus, which valuable topics you can revisit or expand upon for new blog posts.

A common blog feature is to list links to blog post categories and tags. When users browse these category pages, they’re informing us about topics that interest them (and consequently, when they ignore certain links, ones that don’t).

In Google Analytics or other analytics tools, evaluate page views for your category (topic) pages.

Top page views for topic pages.

In the example above, communications is the leading topic for this blog, followed by creation, usability, and analysis. This is a good place to start in understanding what topics interest your users. Conversely, if other categories have relatively low page views, these may be topics that don’t resonate with your audience and perhaps shouldn’t take priority over other more popular topics.

As with categories, also evaluate the popularity of blog tags. While category pages give you an idea of the broad topics users find interesting, tag pages give you insight into more specific areas of interest.

Category and tag page metrics are general and shouldn’t be taken at face value. Instead, use them to start your research. In the example above, strategy could be toward the bottom of the list because of the placement of the link on the page or because the keyword is inappropriate. If posts are more popular than the category they fall under, you may be using the wrong keyword to describe the topic.

After using this method to uncover potentially valuable topics, you can dig deeper with some of the following methods to help validate your insights. You can also then use traditional metrics such as bounce rate and time on page to help answer more specific questions, such as “Do people who view this topic page find what they are looking for?”

Tip: Configure blog permalinks for easy segmentation. To evaluate category and tag pages, it helps to create a web address structure that supports segmentation. By including topic or category in the web address, you not only provide a descriptive web address for users, you also enable easy segmentation of these pages for analysis.

2. Top-performing blog posts

Viewing top-performing pages gives you insight into more specific topics of interest on a per-post basis.

Sort blog pages by page view. Take note of the topics, including related category and tag pages, and pay particular attention to combinations of topics. You may, for example, find that posts covering both communication and social media are very popular.

Open Site Explorer by SEOmoz can help you dig deeper through evaluating top-performing pages by search engine authority, inbound links, and social media shares (with a Pro Subscription). Discover which posts and topics rank well in search results (i.e., those that are most referenced by external sites) and which are most share-worthy.

Top two CMI blog posts, sorted by page ranking authority on Open Site Explorer.

3. Search (internal and external)

When visitors use the search box on your website, they’re again telling you what topics interest them most right now.

Internal site search.

However, visitors don’t always know the right search terms to use, so don’t take search terms completely at face value. Dig deeper.

In your analytics tool, view individual internal site search terms to evaluate whether the search results match the inquiry (i.e., does the user find what she or he is looking for?). This can be measured, in part, by whether visitors click on the search results or choose to leave your site and abandon their search.

The same goes for external organic search from Google and other search engines. What are the top topics (keywords) driving traffic to your site? This approach is focused on prospective readers. View search terms to learn what topics are attracting new visitors. Where are the opportunities for increasing your readership with new, relevant content?

For this exercise, focus less on the exact search terms and more on the topics they relate to. What topics are people searching for?

4. Evaluate referral traffic by topic

In my experience, referral traffic is a metric that is often overlooked. Yet, it provides valuable, dual insight, revealing details on who your readers are as well as on which topics they care about most.

Who is referring traffic to your website? Look past the common referring websites (Facebook, Twitter, affiliates, etc.) and note sources that are new or different. Who are they? What is their business? What topics do they cover? Go for the long tail. Dig deep to discover sites that don’t refer to you often but have shown an interest in your content.

Which blog topics are referrers linking to? Once you have a sense of who your referring readers are, discover what content they are looking for. View top blog posts by page views and referring websites to find out which of your blog topics your readers are commonly linking to. What are new referrers linking to? More importantly, what referring links do people click on most frequently?

5. Outgoing traffic

Track outgoing links to learn what external resources and related topics interest your readers. By default, most web analytics applications, such as Google Analytics, don’t track outbound links, but you can tag them manually or use third-party plug-ins (such as Google Analytics for WordPress that will auto-tag outbound links so that you can track them.

Outbound links to CMI blog posts.

Again, pay attention to topics. What external websites do your readers find desirable? Do those websites cover topics that would be valuable and appropriate for your readers?

6. Comment rate

User engagement is an important benchmark for evaluating content quality — and one of the most effective ways to measure engagement with blog content is comment rate. Find out what percentage of readers comment on your blog posts. But don’t stop there. Look at the comment rate by topic. What topics resonate most with your readers?

Coupled with some of the aforementioned methods of evaluating popular posts, comment rate by topic can help you understand what topics your readers are most excited about.

7. Sharing rate

While you are evaluating comment rate, also take note of what percentage of readers share your posts via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, email, and other social platforms. What blog categories and tags do users share the most? Sharing rate can speak to the caliber of your topic. For example, a big retweet number gives your topic a high qualitative value, not just bragging rights.

Finding inspiration

It can be hard to find inspiration when you sit down to write a blog post. You wonder what new content will attract, inform, engage, and retain your readers. Fortunately, many of these insights are sitting right in front of us.

While web analytics is not a fail-safe method for evaluating user needs and intent, it does provide a great starting point. To learn more, you can follow up with formal or informal qualitative analysis, such as user surveys or feedback gathered through your communication channels.

With a clearer idea of your readers’ interests, you can develop a running list of valuable topic ideas. And, better yet, you can say goodbye to writer’s block.

What analytics insights have you used to evaluate blog content? What other quantitative (or qualitative) methods do you use to generate topic ideas?

That’s why the team here at the Content Marketing Institute recently pulled together a “100 Content Marketing Examples Guide.” While what we’ve gathered is in no way meant to be a representative list of “the only way” to do content marketing (because to achieve that would take, well, forever), we feel we’ve compiled a great springboard from which to launch your efforts.

In the guide, we share how companies big and small from various locations and industries are producing creative and successful content marketing campaigns across multiple online, in person, and print channels. You’ll get content examples from blogs, magazines, social media sites, live events, mobile apps, and more. But, in the spirit of education, we’ve always looked to provide our insights or additional resources to help you take the examples one step further and start incorporating similar ideas into your own programs.

Gathering these initial 100 examples is just the beginning, though. What we’d love to hear from you are additional content marketing campaigns that you find to be the most interesting or unique — especially with the recent launch of Facebook Timeline for brands and the growing popularity of Google+. For example, the Verizon Wireless (check out their Smartphone Glossary) and Old Spice pages have done some incredible things with content marketing on their Timelines — and are creating quite a buzz — so please add in the comments below what stellar examples you think belong on our list. As content marketing continues to grow not only in popularity but also in business relevance, we look forward to expanding our repository of examples into 2012 and beyond.

Finally – just a quick shout out to Jodi Harris and Joseph Kalinowski (JK) for helping us pull together this awesome Guide!

Click here to subscribe to our daily alerts for all the latest news and resources from CMI and to get your free copy of the “100 Content Marketing Examples Guide”!

One of the most beneficial kinds of content is the “how-to” (you’ll find plenty of great examples, like this one, on the CMI site). Simply, it describes how to do something, and is one of several kinds of content I discussed in an earlier CMI post.

In this article, I’ll use the term “posts” as a general term to describe a piece of content, but the concepts are applicable to any type of content, including text, video, audio, infographics, or a slide show — and any length of content: as short as a tweet or as long as a book.

Two types of how-to content

1. The process post describes the steps to be taken, in sequence, to complete a task. Make sure to cover these four points:
• The objective of the process
• Steps to be followed, in order, with enough information so that someone in the intended market can carry them out
• Equipment, knowledge, and supplies required to do the job
• Difficulties the audience may encounter, as well as suggested solutions
2. Success tips also provide suggestions on how to achieve a good outcome, but they involve topics for which sequence is not as important, so these posts are best created as an unordered, bulleted list. Important information to include:
• Why it is important to follow the points in the list (e.g., to avoid a problem or to gain a benefit)
• Your best recommendations on initiatives that will engage someone in your intended market
• Difficulties they may encounter, with your suggested solutions

The type of post you use will depend on your subject matter. For example, content developed by a bicycle store on how to repair a flat tire would work best as a process post because one step follows another. Content on how to stay safe while riding in traffic would work better as an unordered bulleted list of success tips.

How to make the how-to compelling

Compared to the latest sizzling gossip from Hollywood, Bollywood, or Nollywood (that’s Nigeria’s film industry, FYI), a plodding how-to, well, plods. Three principles can make it more engaging.

1) Make it aspirational. Be sure that you’re writing (or talking) about an outcome that people in your market actually want to achieve. A bicycle store might get plenty of downloads for a video on how to repair a flat tire, which is something that most serious cyclists have to do at least once a season. The store would find fewer takers for content on a more difficult process, such as repacking a bike’s bottom bracket.

As an example from the professional services marketing space where I work, it wouldn’t be wise for a lawyer to write a detailed article about how to cross-examine a witness. Most people would want to leave that to the lawyers.

2) Make it feasible. Your content needs to be on a topic that is reasonably possible for someone in your market to accomplish. Have you ever seen a model airplane kit for children… and the package shows the model assembled and painted to a degree of perfection you just know is beyond the skill of any small child?

Don’t be like that. Once again, the bicycle-tire-repair video passes the test, because fixing a flat is really pretty easy. A bottom-bracket repack is not feasible for most shade-tree bike mechanics.

3) Make it legal. There are some procedures that fall into “Kids, don’t try this at home” territory. While “The latest techniques in root canals” might be morbidly fascinating to a non-dentist, in most jurisdictions one would need to be a fully qualified dentist to actually apply that content.

In many other fields, such as engineering, architecture, law, accounting, and actuarial science, some content will be relevant only to specialists, so try to avoid topics that your audience wouldn’t reasonably try to do on their own.

How-to’s that meet your business objectives

The genius of content marketing lies in developing content that informs, but also persuades — that is, persuades the reader/ viewer/ listener to take action.

It’s the same with a how-to post. Choose topics that are tangential to what you do for your customers or clients, rather than directly related. Going back to the bicycle example, a bike store would do well to present content on how to repair a flat because this will convince more people to buy a bike and ride with the confidence that they could handle a tire problem themselves. Again, the bottom-bracket repack subject would fail, because this is a service the bike store would want to provide to customers.

So, be sure to choose topics that are not core to what your organization does — you don’t want to “help” your audience right out of needing your services.

Providing how-to content can help position your organization as a helpful entity that is interested in achieving good outcomes for its clients or customers. While it may not do much to present the organization as a strategic partner or innovator, it can still be one of the most valuable and shareable kinds of content you can create.

Do you have any stories to share about successful how-to content you’ve created? Let us know in the comments. 

Creating great content requires more than skilled writing. It requires market research and personal conversation so that your content will anticipate the audience’s needs and be well targeted to address those needs.

Before you start to write, you need to know what information your readers will want to see on your blog, website, or social networking campaign. You need to know what will be relevant and important enough to command their attention.

So, how will you learn what’s on their minds?

You will ask, of course. But also offer a premium to thank them for their time and show that you value their input. Their information is vital to your business, so it’s in your best interest to offer something of value in return.

Luckily, this is relatively easy to do: Think of ways you can make their lives easier, more fun, more informed, or more efficient. Here are five ideas to help you learn more about your content’s audience:

 1. Create a contest

• It helps you inform clients that an event is coming up, that there is a fee to attend, and that they can reduce their costs if they register online in advance.
• You promote the seminar, your expertise, your questionnaire, and your business all at the same time, and offer clients a money-saving opportunity to increase their knowledge.

As you read these ideas, we hope you were thinking about marketing, because that is what it all boils down to: hard-as-nails internet marketing. Call it content or whatever else you want, but don’t lose sight of the fact that the purpose is to make you and your business more well-known, more of an asset to your clientele, and more successful, overall.

One last thing: Be sure that you treat your content and social networking campaigns like a ball of string — an integrated effort where finding any part of it leads you to the whole. Ain’t nothing better than that.

If you’ve used any of these techniques, let us know how they worked for you by sharing your story in the comments below. 

However, you can save time on content development and reach a larger audience if you find ways to reuse or reinvent the content you have already created. Here are three ways you can get double (or even triple) duty out of your B2B content:

Use an editorial calendar

If you schedule your content marketing in advance by using an editorial calendar, you can plan content themes for different months, promotions, or trending topics. Knowing your themes ahead of time will make it easier for you to gather content.

For example, you may already have a wealth of material about a specific theme that you can easily edit and publish. Or you can use themes to identify subject matter experts within your organization. You can then interview these experts and put together quick blog posts, podcasts or videos based on their interviews. Plus, an editorial calendar lets your team members know who is responsible for what task. This helps to keep everyone on track and your content machine running smoothly.

Start big and break it down

Pieces with a large amount of content, such as webinars, take a lot of time and resources to develop. And if these pieces fail to bring you ROI, it may seem as though you’ve wasted your efforts. However, a poorly attended webinar doesn’t have to lead to a dead end and lost ROI.

Try breaking the content you’ve created for the webinar into smaller chunks that can be used on other content platforms, such as tweets, blog posts, SlideShare presentations, or short videos. As you share these bites across your marketing channels, your audience will grow, and be more engaged in the content you produce.

For example, you can host a live Twitter chat that features key points from your webinar. This open conversation can dramatically increase your mentions, retweets and followers. You can also turn your webinar content into short YouTube videos to reach a different audience. This additional exposure can even help you reach your original goal by bringing more people back to your website to listen to the replay of your webinar.

Or, start small, combine your related content, and go big

Sometimes it’s easier for marketers to develop small pieces of content — such as blog posts or short “how to” videos — than it is to create large-scale content projects. When you take a look at the body of content you’ve created, chances are several pieces will revolve around related topics and themes. Why not combine them to create content components that provide a more comprehensive view of the issues you wrote about, such as white papers, eBooks, or training materials?

Using your smaller bits of content as the building blocks of these more-detailed works can save you a lot of time and stress because you’ll already have most of the work complete. One way you can easily tie small pieces of content together is by turning a series of blog posts about the same topic into an eBook. You can also combine your product demo videos and articles into comprehensive training materials.  

Just remember to think about your audience when you repurpose your content for a new medium. For example, if you want to turn a webinar into a series of blog posts, don’t just throw the webinar transcript on your blog. That’s cheating! Plus, transcripts can be difficult to read. Your blog readers may also have different expectations than do your webinar attendees. You’ll need to adjust your content’s style, length and format to match your medium and appeal to the audiences who use these mediums.

What about you?

How do you repurpose or reinvent your content to get the most mileage out of it? Feel free to share your thoughts below.

Right now, marketers are coming to terms with the fact that a financial transaction is no longer the end-all, be-all of the customer relationship. Sure, achieving a sale is an undeniable win. But it isn’t always enough to drive the loyalty, evangelism, and repeat business that a durable business thrives on.

That’s what engagement is for.

So how can marketers crack the engagement code in content marketing and determine the role it should play in a campaign? And, more importantly, how can we develop a process that helps us engage with customers and prospects more reliably and successfully, time and time again?

There are no magic formulas — after all, we are talking about connecting with something as unique and unpredictable as the human being. But there are many tips that content professionals have picked up in the marketing trenches, and CMI’s latest eBook is loaded with them.

Take a look at Your Kick-Start Guide to Engaging Content, where author Thomas Clifford, and a host of other experts and CMI bloggers, share their perspective on engagement, including:

• What it means and why it is essential to marketing
• The four qualities that must exist for content to be engaging
• How to use content to pump excitement into even the most common product
• Ways the experts engage the mind by appealing to the heart
• The five main categories of engagement tools, and great examples of each
• Knowing what to measure, and ways to use what you learn to determine your next steps

Whether you are looking for some guidance to boost your success rates or need to get up to speed with some useful information and easy-to-implement techniques, we found a lot to think about here, and we hope you will, too.

Over the years content marketers have found the inspiration for this task in some unlikely places, including at the corner of Hollywood and Vine — the center point of Hollywood film marketing. One look at the strange and wonderful subculture that is Hollywood entertainment reveals a glut of new ideas. The techniques may have been devised to promote television and film, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be applied to other content products as well.

In fact, the trend of borrowing marketing concepts from Hollywood is growing so popular that Fast Company magazine recently launched a new site intended to “chronicle the pioneers who are meshing tech, culture, and commerce in new ways.”  The “new creative map,” as the publication calls it, employs the tactics honed in Hollywood and applies them to Madison Avenue campaigns that play out on the web. This convergence of media has the power to produce marketing content that’s unique, effective, and memorable. Here are a few ways to make their strategies work for your brand.

Bring fiction into Facebook

No, I’m not talking about augmented profile pictures and exaggerated status updates. This form of fiction manifests itself as a branded Facebook Page written from the point of view of a character. It might be a product mascot, or an actor featured in a commercial spot — you can use whatever your brand has at its disposal that might help consumers identify with your products. As long as the character is directly related to the company it was created to promote, the creative content possibilities are nearly endless.

One example of this concept that’s been generating buzz is musical artist Katy Perry’s nerdy pre-teen alter ego, “Kathy Beth Terry,” and her personal Facebook Page. The character, portrayed by Perry herself, rose to fame when she was prominently featured in one of Perry’s music videos. Her subsequent multi-platform social media presence now rivals that of Katy Perry herself.

The launch of Old Spice’s “New Old Spice Guy” campaign — the sequel to the wildly successful “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” YouTube videos that ran in 2010 — warranted a similar approach. In an effort to keep audiences engaged with the campaign, new spokesman Fabio was equipped with his own YouTube channel, Twitter feed, and Facebook Page. 

The idea with this approach is to create an additional avenue for generating product interest and, ultimately, sales. Instead of relying entirely on your Facebook brand page to get the word out about a new album, product, or special offer, you can enlist a branded character to do it for you. If the fictional character is positively perceived by consumers, it stands to help you build brand affinity.

Let a mystery build your audience’s interest

Entertainment companies are known for leaking teasers about upcoming blockbuster films. They might plaster billboards and city buses with an obscure call-to-action (as Sony Pictures did with “Find out the Truth: Search 2012″ for its film “2012″), or establish a mysterious Twitter hashtag that consumers must decipher (as Warner Bros. did to coincide with the launch of the website for the upcoming “Batman” film, “The Dark Knight Rises). 

Teasers have proven to be a viable tactic for many brands, but none are so effective as those that drive consumers directly to the product site. For content marketing purposes, this strategy can include using the release date of a new product as the temporary URL for that product’s site, or ending email newsletters with a teaser about upcoming content. Brands might even pump enticing copy from a new contest into a Twitter feed. This is one of those rare cases in content marketing where ambiguity can actually work in your favor. 

Leverage the allure of staggered content

Entertainment companies are known for making audiences want more. One way they do this is through the strategic release of content. For example, teaser trailers, behind the scenes footage, and other promotional content from a new film may be doled out to the masses little by little, leading up to the film’s release date. This unpredictable trickle approach can help build suspense and intrigue, driving audiences to pounce on every new bit of information with excited anticipation.   

While you may not have 120 minutes of action-packed video content loaded with stunts, pyrotechnics and celebrities at your fingertips, you probably have plenty of material that can appeal just as strongly to your target audience’s need for information and advice on your particular area of expertise.

For example, the careful placement of an excerpt from your white paper — something that can stand on its own but doesn’t answer all the reader’s questions in one shot — on your Twitter feed can encourage potential customers to actively seek out more of your great advice. Likewise, a snippet of a product demo or third-party review posted to your brand’s Facebook Page can motivate fans to visit your e-commerce site to see the rest of the story. Another advantage of this is that brands can conserve ad space while still achieving the campaign goal of boosting site visits.

Hollywood has given us plenty to ponder and enjoy. But to content marketers, none of it is more valuable than the lessons its advertising campaigns offer on extending a brand’s story into the social, virtual, and physical worlds.