Robert Katz was becoming frustrated. The year was 2009, and Katz was CEO of Vail Resorts during what was turning out to be the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. He needed revenue, so not surprisingly, he turned to his marketing team for ideas.

Katz was well aware of the explosion of new marketing channels. He had been to a number of meetings where he was bombarded with facts and figures highlighting the rapid rise in mobile, social, gaming, digital-out-of home and online video. In these meetings, his people described an always-on, connected consumer who was snacking on content across an ever-increasing number of devices. They argued persuasively that Vail’s success would depend on being able to deliver the right content to the right customer on the right device at the right time. For the most part, it all made sense to Katz.

That’s where things got sticky. Vail did what almost every company does today. Its internal mobile people met with mobile agencies and technology providers. Its internal social people met with social agencies and technology providers. And so on. In the end, Katz was presented with a mobile strategy, a social strategy and a content strategy. But here’s where the story took an interesting turn. Katz said no.

Why? He understood this channel-up approach would lead to a lot of “clever ideas that don’t matter.” Why don’t they matter? They don’t matter because Vail Resorts is a billion-dollar company operating multiple ski resorts. They don’t matter because a steady stream of one-off ideas won’t move the needle on the bottom line of such a large enterprise. And above all, they don’t matter because Katz was looking for an idea to fundamentally alter the competitive landscape. He was not looking for another short-term promotional push, but wanted a long-term strategy to enhance Vail’s ability to attract and retain customers. In short, a transformational business idea.

Give customers more of what they like best.

After Katz said no to the “channel-up” approach, he gathered his team and led them in a process to use all of these new channels to fundamentally improve the Vail experience. First, they searched for a business idea. Only then did they think about how to use all of these channels to support that idea.

The solution, it turned out, was in the 800,000 RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips Vail embeds in its passes and lift tickets each year. If the passes could be scanned automatically, and if RFID readers could be placed at different points on the mountain, then Vail would have a great deal of information about each guest – information that could be used to develop content and fuel a social experience. All that was needed was a way to display that information and share it with resort guests.

That way to display was EpicMix. Launched in the fall 2010, EpicMix provides a personal scorecard of each customer’s accomplishments on the mountain that can be viewed on the web or via a smartphone app. The idea is similar to the location-based social network Foursquare, but with one big difference: Customers don’t have to drag out their phone to check in or even to sign up. The data is already collected, ready for viewing, when and if they want it.

In a classic example of gamification, the most competitive skiers were now galvanized to get to the top of the EpicMix leaderboard by skiing the most vertical feet. As the first season with EpicMix drew to a close, the ironman atop that leaderboard had spent 140 days on the mountain at three Vail Resorts properties, chalking up a ridiculous 5.8 million vertical feet of skiing.

Knowing that every resort visitor isn’t made of 100-percent testosterone, Vail wisely built other, more accessible challenges and rewards into EpicMix. Resort visitors can also earn digital pins – inspired by the colorful metal lapel pins that have been part of ski culture for decades. These coveted 87-by-85 pixel icons, and the accomplishments they represent, can be displayed on guests’ personal EpicMix pages and shared via Facebook and Twitter.

Some pins are bestowed for purely athletic accomplishments, such as the “Millionaire” granted to those who manage at least 1 million vertical feet in a season. The “Conqueror” is awarded to those who ski every lift at a resort in a single day. The opportunity to win these few thousand square pixels of recognition has driven skiers to try new things and to push their personal limits.

This gamification of snow sports via the rewarding of status to Vail Resorts’ guests has paid some immediate dividends in terms of customer loyalty. “The real value of this program is to drive increased sales, increased days of participation and increased loyalty from our core customer segment,” Katz says, “and all indications are that people are responding to it that way.”

The net result is far-reaching promotion for Vail Resorts that hits some very desirable targets: the like-minded friends of current customers. The math is compelling. More than 50,000 Vail guests activated their EpicMix profiles during the first five weeks of the program’s trial season, posting an average of four updates on Facebook. According to Facebook, the average user has 130 friends, meaning those 200,000 posts translated into 26 million-plus potential impressions for EpicMix and Vail Resorts. Participation tripled since the launch, and so far this year, Vail has seen more than 1.8 million social posts from EpicMix members.

While one of the ultimate aims of EpicMix is to spur this kind of unbiased promotion, Vail Resorts doesn’t look at the program strictly as a marketing expense. Katz explains that EpicMix is designed to enhance the quality and fun of a visit to the resorts, so Vail looked at the investment in EpicMix as essentially the same as adding lifts, snowmaking equipment or a new restaurant.

And it’s not a one-off. Katz is committed to expanding and enhancing the EpicMix experience over time. This year Vail Resorts posted professional photographers on their mountains to take candid photos. A quick scan of the skiers’ passes and their photos are waiting for them when they get home. Most guests quickly post the photos to Facebook.

It’s no wonder Katz is continuing to support EpicMix as a core differentiating strategy. Despite continued softness in the economy, Vail Resorts managed to increase revenue 31 percent between 2010 and 2011.

Think cross-channel and long term.

We all have a lot to learn from Katz, Vail Resorts and EpicMix. The essential lesson: Stop thinking about channel strategies. Instead, start thinking about transformational business ideas. Dig into your customers’ needs. What do they love about our brand? Can we enhance it? What do they hate about our brand? Can we fix it? What deeper need do they have that we can satisfy?

Be relentless. Don’t be satisfied with clever one-off ideas that live alone within a single media channel. Keep digging until you uncover a real problem you can solve. Once you’ve done that, and only after you’ve done that, should you engage your mobile and social content experts. Find an idea then unleash the horses.

The rise of the scatterbrained brand.

Unfortunately in business today, management team members too often say yes when they should be saying no. Too often, brands spend millions of dollars on individual, channel-specific programs. Too often, companies tout the efficacy of their social strategy or mobile strategy or content strategy. Why too often? While each may deliver a positive ROI, they don’t add up to anything substantial in terms of the larger goals of the brand.

Is it any wonder in a recent survey, more than 70 percent of CEOs said they don’t believe their marketing people can adequately justify their investment in new media initiatives? I experienced this firsthand when a CEO told me, “Sometimes I feel I’m jogging in a swarm of gnats. There are all these new marketing ideas swirling around. They’re full of energy and extremely distracting, and I keep thinking I’m going to choke on them. And they sure don’t help me run any faster.”

Those of us who have bet our careers on the success of these emerging channels need to take heed. Senior leadership will never embrace our ideas unless we let go of our myopic focus on individual channels and instead solve real business problems. We need to do things that matter.

So how to proceed? There are many ways to approach it, but here’s my favorite prescription for success:

First, take it easy for a few days (this is going to be a lot of work). Then next Monday, pull together the widest possible team. From the client, include people from marketing, IT, product development, finance, stores, and customer service. Include all of your agencies–traditional, digital, social and mobile. Ask the new team this question: “What do people dislike about being our customer, and how can we use digital to fix it?” Force them all to help define the problem and generate ideas. Threaten to fire anyone who acts like a prima donna or seems more worried about his or her own empire as opposed to the success of the group. When you decide on a direction, sell it to your CEO and get it funded. Once the program is launched, act quickly by testing, learning and refining everything you’re doing. Don’t relax until your customers are telling each other what a great company you are.

Oh, and make sure you do something that matters.

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

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”!

Mobile is undeniably a hot new marketing tool. But it is not just a mini version of the internet we see on our computers. Marketers have to think long and hard about what information they want to make available via a mobile app or site, and figure out the best way to do so.

Top considerations for mobile content:

• Keep word counts short. Smaller mobile screens mean consumers have to do more scrolling to read longer messages — an extra effort that might discourage them from reading.
• Have a laser-like focus on your audience. With significantly less real estate to work with than a traditional website, it is all the more important to understand the target audience for your mobile site and what information they will consider relevant when accessing information this way.
• Understand the platform. Will users be scrolling or swiping content in a mobile app on a phone or tablet, or clicking links in a mobile version of a web page? The parameters of the platform you choose may help you narrow your content choices.
• Don’t be coy. Put the most important info at the top. Users shouldn’t need to scroll or swipe or link to get the payoff. And you risk losing your audience if interacting with your mobile interface requires a lot of work to find the relevant data.
• Link to longer or more detailed content. If you’ve got a lot of information to share, consider linking back to your full website, or perhaps creating an email link to send the full version of the content. If you link people back to your full website, make sure it is a direct link, so users do not have to navigate via the tiny text.
• Make sure there is a call to action. A sign-up option, a link to your email newsletter, a feedback button, etc., will make your mobile content more actionable.

Make your content work for your audience

Mobile content marketing is great, but it requires you to expand your view of what content marketing means. There is not necessarily a direct translation from content marketing for websites to content marketing for mobile applications. Because there is much less screen space for information, most mobile websites and apps focus on providing transactional content, such as recipes that viewers can save, store locators, or tools they can use to send a message, check the status of an upcoming flight, etc.

Indeed, if relevance is the ideal consideration for what content to include, then it seems that users may not be as interested in consuming traditional educational content via mobile devices. People aren’t going to read white papers, case studies, or long articles on a mobile site. They might, however, read blog and Twitter posts, watch short videos, or listen to podcasts.

Here are two examples (one mobile application and one mobile website) that show some of the options for making content available on mobile devices and some of the key considerations involved in the process.

Indiana State University

This mobile application for the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry mobile platforms allows students at Indiana State University to stay in touch with campus news and activities. (Reviewed on an iPhone)

User experience. All the relevant links are available directly from the home page. Here users can choose to see the calendar of events, look at a list of courses for the upcoming semesters, access emergency numbers, read news about the university, or log into their account.

Navigation. Navigation on the app is simple and direct. The home page displays the nine primary options via graphical icons. It also provides links to the lyrics for the university’s fight song (with an option to play the song), phone numbers of nearby businesses, the ability to search the catalog of media in its library, and a link to the university’s official magazine. Many of the subpages also feature a one-button link back to the home page, which keeps users from having to backspace multiple times (thus, reloading each page) in order to move into other sections of the app.

Because there is a lot of content to share, users may have to follow multiple links in order to move down into the site to get certain information (for example, when looking for a particular academic course or athletic event). I also found that some of the links (such as athletic events or news items) lead users back to pages on the main university website. Although these pages are not optimized for viewing on a small screen, the links are direct, so users do not have to navigate the main website on their phones to find the information they are looking for.

Search. Several of the pages have their own search functionality — for example, the course list is searchable once a user has narrowed it down to the main subject (such as art or economics). The magazine is also searchable, which is quite beneficial given the amount of content in a magazine and the lack of space for content in a mobile application.

However, the news and calendar functions do not have search forms. The calendar in particular could benefit from the ability to search, though it is divided into sections, such as alumni events, athletic events, music, student academic dates, etc.

Format/ layout. The formatting and layout are clean and simple, as is best for an application like this. The application is branded consistently with the ISU website — it uses the same shade of blue, and the icon for the button to link back to the homepage is the university’s logo.

Discovery Channel mobile

The mobile website of the Discovery Channel is m.discovery.com, and it provides access to many of the same fun items users will find on the main website. (Reviewed via Safari on an iPhone)

User experience. With advertisements at the very top of the page, this mobile website doesn’t look as clean as many branded mobile applications. But on the plus side, the overall user experience has been well-optimized for viewing on a smartphone.

The home page features a sampling of some of the content types accessible from the navigation bar — such as the full TV schedule, Twitter links, quizzes, and the Discovery store. The main page also displays news headlines, the primetime shows for that day, and links to the most popular videos and photos on the Discovery site.

That said, the mobile site does have some challenges. The videos did not play properly during this review, and the blogs did not seem to be updated. For example, the first entry on the topmost blog “Discovery of the Day” was dated April 30, 2009.

Navigation. There is a primary navigation bar at the top of each screen, linking to each of the core content categories: videos, quizzes, photos, news, blogs, Twitter, the TV schedule, and the store. At the bottom of each page (which sometimes requires a bit of scrolling to get to) there are links to the full website, other Discovery network sites, and general contact and feedback links.

The top navigation bar links back to the home page, but this is not viewable when users have scrolled through the top navigation bar, which only displays three topics (out of nine) at a time. That means there is not always a direct link back to the home page. Additionally, there is no function that allows users to search for content found only on the mobile site.

Format/ layout. The formatting and layout on this app are clean and simple. The mobile site branding is consistent with the main Discovery Channel website, using the same shade of blue and featuring the Discovery Channel logo in a banner at the top of each page.

Conclusion

Content creation for mobile websites and applications will never be the same as it is for materials that were designed to be viewed on desktops and laptops — these devices just don’t have enough screen real estate to make that viable. So marketers have to decide what content is most relevant for users who access their information via mobile devices, and how to lead them to the meatier content, when they are ready to go deeper.

What do you think about these efforts to share content for mobile devices? How is your mobile content different from what you share on your main website? How will optimizing content for mobile devices change the way we think about content marketing in general? What are your thoughts about the next steps content marketers need to take in the mobile space?

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.

While Cone Inc.’s research highlights that consumers continue to turn to ratings and reviews and that blogs have gained customer interest, the reality is content marketing can support every step of the purchase process. If you don’t provide useful content, your competitors, other consumers, and the public will.

To support the purchase process effectively with relevant content, at the very least, you need to:

• Include a relevant call-to-action
• Include a unique promotion code to be able to track results.
• Socialize your content marketing

Below are thirteen online options you should also consider beyond these essentials.

Your Website

Consider content-rich product information, company and executive backgrounds, location (with maps), and customer-driven FAQs.

Photographs

Here’s where your offering can strut its stuff. Remember, consumers want to see your product in action, as well as what they’re getting. Don’t forget to associate relevant text for searchability.

Videos

Increasingly, videos are being integrated into product content offerings to help online shoppers get a 360-degree view. Develop how-to videos to show prospects the basics (and even the not-so-basic ways) of using your product). Don’t overlook video’s storytelling or entertainment value, which companies like  Will It Blend (aka Blendtec), Orabrush, and Mentos versus Coke Experiment discovered and leveraged to great success.

Presentations / White papers

Presentations and white papers have long been at the core of B2B content marketing offerings. To increase their allure, include relevant, usable information wrapped in attractive graphic design. This content shouldn’t be one-sided or purely promotional. Otherwise, it won’t break through today’s information overload. Increase your reach by placing these materials on slide sharing sites that have broad visitor traffic.

Ratings and reviews

While Amazon’s the granddaddy of customer reviews, prospects are increasingly checking what others have to say about your offering through dozens of major and niche sites. Further, Cone Inc. found that prospects look for both positive and negative information. Remember, if you decide that you need to edit your comments on your own site, consumers will turn to third-party sites like TripAdvisor and your competitors to get unbiased reviews.

Testimonials

Direct marketers have used this form of customer reviews for years: “Don’t take our word for it; here’s what your peers say.” The benefit is that these customer comments can be hand-selected to highlight your products’ best features.

Blogs

While blogs should be at the center of your content marketing offerings, make sure you create blog content that can support your products with information that helps consumers use them. The goal is to provide non-promotional information, such as recipes, patterns, and helpful hints.

Discussion boards

Use product forums to answer customer questions before and after they purchase. Furthermore, get help from other consumers and the public who can answer your prospects’ questions based on their experience.

eBooks

Provide useful targeted information for public consumption that’s sexy by compiling it into an eBook. Increase your reach with strong design and social sharing. While widely used by B2B marketers, don’t underestimate their value for B2C and not-for-profit use. You can also consider creating an eBook to supplement your product manuals or to provide public information for not-for-profit (NFP) efforts.

Podcasts (audio content)

Does your product lend itself to the spoken word? If so, why not create a podcast? Increasingly, investor relations professionals are using this content format. Think outside the box, especially for kids who love to hear stories or for visually impaired audiences.

Email newsletters

While email is a core element of many marketers’ plans, you can offer a tailored newsletter that focuses on giving prospects and customers fun and useable content. Basically, you act like a sponsor of your own content and link to relevant products where appropriate. This works for all types of marketers.

Articles on third-party sites

Support your offerings by writing about product-relevant topics and submitting these articles to other media entities. B2B marketers have traditionally submitted content to trade publications; B2C and not-for-profits can also use this tactic effectively by writing about topics that address their prospects’ challenges.

Press releases

The beauty of press releases is that their keyword-rich content can attract broad audiences. To be effective as content, don’t think in terms of the traditional, must-announce-internal-or-regulatory-information releases. Go for intriguing approaches to your product.

Regardless of your target market, consider how you can provide content that your audience wants and is seeking to help them decide to purchase your products. And as I mentioned earlier, make sure you track results from each form of content to determine what’s most effective for your offering.

Is there any other content marketing format that you’d add to this list? If so, please include it in the comment section below.

The spark

Stephanie Gan, Intel’s Asia-Pacific Advertising Manager based in Hong Kong, still remembers the first time she spotted a campaign created by Projector — a boutique agency located in Tokyo, Japan — for Uniqlo, the leading Japanese casual wear retail chain. The visuals and story emotionally connected her to the product and made a lasting impression. She made a mental note to pay this agency a visit next time she was in Tokyo to see how it  could help with an upcoming project.

After a draining two-day planning meeting in Tokyo, Stephanie finally met Projector’s founder, Tanaka-san, in the hotel lobby. He greeted Stephanie in English despite some obvious discomfort with the language. Stephanie wanted to create “something innovative” that would convey the essence of the tagline, “Visibly Smart” for Intel’s latest product line, the second-generation Intel Core Processor family.

Stephanie’s brief focused on conveying the concept, “Visibly Smart Performance for Your Visual Life.” The gist was that through visual experiences we define who we are, and a second-generation Intel Core processor with its combination of smart performance and stunning, seamless visuals is the perfect engine for expressing and sharing your visual life. Stephanie also made it very clear she needed to deliver the “unexpected” and create a “Wow!” reaction. That brief, in essence, was the King. The Queen’s job (in this case, Projector) became how to make this happen.

One month after receiving the brief, Tanaka-san presented several creative ideas to Stephanie, whose heart immediately connected with the Museum of Me concept.

The rough creative concept was to pull information from a consumer’s Facebook page to create a virtual museum of his or her digital life. Photos, videos, and friends were presented as pieces of art, displayed randomly as if in a museum or art gallery. This concept reflected the spirit of the brief that Stephanie had shared with Projector: “Create a personal and emotional connection with people through a seamless visual experience for your visual life.”

The obstacles

The right concept was just the beginning. The next six months was a heart-wrenching experience for both the agency and Stephanie’s team.  To bring the creative concept to life, Projector and Intel had to overcome cultural differences, language barriers, creative disagreements, and geographic challenges.

Creative is an interesting monster. A story can be told from different angles, and there is no right or wrong answer. Every creative decision requires multiple rounds of discussion — the music selection, the flow of storytelling, how it should begin and end, even the simple selection of background color. Both Projector’s and Stephanie’s teams had zealous passion and strong opinions about creative and story development, and these were not always in sync.

The two teams ran into a lot of impasses, debating on communication styles and creative expressions. At times, Stephanie thought this project would never end well.  Eventually, however,  they learned to see and respect each other’s points of view and found a way to partner together as a team.

With the groundwork for the project laid out, Stephanie’s team performed a pilot test on May 31, 2011, the day before the launch. Within 5 minutes, the page had gotten 36 likes. From there, word spread quickly with the first tweet coming from Madrid. Within 5 days, there were 1 million hits — accomplished without any paid-media promotion. The Museum of Me app captured the attention of 2.5 million people and became the most popular viral video Intel had ever created.

Both Stephanie and Projector were blown away by the overwhelming success.

How they reached a resolution

Just as every project, good or bad, should be evaluated afterwards for lessons learned, Stephanie analyzed the differences in the process for Museum of Me and the keys to its success.

• Brief the agency WELL. She ensured the agency understood the essence of the underlying message that Intel wished to convey, not just the product benefits and key messaging.
• Be bold and get fresh perspective. Stephanie made a bold move by working with a new agency — an agency in another country with a different outlook and traditions. Through their unique cultural lens, the team came up with new interpretations of the concept, “Visibly Smart Performance for your Visual Life.”
• Be open and direct on communications. Both Intel and Projector had strong visions and opinions on creative and production. The key to coming to a consensus was conversing openly and honestly to work through the conflicts and to respect each other’s  passion to make it even better. Both sides committed to listen to the other’s approach. When an impasse was reached, they cleared their minds and focused on the best solution with the consumer in mind.

Stephanie is already pursuing her next the King and Queen. Stay tuned.

You’ll want to flip through Jeremy Victor’s countdown of most innovative content marketing projects… our Fab 15! For you CMI groupies, a few of our Fab 15 may look familiar (Eloqua and Velocity Partners make the list) but Jeremy also includes fresh new entrants, such as the video documentary produced by F-Secure to commemorate the anniversary of the first PC virus.

In case you haven’t guessed, our July issue is all about innovation. The word seems to cause as much eye-rolling as interest these days in large part because everyone’s striving for innovative content marketing, but no one really seems to know what it means.

Until they see it, of course.

One of my favorite articles this month is about Tom Fishburne, the Marketoonist. Tom is a Harvard Business School grad who enjoyed all kinds of success as a brand manager for companies like Method and Häagen-Dazs. But Tom also loved to doodle. One day, he walked away from all his successes in corporate life and started a cartooning company. Yes, I repeat: Tom and his company, Marketoonist.com, offer serial cartoons to companies hoping to build a following through humor (sometimes fairly edgy humor).

And here’s the part that amazes me most: The reason why Marketoonist cartoons work so well is that most people don’t get the joke. For example, one of Tom’s clients is CaseCentral, a software company that offers e-discovery services in the legal field, has developed a loyal following through its weekly cartoon. But if you are not a lawyer, chances are you just won’t get this joke. What makes Marketoonist cartoons so shareable is largely the ‘inside joke’ quality to his strips.

So again, don’t ask me to define innovation. But if you asked me for an example, I would confidently point to the Marketoonist.

Now go pack your sunscreen and enjoy our July issue!

As blogging has become more common, certain post styles have become popular because they get attention and interactions from readers:

• “How to” posts
• Narrative story posts
• Sectioned posts that use a series sub headers
• The monologue-style video posts often used for book reviews or Q&A

But one of the most popular types of post is a list. While this style may seem straightforward, there are a few forms it takes, and a number of ways to make it more effective in your content marketing.

3 types of list posts

Brief lists

In this style, lists are bullets that are typically brief statements with little description but plenty of emphasis. Each bullet point may contain a link to another online resource; a link to an individual’s profile blog or company; or even a step in a larger process. But don’t be confused by the name. Brief lists are typically longer in total length than posts with fewer items in the list.

If the post contains quality and relevant content, this style of list can entice  readers to bookmark the post to use the list as a resource down the road or share it across their own networks. Keep in mind that for longer lists  it’s best to use numbered bullets so your readers feel like the content is somewhat sequential and has a sum total.

Here are a few examples:

• Startup Culture: 23 Insights from the NetFlix Culture Deck – Dharmesh Shah
• 50 Ideas On Using Twitter for Business – Chris Brogan

Detailed lists

As compared to brief lists, each bullet is a complete thought. Because of the emphasis on description, these lists typically carry a lower number of bullets, and the overall post is shorter. This style of post is excellent at communicating complex information. Detailed lists also can be used for creating lists of people for whom you would like to share brief stories, biographies or even testimonials.

Here are a few examples of detailed lists:

• 10 Customizable Holiday Gifts for Your-Tech Savvy Office — Sharlyn Lauby
• 9 Ways to Use EdgeRank to Rule Your Facebook Experience – Nate Riggs (shameless self promotion)

Hybrid lists

If you haven’t guessed it by now, you are reading a hybrid list post. Hybrid lists combine the elements of short and detailed lists, often with descriptive narratives or explanations as paragraphs in between the actual lists.  In some lists, videos are used to introduce the idea or need for the content and visually identify the author to the readers. In my upcoming book, humanization is one of the 13 essential elements of successful blogging. Video can also be used to communicate the actual list bullets, but remember to include any links to items you mention in your monologue.

Examples include:

• Innovation Blocks – “Taking the NO Out of Business InNOvation” — Mike Brown
• 5 Keys to Motivating Your Employee Bloggers – Amanda Maksymiw

Lists posts as a powerful content marketing tactic

The five bullet items you see below represent a few of the desired outcomes for any blogger or blog team. Given that the content is timely, relevant and well-written, using the list style will yield strong results in each of these five areas:

• Social sharing: Create a resource your readers want to spread using social and email sharing buttons (Facebook Send, TweetMeme, ShareThis, etc.).
• Bookmarks: Develop enough content value to entice your readers to bookmark your blog post so they come back to it as a reference (Del.ic.ious, Diigo, Digg, etc.).
• Click-throughs: Generate greater internal or external click-throughs to other content you’ve published.
• Link-bait: Provide your readers with enough information or perspective that they are moved to cite and link to your post in their own content.
• Response: Generate increased comments and other forms of reader conversation about your content across social networks.

10 styling tips for your list post

1. Use your list style buttons found in the tool bar in the content editor on your blog. This will ensure that your lists will consistently use the CSS styling.
2. To style bullets with more space between each, hold down SHIFT when you hit RETURN once you have chosen a list style to drop the cursor down a line without creating another bullet.
3. Your lists can be any number you want. Round numbers, such as five and ten, are not required.
4. Longer lists seem to get more attention, but be careful not to add bullets only to make the list long.  Maintain the quality behind each bullet.
5. If you use a numbered list, don’t forget to include that total number in your headline to draw maximum clicks from people who might see your post distributed on social networks.
6. If you want to draw reader comments, leave your list 80%-90% complete and call your readers to action by asking them to add their own ideas to your list in the comments.
7. If your readers leave list bullets or other relevant information in the comments, don’t be afraid to add it to the actual post and then attribute it to the commentator.
8. When creating human lists, always opt first to link to a list member’s blog (if they have one). Doing this leverages pingbacks to alert that blogger that someone is talking about them, which can entice sharing and comments.
9. Don’t be afraid to organize extremely long lists into categories that are broken up by sub headings and descriptions. Your readers will appreciate the organization.
10. THIS one’s all you…

What experiences have you had with using list style posts in your content marketing efforts?

What styling tips would you add?