Selling with Content

A marketing definition of “content”

    Failure to define content in specific terms is the biggest reason content marketing and social media programs fail. But to define the content of a program we first need to define content itself. 

According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, content is:

 

a) Something contained- usually used in plural, ie. the jar’s contents or the drawer’s contents

 

b) The topics or matter treated in a written work, ie. “table of contents.”

“Something contained?” Is that all? No way! For marketing professionals “content” cannot be a vague amorphous thing that just fits in where we put it, it is our life blood. Neither is it just a list of topics on a page, it is the prime weapon we use to fight our battles.

 

Here is my definition of "content" which is extremely helpful in getting new content marketing and social media clients off to the right start:  

 

“Content is information with a purpose

designed to change a target audience.”

Let me describe the four elements of this definition:

 

• Information: I use this word in the widest possible way. Information can be newspaper articles, photos, news, stories, analysis, research, pictures, video, or data.

• Purpose driven: in marketing, content is created for a specific mission with nothing random about it. If the content created does not have a purpose, neither will the website, newsletter, magazine or Twitter account built with it. There is nothing magical about a Twitter account or a newsletter. Just becuse you build it, doe not mean they come. The engagement comes from the content, not the platform. On a technical level, Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh's Twitter account with close to 2 million followers is identical to mine with only 773. 

 • Change: after reading, viewing, or consuming content the audience must be changed in some way. I’m not saying every piece of content has to be life changing but it must be create some change. For example, after consuming content an audience member might be more informed, more entertained, less anxious, more hopeful, more likely to buy a certain product  etc. Content that does not create change is useless.

 

• Target audience: in marketing, content is created for a target audience. Without a well defined target in mind its hard to create content that will hit it. Content audiences can be very varied, for example: car enthusiasts, wine lovers, women between 18-25 years, upper income New Jersey residents, etc.

 Before you launch your next content marketing program think about the purpose driven information you will need to create, that will change a target audience. If you do this first, the rest gets easier. 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Most marketers: Social Media is cheap and cool but not very effective

Social Media's rapid adoption has been primarily because it is cheap and cool. Being effective? Not so much.

Blasphemy? Not really. We have all read the high profile Social Media success stories and know they deliver "the goods." But the majority of the Social Media use I see "on the street" is pretty basic stuff:

• Send out a press release, Tweet about it.
• Have a company event, put it up on a Facebook page.
• Come out with a new product, post it on your blog.
• Etc.

At this level of execution, Social Media is not the tip of the marketing spear, but just offering support to PR and other "exposure" functions. In cases like these, it is hard to isolate tangible results leadingna majority of marketers to doubt the effectiveness of their Social Media.

A recent study by Junta42 and MarketingProfs well documented this.

First, the good news: when close to 1,000 marketing directors were asked which content marketing tactics they now use, Social Media (less blogs) topped the list with 79% saying they are users:

But later the study came to a different finding: despite marketers using Social Media more than any other tactic, it is also the tactic they least believe to be effective (only 31% do). Also, more than any other tactic measured, 69% of respondents believe Social Media to be "less effective" or "ineffective." Ouch! Not good ratings for a medium that prides itself on being highly measurable. What is going on here?

Let's look at cost. While access to Facebook and Twitter (etc) are free, dedicating talent to get a Social Media program done right is not. As anyone reading this blog should know by now, good content is not cheap and a Social Media program is only as good as its content.

But marketers see this differently, Social Media might not be free, but deploying it can cost less than deploying any other tactic on the Junta42/Marketing Profs Study list.

And we cannot ignore the cool factor. I can't tell you how many companies have told me they deployed Social Media programs because their younger employees told them they had to do it.

The message for those of us advocating for a more engaged use of Social Media in business is simple: don't think because Social Media is everywhere that everyone thinks it is effective. Most marketers are still not convinced.

For now, Social Media is everywhere because it is cool and cheap. Someday, it might also become widely used, and used differently, because of its effectiveness. But if this study is to be believed, this time has not yet come.

Download the Junta42/Marketing Profs study

Is social media the small business equalizer?

One finding from the study I did for Social Media Today, "The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications," documented that small business is using social media far more than big business. 

Comparing usage between companies with 100 or less employees against ones with over 1,000, the small companies are  twice as likely to use social media in lead generation, and a third more likely to use  it in branding and public relations.

Larger companies typically have bigger ad budgets, bigger booths at trade shows, more retail outlets, and a bigger PR budget. According to the study:

"Where larger organizations have more resources to touch their customers, such as corporate advertising, social media may not be as big a priority. However, with less money for outreach programs, smaller companies can make big inroads by focusing more on social media."

If you work for a smaller business...get social!

Download the study for free

But what was the content marketing plan?

I love this cartoon by Brady Bonus I found on the Eloqua cartoon collaborative. I don't have to ad much about the importance of having a content strategy driving social media because this cartoon says it beautifully:  

Blogs and websites: like peanut butter and jelly

I frequently suggest to clients they combine their blog and website. But often the mentality is that websites are websites and blogs are blogs.

  Most often, the core content of a website changes less frequently the content of a blog, making it much less interesting for search engines and readers looking for something new.

But when blogs are linked to social media distribution and then combined into a website they become stronger together: the blog becomes a traffic and search engine magnet pulling in attention that gets shared with the less dynamic website content. I’ve never seen an actual case that documented this working…until now:

TMG Brand Communications is a boutique public relations and marketing communications agency in New York City. TMG had an excellent web site which presented its capabilities and samples of its work. But the site was lightly trafficked. A post on Dan McCarthy's ViralHousingFix describes the strategy:

“In the last quarter of 2009, TMG developed a blog centered, integrated social media marketing strategy to elevate its brand presence. TMG established a blog on a sub-domain of the tmg-media URL. This blog, “Tami McCarthy’s BuzzCloud”, was set up “using WordPress and the Cordobo Green Park theme. The agency also created a TMG Brand Communications fan page on Facebook, pointing the page to the primary TMG domain. The Networked Blogs application distributed blog posts to the Facebook page, and a plug-in was used to distribute posts to Twitter.”

The impact was immediate. In the six months following the launch of the blog: TMG increased web traffic to its TMGpr.com agency site and to its new blog, Buzzcloud, by 198%. In addition: 

• Visits to TMGpr.com, the agency site, increased 32% in the six-month period following the blog launch;
• Search engines drove 61% more traffic to the agency site in the six-month period;
• The number of keywords that drove traffic to TMG’s agency site gained from 425 to 1,178 in the six-month period. 

This success story was all about leveraging content. At the center of this strategy was Tami McCarthy’s blog, which constantly pushed content into a social media system that included a Facebook page, and Twitter account.

By combining the blog with the existing TMG website, overall site traffic jumped 198% in six months!

Are you maintaining your website and blog separately? If you are, it’s like eating peanut butter and jelly in separate sandwiches.   

 

Link to Tami’s blog: http://buzzcloud.tmgpr.com/

Read more detail of this case study on Dan McCarthy's ViralHousingFix: http://www.viralhousingfix.com/tag/google-inc  

Should your emphasis be on earned, owned, or paid media?

When I was a kid, there was one kind of milk you could spend money on only, the white kind. But now you choose from whole, skim, 1%, 2%, organic, and chocolate. Media is a lot like that. You used to spend money on it for one thing only: exposing customers to marketing messages. Now you choose from “bought media”, “owned media”, and “earned media.” The definitions:

Bought media: media you pay for like print ads and banner ads.

Owned media: media you own and control such as your company website and blog or newsletters and digital magazines your organization publishes.

Earned media: exposure you “earn” by posting content on social networks, forums, and websites that you do not own. Examples are comments posted on blogs, photos shared on Facebook, or videos uploaded to YouTube. Here is chart from a presentation from Alex Wong that illustrates this:

Conventional wisdom says each of these media has different strengths:

Owned media is best for reaching your current customer base. Since your organization should have the most complete list of your own customers, publishing a newsletter or digital magazine to that list should provide the best coverage available anywhere.

Bought media is best for reaching new customers. The weakness of “owned media” is that it reaches largely people who are already customers or inclined to become them, so it is less likely you will reach customers of competitors or new customer just coming to your market. “Bought media” strives for total market coverage which will include the groups you miss with owned media.

Earned media enables your biggest fans to advocate for you. Every company has customers who, if properly motivated, will advocate for you online. While this is basically an organic process that you have no direct control over, smart organizations find ways to encourage this process along. Many mistakenly think that earned media is free. While there is no charge for posting content on most social media sites, the task of doing this requires staffing for the function, and adding staff is never free.

Earned, owned, or paid media. Which should you emphasize?  
If your customer are heavily involved in social media, then earned media needs your attention. If you have not asked about your customers social media involvement in a year, you need to ask again.

 If you sell a utilitarian product like car batteries, or commodity products like toothpaste or paper towels, paid media might be best. When was the last time you saw a passionate bog post or successful newsletter about toothpaste?

If most of your business comes from repeat customers, you need to think more about owned media.

Different media work best for different situations. Along those lines, I prefer skim milk in my morning cereal, but 1 or 2% % for hot coca.

See Alex Wong's entire presentation on slide share

Content is still King, but audience is Ace

Wait a minute! This blog is about the power of content and its ability to persuade. Am I saying that content is no longer King? To that I say both yes and no.

Yes, content is King and publishing it is the most persuasive tool a marketer has. But publishing content is not the end goal, but a means to an end. Content that educates or entertains can attract an opted in audience of potential customers, every marketers dream.  

No, content is no longer King: many failing traditional publishers are loosing business thinking their end game is content distribution. A recent article in Time magazine documented how traditional content companies are being devalued:

“Content is rapidly being devalued. The first people to press that case are accountants. They have insisted that companies from News Corporation (NWS) to The New York Times (NYT) to Time Warner (TWX) to CBS (CBS) write-down tens of billions of dollars in assets. Cablevision (CVC) bought the large daily newspaper Newsday less than a year ago. Its accountants reduced the value of that property by 70%. That was not simply the value of the Newsday building. What they were saying is that the income from the property has been impaired, probably permanently.”

Don't fall into this trap. It is not enough just to create and distribute content as an end goal. Content has a new function on the web. Ben Elowitz, writing in PaidContent, advocates four qualities that make web content effective. What Elowitz describes is content on a mission. Once released this new breed of content travels the Web and builds an audience in its wake:

"Relevance. When users are skimming thousands of pages from a hundred sites per month, without question the most important factor is whether your content is relevant to the audience.

Make experiences, not content. In old media, the editors made the content and that was the product. Not any more.  Technology and content today are fused like peanut butter and chocolate in a Reese’s, and together they go by the name of “experience.”

P.O.V.  information is proprietary for a few minutes, and then – if it’s valuable – it spreads like a cold in a grade-school. While a minority of publishers build a business around sourcing proprietary information, the vast majority offer something far more valuable and ownable: perspective. In digital media, that is far more important, as the same information appears in hundreds of places. The Huffington Post has a paucity of proprietary reporting, and yet earned an audience of 23 million monthly U.S. users by offering points of view that are meaningful to its progressive audience, while ABC (NYSE: DIS) News has tons of original reporting but less than half the online viewers

Distribution. In the old days, content was assigned and written to appear in one place. Now, it appears everywhere—in blogs, in Facebook, in Twitter, and in search engines. This distribution ability is built-in to the content itself. The words in the writing determine whether it will show up at the top of Google or on page 10. The names you drop in the content determine whose vanity Google Alerts will be set off, beginning a chain reaction of tweet and retweet.  And the style and hook of the content and its headlines will determine its virility. Content that has no destination draw, no pass-along, and no search indexability is plain and simple dead-end content. And like a tree falling in the forest, even the most beautiful content is irrelevant if it’s unseen or unheard." 

On the web, content is the ultimate audience building tool. If you can assemble an audience of your customers or potential customers, you have a the ultimate marketing opportunity. Content is still King, but audience is Ace.

Read Ben Elowitz's excellent PaidContent article 

Read the Time article  Content, Once King, Becomes A Pauper

The social media platforms that most advance business goals

Picking a social media network to invest in should not a popularity contest. The mass popularity of Facebook alone does not guarantee that effort put in to building a presence on it advances business goals. For many, it is the less talked about social media networks or tools that advance marketing goals the most.  
 This surfaced last year in research I did for  Social Media Today, “The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications.” When businesspeople were asked to contrast which social media networks they are using most, and compare them to which ones they are increasing investment in, different winners emerged. The results were surprising...or were they?

Which social media networks did respondents use most? No surprises here, as the big three topped the list: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

 

 

 

But when the same respondents were asked which networks and tools their organizations were increasing investment, blogs top the list, Twitter was second, and “online communities of interest” came in third.

Surprised? Don’t be. Once your content is on Facebook or LinkedIn it is fighting for the attention of a lot of other content sources. But when someone reads content on your blog, for the time they are there, it is only your content they are reading.

A well content on a positioned blog can attract a far more focused audience than similar postings on LinkedIn. Content placed on a focused private social network can have far fewer distractions than similar content placed on Facebook.

If you have drunk the social media cool aid, "own" can be a dirty word. But often to advance business goals, social media environments where the company or sponsor "owns" more of the experience yield betters business results.

Download the whole study