How the Pros Are Modernizing Content Marketing

2014/08/28

Some of our clients...

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What We’re Talking About…

TODAY WE’RE TALKING ABOUT

Content Marketing Content

1. Something about a tree falling in a forest

2. What is a successful piece of content?

3. What tools do content marketers use?

How to Market Content at Home

1. What we can all learn from little green men: co-marketing

2. Who do I target, my industry is boring, and other fun concerns

3. Why won’t anyone share my content?

How to Market Content Abroad

1. How my friends and I became famously bad writers

2. Why it’s a good idea to shop your content around

3. Why it’s a bad idea to shop your content around

Content Marketing Content

SOMETHING ABOUT A TREE FALLING IN A FOREST

Content is Useless Without Marketing

Your content promotion strategy is what brings people to your message.

Content creation without promotion is like an opera singer presenting to an empty theatre or a marketing manager organizing a huge conference and forgetting to invite the attendees.

SOMETHING ABOUT A TREE FALLING IN A FOREST

Vs.

http://www.semrush.com/blog/publications/five-steps-to-an-excellent-content-promotion-strategy/

WHAT IS A SUCCESSFUL PIECE OF CONTENT?

What is a good piece of content?

What does a business look for in good content? A nice headline? A pretty layout?

We can judge one piece of content as being better than another by the relationships and co-marketing opportunities it builds; traffic, links and social shares it generates; or the revenue that it drives.

Relationships

Traffic & Links

Revenue

WHAT IS A SUCCESSFUL PIECE OF CONTENT?

Set Goals for Particular Pieces of Content

Don’t measure all content against the same ruler. Some content generates revenue, some adds to your mailing list, some opens up doors down the road, some helps retain clients. All good goals.

Notice How I Didn’t Mention Headlines

Quality definitely helps, but when you’re looking to create a successful piece of content it isn’t about the words on the page.

Focus on marketing to achieve your goals.

WHAT TOOLS DO CONTENT MARKETERS USE?

Combining PR and Social Media Tools

Good content marketing combines PR and Social Media Marketing to reach out to the right folks at the right times.

Personally I use BuzzStream for a CRM and keeping track of outreach, HootSuite for monitoring social media, Buffer for scheduling social media posts, and an arcane email tagging structure to glue it all together.

WHAT TOOLS DO CONTENT MARKETERS USE?

We Also Leverage

1. All Site Traffic

2. Email Lists

3. Social Media Followers

4. And Existing Relationships

QUESTIONS?

How to Market Content at Home

CO-MARKETING & LITTLE GREEN MEN

Co-Marketing is the Basis for Content Promotion

Kerbal Space Program (a game) has a set of avid space fan followers. NASA also has a set of avid space fan followers. They don’t compete with each other, so they make great co-marketing partners, and managed to garner a lot of great media attention through their partnership.

CO-MARKETING & LITTLE GREEN MEN

It Worked Out Alright…

WHO DO I TARGET, MY INDUSTRY IS BORING…

Target Adjacent Markets

An adjacent market shares your customer base but does not compete directly with you.

Leverage adjacent markets for your content rather than focussing on your core product or service.

Adjacent Markets Give You Breadth

Organizations are stuck marketing what they do or sell, but what if we could tap into all of the markets that the same consumer uses? HVAC doesn’t have a huge following, but Home Improvement does.

Ask Yourself, “Are They a Good Referral?”

My sister works at a vet clinic—would a referral from a pet store such as Petsmart be good for her business? Absolutely. Whether Petsmart directly targets animal health with their content marketing doesn’t matter.

WHY WON’T ANYONE SHARE MY CONTENT?

Don’t Get Stuck In the Tactics

A lot of marketing managers see success in their competitors and want to try the same tactics. I joke that infographics and cat gifs are the true power behind SEO, but you can’t watch a magic trick to reproduce it.

The ultimate trick is to offer value to influential people in your niche.

WHY WON’T ANYONE SHARE MY CONTENT?

SEO Poetry with Powered by Search

As a case study on this principle, I asked a bunch of senior marketing managers at notable companies to write me some poetry. I promised them fun, traffic, social shares and a link to their website in return for a limerick or haiku and help promoting the piece on their own social media networks and possibly email lists or in their own blog.

WHY WON’T ANYONE SHARE MY CONTENT?

Offer Promotion – Social, Email, Organic

There will always be naysayers, but they evaporate when numbers start coming out. Show them a couple hundred social shares, a thousand visitors from email, your ten thousand monthly blog visitors.

Offer Validation – Make it About Them

You’re making their brand look good on your professional looking website. You’re stroking their ego a bit. If you can make this apparently to them before they commit, it’ll be easy.

Offer to Do The Work

Everyone is busy. If I could sell email shovels I’d be rich.

If you put in the leg work to make a project brilliant and they just happen to be involved, thirty minutes of their time is more reasonable.

QUESTIONS?

How to Market Content Abroad

ON BECOMING A WORSE WRITER

Or “How We Got A Dozen Links From Best in Class Websites”

Myia Kelly wrote an excellent piece for Hubspot, and an outsider might suspect that she went through trial by fire to get such great visibility and an awesome link. Myia’s a great marketer, but just like myself and all of the other writers who got these links, it wasn’t the quality of content that got us included.

SHOP YOUR CONTENT AROUND

We Had Already Worked Together – Poetry for a Link?

We had already worked with upwards of fifty companies in adjacent markets to us, so it was obvious to whom we were going to reach out to with our external content marketing. Some of these folks were really big names; we tried anyway.

At the end of the day, the co-marketing relationships we made let us get our content out there.

DON’T SHOP YOUR CONTENT AROUND

Why Fight For Every Article?

A link is a link, readers are readers. If you can build a content marketing relationship with a great company, do it.

The perks are fantastic; they’ll write for you, link to you, include you in contests, refer clients to you, let you into private betas, take your input on their product or services where you overlap, and chat with you when you’re tired of the grind on Friday at 4:30pm.

QUESTIONS?

THANKS FOR LISTENING!

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