Polished copy is easy now with AI. You can quickly write blog posts, social campaigns, video scripts, thought leadership essays, white papers, and podcasts at scale across every imaginable format and channel. And yet, after the content is published, it’s quickly forgotten.

What now separates authentic, smart content from forgettable (and sometimes regrettable) non-strategic content is taste.

When every piece of content imaginable is easy to make, deciding what not to make becomes the real work. The brands pulling ahead of everyone else are the ones making taste a core element of their content creation process.

Taste describes the ability to consistently distinguish what fits from what doesn’t. It’s an exercise in judgment about what deserves to exist in the first place. Taste is a skill that enables content teams to determine what’s worth an audience’s time from what merely fills a content calendar.

The Judgment Call

It used to be that content teams, measured by their ability to produce faster, more efficiently, at higher volume, had the advantage. But this edge has dulled as content has become a commodity. It’s simply not good enough to have “good enough” content.

Content that can be easily produced by tools and systems is competent and fluent by default. What’s often missing is judgment.

Judgement can’t be commoditized. Judgement is thinking. It’s like when a content team takes a dozen viable ideas and chooses only the three worth pursuing. When a person instinctively reframes a piece and trims it down so that what’s being communicated is genuine and advances the message, they’re making a judgment call.

Editors have always known what’s worth making and what’s best left out. The sharpest content teams are taking their cue from editors and gaining a competitive edge.

More Content Isn’t The Same as More Impact

Most organizations default to pursuing more content. More blog posts. More thought leadership. But publishing everything without taste doesn’t necessarily lead to better results.

Brands also risk diluting their message when they overload their audience with content. According to Accenture, 74% of empowered consumers walked away from purchases simply because they felt overwhelmed. Content overload works the same way. What readers want is clarity. If they get that from the content they read, they stay and reward brands with their trust. Bore or bombard them with content, and they often leave quietly.

The trap of producing more content is seductive because the metrics lag behind the damage. Publishing more can keep the pageviews and open rates looking fine for months, even as readers slowly lose interest. By the time the decline shows up in the numbers, the problem has been compounding for a long time—because nobody was asking whether any of it was worth making.

What “Taste” Actually Means

Taste sounds inherently subjective. You either have, or you don’t. But in practice, it’s far more concrete than its reputation suggests.

Content guardrails tell you what to do or not to do. For example, brand guidelines tell brands how to sound. Taste takes on a harder question: What’s actually worth making?

Creative taste involves a clear sense of what fits and what doesn’t. Organizations that have it know their own voice well enough that they don’t need to watch what other brands are doing (though your content is also competing for a spot in AI-generated answers).

Brands using taste to their advantage accept that not every audience segment will be served by every piece. They also know that there’s a payoff to being opinionated when it serves the strategy, because the safest content is often the least memorable.

Codifying Taste Without Killing Creativity

Taste can be scalable when shared, but avoid the temptation of turning “taste” into a checklist or formula. How can you define taste in a structured way so that creativity flourishes?

First: Show, don’t tell. Nothing communicates taste faster than showing people what good looks like and what it doesn’t. Collections of the brand’s best work, annotated with notes on why it works, give teams a reference point far more useful than abstract principles alone.

Second: Set clear principles. Principles can help lock in content teams to what taste is, as long as the principles are clear. An example, “We explain, we don’t lecture,” sets a standard while allowing for interpretation. Principles point content teams in a direction. But they also need freedom to experiment and adapt messaging without going off-brand.

The balance that works is shared standards plus human discretion. The system provides the framework. The people provide the judgment.

Editors Were Right All Along

As the volume of potential content grows, the need for experienced judgment grows with it. Senior editors and creative directors are filters. They’re the members of the team who look at a week’s worth of planned output and ask whether it actually says anything new.

Senior editorial leaders don’t just catch errors or enforce style guides; they decide whether content is worth sharing with the world. They set the standard for what makes sense while serving as a bridge between strategy and creative execution.

From a business standpoint, investing in strong editorial leadership helps manage risk. Any piece of content that falls short costs the company something, such as audience attention, brand reputation, or internal resources. Leaders who prevent mediocre work from being published help protect the value that’s hard to recover once it’s lost.

Taste Offers A Real Creative Advantage

The future of content belongs to teams who can say, with confidence, this is us, this isn’t, and this is worth your time.

Content creation will get easier as tools get better. Taste remains the throughline that keeps brands coherent, credible, and distinct.

The volume of content will keep increasing. But the organizations that treat editorial judgment as a strategic asset will be the ones whose content still matters five years from now.

Building that kind of editorial capability doesn’t happen by accident. It takes experienced leadership, shared systems, and a commitment to quality over quantity. Connect with Contently to work with expert managing editors who can help your team develop the taste and judgment that turns content from output into advantage.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

How do I build “taste” into my team if we don’t have a senior editor?

You may not have a senior editor yet, but you can still take key steps to establish “taste” guidelines for your team. First, gather five to ten pieces that your team thinks are their best work and note why each one succeeded. This will be your “taste” reference set. Next, create two or three clear editorial principles to guide decisions, but flexible enough to encourage creativity. Keep updating the reference set and refining the principles over time, revisiting them every quarter.

How do I convince leadership that publishing less content is the right move?

Leadership will likely want more. So offer a new perspective—too much content can weaken the brand and reduce trust. Also, producing too much can stretch resources thin, resulting in team burnout. Then connect the idea of less content to real results, such as the pipeline, engagement, or earned media generated in the last two quarters. Compare that data to the total output. Usually, a small portion of content drives most of the results. This data helps make your case.

How long does it take to see results after shifting from volume to judgment?

Plan for one full quarter. In month one, review past work and set standards. The team uses them on new projects in month two. By month three, expect results: better engagement, fewer revisions, and clearer priorities. This information will give your team a stronger understanding of what’s worth creating. Be sure to agree on this timeline with leadership before starting.

The post The Future of Content Belongs to the Tastemakers appeared first on Contently.

Not KPIs, not personas—entities. We know it sounds vaguely like the plot of a sci-fi film about sentient databases. But entities are real, and if AI models don’t recognize you (or your brand) as one, you may as well not exist to the millions of users currently asking AI tools for answers instead of typing searches into Google.

Somewhere between “thought leader” and “structured data,” entities are how AI search engines recognize and categorize information sources. That means your brand needs to show up as an entity and your products as their own connected entities. Beyond making your brand and flagship content machine-readable, you can tap the people within your organization who already embody that expertise—and elevate them as recognized entities, too.

So if you’ve got a CTO who wows the crowd on stage with her cutting analysis of AI ethics, or a chief economist whose byline shows up in every industry trade mag, you’re halfway there. But you still need to figure out how to turn these living, breathing experts into machine-legible profiles complete with context, connections, and citations that LLMs can actually read.

Why Internal Experts Matter in AI Search

As AI-driven search tools evolve, they’re often rewarding recognizable human expertise over anonymous brand content. Research from BrightEdge identifies author expertise as one of the key quality signals AI algorithms use to evaluate trustworthiness and relevance. In other words, an article bylined “Marketing Team” carries less authority than one attributed to a real person with verifiable experience and a digital footprint to match.

This ties into a larger shift in how credibility is gauged online. Search Engine Land notes that “verifiable authorship makes your content stand out as trustworthy in a sea of generic AI material,” recommending brands use structured data to help AI systems understand who is behind the content (more on this in a sec). When search engines and AI models can connect a name to reputable publications and other professional activity, they’re more likely to surface that expert as a reliable source.

This matters because buyers trust people more than logos. The 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report found that nearly three-quarters (73%) of decision-makers say an organization’s thought‐leadership content is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities than its marketing materials.

Put simply: Both algorithms and audiences are looking for the same thing, and that’s credibility. When brands elevate internal experts with visible, verifiable identities, they improve their odds of being cited in AI-generated answers and influencing real-world buying decisions.

Three Implementation Layers

Turning experts into search entities requires three systems working together.

1. Optimizing authorship metadata

Think of your expert pages as digital passports for your people. If AI systems can’t read the name or credentials on that passport, your content risks rejection.

This first layer is about definition, i.e., making sure every expert within your organization has a clear, consistent identity that algorithms can recognize. Maybe your head of compliance appears as “J.R. Martinez” on your blog, “John Martinez, JD” on LinkedIn, and “John Martinez” on a conference agenda. To a human, it’s obviously the same person; to an algorithm, it may be three separate entities (there’s that fun term again).

Likewise, specificity matters. The same rules that make a resume effective apply here: A vague bio like “20 years in B2B SaaS” tells a weaker story than “former VP of Product at Salesforce, led three launches generating $50M ARR, published in Harvard Business Review.” This layer is about getting the foundational data right so AI systems know who your experts are.

Action items for marketers:

• Add structured data: Use Schema.org/Person markup on every author bio to make expertise machine-readable, and link to LinkedIn and external publications.
• Standardize bylines: Keep author names, titles, and bios consistent across all platforms, and maintain a canonical author page as the single source of truth. Update on a consistent basis (quarterly or every six months) to reflect new achievements or expertise.
• Show concrete credentials: Use specific, verifiable achievements (e.g., awards, results, publications) instead of vague experience statements.

2. Building cross-platform credibility

If your experts only exist on your blog, they might as well be whispering into the void. Once identity is defined, visibility is the next layer. AI engines (and human audiences alike… those still matter too) take cues from signals across the web. A CTO who posts on LinkedIn, appears on a podcast, receives invites to CES and SXSW every year, and gets quoted in TechCrunch looks a lot more “real” to both humans and machines than one who lives exclusively on a company site.

This layer is about amplification: showing up in trusted spaces where expertise carries weight. Each verified appearance helps algorithms cross-reference your experts and build confidence in their authority.

Action items for marketers:

• Show up beyond your own domain: Encourage experts to share insights on LinkedIn, contribute guest articles, join panels, or appear on podcasts. Each mention reinforces their authority signal.
• Keep bios consistent: Use the same headshot, job title, and expertise descriptors across platforms so AI sees one cohesive identity.
• Prioritize trusted venues: Focus your experts’ visibility in the channels and publications your audience already trusts. Quality beats quantity.

3. Connecting human voices to structured data

Your VP of Product might publish a brilliant post on API security, but unless that article links her name to the subject in structured data, those insights will disappear into the algorithmic abyss. This third layer closes the loop and linking who your experts are and where they appear to what they know.

This is where human knowledge becomes data that machines can understand and reuse. By embedding structured tags and capturing expert insights in standard formats, you make it easy for AI systems to retrieve and cite that expertise again and again.

Action items for marketers:

• Connect people to topics: Use internal knowledge graphs or structured tagging to link each expert to their focus areas within your content taxonomy.
• Use Q&A formats strategically: Create FAQs or explainers where experts answer common questions, then mark up with FAQPage schema to give AI clean, citable quotes.
• Close the feedback loop: When experts share new insights or answer customer questions, capture that information in structured formats so AI systems can find and surface it.

Common Barriers to Expert Participation

Getting insights out of busy SMEs or execs is messy, political, and often lands low on their priority list. Here are the five roadblocks that show up again and again:

1. Time (and attention) scarcity. Experts are underwater. Billable work and internal projects always come first, leaving “content” to fight for scraps.
2. The curse of knowledge. The more experienced someone is, the harder it is for them to explain what they know. SMEs often skip context or assume everyone understands their shorthand, which makes it tough to extract content that’s clear and usable.
3. Legal and brand risk aversion. Some organizations hesitate to spotlight individuals, fearing off-brand messaging or intellectual property leaks.
4. Internal competition. In fields where credibility equals career capital, multiple people may want to “own” the same topic. Without guidelines for who speaks on what, thought leadership can turn into a turf war.
5. No infrastructure for knowledge capture. Most teams lack the systems to document, tag, and reuse insights efficiently. Without templates, structured interviews, or AI-assisted content extraction, valuable expertise slips through the cracks.

Extraction Tactics That Work

Most content programs stall not because experts lack ideas, but because teams lack infrastructure. When you fix the process, expert participation scales naturally.

1. Make participation low-friction. Stop asking experts to write. Instead, schedule 30-minute interviews where content teams extract insights. One conversation can fuel three blog posts, five LinkedIn updates, and a dozen quotable soundbites. Layer in micro-content opportunities, e.g., quick takes on breaking news or short Slack replies that can be repurposed later. Even better, host “office hours” where content teams drop in with questions.
2. Level up your content team. Train writers to think like interviewers. Teach them to draw out “atomic insights”—the smallest, most original nuggets of expertise that make content stand out. Close the loop by showing experts how their words evolve into polished stories.
3. Partner early with legal and comms. Bring them into the process instead of treating them as gatekeepers. Create simple review workflows and clear guardrails, e.g., what experts can and can’t comment on, how approvals work, and where quotes will appear.
4. Frame it as career growth. Recast participation as professional development. Show how visible experts land conference invites or grow their LinkedIn following. The more your people see real outcomes, the easier it is to get them on board.
5. Create repeatable extraction systems. Build interview templates by content type, e.g., thought-leadership sessions, tactical how-tos, or case-study debriefs. Run monthly roundtables where three to five SMEs discuss one topic; use AI transcription to surface quotes instantly (but have a human double-check for accuracy, of course).

The Long Game

Building expert authority takes time; you probably won’t see results in 30 days. AI systems need consistent, credible signals across platforms before they cite your experts by name in generated answers.

But bit by bit, those signals create a map of expertise that algorithms rely on. Over time, AI builds its own understanding of who knows what. The organizations that keep contributing credible information will shape how their fields are defined in the years ahead.

We can’t change the jargon, but we can make it useful. If “entities” are what the algorithms respect, your experts deserve to be recognized as some of the best.

Learn more about how Contently can help your brand build lasting visibility through expert-driven content.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

Why should marketers care about entities?

If your experts aren’t recognized as entities, their insights are harder for AI to associate with your brand. Your competitors’ names might even show up in generated answers, even if they’re referencing ideas you originated.

How can I tell if my experts are already “recognized” by AI?

Search for their names alongside key topics on Google and emerging AI search tools like Perplexity or ChatGPT’s search mode. If their profiles or quotes appear consistently, they’re already surfacing as credible entities. If not, you’ve got an opportunity to strengthen their visibility through structured data, authorship pages, and off-site presence.

What’s the fastest way to start building entity recognition, and how long does it take for results to show up?

Start small. Add Schema.org/Person markup to your expert bio pages, link those bios to LinkedIn and other verified sources, and make sure bylines and job titles are consistent across platforms. Then, publish or syndicate content where the algorithms and your audience already look for expertise.

As for how long it takes, this depends. In most cases, consistent, well-structured authorship data starts showing traction in a few months. Over time, as AI models absorb more signals, that visibility compounds.

The post How to Turn Your Internal Experts Into Search Entities appeared first on Contently.

Now, there are two ways to explain this coincidence. 1) Henry is currently a popular name for boys, so the advertisers looked at a baby name list and decided to put Henry on their ads. 2) Facebook and Instagram tracked my online behavior and created tailored ads to increase clicks and conversions.

And the correct explanation is option 2 — targeted advertising!

While this level of personalization may seem creepy and invasive, it can actually make the shopping experience more convenient, especially for people with a son named Henry. And for that, I thank Meta Ads.

But is targeted advertising always this effective?

As many times as I’ve had a smooth shopping experience after clicking on targeted ads, I’ve also been served wonky ads that made me think, “Why in the world did this company target me?”

Before we can conclusively determine the effectiveness of targeted advertising, let’s define what it is.

What is targeted advertising?

Targeted advertising is a form of online advertising that specifically caters to a particular audience based on its characteristics, interests, or behaviors. This allows businesses to reach potential customers who are interested in their products or services.

However, audiences aren’t defined by just one characteristic, which is why advertisers can use different types of targeting to reach their intended audience.

Demographic targeting — Targeting based on factors like age, gender, income, and education.

Geographic targeting — Targeting based on location, such as city, state, or country.

Behavioral targeting — Targeting based on a user’s online behavior, such as browsing history, search history, or purchase history.

Psychographic targeting — Targeting based on personality traits, values, and lifestyles.

Businesses love targeted website advertising because it allows them to deliver more relevant ads, effectively allocate their advertising budget, improve their ROI, and enhance the customer experience. Yep, even though targeted ads can feel like an invasion of privacy, personalized promotions actually improve customer satisfaction.

How can targeted advertising be used for content marketing?

Targeted advertising can be a powerful tool to maximize the impact and reach of your content marketing strategy. Essentially, content marketing provides the substance, while targeted advertising ensures the substance reaches the right audience. Together, they create a more effective and impactful marketing strategy.

But you have to make sure your targeting and content strategy work hand-in-hand to ensure a seamless experience for your customers. First, design ads that encourage users to click through to specific landing pages — blog posts, product pages, customer review pages, etc. Make sure your targeted ads on social media and search engines perfectly align with your landing page content, and visitors will be more likely to become customers.

This approach is all about creating consistency throughout the entire customer journey and can be used to promote high-performing content, retarget website visitors, promote a content series, support social media campaigns, and generate leads.

Is targeted advertising effective?

Here’s the big question: Do ads actually work? To answer that question, we need to look at the numbers:

In 2023, the value of global digital marketing reached $366 billion, and that number is expected to grow at a rate of 13.6% every year for the next decade. In fact, the majority of CMOs in the United States and Europe are planning to increase their budgets for social media marketing, online videos, and influencer marketing in addition to the 9.1% of total revenue spent in 2023.

The reason CMOs are willing to pour more money into digital and targeted advertising is because marketing data collection and analysis is getting more sophisticated every day, leading to more effective ad spend and higher ROI.

Targeted online advertising is only as effective as the advertiser. To create effective targeted advertising campaigns that reach the right audience, generate leads, and drive sales, businesses need to:

• Gather relevant data
• Analyze the data to identify trends
• Clearly define their target audience
• Develop targeted ads that resonate with their audience
• Select appropriate channels for their ads
• Test and optimize
• And monitor ad performance

Yes, you have to complete all these steps to ensure successful targeted advertising campaigns. And there are a lot of brands who are willing to do it right. And since I just got an “A deal picked just for you” alert on my phone from Amazon, let’s talk about how Amazon uses targeted ads to grow their business:

Amazon’s targeted advertising success

Amazon is a prime example of a company that has effectively leveraged targeted advertising to drive significant growth and revenue. Their targeted advertising strategies have been particularly successful in:

Personalized recommendations

Amazon uses a sophisticated algorithm to analyze customer purchase history, browsing behavior, and product reviews to provide highly personalized product recommendations. These targeted recommendations have led to a significant increase in sales, because customers are more likely to purchase products that align with their interests.

Retargeted campaigns

Amazon uses retargeting campaigns to engage customers with abandoned carts. By reminding customers of their abandoned carts and offering incentives, Amazon successfully increases conversion rates.

Lookalike audiences

Amazon expands its reach by creating lookalike audiences based on its high-value customers. By targeting users with similar characteristics, Amazon is able to acquire new customers who are more likely to complete purchases.

Dynamic product ads (DPAs)

DPAs allow Amazon to target specific products to users who have shown interest in similar items or categories. This targeted approach ensures customers see relevant products, increasing the likelihood of clicks and conversions.

What are the challenges and limitations of targeted advertising?

While targeted advertising offers many benefits, there are some potential challenges and limitations that business owners and marketers should be aware of.

Ethical concerns

Let’s be honest — data collection is creepy. “There is definitely a ‘creepy line’ for targeted advertisements,” says technologist and writer Robert Quinlivan. “We’re being slowly conditioned to accept privacy invasions as inevitable, but people are still creeped out by the ‘surprise’ factor.”

The collection and use of personal data for targeted advertising raises privacy concerns among consumers. The more personal the data (think sex, health, and finances), the less comfortable people are about others knowing it. For this reason, we now have stricter data privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, which have made the targeted advertising process more complex.

Ad fraud

Ad fraud occurs when bad actors put out bots — automated, fake users — to click on ads many times. These extra, fraudulent clicks fool companies into thinking their ads are working and puts more money in the pockets of advertising firms.

According to Imperva’s 2024 Bad Bot Report, “almost 50% of internet traffic comes from non-human sources. Bad bots, in particular, now comprise nearly one-third of all traffic.” What’s even scarier is that Bad Bots can now mimic human behavior, making it difficult to detect and prevent fraudulent clicks.

If you notice sudden traffic spikes, high bounce rates, or near-nonexistent session duration, reach out to your ad provider. You can also implement fraud prevention tools to ensure your clicks are coming from humans.

Over-targeting and ad fatigue

Over-targeting occurs when a business excessively targets a specific audience segment to the point where it becomes intrusive or irrelevant. This can lead to ad fatigue, a phenomenon where consumers become so overwhelmed by repeated exposure to the same ads that they tune them out. Excessive targeting can also lead to negative brand perception if consumers think a brand is spammy or intrusive.

You can prevent over-targeting and ad fatigue by focusing on multiple audiences and limiting your ad frequency. Also, be sure to track campaign performance to identify signs of ad fatigue, so you can make the necessary adjustments to ensure the best customer experience possible.

In short, targeted advertising is complex, and it’s not going anywhere. Yes, new regulations may make data collection more difficult, but targeted advertising has proven to effectively reach specific audiences, increase sales, maximize the impact of content marketing, and improve the customer experience. So, as you create your own targeted advertising campaigns, just remember: don’t be creepy.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs about targeted advertising

What are the ethical concerns related to targeted advertising?

Targeted advertising relies on the collection and use of personal data, which can be seen as an invasion of privacy. And consumers may not be fully aware of how their data is collected and used for targeted advertising, creating a lack of trust among consumers. This problem becomes worse when businesses share personal data with third-party advertisers, which often happens.

How can businesses effectively measure the ROI of targeted advertising campaigns?

Here are the key metrics businesses should track and analyze to determine the effectiveness of their targeted advertising campaigns: click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), brand awareness and recall, and customer lifetime value (CLTV).

What are some future trends or developments in targeted advertising?

Targeted advertising is a rapidly evolving field with several promising trends, like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, to help predict future customer behavior and preferences. Businesses will also need to adopt more privacy-focused approaches to data collection, so users can have greater control over their personal data.

For more insights on content strategy, subscribe to The Content Strategist. 

The post Targeted Advertising: Does it Actually Work? appeared first on Contently.

Bandwidth constraints aren’t the only challenge you may face when working with SMEs. Sometimes the SME recognizes the value of content but doesn’t want to work with you on it. But since that’s your job, dear content person, we’ve crafted some tips to help you succeed at getting great content from SMEs. As a start, we’ve defined four SME archetypes along with effective strategies for working with each of them them.

4 SME “Types” You May Encounter While Creating Content

SMEs fall roughly into one of four general “types” based on where they fall in relation to two dimensions: the originality of their ideas and their willingness to collaborate.

Note that the first dimension is originality, not authority or credibility. By definition, an SME has expertise in the form of knowledge, experience, or a set of skills.

The dimension here isn’t whether they are an expert or not (we are assuming they are), but whether that expertise manifests in the ability to come up with new, fresh ideas you can translate into content.

To illustrate, we’ve used the music industry and the different types of performing artists as a metaphor for the different kinds of SMEs.

Along the dimension of originality of ideas (the vertical axis), you have the cover performer in the low originality-to-low-collaboration quadrant, and the solo artist in the high originality-to-low collaboration quadrant.

Both are experts in music. But that expertise manifests for the cover performer in a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the existing songbook; while for the solo artist, it manifests in the form of new, original songs.

Shift to the right, and the low-originality-to-high-collaboration musician is a band member, while their high originality-to-high-collaboration counterpart is a front person for an ensemble (see below).

It isn’t necessarily better for you to work on content from SMEs in one quadrant over another. Any of the archetypes can contribute something useful.

Your strategy for extracting that something, however, changes depending on what you’re dealing with in any given situation.

Step number one? Ask them: How do you want to work together? Beyond that, consider the following four approaches.

Working With the Cover Performer

The cover performer has extensive expertise about your organization, its product(s), or the industries in which you operate. That expertise is static, however.

Ask them to opine on the future of the organization or the sector, and the cover performer is going to answer with, “Just the facts, ma’am.”

The cover performer also likes to take the stage alone — just them, a microphone and a guitar, and that ballad everyone knows (and often likes hearing). We summarize their strengths and challenges as follows:

Strengths

• Deep knowledge of the organization’s past and present
• Contextualizing current challenges in light of the organization’s historical context

Challenges

• Making predictions or expressing opinions about the future
• Asking for or taking advice

The cover performer will never be your go-to source for new or original content. They are essential, however, in contexts that require gravitas or institutional solidity.

Strategies for Working With the Cover Performer

• Can you leverage them in contexts that require a tone of reliability, trustworthiness, or extensive knowledge, such as product content, onboarding new employees, and investor relations?

The cover performer’s extensive knowledge about your product, organization, or industry is essential for helping new employees, customers, partners, or investors get up to speed on everything they want and need to know.

Just make sure you set them up to add value in the format that best suits them. Live or pre-recorded presentations are an option here.

• Can you leverage your cover performer’s historic relationships?

Cover performers may have a back-catalog of relationships in the organization or industry as well, making them the right interviewer for a video case study with a long-time customer or an iconic industry leader.

Working With the Solo Artist

The solo artist SME archetype has plenty of original ideas but prefers to develop and share them without input or help from others. Their resistance to content collaboration can show up as an unwillingness to contribute to a content effort at all or contributing on the condition that there are no edits or comments. We summarize their strengths and challenges as follows:

Strengths

• High volume of ideas
• High-quality ideas

Challenges

• Communicating ideas in ways that reach audiences at scale
• Communicating ideas using language/formats that engage audiences
• Contradictions with other messages from the organization

At face value, solo artists are the most challenging archetype to work with. They are unquestionably knowledgeable and authoritative — and are often heralded for that knowledge.

Their lack of willingness to collaborate can feel disrespectful to your expertise (in communications). It can also result in contradictory messages appearing in the market because they aren’t collaborating on position alignment. That can sometimes blow back to you.

So, for all of you out there dealing with a solo artist, we feel you, but… get over it. They have ideas. You need ideas. And they can’t help the way they are. Solo artists are often non-collaborative because of personality (they’re introverts), training (they came up in individualistic environments), or fear (they’ve had collaborators steal their ideas or misrepresent them in the past).

In other words, it’s not about you. The key with them is to harness the plethora of ideas they have in any way they will let you.

Strategies for Working With the Solo Artist

• Does your solo artist like to present but not write?

Film them presenting and repackage the content in smaller snippets they can use as social posts on their feed. Or publish part of the cleaned-up transcript of their presentation as a blog post with their byline (if they say it’s okay).

• Does the solo artist write in non-content-friendly formats (like through emails or over Slack)?

Capture their writings and repurpose them word-for-word (if feasible) in content assets such as “Ask an Expert” articles, FAQs, quotes, and social posts.

You need to build up trust with a solo artist — so stay close to their original work with any outputs you create and always, always give them credit.

You also may want to explore whether they have a proxy you can work with — for example, a more junior employee on their team who they already trust and who you can more easily engage with. Mediating the relationship is easier and can get you further than dealing with them directly.

Working With the Band Member

The band member is highly collaborative. They participate in brainstorms and may have a lot to say, yet the ideas they get behind may not be particularly fresh or original.

Fortunately, because of their highly honed collaborative skills, they will ask for and take advice. Their strengths and challenges are as follows:

Strengths

• Highly honed collaborative skills
• Willingness to seek and take advice and tap into others’ expertise

Challenges

• Contributing a new or unexpected perspective
• May not thrive in live or interactive contexts that require improvisation

The band member can be easy and pleasant to work with. You may walk away from a brainstorming session feeling like you had a productive conversation, only to find when you sit down to write that you don’t have much to say that hasn’t been said in other ways by other people.

This is where you and your editorial expertise come in.

Strategies for Working With the Band Member

• Can you apply the non-original ideas to a new context?

Leverage current events or moments in the news cycle to apply your boy/girl/non-binary band member’s ideas — the fresh context can liven up the ideas.

If your organization serves different industries, leverage the ideas for content geared to distinct markets. Similarly, develop content assets that speak to common issues faced by leaders in adjacent functions from your typical buyer.

• Can you leverage your band-member SME as a moderator for a podcast or webinar event featuring more iconoclastic guests?

Help your SME display their talent as an expert collaborator by having them engage other experts in a public forum in real life or through digital channels. Doing so allows them to excel in their comfort zone while drawing out the unique insights of their guests.

Working With the Ensemble Front-Person

The front person is both highly creative with their ideas and highly collaborative about evolving and communicating them. They have a lot to say, and they accept input from others. They are willing to delegate creative tasks, too.

Their strengths and challenges are as follows:

Strengths

• High output of original ideas
• Highly honed collaborative skills

Challenges

• Prioritizing which ideas and channels to explore
• Focusing long enough on one idea to finish an output

The front person seems like the easiest expert archetype to work with — and the best for producing great content. But they also bring a set of challenges.

In particular, they’re often more interested in ideation than in execution. Good luck getting them to concentrate on one idea long enough for you to create a content output.

That combination of prolific imagination coupled with prolific collaboration has them constantly rethinking an idea, asking for opinions from others, and suggesting something “better.”

By the time you circle back with a draft or explore an idea more fully, the front person is on to something else.

Strategies for Working With the Front-person

Focus on speed and volume over perfection when working with a front person.

• Can you capture their ideas and turn them into content quickly?

Prioritize outputs with a short turn-around time. Examples include social posts, Q&A blog posts, social videos based on a recorded conversation, and so on. Deprioritize anything that requires more than a week to move from ideation to first review.

• Can you leverage your front person for live or interactive events?

Front people are very good in live interactions requiring a combination of practiced responses and off-the-cuff engagement with unanticipated questions. Think live panels in which they are a discussant or press interviews.

From Expertise to Expert Content

These approaches can help you get the best content out of the different SMEs you have to work with. A word of warning, however. Customizing your approach for each SME you work with is key. It is not a cure-all, though. If you’re dealing with a person who won’t engage with you and doesn’t produce content you can leverage, you are better off shifting investment to another SME or content type.

Learn more about content strategy every week. Subscribe to The Content Strategist newsletter for more articles like this sent directly to your inbox.

The post Content Creation 101: Tips for Working With Reluctant Subject Matter Experts appeared first on Contently.

These trends reflect a transformation that has marketers losing their seats at the table, which is strange because marketing budgets are higher than ever. Overall budgets have risen to 11.8% in 2022, resetting to pre-pandemic levels.

Why this shift away from the CMO role? Companies want every position to be as efficient as possible with profitability in mind—no matter what department you work for. This transition can be challenging for CMOs who lead a department that’s traditionally been a cost center. If CMOs want to keep their seat at the table, they need to shift their focus and become obsessed with three things: customers, data, and revenue.

Prioritize Your Focus on the Customer Journey

CMOs have always been concerned about customers, but today, a CMO with a competitive edge has to prioritize their focus on the entire customer journey.

Traditionally, a CMO’s core responsibilities include market research, vetting new products, advertising, and managing the brand, all of which happen before a customer makes a purchase.

Today, savvy CMOs understand the whole customer journey impacts someone’s decision to make a purchase—from marketing to sales to support. The marketing team’s scope has widened in response and oversees everything from the initial interaction with a brand to providing engaging experiences and exceptional service.

Each of these elements affects whether or not the overall customer experience is positive, which 73% of customers say is a factor in their decision to make a purchase. And CMOs obsessed with optimizing this experience will be the most successful.

Data Management Should Be a Top Priority

People interact with almost every business online. Even if they’re not tapping a virtual credit card, they’re still researching before making a purchase.

All this online interaction creates piles and piles of data to be collected and analyzed. Keeping track of that data while ensuring you comply with privacy laws must be a top priority. Most marketing leaders think managing customer privacy falls under their job description, and 58% are taking steps to strengthen data management practices in response.

CMOs who want to stay competitive will need to do this while weaning off third-party data before the cookie dies in 2024. Almost 18% of marketers expect their use of third-party data to decline over the next two years, indicating that savvy CMOs should focus on building a robust first-party data strategy and testing alternatives like contextual targeting.

Part of managing data well includes using the smartest technology you can—CMOs can get ahead by looking for platforms that manage and analyze customer data for you while also meeting the compliance requirements for your industry.

All Activities Should Be Measured By Revenue Impact

Modern CMOs are responsible for revenue generation, and their success is measured by it. While attribution for this—like sales representative activity or the impact of an event or ad campaign—may be clear, it gets muddier when you start digging into activity that happens earlier in the customer journey. The modern CMO should seek to advance their measurement capabilities so that single-touch or multi-touch attribution is possible for all marketing activities.

Contently has built a maturity model to guide companies looking to advance their digital marketing measurement in four easy-to-follow steps: crawl, walk, run, and fly.

Gaining Back a Competitive Edge Is Within Reach for CMOs

The fate of the CMO isn’t sealed—far from it. The role is just transforming. The CMO’s fate depends on their ability to focus on the customer, manage their data, and measure the impact marketing has on revenue.

Gaining back your competitive edge is a matter of shifting focus to the customer journey and measuring your success by revenue. Schedule a demo to learn how working with Contently will tie your content marketing efforts back to revenue and accurately measure your content’s impact on your customer experience.

The post Marketers Are Behind: Here’s How to Win Back that Competitive Edge appeared first on Contently.

Where do Chief Content Officers fall in the hierarchy?

Creative teams, made up of copywriters, graphic artists, videographers, web designers, and more, are usually under the brand function of enterprise organizations. Many companies diversify their structure by creating content teams under a demand generation function of marketing as well.

When you think of content marketing, you probably think of multi-media influence across mediums. It’s an omnichannel experience, and content marketers must rise to the challenge of communicating with their target audience in a personalized, meaningful way to engage and delight them. The reward? Their interest, following, engagement, and (hopefully) conversion to a customer. If you do it right, you gain trust, loyalty, and advocacy for your brand. For this reason, content creators typically fall under the marketing function, and marketers are often led by Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs).

Since 56% of Chief Content Officers have been appointed since 2016, the hierarchy within each organization might look different. At some, a CMO will lead the marketing department and hire a VP of Content Marketing to run content strategy and production. At other organizations, CMOs and CCOs both have a seat at the executive table. So, why isn’t Chief Content Officer a more prominent title? Well, it’s the same reason that CMOs are finding it harder and harder to maintain their executive presence.

What CMOs and CCOs currently lack

CMOs are falling behind their peers when it comes to tech adoption and data-driven strategy. That’s because our world is rapidly evolving, and technology is reshaping the way we approach business. While marketers have adopted technology that helps optimize their campaigns, they are slower to adopt more advanced technology for a few reasons. The first is their budget. A CMO’s budget is usually not as high as some of their counterparts, making it difficult to adopt more expensive technologies at scale to showcase the value-add it would provide to their teams. In addition, marketers house several creatives who are worried about the impact of AI and machine learning on their creative skillset. Finally, marketers have one of the most difficult jobs when it comes to proving brand awareness, attributing prospect engagement to marketing spend, and showcasing the ROI that is directly derived from creative content. Why? It all comes down to one major problem… Humans are complex creatures.

Sounds like brands just need to set up more Match profiles, right? How well has online dating worked for you? Same concept here. Market research is extremely helpful for strategy and execution, but again… what works for one person won’t work for someone else. We all have unique needs and desires. Go figure. No wonder both dating and marketing are so difficult.

So, why aren’t Chief Content Officers a bigger “thing”? Well, I’d argue it comes down to showcasing value—specifically, value down to the dollar. How much is the ROI for investment in expensive brand awareness campaigns? What about that content budget to create hype videos, thought leadership blogs, branded podcasts, influencer webinars, etc.?

Becoming more data-driven with help from technology

Chief Content Officers are few and far between, but they are becoming more prevalent. While we can’t all be as cool as the first-ever CCO, Ann Handley of MarketingProfs, we can strive to achieve greater impact at our organizations by taking a more data-driven and human approach to our content. Great content comes from great research, expertise, and a commitment to quality. That’s why understanding your market is so important to content strategy, creation, and execution. You need to understand your audience and cater to their needs. And prioritizing personalized content at a rigorous scale requires a technology partner to help you do it. Let’s face it. The world isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Tech advancements aren’t either. As content marketers, we must be prepared to earn our seat at the table with data-driven strategy and tech-savvy processes that amplify our programs and create measurable impact.

How can you possibly do that, you ask? Well, we’re approaching a time where the Fly stage of our Content Maturity Model is necessary to move the needle. We need to adopt technology as our partners to scale our content programs and create more meaningful engagement with our targets.

Leverage AI to connect with individual consumers

Just imagine what you could do if you leveraged AI to help you understand the buyer’s journey of every individual customer. Michaels is a great example of hyper-personalization success. Susan is interested in purchasing 10 new easels for her art studio. She is a frequent shopper at Michaels and wants to see their prices. She searches online to see the different options and puts one in her digital shopping cart. Suddenly, Susan gets a message from her partner and exits her browser. She’s forgotten about the easels.

Marketers currently use retargeting to try and jog Susan’s memory. She may see Michaels put an ad on her Facebook feed or send an email with the Subject: Forget something? Your easel is waiting.

But let’s go back to when Susan put the item in her cart. Say she purchased it. How many people still get those ads showing the same product for purchase?

Now, what if Michaels knew Susan was interested in learning more about crafting? As a professional painter, she is passionate about her trade but wants to expand her studio to make it welcoming for everyone. Michaels hosts classes for different arts & crafts, teaching interested participants like Susan how to make wreaths, create jewelry, or frame portraits. What if we knew Susan well enough to know she’d inquired about a jewelry class at the same time she was looking to purchase those easels? Could we create a better opportunity to educate her on the new class Michaels offers for jewelry making?

CMOs and CCOs have an incredible opportunity here. It’s an opportunity to drive personal connection with their consumer through data-driven insights that were readily available to them directly from the consumer. So many of us can relate to poor personalized experiences with brands. We fill out a form online only to talk to a customer service agent who asks us to repeat ourselves. With AI-driven technology, marketers and content creators can take customer experiences to a whole new level. Just think of the customer satisfaction and what benefits you could gain from listening more intently to what your customers want from you.

An Opportunity for Data-Driven Strategy

Technology helps us leverage the data we have on our customers to create seamless buyer experiences and more authentic communications. Ultimately, Michaels wants to help Susan fulfill her dream of owning an inclusive art studio where everyone can find something to create. Michaels wants to be her loyal partner for both the training she wants to pursue and the supplies she needs to make her studio dream a reality. So, how can we create holistic consumer experiences the way Michaels wants to with Susan?

We must create consistent user experiences, leverage the consumer data we have to create more meaningful connections, and track the content each individual consumes throughout their buyer’s journey.

There are several tools on the market to help you achieve these goals. With PathFactory, you can create binge-worthy content experiences with tracks that line up content for consumption based on prior interest. Hubspot allows you to track email, social, and blog interaction and integrate with other platforms to understand the impact of your content throughout the buyer’s journey. You can also integrate UTMs into every piece of your content and connect it back to Salesforce campaigns to show click-throughs and catalog the dates they were accessed. Plus, you can identify how much you would spend in CPC and search to gain the same amount of engagement with Contently’s Content Value Tracker.

It’s a pivotal point in time for content marketers. It’s never been more important to showcase the impact of content, especially in the age of AI and digital transformation. We are at a turning point, and we can either embrace the change with open arms or let it overcome us. Those looking to become Chief Content Officers must prioritize data-driven insights and technology adoption to keep pace with their peers. It’s time to be a part of the conversation. It’s one that will influence the way businesses communicate in the future. It’s time to educate ourselves and level up our playing field so that CCOs are more widely known as an integral part of the C-Suite. We must understand the technology that powers our decisions and create strategies to drive greater impact for our organizations.

Stay informed on the latest content trends, industry insights, and news. Subscribe to The Content Strategist to receive weekly updates.

The post Why Isn’t Chief Content Officer a Bigger “Thing” Yet? appeared first on Contently.

The discourse around tech—specifically B2B tech—often comes in the form of thought leadership content. What does the future have in store for us? And how can new technology help us solve big problems?

It’s vital that we ask these questions, but there’s a disconnect in the way B2B marketers are answering them.

According to 2020 joint study from LinkedIn and Edelman, 89 percent of B2B decision-makers believe thought leadership enhanced the perceptions of an organization, while nearly half (49 percent) claimed that thought leadership influenced their purchasing decisions. However, the results “show that 85% of decision-makers feel that current content under-delivers on quality.”

When I started freelancing for a billon-dollar B2B tech giant, I saw this problem firsthand. My role consisted of writing and editing, but after three months, I was asked to put together a training session to help the internal team, based on all the press releases, blog posts, case studies, and site copy they’d created.

Here are the three biggest mistakes that crept into the content along with advice I offered for how to fix them.

1. Focusing too much on consumer technology

Good writing should be engaging. But marketers shouldn’t prioritize entertainment value over relevance. When sifting through my client’s work, I noticed that some content creators were throwing in references to exciting consumer technologies like driverless cars when the topic of choice was, say, cloud computing.

These mentions were clearly added to make blog posts more appealing, but they didn’t really tie back to the point of the piece. By attempting to improve engagement this way, the writers actually got the opposite result. B2B decision-makers are usually knowledgeable in their fields, so incorporating unrelated topics will turn them off.

As a journalist, I receive dozens of thought leadership bylines every week via email, so I understand that it’s difficult to stand out, especially with technical subject matter. But your audience might walk away with a negative perception of your brand if you just shoehorn in trending topics.

What you should do instead:

Thought leadership content is meant to be strategic, so stay focused on the topic at hand. Unique advice can stand on its own. Plus, a niche audience will probably geek out over the specifics.

I’m glad marketers are pushing to be more creative, but analogies and cultural references work best in small doses. If you find a relevant example that can provide a new way of thinking about complex technology, go for it. But make sure the connection is clear.

2. Abandoning the hook

Some of the strongest blog posts I’ve reviewed began with a strong narrative like a news hook or an anecdote. Over time, though, the narrative thread disappeared as the piece went on. By the conclusion, the initial story was almost completely forgotten. This is a structural problem that plagues a lot of B2B content marketing.

If you don’t follow through with your story, the piece won’t flow as well—or leave as strong of an impression.

What you should do instead:

Endings are often the hardest part to write. You’re almost across the finish line, you’ve developed a clear thesis, and now you just want to get the article up on the site. I see this as a planning error. If you create an outline before you start writing, you can map out a conclusion that ties together everything that comes before it.

My client’s best pieces of content continued the narrative. In some cases, all they needed to add was a few words or a single sentence that alluded to the intro. To see this in action, check out this link to an article about content fluency on The Content Strategist.

3. Using jargon as a crutch

When trying to appeal to a senior audience, there’s always a temptation to use flowery language and longer sentences. Also, thought leadership content tends to be littered with jargon, especially in B2B tech. These articles articles read more like press releases than insightful opinions.

One phrase I encountered a lot with my client was “in this fast-paced digital world.” Frankly, this term doesn’t really mean anything, so I advised them to stop using it.

What you should do instead:

Iron out the unnecessary words from your content. Concise writing is more effective for the B2B audience. If decision-makers believe their time is valuable, then make sure every creative choice you make delivers something of value.

I try to address this before I start writing by asking a basic question: What do you want to achieve with this piece? That way, when you’re done working, you can refer to the answer as you’re proofing. You’ll almost always catch some fluff before it goes back to the editor, manager, or in this case, back to the client.

The post 3 Big B2B Content Marketing Mistakes—And What You Should Do Instead appeared first on Contently.

How Dubin pulled it off is the stuff of marketing legend. His company, Dollar Shave Club, rose from obscurity in 2012 after he created a YouTube video called “Our Blades Are F***ing Great.” The video only cost a few thousand dollars to produce, but it caught mainstream attention. It established Dollar Shave Club as a funny, irreverent, bold, and most importantly, helpful brand.

Brands love to talk about going viral; Dubin actually did it. He created a single piece of content, and suddenly, millions of people knew about his business. Better yet, that awareness led to revenue. Within two days, Dollar Shave Club had more than 12,000 orders. (The response was so overwhelming that it crashed the company website) The company’s annual revenue rose millions year after year. And in 2017, Unilever bought it for $1 billion.

That’s quite the fairy tale, right? Well, Dollar Shave Club’s origin story is a little more complex than it seems at first glance.

The brand’s success was about more than just going viral or getting lucky. Like other companies that have mastered content marketing, Dollar Shave Club had a clear mission, audience research, a unique voice, and high-quality storytelling.

Content marketers in all industries can learn from these examples. You don’t need an unlimited budget or a team of 80 to drive business results (although more resources is always nice.) But what you do need is an understanding of the different components that’ll set your company up for content marketing success.

A model for success

A brand is just the sum of all interactions someone has with a company. Every purchase, TV commercial, customer service call, and tweet contributes to the relationship, whether good or bad. Over the past decade, content marketing has become one of the primary ways brands build those relationships. If you want to drive awareness, trust, and loyalty, great storytelling is much more effective than intrusive ads or overt promotion.

Engaging the right audience starts with a basic question: How are you going to help someone?

As Joe Lazauskas, our director of content strategy, writes:

“The easiest way to build those relationships is to genuinely help people. If you’re B2B, help people get better at their job and move up in their careers. If you’re B2C, help them enjoy personal passions (travel, fitness, wellness, food, sports, etc.) more. If you help someone master their little corner of the universe a little bit better, they’ll trust you.”

Marketers think they have to be perfect at this from the very beginning, but building a brand takes time. If you do things right, you’ll start to see progress.

Just ask Michael Dubin. Dollar Shave Club didn’t happen overnight. “The beginning of the story is about solving a problem for guys,” he told Fortune magazine in 2015.

With that simple sentence, Dubin clearly articulated the blueprint for meaningful content marketing. First, he started with a problem—razors are too expensive and inaccessible. He locked in on a specific audience—guys, specifically people old enough to shave who wanted simplicity over luxury. Then, he found a way to reach them and solve that problem—a subscription service that brought them razors for one dollar per month. That foundation established why the brand existed, which would serve every video, blog post, and marketing asset to follow.

You see, the billion-dollar deal had little to do with Dollar Shave Club’s products. Dubin actually bought razors pre-made from a wholesaler named Dorco. What Unilever really wanted was access to the relationships Dollar Shave Club had fostered through content.

The brand invested heavily after the success of the YouTube video. It started sending customers a monthly print magazine called The Bathroom Minutes with their razors. There was a popular Father’s Day video series. Then came Mel Magazine, a digital publication that specializes in ambitious, longform stories on topics off the beaten path. It’s the only place you can read about people who refuse to drink water or watch documentaries about former Harvard graduates who become medieval fighters.

At the time of the sale in 2017, Dubin had more than 3 million subscribers coming back for more every month.

Building this type of content program is so difficult because it requires the perfect combination of strategy, talent, process, and tools. Contently developed our own Content Maturity Model to show what the different phases of success look like:

Based on all the market research we’ve compiled over the last decade, too many brands are still stuck in content chaos. They may publish a blog sporadically or create marketing assets they hope will drive business results. We know this approach doesn’t work long term. A Contently study found that 98 percent of senior marketers believe that having and following a content strategy is crucial, but only 55 percent actually have a documented strategy.

What’s causing this disconnect? Why is 65 percent of content either unusable or unfindable, according to SiriusDecisions? And why are 75 percent of B2B organizations without a formalized content process?

To help marketers right the ship, we’ve releasing a series of five playbooks over the next few months. They’ll cover:

• Brand Awareness & Thought Leadership
• Lead Generation
• Scale & Alignment
• Sales Enablement
• Retention

For each e-book, we spoke with some of the most insightful content marketers out there to uncover their biggest tips and pain points. By the end of the series, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about building your brand, setting up effective internal processes, and proving the value of content marketing throughout your organization.

Whether you work in B2B or B2C, the goal of these playbooks is to get you out of content chaos and on the path to content mastery. Let’s get started.

This is an excerpt from The Content Marketer’s Playbook: Brand Awareness & Thought Leadership. Click here to read the entire first e-book.

The post How to Build Brand Awareness & Thought Leadership appeared first on Contently.

2. Write complete paragraphs (looking at you, LinkedIn poets).

3. Ease up on the allegories.

4. Take the passive-aggressive email subscribe box off your blog.

5. If you’re going to critique something, call out real names and companies.

6. Don’t create your own buzzwords.

7. Remember that nobody cares about your business awards.

8. Remove all inspirational quotes from your social posts.

9. Stop writing on glass walls with a dry erase marker.

10. Don’t brag about how you only sleep four hours a night.

11. Hashtag responsibly.

12. Limit yourself to two goofy headshots on your website.

13. Think really, really hard before you launch a new podcast.

14. Never talk about how many followers you have.

15. Don’t post your personal phone number online and ask people to text you.

16. Take the number of pop-ups on your site, divide by two, and subtract by whatever number leaves you with one.

17. Only ask your followers questions if you actually care about their answers.

18. Write your own blog posts.

19. Don’t try to convince people that simple insights are profound.

20. Be honest about whether you’re really a bestselling author.

21. Seriously, be honest.

The post 21 Rules for Being a Better Thought Leader appeared first on Contently.

-Susan, New York

When you read headlines like “The Washington Post’s Robot Reporter Has Published 850 Articles in the Past Year,” it’s bound to give you nightmares. Hell, I just had a nightmare that Contently fired me and replaced me with robot Will Smith, which is probably a sign I need to stop watching I, Robot every time I fly Delta.

While automation is destined to disrupt our professional lives to an epic degree over the next decade, I don’t think most writers should be worried. They just need to hone their skills to do the things robots cannot.

Algorithms like Heliograph, the Washington Post’s AI technology that spits out short articles, have gotten pretty damn good at relaying objective information backed by data, such as recaps of sporting events and analysis of financial reports. These are boring, formulaic assignments usually given to cub reporters in newsrooms as a form of hazing before they move up the ranks. It’s such a brainless activity that many reporters simply use a Mad Libs-style template to produce them.

What the robots aren’t very good at, however, is telling stories that build an emotional connection with an audience. They can’t connect with a reader by sharing a personal anecdote or describing the protagonist of a story with a vivid description. Robot writers can’t use the first person—at least not until we reach the singularity.

Neuroscience tells us these are the exact stories that build human connection. Our brains are wired to light up when we can relate to a narrative. That’s why a story in a far-out world like Star Wars works; Luke is the archetype of the working-class underdog called to great adventure, riding around in spaceships that look like 1950s hot rods. Even though the Star Wars universe is foreign on the surface, we can still connect to Luke and the world he inhabits.

This dynamic can also apply to B2B blog posts. I was the editor-in-chief of Contently’s blog, The Content Strategist, for years. The worst performing posts were the ones that began with bland stats or facts. The best stories began with a personal anecdote or a vivid scene that marketers could relate to—like this confessional about my biggest shortcomings or this profile of Marriott’s newsroom.

I often speak to college students who want to become professional writers. A lot of professors still preach the old-school route—cutting your teeth as an entry-level reporter writing straightforward news stories. While these assignments can make you a more concise writer, those jobs are going away. If you want to make it in 2018, you need to be able to find unique, human stories, and tell them with an engaging voice. And you need to be able to tell those stories across mediums—text, video, audio, graphics, and everything in between.

Should content strategists make an investment to learn to program Hadoop (on top of other data analysis tools), and would that help make us more marketable to work at Contently?

—Kate, New York, NY

This is a question that Shane Snow and I didn’t get to answer during the Facebook Live Q&A we did to promote our new book. So Kate, sorry for the delay.

The answer to your question: One hundred percent yes! Data skills are at the top of our job requirements for content strategists. It’s incredibly important to be able to analyze first- and third-party data to figure out what your target audience craves. We just hired a new content strategists (sup, Kema!) and she’s in the middle of a month-long crash course on data analysis. But one of the things that impressed us the most was how she used data strategically to optimize content programs at her previous jobs.

As I wrote in this Ask a Content Strategist column about creating data-driven content, data analysis is just the first step in coming up with a breakthrough strategy. It provides the creative constraints to unleash your best ideas. Plus, it ensures that you’re covering topics that interest your audience in the formats and channels they care about.

I have had reasonable success with Twitter about a year in with 1,100 followers. However, I don’t know how to handle my Facebook. I never really paid attention to it, but would like to retool it to be a way to promote content marketing towards a content marketing audience. Is there a way to do this? As it stands I have 240 followers, but they’re mostly unengaged, and I’m lucky to get more than 20 likes for my most popular content.

—Jason, Detroit

At the end of 2017, aspiring Black Mirror villain Mark Zuckerberg made a New Year’s resolution to crush the hopes and dreams of any marketer or media company hoping to generate organic engagement on Facebook. And boy, did he deliver.

The traditional Facebook game plan—posting links to interesting stories and videos with a compelling teaser—just doesn’t work anymore. However, there are a few tactics that still do:

Post from your personal account: Facebook is now prioritizing posts from individuals instead of media and brand pages. So content you post from your personal account will now get a boost.

This only works, of course, if you are friends with a lot of people in your target audience. I don’t know about you, but I’m friends with very few people in the content marketing community on Facebook. I relegate those relationships to Twitter and LinkedIn. I only use Facebook for big work announcements, like when my book came out or when I won the Contently company photo for a third straight year.

Really nailed the @contently company photo this year pic.twitter.com/GE6r3aAe4K

— Joe Lazauskas (@JoeLazauskas) January 18, 2018

Facebook groups: Search out active Facebook groups that align with your target audience. Since you’re a content marketer trying to reach content marketers (so meta!), I’d suggest the Content Strategists group on Facebook. It’s private, but pretty easy to get in.

Then, be a good community member. Don’t just promote your own crap. Like and comment on other people’s posts. Share interesting things you’ve read that aren’t from your own blog. Facebook still promotes content from groups, although that could change at any time.

Facebook Live: Facebook isn’t as hot on Live video as it was two years ago, but it still juices live video much more than any other medium in its feed. You can set up a serviceable Facebook Live studio in your living room for about $60. Just get a $30 iPhone tripod off Amazon, a decent bluetooth lapel mic that connects to your iPhone, and have at it. Just be sure to teach people something interesting, and keep it short.

Facebook ads: Facebook may be a black hole for organic engagement, but it’s still the best paid content distribution platform on earth—even for B2B. We used Facebook ads to triple our email list in a few months, optimizing for posts that led to a higher newsletter conversion rate.

That’s how I’d recommend using Facebook ads—drive folks to blog content that compels them to sign up for your newsletter. Then you can have a direct relationship with them instead of relying on Facebook’s fickle algorithm.

Focus on LinkedIn instead: After substantially improving the way content appears in the feed, LinkedIn is having a moment. Native LinkedIn videos and LinkedIn Pulse articles get incredible reach. Among the four big social networks, LinkedIn was by far the biggest driver of sales for our book. Hundreds of marketers liked every excerpt we published.

I’d still exercise the same caution with LinkedIn as with Facebook: Don’t build your audience on rented land. But it’s a pretty great place to get out your story right now.

If you want a master class in using LinkedIn to reach content marketers with content marketing, just follow Trackmaven CEO Allen Gannett. That man has it figured out. And he’s one hell of a dresser.

Wool vs polyester @Allen @JoeLazauskas pic.twitter.com/W7rBH9u8W3

— Katrina Neal (@katrina_neal) September 8, 2017

I think my shoes worked better, but it’s up for debate.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s head of content strategy and co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: When Will the Robot Writers Take Over? appeared first on Contently.

If we learned anything from last year, it’s that marketers are striving for accountability more than ever. They’re no longer just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Budgets have a purpose. Strategies get developed with long-term vision. And results need to be tangible.

As content marketing continues to transform in 2018, here are 24 predictions that will keep you one step ahead.

1. “Content marketing” will cease to be thought of as just a top-of-funnel activity for building an audience. Instead, marketers will realize content is the golden thread that connects every experience in the customer journey. Great stories aren’t just crucial for articles and videos; they’ll be necessary for case studies and sales decks as well. (Tweet this!)

-Joe Lazauskas, director of content strategy

2. Less quantity, more quality. Smart brands will reduce the amount of content they produce, using that budget to improve the production value of everything they create. (Tweet this!)

-Shane Snow, co-founder

3. For a while now, brands have tried creating their own podcasts without much success. This year, I think brands will sponsor individual episodes of existing podcasts that are already popular. (Tweet this!)

-Alli Manning, director of talent and editorial services

4. Content marketing initiatives will become table stakes for marketers to compete in their fields and keep their jobs. (Tweet this!)

-Greg Merson, sales operations manager

5. Brands will make much better use of persona research and buyer’s journey stages when planning and executing their content strategies. (Tweet this!)

-Kelly Wenzel, CMO

6. B2C companies will take more of a public stand on key topics, especially social issues, which will be reflected in their content. (Tweet this!)

-Cyrus Park, implementation manager

7. Paid distribution will lean heavily toward video as content marketers add YouTube and Facebook video to their list of most important channels. (Tweet this!)

-Felicity Blance, manager of distribution services

8. To prove their value, marketing teams will put a lot of effort into creating content that can be used across all departments. (Tweet this!)

-Luke Maloney, senior sales executive

9. The past few years have focused on the mechanics of content marketing—how the sausage is made. In 2018, brand leaders will return to a fundamental question: How good is the sausage? (Tweet this!)

-Erin Nelson, senior managing editor

10. Content marketing and revenue are going to become great friends. As marketing systems get more integrated, marketers are going to be able to prove their content marketing initiatives drive meaningful revenue. With that quantified data, the pressure will be on to consistently increase the number. (Tweet this!)

-John Fernandez, VP of revenue marketing

11. To stay relevant but avoid adding to the noise of shortform video, brands will experiment with animation, motion graphics, and other advanced forms of multimedia. (Tweet this!)

-Brian Maehl, manager of talent and editorial services

12. CMOs will become increasingly obsessed with transparency across lines of business, different campaigns, and executive teams. (Tweet this!)

-Adrienne Todd, communications specialist

13. Content marketing platforms will begin to consolidate as larger software companies look to make acquisitions. Expect these big companies to include content marketing offerings as a standard part of their marketing cloud solutions. (Tweet this!)

-Dillon Baker, product marketing specialist

14. Marketers will opt for more a strategic approach to content creation, delivery, and optimization that is powered by artificial intelligence. As a result, they will automate personalized customer experiences across the entire content journey like never before. (Tweet this!)

-Priyamvadha Ramakrishnan, content distribution associate

15. Organizations will get more sophisticated and truly look to measure ROI in meaningful ways. (Tweet this!)

-Rob Haber, director of customer success

16. Brands will look at how their systems connect to make it easy for anyone in the entire organization to access any content that’s created. (Tweet this!)

-Alicia Phuah, account manager

17. We’ll see more content marketing connected to the internet of things. The internet of things is all about providing convenience, and anything brands can do to make their customers’ lives easier is a win. (Tweet this!)

-Ann Fabens-Lassen, chief of staff

18. Enterprise brands will start embracing the “center of excellence” approach we have been preaching for years. For marketers to succeed in the age of digital transformation, their approach to content marketing and marketing content must mature and evolve. (Tweet this!)

-Henry Bruce, VP of product marketing

19. Brands will talk a lot about delivering a frictionless content experience to their consumers by analyzing online and offline behavior. But the key phrase here is “talk a lot about” because the majority of brands are years away from successfully tackling this challenge. (Tweet this!)

-Syd Alperowicz, senior product manager

20. There will be an excess of founders posting thought leadership videos on LinkedIn. A lot of it will sound vaguely Vaynerchuk-ian, and a lot more will sound like two-minute TED talks. (Tweet this!)

-Colton Cox, outreach associate

21. As Fortune 1000 CMOs learn of the successes achieved by the likes of RBC, Morgan Stanley, Manulife, and IBM, they will accelerate the shift of marketing dollars from traditional marketing channels into content marketing. In particular, these executives will leverage content marketing platforms to drive this shift. (Tweet this!)

-Gavin Power, VP of finance

22. So many of us believe multimedia will rule, yet brands shy away from investing because of the sticker price. However, there are big payoffs to prioritizing social-first videos and graphics that deliver your messaging in a relatable and shareable way. (Tweet this!)

-Ines Tamaddon, content strategist

23. The smartest marketers will have an increased desire to completely understand the ROI behind their content programs. (Tweet this!)

-Marc Schraer, SVP of sales

24. Hot takes will cool down. Even though creators will keep manipulating algorithms and peddling clickbait, I think we’ve finally reached the threshold of fatigue. Companies that treat their audience with intelligence will gain a huge advantage when customers are ready to make a purchase. (Tweet this!)

-Jordan Teicher, editor-in-chief

The post 24 Content Marketing Predictions for 2018 appeared first on Contently.

That’s why, much to some people’s chagrin, the term just won’t go away. Thought leadership has fundamentally changed in the age of smartphones and social media. It’s become more effective thanks to the low cost of digital distribution and the ability for individuals to cultivate their own followings. While building up an executive as a thought leader once required an immense PR effort, professionals with loyal followings and powerful influence are now a dime a dozen.

CEOs, in particular, have become social media rockstars. Elon Musk, Marc Benioff, and Mark Zuckerberg are easy examples. But not every CEO uses social media. According to new research from CEO.com and Domo, 60 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have no social media presence whatsoever.

CEO.com found the result incongruous with best practices. As the company writes in the report, “Social media… has a major impact on brand reputation. A CEO can either participate in the discussion and influence it, or risk the implications of allowing his or her corporate image to be decided in the court of public opinion.”

It’s worth noting, however, that social media thought leadership tends to have more of an impact in certain industries. The study found that executives from technology, retail, media, and entertainment were most active, while energy and air travel were the least active. B2C industries need to play in the public square, while B2B industries can afford to be more targeted with their approach.

The more active industries tend to be more competitive as well, so companies want their executives front and center in real-time. Tech executives, for example, need to shape and promote company vision. Exxon’s CEO, on the other hand, would probably rather avoid public scrutiny and let his company do the boring work of slowly gaining market share.

The report also analyzes which social media networks play host to CEOs. A majority of them are only on one or two networks at most—only five executives are on four networks, and only one (Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi) is on five. For those who are active on social, LinkedIn tends to be the first choice, followed by Twitter. Every other social network lags behind in a major way: 40 F500 CEOs use Facebook (but only eight are active), while 11 are on Instagram.

This data points to a broader truth: For influencers, there are really only two viable social platforms. Twitter is the perfect place to influence media narratives since the press spend more time posting and scrolling than they do writing their own stories. LinkedIn, meanwhile, is an excellent place to build clout in industry circles.

After finishing the report, I was curious how all of this social activity affected the bottomline. If the study has a flaw or gap, this is it. The writers admit as much, saying that a major reason why some CEOs are still hesitant to get on board is because it’s hard to “capture and understand the ROI from digital marketing and social media activity.” That’s an industry-wide problem, and it likely won’t go away anytime soon.

That said, it would be unwise for company leadership to ignore social. While influence is hard to measure, social gives executives a unique opportunity to join and shape public conversation. That will always be important, no matter how thought leadership continues to evolve.

The post How the World’s Top CEOs Use Social Media appeared first on Contently.

So let’s get into it. Here’s what you asked this month:

We’ve been using the term “thought leadership” internally for a while. Is it okay to use that term for the general public? Does it mean anything or resonate with people outside of content marketing, communications, and publishing?

-Jason, New York

On Friday night, I was sitting on my roof with some friends when the subject of content marketing came up. Or more specifically, the subject of how I won’t ever stop talking about content marketing with two my friends, Contently co-founder Shane Snow and Jessica “Jess at Contently” Black.

My roommate Brandon, who doesn’t work in content marketing, looked at us and ranted: “I go to the bathroom for thirty seconds, and when I come back, you’re screaming at each other about thought leadership and brand storytelling. What the hell are you guys talking about?”

We laughed, but there’s an important lesson here: You have to remember that not everyone lives in your industry-speak bubble.

True thought leadership consists of thought-provoking ideas, perspectives, and research. It should pique people’s interest and make them think about concepts in a new way. There’s no situation where you should have to tell people that they’re reading “thought leadership.” That’s incredibly pompous and lame—it’s the equivalent of going around telling people that you’re really smart.

In my experience, people outside of marketing and communications have no idea what thought leadership means. Media professionals may not have any idea either. Yesterday, I asked some editor friends if they’d heard of the term, and they thought it was absurd.

The term definitely has value for those of us who work in marketing because it’s part of our common language. But it should only be used inside that bubble, and we should use it carefully. A lot of what we call thought leadership isn’t thought leadership at all, It’s one of the most poorly used buzzwords in marketing (as I explain here, in GIFs.)

Are there negative repercussions to repeating messages/content/posts across your media channels all at once versus sharing the same message at different times?

-Michael, Chicago

I’d question whether you want to share the same message across all of your channels. Each channel is unique. An effective LinkedIn update will have different copy than a tweet, which will have different copy than an email blast. It helps to think about the context of your message when planning these posts.

While there aren’t any major repercussions for blasting out an update across channels, it’s not a good strategy. There are a lot of tools that’ll make educated guesses about when your audience will be most engaged on each channel. For social, we rely on Buffer to automate the best time for posting on different networks. For newsletters, a lot of email service providers (such as MailChimp) have this functionality as well. This is one of those situations in which it helps to trust the algorithms.

Where is the best place, virtual or otherwise, to take classes for content writing/creation/strategy for those of us who are not digital natives?

-Margaret, Providence, RI

Most people would suggest that you take an online content marketing class like Copyblogger’s well-regarded Authority course, but I’d suggest that you start somewhere else: take an in-person writing workshop.

We’re in an era when only the best content breaks through. The top five percent of branded content garners 90 percent of the attention. As a result, the first step for anyone interested in content marketing is to get your writing and storytelling skills up to that level.

I went to Sarah Lawrence College, a liberal arts school just outside New York City. Although I left college a happily employed journalist/blogger, I didn’t take journalism classes. Instead, I took a number of non-fiction and fiction writing workshops where my writing was torn apart. In the process, I developed my voice, tightened my language, and became a better editor. Those skills made me a more effective editor of our college newspaper and helped me pick up digital media gigs in New York.

Once you start to develop those skills, then look into a content course like what Copyblogger offers. Additionally, you should just start writing on your own. Storytelling is like any skill—you’re going to struggle at first, but with practice you’ll only get better.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s director of content strategy and editor-in-chief of The Content Strategist. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: Does Thought Leadership Mean Anything to Regular People? appeared first on Contently.

Tesla’s investment in the Gigafactory is the company’s latest bid to accelerate sustainable energy adoption. “It’s worth highlighting the sheer scale of the Gigafactory,” Elon Musk, the famed CEO of Tesla, said in an address to Nevada legislators, who brokered the deal. “It’s not just going to be the biggest lithium ion battery factory in the world—it will be bigger than the sum of all other lithium battery factories in the world.”

In addition to its size, viewers have said it looks like its own city, the Gigafactory signals a significant shift in Tesla’s business model. While the company is often assumed to be a luxury auto-manufacturer, the Gigafactory is the manifestation of Musk’s mass-market vision.

In a 2006 blog post, Musk revealed his secret plan to “Build a sports car/ Use that money to build an affordable car / Use that money to build an even more affordable car.” Eleven years later, Musk has done just that.

Tesla used profits from the company’s first model, the sleek Roadster, to invest in its next iteration of luxury electric vehicles: the Model S sedan and Model X SUV. This, in turn, produced sufficient funds to develop the company’s first affordable electric vehicle, the Model 3, priced at $35,000.

The dramatic pivot into the affordable market raises questions as other competitors race to claim their slice of the electric vehicle pie: How will Tesla compete with other affordable manufacturers? And what will its marketing strategy look like now that it is no longer strictly a luxury brand?

From luxury to mass market

From the beginning, Tesla’s marketing budget has been notoriously slim. The mythology is that Tesla ran on a $0 marketing budget early in its life—which is not entirely true, but the company’s investment in marketing was limited, to say the least. Tesla had practically no advertising budget, resisted hiring a CMO, and operated out of a series of showrooms rather than automobile dealerships.

Rather than invest in traditional marketing, Tesla focused on earned media, capitalized on a generational thought leader (Musk), and cultivated an active community of fans around the concept of sustainability.

Tesla’s most valuable marketing tool to date is its earned media coverage on energy projects, such as the Gigafactory, and its disruption of the traditional auto industry. Elon Musk regularly conducts interviews about his personal background, innovation, and his plans for colonizing Mars. While most of these stories do not directly relate to Tesla products, they reinforce the narrative that Tesla is a leader in sustainability and innovation. Such coverage has been—and remains—a critical part of Tesla’s strategy to remain top of mind.

In a 2013 interview with AdAge, Jeremy Anwyl, vice chairman of Edmunds, explained it this way: “You have to credit [Musk], who’s very Steve Jobs-like in how he deals with the media. A lot of the attention is not generated through what we consider traditional advertising. It’s really through social media.”

Alongside Tesla’s YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter pages, a good portion of that social buzz comes from Tesla’s subreddit, which features contributions directly from Musk. Whether it’s announcing a commitment to Mars exploration or commenting on hygiene habits, Musk is an integral part of the Tesla community.

This community, while easy to overlook, points to one of Tesla’s key differentiators: Company leaders understand the importance not only of engaging with consumers where they live, but also inspiring wider discussions built around the brand.

Community engagement has even spawned a new marketing avenue for Tesla: user-generated commercials. After Musk received a letter from a fifth-grader who noticed there were many good “homemade” Tesla commercials, and that perhaps Tesla should have a contest to determine the best, Musk took her up on her idea.

Yet as Tesla moves into a mass manufacturer of affordable electric vehicles, inspiring that core community of fans may not be enough.

The knowledge gap

While Tesla has generated an impressive amount of buzz surrounding the new Model 3 electric vehicle—by March 2016, 115,000 customers made a down payment of $1,000 on the Model 3 before knowing what it looked like—experts believe Tesla and other electric vehicle manufactures haven’t done a great job of educating the market.

According to Micheal Smyth, assistant director at the National Alternative Fuels Training Consortium (NAFTC), there is a gap between consumer interest in electric vehicles and knowledge on the available products. “The public knows about alternative fuel vehicles, especially electric vehicles, but somehow they still don’t have the basic knowledge on what an electric vehicle does and the different types available,” he said. “Many times we get questions asking, ‘Well, which one should I buy?'”

As a nonprofit, NAFTC does not direct consumers toward any particular brand, but Smyth is surprised by the overall lack of content that explains the high-level differences between alternative energy cars, the benefits of each type, and the basic mechanics of specific vehicles. “If your average consumer is interested in electric cars and doesn’t understand how the vehicles operate, there is a lot of education that is left to be done,” he said. The knowledge gap presents an opportunity for organizations, including brands like Tesla, to lead the conversation.

Tesla had practically no advertising budget, resisted hiring a CMO, and operated out of a series of showrooms rather than automobile dealerships.

Tesla’s blog essentially functions as a media toolkit for company announcements. It’s two main competitors—General Motors’ $30,000 Chevy Bolt EV and Volvo’s $40,000 electric car expected to be available by 2019—also lack a substantial body of content to bridge this consumer gap.

GM has a “Sustainability” portion of its website, though articles function as press releases, announcing company developments in sustainable production. Volvo, too, has a site section called “CSR & Sustainability” that highlights how cities around the world are working with the automaker to invest in clean energy, but each piece focuses on Volvo rather than consumer education.

“Every manufacturer is bringing out more electric drive vehicles,” Smyth said. “But as far as I’ve seen, there is no place where consumers can go for the basic information on how these vehicles work mechanically or address their specific needs.”

No one would disagree that Tesla’s earned media marketing strategy has won customer’s hearts. But as Musk’s company moves to colonize the affordable electric vehicle market, it’s fair to ask if his brand’s earned media prowess and brand power is enough to win customer’s wallets as well.

The post Can Tesla Ride Earned Media Forever? appeared first on Contently.

While working as an account representative at Contently last year, I often heard this type of request from customers interested in our freelance network. Regardless of the industry, be it finance, insurance, technology, etc., many of our clients came in with a desire for that perfect hybrid of writer-professional. The request may sound smart, but it’s actually a damaging approach that can ruin your efforts to build a team of freelancers.

Unlike editors, marketers are trained to think about professional background when considering candidates. When making a new hire, for example, they’re accustomed to reviewing a resume and gauging someone’s experience. So taking this mindset to content marketing makes sense to them. But rather than reading through a writer’s clips to see if she can spin a compelling narrative, they’re prone to searching for job titles and responsibilities.

Here’s the crucial detail everyone in content marketing needs to understand: Being an expert and communicating expertise are two very different things. Clients that fixate on finding the perfect professional who can also write tend to struggle. Companies that understand the value of quality writing and subject-matter expertise usually execute successfully on their content plans right from the start.

To be fair, there are other factors at play that impact a brand’s readiness to publish (such as understanding how to work with a freelance team or receiving organizational buy-in). But it helps tenfold to understand that a quality writer is more important than a professional with an established background. Freelancers typically write stronger first drafts, track down sources quicker (and are familiar with using sources), and already know how to work with an editorial team.

Besides, if a freelancer has extensively covered an industry for a decade, then she’s already an expert. In fact, with a more widespread and nuanced view on an industry like financial services, a freelancer could arguably bring more expertise than a professional who’s been in the field with only a few companies. In the end, marketers that rely on trained writers avoid creating more work for themselves and publish quicker—two trends they’re very pleased to share with their bosses.

“If you haven’t worked in journalism, you may not recognize that good journalists can write well about practically any topic,” said Philip Garrity, a brand editor who has worked with Contently clients like Google and Citizens Bank. “A writer’s skill is communicating information accurately and effectively. You do that by doing the right reporting, reading the right sources, and interviewing the right people.”

Being an expert and communicating expertise are two very different things.

Last year, I transitioned within Contently from the account management team to the talent team, which vets freelancers in our network and recommends them to clients. A big part of my new role includes developing educational programming for our contributors. As you might expect, those who understand how Contently works turn out to be our strongest contributors.

My job also includes setting the right expectations with our clients so they understand what it’s like to work with a freelance team—often for the first time. (You should’ve seen me trying to explain this to my family during Christmas.) We’re making some substantial progress, like building story rubrics and in-depth training programs to track and improve the quality of the work that contributors submit. But the perception about professional background still remains and inhibits customer success.

The issue gets even more complicated depending on the type of branded content. For example, where does expertise come into play for thought leadership? What about ghostwriting? If brands need a strong opinion on a subject, the same rules apply. Talented contributors in our network pair up with our clients’ marketing executives to bring their perspectives to life. And in-depth whitepapers demanding niche expertise simply require an experienced freelancer who knows how to interview.

“Find experts, and have strong writers bring forth their experiences,” Garrity said. “Your top financial writer doesn’t need to have a CFA. But he or she should probably know how to track one down.”

Industry professionals who are also fantastic writers do exist, but based on my experience, they are rare. So if you’re trying to scale your content program or build a brand newsroom, you should focus on looking for writers who can deliver their own type of expertise. Not cardiologists.

The post Why Marketers Struggle to Hire the Best Freelance Writers appeared first on Contently.

At that point, I vowed to never enter what I saw as the seedy underworld of ghostwriting. Of course, years later, I conveniently forgot that promise as I found myself working in a PR agency, drafting comments and opinion pieces on behalf of so-called “thought leaders.”

Guest posts, op-eds, thought leadership—regardless of the terminology, we tend to think of these as staples of a CMO’s repertoire, a chance for executives to offer advice based on their experiences and show off their personality. In that case, shouldn’t the opinion piece be written by the person who gets the byline?

Ethically speaking, this practice still makes me deeply uncomfortable when I have to forge someone else’s thoughts. It probably goes back to the time I received a reply to my letter to the British queen when I was seven years old and was disappointed to find it was written by her “ladies in waiting” rather than the Queen herself. To use a very British expression, I was pretty gutted.

Ghostwriting isn’t just an issue in journalism and blogging. Song lyrics, novels, autobiographies, letters—plenty of people propel their careers forward on the momentum of other people’s words. But whether we see it as morally kosher seems to depend on the industry.

Let’s look at academia, where using someone else’s writing is absolutely off limits. If you’re caught paying a shady essay mill to write your paper, you’ll probably be suspended and may face expulsion. You didn’t do the research. You didn’t write the paper. Your academic reputation would be in tatters.

Somehow, these consequences don’t apply in a professional setting. Instead, if you pay someone to write your professional guest post, your reputation could be bolstered instead. What about if I paid another freelancer to write this article under my name, would that be ethical? No, not really. Plus it would be weird. Society’s rules on this front are pretty arbitrary.

Across the publishing world, I believe we should give more thought to whether it’s okay to continue ghostwriting without any sort of disclosure. Apart from walking away entirely from ghostwriting opinion articles, which a lot of us can’t afford to do, this is an opportunity to reassess how we put them together.

A collaborative ghost

Even though ghostwriting is misleading by its very nature, some assignments are better than others. The difference often comes down to collaboration. Is it a question of making someone’s existing thoughts sound prosaic or are you doing all of the work yourself without any of the credit?

Inventing opinions for other people can be demoralizing if you do it for long enough, and it’s even worse when the person getting the byline doesn’t have anything new to say. If you want to fabricate something from scratch, writing fiction is probably a lot more fulfilling (although there’s less money in that).

But in many cases, clients should be willing to share some thoughts. Make time to meet in-person or over the phone to discuss the topic. Get into their heads, note the way they speak, and ask where their business is headed. Pay attention to their senses of humor. All of these factors will typically lead to more accurate representations of someone’s voice, which smooths out some of the moral wrinkles and could lead to more repeat business.

Once you finish the draft, it also helps to get feedback from the client. Hop on the phone and ask what the person really thinks of the piece. Do they disagree with any major points? Would they say a phrase differently? Is there a personal anecdote they can provide that adds to the narrative (and makes your job easier)? You may have to go through a rewrite or two, but doing so will make the piece stronger.

Due credit

Collaboration can certainly help some of the issues with ghostwriting, but changing the creative process for the better still doesn’t fix the end result. At some point, most ghostwriters probably think: What if I wrote this for myself? What if I got the recognition for my effort?

For now, there’s no way for ghostwriters to get paid the same rates and get credit for a thought leadership byline. But a minimal tweak could change that.

When some celebrities sign book deals for memoirs, co-writers are included in the byline, just in a smaller font. It might seem strange at first, but why couldn’t bloggers use this same system? Or at the very least, put some sort of disclosure at the bottom of the story to acknowledge the name of the person who actually wrote the post.

While marketers may have a reputation for being manipulative, we do also have a duty to call bullshit. If you’ve been in the game a long time, it’s easy to justify your decisions instead of thinking about ethics and morality. I find myself in constant conflict over this, and I think it’s important for us to give the pros and cons of ghostwriting some serious thought.

To be clear, I’m not calling out freelancers who take on the work. We have the ability to flesh out ideas relevant for a wider audience, easier to understand and more shareable. Ghostwriting assignments often pay well and can be a good way to make connections with executives. They also let us work on our brainstorming and writing skills without the fear of negative criticism on social media and comments sections.

But just make sure you’ve made peace with what you’re writing. Otherwise turn down the money, and protect your personal voice. You’ll sleep better for it.

The post Is It Morally Okay to Ghostwrite Thought Leadership? appeared first on Contently.

We did it, guys. You, me—all of us, really, for saying horrible, nonsensical things every day. We are mad men and women, speaking in an indecipherable tongue, cruelly confusing our nana at Rosh Hashanah, who heard CPC as PCP and got excited. Let’s get to it.

1. Thought Leadership

Listing yourself as a “thought leader” on Twitter or LinkedIn is like listing yourself as an “artist” on OkCupid or Tinder; there’s a 99 percent chance you’re lying to yourself, and a 1 percent chance you’re Kanye.

We’ve now reached the point where everyone claims to do “thought leadership,” but very few are actually doing it. These pseudo forms of thought leadership range from writing something safe that tons of other people have said…

… to making arbitrary rules that other people in your industry should follow…

… to putting out tone-deaf PR responses…

… and lazily criticizing others to kill an afternoon while relying on GIFs as a crutch!

2. People-Based Marketing

“People-based marketing” just might be the perfect buzzword. For starters, this euphemism for ad retargeting has a beautifully dystopian ring. It’s like George Orwell was reincarnated inside the marketing department of Facebook, which introduced the term when it launched its mobile ad-stalking platform last year.

But what makes it a true winner is the balance between friendliness (“It’s people-based! It’s advertising that cares about you!”) and existential threat (“We put you through a meat grinder and use you to power our quest for world domination”). Congratulations, guys: We’re finally living in a mashup of 1984 and Minority Report, just like our 16-year-old selves always wanted.

3. Gamification

Do you remember when your parents or teachers tried to convince you something was a game when it clearly wasn’t? Let’s see how many things you can pick up in your room in the next five minutes! Let’s see who can stay quiet the longest! That’s what brands are doing right now.

What started as an effort by brands to actually deliver fun experiences has mostly turned into a half-hearted trick to engage consumers. Tell us your brand story and we’ll give you points on this arbitrary microsite and enter you to win a trip to some shithole beach town in Florida! Do you guys remember when Zappos just started giving out badges for no reason? I’m pretty sure it was just based on how much they people-based marketed you.

4. Newsjacking

A modern buzzword with its very own book! You’ve gotta love a buzzword that sounds both like a violent crime and a popular tag on PornHub. I don’t know why you’d choose this term to describe your content strategy, but whatever floats your boat. And it’s a pretty fitting term, actually, because when brands “newsjack,” it tends to get weird and ugly.

5. Micro-Moments

Throughout 2015, Google has been pushing the idea of “micro-moments,” and it’s spreading through the marketing industry like polio. Micro-moments are times when buyers are influenced by some piece of content from a brand during a purchasing decision. So now, marketers can say things like, “We really need to leverage people-based marketing to get our snackable content in front of people at key micro-moments!” while I fill up with homicidal rage.

There’s no such thing as a micro-moment, my dear Google-Alphabet-Optimus-Prime overlord. There are just moments. Sweet, simple moments for you to wring revenue out of our monetizable existence.

6. Content Creator

I’ve been going through a lot of résumés lately for an open editorial role, and the fact that so many people who work in digital media identify as “content creators” scares the shit out of me. Over 21,000 people list it as their job on LinkedIn. It’s as if we’ve stopped thinking about ourselves as writers, videographers, or designers, and started internalizing a more cynical existence, where we are just fleshy machines built to pump content into the great void.

I mean, that’s probably true, but when the hell did LinkedIn become a place for honesty?

7. Space

https://twitter.com/ski_kansas/status/591265616838819840

DEEP DOWN, WE ARE ALL MATT DAMON.

8. Marketing Stack

One of my goals over the past year has been to go a full month without feeling like an idiot while talking to Ray Cheng, our VP of marketing. Early on, we had at least a half-dozen conversations about marketing stacks where I just nodded while thinking about pancakes. (Mmmmm. Pancakes.) Eventually I decided to devote an afternoon to reading ChiefMartec.com and realized a marketing stack is just a bunch of marketing systems working together.

Since then, I’ve gotten surprisingly into “martech,” as the cool kids call it. But the term “marketing stack” seems strange. When I think working together, I don’t think stack. Huddle, cabal, system, orgy—all of those, sure. But stack just conjures memories of diner food, or junk yards, or nearly suffocating after your overweight cousins piled on top of you at your aunt’s house that one Christmas.

9. Contentification

I see you creeping up, contentification. Sneaking your way into awful fill-in-the-blank sentences to describe the growing impact of content. The contentification of ______ (social media/business/PR/our souls).

I see you fighting to come to life everywhere in New York, from Madison Avenue to Soho (but mostly on Twitter). And let me just say this: Not in my industry. Not in my town. Not as long as I have an Internet connection and the power to make fun of anyone who uses it. You are not becoming a full-fledged buzzword.

10. Holistic

Nowadays, every agency takes a “holistic” approach to marketing. It’s like the marketing industry is Williamsburg, brands are hipsters, and everyone else is putting on a hippie persona because the rent just got jacked 200 percent. Who’s ready to rid their company of toxins? Jim from Lead Gen—he’s gotta go. And those silos—well, we should be able to take care of those with a little acupuncture and a $250,000 team retreat.

Or you know what? Screw it. Let’s all just go live with bears.

Got a buzzword I missed? Tweet me @joelazauskas because you better believe I’m going to keep doing these until we get to 100 or someone here forces me to stop.

Previously in Content Marketing Buzzwords:

10 Content Marketing Buzzwords You’ll Hear Way Too Much at SXSW

10 Content Marketing Buzzwords You’re Going to Hear Way Too Much This Year

10 More Content Marketing Buzzwords That’ll Make You Want to Stick Forks In Your Eyes

The post 10 Content Marketing Buzzwords That’ll Make You Want to Go Live With Bears appeared first on Contently.

Why? Because when done well, thought leadership delivers true benefit—both for the people writing it and the people reading it. But a lot of supposed “thought leadership” falls short of the latter.

WTF is thought leadership, anyway?

Before we launch into more explanations, let’s first define thought leadership. On a holistic level, thought leadership is a means of influencing and disrupting societal norms. Human beings exist in a form of stasis, with our brains learning just enough to keep us alive under the conditions we’re in, while mental auto-pilot systems take over everything else. Where thought leadership comes in is in turning this great mass of human auto-pilotism on its head. Ideas can be introduced and presented to the public that literally shift the direction of social thought and action.

Top-level examples of this? The Declaration of Independence. The “I Have a Dream” speech. The Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. Each presented a new way of thinking that disrupted the agreed-upon order of How Things Are, and provoked radical social shifts.

When applied to corporate America, the rules of thought leadership, while perhaps not as inspiring, still apply. Leaders in the business world with valuable insights to share have a podium to express those ideas freely, and possibly guide the future of their industries, or even make statements that influence the working world at large.

The problem is that the pool has been diluted. As more and more people leap on the Thought Leadership bandwagon, the distinction between ideas that actually lead thought, and those that do not, is getting murkier.

Real thought leadership

When thought leadership is done well—meaning a truly insightful and powerful idea expressed with skillful storytelling and published on a platform with smart distribution—it’s a win for everybody. Readers get a takeaway that has tangible value for their industry, or their business, or even their career. And authors get the cachet and influence that come with being a true “thought leader.”

In the marketing/ad world, there’s no shortage of smart, bleeding edge writing that has upended conventions, started conversations, and driven action. Some CMOs have made big splashes by challenging “big corporate” functioning and adding some basic lessons in being human while still holding a big job. Even execs who are no longer “in the game” are able to drop some perspective on the younger crowd and get them thinking about whether past is prologue.

Sounds great, right? Let’s all get on that!

The issue, of course, is that you can’t generate “thought leadership” just for the sake of it. In order to express original and impactful ideas, you have to have them.

As authors/potential authors of thought leadership, the onus is on C-suiters to determine which of their thoughts are just thoughts, and which are worth designating as “leadership.” The key to knowing the difference is developing a keen sense of the past. What ideas have moved the needle in your industry in the past year or two? Take a look at the highest traffic generators on LinkedIn, and look for common themes. Pay attention to the top influencers in your industry—why are they influential? What insights are they offering, and what topics are they staying away from?

Above all, avoid anything resembling the following drill: “Quick! We need to lead some thought! Get an intern to ghost-write some posts about stuff that’s trending on Google! Throw them up on LinkedIn!”

This type of “thought leadership” doesn’t deserve the name. There’s no respect for the reader’s time, no desire to solve a problem the audience is having.

What’s the key to creating effective and engaging thought leadership that pierces the digital noise? In short, it’s all about isolating your “special sauce” that has brought you to success in the first place, and finding authentic ways to showcase it through narratives that truly speak to audiences. (My company has been boiling it down to a science, which we now offer in our Thought Leadership Boot Camp for execs and companies looking to create top-shelf thought leadership that actually, well, leads thought.)

Still, even with all the boot camps in the world, effective thought leadership takes work, discipline, and, of course, great ideas. If leading thought were a task you could slap on the end of a To Do list, human society would be a hell of a lot more advanced than it is now (for starters, we’d have eliminated things like famine, highway fatalities, and dating apps).

The digital landscape has given C-suiters more opportunities than ever to say insightful and powerful things about their businesses. But the onus stays on the author to make sure that what you’re sharing is real thought leadership, not self-promotion.

Melissa Lafsky Wall (@Lafsky) is the founder of Brick Wall Media.

The post WTF Is “Thought Leadership” Really, and Should CMOs Bother With It? appeared first on Contently.

So, if you’re still beefing up your strategy for the new year, or you’re curious as to how to jump in those content marketing waters and make the biggest splash, we’ve collected the most important predictions right here.

1. Budgets for content marketing across most industries will reach record highs.

Forbes included this point in their “Top 7 Content Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2015,” noting that 58 percent of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing budgets in the next year.

This forecast also touches on an important trend we found in our own 2014 survey of 600 marketers: Over 33 percent of respondents noted that a lack of budget was their biggest challenge to creating effective content.

It’s very promising that companies are devoting more money to content. The more they spend on high quality projects, the more likely it is they’ll be able to stand out from their competitors and other publishers. Even if marketers have big plans for content campaigns, they still need the capital to back them up. On that note: Check out our guide for how to secure a bigger budget in 2015.

2. Paid ads will become unavoidable.

Social Media Examiner compiled a comprehensive list of “28 Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2015 From the Pros.” Among these predictions, certain patterns emerge. A few people believe video will explode in 2015, and others expect SlideShare to surge ahead as a key platform for B2B marketing. But the biggest prediction on people’s minds? The importance of paid distribution.

As Kristi Hines writes:

We already know that Facebook plans to stifle organic promotional posts in the news feed starting in January 2015, and that Twitter hasn’t ruled out implementing a Facebook-like algorithm for their news feed. Instagram is still busy expanding their advertising platform, and since they’re owned by Facebook, an algorithm that limits organic posts from businesses and brands could easily be added into the mix.

Hence, social media marketers who might have avoided social advertising in 2014 will be forced to embrace it in 2015.

For more on how to own your sponsored campaigns, check out our Paid Social Distribution Playbook.

3. Context will play a bigger role in personalization.

Rebecca Lieb, an analyst at Altimeter Group, published an impressive list of data-based predictions—excuse me, research—for 2015. While her entire report is worth a read, her ideas about “context” as a complement to “content” are particularly noteworthy.

Lieb writes:

Context’s untapped opportunity is to get an extremely granular understanding of customers, then to anticipate their needs, wants, affinities, and expectations and develop unique insights to power better marketing across all devices, channels, localities, and brand experiences. Context, in other words, takes not only the “who” into account, but also the when, where, why, and how. Simply put — it’s deeper targeting and more on-point messaging.

As more brands look to explore personalized marketing and technologies that can reach specific consumers, context will play a crucial role in how publishers distribute content. For example, Facebook just introduced its new Place Tips feature, which places recommendations in users’ News Feeds based on their locations so they can see content on pages for restaurants, museums, shops, etc., and even see what friends have said about it.

4. There will be no room for “medium-sized” content.

“11 Bold Content Marketing Predictions for 2015,” published by Inbound Marketing Agents, gives a shout-out to our own VP of content, Sam Slaughter, who shares his prediction that “the term ‘snackable content’ will mercifully be put out of its misery.” (Slaughter also voiced his frustrations about the term in our content team’s insane HipChat debate.) However, while “snackable content” may not go away as long as platforms like Twitter are still around, it seems there’s another type of content being edged out: medium-sized content.

Puranjay Singh writes:

A recent study by Buzzsumo showed that people are far more likely to share lengthy, in-depth content. Part of this is for SEO purposes–Google favors posts over 2,000 word on its front page–and partly because consumers are sick of the same regurgitated 500-word pieces.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, micro-content–tweets, 6 second Vines, Snapchats, Whisper secrets, small infographics–continues to grow at breakneck speeds.

So, what’s left to die out? Medium-sized content. For content creators struggling with the length of their content, it’s important to remember that not every topic deserves 2,000 words. If your articles are only coming in at 500 words, the solution isn’t to keep writing filler until you hit 1,000. Rather, the better strategy is to adjust your content mindset to pick topics worthy of more words. This way, you’ll be offering your readers an opportunity to fully immerse themselves in your content, take the information that’s helpful to them, and associate that positive experience with your brand.

5. The “subculture influencer” will become more important.

Marketing consultant Brian Honigman’s “6 Content Marketing Predictions for 2015“ focuses on a subject that went untouched in most other prediction lists: social media subcultures. Subcultures often consist of small, highly engaged communities that convene on a social platform in order to share information about a niche product or industry.

Honigman writes:

From Google’s socialization of search with Google+ or the extension of the Facebook “like” button to nearly every site online, our social ties are increasingly shaping our experiences online… and with this fragmentation of online experiences will come new, unique and highly specialized “echo-chamber” subcultures.

These groups are of unique importance to brands because the degree of trust and loyalty amongst these niche subcultures means that once a brand or product or celebrity gains acceptance they are more likely to be embraced.

How are brands supposed to reach these subcultures? Through influencers, such as online celebrities with significant followings on YouTube, Instagram, and Vine. These influencers bring fans and followers who are usually very engaged and willing to listen because the relationship is much more personal. For example, as Digiday points out, luxury brands like Mercedes-Benz, Maserati, and Dom Pérignon, have partnered with popular Instagrammers in order to increase exposure.

6. 2015 will see the rise and eventual preeminence of mobile data.

TopRank’s “21 Digital Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2015” features insights from content marketing leaders representing Marketo, MarketingProfs, Google, Intel, and more. One of the most on-the-mark predictions comes from Tom Webster, vice president of Edison Research, who has some interesting thoughts about the rise of mobile:

Consider this—I’m walking around town, listening to online radio over my phone, and I hear an audio ad for a product that might interest me. In the past, were I to hear that ad, I’d have to remember the name of the company, then go home and use a search engine to learn more about the company before an eventual purchase. Who gets the attribution credit in that scenario? Search, sadly—and a most undeserved credit it would be.

But the continual removal of barriers between message and action that mobile gives us (for those who begin to think that way) will begin to restore the balance of the Force for attribution, and digital marketers can start to get away from channel-based thinking and move towards a more human behavior-centered model, with mobile serving as the unifying principle to unite offline and offline marketing.

7. Content marketing will go supernova with visual storytelling.

“Does Your 2015 Content Marketing Strategy Cover These Trends?” published by Marketing Tech Blog, features a nifty infographic that covers just about every big-picture topic that marketers are thinking about. Number eight on that list predicts that the importance of visually compelling content will only increase in the year ahead. The blog is in good company—as BuzzFeed pointed out last September, two factors will likely control the future of branded content: video and mobile.

8. LinkedIn will continue to dominate industry and marketing news. And will be the dominant social channel for content distribution.

Last year, LinkedIn was in prime position to become the new best friend of B2B marketers, and as noted in Kapost’s “2015 Content Marketing Predictions,” that won’t change anytime soon. In fact, LinkedIn’s influence will only grow stronger.

As Jean Spencer writes:

LinkedIn is making powerful strategic moves suggesting that it wants to be a noteworthy player in the marketing technology space: it bought Bizo, it launched “posts,” and it now has featured news.

These moves by LinkedIn will help the platform stand out even more as the place for marketers to emerge at thought leaders and share their insights about their industries. As Business Insider reported, LinkedIn plans to be a $1 billion business by 2017, becoming “the most effective online platform form marketers to engage with professionals.” Not only should marketers bolster their paid distribution strategies, they should also take a good look at what LinkedIn can offer them.

9. The push for quality content will highlight the need for professional writers.

Visually’s “Five B2B Marketing Trends for 2015 That You Should Get a Head Start on Now” was published back in the middle of last year, but seven months later, its forecast still holds true:

The need for well-crafted copy and visuals goes hand-in-hand with one of content marketers’ consistent pain points of not being able to produce enough to fill their content pipelines. In a 2013 copywriting survey by UK-based content marketing firm Sticky Content, two-thirds of respondents reported that product managers and marketing do the majority of the digital writing in the business. They are already juggling so many balls, the time and effort they devote to crafting copy is decreasing. This will lead forward-thinking marketers to seek out either experienced content writers or outsource writing to agencies or marketplaces that specialize in writing or creating content.

As brand publishers figure out how to structure their newsrooms, they’ll be looking to source the best talent, either by contracting freelance writers or building in-house teams, a debate we address in one of our best-performing pieces this year, “Build vs. Buy: Why Top Brands Are Leaning on Freelancers to Build Hybrid Newsrooms.”

10. Medium-sized and large businesses will begin to purchase niche media companies because they thirst for creating real relationships with their target audiences.

The Content Marketing Institute wasn’t going to be satisfied with just a blog post about what 2015 might have in store. Instead, they published a whole e-book on SlideShare: “60 Content Marketing Predictions for 2015.” The compilation includes stats and predictions from huge players in content marketing, including Joe Pulizzi, the founder of Content Marketing Institute. This particular prediction marks one of the biggest changes that could be ahead for content marketing. Basically, the secret’s out: Everyone knows you need content marketing to stay in the game. But for those who won’t look inward to build out their teams—and for those who have the capital to do so—they’ll latch onto media companies that are already successful at building engaged audiences.

These predictions cover a wide range of topics, which just shows brands primed to succeed in content marketing will need a holistic approach that includes distribution, social media, talent, and multimedia. In order to target the right consumers, brands have to know what their audiences want and how they want it. That has always been the case, but as 2015 progresses, brands have even more knowledge about how they can refine their content marketing. We’re excited to see what they come up with.

The post 10 Content Marketing Predictions That Will Make You Sound Really Smart appeared first on Contently.

Late last year, Neil Patel, founder of marketing consultancy Quick Sprout and co-founder of analytics companies KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg, conducted an experiment based on a straightforward theory: that commenting on other people’s blogs can increase the flow of traffic to your own.

To test his hunch he left 249 comments on various third-party blogs during the month of October. Patel found that if he commented on a blog post within an hour of it being published, thereby ensuring that his remark appeared near the top of the comments section, the effort drove thousands of visits to his site. Furthermore, when he commented on his own posts—articles he wrote as a guest contributor to such sites as Forbes.com and HubSpot—he could actually generate leads.

All told, Patel’s test resulted in 3,973 blog visitors and six consulting leads. One of them, he says, precipitated a corporate speaking engagement worth $25,000.

Patel took two decidedly different approaches to his informal experiment. Comments that he categorizes as “basic,” such as a word or two of praise for the blog post in question, generated an average of 3.2 visitors per comment. He left very few of these—just 25 in all. Instead, he focused on fleshing out his responses to create comments that were 4 to 17 sentences.

With every comment Patel left he included the URL for his consulting site. Though they took a few extra minutes to produce, his 224 thoughtful comments drove 3,891 visitors to that site—an average of 17.3 visitors per comment.

A secondary finding from the experiment was that commenting on larger, more mainstream blogs like the Huffington Post didn’t yield as many conversions.

Still, Patel believes that his technique can work for both B2B and B2C brands. “You just have to leave very valuable comments,” he says, noting the importance of selecting blogs specific to your business and area of expertise. “Don’t focus on building a brand. Focus on helping people through comments.”

At the root of Patel’s comment strategy is the idea that blogs have evolved from online journals to public conversations. One of the original forms of social media, blogging has been around since the early 1990s. Online comments followed in 1998 when Open Diary, widely considered to be both the world’s first blogging community and one of the first social networking sites, launched with reader comments.

For many modern brands, blogging remains the keystone of their content marketing strategy: 80 percent of B2B marketers still invest in blogs. Apart from demonstrating thought leadership and industry expertise, blog posts can go a long way towards humanizing brands.

The question remains, however, on whether brands have any business commenting on the blogs of others. Anti-spam service Akismet, which helps brands filter comment spam from their blogs, reportedly tackles 7.5 million incidents of spam per hour. Patel says that because comments like his were “good comments on relevant sites” that included nofollow links, he wasn’t at risk of being penalized for spamming by search engines like Google. But could comments made by marketers read as spam to the customers brands are hoping to engross?

“It depends on what they’re commenting on,” says Maria Lopez-Knowles, chief marketing officer with California-based Pulpo Media, a digital marketing agency specializing in the Hispanic market. Lopez-Knowles believes that the quality of the comments is paramount to success. “If [the subject] is something a brand is considered an expert in, such as food, and they’re commenting on improving a recipe … it might not be too intrusive. But I think a fine line needs to be walked.” She adds that the comments need to feel organic. Sticking to topics about which a brand is a known authority can help them evade a backlash.

Sean O’Neal, president of social media buying agency Adaptly, warns of the dangers associated with throwaway comments. “If the marketing has no connection to the underlying content, contributes nothing to the conversation that is taking place, and disrupts the natural flow of an authentic discussion, then it’s not likely to reflect well on the brand.”

When a marketer comments on another’s blog as a way to promote their own products, the stakes are even higher. “Great marketing is relevant. It’s contextual. It adds value,” O’Neal says. “And while ‘blog marketing’ might be an easy way to get some free media, reputable marketers will be weary of the risks around negative reader response.”

The takeaway from Patel’s blog traffic game plan is that blogging alone isn’t enough. If a brand hopes to woo audiences and ingratiate itself with potential customers, it must go a step beyond posting to show audiences it’s ready and willing to engage. Brands, after all, employ interesting people who are experts in their field.

They might as well show it.

The post Should You Drive Traffic by Commenting on Other People’s Blogs? appeared first on Contently.

“I’ve seen significant drops in CPCs already, across the board on all campaigns,” Contently Studios Manager Amanda Weatherhead says. “Since the very end of December, CPCs have dropped anywhere from 10 to 17 percent.”

Why? It’s simple. Towards the end of each year, most companies push out a great deal of campaigns to close the year strong. B2C marketers are scrambling to engage consumers with holiday-themed content; B2B marketers are trying to drive their last round of conversions for the year. Everyone’s trying to burn through the rest of their budget while getting maximum results. That creates a competitive market—and inflated CPCs—that drop dramatically when January hits and the spending slows dramatically at a time when many brands’ paid media plans still not in place.

“Q4 will see significantly higher CPCs [than in Q1], and it is definitely much more competitive,” explained Asaf Hochman, senior director of product marketing at Outbrain, a leading paid content distribution platform. “In general, as the year progresses we often see CPCs increasing,” says Hochman.

(Full disclosure: Outbrain is a Contently partner.)

For example, Hochman notes that healthcare companies overload their content in Q4 because of flu season, and retail companies up their distribution to drive sales during the holidays.

Weatherhead also reports that CPCs went up throughout the year, meaning you’ll never find a time to buy cheaper content placements than in January. Specifically, as many brand publishers work to gain footing for their content operations in 2015, marketers are still putting their efforts into building an engaged audience around their brands. In fact, for many, 2015 is the year when higher-ups aren’t going to approve of content marketers simply creating content and throwing it against a wall (or Twitter feed) to see what sticks. They’re going to want to results and ROI. For nascent brand publishers that have yet to build a robust audience, paid distribution provides a relatively inexpensive way to get eyeballs on their content. Then, they can figure out what’s working best and optimize accordingly.

“If a brand doesn’t have a seasonal preference for when its audience discovers its content, it might make economic sense to front load an Outbrain media buy in the first half of the year,” says Hochman.

As Weatherhead urges, “Now is the time to start gaining momentum, growing your audience, and driving up engagement.”

For more on paid social distribution, refer to our series of playbooks on the best Twitter campaigns for your marketing needs, hyper-targeting with sponsored Facebook posts, boosting your thought leadership on LinkedIn, and how to grow an audience through Outbrain—one of the least expensive and most popular options out there, and, evidently, never cheaper to use than right now.

The post The CPC for Paid Content Distribution Is Cheapest in Q1. Here’s Why appeared first on Contently.

We’ve already created in-depth guides for navigating each of the four major platforms we advocate experimenting with: Twitter, Outbrain, Facebook, and LinkedIn. With our guides, you’ll learn the best Twitter campaigns for your marketing needs, how to grow an audience through Outbrain, hyper-targeting with sponsored Facebook posts, and boosting your thought leadership on LinkedIn.

Now, we present a tl;dr version of the four guides in one neat package to help you answer questions like: Which platform is best for B2B marketing? Which platform is best for hyper-local B2C content? Which platform is easiest to create ads for? Which platforms are still evolving?

Whether you’re just getting started or looking to run a mix of sponsored posts on multiple platforms, let this comprehensive guidebook light the way.

Twitter

Twitter is our go-to channel when we want to drive a little extra paid traffic to a post at Contently. Visitors from Twitter tend to be highly engaged and are very likely to share your content, creating an organic boost on top of your social distribution. But you can do a lot more than simply drive referral traffic on Twitter, and each type of sponsored campaign offers unique benefits.

Engagement Tweets: Use Engagement Tweets if you want to encourage more people to click on a link and read your content. This is the easiest type of campaign to put together. You can either compose a new tweet on the campaign page or just choose one you’ve already published.

Followers Campaigns: These campaigns are set up for the sole purpose of gaining new Twitter followers. They’re basic—just text, no links or multimedia of any kind.

Website Cards: If you want to add a call-to-action button to your promoted tweet, you can create a campaign for website clicks or conversions. It’s best to use this type of campaign to promote a piece of content that has an actionable conversion, such as an ebook that can be downloaded in exchange for an email address. You’ll have to create a Website Card, which includes an image, a headline, a URL, and a call to action for your reader to click. To track conversions from that call-to-action button on the Website Card, set up a website tag.

Leads Campaigns: Similar to conversions campaigns, except you’ll be creating a Lead Generation Card instead of a Website Card. The Lead Generation Card is optimized for gathering email addresses directly from Twitter, whereas the Website Card is best for adding a visual touch to a piece of content that readers can click that leads to a conversion on your website.

Still, no matter which campaign you choose, there are a couple of similarities across the board. In terms of scheduling, you can either start the campaign immediately and run it until you exhaust your budget or choose specific start and end dates. Twitter recommends using a few tweets for each campaign. This allows you to diversify your offerings and engage a wider audience, but, most importantly, it allows for trial and error so you can optimize future campaigns.

When it comes to targeting your desired audience on any type of campaign, there are some key tips to remember. If you’re targeting based on interests and followers, it’s smart to target followers of your competitors’ Twitter accounts. Try between seven and 10 and swap some in and out for future campaigns. There is also an option to limit targeting to specific devices or platforms. Website Cards are optimized for mobile, so it’s best to target users on mobile devices for these campaigns.

Setting your budget for a campaign includes three main parts: 1) a daily minimum budget 2) a bid range per engagement and 3) total spend for that campaign. The budget and bid can be adjusted while the campaign is running. For example, you might want to adjust the bid at different times of the day or week, such as when a buzz-worthy event takes over the conversation on Twitter. During these instances, you may have to bid higher to get eyeballs on your content.

Twitter allows you to view your campaign stats based on a certain range of dates, platforms, locations, and demographics. The “Engagements” tag will break down campaign performance by individual tweets, impressions, clicks, retweets, replies, followers, and engagement rate. Pair this information with the offerings from Twitter Analytics to see how your sponsored tweets are performing in comparison to your regular posts.

Facebook

It’s much simpler to create sponsored posts on Facebook than on any other social platform. Before or after you post a piece of content on Facebook, just click the blue “Boost” button and customize.

First, choose the audience you want to reach. If you choose “People who like your Page and their friends” or “People similar to people who like your Page,” then the majority of the targeting is done for you. You simply have to add a price and start the campaign. However, if you choose to target your own pool of users, you can narrow your audience by location, age, gender, and interests.

While a campaign runs, you can add money, but you cannot adjust your targeting specifications. Once the campaign is completed, click the “See Results” button at the bottom of your post to review how your campaign performed.

In our experience, CPC seems to be a bit higher on Facebook than on Twitter. However, hyper-targeting by location on Facebook has proven incredibly useful. For example, it’s a good place to target readers who freelance in Chicago if you want to promote a piece about the best coffee shops to work from in the city.

Outbrain

Outbrain, a content discovery platform, is a great option for publishers looking for an easy and efficient way to drive readers to their site. How do you do that? By generating lots of headlines. Outbrain places these recommended links next to and below articles on high-quality news sites like Hearst and Condé Nast publications, so they must be engaging enough for readers to click on.

To start, choose “Create New Campaign,” and submit the URL of the piece of content you want to promote. Name it, put in your budget, and define your schedule. Choose your type of campaign based on the format of the content or where you want it to appear: video, mobile, or desktop. In general, mobile CPCs do very well, especially with fashion and retail content.

The budget can be assigned on a monthly, weekly, or daily basis. According to Contently client services manager Amanda Weatherhead, you’ll often see lower CPCs earlier in the week, month, or quarter, and then it becomes more competitive to get eyes on your content. So budget accordingly. For example, if you have $10,000 allocated for a quarter, spend $5,000 in the first month, $3,000 in the second, etc. If you decide to set a daily, weekly, or monthly budget cap, Outbrain’s system will divide by each day to distribute content evenly.

Now, for the headlines: It’s best to come up with several variations for each link and include different images and subheaders. Oubrain’s algorithm will optimize and show the best performing ones more often.

When it comes to measuring the success of your content distribution, Outbrain primarily tracks clicks, but you can also track conversions through a code that you embed on your page, similar to Twitter. Outbrain recommends a CPC for each piece of content, and if you’re beating that with a lower price per click, it’s a good sign you have a strong content strategy and engaging headlines. But be sure to check the visit duration and bounce rate of your Outbrain referral traffic in Google Analytics to make sure Outbrain readers are actually sticking around once they land on your site.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s ad program is the holy grail of hyper-targeting—particularly for B2B marketers. You can target audiences based on location (down to the city), gender, age, LinkedIn groups they might belong to, skills, and even schools they attend or graduated from.

However, the most unique and useful option that LinkedIn provides is targeting by company name, category, and industry size, as well as by job title and seniority. For example, if you’re looking to acquire in retail, you can promote a thought leadership piece relevant to retail marketers’ interests and target them directly, even going so far as to target the senior VP of a specific company.

The budgeting options are similar to those on Twitter, offering the ability to set a total budget for the campaign, daily maximum spend, and length of time you want the campaign to run. However, LinkedIn differs by offering the option of paying per click (every time someone clicks on your post) or per impression (every time LinkedIn shows your post, per 1,000 impressions). You can choose one and then enter a bid for the most money you want to spend when the action is completed.

You can also set up a few broader campaigns and assign multiple pieces of content to each. Continuing with the above example, say you want to target retail companies with multiple pieces of content and just a $500 budget. Set up one overarching campaign for targeting these retail companies and then simply choose that targeted campaign when you go to sponsor each piece of content. The results will show up directly under the sponsored post on your page with an option to further manage or adjust the campaign as it progresses.

Final thoughts

Each of these platforms provides unique opportunities for your needs in terms of boosting distribution and audience growth. By testing out each one, marketers can find the one that serves their objectives the best. For us, that’s Twitter. For Upworthy, it’s Facebook. For you, it may be Outbrain or LinkedIn. It’s important to experiment with each option and double down on the ones that are most effective for your content mix.

The post The Paid Social Distribution Playbook appeared first on Contently.

But in just a few months, the content marketing scene has changed dramatically. More studies have been done, more charts have been made, and content marketers need this information more than ever to stay on top of this rapidly changing industry. So we’re back with another iteration.

Our first charts piece focused on the basics of measurement—getting a feel for sharing, time on page, and the importance of promotion—but in this post, we’re taking charts on some new topics and going a bit deeper, exploring everything from sponsored content trust to the evolution to mobile. Enjoy.

1. People primarily use social media for one reason: to find good content

Tumblr and WPP recently conducted a comprehensive survey about what readers are looking for in a social media platform. Overwhelmingly, the answer was content. Along with ease of use and allowing for creative freedom, high-quality content was the most important aspect to the success of a social media platform.

2. Substantial, longform content is on the rise

This summer, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick published an incredible analysis of Internet reading habits based on his years of expertise from working at Time Warner, Betaworks, AOL, and others. Content geeks should read the piece in full, as it’s chock-full of insights, but the above chart tells an intriguing story of where content is headed—and one that doesn’t quite jibe with the conventional wisdom that “snackable content” is about to eat the content world.

After analyzing millions of Instapaper “reads”—defined as someone consuming at least 75 percent of an article—Borthwick found that the publishers with the biggest gains were all publishers known for producing incredibly substantial stories. The Atlantic, Medium, The New York Times, and the Guardian all saw increases of over 250 percent between the summer of 2013 and the summer of 2014.

3. Executives crave branded content—as long as it delivers in-house expertise

Quartz conducted an in-depth study into executives’ content consumption habits and concluded that executives are interested in content produced by brands. But there is a caveat. Executives are not interested in just any content with a brand’s name strapped onto the hood. They want true analysis and in-house expertise on the industry, innovation, and leadership. The full study contains important points for any marketer looking to engage with executives.

4. Content experimentation is the name of the game

Parsely published the above chart about the pageviews of BuzzFeed’s insanely successful content format: the quiz.

It turns out that BuzzFeed didn’t have insane success initially with quizzes. Instead, it took several iterations before the format took off (and did it ever, with one quiz garning over 40 million views—which is in the neighborhood of the total monthly traffic of The Washington Post at the time the quiz launched).

This is BuzzFeed’s recipe for success: Experiment until something feels right, measuring and optimizing every step of the way. BuzzFeed’s next foray—into Hollywood—should be a fascinating test of that strategy.

So don’t fall for magical distribution myths about content getting shared instantly the first time you push it on social. Finding an audience takes work. But then they’ll come back. Even the best results can take a few tries before they happen.

5. Sponsored content has a trust problem,but it can be fixed

As everyone in the advertising industry knows by now (and America at large, thanks to John Oliver), brand-sponsored content that runs on publisher sites has a trust problem. In a comprehensive survey, we set out to learn more. The findings were troubling: Two-thirds of readers have felt deceived by a piece of sponsored content, and coveted, highly educated audiences trust sponsored content the least. But there were some clear paths forward: Readers also indicated that they have faith that sponsored content can be interesting and can be trustworthy. Dig into the full findings.

6. Share buttons tell the story of the future of sharing

Much like the homepage, share buttons are also less important than they once were, which may seem like a surprise in the age of promiscuous media. But as Joshua Benton points out in Nieman Lab, much of the decline is due to the move to mobile, where device operating systems often have sharing built in and where share buttons are too tiny to be useful.

7. Content scores are the future of measurement

The number of mechanisms with which to measure content has grown fast: There’s engaged time, page scroll length, shares, share of lead, pageviews, and more.

So which should you use?

More often, publishers and advertisers—from BuzzFeed to Medium to Sharethrough—are using a blend of metrics to create content scores, weighing individual items against others to create composite metrics. We’ve examined through some of the leaders in this trend. The above score is based on some basic arithmetic that assigns weights to different measurement units. The score goes up as the content performs better than content published before it.

8. When it comes to reader engagement, quality trumps quantity

One of the basic assumptions of content measurement—that people tend to spend more time with longer articles—tends not to be entirely true. Chartbeat found that past a certain point, time spent with articles tends to flatten out. As publishers decide where to place in-feed ads and strategize for article length, it’s worth remembering that longer articles are not a “time spent” savior. Readers recognize quality immediately.

9. Sharing can be a red herring

Building on a study by Upworthy, Borthwick also created published the funny infographic above that actually reveals quite a lot about how and why people share content.

It turns out that attention-grabbing headlines really do make people lose their minds a bit with sharing, but so do articles that people legitimately read and engage with. So if what you really want is for people to engage with content, the share rate won’t necessarily tell the complete story. In turns out that only great content lead to both sharing and true engagement.

10. Facebook rules the content universe

We’ve all got to serve somebody, and content producers serve Facebook—it’s just a fact. The Atlantic found that Facebook is far and away the biggest driver of traffic. Sites like BuzzFeed get over half their traffic from Facebook, according to Pew. Publishers across the board get 4 times more traffic than Facebook than any other social media source. When Facebook goes down, it makes a publisher traffic chart look like the Black Friday stock market crash.

Facebook sees itself as a curator, and its News Feed algorithm can make or break a publishing operation. Everyone wants to crack what it takes to gain Facebook traffic riches, but Facebook maintains that quality is the only thing they’re looking at. I guess marketers are on the same plane as anyone else in this regard: Great content will eventually get that much-coveted Facebook boost.

What charts blew you away? Tell us @Contently for the next iteration.

The post 10 More Charts That Are Changing Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

How to Write Thought Leadership Posts That Don’t Make Editors (and Readers) Want to Die

Contently co-founder Shane Snow goes meta with a thought leadership post on… thought leadership:

If entrepreneurship is, as Harvard professor Howard Stevenson calls it, “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled,” then business builders have a lot in common with journalists. And whereas entrepreneurs can learn much from thejournalism trade itself, some of today’s top business leaders are actually participating in journalism, with enterprise-worthy results.

The way they do it is through guest writing, and the point of attack is the Opinion section or other places where publications print expert commentary. Whether it’s the governor of New York guest writing a persuasive essay on climate change in a daily newspaper or this guest column you’re reading right now in Fast Company, most magazines, newspapers, and blogs allot space for industry experts to share their points of view.

But most publications won’t take just anyone. And they won’t print thinly-veiled marketing messages with no takeaway. Here are four tips for getting printed and breaking through the full-to-bursting inboxes at your top-choice publications: Read it.

I Explored ‘Interstellar’ Using Oculus Rift. What I Found Was the Future of Storytelling

Dillon Baker experienced Interstellar through the lens of Oculus Rift, and found that storytelling will never be the same:

What is the future of space travel? Can humanity expand beyond our native home? What would it mean if reality could be virtually recreated? These are some of the big questions that have shaped science fiction, and at least one of them is finally very close to being answered. Read it.

10 Tech Trends That Will Change the Way We Tell Stories

New tools and publishing technologies are shaking up the media world on a weekly basis. Yael Graer looks at the 10 trends that you need to know about today. Read it.

Why Is Gigaom Running an Overtly Promotional Native Ad for the NSA?

After The Atlantic‘s Scientology debacle, I didn’t think we’d see another native ad mess-up on that level. I was wrong:

Last week, we dissected Gigaom’s bizarre and inconsistent sponsored content: Some posts are high-quality analysis of industry issues; others are 100 words of product copy pasted into an article format. Now the NSA is running a sponsored post on Gigaom, and it’s 220 words of pure advertorial, recruiting cloud computing professionals for the NSA. And it could be quite troublesome if Gigaom hopes to credibly cover the NSA in the future. Let’s look at a few aspects.Read it.

The Science of Content Creation, According to BuzzFeed and Coca-Cola

In today’s media world, it’s not just about creating content; it’s about constantly testing and iterating the content you create, and experimenting with new ways to get it in front of the right audiences. Sam Petulla dishes on how BuzzFeed, Coca-Cola, and Mediabrands have boiled that down to a science:

Making creative choices may start out as an art, but as capable publishers have found out, understanding which choices audiences respond to has become a crucial science.

A/B testing, the process of comparing engagement results for two variables, is now the popular choice for testing audience preferences and eliminating uncertainties. BuzzFeed is a leader, if not the leader, in A/B testing. They experiment with everything from headlines to item No. 42 in a listicle. Likewise, Upworthy pioneered the testing every element of a piece of content, including all the elements that surround it on a webpage. Read it.

Enjoy the last bits of sunshine this weekend; it won’t be long until this is your life:

The post Content Catchup: The Art of Thought Leadership, Gigaom’s Native Ad Scandal, and More Must-Reads appeared first on Contently.

If entrepreneurship is, as Harvard professor Howard Stevenson calls it, “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled,” then business builders have a lot in common with journalists. And whereas entrepreneurs can learn much from the journalism trade itself, some of today’s top business leaders are actually participating in journalism, with enterprise-worthy results.

The way they do it is through guest writing, and the point of attack is the Opinion section or other places where publications print expert commentary. Whether it’s the governor of New York guest writing a persuasive essay on climate change in a daily newspaper or this guest column you’re reading right now in Fast Company, most magazines, newspapers, and blogs allot space for industry experts to share their points of view.

But most publications won’t take just anyone. And they won’t print thinly-veiled marketing messages with no takeaway. Here are four tips for getting printed and breaking through the full-to-bursting inboxes at your top-choice publications:

Establish credibility

Editors are busy people who are constantly badgered by pitches that are far off the mark, and they are the gateway to publication through which you must pass. So don’t waste their time. Convince them to give you a shot through at least two of the following three:

1. Show you’ve got a track record of writing for legitimate places (the editor will infer you’re a good writer, and probably easy to edit). Your pitch email itself is another opportunity to show your writing ability, so let a little personality in. If your email bores them, why would they want to subject their readers to a longer version of it?

2. Write a concise story pitch that shows you can write well in few words. (I recommend keeping your story idea pitch to 300 characters or less.)

3. Tout relevant credentials or expertise in the subject matter (CEO of a relevant company, Albert Einstein’s apprentice).

These will make a wary editor’s leap of faith a little easier to make.

Have something to contribute to a larger conversation

To get the gig—and the audience respect that comes with it—“you have to truly be a valuable source of information,” says Michael Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media and frequent guest writer for Advertising Age and Fast Company.

A former journalist, Lazerow understands that his industry—social enterprise software—is full of people hungry for information and fearful of being left behind. His guest posts about Facebook, advertising, and social marketing help his audience make sense of the industry, while establishing Lazerow (and his company) as a thought leader.

“Think about who you are trying to reach, and then think about the top questions those people would ask about the topic you’re writing about,” Lazerow says. “Try as best as you can to answer those questions.”

For the social media newspaper The Daily Dot, guest writing is a way to simply get on people’s radar.

“We wanted to find opportunities to tell our story to audiences we weren’t already reaching,” says founder Nicholas White. White’s stories at places like PBS discuss the future of newspapers, using The Daily Dot’s experiences as conversation starters. To be successful, says White, “It has to be a real contribution to a conversation, not just an ad for your site.” Telling compelling stories about your personal experiences or citing case studies from your own company in some instances can help illustrate points about your industry or area of expertise and give you material that no one else has.

Use journalistic rigor

As the prestige of a publication increases, so does the credibility and rigor necessary to be published. For example, in a recent op-ed I wrote about America’s freelance economy for The Washington Post, I researched and interviewed economists, business professors, advocacy groups, and man-on-the-street freelancers, and pored over dozens of government reports in order to back up my point, that the growing number of freelancers in the U.S. is helping the economy and needs infrastructure.

Thorough research, reporting, and proper attribution of sources prevents writers from being dismissed as self-promotional gasbags. And with all information publishing—whether objective news or content marketing—be ethical. Never betray your readers with misleading material.

Take a stance, if you have one—and you should

Guest writing, says White, often best succeeds when it’s opinionated. “It can’t be like, no, duh,” he says.

In many cases, that’s exactly the reason publishers will print expert commentary; you’re bringing something to the discussion that a traditional news story can’t. Your business should stand for something anyway. Why not leverage your unique point of view?

Focus on what you can contribute, not self-promotion

“Too many founders think about guest posting in terms of, ‘How can I translate my sales deck into a guest post?’” Lazerow says. “If you’re just going to use a guest post to plug your widget, it’s useless and people will see through it.”

Guest writing ought not to be thought of as marketing. The likelihood of directly tracking ROI (e.g., someone clicks on your byline in a guest post, then immediately buys something on your site) is very low, and not the best use of guest writing opportunities. For young companies with small footprints, or established organizations wishing to align with certain topics, guest writing raises awareness, builds brand equity, and cements the idea that a company cares about an industry, topic, or cause.

“Being a good source—through speaking with journalists and writing guest columns for publication—is one of the best ways to create value,” Lazerow says.

And in the long run, it can drive business. As White puts it, guest writing is like giving out samples in a grocery store. “You get a taste and hopefully you decide to buy a bottle.”

The post How to Write Thought Leadership Posts That Don’t Make Editors (and Readers) Want to Die appeared first on Contently.