The fact that 100,000 people voluntarily signed up for a brand newsletter may surprise some. For GE, however, it’s the culmination of a decade-long commitment to content marketing. The company sits at the intersection of some of our most crucial sectors, like technology, energy, and transportation. As a result, the brief brims with journalistic rigor, pulling in stories from GE Reports, the brand’s main content hub, where employees across the globe explain new research and innovations by focusing on ideas instead of products. But the newsletter also contains worthwhile content from around the web that has nothing to do with the brand.

In other words, spam this is not.

“The time your audience spends with your content is really a transaction,” said Tomas Kellner, editor-in-chief of GE Reports. “You have to give them back something of value. If the content becomes too promotional, too self-serving, you will lose your audience very quickly.”

GE has managed to take brand awareness to the next level, turning its distinct point of view into something that every company wants: leads.

Building a database of 100,000 people doesn’t happen by accident. Chances are your company already has a newsletter or some e-books. But like brand awareness, lead generation requires a comprehensive plan. You can’t just slap a form on your website and expect thousands of potential customers to fill it out.

As the stakes increase, the value your content provides needs to rise as well. A great blog post can establish trust, but is it really worth someone’s contact information? Probably not. Inspiring your audience to take action calls for more substantial content.

Taking the lead

In our first playbook for marketers, we covered how brands should develop a content strategy to build awareness and establish thought leadership. We also went over the top of the marketing funnel, typically reserved for blog posts, infographics, and other types of shorter content meant to educate and entertain.

As a prospect moves down the funnel toward the engagement and consideration phases, the same strategic principles still apply. You still want to study your audience to understand their preferences and pain points. You still want to refer to your gap analysis to see what content topics and formats are fresh. And you still want to develop a distribution plan to increase the chances your work gets the attention it deserves.

Now, however, you have to do it on a bigger scale.

A lead is anyone who shows interest in your brand by taking a deliberate action to hear more. This could mean filling out a form, signing up for an email newsletter, or answering a survey. Lead generation is just the practice of influencing those people on a regular basis.

That definition may sound simple, but generating quality leads is complicated. (We’ll explore how to judge the quality of leads later in this playbook.) The experts and practitioners we spoke to for this series pointed to lead generation as the toughest part of their jobs. Brands get excited about flexing their creative muscles with awareness content, and they’re usually comfortable talking about their products and services at the bottom of the funnel. But balancing both of those instincts in the middle is where things get tricky.

“We work really hard to set a standard in terms of quality and voice,” said John Fox, athenahealth executive director of content and communications. “There’s a sense of integrity and credibility. Pivoting from that into more of a sales message requires some art so you don’t lose that. You don’t want to lose them on the next click.”

[Full disclosure: athenahealth is a Contently customer.]

On athenaInsight, the brand’s main publication, creators explore healthcare trends, speak to issues affecting physicians, and unpack the latest medical data. The content carries a helpful tone, breaking down complex topics into blog posts that fall under 1,000 words.

For lead gen content, other members of Fox’s team work on webinars and longer whitepapers that run upwards of 10 or 20 pages. Take this paper on replacing electronic health records (EHR). It’s stacked with data and sidebar panels that incorporate reporting and storytelling. Over 12 pages, there are only a handful of brand mentions woven into the narrative.

At GE, Kellner operates with a similar philosophy. He makes sure every newsletter is “not all about GE.” By focusing on topics instead of sources, GE conveys authority without puffing out its own chest too much. Subscribers can come to learn about robotics or machine learning without feeling the pressure of product placement. According to Kellner, that’s one of the key reasons the GE audience comes back for more.

“The content universe has exploded over the last five, ten years,” he said. “It’s getting bigger and bigger, it’s like the big bang happening in the content space. Individual people, brands, and old media companies are all producing content. But the day is still only twenty-four hours.”

This is an excerpt from The Content Marketer’s Playbook: Lead Generation. Click here to read the entire e-book.

The post ‘Give Them Back Something of Value’: How to Start Your Lead Generation Program appeared first on Contently.

Her article describes how an editorial background can infuse useful values into a content marketing strategy, pointing out that most writers who’ve worked at independent publications are trained to produce content that’s free of clichés, narratively engaging, and universally readable. Best of all, she makes this argument in 1,400 words. Though I appreciate her argument, if it were expanded into a different format with more words, she might start to lose her audience.

That’s the thing about additive content—piecing together small bits of content like articles into something more substantial, like an e-book. It only works if your blog post is the tip of an iceberg. In Brown’s case, her argument is just a really well-shaped piece of ice, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Content marketers are often on the hunt for ways to adjust and repurpose their most successful projects. So how do you know if your idea is worth an e-book or a blog post?

When to write a blog post

Blog posts can be op-eds, news analysis, listicles, reportage, case studies, Q&As, profiles, or trend pieces. There are a million ways to fill that space, though an ideal range probably spans 400 words to 1,500 words. There are some cases, depending on the complexity of a topic, when 2,000 words makes sense. Anything longer than 2,000 words has become its own category of “longreads” (excuse the Orwellian term). Those pieces of content tend to be feature stories that require diligent reporting and research that could belong in a print magazine.

Let’s say you have an idea and you’re not sure where it belongs. Is your idea just a hot take on Facebook’s latest algorithm changes? Is it timely news analysis on a new report about emoji usage? Not every e-book has to be perfectly evergreen, but you shouldn’t stall your team to put together a long-term project that will feel dated by next quarter.

Consider your resources as well. If your design team isn’t available to add illustrations or graphics for an e-book, perhaps they’re willing to break up the art into chunks and release your idea as a series of blog posts. If you’re still in the early stages of developing an audience, your series of blog posts can help advance your SEO and give potential a reason to keep coming back.

Additive content can also provide a nice little runway for launching an e-book down the line. If a blog post or two takes off, engagement metrics can give you the proof you need to justify further investment.

When to write an e-book

Deciding which ideas merit their own e-book can be trickiest of all. It’s not just a matter of deciding how many words you need to make a point. To download an e-book, your audience needs to hand over contact information, and if a customer gets partway into your e-book and regrets giving you their email address, then you’ve effectively put a lot of time and energy into damaging your relationship with your audience.

The general consensus is that an optimal e-book starts around 2,500 words, but some go all the way up to 15,000 words. (For reference, most publishers consider a work of fiction to qualify as a novel if it’s between 50,000 and 110,000 words.)

Imagine your e-book’s readership the way you might plan for a house party. Don’t announce a party if you suspect only a handful of people will come—there’s nothing worse than a “party” that’s just three strangers in a room eating chips.

If the potential readership is waiting for your e-book, conduct some research on how you’ll prepare for the launch. I personally had no idea how much analysis is necessary before a book comes out until I read Shane Snow’s plan that started a full year prior to his publication date. He broke his potential audience into segments and analyzed their reading patterns, used Docalytics to track where his editors were getting bored, set goals, and brainstormed ancillary content he could publish to encourage people to buy his book. An e-book and a non-fiction book are different beasts. But if that process sounds much more complex than what you had in mind, consider the idea that you’re not yet prepared.

Finally, consider the content itself. An e-book isn’t really the best venue for thought leadership, although you can certainly weave that in. Data-based research like an independent study is more likely to satisfy audience expectations. Think of your e-book as a product with a price tag that says “give me your email address.” Then ask yourself whether the average member of your audience will believe it was worth it after they finish reading. If someone turns away disappointed from a blog post, the residual damage will fade after a few days. But if someone gives you their private information and feels duped by the content, that regret could last forever.

Ultimately, if you suspect you have an idea worth a long-term feature project like an e-book, your idea deserves to be vetted by all sides before you commit. Err on the side of caution. Sometimes the negative impact of publishing a half-baked idea outweighs the potential success of adding an email address to your list.

The post How to Decide If Your Idea Should Be an E-book or a Blog Post appeared first on Contently.

While output levels are high, so, too, is quality. Brands are pushing the envelope by experimenting with new formats and finding fresh ways to leverage the tried-and-true tactics they’ve used in the past.

Here, we look at the latest European marketing trends to examine how top brands are consistently creating world-class content marketing campaigns.

Mobile video

With more than 1 billion active mobile subscriptions in Europe, video consumption on smartphones and tablets has been steadily rising, and European audiences are among those devoting more time to mobile video. In Austria, 34 percent of consumers said they watch more mobile video now than they did a year ago. In Italy, that figure was 35 percent; in Sweden, 36; and in Denmark and Finland, 39 percent.

Other studies show that smartphones and tablets are gaining on desktops. It’s a neck-and-neck race between tablets and desktops in Germany, while nearly as many Italian consumers choose to watch videos on their tablets as on a desktop computer.

As a result of this evolution, marketers across Europe are shoring up their mobile video investments. For example, since 2013, Philips has been running a digital campaign to promote its Click & Style shaving toolkit that uses mobile interactive video to let potential customers experiment with shaving. Created by Ogilvy & Mather Düsseldorf—and using video technology from Rapt Media—the campaign, available in four languages, was touted as “the world’s first fully mobile-enabled interactive video experience.”

“Designed to Play” produced some impressive results: The average viewing time of the mobile video surpassed four minutes, and consumers engaged with the media an average of three to four times.

As Lenze Boonstra, head of the global marketing team for Philips Personal Care put it, “Given the fact that we are the first ones to launch a mobile-enabled campaign like this, I think we have delivered something promising.”

Social media-exclusive content

Brands are quickly realizing the importance of providing their social media followers with original media assets. Let’s look again at Adidas. For six months prior to its 2014 FIFA World Cup campaign, the German athletic brand and its social media agency, We Are Social, collected photos and footage of Adidas-sponsored soccer players.

This exclusive content was pushed out for the brand’s “#allin or nothing” social campaign. With 1,000 images and 160 videos at its disposal, Adidas doubled its YouTube audience, attracted over a million new fans on Facebook, and generated 2.1 million mentions on Twitter—more than any other FIFA World Cup sponsor.

Ready to rumble. #allin or nothing #WorldCup pic.twitter.com/Jtnp0zIgch

— adidas Football (@adidasfootball) June 14, 2014

“The work Adidas did during the 2014 World Cup was outstanding in terms of content planning at scale,” Della Dora said. “It created thousands of pieces of content in order to be able to react to every single crucial moment of the competition in real time on social. It was a huge success and created a real relationship between a soccer ball and the soccer enthusiasts.”

Adidas has said that it achieved record soccer-related sales amounting to 2 billion euros as a result of the campaign. Eight million jerseys and 14 million soccer balls in the Brazuca design were sold. That’s 1 million more balls than Adidas sold in 2010.

In addition to more than 1.5 million social conversations, Adidas received 5.8 million new followers across all social platforms and 917,000 #allin hashtag mentions on Twitter. And the @brazuca Twitter account grew by 603 percent, generating over 530,000 user interactions.

Brand series

Longform video, specifically the concept of the brand series, is a rapidly emerging format among marketers, who promote everything from blouses to beer with collections of high-quality videos that embody the spirit and lifestyle associated with their brands. Since 2012, Prada’s women’s-only Miu Miu label has been enlisting female filmmakers to help craft its feminine films, which together are known as The Miu Miu Women’s Tales. In addition to being available online, the short films are routinely screened at the Venice Film Festival. In keeping with the mobile video trend, they can also be viewed by way of a project-specific app.

Perrier’s five-part brand series, called Tales of the District, uses animation, narration, and its distinctive shade of green to tell the story of a man who is besotted by the hostess of fictional locale District Perrier, which followers can find on Tumblr.

Dutch brewing company Heineken, meanwhile, earned itself more than 6.5 million views for The Experiment, a three-minute original video that’s part of the ongoing global project “Enjoy Heineken Responsibly,” designed to encourage drinking in moderation. Launched in 2014 with the slogan “Dance More, Drink Slow,” the campaign has been promoted in more than 20 countries and demonstrates how a great DJ can decrease the amount that party-goers drink. Additional video content, like a behind-the-scenes look at DJ Armin van Buuren and a video offering even more insight into “the experiment,” creates an in-depth brand experience.

Inspirational storytelling

Video may be popular, but don’t let it detract from the value of longform written content. French mountaineering equipment brand Quechua uses it on its blog, Hiking on the Moon, where readers can find inspirational adventure stories of mountain-loving customers like photographer Théo Giacometti through episodic posts. With the help of articles in both English and French, photography, maps, and video, the audience can follow him through Norway’s Hardangervidda National Park, where reindeer run wild.

The Swiss beverage brand Schweeps has also covered immersive territory with the digital culture and lifestyle magazine Villa Schweppes, which features articles on music festivals, Parisian bars, and fashion trends along with cocktail recipes. DJs, designers, and mixologists designed to inspire readers to adopt the brand’s hip nightlife vibe.

Widespread influencer marketing

Last year, a Dutch startup called Influencers at Work launched Europe’s first fully automated influencer marketing service, and already, we’re starting to see major brands including Lancôme Italy and Beck’s Brewery embrace influencer campaigns.

To promote its Hypnôse Volume-à-Porter mascara, Lancôme recently partnered with social media influencers and bloggers to create a series of Facebook and Instagram videos. The campaign reportedly reached more than 5 million users and saw engagement rates as high as 2.5 percent. For Beck’s, influencers helped the beer brand promote a consumer contest with 30 social media posts, which reached 6.8 million consumers and generated 170,000 social interactions.

This is an excerpt from the e-book “State of Content Marketing: Europe.”

The post 5 Content Marketing Trends Sweeping Europe appeared first on Contently.

Brands that are Masters of Social Media Content Publishing

Business Insider’s Christina Austin analyzes the companies successfully producing content on social media.

There’s General Electric, which has over 900 likes on Facebook and has produced videos and infographics about the “Tropicana ‘Juice Train’ for those interested in how juice gets from the orchard to their glass.”

Sears has over 2.1 million Facebook likes, more than 31,000 Twitter followers, and created FitStudio, a website focused on fitness. Amazon has over 378,000 Twitter followers and has its own online publishing sector.

Common Content Marketing Mistakes

Tom Treanor highlights some common mistakes that businesses make with content marketing.

Some are inconsistent with content creation, do too much self-promotion and selling, and forgetting to include calls to action.

Content needs to include real life news as well: “Real world items such as events, seasonal changes, special customers, daily specials, the local weather, promotions, VIP sightings, new customer visits, new products, partners, and production runs can be fodder for blog or social media content.”

Ups and Downs of Freelancing

Susannah Breslin of Forbes weighs the pros and cons of freelancing. Freelancers feel more independent, get to spend more time with family and loved ones, and get to multitask, if they want.

The biggest complaint is the money, which isn’t guaranteed.

Gigi Griffis of Content for Do-Gooders said, “One month I’ll be incredibly busy and the next month things will be slow. One month I’ll make $8,000 and the next month I may bring in $300. It takes some getting used to, particularly that first year.”

Counterculture Music Magazine Arthur Coming Back

The New York Times reports that Arthur, a defunct free music magazine that was printed from 2002-2008, is now returning at $5 an issue.

The circulation will now be 10,000 instead of 40,000 and is going to come out on Dec. 22. In a time when magazines are struggling to stay in print (especially music ones, such as SPIN) this seems like a brave move.

News Corp Investing in YES Network

News Corp is going to be acquiring a stake in YES, the network that broadcasts Nets and Yankees games, according to the New York Times.

YES Is worth about $3 billion, and is based in New York.

Benefits of eBooks

Content Marketing Institute’s Nicolas Gremion discusses why eBooks are beneficial to content strategies.

EBooks are subtle marketing tools and provide valuable information to the people that read them. If they contain links, businesses can track and analyze who is downloading it, and they are affordable to create.

Ben & Jerry’s Featuring Instagram Photos in Ads

Mashable reports that Ben & Jerry’s is placing fans’ Instagram photos in its local ads. Fans are being asked to tag #captureeuphoria on their photos, and 20 will be picked until January.

The winners’ pictures will be placed in bus stations, print ads, and billboards around their hometowns.

The post Master Brand Publishers, Content Mistakes, Freelancing Benefits appeared first on Contently.

Adidas’ Content Marketing Campaign for the Bulls

Adidas created a web series and a hash tag to promote the return of Bulls player Derrick Rose last week, reports Kuno Creative.

Using the hashtag #thereturn, people find the webseries, which chronicle, in five episodes and a commercial, the story. Rose tells his story episode one, in episode two Rose is training and starting over, and in three he’s working hard to get back in the game.

CopyBlogger’s E-Book Writing Month

CopyBlogger is putting a spin on NaNoWriMo, national novel writing month, and holding a “write an e-book” month for content publishers. 

Right now, content makers should be thinking about topics to cover and planning which days it’ll be written. When the e-book event is officially launched on October 31, the site will allow content creators to track their progress.

The Best Branded Content of the Week

The fourth episode is a “behind the scenes” video for the commercial, and in five, “we learn that it is what drives him to be better. It also kind of makes us want to buy the shoes that will help us do better…see how that works?”Last Week’s Best Branded Content

Business 2 Community rounded up the best branded content of last week, which included the LG elevator “prank” video and the Coca-Cola dance vending machine video from South Korea (along with the 007 piece).

Also on the list is Adobe, which made a video called “BS Detector” that promotes its Digital Marketing Cloud, and Ocean Spray, which conducted a stunt where it “set up a 1,500 square foot cranberry bog filled with 2,000 pounds of cranberries smack dab in the middle of Rockefeller center” and put it up on UStream.

Current TV Up for Sale?

The Chief Executive of Current TV, Joel Hyatt, announced that his company might be sold, according to the New York Times.

The cable channel is in 60 million homes in America, and Hyatt, Al Gore, Comcast, and Direct TV are some of its stakeholders. Nightly hosts on Current include Eliot Spitzer, Jennifer Granholm, and Joy Behar.

News. Corp Might Buy Penguin Group

Although it was announced that Random House and Penguin Group were considering a merge, News Corp. has now expressed interest in purchasing Penguin, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The move comes at a time when News Corp. is looking to expand into educational publishing, and when the book industry is being heavily affected by Web retailers like Amazon, Google, and Apple.
Map Shows Tweets Around the World

A new program called Maptimize shows a world view of where one million tweets are coming from at any given time, according to Mashable.

Using geotagging, it “can be viewed as a heat map or cluster and you can narrow the timeframe for when tweets were sent” and each time 20 new tweets are sent out, “20 of the oldest tweets are removed.”

How to Spread an Infographic

Business 2 Community’s Brent Nau says that when companies post infographics, they need to do it on their own websites so that they will receive credit for the content.

The image’s description should match what the infographic is all about for SEO puposes, and it should be easy to embed on social media sites. To reach Twitter users, companies can utilized ClickToTweet, which “will help you generate a link that will allow your users to effortlessly tweet your infographic data snippets.”

The post Adidas Runs with the Bulls, E-Book NaNoWriMo, Best Branded Content appeared first on Contently.

Passive income aims to do that, with one caveat. The mantra is: “Work hard now, reap the benefits later.”

Pat Flynn of the site Smart, Passive Income is the first to say that generating revenue this way does not happen overnight and is not easy — but it is possible.

Content drives future profits

Writing a book is an example of passive income — once the work is done, you’ll collect profit as long as people continue to discover and purchase the book, with minimal effort such as continued marketing.

For content creators, a new digital goods platform, Gumroad, offers smaller startup costs for selling an e-book. (Read more about why Gumroad nets more profit to writers than Amazon).

In addition to your own products, passive revenue can also be generated from selling the products of others.

Promise and perils of affiliate marketing

Amazon has made this practice, known as affiliate marketing, mainstream by allowing anyone to sell anything, from books to diapers, and keep a small percentage of each transaction.

But just like the content you place on your site, any affiliate links should be carefully tailored to your audience. Ideally, affiliate links will improve the user experience of your readers while also bringing in a new source of revenue.

How one blogger makes it work

Alexis Grant, who blogs about careers, traveling and writing, says she only includes affiliate links on her site from products she planned to write about anyway. She often includes these links inside blog posts, in her sidebar (example: Thesis, the Wordpress theme used on her site) or in her newsletter.

Because Grant has a targeted audience, she is better able to choose what products to post with affiliate links. This will increase the percentage of both click-throughs and eventual purchases. Starting with a very large audience is the best way to gauge potential returns.

Disclosure is important. First, because it maintains your trust with your audience, but also because readers might remember to come back to your site and purchase through you because they know it’ll benefit you.

Top image courtesy of kentoh/shutterstock

The post How Content Can Generate Passive Revenue appeared first on Contently.

Some news organizations have done this successfully, but it is still an untapped market.

Selling ebooks, even as Print On Demand (POD), in which you don’t pay for copies of your book to be printed until they are sold, can provide an additional source of revenue for a writer with minimal effort — simply select a few great articles, edit them together, write an introduction and conclusion and perhaps hire a designer to create a cover.

But Dan Pacheco, who runs a startup called BookBrewer, cautions that the big win will go to writers who have an already existing audience and content.

“Ebooks are good for any blogger with a significantly large audience in the tens of thousands of unique visitors who engage regularly with the blog [through posting comments and sharing articles],” he says. “And of course you need a good collection of content in your archives that can also be stitched together into a narrative.”

Pacheco’s clients include news organizations, such as The Denver Post, which have both the content and audience required to make ebooks worth the time. With the Denver Bronco’s season still underway last year, Pacheco put up a URL so people could pre-order a book about Tim Tebow and the Broncos while Post editors put together the story in a great print layout. Most sales came from the POD book, so the Post needed to put no money down and generated a profit (in the high thousands) from the beginning.

Pacheco notes that having a book simply available through Amazon.com does nothing to drive sales. In fact, he says if you’re able to convince Amazon to do promotions, it will take a larger cut than the standard 30 percent.

For news organization clients, Pacheco sees most sales come directly from the newspaper’s website (and he’s gone so far as to arrange delivery of POD titles directly from the printer to the customer).

Lewis DVorkin, chief product officer at Forbes Media, notes that the Forbes blogging platform enables writers to translate their content and expertise into ebooks.

DVorkin himself will be publishing an ebook of his archived Forbes content through Hyperink, a service that actually offers insight into engagement levels and keywords to assist writers in deciding which posts to use.

For some Forbes writers, the blog was an effective research tool to see what topics readers were most interested in and allow that knowledge to shape reporting. This back-and-forth with the audience is what can hedge a writer against wasting time developing an ebook.

Ebooks are a huge opportunity. Platforms such as Amazon’s store and Hyperink’s service can streamline the process but not without cutting into the potential profits. Creating an ebook from past writings won’t likely make a person rich enough to never work again, but it can bring value to your personal brand and link your name with your ideas.

Related articles

• How to become an ebook superstar(guardian.co.uk)

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• Stephen King and eBooks(nathancampos.me)

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• Hyperink Goes After All-Star Bloggers With New eBook Creation Service(betakit.com)

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The post Should Bloggers Repackage Content to Sell as Ebooks? appeared first on Contently.