Since then, comments and questions have been the content metric I secretly value over likes and shares and views. Did I make people think about things differently? Did I spark enough curiosity to make someone want to learn more?

By that measure, our webinar on the science of storytelling a few weeks ago was a big success. By the time we got to the Q&A, there were nearly 100 questions in the chat. I answered as many as I could live, but I also wanted to give the best of the rest some love in a content mailbag. Let’s dive in.

Should we change anything about our storytelling because of the COVID-19 situation?

-Anthony

Over the past month, the phrase I’ve come to loathe the most is “business as usual.” Nothing about our current situation is usual. Our work and personal lives have changed in very real ways.

As marketers, our top priority right now should be helping our audience overcome the challenges they face. If we do that, we’ll build trust, nurture leads, and have a strong pipeline when the economic landscape shifts. To steal a line from Hootsuite, we need to “do good or make people feel good.”

For most brands, doing good means taking action in the fight against Coronavirus. For example, we’re raising funds for emergency grants for freelance creatives in need.

The easiest way to make people feel good is to create high-quality content that educates and entertains them. As a marketer, think of yourself as in public service. If you’re in finance, help people take advantage of every financial program available to them right now. If you’re in healthcare, follow GE’s lead and share important innovations that can help fight the disease. If you’re in marketing or technology, help people figure out how to work more effectively together.

However, don’t just create coronavirus content for the sake of it. In other words, don’t be this brand.

Bottom line: Everything that’s going on right now should prompt us to reevaluate the stories we tell and ensure that we’re prioritizing the ones that’ll help people the most.

What is your opinion on sending email content regarding the current situation?

-Ryan

Email remains the best way to reach your audience with stories and build a connection. When done well, it amplifies your traffic across all other organic channels. Coronavirus doesn’t make that any less true.

But we do have to be extra careful about the amount of emails we’re sending right now. This is what my inbox looked like for most of March:

Apparently, I have a lot of friends at Via. I also have a second family—the sweetgreen family, and they would like to take care of me during this unusual time. And Target considers me a “guest” because …. yeah, I guess I did get drunk and fall asleep in the camping section that one time in college.

We all get too many emails from brands, in part because it’s one of the toughest things for companies to manage. Product is sending a survey, the content team is sending a newsletter, customer marketing is sending a product update, and the sales team is reaching out with a special expansion proposal. And that’s when everything is normal. In times like this, our instinct is to do more, more, more. We try to drown our business anxiety in hyperactivity.

At Contently, we definitely sent a few too many emails to some folks after the crisis hit. Last month, we quickly spun up new virtual events to address challenges our audience were facing, like remote content collaboration and making the case for content marketing. These events had a ton of sign-ups, but in the course of promoting them, we ended up sending too many emails to people who were already signed up for our weekly newsletters. Once we realized this, we vetted our lists and reduced our email frequency.

In other words: Keep sending helpful content to your audience, but audit your email comms and ensure that people aren’t on overlapping campaigns. Even your most engaged contacts shouldn’t hear from you more than twice a week.

What if I am writing for tech savvy audience? Does it still make sense to write at a 4th grade level?

-Anna

You’ve talked about white papers at the beginning and the “level” at which they should be written—does that apply to brands across the board? We are in institutional asset management and continuously struggle with the “tone” and “level.” Senior management is pushing for academic level and the marketing team is pushing for something lower?

-Herbert

After my last webinar, I got a lot of questions about our research on content fluency. Should all brands really strive to write at an elementary or middle school level? Even B2B brands in niche industries?

The answer: Yes.

Complexity doesn’t equal authority. Whether you’re writing about institutional finance or pharmaceuticals or email marketing, you should make your writing clear and enjoyable to read. Doing so leads to a huge competitive advantage. If you’re the only one in your industry who does that well, people will turn to you first. You’ll earn their loyalty.

Now, your content may require some technical industry jargon. If that raises your reading level, that’s okay. But a lot of jargon can often be simplified into basic terms, so try to keep it to a minimum.

How relevant do you see content marketing being for B2B companies, and which kinds of content would you recommend?

-Herbert

In many ways, content marketing is more important for B2B companies than B2C companies. I wrote about why a couple years go:

People only want to read and watch content about their passions, and those things tend to fall into two camps:

A) Content that helps people enjoy their personal passions, like sports, gaming, wellness, fitness, cooking, travel, health, and, in my case, bouncy castles and large water slides.

B) Content that makes people better at their jobs, where they spend most of their days. These people desperately need to improve if they want to retire before they’re 85 years old and Boca Raton is somewhere under the Atlantic Ocean.

If you’re a B2C brand, you’re likely playing in the first camp. And the competition for attention there is fierce. If you want to stand out, you need to drop someone from space or tell truly unique stories—like Marriott or Dollar Shave Club—to stand out.

If you’re B2B, you still need to create content that stands out, but there’s much less competition. Condé Nast isn’t about to launch a magazine to help content marketers measure ROI. Meredith won’t start a new pub to help healthcare executives navigate the complex regulatory landscape. As a B2B brand, you likely have knowledge and expertise people crave.

This is a topic I’m weirdly passionate about. I even made a video about it!

Obviously every audience is different, but in general, what types of media and placements are most effective for storytelling, particularly for B2B on a small budget?

-Justin

There’s no universal rule here. You should reach your audience on the channels where they’re most engaged.

Our two biggest traffic sources are search and email. Search helps us reach thousands of new people who subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Then that weekly newsletter keeps them coming back. We’re a B2B startup with a pretty small budget, too, so we’re very deliberate about which keywords we target, focusing on terms like “content audit” that bring in readers likely to subscribe.

After that, LinkedIn is our biggest social channel. We have two new LinkedIn newsletters, The Storytelling Edge and The Content Report, that are growing by about 500 subscribers per week. We try to repurpose content as much as possible, so after a few days or a week, we repost our LinkedIn newsletter to our blog, reaching our audience in two places.

The biggest key is to tailor your content to the channel. On Twitter, threads work super well; often, we’ll summarize the contents of an entire article on Twitter, especially if it’s data-heavy, so our audience doesn’t have to click out of the feed.

We're aiming to raise $50,000 in emergency grants for the @freelancersu's Freelancers Relief Fund to help freelancers facing economic hardship during #COVID19. Here's why 1/https://t.co/PV6Rwsn7tb

— Contently (@contently) April 7, 2020

On Facebook, native video is king. Once you figure out where your audience spends their time, study that channel to figure out what works best. Short “NowThis” style social video and animated explainers work really well here, and they’re much less expensive to produce than live-action shoots.

How can I express the value of emotion in advertising to a leadership team that is highly focused on price-based messaging?

-Christine

Every brand needs to find the right balance of short-term sales activation with long-term brand building. The problem is that most organizations invest much more in the former than the latter.

Leading marketing researchers Les Binet and Peter Field have found that the ideal split of resources is 60/40 in favor of long-term brand building. (My ex-colleague, Guissepe Caltabiano, has a great breakdown on it here.)

While price-based offers will deliver an immediate short-term boost, those gains mostly disappear after six months. Brand building efforts, however, deliver compounding returns over time and a long-term uplift in sales. You can still use short-term sales activations to get over the finish line in any given quarter, but brand building is the key to long-term success.

Unfortunately, we’re drawn to short-term sales activations because:

1. They’re easy to measure. You send an offer, people click and buy, and you can measure the ROI.

2. The immediate results make our brains feel good.

But it’s not a great long-term strategy. Ask your leadership team: Do they only care about boosting sales for the next 3-6 months? Or do they want to build a brand that lasts?

What tips do you have about formatting copy? For instance, do bullets kill storytelling?

-Eric

Some thoughts here:

• Bullets are a great way to break down complex information and make it easier for our brains to absorb information. Bullets, lists, and images are a great way to keep people’s attention and cater to visual learners because it mixes up the monotony of long text blocks.
• However, don’t begin an article with bullets. That’s snoozetown. Start with a relatable story or anecdote that invites your audience in.
• Lastly, make formatting choices with intention. I tend to use shorter paragraphs to cater to mobile readers. I also almost always use H2s or bolded questions to break a piece up so it’s easier for people to digest. When in doubt, copy the formatting choices from others that you enjoy the most. And never make a bullet as long as this one. Honestly, it’s just getting out of hand.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s former head of marketing and co-author of The Storytelling Edge. Ask us your most pressing content strategy questions here.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: Answers to Your 7 Biggest Content Questions appeared first on Contently.

-Sara, New York

This question cuts deep.

In March, I took on a new role as Contently’s head of marketing. I immediately started thinking about I could make a big impact as quickly as possible.

My first instinct was to pump more inbound opportunities into the pipeline. The more opportunities you have, the more business you’ll close, right? So, I worked with my team to ramp up our content marketing machine and push out lead-gen campaigns that would appeal to our target audience.

But then I thought of a second, bigger opportunity. What if we could also make our sales team more effective? If you think about it, sales enablement is the easiest way to drive marketing ROI. Let’s do the math.

Say you’re a B2B software company, and you close 15 percent of all inbound opportunities. That means if you have a goal of closing 15 deals a quarter, you need to generate 100 opportunities.

But say your company needs to close 20 deals next quarter to hit its target. With that 15 percent opp-to-win rate, you’re now going to have to generate 133 opportunities to close enough deals.

That’s not easy to do with a flat budget. Sure, you can make some badass content your audience loves and increase your inbound leads, but a lot of those leads will need to be nurtured for months to become opportunities.

What if you just increased your opp-to-win rate instead?

Most marketers recoil at the idea of being on the hook for sales goals. As a result, sales enablement is often an afterthought. Some companies just leave salespeople to figure it out on their own. Here’s the truth: The average B2B executive buyer consumes 17 pieces of content over the course of the sales cycle, according to Sirius Decisions. Two-thirds of that content is delivered directly to buyers from your sales team.

When it comes to content distribution, social networks and email platforms get a lot of love. However, your most valuable distribution channel is actually your sales team. Seventy-nine percent of B2B buyers say that content provided by sellers is extremely influential in their buying decision.

When we don’t put the right content in the hands of their sales team at the right time, we waste the opportunities we worked so hard to generate. On the flip side, if you can help your sales team close just five percent more deals, you’ll completely transform the trajectory of your business.

So how do you do this? I’d suggest starting with a 3-step process:

1. Set a marketing goal for improving opp-to-win rate.

You won’t get credit for driving sales enablement ROI if you put it on the record. Pick a target that’s ambitious yet realistic. (We’re shooting for a 50 percent boost by year’s end.) And make sure everyone in the company knows about the goal.

While, you’re at it though, keep focusing on increasing demand gen. The Venn diagram between increased inbound opportunities and increased sales effectiveness is where true marketing success lies. Don’t believe me? Then tell this actual Venn diagram that he isn’t real. I dare you.

2. Get close with sales and find out what they need.

To develop effective sales enablement collateral, you need an intimate knowledge of your sales cycle: How your team qualifies and nurtures opps, how they pitch, what common objections and challenges they face, who the decision makers are, and the reasons they say yes or no.

Shadow your sellers. Learn how they work. Naturally, you’ll start to see a lot of opportunities to help them out.

First, you’ll spot situations where sellers could use existing content but don’t know it exists or where to find it.

Second, you’ll see certain conversations stall because you lack a crucial piece of content. If we’d done a couple more case studies on our healthcare clients last year, for instance, I bet we would have closed five more deals. If we’d made a better ROI calculator? Ten deals, easy.

Solicit these needs from your sellers. We use the content requests feature on Contently’s platform to organize and respond to ideas from our sales team. That kind of technology is really useful and helps marketing and sales feel like a cohesive team. If you don’t have software like this, you can always use Google Forms.

According to CSO Insights, sales teams only receive 34 percent of the content they need from marketing teams. If you take an honest look at your content program, I bet you’ll see a lot more you can do to help.

In our case, we’ve realized our sales enablement needs fall into a few buckets:

• Content and case studies that speak to key buyer concerns
• Training on the latest marketing trends and models that let sellers be more consultative
• Tools and calculators that help them develop more customized proposals.

3. Make sure your sellers can find the right content

Oh boy, do I have more sales enablement stats for you. Did you know that on average, salespeople need to look in six different places to find the content they need? Or that, according to SiriusDecisions, 66 percent of companies with a sales enablement process are on track to hit their goals compared to only 48 percent for those that don’t? I bet you didn’t, because you have a life, unlike me, who is writing this column while on a plane to Hawaii for my friend’s wedding.

Another study found that sales people will stop looking for content after 90 seconds if they can’t find it. So you need a really good system in place.

To build that system, we created a feature in Contently called content portals that makes all of our content easily searchable by asset type, audience persona, funnel stage, industry, etc. for anyone in the company. Our clients love it because any employee can use it—even if they don’t have a Contently login.

This past week, we took that to the next level with the launch of an official app in the SalesForce AppExchange that recommends custom content to sellers at the opportunity level. Now they can easily send helpful, relevant content to prospects, instead of sending another empty “Hey, just following up…” email.

This is an area where tech really matters. You need a system that’ll help your sales people find the right content, and it should use the same tagging structure as the rest of your content management program.

How do you convince your boss to prioritize storytelling over SEO-driven content that’s basically just adding to the noise and has already been covered by everyone? On my team, we can only create content around a certain topic if it has significant search volume behind it. In theory, this strategy sounds great, but the majority of our posts end up being explainers of dry topics or how-tos on really boring tasks. We don’t write anything that actually resonates with people anymore, like opinionated pieces, analysis, or strategy. It’s honestly soul-sucking.

-Clifford, Boston

I feel for you, Clifford.

It sounds like your boss is stuck in a 2008 SEO mindset, so I’d challenge you to show your boss where this strategy is falling short. Some things to examine:

• How well is this content ranking for the keywords you’re targeting? It doesn’t matter is a keyword has a high Monthly Search Volume if no one’s engaging with it and it’s not ranking well.
• How engaged are folks when they come from search, past just pageviews? What’s their bounce rate? Session duration? Pages per session? Scroll depth? Learn your Google Analytics inside-out so that you can give your boss the full picture.
• Are the visitors from search taking action? Are they signing up for a newsletter, viewing a product page, downloading an e-book, or taking any other sort of significant action? Set up conversion goals to track these pathways. (Here’s a great guide).

It’s not enough to just tell your boss that your content strategy sucks. You have to explain why.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s head of marketing 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: How Can Sales Enablement Drive Content Marketing ROI? appeared first on Contently.

I’ve been told that at the end of the Q&A, I promised I’d answer some of the outstanding questions in my first Ask a Content Strategist column for 2019. So I’m going to do just that.

Before I get to the questions, though, I have to make a programming note. I’m leaving on my 2-month Contently sabbatical in January. So if you want any content strategy advice before March, you’ll have to track me down in South America. Just look for the boat with a giant New York Knicks flag blasting Robyn.

What are the most effective way you’ve seen companies getting departments on board with this concept of a centralized content strategy? So many different departments are stuck in their old ways and want to continue on.

-June, Illinois

Complacency is the enemy of good content. So many marketing departments are happy churning out the same four crappy white papers year after year, even if they perform about as well as Donald Trump at a spelling bee.

I’d recommend reaching out to the individual lines of business first and ask them to collaborate. If that doesn’t work, you’ll need to get an executive on board to drive the effort from up high. Here’s how to make that happen:

1. Conduct a content audit to reveal wasted content.

If the other LOBs inside your company are operating without a content strategy, chances are their content isn’t performing. A study by Beckon found that the top 5 percent of branded content garners 95 percent of all engagement. SiriusDecisions estimates that 65 percent of B2B content receives no engagement at all. Conduct a content audit to pinpoint content that’s been published but not seen.

The message: No Content Strategy = Wasted Resources.

2. Show the exec what a good content strategy looks like—even if you have to talk up your competitors.

In an ideal situation, you can come at this from a position of strength. You’ve implemented a successful content strategy within your individual LOB, and you want to spread that model to the rest of the team. If so, create a compelling case study about your own work. Show how your content strategy transformed your marketing, improved efficiency, and delivered superior results.

If not, come handy with case studies from competitors. The fear of falling behind is a fantastic motivator. Here’s a handy flipbook of over 30 case studies to get you started.

3. Present a clear game plan for implementing a centralized content strategy.

Our content maturity model and content strategy playbooks can help.

What are your thoughts about user-generated content? For example, emojis and the use of emojis for targeted marketing. How can I, as a marketer, identify such hidden layers of content marketing?

—Jagjit, Location Unknown

It’s impossible to have a user-generated emoji. Emoji creation is controlled by a powerful consortium of tech bros. (I wrote about it for the Observer. It’s wild.)

The best user-generated content comes from campaigns where you give people a good reason to share something with you. For instance, four years ago, we created a public freelance rates database where freelancers could anonymously submit what they’d been paid by various companies. The idea was to create transparency across the industry and help freelance creatives negotiate.

Recently, we combined that user-generated data with internal data to create a badass freelance rates calculator so you can easily see what to charge for future projects. People contributed to this database because we gave them value back. That’s the only situation in which UGC works.

What would you say are the absolute essential components of a content marketing strategy going into 2019?

—Amanda, Phoenix

Our editor-in-chief, Jordan Teicher, did an excellent job mapping this out in detail a few weeks ago in his first content marketing playbook. I highly recommend you check it out.

The seven key components are:

1. Set goals and KPIs and measurement framework

2. Understand your audience and the challenges they face

3. Perform an SEO analysis and craft an SEO strategy

4. Conduct a gap analysis

5. Map content to the buyer’s journey

6. Develop a distribution strategy

7. Create a content calendar

Oh, and buy whoever controls your budget a really expensive bottle of their favorite liquor.

Neil Patel recently said content marketing will be over next year (at least written text). What are your opinions about that?

—Alexandre

Disclaimer: I can’t find any evidence online of Neil Patel saying this. Given that he emails me 20 different 5,000-word articles every week, I doubt he believes such a thing.

For years, people have predicted that text content was about to die. A few years ago, publishers were so tricked by Facebook’s BS video metrics and promises that they fired half their writing staff in the great “pivot to video” tragedy of 2016. Now they’re firing all of their video people and hiring writers back. Because much like boot cut jeans, text will never die.

It’s not terribly exciting or tweet-worthy, but content isn’t going to change dramatically in just one year. The content that performs well in 2019 will look a lot like the content that performed well in 2018.

Content will remain an important part of every touchpoint with your customers and prospects. The format will change depending on the channel and purpose. Sometimes it’ll be an article with an interactive graphic on your blog. Sometimes it’ll be a Facebook video with overlay text. Sometimes it’ll be an email newsletter with text and images. Sometimes it’ll be a pitch deck that tells the story of your company. The important thing is that it’s content your audience will enjoy and find helpful.

Sure, we’ll probably start using Facebook a little less because we’re seven days away from learning that they’ve been selling our data to Amazon because of some crazy bet Mark Zuckerberg lost at Burning Man. And older people might start using Instagram more, mostly to horrify their kids. But as Mark Ritson wrote in this incredible Marketing Week piece, the marketing landscape isn’t going to just up and change all of a sudden.

So don’t go chasing some new fad. There are no secret shortcuts to good marketing. Just try to help people. Listen to their problems. Find out what they’re searching and asking. Pay attention to where they spend time online. And then reach them there with helpful material that’s actually fun to watch, read, and listen to.

There are no magical marketing tricks. But if you spend every day genuinely trying to help your audience, you can never really fail.

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: Will Written Content Be Obsolete By Next Year? appeared first on Contently.

Over 700 people signed up, and we got a ton of questions. We tried to answer them all, but I spent a little too long breathlessly explaining how to work with compliance teams. So for this month’s Ask a Content Strategist column, I thought I’d dive into some of the best questions that went unanswered.

As a content team of one, I struggle holding onto the roles of creating the strategy, campaigns, assessment, graphics, etc. to avoid the chaos that always ensues. What should my primary focus be? And what are absolutely necessary technologies to invest in?

-Paul, Colorado

It’s never fun being a one-person team. No one realizes you’re responsible for 1,000 percent more than just creating content. And there’s usually that one guy who thinks he could do your job way better than you. (You may think you can write, Chad. But you can’t.)

When you’re a one-person content team, you’ll always be tempted to focus on just creating more. More content. More campaigns. When you’re overwhelmed, it’s much easier to just focus on the rote tasks in front of you.

But to be successful, you need to take a step back and focus on your content strategy. You’re one person. You can’t do everything. So it’s all about honing in on the few channels and tactics that are getting you the best results.

This is essentially the 80/20 rule. If you’re getting 80 percent of your leads through email and SEO campaigns, but spend the vast majority of your time trying to maintain an always-on social and blog cadence, you’re wasting time and effort.

Focus on the channels that work best for you, and then put all of your energy into creating a few pieces of high-quality content specially crafted for those channels.

As for the technologies you’ll need: It depends. A B2C startup focused on paid social video has a much different stack than a B2B company focused on email campaigns and partner webinars. But there are a few must-have buckets.

Analytics: The biggest key to growing your program is showing results. If you’re B2B, you need to show that your content drives leads. If you’re B2C, you need to show that people who engage with your content come back and buy something within a 90-day window.

Google Analytics is free, awesome, and can track both engagement metrics as well as basic conversion pathways. But to provide a full picture, you’ll need a good CRM as well. For most smaller companies, HubSpot is the easiest to plug in and get working.

Calendar and workflow: These tools are important for your own sanity and organization, but they also provide transparency to other teams you work with (sales, demand gen, accounts, etc.) so that they can know what content is coming. A lot of Fortune 2000 and fast-growth companies invest in a content marketing platform like Contently, but if your program isn’t ready for that yet, you can use a more general workflow/calendar tool like Asana.

Social media management: The free version of Buffer is awesome for smaller companies. For enterprise companies, Sprinklr and Spredfast are client favorites.

CMS: For owned content, you need a strong CMS that you won’t spend half your time troubleshooting. WordPress remains the easiest platform to design, maintain, and use. Plus, there are tons of great plug-ins to create different content formats (interactive, quizzes, parallax scroll, etc.) and templates that boost conversions and sharing.

What’s an example of a “big rock” asset in the consumer content world?

-Woo, San Diego

Usually we refer to “big rock content” in a B2B context—white papers or e-books that then get repurposed in a bunch of different ways: blog posts, infographics, videos, social posts, and interactive content that relies on the foundational research in the original asset.

But B2C companies create big rock content too—just look at Spotify’s “Year in Music” research, which it remixes as everything from personalized playlists to 100-foot-high billboard ads. There’s also Red Bull’s epic music and extreme sports documentaries, which the brand slices into “social cuts” specially designed for their audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.

One of our customers, Silversea, creates big rock “Collections” that serve as travel guides for specific destinations around the world. Each component within them—like these awesome Planet Earth-esque travel videos—serves as a divisible piece of content.

Just look at that freaking walrus!

What are the most effective ways to track ROI for each individual piece of content you produce?

-Sam, San Diego

Here’s the truth: I really do not recommend trying to quantify the hard ROI of every individual piece of content that you create, as opposed to your content program as a whole.

It will lead you down a terrifying rabbit hole in which you have to match up a ton of web analytics and CRM data, and you’ll spend 90 percent of your time making those calculations instead of, you know, actually making cool stuff.

That being said, here’s an in-depth guide on one way to measure the full ROI of individual content pieces. And here are some key metrics you can look to in order to identify top performers.

Conversions: Track which pieces of gated content generate the most leads. For instance, in 2015, I wrote a series of five content marketing playbooks for Contently. They were extremely popular, generating tens of thousands of leads.

Each playbook was classified as an individual campaign, which we then tracked as the lead source in Salesforce. If a deal closed as a result of a playbook, it got credit. As a result, we were able to attribute millions of dollars of revenue from that campaign. (I’m still waiting for my cut…) And guess what? We’re rolling out an updated series of playbooks in the coming months to try to recapture the magic.

SEO: Three things I love about SEMRush—it’s cheap, easy to use, and tells you the monetary value of your primary organic keywords. If a piece of content is ranking for a high value keyword and driving a ton of traffic, this is an easy way to show hard ROI for an individual piece.

Here are some other ROI guides that should help:

The content metrics that really matter.

How to show the ROI content has on your brand.

One last piece of advice: Find the friendliest marketing or business analyst in your company, bribe them with booze and cupcakes, and get them to set up an automated dashboard that pulls in your most important KPIs each month. (In all likelihood, they already use Looker, Domo, Tableau, or Google Data Studio.)

It’ll mean the difference between looking like this at the end of every month…

Versus looking like this instead…

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: What Should You Focus On When You’re a Team of One? appeared first on Contently.

Jannelle, Halifax, Nova Scotia

In our weekly editorial meetings, we go around the room pitching stories. The vibe is fairly professional and even-keeled … until it comes to me. I might start out measured, but inevitably, I’ll launch into a PG-13 tirade about some content marketing topic. Editorial meetings are my safe space, and my creative process (unfortunately and unintentionally) involves channeling Gary Vaynerchuk.

Jordan, our editor-in-chief, will nod along with a smirk on his face and then say, “That’s actually a good idea.”

[Ed. note: This is true.]

Two weeks ago, my weekly rant was about content marketing design—specifically, the many Fortune 2000 brands with content hubs that look like they were designed by a half-blind fisherman in 1998… and haven’t been updated since.

Design is incredibly important in content marketing. If the design of a content site is terrible, people won’t give the words a chance—they’ll perceive it all as low quality.

According to a Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab study, 46.1 percent of people say that “design look” is the top criteria for perceiving the credibility of a brand. Design and UX impact read time, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc. Just imagine if Contently looked like it was a forum built in 2000. This isn’t surprising. According to a 2012 Forrester CSO study, 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and the brain processes visuals 60,000x faster in the brain than text.

In other words, hubs that look like the image below don’t exactly scream “trustworthy” and “innovative.”

Finance brands tend to publish higher quality and more sophisticated content than other industries. But going from HBR or the Wall Street Journal to most finance brand blogs is like going from streaming Hulu to popping in a faded VCR tape you found under your dad’s couch.

Guess dad was really into Billy Banks workout videos in the ’80s

I’ve seen plenty of marketers baffled when readers don’t convert to customers. Sometimes it’s because the content isn’t very good. But more often, it’s because the site design makes it extremely difficult to convert in any way. People won’t sign up for your newsletter unless you prompt them to do so. They won’t check out products related to the topics you’re covering unless you make it easy.

One brand that does this extremely well is Marriott, with Marriott Traveler magazine. Traveler has over 40 editions around the globe, all run by Marc Graser, a former staffer at Variety and Entertainment Weekly, who refuses to publish any stories that feel like hotel ads. Instead, Traveler operates with the integrity of a high-quality travel magazine, publishing fun stories about little-known travel gems.

(Disclosure: Marriott is a Contently client. But read Traveler. It’s good.)

Even though Marriott Traveler doesn’t push product, it drives millions of dollars in direct revenue for the hotel giant. How? The site does a really good job of recommending related products and experiences to the story that you’re reading.

Take this article from Marriott about lesser-known, kind of weird things to do in Midtown Manhattan. It’s a smart addition to Traveler because it solves a common problem for tourists in New York City: Most of the hotels are in midtown, which gets boring after you’ve done the standard tourist activities. Everything seems like one giant M&M megastore—an artificial tourist trap designed to steal your money and give you diabetes. Most people figure that if you want to find anything classically “New York,” you need to head to the Village, Harlem, or the outer boroughs. This piece, however, details old-school New York attractions that fell under the radar, like a Houdini museum. Hell, I’ve lived in Manhattan for a decade and have never heard of that.

The article doesn’t plug Marriott at all, but it makes you think that maybe staying in midtown—where Marriott happens to have several hotels—isn’t so bad after all. And once you finish reading, Traveler makes it very easy to book a room or a Marriott Rewards experience with a module at the bottom of the page. Marriott essentially acts as the advertiser of its own high-quality editorial content.

And it works! Marriott Traveler would drive a fraction of the revenue for the company if the site didn’t make it so easy to book a hotel. Without that hard ROI, there’s little chance Marriott would have invested so heavily in Traveler, launching new editions around the globe every few months. Since the ad exists in a place where consumers are used to seeing advertising, it doesn’t corrupt the editorial experience. Everyone wins.

How do you create content that drives customer engagement while delivering ROI for the business?

-KL, London

This overlaps with what I wrote above about Marriott Traveler, but I’ll repeat it here with a twist of different analysis. Also, I may be a little conceited, but I’m not conceited enough to assume that you read everything that I wrote. (But if you do, thank you, I love you, and please scroll down to the next question.)

Marriott executes a strategy that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago on this blog. The best brand blogs follow the law of Poliakov’s Pyramid, which illustrates the narrow band of content that people actually want from brands—stories related to their interests and passions, and content that helps them do their job better.

In short, B2C brands should ask, “How can I help people live their lives better?”

B2B brands should ask, “How can I help people do their jobs better?”

Both groups should slap themselves with a fish if the primary answer to that question is just “our product!”

If adhere to Poliakov’s Pyramid—and if your answers are different than what’s already readily available on the web—you have a damn good chance to succeed. If you don’t, you’ll come across as the brand equivalent of the boring, self-absorbed jock villain in every ’80s teen movie.

Which tactics can be used to figure out the questions your target group is asking about a specific (read: technical) topic?

-Griselda, Stockholm

Let’s finish with a bulleted list, shall we? I promise there’s a kicker in here somewhere.

• Search data: It’s the holy grail of user questions. I love this simple overview by Moz on how to integrate search queries into your creative process.
• Internal search: What are people looking for on your site?
• Reddit/forum data: BuzzSumo recently integrated a lot of this really useful information.
• Persona interviews: Actually talking to the people you’re trying to reach might seem old school, but it’s super valuable.
• Surveys: We survey newsletter subscribers all the time to learn about their challenges and needs, which drives a lot of our story ideas.
• Help desk, accounts, sales, and other client-facing teams. These groups are a source of anecdotal data that can complement quantifiable research.
• Customer councils: Get your top prospects and clients in a room together and listen to what they’re struggling with. It’s a worthwhile way to get a bounty of valuable data. Facebook does this very well with its major agency and brand clients. In a few years, this will be mandatory when Mark Zuckerberg is named Dark Lord of the Connected Realm.

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: Why Are Brand Blogs So Ugly and Outdated? appeared first on Contently.

-Jake, New York

As I sat down to write a navel-gazing trends piece for the fifth straight year, I couldn’t help but think of this cartoon by The Marketoonist for two reasons.

1. This cartoon is way too real. I own that outfit. I’ve had that exact conversation at six different conferences this year. I don’t want to come off as self-centered, but I’m pretty sure The Marketoonist is using me as a muse.

2. This cartoon illustrates why the content strategy echo chamber is so problematic. As I wrote in August, this silo-ing of “content marketing” as a special, separate activity within organizations has caused massive growing pains for the industry. Preaching to the converted is a waste of our time.

So as we talk about the big trends that’ll transform content marketing in 2018, let’s look outside the echo chamber.

1. The content operations shake-up

The hardest part of content marketing isn’t starting a blog or crafting a clever social media graphic. It’s figuring out how to use content in a way that makes every interaction with your customers more effective—while simultaneously overcoming bureaucratic headaches.

Inside large organizations, pulling that off requires an incredible amount of internal coordination and buy-in. You need to assess the content needs of every department and figure out how to build a content machine that’ll pump out the high-quality assets they need. Then you need to figure out how to deliver all that content to the people you want to reach.

This means asking big questions like:

• How do we create a system that lets stakeholders make requests and avoid email chains from hell?
• How do we locate all outdated or low-quality content and get it out of circulation?
• How do we surface relevant content to the right people?
• What key KPIs should we track to measure success and justify this significant investment?
• Who the heck is in charge?

I have conversations with marketers every week about tackling these challenges. The good news is these conversations now include more marketing leaders, who are taking content seriously. I advise them to focus on three big areas.

Content Strategy

Content strategy is much more than coming up with a bunch of story ideas and populating an editorial calendar. It starts with examining organizational needs. (What business goals do you hope to impact through content, and which are most important?) If you’re a brand-driven organization, for instance, your content goals will level up to brand marketing objectives, and the brand marketing team will likely make final decisions about what to produce.

Next, you need to conduct a content audit to identify what assets you can repurpose and what needs to go. Then you have to put in the time to understand your audience personas and the content they crave, which will help you figure how to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Most importantly, you need a plan of attack for getting that content to people through the right channels at the right time. That plan should contain a proper framework for approval workflows (who needs to sign off?), governance (how can we make sure we won’t get sued?) and comprehensive brand and style guides.

Taken altogether, that’s your content strategy.

Technology

You can’t manage an enterprise content operation over email and Google Drive. It’s like trying to manage your sales operation in Excel. It may be free, but it’s a huge waste of money when you factor in all the inefficiency that comes with it.

By this point, a central content marketing platform that bring your teams together to manage creation, activation, and optimization is just table stakes. You also need your content analytics set up properly to measure the impact of your content. Using a simple setup with Google Analytics and Marketo could work fine, but you need to make sure the platforms talk to each other so you can track how top-of-funnel engagement impacts down-funnel conversions.

On top of that, there are a whole slew of SEO and competitive benchmarking tools that we’re in love with. But if I told you what they were, my content strategy team would actually kill me.

Creative Talent

Having the greatest strategy and tech stack in the world doesn’t mean anything without talented content creators who can communicate with your target audience. I expect companies to put a lot of effort into finding those who have that beautiful combination of subject-matter expertise and storytelling skills.

The through line here is that content marketing is extremely difficult. It takes a lot of time, effort, and hard work. Anyone who tells you there’s an easy way to build a world-class content operation is full of it.

Over the last few months, I’ve witnessed a wave of companies flipping the switch and committing to making content work. The journey is hard, but as industry leaders like GE, Amex, and Chase will tell you, the payoff is worth it.

2. The courage to avoid “me-too” content strategies

Last week, BuzzSumo’s Steve Rayson published fascinating research that shows an inverse relationship between the number of posts published on a particular topic and the average shares each individual piece gets.

Take influencer marketing as an example. It’s exploded as a topic over the last couple of years, to the point that over 1,000 stories about influencer marketing are published each month. But on Twitter, the average number of shares per piece has plummeted.

In early 2015, influencer marketing was still somewhat novel, and the folks writing about it tended to be industry leaders and exciting startups riding the crest of the influencer marketing wave. But then a bunch of copycat content creators jumped on the bandwagon, writing the same generic how-to listicles. As a result, the shares plummet because only about 5 percent of the content says something original.

Mark Schaefer termed this phenomenon “content shock.” Being late to a content topic is like being one the last people to buy a hot stock—it seems like a safe choice, but in reality, the risk of failure is huge. Or put another way, Adidas would never copy “Just Do It” as a slogan. Microsoft wouldn’t try to co-opt “Think Different.” But when it comes to articles, videos, and white papers, brands seem more than happy to copy each other.

That doesn’t mean that you need to avoid a topic just because it’s saturated. The topic of content marketing has been hit hard by content shock over the past few years. It’s a hell of a lot harder to break through with a content marketing story today than when I took over The Content Strategist four years ago. But that doesn’t mean that we’re going to pivot and go all-in on Bitcoin coverage.

The challenge is to anticipate what’s next in your industry. For us, that means focusing more on topics like content marketing AI, data-driven content strategies, and content’s role in the customer experience. Internally, our mantra is that we have to both anticipate where the industry is headed and also help drive it there.

When it comes to content, a lot of marketers’ instinct is to do what’s already proven to work. But as the data shows, this approach is likely to fail.

3. Fewer stories, better content

Per research by Orbit media, the publishing frequency of top bloggers over the past few years has decreased while the average length of their pieces has increased. In other words, the best online writers have discovered that the winning formula is publishing fewer posts that are far more in-depth.

I’ve been strongly advising our clients to focus on creating breakthrough stories and invest more resources into distributing them to the right people—particularly through paid social.

You need breakthrough content because simply getting people to click on your content isn’t enough. You have to capture their attention. You need to teach them something. You need to wow them. And when a story can do that, you need to make sure your target audience sees it.

It’s just advertising 101. When Budweiser spends big money to make heartwarming “Puppy Love” commercials, the marketing team doesn’t just post it on the website and hope people find it. They buy as much media behind it as possible.

That awesome interactive infographic, captivating short-form motion video, and thought-provoking white paper you publish works the same way. You need to milk that content for everything it’s worth.

That’s how you avoid content shock—and stun your competitors.

Joe Lazauskas is the director of content strategy at Contently. The Storytelling Edge, his book with Contently co-founder Shane Snow, is available for pre-order now. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here.

The post What Are 2018’s Biggest Content Marketing Trends? appeared first on Contently.

-Alejandro, Mexico

Content marketing is a funny discipline. It’s been a major movement for the past six years, but some companies are still just starting to take it seriously. And once they do, marketing leaders panic. They turn to the closest living creature and scream, “We need to do content! Now! Someone start typing!”

That approach doesn’t work out great, because the worst kind of content only exists to check a box. Just creating content isn’t a goal. That won’t do anything for your business. Plus, you’ll waste a lot of money if your content fails to impact some larger pursuit like brand awareness, lead generation, or sales enablement.

Alejandro, without a larger strategy, you’re doomed to fail.

So how do we change your boss’s mind? Here are three great stats that could help you make your case:

1. According to a 2017 Contently survey, 98 percent of marketers believe that “having and following a content marketing strategy is important for content marketing success.”

2. Per CMI’s 2018 B2B Content Marketing Trends survey, 62 percent of content marketers who rated themselves as very successful or extremely successful have a documented content strategy. Conversely, if you don’t have a strategy, there’s a good chance you won’t be successful.

This holds true for B2C companies as well, as we see in CMI’s 2017 B2C report. (The 2018 B2C report hasn’t been released yet.)

3. According to SiriusDecisions, 65 percent of all content that brands produce goes unused. There are a few big reasons for why: content is hard to find, unknown to users, irrelevant, and low quality. All of these stem from a lack of content strategy.

Your boss is going to waste a lot of money if you don’t get the opportunity to put together a comprehensive content strategy. If you want to start mapping out where you need to go, check out our whitepaper Content Methodology: A New Model for Content Marketing, which provides an end-to-end guide for building a content marketing program.

How can you best measure content marketing ROI for content that’s distributed via social channels? What are the best ways to go beyond likes and social shares?

Ryan, Chicago

It’s all about setting up the right conversion pathways so you can follow what folks do after they find your content. Do they sign up for a newsletter? Check out your product page? Ask to talk to a salesperson? Your business goals will ultimately dictate what you decide to track. Regardless of what conversions you’re after, this KissMetrics guide to Google Analytics social reports is an excellent place to start.

What are the differences between a writer’s role and a content marketer’s role? Does a freelancer have to know all the technical marketing jargon, or can they just write?

Kate, Las Vegas

Contently has a network of over 160,000 freelance creatives across the globe that we vet and train to work with brands, so this is a question we’ve thought about quite a bit. If you aspire to write for a brand, you don’t need to be a content marketing expert. (Unless, of course, the topic is content marketing.) Just be a good writer who specializes in a certain topic or industry.

That being said, you do need a basic understanding of marketing terms. Writers should be versed in the foundational elements of a company’s content program. (Which is why we create a content strategy for every Contently client and make it accessible in our platform for every freelancer.) Specifically, you’ll want to know:

Business goal(s): What is your client trying to accomplish with this piece of content? What metrics will determine success?

Audience: Who is the target audience for this piece of content? (You’re going to write differently for a 55-year-old CMO than a 20-year-old student.)

Content pillars: What core topics and concepts does your client focus on?

Target SEO keywords: What target SEO keywords is your client trying to rank for with this piece of content?

Writers have to keep these factors in mind when they’re crafting content, and they need a certain level of marketing fluency to reach that point. Alternatively, if you’re a marketer working with freelancers, you need to make sure they understand this information before you start commissioning work.

Over the past five years, tons of writers have gotten hooked on content marketing after upping their marketing fluency, including me. Who knows? Once you start to geek out on content marketing, it could open up a whole new career.

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

His book, The Storytelling Edge: How to Transform Your Business, Stop Screaming into the Void, and Make People Love You, which he co-authored with Contently co-founder Shane Snow, will be published on January 29 by Wiley. Pre-order it here.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: My Boss Wants Me to Write Blog Posts Without a Strategy. What Do I Do? appeared first on Contently.

It’s July, which means two things: seething with jealousy over the out-of-office messages of your European colleagues (“On Holiday until September!”), and a chance to take a breath and reflect on our biggest marketing challenges. With that in mind—and as a part of our Accountable Content Series—let’s dive into the hottest topic of marketing in the past 10 years (and probably the next 10 as well): data.

I’ve been hearing the term “data-driven content” in pretty much every corner of the content marketing universe lately. But what the hell does that really mean? How do you create it?

—Ashley, New York

I love to lampoon marketing buzzwords, but truth be told, I use them every day. (“Let’s optimize this article with real-time personalization that’ll yield down-funnel business results, guys!”) Without a doubt, “data-driven content” is one I use without shame.

That’s because a good content program should always be driven by strong, data-backed insights. It’s at the core of our approach at Contently; we’ve built a technology suite that reveals everything from what writers you should use, to how to optimize the tone of your content, to which pieces are secretly driving more—or less—engagement than you think.

But as marketers, we tend to view data as a magic oracle that’ll solve all our problems. The reality, though, is that data in a vacuum is nothing but a bunch of numbers in a spreadsheet.

I often think of something that Alicia Hatch (the CMO of Deloitte) said when I joined her on stage at the Collision Conference this year:

The thing I’ve noticed the most when I talk to CMOs is that they have all the technology to make this happen. They’ve got a shiny stack as tall as the sky. They’ve got all this data at their fingertips. And yet, the organization doesn’t know how to use it effectively.

In other words, data itself is just one part of a larger machine. It may be the fuel, but you need a working engine that turns data into something that actually drives results.

In the simplest form, raw data that you have about your audience—think audience demographics, persona research, and first-and-third party data about what content they like to consume or tends to drive sales—should translate to insights. For a finance brand, this might result in something like: “High-income millennials in the northeast are more likely to watch financial advice videos on Facebook than any other network, and engage disproportionally with content that triggers nostalgia.”

Data is just one part of a larger machine. It may be the fuel, but you need a working engine that turns data into something that actually drives results.

Those insights should inform creative ideas, like doing a series of 90-second explainers animated in the style of iconic video games from the 1990s optimized for Facebook native video.

This process is crucial. If you just deliver a giant spreadsheet of data to creative people, they’re going to struggle. But if you give them easy-to-understand insights—in other words, value context to help them make decisions—you’re much more likely to facilitate breakthrough content that delivers business results.

It’s not the easiest task. At Cannes Lions last month, I attended a panel at Index Exchange’s suite where Vox Media CMO Lindsay Nelson talked about how good data analysts are some of the hardest people to find. But they’re worth the investment. And if you can find a content strategist who can both translate raw data into great insights and then also come up with killer content ideas? Never let them go.

What tactics can you use to find the questions that your target group is actually asking about a specific (read, technical) topic?

—Griselda, Stockholm

I love this—there may be no better fodder for story ideas than the questions your target audience is asking. These are my five favorite sources for tracking them down:

1. Q&A sites and other online communities where your target audience is active

I spend a fair amount of time checking content marketing and content strategy questions on Quora, inbound.org, and content marketing groups on LinkedIn. Social listening tools can also be a boon here.

Sites like Inbound and LinkedIn are great because their professional information is front and center, so you can even track questions by persona. These kind of sites also tend to have less filtered discussions since it’s a group of peers casually discussing their issues, rather than a formal focus group.

2. Interviews with customers

You know they’re in your target audience because they bought something from you! Take time to formally interview them about their questions and challenges, particularly as it relates to the solution you provide.

3. Your sales and accounts teams

They field questions from clients and prospects all day. Ask them to take 15 minutes to fill out a Google form and record the questions they hear the most, and hold meetings to get their perspective. (We even created a whole system inside Contently to collect this information.) You won’t regret it.

4. Audience surveys

We survey our 100,000-plus subscribers regularly, and often ask them what questions they’d like to see tackled in our content. You’d be surprised at how eager your audience is to provide feedback.

5. Start a mailbag column in which you ask readers to ask you questions on a very specific topic like, say, content strategy

Not going to lie—it’s working pretty well.

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

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do You Create Data-Driven Content? appeared first on Contently.

Sorry, I’m getting word from my team that’s not what we’re doing with this column, and that if I really want to write 1,000 words on patriotic rompers, I should just suck it up and take that $20,000 per year editorial assistant job at GQ.

Instead, in the spirit of Contently’s accountable content series, let’s talk about something much more practical: how to use B2B content to drive leads. And instead of answering a series of reader questions like usual, I’m going to share an exchange I had over email with one of my good friends, who recently took over a B2B content operation. I’ve lightly edited our exchange.

So, how do you—or others—use article content to influence leads in the B2B process?

—Joe’s Friend, New York

First off, it’s critical to have fleshed out buyer personas so that you understand the audience you’re going to reach. You’re marketing team should already have these. If not, get working on it! You can’t start planning a content strategy without understanding the audience you’re serving.

Then, leverage content analysis tools (something we can help you with) and persona interviews to figure out which types of content will be most useful to those personas at each stage of the funnel. The top of the funnel might require articles, videos, and research papers. The middle of the funnel may include calculators, tools, and case studies. And the bottom-of-the-funnel will need product videos, product information, sales decks, and other content that’ll help your buyer get approval for the purchase internally.

A lot of short-sighted marketers don’t see how top-of-funnel content like articles and videos drive leads. But your funnel is going to be pretty damn empty if you don’t have enticing content to capture your audience’s attention and start convincing them that you’re the right solution.

Obviously, this all breaks down if your personas aren’t fleshed out. At Contently, we actually just finished refreshing our personas. (Shoutout to our content strategist Caerley Hill for leading the charge!) This slide from analyst firm Sirius Decisions provides a solid framework for what your personas should include.

Things like initiatives, content preferences, and decision drivers are often overlooked, but it’s really important to understand them if you want to create content that drives business results.

I know blog articles are often used as lead nurturing similar to the way we do with B2C—like an e-newsletter. But is it ever used as acquisition tool, and if so how do you get it in front of the right audience?

Articles can absolutely be the first touchpoint with a prospect. After all, that’s the whole idea of top-of-funnel content.

On the organic side, the goal is to create content that’s discoverable via SEO and social. It should be optimized towards the target keywords your buyers are searching for, and compelling enough to earn backlinks (boosting SEO) and shares (reaching new folks for free). Shares are often overlooked in B2B marketing, but they’re crucial. If the right people are sharing your content, the network effect will allow you to reach hundreds or thousands of similar buyers for free.

On the paid side, it’s a golden age for B2B content distribution. Facebook targeting has gotten incredibly granular (job title, company, income, lookalikes based on your customer base, etc.) and is still very cost-effective. LinkedIn is more expensive, but delivers content in an environment where folks are looking for work-related content. Outbrain also recently introduced a lot of advanced targeting options that mirror Facebook’s offerings, including look-a-like audiences.

You can also distribute content via paid search (expensive, but worth it in some cases) and other partnership programs, like when we partner with Hubspot to create and co-promote a joint webinar. The key here is finding a partner with a similar audience so you’re reaching the right persona. (Sensing a theme?)

If someone consumes said article content as a first touchpoint, what happens next? Unless we’ve bought a list, we don’t have any contact info for said person. So is retargeting based on their cookie information the only possible next step? Or is there something else?

If you’re retargeting, what would you follow up with? More article content, video, or visual content for where they are in the journey leading up to a “premium content” moment (webinar, ebook, event) which is gated?

Right on again: it’s cookie-based retargeting until you get them to opt-in to a relationship with you.

The most common stream is: They read an article, you retarget with an e-book offer, they download the e-book, then you retarget them with more product-oriented ads (demo requests, free trials, check out our solution, etc.), while also nurturing them via email now that you have their email address. You can use marketing automation software to stop serving ads to them at this point, particularly if they’re responding to your emails, have talked to a sales person, etc.

There’s also an argument to be made for retargeting them with more content to deepen the relationship. I think this is a valid strategy, but if you’re going to do it, you want to hit them with mid-funnel content (case studies, ROI calculators, etc.), not more top-of-funnel content.

It really depends on the product you’re selling and your sales cycle. Is this an expensive enterprise solution with 9-month sales cycles, or a $50/month offering that’s a much easier close?

Does article content get scored lower than other kinds of content in lead scoring? Why or why not? (This one feels like an essay question.)

Looks like you’re conflating lead scoring with lead attribution, which is a common mistake. Lead scoring is when you score the lead based on their profile. For us, a director-or-above marketer from a Fortune 500 finance company is an A lead, while the marketing manager at a small CPG startup is a D lead, since the customers who get the most out of Contently are enterprise finance and B2B companies.

Lead attribution is when you assign credit for a lead to a piece of content or marketing program. At that point, it just relies on your model, but articles usually don’t get dinged as lower. This is a pretty simplistic explanation of one way to think about multi-touch attribution.

Who owns the decisions on the previous two questions at most companies? It doesn’t seem like it should be me—it seems like it should be data-backed traditional marketing, but just want to confirm my gut.

This is usually owned by the demand gen or “revenue marketing” team. Just make sure they know what they’re doing, and that your teams are as aligned as possible.

How do I convince the relevant stakeholders that article content has value in the process?

I think there’s a lot of research that backs up the value of top-of-funnel content like articles; Sirius Decisions, for instance, has found that articles are the third-most impactful type of content for B2B C-suite buyers, and make an impact at all three stages of the funnel.

And the average buyer consumes over 17 pieces of content before they make a purchase:

It’s universally accepted that B2B buyers do a ton of research before they ever fill out a form or get in touch with you. And if you’re not present in the research phase to influence their decision, you are totally screwed. So how do you avoid being totally screwed? Articles that get shared a bunch and rank highly on key search terms and perform well in top-of-funnel paid campaigns.

You’ve said you think B2B marketers gate too much stuff. But at some point you have to gate something to get the lead. So can you explain what you mean?

What I’m arguing for is opt-ins. Give people an awesome 2,000 word e-book ungated, but then have offers (trials, demos, events, webinars, etc) that show up as ads mid-stream in the content.

To be clear, I do think that webinars should be gated. You want to send reminders and follow-ups. They’re more like an event.

As for what’s good enough to be gated, it’s important to ask whether you’re offering a fair value exchange. Is this e-book so good that it’s worth it for someone to give up their email address and opt-in to being potentially contacted by your company?

It’s also worth considering the trade-off. Let’s say that a piece of content would get 1,000 readers ungated. If you gate it, maybe only 250 people will download it. Assuming you email the report to them, maybe 30 percent of those 250 will actually end up reading it. So then it becomes a question of having 1,000 people read something versus 80, and whether those 250 email addresses are worth the readers you lose.

Ultimately, you have to pick and choose your spots. Gating is a very effective lead gen technique, but you need to use it only when it’s appropriate. If you’re unsure, always lean in the direction of providing value to your audience.

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 for a chance to be included in his next mailbag, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do You Use Articles to Influence B2B Leads? 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.

Welcome to the April edition of Ask a Content Strategist, the monthly mailbag column about love, life, and mostly content marketing. This month’s column focuses on a topic that no one’s talking about: video marketing.

What’s that? Everyone’s talking about video marketing? Even your nana wants to know why you aren’t doing more video? Well then damn—we don’t have any time to waste. Let’s get to questions from our award-winning readers.

How do you measure the ROI of video marketing?

-Laura, San Diego

I’ve done a deep dive on content marketing ROI in this column before, but over the past month, I’ve gotten a dozen different questions about video ROI.

I’m not surprised. Digital consumption trends have shifted heavily toward video over the past six years. According to eMarketer, the average U.S. adult now spends 105 minutes each day watching digital video, up from just 39 minutes in 2011.

With increased consumption, video has gradually become a go-to marketing tactic. B2B marketers now use it almost as much as e-books, per CMI’s 2017 Content Marketing Benchmarks report. (Sixty percent of B2C marketers use it as well.)

But there’s a big difference between doing video and doing it well. I spend more time perusing the YouTube channels of Fortune 1000 brands than anyone ever should, and a lot of them are graveyards of 20-minute talking head interviews with fewer than 200 views. They make C-SPAN look like The Fast and the Furious.

That’s why I love Laura’s question here. She’s not just looking to check the box with video. She wants to get a real return on investment. But where to begin? Time for a list!

1. Determine the problem you’re trying to solve.

What business goal does this content address? That’s a question you need to ask whether you’re making a motion graphic explainer video or allowing your editor-in-chief to publish a quiz called “Is This Headline About Pokemon Go or Kim Kardashian?” At the risk of over-simplifying things, most videos will level up to one of three goals:

Brand awareness and sentiment: You want to reach people. You want them to know what your company does and that you exist. And you want them to walk away with a positive impression of your brand.

Revenue generation: You want to increase the number of people buying your product or expressing interest in buying your product.

Customer service and education: You want to help customers use your product more effectively.

It’s very possible that you’ll have multiple goals. You may want video to both build your brand and help drive revenue. That’s fine, but to increase your chances of success, just be sure to identify one as the primary goal and the other as a secondary goal.

2. Set your KPIs—and don’t be afraid to think outside the box.

A lot of marketers are in a measurement rut, only looking at a few metrics to determine success: impressions, views, click-throughs, shares. This is unfortunate, because there are a lot of powerful ways to track the ROI of video. I’m a big fan of this infographic by Hyperfine Media, which lays out different ways you can think about ROI, from increasing the CTR of your newsletter to upping landing page effectiveness.

Keep in mind, a lot of these KPIs require preparation. You can’t measure video’s impact on landing page effectiveness if you don’t record a baseline of how that page performs without video. You can’t measure sentiment without a tool like Knotch. You’re not going to track video’s impact on purchase behavior if your content analytics aren’t properly integrated with Salesforce.

3. Ensure that your content is actually designed to accomplish your stated goal.

Every piece of content you create is an experiment. You have a hypothesis about what will work, and you’re testing it out. You just have to ensure that your methodology makes sense so your content isn’t set up to fail. You can’t expect a video to generate leads, for instance, if it doesn’t link to a demo request page or includes a lead form. A video won’t impact brand awareness if it’s made to educate existing customers.

One recent example I love is this interactive video designed to drive 401k contributions for BlackRock. Our friends over at Magnet Media made it using Rapt Media‘s interactive video technology. It had a very explicit goal: increasing employee 401k contributions. In the clip, viewers go through a series of choices (such as whether to buy a coffee or contribute that money to their 401k) and see the financial impact. It sounds corny, but it was very well done, and the results speak for themselves. Seventy percent of viewers engaged with the video, and 50 percent of the people who engaged increased their 401k contributions.

Fifty percent! That’s incredible, but it goes to show what can happen when video content is designed with a specific business goal in mind.

How many words are necessary to get google to recognize it!!

-Chris, Seal Beach

I love the freneticism in this question from Chris. I’m picturing him just sitting on a beach, surrounded by seals, refreshing Google every five seconds waiting for his post to appear on the first page of a search.

Pictured: Chris from Seal Beach

Vague wording aside, it’s actually a pretty good question. While Google doesn’t have a minimum word count, there are some rules to keep in mind.

• Google seems to favor posts over 1,000 words, although much of this likely has to do with the fact that comprehensive posts are more likely to earn valuable backlinks.
• The gods at SEO Yoast claim that posts should be at least 300 words.
• What’s often more important is including keyword-rich H1 and H2 subheads that break up your story. You’ll notice that all of the questions in this post are formatted as H2s in hopes of pleasing the Google gods.

How good a writer do you need to be to create good content?

Janet, London

You need to be a very good writer to create good content. This isn’t negotiable. You can have the best insights in the world, but if you aren’t able to communicate them in a clear, entertaining way, you’re not going to break through. There are thousands of fantastic writers out there hungry for work. Hire them to tell your story and focus your attention on the things that you do best.

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

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do You Measure the ROI of Video Marketing? appeared first on Contently.

This is a dangerous month for marketers. Finalizing budgets, surviving SXSW’s endurance test of booze, buzzwords, and barbecue. Making it through March Madness without getting fired for running a gambling ring and sports bar out of your cubicle. On top of all that, there’s a good chance your CMO is about to stroll by and ask about your content calendar. Forget hiding the whiskey and stacks of cash—what the heck are you going to say?

As always, I’ve got you covered, starting with the first question of this month’s mailbag.

How much content should I actually publish? Like how many stories should be on my calendar each month? No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer.

—Jamie, London

Most content marketers struggle with this question. I still remember my first meeting with Sam Slaughter, Contently’s VP of content. A day after Sam hired me to run this blog, we were going over the content strategy one-sheeter he’d asked me to put together. Almost immediately, we got into an argument over how much we should publish. I proposed three pieces per day. He disagreed, countering with one story per day.

“One piece a day?” I shrieked. I’d just spent three years running a news site, The Faster Times, that published over 30 pieces every day. (Half of them were crap, but still.) One piece per day seemed insane.

After another 20 minutes of negotiation, Sam agreed to let me publish twice a day. Before long, I was pushing out three or four stories a day and hoping he wouldn’t notice. After all, I wanted us to be a real publisher (we even launched an award-winning print magazine!), and pumping out a lot of content was part of what made you a real publisher, right?

Before long, though, I realized I was wrong. Along the way, I developed a few rules that helped dictate how much we should publish.

Rule 1: Quality trumps quantity. Plan your calendar with that in mind.

Shocking rule here, right? Still, this cliche needs to be said. Five percent of branded content gets 90 percent of all engagement. Mediocre content is pretty much useless for SEO. And it’s also detrimental to your brand.

In the early days of The Content Strategist, I was supplementing our meatier stories with a fair amount of AdFreak-style blog posts that only took me an hour or so to produce. They generated short-term social traffic but did nothing long term for our business. I could have spent that time on unique, memorable stories. I was just checking the box.

I had this epiphany one afternoon over tacos with Sean Blanda, who was then the editor of Behance’s legendary blog, 99U. Sean successfully challenged my thin logic, and soon after I focused all my attention on high-quality, original stories. Before long, our readership skyrocketed.

Rule 2: You need to publish at least enough to fill a regular newsletter.

I don’t care if you’re B2C, B2B, or B2J [note] business-to-journalist [/note], which definitely doesn’t sound right but is a real term I heard used multiple times this year at SXSW. No matter your business, you should have a newsletter for your content.

As I explain here, a newsletter is often the most important aspect of content marketing. It’s the O.G. of distribution tactics—a direct line to your audience that requires few resources and can’t be sabotaged by Facebook’s or Google’s algorithm. Most lasting content marketing success stories attribute their effectiveness to the newsletter.

At minimum, you want to send a content newsletter once a month, which means you should produce at least 2-4 pieces of content per month. You’re still at the crawl stage, but at least you’re moving—and beginning to build a relationship with your target readers.

Rule 3: Be realistic about your resources.

I’m a notorious Contently loyalist. Sometimes, people point this out by mentioning that I once actually slept in the office because I was still there writing at midnight. (I also had no idea how to lock the doors and was afraid all the computers would get stolen if I left.)

What they don’t mention is the reason I was still there is because I offered to produce a half dozen new e-books in Q1 2014—in addition to running the blog. This was insanely unrealistic, and the quality of my work suffered. So did my lower back—our couches really sucked back then.

When deciding how much content to produce, I recommend following the conservative chart below, which comes from our popular content methodology white paper and lays out the dedicated staff, freelance resources, and technology you need for each content marketing maturity stage.

One thing to note: Freelancers can be a really effective way to scale your efforts when you don’t have a lot of internal resources. Companies will often be much more willing to commit budget for freelance help than they are for full-time headcount. Back when I was the only full-time editor at Contently, I leaned heavily on the skilled writers in Contently’s creative talent network to produce high-quality stories that helped us build our audience. It’s a strategy that’s been incredibly effective for our clients as well.

How can I measure the result?

Milad, Tehran

I love cryptically existential questions. Measure the result of what? Our personal journeys? Our brand new buyer personas? The thousands of dollars I’ve clearly wasted on my West Village therapist over the years? I’m just going to assume you’re talking about content marketing and link to this measurement advice column before I try to quit Contently and move to the jungles of Panama again.

How will content marketing change with Facebook’s removal of “fake news” and the emergence of “alternative facts”?

-Sydney, San Diego

This is a great question—one that I could easily answer with a 3,000-word rant. But I already did that on CNBC, so I’ll keep it short here.

First, we should establish that Facebook hasn’t removed fake news; it’s still fairly pervasive, although the social network is taking steps to crack down on it. One of the good things that came from the fake news controversy, however, is that people are more skeptical about the stories they read. That’s good for media literacy.

With this in mind, brands should follow a simple rule: Don’t trick people. Don’t publish content on some unmarked microsite that hides your logo. Acknowledge the inherent bias in your stories; readers will respect you more for it. (This is your friendly reminder that The Content Strategist is the blog of a really great content marketing software company!)

If the removal of fake news changes anything, I expect us to see more good content. And I think we can all get on board with that.

Update: Contently developer Ryan Morlock slacked me this cartoon from The Marketoonist, which perfectly encapsulates one other rule I forgot: As you publish more content, track how your audience responds and look for the point of diminishing returns. Also, the guy in this cartoon is totally me.

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

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Many Stories Should I Publish Per Month? appeared first on Contently.

This insane supergraphic (via Scott Brinker) classifies nearly 4,000 marketing technology solutions available today. When Contently launched in 2011, there were only 150. That means there are about 25 times more companies creating content about marketing and competing for my target audience’s attention.

Which leaves me with the question: In this terrifying sea of logos, how the hell do we stand out?

I’m not the only one asking this question. It was also one of the dozens of inquiries I got during our content strategy webinar last week. Let’s dive in.

How do I differentiate my content from competitors who are also writing with ‘an audience-first’ focus?

— Daniel, Orange Finder

Ultimately, three keys will help you stand out from your content competitors, and none of them involve paying an agency $250,000 to conduct a content audit.

1. Articulate your brand’s unique vision and mission in detail—and use that as content inspiration.

Contently is a content marketing technology solution. Naturally, we want to educate people about the importance of content marketing and the incredible ROI it can deliver when done right. But so do thousands of other companies. For us, “content marketing is great” would be a terrible guiding light because it’s so damn generic. Instead, we need a perspective that’ll allow us to deliver true value to our readers. We need to provide a unique perspective that they can’t get anywhere else.

To accomplish that, we do things like:

• Intelligently communicating that the key to great content strategy is using data and technology to boost human creativity.
• Publishing comprehensive reports, like our Content Methodology e-book, which provide actionable content marketing strategies that people can actually put into place.

• Investing heavily in original research, whether it’s via our platform data or through large-scale consumer studies.

• Publishing as many case studies as possible so folks can understand what success actually looks like.

2. Use that unique vision to craft your brand voice—and make sure it stays consistent.

“Brand voice” is one of the most vague and overused buzzwords in content marketing. Yet, it’s still crucial for you to develop a great one.

Luckily, communicating a clear mission and unique perspective is half the work. Once you have that, it’s pretty easy to conceptualize your brand’s identity. As I wrote in our content strategy playbook:

A clear sense of identity is what categorizes the best brand publishers. GE is the smart, inquisitive, clever science nerd who blows your mind. Red Bull is the death-defying rock star you want to hang out with. HubSpot is the inbound marketing genius who wants to help you get that promotion. Moz is the wizard of SEO with secrets that will fundamentally change your business. In different ways, they’re all a kind of person who will accumulate a posse of interested admirers at that dinner party.

We’re obsessed with crafting and maintaining a great brand voice, which is why we built a tone analyzer into our platform to quantify it, based on the five-factor model.

This tool allows us to not only track the consistency of our voice over time, but also see the tonal traits of our best-performing pieces. Then, we can optimize our content over time so that we get our voice exactly right.

3. Perform a white-space analysis to understand what topics we should cover.

In our weekly editorial meetings, story pitches have to pass a basic litmus test: Has this story been done before? If so, has it been done well?

If the answer to both of those questions is yes, that pitch gets rejected. There’s just no value in doing something that’s already been done. We’re not offering any true value to our audience.

We also use content strategy tools to analyze which publishers have the highest share of voice across topics relevant to our audience and pinpoint where we can stand out. (See our content strategy playbook for more on how that works.) For instance, we’ve started covering marketing technology a lot more after spotting a gap in the market.

This process has become so crucial that we’re currently building a white-space analyzer into our platform to help our clients glean these insights. (That’s all I can say for now, but be on the lookout for some exciting news soon.)

Some of these tactics are pretty advanced, but they’re worth it. At the very minimum, just ask yourself those key questions: Has this story been done already? Am I offering my audience something new?

Are you seeing any learnings that suggest what makes the strongest use of video?

-Paul, Tilt 300

Here are some excellent data points from this roundup by Dillon Baker and this roundup by Tubular Insights:

• Time spent with digital video exploded from 21 minutes per day in 2011 to 76 minutes per day in 2015.

• Young millennials watch more digital video than TV.

• 46 percent of all video plays in Q4 2015 were on mobile devices.

• 69 percent of videos watched on smartphones are shorter than 10 minutes.

What can we conclude from this? For starters, there’s no doubt that video is only going to become a bigger part of content marketing. The secret sauce seems to be short videos distributed through social media platforms and watched on smartphones.

Native video on Facebook, in particular, has changed the game. Most major publishers invested heavily in Facebook video in 2016 and saw a big jump in engagement, per NewsWhip.

These numbers come with a caveat, though. If you watch for just three seconds, Facebook counts that as a view. Some users even accidentally “watch” a video by scrolling slowly through the feed. But Facebook is still the dominant media platform of our time. American users spend 50 minutes per day on the social network, and by one Facebook exec’s account, Facebook feeds will be all video by 2020. This trend isn’t going away.

As with most content trends, media companies are in the lead, with brands soon to follow. That’s why marketers should start studying the most successful video tactics of these publishers in detail. A few key elements pop out:

• They’re short—usually less than two minutes.

• They serve one of three purposes: make you laugh, show you how to do something, or explain something in an easy-to-understand way.

• They’re visually engaging from the first second, with title screens that immediately communicate the value proposition of the video.

• The visuals move fast, meaning things like motion graphics, overhead shots, and quick cuts.

• They don’t involve your middle-aged VP of finance speaking to a camera for 20 minutes.

“I see video as a megatrend,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said on an earnings call Wednesday. “That’s why I’m going to keep putting video first across our family of apps.”

Facebook Live is poised to explode, especially since Facebook does everything it can to promote live videos, including sending push notifications anytime someone goes live.

Live video can be overwhelming, but it’s worth exploring. We’ve been dipping our toes in the water by broadcasting various content marketing talks and company culture talks at Contently. I’ve been paying a lot of attention to The New York Times’ strategy for future content. After a rough start, the Times really hit its stride, producing a ton of inexpensive live video on the fly about smart issues .

Can you recommend any tools that can analyze our content and provide insights for actions? For example we want to display relevant related articles to users who are reading a certain topic, how do we go about doing this?

-Ashleigh, DHi

Yes! In B2B content marketing, it’s absolutely necessary to track the industries of your readers and serve them personalized content. This strategy more than doubled our conversion rate on e-book offers on article pages. The two technologies I recommend are Optimizely and Funnel Envy. Check them out.

Chocolate, please.

-Stephanie

After the last two weeks, I think we could all use a little chocolate. Unfortunately, I still haven’t figured out how to transfer chocolate via an article about content marketing. So how about a GIF of this dancing bear instead? It’s a heck of a lot more fun than staring at a supergraphic of martech companies, I’ll tell you that.

If you have a question for next month’s column, please submit it here. You can also tweet it @JoeLazauskas, and I will promise to respond with more bear GIFs.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do I Stand Out From My Competitors? appeared first on Contently.

At some point over the past 12 months, everyone seemed to simultaneously realize that simply saying the word “scale” would make them sound smart as hell in any meeting. When I wrote “scale” into the headline of this article, my first thought was that I’m an all-powerful god. My second thought was that this headline is going to absolutely kill it in search.

After all, scaling your content marketing program is on a lot of people’s minds right now. 2017 is approaching, so it’s time to plan how we’re going to kick ass next year. And there’s never a more optimistic time in content than when you’re planning your ideal budget. I almost talked myself into blowing 30 percent of our budget on VR cameras just now. (It’s the future!)

Unfortunately, figuring out how to scale your content efforts is a much more measured activity, especially when your VP of finance doesn’t see how a hoverboard and 17 GoPros will help the company sell more software. As the head of the edit and strategy teams here at Contently, it’s a challenge I think about a lot.

This month, it seemed to be on our readers’ minds too. I got a ton of questions about scaling a content marketing program in 2017, so this week, we’re sticking to just one topic. But it’s a damn good one.

We’re creating content and think we understand our audience. The bigger challenge is scaling. We use social media and SEO for organic search. What should we do to scale and reach more people?

—Kate, New York

Right now, a lot of brands are finishing up their “if we build it, they will come” content marketing strategy and … well, they’re realizing that no one came.

Far too often, I hear brands say their goal is to “build a content marketing hub.” It’s kind of like buying some land in a rural field, spending months building a community center on it, and then looking at it and saying, “Well, my work here is done. Time for people to start showing up!”

If someone asks you, “What did we get for that $500,000 you spent this year?” responding with “a content hub” is not a great answer. That’s not a result.

You could respond with something like this…

But it’s just not true. Content marketing is about a lot more than content.

In my July column, I talked a lot about the specific distribution tactics that work best, so I’m not going to rehash them all again. But as you finalize your growth plan for 2017, keep a few key principles in mind:

1. Document your strategy and forecast the compounding returns of your content.

We’ve all heard the stat: More than 60 percent of marketers still don’t have a documented content strategy heading into 2017. I still struggle to understand why.

Getting a budget and resources for your content marketing program without a content strategy is like applying for a bank loan without a business plan. The bank isn’t going to give you much money, and chances are, your CEO won’t either.

You need to show how your content efforts map to business goals and how you’re going to reach your target audience. Forecasting audience growth is always going to be an educated guess, but paid distribution helps make it fairly predictable.

Say that you’re starting a content marketing budget from scratch. Between staff, freelancers, and site maintenance fees, you’re going to spend $20,000 a month to produce content. Then you have another $20,000 to spend on paid distribution on Facebook, which allows you to hone in on your ideal audience thanks to its advanced targeting features.

If your content is good, it’s not hard to get a $0.25 cost per click on Facebook. That translates to around 60,000 unique visitors each month off the bat (assuming one-third of the clicks come from people who click twice). Let’s say 5 percent of those 60,000 visitors share your content, driving three new readers with each share. That’s another 9,000 visitors, bringing your total to 69,000.

But let’s say you use an email capture tool like SumoMe to entice 5 percent of those readers to become newsletter subscribers. That’s 3,000 subscribers right there, half of whom will likely visit again next month. You’ll start to see a gradual rise, particularly as your email list grows and long-tail search and social traffic give your publication a continued boost.

Month 1

Paid: 60,000

Social: 9,000

Total: 69,000

Month 2

Paid: 60,000

Social: 10,000

Email: 1,500

Search: 1,000

Total: 72,500

Month 3

Paid: 60,000

Social: 13,000

Email: 3,000

Search: 3,000

Total: 79,000

This is a simplified calculation, but it illustrates what venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz calls “the compounding returns of content marketing.” Basically, as you create and distribute more content, your audience naturally grows. You build a loyal audience through email and social. The content published in previous months attracts long-tail traffic.

This prediction doesn’t just hold for readers. It’s true for other conversion events, like newsletter subscribers (illustrated above), e-book downloads, leads, opps, etc. No matter your KPIs, the same dynamic tends to hold true.

Pictured: One of my favorite charts ever

Of course, none of this works if you don’t do the next thing on the list.

2. Commit to creating freaking amazing content

In September, the marketing data platform Beckon announced a remarkable finding: The top 5 percent of branded content accounts for 90 percent of all engagement.

Some folks have taken that to mean that content marketing doesn’t work. I don’t see it that way. To me, the stat validates something obvious—that if you create something original and great, you have the opportunity to monopolize consumer attention and leave your competitors in the shadows. It’s proof that mediocre content just doesn’t work—on social or search.

When I interviewed Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin last year, this is what he had to say:

I think there’s still a lot of [misguided] belief around quantity over quality. The vast vast majority of links and shares and amplification signals of all kinds are going to only the top 5 or 10 percent of content that gets put out. There’s not a whole lot of value in writing a decent blog post anymore. [There’s not a lot of value] unless you can be pretty extraordinary.

Ask [this]: If they’re searching for an answer to a question, would they rather reach your piece of content than anything else on the Internet right now?

Unless the answer is a slam dunk, “Yes, this is 10 times better than anything else out there,” I’m not necessarily sure it’s worth publishing.

It’s true. Great stories are the only thing that breaks through.

3. Spend at least 25 percent of your budget on paid distribution

Or half. Or more, depending on your goals and what stage you’re in. Acquiring new readers in your target audience is what allows a content marketing program to grow. Content only matters if people see it.

Yes, you need to maintain a steady stream of content to keep your subscribers and followers engaged. But the winning formula in 2017 will be to push readers to amazing pieces of content through paid distribution platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Outbrain, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Do that and you will crush the meeting with your CEO next December.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do I Scale My Content Marketing Program? appeared first on Contently.

Oh, how much has changed. Since then, I finally hit puberty. More importantly, the interest graph in content marketing took an upswing that’s only been matched by people Googling “American move to Canada or maybe France?”

As the content marketing industry has evolved, so has the sophistication of the questions people ask about it. People tweeted us dozens of questions during The Contently Summit, and we didn’t get a chance to answer them all on stage. So for this edition of “Ask a Content Guy,” I decided to answer the best ones.

advice on maintaining unique engaging voice while navigating bureaucracy and adhering to more rigid corporate brand rules? #contentlysummit

— dj (@djhalp) October 13, 2016

How should traditional/conservative industries try to introduce engaging, innovative and appealing content?? #contentlysummit

— Amy DeCicco (@ADMktg) October 13, 2016

These two questions go together since it’s really hard to create engaging content without an appealing brand voice. There’s a reason Siri doesn’t tell bedtime stories.

At Contently, we work with a lot of brands in conservative or technical industries, such as finance, insurance, healthcare, and B2B technology. In these industries, there are a few common misconceptions that can sabotage a content marketing program from the onset:

1. We conflate being dry and boring with being authoritative.

A lot of us learn a bad habit in high school and college, which is that if you want to write something authoritative, you have to be dry, pedantic, and just not very fun to read.

That’s insane. As a content marketer, you want to tell stories people actually enjoy. You don’t want to make it difficult for them to learn something from you, especially when the subject is technical or complex.

Just look at the publishers that do a really good job of making dense topics go viral. Vox is one of my favorites. It takes subjects that have the potential to be really difficult to understand and makes them accessible to the masses. For example, watch this explainer on the war in Syria, which uses colloquial narration and strong visual cues to break down the conflict. In the wrong hands, it would be incredibly dry and boring. In Vox’s hands, it’s been viewed over 3 million times and went viral on Facebook.

This doesn’t mean banks and insurance companies should start using “on fleek” and calling their audience “fam” in an attempt to mimic a millennial-friendly publisher. They should establish an intelligent, friendly voice that fits their brand. But they should also learn from the storytelling tactics that work for publishers like Vox, BuzzFeed News, and The New York Times.

Another favorite example of mine is Margot Robbie explaining mortgage-backed securities in The Big Short, which won last year’s Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. I know that a video of Margot Robbie in a bubble bath probably isn’t getting approved by most big banks. But it illustrates how to take a boring topic and explain it in a way that captures people’s attention and helps them learn something.

2. We don’t define our brand voice, and we don’t have anyone on the hook for maintaining it.

This simple step often gets skipped, but you should actually go through the trouble of defining your brand voice. Come to a consensus. Write it down. And then educate the rest of the company on what it is.

If you need help defining that voice, content strategist Melissa Lafsky wrote a helpful two-part guide on how to craft your brand voice. (Read it here and here.)

Finally, have someone on the hook for approving every piece of content that you publish. As I outlined in our content methodology report, your content workflow should look something like the diagram below. One person should be in charge of green-lighting each story and pressing publish when it’s ready to go live.

3. We don’t make the easy sell.

Case studies! Use them. There are are so many case studies of brands that think outside the box and create rich, engaging content in traditionally stuffy industries. Three of my favorites:

• GE Reports
• American Express OPEN Forum
• athenahealth

It’s way easier to get approval to take risks when you show that other people are already having success. Trust me, it works.

#contentlysummit top tips for energizing a small team already underwater with client work to dig into thought leadership content creation?

— Amanda Story (@Amanda_Story) October 13, 2016

To start, content needs to be a priority. If you put 17 client tasks on someone’s plate and then say, “If you can write that post about ROI for the blog, that’d be great too!,” the post for your blog will always be the thing that gets pushed off.

On the other hand, if you make writing a story one of the most important things someone on your team has to accomplish that week, then they’ll write it.

That’s easier said than done, but it helps to consider the hidden value of thought leadership content. “Thought leadership” is an overused—and often misused—term, but when it’s done right, you get a lot more out of it than a blog post. Sitting down to think critically about a problem and writing about the solution is an incredibly valuable exercise. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve written a thought leadership post about a content marketing topic and figured out how we could improve internally as a result.

Take, for instance, this post on the five rings of marketing ROI by Sam Slaughter, our vice president of content. This post inspired us to expand some of the metrics we tied to content, and it’s helped justify our investment in content to our execs.

If you want to energize your team, you also have to make sure that the audience reads what the employees write. That means having a strong content distribution strategy. See this “Ask a Content Guy” column for some tactics that’ll help you up your distro game.

#ContentlySummit what arguments would you use convince sales-focused execs to look @ audience growth & engagement metrics, not NMRR?

— Tai Nicolopoulos (@tainicolopoulos) October 13, 2016

I really hope that NMRR stands for “new monthly recurring revenue” and not something like “non-monetizing Russian roulette,” or else this answer is going to be really off.

Let’s be real, most CEOs and CFOs don’t care a ton about audience growth metrics. The key to effective content measurement is tying your metrics back to business goals that they do care about. In other words, your content objectives and content metrics should derive from your company’s larger business goals.

Another effective tactic is to explain the five rings of marketing ROI. Direct revenue from content is certainly an important ROI metric, but it’s just the center of the bull’s-eye.

We break down how to measure each ring here; I encourage you to check it out and reach out if you have any questions.

How (and how much) should quality storytellers think about content distribution & targeting? #contentlysummit

— Katie S. Sanders (@KatieSSanders) October 13, 2016

A lot—content creation and distribution shouldn’t be separate thought processes. From the moment you come up with a story idea, you should think about the platform you’re going to use and the audience you’re hoping to reach. When hiring your content team, make sure they understand that.

Otherwise, you’re going to end up posting a 30-minute video to Facebook of a pasty, washed-out financial advisor explaining mortgage-backed securities. You don’t have to watch The Big Short to know that no one wants to see that.

If you have a question for next month’s column, please submit it here. You can also tweet me @JoeLazauskas or send me a Snapchat of a puppy playing checkers. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to figure out what you’re asking.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do You Create Good Content in a Boring Industry? appeared first on Contently.

It goes to show: You can plan out all the research and intelligent content strategy choices, but sometimes you just make a gut decision that works out. (These mailbags are consistently among our top-performing posts every month.)

I usually advise against making content strategy decisions with your gut. But if you do, surround yourself with people willing to tell you your idea is awful. Or, at the very least, people who make fun of you when you start humble-bragging about your content marketing column with Mac Miller GIFs.

ON TO THE MAILBAG.

Monetization! You barely discuss how to monetize content. Creating and distributing is all fine, but once you do that, what’s next? How do you start producing revenue off your content? What are the options available and what’s right for me?

—Eyal, Tel Aviv

What’s up, Eyal? Fun fact: I lived in Tel Aviv for the first month I spent running The Content Strategist. I felt like such a badass editor because even when I woke up at 11 a.m., it was still only 4 a.m. back in New York.

The main reason I don’t talk very much about monetizing content is that most brands simply aren’t ready for that yet. In fact, it’s the last step in Rebecca Lieb’s content marketing maturity model.

However, I do think it’s possible for brands to monetize before they hit the “run” stage. Part of the beauty of content marketing is that there are more flexible approaches to monetization than there are in traditional media.

Usually, content monetization falls into three stages:

Attribution: The point at which you can effectively calculate hard ROI for your content marketing. When your CEO knows that if he puts $1 into content, he’ll get $2 out, that’s monetization.

There are a few models for attributing content to revenue. (Here’s the multi-touch one we use.) Remember, though, that direct revenue is just the bull’s-eye in the five rings of content marketing ROI. There are other ways for content to boost your brand, but tying them to concrete dollar amounts isn’t as simple.

Bartering: If your content is killing it, you’ll eventually reach a point when your audience is big and valuable enough for you to barter with other outlets. It’s a great way to get marketing and advertising opportunities for free. Plus, bartering is hip! All the cool kids in Brooklyn are doing it.

Essentially, you’re trading access to your audience for access to another audience. I’ll give you a few examples. We regularly swap ads between CMI’s Chief Content Officer magazine and Contently Quarterly. We forged an editorial partnership with the Digiday Awards. And on Thursday, I’m doing a webinar with HubSpot about executive buy-in for content marketing, which HubSpot has been promoting in its newsletter for weeks. (We’ve also been promoting it to our list of 100,000 email subscribers.)

All of these programs would normally come with a five-figure price tag, but since we also have an influential magazine and blog, we’re able to get them for free.

The key, of course, is finding the right partnerships. Reach out to like-minded companies with similar audiences. You never want to betray your audience’s trust and promote something they won’t find interesting.

Selling ads: Ah, the final frontier.

Over the last two years, marketers have started monetizing their content like traditional media outlets—particularly as brands start poaching folks from media companies.

For instance, David Beebe left ABC to run Marriott’s content program two and a half years ago. Since then, Marriott has started licensing its award-winning short films and TV shows to distributors while beginning to think about selling ads in Marriott Traveler, the company’s travel magazine.

“That money goes toward producing more content,” Beebe said. “If you scale it right, marketing starts funding itself.”

(Full disclosure: Marriott is a Contently client, and Marriott Traveler was created in partnership with Contently.)

This is easier said than done. Hundreds of people work in the ad-sales departments of major publishers. To start, you need at minimum:

• A media kit
• A sales rep
• On-demand talent to produce creative
• An audience development manager to ensure ad performance
• Someone sharp enough to produce an ad-performance report

That being said, I think we’ll see more companies monetize their content marketing through ad sales or sponsored content. It just makes sense when you reach a certain maturity, particularly in B2B.

Look no further than Contently. With the analytics tools we use (Contently Analytics, Demandbase, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, Campaign Monitor), we can see that we reach a loyal, high-value audience of several hundred thousand marketers and media executives each month. We know that B2B publishers with a similar audience sell sponsored content packages that start at $10,000. We also know that our audience responds very well to partnerships, as long as they’re carefully selected and provide real value, which is why we’ve started running sponsored content campaigns with select partners. (Email us if you’re interested!)

At a level of maturity, it only makes sense. Especially since, as Beebe said, you can reinvest that revenue back into your content marketing and drive bigger returns for your organization.

How do I create a hero brand on a low budget?

—Philippe, Kinderminster

Let’s start by defining a hero brand since not everyone speaks marketing. I’m fond of this definition from Inc.: “The Hero is tough and courageous, overcomes tremendous obstacles and persists in difficult times. They are most fulfilled when they can rise to or overcome a challenge.”

I think that small companies with low budgets have a lot of advantages when it comes to creating a hero brand. You can lean into the underdog narrative. You can move quickly. And you can talk about your company in a casual and colloquial way without pissing off some brand manager halfway across the world.

The key is that your brand needs a mission. Yes, I put that in italics because I cannot stress it enough. Your brand needs a compelling perspective on the world and a mission to change how things are done. As I wrote last year:

When you wonder what your brand believes in, it’s easy to land on something bland and broad that would sound ridiculous if it came from a person. We believe in happiness. We believe in togetherness. We believe in innovation. These are not things you would tell someone at a dinner party. (So glad you believe in happiness, Bob. Now please pass the Chardonnay.)

If you focus on what the key people in your company believe, it increases your chances of coming up with interesting content. Your CEO doesn’t believe in the general concept of innovation; he believes that very specific things lead to success in your industry. Our co-founder Shane Snow doesn’t believe in content, but he does believe that brands will win if they invest in telling great stories instead of intrusive advertising, and that a combination of great technology and superb creative talent are the keys to actually accomplishing that mission. This belief informs our own content strategy, guiding us in the right direction.

At Contently, having a real opinion and a mission is the key to building our brand and capturing an audience—especially three years ago, when we were just a dozen people and a bunch of dogs. It was glorious, and it worked. This was how I felt when we first hit 100,000 readers:

I’ll never forget that day.

Is it kosher for a writer to accept payment from a client to write a piece and post it on a high authority website (LifeHacker, Forbes, Huffington Post, etc.) without disclosing that payment? I’ve been asked to do this quite a bit and it really irks me. I figure that if I’m posting PR copy under my own byline, it besmirches MY reputation as a writer (I’ve come into copywriting via journalism). Keen to find out if I’m just being naive and that everyone’s “doing this” or if there are some kind of ethical standards to which copywriters should abide. Trying to keep myself nice, here!

—Margaret, Blayney, Australia

Hell no! That’s less kosher than the last 100 pages of Lord of the Flies.

I get emails like this all the time. There are a bunch of shady PR and SEO firms out there that try to juice their clients’ website rankings. They have two tactics: They pay writers to embed links in their stories, or they pay writers to pass off PR copy as a legitimate article to editors. They’re dark agents, taking advantage of cash-strapped writers and paying them to poison the sites they work for.

I understand the temptation. But just don’t do it. If I found that a writer was doing that, I would never work with that person again.

If you have a question for next month’s column, please submit it here. You can also tweet me @JoeLazauskas or tag me in the comments section of this incredibly creepy Facebook Live video from Monopoly.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do I Monetize My Content Marketing? appeared first on Contently.

This month, I’m going to get my Tony Robbins on and talk about story inspiration. Because there are invisible forces motivating all of us. And that invisible force is the desire to keep our jobs.

Even though we reuse content, how do you keep coming up with new content ideas?

—Cass, St. Louis

For the sake of this answer, let’s assume you already have a solid content strategy in place. Your content maps to your company’s business goals, and you’ve figured out all the components of a good content plan.

But now the well is dry. And your audience is thirsty as hell.

Start by examining what’s worked for you in the past. Which stories resonated with your audience and which ones fell flat? An easy way to do this is to tag your stories by different attributes, like topic, format, and contributor. Then compare how many stories you created per attribute and how those stories performed. For example, here’s a snapshot of my Contently Analytics dashboard, which compares stories created by topic with how those stories did across a few different engagement metrics.

This data can help guide your decisions when you’re brainstorming ideas. In this instance, I’d conclude that we should be mixing in a little bit more “Fun” content, like this marketing buzzwords burn piece or this surprisingly popular headline quiz. This type of content takes relatively little effort, and our audience loves it. We should also focus on social media stories a bit more, and probably not publish quite as many stories on content strategy. These are adjustments I’ll make in September.

Another simple yet effective tip is to gauge how different stories about your topic of choice are popping off on other sites. I recommend BuzzSumo, an excellent competitive analysis tool. Here’s a search I did for the most-shared stories on “content marketing” over the last month.

This is just a starting point. Obviously, you don’t want to just copy your competitors’ ideas. You want to tell original stories that will make your audience react like they’re at a Beyoncé concert. This could be you on Twitter!

So how do you get inspired? Here are a few tactics we use every week.

Editorial meetings: On Mondays, my team meets for an hour. Everyone is obligated to pitch at least two story ideas. Then we discuss them. We poke holes or suggest new angles. There’s creative energy. There are stakes. The person with the best ideas wins a Groupon for a booze cruise; the person with the worst ideas has to wear a bear suit and ask our VP of finance to approve us expensing a booze cruise. (Note: This reward system is still pending HR approval.)

Tap other departments for story ideas: Even if you’re an edit team of one, there are still ways to brainstorm with your coworkers. I like to think of all the other departments in our company as possible sources. Our sales team, for instance, spends all day talking with marketers. They hear about their concerns and struggles when it comes to content, and they know what questions these folks want answered.

Every two weeks, we hold a meeting called Content Universe. Our edit team spends most of the time listening to what our sales team learns talking to brands. This process has helped us create some of our most popular pieces of content, like this in-depth guide to securing a content budget.

Slack (or some group chat): We spend all day in Slack sharing industry news and tossing around story ideas. It’s a great way to get inspired and maintain a reservoir you can tap for future content. Plus, as I wrote about here, this type of running conversation helps get the entire company involved and makes everyone smarter.

Freelance pitches: One of the biggest advantages of working with freelancers is that they bring fresh angles and perspectives that your internal team just wouldn’t have. (Check out this great guide to working with freelancers.)

(Finally, I sometimes just sit at home with a bottle of wine and text crazy ideas to Jordan, our senior editor, until he asks me to stop ruining his date night or admits that yes, what the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can teach us about content marketing is a great story idea.)

Hi, Jess, can you please give me advice on how to smile every time I go to a job interview? I may need a voice coach.

—April Ann, Daly City, CA

Even though Jess Black is our head of events, all of our daily and weekly newsletters go out from her email address. This means that “Ask a Content Guy” questions occasionally get directed at her.

Jess is one of the most smiley people I know (evidence)—probably because I bought an inflatable hot tub for her backyard this summer. So I thought I’d let her weigh in with a guest answer:

Hi April Ann,

In my experience, smile/voice coaches are like chiropractors and psychics: They have weird offices. Instead of a smile coach, maybe you’re not applying to funny enough jobs. Is Guy Fieri looking for an assistant? Probably.

Alternatively, you might want to consider occupations in which smiling is actually an occupational hazard—maybe the DMV, or a TGIF Fridays in Atlantic City?

Good luck!

Jess

How do you keep your drive while keeping the content flowing?

—Aaron, Sumter, SC

A lot of what I wrote above applies to this question, but it brings up another point: You have to be passionate about the topics you’re covering.

A company’s content should reflect the passions of the people who work there. GE’s stories reflect how much its employees geek out about science. When you read the Moz blog, you know that team really, really loves SEO. In storytelling, enthusiasm is infectious. If you really care, it shows. The opposite is true as well. If you have apathetic content, you’ll have apathetic readers.

If you can’t get excited about the content you’re creating, you’re either covering the wrong topic or hiring the wrong people.

If you have a question for next month’s column, please submit it here. You can also tweet me @JoeLazauskas or tag me with the question on Instagram in the comments section of this photo of President Obama looking very confused by a newspaper. My Instagram handle is @joelazer.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do You Keep Coming Up With New Story Ideas? appeared first on Contently.

Last month, I covered what content metrics really matter, and the month before that I decoded some game-changing marketing buzzwords.

Today, we’re tacking your content distribution questions, which seems appropriate since media Twitter is still having a collective freakout about Facebook’s decision to deprioritize content sites in the News Feed. I covered all the consequences here, and without a doubt, it hurts. It’s like being dumped by the most popular girl in school. Which is why we need a Mean Girls GIF to help us process our collective feelings.

Whew, I feel better. Let’s move on, examine some larger content distribution questions, and remind ourselves that there are other fish in the sea.

Isn’t paid search easier than devoting hours and money to content creation and hoping for the best?

—Ruth, Cambridge

This is a content marketing question that comes up a lot, so let’s unpack it.

Is paid search easier than devoting hours and money to content creation? Absolutely. My mom can’t figure out how to read email on her phone, but she can run paid search ads like a boss. It’s one of the oldest forms of digital advertising, and Google makes it easy to pull off.

But is it a better strategy than creating content? That depends on what you plan to do with that content. A lot of marketers invest heavily in content creation but have no real distribution plan. They assume that sharing an article with 100,000 Facebook fans and 100,000 Twitter followers will make it go viral—even though, on average, that would only result in a couple hundred clicks at best. If that’s your approach, then yes, save your time and money, and stick with paid search.

But if you’re going to put a smart distribution strategy in place, content is the way to go.

Let’s start with just search. There’s a massive difference between ranking organically for a key term and paying for ads to run against that term. It’s like the difference between winning a penthouse apartment in Tribeca with no property taxes and paying $3,000 a month for a shabby studio with weird yellow walls. People are 8.5x more likely to click on an organic search result than a paid one, and a piece of content that ranks well for a key term will pay for itself exponentially in value over the long haul.[note]PPC and SEO can be used effectively together as well, especially when you’re first starting out. BrightEdge has a great guide here.[/note]

But today, there are so many other places that content can benefit you. It can have a long-term impact on social. It can help you build a devoted audience. It can make your website more dynamic and play a key role in the buyer journey. It can even win you a free trip to speak at a conference in New Orleans!

SPITTING FIRE ON THE TRACK. (marketing track.) #collisionconf pic.twitter.com/qiDZdxNH6e

— Joe Lazauskas (@JoeLazauskas) April 26, 2016

But where do you start, and how does it all fit together? That brings us to your next question…

So we’ve started creating great content relevant to our industry. How do we push it and get it out there? What are some tips for showcasing your content—Google ads, building relationships with other content marketers, etc.? Where do we begin?

—Lisa, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

We live in an era of distributed content, when the sheer number of places that you can publish content and reach people will make you feel like this dude:

When you’re just getting started, the first thing you need to do is launch an email newsletter and give it tons of love.

The email newsletter will serve as the foundation for your entire content marketing program, and if you don’t get it right, you’re screwed. Unlike social or SEO, it’s a direct line to your audience that you control. And it’s the easiest way to build a devoted readership that comes back every day.

If you don’t have an email service provider (ESP) for your content already, I recommend using MailChimp. (We break down some other options here.) It’s cheap and easy to use, letting you A/B test subject lines and customize send times. Since you want to convert every new reader to a subscriber, you should also heck out SumoMe’s suite of tools. Through SumoMe, we’re able to convert roughly 4 percent of all new visitors to email subscribers.

You may be thinking: Isn’t this an old-school place to start? In 2016, shouldn’t I be snapping my #tbt Instant Article and ‘gramming the entire content experience? You could try, in the same way that you could try to start a successful country music career by singing in the Bleecker Street subway station. A few people will see you, but they’ll probably just wonder what the hell you’re doing.

The beauty of the email newsletter is that it doesn’t just drive reader engagement and traffic in a vacuum. Instead, it sets off a waterfall of traffic that spreads across social networks. Every day, The Content Strategist newsletter drives thousands of readers to our site, and those readers go out and share our content with thousands more.

DIAGRAM TIME!

This is content 101, but a lot of content marketers inexplicably don’t have a newsletter. It’s baffling and a little terrifying.

Next, examine where folks share your content. Those are the social networks where your company should be most active. There are a million different strategies for social, but for now, let’s just focus on sharing links to your stories. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are requisites for most companies.

You also probably want to invest in paid content distribution. If you’re going to spend $400 on an article, spending an extra $50 to ensure that twice as many people see that article just makes sense, assuming that traffic is high quality. And the best way to buy high-quality readers is through Facebook.

Facebook may be terrible for organic reach, but its targeting capabilities are tremendous. You can target by age, gender, location, job, pages liked, past site visitors, and a slew of other factors. If your content is really good, you should be able to drive readers for about $0.10 a click.

Additionally, you’ll want to set unique UTM parameters on those links using Google’s URL builder so you can make sure these new visitors actually spend time with the piece instead of just bouncing. With parameters in place, you can also track how well visitors convert to email subscribers or visit other sections of your site.

The beautiful thing about paid content distribution is that you buy a lot more than just clicks. If your content is good, a lot of those new readers will become loyal email subscribers and organically share your content with their networks. (You should gain a new email subscriber for every $5 you spend on paid content distribution.) Some readers might even perform more high-value actions, like visiting a product page or requesting a demo. And popular articles will rank well for search. It’s beautiful, and yes, it deserves its own diagram:

Once you get these owned content fundamentals in order, it’s time to start thinking about going beyond the blog and getting into distributed content—the modern media term for creating content that’s made specifically for social platforms. Think Facebook Instant Articles and auto-play videos, Instagram video, Snapchat, YouTube, Medium, LinkedIn Pulse, and other platforms that let you reach tons of people. That’s a giant topic in its own right, but we’ll get to it in another column soon.

Should I use YouTube or Vimeo for a business video channel?

—Joe, Leicester

YouTube. That way your videos will rank for search if you drive enough views. However, Vimeo does look better, so I’d recommend using it for any promotional videos on your website.

What’s too much—or not enough? How can you measure it?

—Kathy, Denver

Measure it in love, Kathy. In love.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: Where Should I Distribute My Content Marketing? appeared first on Contently.

Every day, someone from our company comes to me with a content question—a best practice, a trend, a definition. It makes me feel like the Oracle, except far less cool than Gloria Foster. So we decided to launch “Ask a Content Guy,” a monthly mailbag in which I answer our readers’ most pressing questions.

In a nutshell, what’s just one sentence to describe content marketing?

—Keith, Palatine Bridge, New York

First off, Keith, if you’re stuck in a nutshell, it’s kind of messed up that you’re worrying about the definition of content marketing.

Now that I’ve set a really low bar for jokes in this mailbag, here’s how we define content marketing:

Content marketing (n.): The use of storytelling to build relationships with consumers by providing them with something entertaining or useful.

Pretty simple. The key here is the focus on the consumer—for something to qualify as content marketing, it has to provide actual value. A lot of what people try to pass off as “content marketing” are just long display ads pasted into an article format. This weird native ad from the NSA is not content marketing.

I am still a little lost with some concepts and their relation. I believe that content marketing has them all inside, but what is the relation and difference between branded content, brand journalism, native advertising, and sponsored content?

—José, Madrid, Spain

José, you are not alone. This stuff is confusing. Going to a marketing conference nowadays can feel like stepping into a Newspeak Orwellian universe, featuring Pepperidge Farm’s keynote on how you need to SoLoMo your roll.

Here’s how I define those four terms:

Branded content: A synonym for content marketing (see above).

Brand journalism: An incredibly confusing term specially designed to piss off Jeff Jarvis, Copyranter, and other industry watchdogs. It’s used—incorrectly—by many brands that start a blog and want to play journalist. The term should be restricted to brands that sponsor editorially independent journalism—think T Mobile’s Electronic Beats or… yeah, that’s the only good example I can think of. And that’s the problem. Right now, brand journalism doesn’t really exist.

Native advertising: An umbrella term for ads that mirror the environment they appear in. Google search ads are the granddaddy of digital native advertising, and in-feed Facebook ads are the most lucrative type of native advertising today.

Sponsored content: In the media industry, native advertising is often used synonymously with sponsored content. However, the two terms are not synonymous. Sponsored content is just one type of native advertising—the brand-sponsored articles and videos that appear on the sites and social platforms of publishers and influencers.

For example, this BuzzFeed listicle of 12 tweets about being hungry, sponsored by Wendy’s, is both sponsored content and a native ad. This search ad for caninestyles.com that shows up when you Google “victorian dog sweater” is a native ad, but it’s not sponsored content.

Basically, sponsored content is the intersection of native advertising and branded content, while brand journalism is floating off in Gibberish Land. Here’s all of them in a Venn diagram:

How do you sell newer social media channels into the organization, especially when they have no measurable KPIs associated with them (e.g., Snapchat)?

—Kristen, St. Paul, Minnesota

The first thing you need to figure out is if the new channel is actually worth pursuing.

My first editorial job out of college was as a social media editor at Babble, a Park Slope hipster parenting magazine. After we spammed Google with about 40 blog posts about the Royal Wedding (“Royal Engagement Wedding Cakes: 7 They Might Try!”), our search traffic plummeted and our panicked editor commanded me to make it up by launching our Tumblr presence.

The problem: The only moms on Tumblr at the time were Canadian teens. Not exactly Babble’s audience. I tried to build our presence, but it was a waste of time. Blindly jumping on the next big thing is a very easy way to get fired.

To start, look at your own content. Are you getting shares and referral traffic from social networks that you’re not active on? Showing that data is an easy way to get buy-in. Alternatively, you can also take a deeper look at the sites you aspire to be like. If you want to be the next Refinery29, use tools like BuzzSumo and SimplyMeasured to see where their content gets shared and where their referral traffic comes from. It’s a smart way for you to convince your boss either way.

Snapchat is trickier. Due to its closed nature, it doesn’t have the kind of accessible analytics we see on other sites, which means you’ll have to rely on anecdotal evidence. Find a handful of incredibly compelling case studies of people or companies who are reaching your target audience on the social network. Tell their stories. That’s your best chance at selling a new channel in your organization.

Do you prefer focusing your budget on a special piece of content hoping for lasting impact and traction, or spreading your budget so that you can produce content all year long?

—Matthieu, Montreal, Canada

Ah, the quantity vs. quantity question. It’s the classic “Why are we here?” existential quandary for marketers.

The jerk answer I could give is: Do both! But that’s not very helpful if you’re a marketing manager with 15 hours a week to devote to content, a $631 budget, and a dog intern. (Use the serial comma, Fluffy!) Ultimately, I’d try to follow two rules:

1. Mediocre content isn’t worth it. Not for social. Not for brand building. Not for search. Publishing for the sake of publishing is like throwing a birthday party at Arby’s. You could do it, but why?

2. You need to publish enough to grow an email newsletter. You can only build an audience if you publish enough to get them to keep going back. And the best way to build a dedicated audience is still the email newsletter. That doesn’t mean you need to publish every day, especially if your content is really good. Just look at Wait But Why, the wildly popular blog by Tim Urban and Andrew Finn that has nearly half a million subscribers despite only publishing a few posts each month.

Save your budget for quality work. But think about scaling your content once you get more buy-in.

What does that scaling look like? CHART TIME!

This is a template of the Crawl → Walk → Run staffing model from the content methodology report I co-wrote with Rebecca Lieb. This chart was a lot uglier when I sent it to our design team, but now that it looks professional, hopefully it’ll help.

Okay, that’s enough for this week. If you have a question for next month’s column, please submit it here! You can also tweet it @JoeLazauskas, because we are all hip, social people here.

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