Educating Targets with T-R-U-S-T-E-D Content
Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them.
—Doug Kessler, Cofounder of Velocity
Did you ever imagine a world without cold calling or interrupting ads? How about one where marketers share their secrets for free? There go all of our textbooks on baiting audience attention and holding them hostage to switching costs and the remorse of lost opportunities.
But in the immortal words of Charles Dickens, these are “the best of times and the worst of times.” As quickly as sales personnel and marketing communications departments are departing their professions, brand publishers and entrepreneurs are relishing the opportunity to unseat the big dogs in their industries with content-marketing strategies. Instead of watching deep pocket competitors monopolize billboards, commercials, and print ads, smaller businesses can outflank them in audience exposure and engagement with carefully crafted blogs, webinars, and e-Books that help rather than sell. In essence, they let their content do the talking and only when asked.
The first stage of any social content plan should begin with discovering and qualifying conversational topics that could stir up the passions of your intended audience while inviting you to demonstrate your trust. This trust with a targeted audience is created to a large degree by the content itself. One way to look at this is to consider the evidence backing a society’s migration away from transactional marketing to relationship marketing. The latter is driven primarily by communications, trustworthy actions, expertise, and social bonding. Contrast this with sales offers and promises of great deals often associated with transactional marketing.
Relationship marketing theories posit that trust is the result of benevolent activities—like donating advice without expecting something in return. This implies that new comers to a community must show their willingness to help before promoting any offers. These offers not only suggest opportunism, but they also preempt your opportunities to get invited to communities thriving as much on research advice as on what to buy.
But how can this be done online? Why not start with content that benefits your targeted community through education or by feeding a passion? For example, American Express hosts an advice sharing platform, known as the Open Forum, which provides valuable information to entrepreneurs on running their businesses. Consequently, they have rejuvenated their credit card image as one that helps start-ups and early business growth. In the process, they entered their audience’s sphere of influence.
Once invited to an audience’s sphere of influence, relationship marketing theories suggest that these prospects will subsequently subject you to a series of trustworthiness exercises through ongoing communications and information disclosure. This may include a request for more content or an examination of your willingness to participate in a nonopportunistic manner.
In theory, we could build trails of trustworthy blogs at the top of the sales funnel to encourage deeper engagement with audiences as they advance through their buying journey. These blog posts and other forms of light content at the top of the sales funnel allow audiences to test our expertise and helpfulness before diving into more in-depth webinars and e-Books. In the process, we share valuable advice in order to build trust that is worthy of an invite.
At this point, this may sound more like marriage counseling than marketing. Exactly! Imagine your targeted persona starting with: “. . .We don’t want to hear from you; furthermore, we don’t trust you. Our attention is determined by our peer recommendations and what we read on our own. . .”
Now envision what happens when you continually provide your prospect with information that addresses their job security or ignites their passions. Could they become dependent on that information? Moreover, would they mentally position your brand in a better light? Suppose they see you as a corporate citizen, or a socially responsible, goodwill ambassador, or a charitable community giver? Okay, that might be a stretch, but you get the picture.
Yes, we are asked to share competitive secrets and provide free content while waiting for an invite from our target audience. This would make sense given nearly everyone’s aversion to unpermitted marketing messages. However, it obviously raises concerns among marketing traditionalists taught to guard their secrets while holding on to their trump cards. In their mind, overpublicizing their problem solving not only helps the competition, but it also makes the marketer more vulnerable to audiences exploiting their free contributions. Add to this the growing demand to discuss thorny issues like pricing, installation challenges, and competitive comparisons, and you can see why traditional marketers are hesitant to embrace inbound marketing.
Letting Trusted Content Do Your Talking
A question often arises why would marketers spend time and money for target audiences to download the marketer’s free content only to wait for an invite? When marketed correctly, useful content during the awareness stage of the buying cycle can leave a trail of expertise backed by a likable persona. And if delivered free and without wanting something in return, marketers can be credited with thoughtful contributions and empathy. Overtime, the audience may seek out the content provider as a trustworthy source of timely, relevant, and useful information.
Now imagine doing this with ads and cold calls or what is normally referred to as outbound marketing. Where is the trail of expertise and trustworthiness when the media of communications and delivery channels are inherently one way and rolled out as repeat doses of “call now”? Let’s face it. Today’s consumers hold little trust in our promises and will demand a trail of trustworthy advice before inviting use to help. What’s more, they have the power to ignore our unwanted e-mails and unidentified calls while fast forwarding through our commercials. Instead, they conduct their own online evaluations and consult with social-networking friends as their trusted advisors.
To fit this new mindset, we have to embrace a more inbound marketing approach that ultimately creates a higher level of trust between you and your target audiences. And to do this effectively, it’s the content itself—not your preemptive call—that has to show evidence of expertise, customer understanding, and impartiality. Otherwise, the audience senses opportunism and a potential supplier incapable of addressing their pain points. To be credited as the favored solution provider, the content not only has to be seen as useful and relevant, but it also has to be seen as trustworthy. Finally, marketers are quickly discovering the merits of adopting content formats that suit their audiences’ channel preferences for reading, viewing, or listening to your advice.
Timely Content around Urgencies and Consumption Routines
One way to get your target audience to appreciate your timely content is to address urgent situations early in their buying stage. The example shown in Figure 1.1 illustrates how a real-estate accountant educated his property management and Home Owner Association (HOA) audiences on what to do with a recent county regulation. At the time when condos and housing associations were faced with serious economic issues, HOA boards were looking for sources of cash to offset foreclosures. One method to solve this problem was to liquidate reserves applied against potential property damage. But when a county ruling restricted the use of reserves as a cash source, HOAs faced tough choices on how to fund budget shortfalls.
Figure 1.1 Accounting Example of Exploiting an Urgent Situation
A savvy real-estate accountant used this opportunity to connect with an urgent pain point. Starting with what the ruling implied, and continuing through the decision cycle with alternative workarounds, timely content was aligned with the HOA’s frame of mind from awareness to decision. The accountant, in this case, was credited with providing an objective response to an urgent issue.
Another way to ensure a timely consumption of your content is to understand the routine your audiences follow in checking their e-mail, tweets, or posts. Knowing their consumption patterns can make a difference in whether your content gets on their radar at the right time. Many tools like Klout’s scheduler shown in Figure 1.2 will let you know when your audience is most active across each day of the week. Their scheduler, along with that of Hootsuite, TweetDeck, and others, allow you to tweet your content to meet these peak periods.
Figure 1.2 Timing Tweeted Content with Audience Peak Activity
Relevant Content for Target Personas and Their Buying Stage
If your content marketing is for everybody, it’s for nobody
—Joe Pulizzi, author of Epic Content
One of the most common complaints expressed by brands and entrepreneurs is the inability of their e-mail marketing to yield high open and click through rates. Invariably, the low rates are blamed on e-mail content or messaging that failed to connect with the target audience. The same holds true for content postings on blogs or social media. In a growing climate of infobesity, relevance is arguably the most critical attribute of any content intended to educate its target audiences.
For content to be truly relevant, it has to resonate with a persona’s pain points or passions. A test of relevance could start with the following questions proposed by content-marketing strategist, Joe Pulizzi:1
1. Who is the audience and specific buyer persona you are targeting for each piece of content?
2. What’s the pain point you are solving for them?
3. Is what you are saying really that important?
4. Could they find the information elsewhere?
But the process of first discovering the relevant personas is not as simple as framing clients with monikers like “Debbie Downer” and “Soccer Moms.” Unless the persona evaluation leads to distinctions on what topics intrigue each persona or where they hang out, the evaluation serves little purpose.
If, on the other hand, an examination is made of the audience subtleties that reveal distinct pain points or passionate interests, any blog post, webinar, or mobile app aimed at these persona nuances has a chance of at least being viewed by a target audience. Where the rubber meets the road on delivering relevant content is when it reveals a rich enough insight into each personas interest that the marketer is credited with intimately knowing the targeted persona as well as speaking their language.
To do this effectively, the following audits and analyses should be conducted as a prelude to discovery relevant topics:
1. An audit of the spending motivations behind current target audiences (i.e., why was your offering selected?).
2. An examination of distinct psychographic personas most associated with each spending motivation.
3. An analysis of the traits, wants, and passions associated with each persona.
4. A translation of these personas attributes need-oriented topics of interest.
Notice how this was down for the case of a custom tailor shown in Figure 1.3. Starting with why target audiences pulled out their wallet, four spending motivations were discovered. Customers of the tailored suits were either seeking (1) perfection, (2) pleasing others, (3) prominence, or (4) posturing. But when further examining the psychographic attributes of personas, 12 distinct personas were discovered, each with distinct traits, wants, and passions.
Although this seems like an overkill, a scan of the 12 personas should convince you that these folks don’t hang out in the same circles; nor do they expect the same lifestyle image from their tailored suits. Each one showed distinct enough persona traits and passions to warrant dedicated content topics especially at the top of the funnel (ToFu).
Continuing with the analysis, each persona attribute now allows a consolidation of needs traced back to the spending motivations. This begins the process of defining relevant content without having to build 12 different segment strategies. In this case, 11 topics were compiled for potential blog content that addressed the following pain points:
1. not fitting in desired social circles;
2. inability to exude charisma; and
3. fear of embarrassment from inappropriate etiquette or attire.
Figure 1.3 Persona Evaluation for Custom Tailors
Topics were developed as a way to brainstorm helpful tips that address these pain points. But without knowing the personalities associated with each spending motivation, pain points are difficult to derive. Consider the case of an organic food supplier whose target audiences include chefs seeking worry-free appetizers; mothers looking for nutrition for baby development; adults seeking hair and skin development; and those suffering from inflammatory diseases. The latter, in turn, consists of three personas: a Deprived Athlete, the Closet Bound, and the Les Miserable.
Each of the personas has highly distinct pain points. For example, the Deprived Athlete is mainly concerned with high burst performance in high pollen conditions. The Closet Bound is concerned with disguising ailments. And the Les Miserable needs energy and lifted spirits to get through the day. Collectively, the target audience (inflammatory diseases) needs relief and could perhaps benefit from natural remedies; however, their specific pains points require very different content. For a more complete evaluation of more small business personas and the process used to derive relevant content, you can download the e-Book found at http://slidesha.re/1mMqovu.
Useful Content for Research, Self-Help, and Decision Tools
Instead of one-way interruption, Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.
— David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR
Equally as important as content being timely and relevant is the need for it to be useful. For content to be useful, you have to be helpful. If it doesn’t help your audience in their research, decision making, or fixing something on the spot, it gets archived at best and trashed at worst.
At the top of the sales funnel, when audiences are researching solutions to their primary needs (e.g., image, career transitioning, health, etc.), helpfulness can be enlightenment. Content that sheds light on their possibilities for changing their image, improving their health, or transitioning to a new career, for example, could help them in their research. Any assistance you provide in laying out a criterion for solving their problems could be just as helpful as making them decide on a course of action. This is where blogging becomes especially important as an opportunity for you to help them narrow their choices.
In the middle-of-the-funnel (MoFu) consideration and evaluation stages, audiences then begin to seek out product reviews, spec sheets, “how to” demos, webinars, and case studies. The more your content helps complete their compliance check lists, the more useful it becomes when conducting their evaluations. In fact, with audiences now spending upward of 90 percent of their decision-making research before contacting a supplier, it’s apparent that MoFu content is considered by many to be useful enough to thwart off sales calls.
But where the usefulness of content becomes especially critical is at the bottom of the funnel (BoFu). Banks, tax accountants, and realtors often provide apps for mortgage calculations in the later stages of buying. Similarly, product suppliers can easily provide usage demos, installation instructions, or nutritional content in digital formats that warns prospects in advance of potential complications. In so doing, the prospect has one more piece to complete their evaluation.
Indium Corporation, a maker of specialty alloys and solder paste, hosts a highly popular blog for engineers talking to other engineers. Rather than pitching the benefits of their solder paste, the firm hypertargets engineers who have questions about industrial soldering equipment. The 10 blogs and 15 writers always talk about matters relevant to Indium’s target audience. As a result, the potential prospects benefit from content useful to their routine practice. And by encouraging comments and dialog exchange, the company has drastically cut their technical support costs in the process.
Add to these decision-making tools the growing reliance on location-based tools, and the growing demand for useful content becomes more evident. Especially in this day of appification, target audiences are accustomed to having apps handle their emergencies and real-time inquires.
As explained well in Jay Baer’s book Youtility, and in Chapter 9, content marketers are finding clever ways to provide real-time solutions to customers facing urgent pain points. A widely downloaded app for stain removals is sponsored by Clorox. Although much of their researched advice goes well beyond the scope of their offerings, the app addresses some immediate ways to address recently spilled substances like wine before it is too late. Similarly, Ortho has an app that will help you identify and treat harmful weeds before it is too late. In both cases, these brands are counted on target audiences crediting them with real-time responses to urgent problems.
Finding the Useful Content that Strikes a Chord with Targeted Audiences
Knowing what content can be most useful to your audience may seem like an overwhelming task because of the myriad of options to consider in content formats and media tactics. Your content strategy should not only address what content to include, but it should also center on how audiences prefer to access this content. But if you start by answering the what, why, and how content is delivered in your industry, you may discovery a structured approach to managing your content development efforts.
Target audiences in the social-media ecosystem are comfortable with media familiarity; so if these audiences regular tune in podcasts, this would be a good place to start. Similarly, if the communication format is highly imagery based, there is no sense in shifting their attention to fact sheets.
Where many struggle in this area of content defining is in getting the process started. Consider the following three-tiered approach to mapping our content elements. And exclude entertaining content for the moment. This will be covered in Chapter 3.
1. Defining the purpose: Is the content meant to instruct, inform, or evaluate?
2. Selecting a preferred communication mode: Will the mode of communication be text, audio, image, or video based?
3. Identifying the right media tactics: Will the audience expect blogs, newsletters, e-Books, white papers, videos, reports, articles, webinars, case studies, or apps?
Selecting Content Tactics that Balance Expertise, Objectives, and Usability
The process starts with an understanding of content purpose. How does your audience want to be taught? And will they benefit more from learning how to do something; gaining insights on their business practice; or making quick and accurate choices on solving their problems?
In general, educational content used successfully in B2B and B2C arenas tends to be either instructional, informative, or decision helpful. The informative side can be further divided into insights and intelligence gathering. Collectively, they provide the core of what audiences will find useful throughout their buying stages.
Instructional Aids
One effective way to meet this goal is to use product demonstrations or instructional videos that explain “how to” do something related to some benefits offered by your firm’s offerings. Consider how often we use the Internet to accomplish something like training a dog or cooking a meal. In fact, if you search for “how to tie a tie,” you’ll find videos garnering over 20 million views.
Our target audiences have the same challenges and could benefit from your stepping them through a solution. As a result, tutorials become especially useful in the awareness and consideration stage of the buying cycle. They also allow you to demonstrate your expertise and credibility before committing to the more research-intensive content required in the evaluations and decision-making stages.
A related instructional technique involves the use of checklists, to-do lists, and budget planners. In this case, audiences may appreciate the advice you provide in managing their tasks more efficiently. That is why realtors compile moving and inspection lists or why outdoor recreation suppliers offer lists of items to pack.
To keep up with the latest trends in their field of interests, target audiences often benefit from the latest news or business trends. As a content marketer, you can create or curate content that keeps the audiences well informed. Like instructional aids, these topics provide an opportunity to build subject matter authority.
Most often, these insights are gathered from expert interviews, research, and industry forums. Interviews, in particular, are a great way to provide business insights. By interviewing experts who have professional knowledge in the topics of interest to your audience, you not only provide a fresh perspective but also can take a break from your own content creation efforts. Moreover, the two-party interaction provides a more stimulating listening and viewing environment than even the best of talking head formats.
Other ways to provide expert commentary include the use of discussion forums where threaded conversations help answer your audience’s business challenges or personal passions. LinkedIn, in particular, provides a great way for you to build thought leadership by responding to questions posed by members fitting the profile of your targeted audiences.
Oftentimes, these insightful commentaries can be gathered by highlighting main attractions at an event. For example, content marketers often curate news clips of important announcements and expert opinions collected from industry conferences, conventions, and shows. Audiences not only benefit from missed sessions, but they also save time in reading a more condensed synopsis of key takeaways.
Research can also provide opportunities to help audiences seeking insightful business intelligence. Hungry for industry statistics and technology solutions, B2B buyers appreciate the empirical data derived from survey results as well as digital conference papers or technical briefs addressing their operational pain points.
For a less-demanding form of insightful content, content marketers often resort to news reporting. Whether it’s an editorial on industry trends, coverage of an event or a breaking announcement about a firm of interest, audiences benefit from time saved in keeping up to date. And by repeatedly releasing insightful news, your audiences eventually look forward to seeing your updates.
Decision Aids
A third way to provide useful content is to help your target audiences with decision making. Starting from the consideration phase of the buying cycle, audiences benefit from your helping them make up their minds. Any content that addresses the evaluation of suitable offerings or permits a test trial saves your audience’s time while boosting their confidence in making the right choice.
This is where reviews, ratings, rankings, and buyer’s guides become invaluable resources to your target audiences. Assuming that the reviews of solutions relevant to your audience’s pain points are not biased toward your own offerings, the recommendations further add to your credibility as a subject-matter expert. The same applies to fact sheets and blogs that address frequently asked questions (FAQs).
Another way to help an audience in their decision making is to provide convincing examples of how an offering like yours can help them. Virtual tours and customer success stories are among the content forms that can provide this evidence provided they are not self-serving. Credible testimonies, especially from notable thought leaders, can also help in this evaluation stage.
But the decision often requires a physical touch and feel before a target audience reaches for their wallet. In these days of freemiums, audiences expect branded content tools ranging from product previews to free test trial apps. This is why brands have stepped up to return on investment (ROI) calculators, configurators, trackers, and other interactive content. These mobile apps and widgets provide a real-time examination of what the audience intends to buy. Consequently, it represents one of the most critical components of a content-marketing strategy.
Selecting Content Delivery Formats that Balance Consistency and Audience Familiarity
For content to truly resonate with an audience, its format has to suit their channel preferences and the time they allocate to reading, listening, or viewing it. When used for educational purposes, the following content has a proven track record of success:
1. podcasts
2. explainer videos
3. virtual seminars
4. customer success stories
5. blogs
6. infographics
7. e-Books
8. e-newsletters
9. authoritative articles
10. slideware
11. branded content tools and apps.
Podcasts
Without a doubt, the most popular form of audio used in content marketing today is a radio stationlike podcast, or simply downloadable audio programs that play on a computer, iPod, or smartphones. The digitally compressed files are delivered over the Internet to a subscriber, who can then download the content at a time of their choosing.
The content is often distributed via a really simple syndication (RSS) feed that alerts audiences of updates soon after the release of an episode. This allows audiences to subscribe to and get alerts of new content much like they experience with a new blog post. Podcast episodes can be downloaded to subscribers from syndicated directories like iTunes, Sound Cloud, or Stitcher. Because the downloaded audio clips are released as continuous clips or episodes, marketers have jumped on this opportunity to emulate radio talk shows.
What has created excitement over recent years for marketers is the growing number of audiences who are now aware of podcasting. This year approximately 39 million Americans will listen to podcasts each month, with 1 in 5 weekly podcast users consuming 6 or more podcasts per week. Helping to fuel this growth is a growing number of audiences more inclined to deal with its technical requirements. For example, you can now get your podcast episode delivered direct to a smartphone without having to hook up an iPod to the computer. This comfort with the technology has led to Apple announcing their one billionth podcast subscription logged on the iTunes store. And Pew Research confirms that over one quarter of Internet users listen to podcasts.
This ability to target anyone through subscription makes this audio content especially suitable to building thought leadership. Successful podcasters will argue that narrowcasting—or targeted your niche to specific personas—is what allows podcasting to overtake radio shows. Compare, for example, the impact a radio broadcast has on its audience. Being limited geographically, they have to appeal to a wide spectrum of interests. Podcasting, on the other hand, can address a worldwide audience that has specific interests. Overtime, the podcast host has an opportunity to build authority and credibility by addressing specific pain points or passions felt by the targeted audience.
For a podcast to be effective, it helps to limit its time to that of an average commute. Venture capitalist, Mary Meeker, says there are 52 minutes of unclaimed time in the car every day, and people are seeking things like podcasts to fill it. As a venue for narrowcasting, it is especially crucial to narrow your audience theme to something very specific. And then stick to the same theme throughout episodes as audiences will know what to expect.
Among the most popular applications for podcasting is the interviewing of experts and other guests. Often through a simple Skype or phone connection, these audiences are sometimes encouraged to share their industry perspectives. Other techniques include a cohosted talk show that regularly updates their audience with trended news and tricks of the trade. Finally, a growing number of podcasters are using their episodes to highlight major industry show activities and events. The audio and video podcast formats, in this case, work well in capturing roundtable discussions, debates, and conference presentations.
As perhaps the one type of content that absolutely needs a scheduled release, podcasting should only be attempted by those who can be passionate enough to host every week. Finally, for a podcast to gain listener insight, it’s imperative to link the audio content to a blog that accommodates user feedback.
When produced and distributed effectively, expert podcasters normally cite the following as among the key benefits derived from the use of podcasting:
1. Super fans: Podcasting offers far more of a personal connection than what you can get from a blog post. It allows for the show host to convey passions, emotions, and feelings. And especially when mixed with fun facts and motivational speakers, the show can create a sense of loyalty among avid followers. Overtime, audiences begin to share their own stories, thereby creating a sense of intimacy with a tight community. Some podcast experts believe this is the perfect formula for creating brand evangelists.
2. Audience accessibility: Audiences unable to attend seminars during their busy work schedules are using commute and exercise time to listen to audio tutorials and business news. Driving a car is prime podcast-listening time where an estimated 15 billion hours of time is spent per year by Americans who drive alone in their cars.2 And according to Edison Research and Arbitron, 23 percent of existing podcast listeners play digital audio in their car almost every day.3
3. Worldwide narrowcasting: There is power when your show has a niche focus. You can not only pinpoint your message to qualified listeners, but you can also expand your reach to anyone possessing a smartphone, iPod, or computer. This essentially makes the content marketer a program manager for their own global radio station.
4. Top to BoFu Relevance: Dan Miller, an expert podcaster, points out that no other form of content invites people into the sales process like podcasting. Podcasting uniquely fits the early stage of trust and rapport building where the host can walk their audience through common business challenges. Later, the broadcasting of events and highlighting of news can acquaint listeners with your expertise. And as audiences reach the consideration and evaluation stage, podcasters can field FAQs as well as invite audiences to share their successes.
5. Affordability: You likely already have the equipment you need to podcast. All that is required is a microphone (including a built-in mike in your laptop) and software or sound-mixing apps for recording and editing audio. Many of the popular programs like Audacity and GarageBand offer free downloads. Podcast costs normally start at $100 per show. But if you’re looking for radio-quality results, expect to pay around $350 per episode.4
6. Competitive head start: Despite the rising number of podcast listeners, few marketers have taken this route. A study by Social Media Examiner found that only 6 percent of marketers offer a podcast, but 28 percent want to improve their knowledge of podcasting. Moreover, 33 percent marketers want to start podcasting this year.5 This provides a great opportunity for marketers to gain a competitive advantage.
7. Mobile: The number of listeners who access podcasts by mobile device is now higher than the number who downloads a podcast from their desktop computer (Next/Market). And with over 7 billion mobile devices in use around the world (Cisco), it is only a matter of time before the greater population realizes the advantages of narrowcasting for a growing “on the go” society. Add to that the accelerating growth of smartphones, car-connecting devices, and iTunes adoption, and it is not surprise that podcasters are so bullish in their forecasts.
8. Evergreen content: The format of a podcasts lends itself well to evergreen content or the type of content that stands the test of time. Shows featuring how-to tips or personal stories, in particular, can maintain their relevancy over several years.
9. Time-lapsed recordings: Podcasts are an excellent way to capture lectures, presentations, and even virtual conferences for playback to people who missed the live setting.
10. Influence marketing: Including guest speakers with relevant audience expertise is a great way to extend your community influence.
11. Multimode: Besides audio podcasts, video podcasts have emerged from MP4 technology. But perhaps more promising for business professionals are “slidecasts” that merge audio files and PowerPoints to form self-contained presentations like webinars.
12. Repurposed content: Audio content from a show’s episode can easily be repurposed for infographics, e-mail marketing, articles, blogs, and e-Books.
13. Qualified Listeners: Unlike traditional radio, podcasting allows you to narrowcast a specific audience so as to address more qualified listeners.
14. Easy distribution: Audio content can be readily distributed across different networks. Most podcasts are uploaded through iTunes simply through the “submit a podcast” from the iTunes storefront. Once recorded, podcasters can easily park the episode alongside a related blog post since most blog content management systems accommodate audio files.
15. Search results: iTunes is a massive search engine for content that serves 575 million subscribers. Although not as fine tuned as Google search, there are many ways you can maximize your exposure in the iTunes search listings.
Video podcasts, in particular, have shown exceptional performance in search results. These podcasts essentially combine the audio component of podcasting with visual media. You see this quite often on sites that provide quick demos. A dentist in Fort Lauderdale, for example, raised his site traffic dramatically by featuring video podcasts on subjects like “removing a gummy smile.” Others use it to demonstrate cooking tips.
The advantage of these video podcasts over YouTube-shared videos is the impact each video episode has on search and website traffic. Although YouTube gains favor with Google search algorithms, podcasting capitalizes on RSS feeds that permit a great deal of exposure on syndicated sites. These sites often link back to your own podcast hosted website—as opposed to delivering traffic to YouTube. Search engines not only award these links with high PageRanks, but credit is given also to the video format. Moreover, there are ample opportunities to feature the video podcast in multiple podcast directories (e.g., iTunes, Stitcher, and Sound Cloud).
Podcasts are not only growing in popularity, but podcast subscribers are now also seen as among the most desirable audiences for podcast hosts to target. Their tuning into a niche-oriented program qualifies them as a potential business prospect. And the personal forum creates an atmosphere conducive to story sharing and ultimately brand evangelism. But besides the growing audience popularity, those entering the podcast arena have a huge opportunity to gain an early competitive advantage. According to Chris Brogan, a world-renowned social-media expert, “. . .It’s a pretty open space right now because companies aren’t rushing in and figuring it out. . .”6
A common application of videos for education includes explainer videos. This particular content provides an excellent way to introduce your firm and explain what it can do for your viewers. Consisting of “how-to-use” tutorials, demos, trailers, and virtual tours, the format addresses the limited attention span of today’s audience demanding a “show me” over “tell me” style of content delivery.
There are a vast number of ways to use explainer videos, but the most common cited include the following:
1. Demos, tutorials, and how-to’s: Since it is far more effective to show than to tell, video demos can be highly effective in explaining how a product works or what it does.
2. Trailers: According to Moz, you have about 8 seconds to sell yourself and your business to potential customers. With trailers, you can grab the attention of your visitors to introduce yourself or your company in just a few seconds.
3. Live-event coverage: From features of fashion shows and conventions to facility tours and expert interviews, these videos take advantage of a captured audience in an energized atmosphere.
4. Behind the scenes showings: This technique allows audiences to gain an insider perspective that adds to their feeling included in exclusive communities. Consisting of facility tours, interviews with the core team, and “how it is made” demonstrations, this technique is one of the best for creating intimate connections to your company.
5. New stories and intelligence: Video reports on industry news can make content seem more relevant. And by adding statistical information and other marketing intelligence, you can position yourself as a reliable source of information.
6. Customer testimonials: Customer reviews of your service as well as their success stories can be highly effective especially when it involves user-generated content.
7. FAQs: A common use of videos is for Q&A’s where the host reads and answers questions from the membered audience. In so doing, you establish yourself as a thought leader with more recall due to the visual nature of the forum.
Much like the case of podcasts, the key to developing effective explainer videos is to narrowcast in order for attention-deprived audiences to see a clear connection to their specific pain points. Furthermore, many experts suggest that their attention has to be caught within the first 10 seconds. Think “elevator speech time.” And to maintain attention, it is recommended that you limit the total length of an explainer video to around 4 minutes.
Another key requirement is to ensure that the video is distributed across a broad range of demographic channel preferences. This includes, at minimum, Vine, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. However, baby boomers will prefer YouTube, and millennials will prefer 6 second loops on Vine. More is described on this subject in Chapter 5.
If constructed effectively, explainer videos have some distinct advantages over plain text, audio, and still imagery in terms of engagement, trust building, and overall ROI performance. Some well-proven benefits include the following:
1. Search engine results (SEO) results: The chances of getting listed on page one of Google’s search engine results increase 53 times with video (source: Forrester Research). Supporting this finding, MarketingWeek found that video results have appeared in about 70 percent of the top 100 search listings on Google. This is not just for entertaining videos. According to Google, there are three times as many searches for the term “how to” than there are for “music video” on YouTube.7
2. Click-through rates and links: Not only do videos have click through rates over 40 percent higher than plain text, SEOMOZ concludes that video-based posts will attract three times more in-linking domains than a plain text post.8 What’s more, consumers are 27 times more likely to click through online video ads than standard banners. E-mail, in particular, benefits from having video links. A survey by the Web Video Marketing Council and Flimp Media, for example, found 88 percent of their respondents to agree that campaign performance improved when e-mails included integrated video.
3. Conversion and purchase: The same study found that 72 percent of respondents believed their prospective clients are more likely to buy after viewing video content sent via an e-mail. Another recent study by Invodo found that half of consumers claimed YouTube videos influenced their purchase decisions. And some 57 percent of online shoppers said they are less likely to return a product bought after watching it explained via video.
4. Easy to create and share: Who could imagine this claim only a few years ago? With the availability of high-quality video production hardware and software, over 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Using the current generation of smartphones and older, video recording and editing has reached unprecedented levels of simplicity. Sharing videos has become the preferred method of sharing as well. Consider the number of mobile users—who now represent 40 percent of YouTube viewing time—and how easier it is for them to share videos compared to text-based posts.
5. Purchase impact: The fact that explainer videos tend to address many of the concerns target audiences have in the consideration an evaluation stages of their buying cycle makes them critical to purchase influence. Many of the applications, for example, include demonstrations of use, client testimonies, and FAQs questions. All of them tend to impact the middle to bottom of the sales funnel.
6. Engagement: More than e-Books and white papers, videos make people feel something. And when they feel connected to you, they are more likely to engage with you and share your content. A study by ROI research, in fact, demonstrated that users interact with video at twice the rate of other forms of content.9 Another showed that 65 percent of online shoppers spend 2 minutes longer on a site after watching an online video. And when used with rich metadata (e.g., transcripts and tagging), video can drive engagement rates by anywhere from 40 to 300 percent.10
7. Trust: Video provides the greatest opportunity to showcase who you are in a persona setting. Audiences can connect with you on a far deeper level than can ever be accomplished through words. And given that most of our impressions are derived from body language, videos are uniquely suited to trust building.
8. ROI: About 52 percent of marketing professionals worldwide mention video as the online content with the best ROI (CopyPress).
9. Visual learning: With a vast majority of the world population being visual learners, video is the best mode of communications especially when used for instruction and decision making.
Virtual Seminars
From a marketing and sales perspective, virtual seminars have been quite popular in providing MoFu content to target audiences. Ranging from simple telephone hook-ups to highly interactive web conferencing, virtual seminars score high on content usefulness as an on-demand alternative to attending costly trade shows, workshops, or conferences. And by offering audio and sometimes video, they allow your audiences to connect with you more intimately.
Some of the more popular ways to conduct virtual seminars are the following:
1. Webinars: These collaborative and in-depth presentations permit live interaction with your audience by combining audio and slides through an Internet connection. But they must be recorded to be viewed on demand.
2. Webcasts: This streaming media technology adds video as well. They can be viewed on demand, but the transmission of information is one-way from presenter to listener.
3. Teleseminars: As an audio only venue, these interactive telephone seminars are accessed through a phone or Skype connection. If recorded, the teleseminar can essentially function as a podcast.
4. Hangouts on-air (HOA): Hangouts give users the ability to create instant webcasts over Google+ through a live streaming platform and automatic HD video capture. There is also a screen-sharing option, so you can also present slides or share anything from a Google doc or spreadsheet.
Webinars combine audio and slides where listeners can ask questions and get immediate answers. They are also capable of conducting online polls, chats, and information transfers throughout the live session. This interactive focus makes them especially useful as a tool for collaboration and learning.
A typical webinar session normally lasts between 45 minutes and an hour including a 15-minute live Q&A at the end. Although the webinars must be watched at a scheduled time, they can easily be recorded for those unable to attend. If recorded, however, webinars can be hosted on a website augmented with downloadable slide decks, MP3 audio files, and transcribed narration. As the technology matures for webinar setup, companies like Webex, GoTo Webinar, and Adobe Connect Pro have made the service very affordable.
Webcasts add a video component to a webinar; however, audiences cannot verbally ask questions. These have to be e-mailed in advance to the presenter. But since the platform is not overburdened with data sharing and two-way interactivity, webcasts are more suitable to serving large audiences. Webinar audiences, on the other hand, typically max out around 500 viewers.
Teleseminars resemble webcasts but without the video or screen sharing. In this case, participants are given an option to receive slide decks and other information in advance. It’s then up to the audience to synchronize these elements to the presenter’s narrative. An advantage of teleseminars over webcasts is the interaction permitted with audiences. For example, listeners can call in with questions during a live session. And like webcasts, teleseminars provide an opportunity for a host to provide information to a large number of people simultaneously.
Google+’s HOA have become one of the most popular ways to engage conversations with real people for virtual seminars and chats. Some of the popular applications surfacing across politics and business include its use in the following:
1. Company news or product announcements: Hangouts could include company executives hosting a news release. The audience could include members of the press and other stakeholders.
2. Educational seminars: Because of their setup flexibility, collaborating options, and an ability to fine tuning the end production, Hangouts have emerged as a primary hosting platform for webinars as well as one of the best mid-funnel content vehicles for building thought leadership.
3. Peer-to-peer panel discussions: Industry thought leaders can be assembled into an online roundtable for current event discussions, survey data analysis, and trended news. Similarly, Hangouts can feature users’ groups for showcasing customer success stories or Q&A sessions.
4. Video blog or video podcast episode: Interviews can be conducted with leading experts as an opinion or advisory piece to host in lieu of a video blog or video podcast episode. This could provide a refreshing changeup if the episode featured new guests and thought-provoking interaction with the right audience.
5. Virtual summits: In this case, you could livestream conference events including the presentations of featured speakers.
Depending on the number of participants, hangouts should last between 15 and 45 minutes in a fast-paced setting facilitated by a moderator. Up to 10 participants can collaborate throughout the dialog as it is presented to members of Google+. During the live hangout, text questions can be taken from the audience.
Hangout experts find that a mix of attention getting pattern interrupts and conversation spontaneity work best for HOAs. Although slides provide an opportunity for pattern interrupt, care must be taken to always emphasize conversation over slides. And like all video media solutions, lighting and sound quality are key. So it’s advised to use headsets to avoid feedback. For an excellent resource on setting up HOAs, check out Social Media Week’s “Google+ Hangouts on Air” at http://bit.ly/1lJvZ3C.
To prepare and promote an HOA, hosts often use a special guest to promote a teaser video. In the trailer, YouTube viewers are told of Hangout time and invited to post a question using a hashtag. Viewers can then be selected to join the hangout based on the thought-provoking nature of their question. Consider how this was down by Facebook expert, Mari Smith at http://bit.ly/1pDlv9B or soccer superstar, David Beckham, at http://bit.ly/1iKd6OJ. Similar 1–2 minute teasers could be offered after posting the broadcast on YouTube with highlight clips to encourage future attendance.
When live, up to 10 members from a Google+ circle can collaborate as an expert panel. But questions can be fielded live from up to a million concurrent viewers. The entire episode can then be recorded, edited, and uploaded on YouTube. And once uploaded to YouTube, you can then host the edited Hangout on blogs, websites, and social platforms. In effect, you have your own TV station.
Customer Success Stories
Customer success stories, also known as case studies, are arguably the most credible sales content that you have under your control. According to a recent B2B Content-Marketing Trends Report, customer testimonials and case studies are the most effective content-marketing tactics.11 The study showed that 89 percent of respondents found testimonials to be effective, while 88 percent found case studies to be effective.
By letting your customers tell their stories in their own words, you are adding a human element to your brand. Like any good story, the narrative behind a case study can create empathy with the case study subject. Especially if audiences appreciate the challenges faced by the subject, a personal connection can be made.
Customer success studies become especially useful in marketing when the content does not directly involve your product or service. Instead, it involves a solution to a problem your firm can potentially address. For example, an accounting firm soliciting case studies on how the firm’s exemplary tax advice bailed them out would not be as effective as a case demonstrating how a particular asset management remedy or other accounting procedure improved the case subject’s net profits. The accounting firm could then feature themselves as an experienced advisor in this field.
But to be truly effective, the case study should follow a familiar story arc with a journalistic tone. This includes you, the hero; a series of obstacles standing in the way of success; and a turnaround in results following the resolution of a problem leading to proven results. And by using video, the case can more dramatically play out the suspense surrounding challenges as well as the excitement of reaching a happy ending.
Overall, some of the key advantages of using customer success stories over alternative forms of content include the following:
1. Emotional connections: As discussed more in Chapter 3, storytelling is the key to building an emotional connection with your audience. When a case study is actually told as a story, audiences are more likely to be interested in and engage with the content especially if they can recognize some benefit relevant to their own challenges.
2. Nonbiased endorsements: A great advantage of case studies is their peer-to-peer influence and “show me” versus “tell me.” By having an outside party endorse your offering, you can avoid coming off as self-serving. Moreover, target audiences are more likely to empathize with someone in their own shoes.
3. Word-of-mouth sharing: Many would argue that the greatest way to improve word-of-mouth marketing is to amplify the voices of your customers. And case studies appeal to a basic human instinct to tell a story and give advice. So by sharing their success stories, you are essentially empowering your case study subjects to sway the decisions of your target audience.
4. Mid-funnel response: Case studies supply insight into how a problem was solved, thereby making it useful for the consideration stage of the buying decision cycle. But more importantly, case studies can be crucial at the zero moment of truth (ZMOT). This is time when the prospect is about to purchase and merely wants final reinforcement through peer reviews, buyer’s guides, and customer success stories. According to Weber Shandwick, the average buyer consults 11 consumer reviews on the path to purchase.12
5. Fine-tuned collateral: Rather than packing repurposed articles, brochures, and data sheets into a customer application folder, sales personnel can handpick success stories from a library of cases that most resemble the prospect’s pain points and interests. This further adds an element of variety and personalization to the sales collateral.
6. Expertise: As the archive of case studies grows, you have more opportunity to showcase your expertise and where you excel. Only now, you have the backing of outside endorsements.
7. Easily repurposed: A typical case study runs around 1,500–2,000 words, making it easily repurposed for e-Books, podcasts, best practice guide, and blogs.
8. Build partnerships with evangelists: Several case study writers highlight the success they have had forging better relationships with those willing to produce a case study. To begin, the discovery of willing subjects often reveals your true evangelists. If conducted more as a journalistic piece than an endorsement, the case subject themselves could gain from the publicity.
Blogs are essentially websites that are regularly updated and displayed in reverse-chronological order (e.g., most recent updates are displayed first). The content is broken down into posts and published simultaneously to many sites (syndicated) using an RSS feed that alerts subscribers when new content is posted. Each post hosts a comment section where readers are encouraged to provide feedback or engage in a discussion.
As a predominantly top-funnel asset, they provide marketers with great opportunities to showcase their expertise and build trust one small chunk at a time. And as blogging expert, Jeff Bullas, states “blogging gives the introvert a voice.” Limited effort and personality strain is required to get on this stage. Any reader advice or helpful tips can be offered in the language of your own voice but in an unintimidating format resembling that of a Word document.
For many firms, a corporate blog is the centerpiece of their content-marketing strategy. Blogs can be readily shared on almost any social platform. And they often serve as an aggregator of all other content in the form of downloads, links, embeds, and recordings. This not only provides a central repository for all of your media elements but also contributes to search results. But more than an aggregator of searchable content, blogs also function as the center of conversation as well. Because of the audience feedback and ability to host new topics, blogs provide an excellent opportunity to trigger discussion while gauging audience sentiment.
An examination of the most popular types of blogs will reveal the following 12 archetypes. Since its early beginnings, the how-to’s continue to dominate the archetypes especially if they offer detailed information not easy to find elsewhere. These blogs normally average around 1,500 words and incorporate short video clips to reinforce visual learning. These how-to blogs could be more readily scheduled than other blog types as its tips are not tied to external events. Others like industry news, ratings, and reports often require a significant time lapse between releases.
Among the key benefits of blogs over alternative communications methods are the following:
1. Ease of publishing and updating: Blogs are hosted on very user-friendly platforms, like WordPress, Blogger, and many other free sites, so that almost anyone can set up and maintain their posts. Even the process for embedding, linking, and moderating comments has reached the point where little, if any, web master support is required. And in contrast to that required for editing video content, updating blog posts is not more difficult than crafting an e-mail.
2. Easily scannable: Unlike podcasts, webinars, and videos, a quick scan of a blog post can let a viewer know if the content is relevant. And by skimming text, parts of the blog could be skipped. This is more challenging in audio and video where rewinds and bouncing across content leads to more time consumed in reaching relevant points.
3. Easily found: Blogs can be syndicated through blog directory services and subscribed through RSS. This makes blog content more readily discovered while saving viewers time in search since they are alerted of any updates. The ability to optimize blog text around key phrases makes it highly discoverable by search engines as well. Google’s Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird algorithms place a premium on continually refreshed content.
4. Easily linked: Blogs are more oriented to the topics of interest to your audience, thereby attracting far more inbound links to its postings than can be expected for a more self-serving website landing page. And with the ability to easily cross-link postings, bloggers can interconnect a series of related posts. This further boosts the search engine performance.
5. Top of the funnel (ToFu): Blogs are a great way to establish connection with target audiences early in their buying stage. Because they are less resource intensive than mid-funnel content, they can be more regularly published.
6. Owned content: With the exception of blogs hosted on LinkedIn, Tumblr, and other social-networking platforms, most are hosted on domains owned by the blogger. This limits the risk of unexpected and undesired changes made by platform suppliers. A good practice when establishing your blog domain is to ensure you have your name in the URL and not that of the software platform supplier (e.g., blog.yourcompany.com vs blog.wordpress.com). Otherwise you are merely building traffic for the platform provider.
7. Conversation with targets: Unlike a web landing page that hosts comments, blogs are designed to facilitate conversations with its audiences. In the process, this often helps build communities as responders feel connected to each other. It also provides greater opportunities for the blogger to identify, monitor, and connect with target audiences.
8. Word-of-mouth spread: More than news articles and subscribed content, blogs can have the most viral impact on a content-marketing strategy. Messages are highly portable, making them ideal for sharing across any device and across any platform. And with word of mouth being twice as effective as traditional marketing in terms of more lasting results and new customer acquisitions, blogs offer a great opportunity to improve the bottom line.13
9. Trail of trustworthiness: In his book, Youtility, Jay Baer discusses the use of bricks and feathers in content planning.14 Blogs serve as feathers, or a lighter content that allows readers to check you out before digesting a 45-sminute webinar.
Small businesses, in particular, benefit from blogging as the cost and time consumed to host a blog is far less than most content-marketing alternatives. And since each post serves as a continually refreshed website page, websites with blogs have 434 percent more indexed pages in which to attract the attention of search engines. Other notable statistics especially encouraging to small businesses are the following:15
• Small businesses with blogs generate 126 percent more leads.
• About 81 percent of U.S. consumers trust advice from blogs.
• About 37 percent of marketers believe blogs are the most important type of content marketing.
However, with an estimated 400 million blogs registered globally, the challenge to small businesses in particular is syndicating, socially sharing, and advertising their blog posts in an ever-growing noisy blogosphere. Chapter 3 discusses in more detail how to amplify your blog exposure. This section describes what it takes to ensure that your blogs are tuned to target audiences, focused on attraction, and backed by consistent quality.
e-Books
“The eBook has become the current standard for the long-form content package. A lot of companies are moving away from the verbose white paper to the sleeker, more appealing eBook.
— Joe Pulizzi, author of Epic Content Marketing
Marketing at the top and MoFu often involves the use of e-Books. And unlike their more technical cousin, white papers, these 6–50 page PDF documents are well suited for infotainment. Because they are usually graphics heavy, e-Books provide a great avenue for businesses to communicate complex information in a fun and interesting way. This is especially important at a time when audiences are seeking ways to be entertained or inspired when they consume content.
In the process of infotaining, you have an even greater way to show your expertise than what can be done in a short blog post. For those new to content, e-Books offer an easy way to launch in-depth content. Free downloaded graphics and page assembly templates, for example, are offered by companies like Hubspot. Once developed, the document can then be easily saved as a PDF file where it can be stored on your own computer site or via a hosting service like Google Drive or SlideShare. As demonstrated in Figure 1.4, an e-Book can garner SlideShare traffic while being hosted as a blog download.
Figure 1.4 Downloading Process for an eBook from Blog to SlideShare
Among the key benefits of e-Books over alternative communications methods are the following:
1. More in-depth content: e-Books offer more in-depth perspectives than what can be offered in a blog post. Blogs are normally consumed for more immediate needs. Consequently, you run the risk of losing your audience with a very in-depth post that is too long to digest at the time. e-Books, on the other hand, normally follow a blog or an e-mail introduction to the content. These intros allow a preview of its usefulness while permitting an easy way to download and archive the e-Book until it could be read at a more convenient time.
2. Searchability: Search engines love longer content. In fact, according to Jeff Bullas, a world-renowned content-marketing strategist, the average content length for a web page in the top 10 results for most searched keywords is 2,000 words or more.16 Although not one of the best for SEO optimization, PDFs are nevertheless well scanned by search engines.
3. Thought leadership: e-Books provide ample opportunity for you to demonstrate your expertise by solving complex problems more completely than you can expect from blog posts. Over time, a series of e-Books can become an excellent training resource that adds to your thought leadership.
4. Test trialing content: Unlike a printed book, e-Books can be dissected and released as your individual topics are completed. This further allows for an exploration of what really fascinates your audience before devoting too many resources.
5. Opt-in for growing e-mail lists: By providing far more value than a brief blog post, e-Books have a greater opportunity to enlist opt-ins for e-mail. With a registration form, some information can be collected about the subscriber. In addition, the downloads are easily tracked thereby making them ideal for lead qualification.
6. Broad EPUB audience: Converting your e-Book to an EPUB-style format can make it available on a Kindle, Nook, or iPad. The fact that e-Book sales grew from $68 million in 2008 to over $3 billion today attests to the popularity of readers enjoying this format.
7. Portability: Available on any smart device, e-Books are always within reach.
8. Interactivity: e-Books are able to accommodate tweetable quotes, graphics, and links for a rich content experience.
9. Speed of release: As an alternative to traditional publishing, e-Books offer a much quicker route to production while providing instant attachment through e-mail.
Some of the more popular applications of e-Books include its use in playbooks or guidelines for mastering a task. Others applications include the compilation of procedures, expert insights, or case studies that collectively provide a comprehensive insight into solving problems.
For e-Books to be effective, they need to follow the same rules applied to blogging including the use of imagery, small blocks of text, and short titles that will pique your audiences’ curiosity. In addition, e-Books that reference key influencers in the content have been shown to greatly boost their circulation while adding credibility.
Overall, e-Books offer a great way to advance your engagement with target audiences. And when matched with a preceding trail of blog posts, it not only remains one of the better methods for validating your expertise, it offer sufficient enough value for your readers to download a registration form. From there, Chapters 4 and 5 will explain how the captured e-mail can jump-start the process of converting leads to customers.
e-Newsletters
e-Newsletters remain the third highest content-marketing tactic used by B2B and B2C marketers. Despite its once tarnished image in the early days of e-mail blasting, this content remains useful to audience seeking the following:
• updated trend information and other relevant business news;
• helpful tips on trade-related or other reader challenges;
• educational digests on new concepts or helpful how-to’s;
• curated clips of periodic newsworthy topics;
• links for related resources; and
• ratings and reviews.
Its real value over blogs and e-Books is the timeliness of topics where updates are regularly expected. So when deciding whether you should use e-mail newsletters in your content strategy, you should first consider the nature of topics that lend themselves to habitual communication with your target audience.
Managed properly, e-Newsletters offer a valid means of regularly interacting with your target on a variety of updatable newsworthy items. Some candidate topics include updates on industry trade shows, periodic forecasts, industry news, expert tips, and product or service reviews. And by targeting the information based on a subscribed audience of readers, information could be tailored to the local and other specialized interests of your readers. This is more of a challenge for e-Books and blogs that lack a subscription mechanism.
e-Newsletters also have an advantage of providing a content change-up while still staying focused on a targeted audience. Notice how this was done for a real-estate accounting firm in a quarterly newsletter aimed at property managers in South Florida. Among the topics covered in the issue were the following:
• New tri-county property management positions posted on LinkedIn
• An interview with the continental group on COA and HOA collection challenges
• New property developments in Palm Beach County
• Review of the top rated residential property management software
• Preview of this year’s South Florida PM-EXPO
Much of this information was repurposed from blogs and a review already in progress but with a more humanized approach. This human side was accomplished by using a recognized community expert and by posting local community photos. This coincides with the results of a study by the Nielsen Norman Group whose findings suggest that “readers become emotionally attached to e-Newsletters and look forward to receiving them, provided they are timely and informative.”17
e-Newsletters that share behind-the-scenes insights and community goodwill activities can also strike an emotional chord with audiences beyond what can be expected from e-Books, webinars, or podcasts. And by making these insights local and exclusive to subscribed members, audiences feel more intimately engaged with your firm while associating your brand with corporate citizenry.
Authoritative Reports
Another form of content that could greatly benefit your target audience is white papers and market reports. Unlike the more entertaining style of an e-Book, however, this content has a more technical tone. Their purpose is to convey survey or study results from research.
The benefit to readers, especially in B2B settings, is having documented evidence to back the study claims. This adds credibility to your thought leadership while allowing your readers to leverage your findings as support for their own positions. Buyers, in particular, use white papers and market reports to justify their choices. e-Books and infographics in this case may not be taken seriously enough.
Slideware
Almost every successful content marketing has found a way to leverage their blogs and e-Books into slide decks that allow them to host webinars or live presentations. What many may not realize, however, is the tremendous social power behind slide sharing. Readers enjoy the page-by-page flips of predominantly visual content that have always been the preference among business professionals too busy to read a lot of words. Be even more importantly, the booming success of SlideShare has convinced many firms to publicly host their content.
Referred to by Forbes as the quite giant of content marketing, SlideShare remains the world’s largest content sharing platform. Slideshare’s special ties to LinkedIn allow you to seamlessly expose your slide decks or e-Books in your LinkedIn profile (Figure 1.5) as a way to boost your thought leadership. Because it provides social proof by way of views, comments, and downloads, those viewing your LinkedIn profile can ascertain your popularity as well.
Figure 1.5 Embedding Slideware on Your LinkedIn Profile
To create an effective presentation useful to your audience, the slides should be highly graphic. The fewer the words, the better. Once developed, the slides get uploaded from a PDF format into your SlideShare account channel where over 60 million visitors per month can like, comment, download, and easily share your content.
Branded Content Tools and Apps
Perhaps the most promising form of educational content that audiences find useful is when content solves problems in real time. Known as branded content tools, these apps offer self-help assistance or gather information from prospects for use in customized assessments. Discussed widely in Chapter 12, brands and small businesses are discovering how these apps can help solve immediate problems like removing stains or fixing a drain.
On the less urgent end of the spectrum, many branded content tools are used in analysis support where user data can feed an ROI calculator or product configurator on their smart phones as your audience gets close to making a decision. This offers great potential to marketers when addressing mid-funnel and bottom-funnel opportunities for sales conversion.
Creating a Content-Marketing Landscape to Map Your Format Requirements
Now comes the grueling research part of understanding what content best resonates with your audience. By knowing content objective (instruction, insights, or decision making) and the format preferences (webinars, podcasts, blogs, e-Books, etc.), you are well on your way to discovering how your content will be useful.
What remains is an examination or content popularity in your industry as well as the resource demands to produce each type of content. Shown in Figure 1.6 is an example of a content landscape to consider when examining your most feasible media tactics. To help tailor what content is applicable to your industry, the table also shows the popularity of each type across resources to publish regularly updated content.
Figure 1.6 Content Landscape for Preparing Media Tactics
Situational Triggers for Timely Placements
High on the list of many content-marketing plans is the timely sequencing of content across a target audience’s buying cycle. At the ToFu, content marketers have an opportunity to encounter audiences right at the time they recognize a pain point. Known as situational triggers, these moments provide timely opportunities to post blogs and other ToFu content.
Figure 1.7 Situational Triggers for Cosmetic Dentistry
Consider the case of a cosmetic dentist shown in Figure 1.7. Many dentists wait for signs of aging teeth as the moment to present their message. Others see the value of encountering prospects the moment they detect hair loss, discover new wrinkles, or experience aging ailments.
Using this moment as a situational trigger, their content could be developed on the subject of antiaging, which features smile makeovers as one of the antiaging remedies. This assumes that the content is not perceived as self-serving (about teeth) or biased (about the dentist).
Continuing the analysis across other targeted personas, moments of encounter could then be identified for audiences planning to walk down the aisle, perform on stage, or mingle in high-society circles. When timed to reach the audience as they experience these early awareness pressures, the content can then create an opportunity to influence the consideration and evaluation phases of the audience’s decision making as well.
Transparent Content to Create Early Trust
Talk about things no one wants to discuss.
— Marcus Sheridan, founder, The Sales Lion
Now that your content is seen as timely, relevant, useful, and synchronized, the next objective is to demonstrate your transparency. This means revealing your insights on sensitive business issues like your price, your problems, and who does the best job—all the issues marketers dread discussing. Why would we reveal what we were taught should always be held close to the vest? Because it addresses your target audience’s biggest questions. Your contributions not only save them time, but you also relieve them of the most aggravating part of their search process.
No one understands this more than swimming pool installer River Pools and Spas that went from near bankruptcy to one of the largest in-ground pool construction companies in the country. Their turnaround came by educating their target audiences on what matters most to them. The owner, Marcus Sheridan, blogged his way to success. And he blogged about issues few companies want to discuss.
River Pools and Spas understood the power of solving lingering problems. Marcus Sheridan essentially took information from his website FAQs and translated them into useful content. But rather than having prospects dig out the data from reviews and competitive sites, they proactively met their audiences in the early research phases with donated content. Today, some prospects download nearly 100 pages of this content before committing to a contract. And they did this by being transparent. The company blogs on subjects we were told to put off until later in the buying stage. For Marcus Sheridan, this meant preempting his target audience’s biggest pain points with answers to the following:
• What does a fiber glass pool cost?
• Who are the best suppliers?
• What are some of the shortcomings in pool life and installation?
To his pleasure, no one else seemed willing to address these issues for fear of competitive exploitation or the risk of creating a premature expectation with the prospect.
Like Marcus, a common practice followed by leading bloggers is to actually survey their customers on what they are most anxious about when considering a solution the blogger can address. Others examine the FAQs logged over time from their field sales force or customer support teams. Regardless of the mechanism, the closer the question relates to sensitive pricing and problems, the greater the opportunity you have to demonstrate transparency.
Knowing that sales and profits will come later, River Pools and Spas first proved themselves as a worthy member of their prospects’ attention. And by risking exploitation from divulging free and competitively sensitive information, the firm started a trail of trustworthiness. The gesture of helpfulness, in essence, opened the doors for prospects to determine if the firm’s contributions are useful and relevant to their passions or business challenges.
Engaging Content for Attentive Learning
As this chapter deals with educating our audiences, we only need to consider the level of attention deficit pervading our society. To keep students engaged, we have to:
1. adapt to their learning and communication styles;
2. keep them involved; and
3. entertain them as much as possible.
The same applies to readers, listeners, and viewers of our content. If we expect to stand out from the growing noise of content marketing, we need to engage them.
Selecting Content Communication Modes that Resonate with Target Audience
The first stage of the defining engaging content involves the selection of a communication mode most suitable to a target audience’s learning style. Does the audience prefer to listen, read, or view? And if a visual context rules the day, are they better served with graphics, photos, animations, slides, or videos?
Viewing Content
It goes without saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. In fact, we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Perhaps the most widely discussed topic in social content circles over the past year has been visual storytelling, a subject covered in Chapter 3. But visuals also play a key role in instruction and information. The rapid rise of slide decks, infographics, and photo galleries is testimony to how brands and small businesses are embracing this short-form imagery format by audiences overwhelmed with text.
But if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million. In fact, according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research, one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. As the top format for content marketing, videos especially pique the interest of your target audience while establishing an emotional connection. And with 78 percent of the world adult population watching at least one video a week, it is not surprising that videos have moved front and center in most content-marketing strategies.18
What has fueled the growth of video is a combination of its growing popularity and effectiveness in driving internet traffic. According to The Hazlett Group, Cisco, and Imedia Connection, consumer video traffic will reach 55, 69, and 90 percent, respectively, of all global Internet traffic in the very near term.19 To fully grasp the enormity of this popularity, consider that over 6 billion hours of video are now watched on YouTube every month by an estimated 1.15 billion people. Without a doubt, video content has become the most crucial component for most content-marketing strategies.
Like most content distributed through social media, videos are useful in storytelling and education. The former, a subject covered in Chapter 3, represents a new generation of connection based on entertaining and inspiring audiences. And according to experts, this application clearly has more potential in terms of engagement and emotional connection. However, the use of video for instruction and information has arguably more impact on helping target audiences make an informed buying decision.
Listening to Content
Next to video, audio has the next highest impact on humanizing content. Its preference over video has much to do with its “on the go” accessibility and suitability for multitaskers. And whether it’s used for audio books, podcasting, slidecasting, streaming radio talk shows, or online conference recordings, audio represents the only practical way for “mobile-equipped” audiences to consume content while exercising, commuting, waiting in line, or working at their desk.
As almost all new-generation cars equip passengers with plug-in smartphone podcasting (e.g., Apple CarPlay, Stitcher, and TuneIn), audiences will become more accustomed to selecting their own audio content on demand. The advantage to content marketers is that audio provides one of the best ways to build credibility and authority.
When released consistently, audio content builds a high level of intimacy with subscribed audiences without having to incur the higher costs of radio broadcasting and most online video productions. Quality sound can now be produced for less than $200 for a microphone and software. And the ease of social sharing on MP3s and audio platforms rivals that of YouTube videos.
Of course, a downside to audio is the fact that they are linear, meaning that you cannot skim them. And if the audio quality or conversational style of the host is not that of a radio broadcaster, audiences could quickly get turned off.
Reading Content
With the continual rise of microblogs, textual content will remain a preferred choice among those accustomed to short-form tweets, posts, and text messaging. Add to this the accelerating growth in native advertising content, and a strong case can be developed for textual content surviving the onslaught of social video, visual storytelling, and infographics.
Textual formats still have the advantage of quick release times, quick loading times, and low-budget development. Despite the hype surrounding video search results, more opportunities are given to textual blogs and articles to score precisely on targeted key words. Finally, text has the advantage of self-paced scrutiny, skimming, and repurposing.
Getting Audience Involvement
One way to keep our audiences engaged in our content is to get them involved. Consider content that asks us how to resolve a debate, solve a riddle, or offer an opinion. Aren’t you at least curious to know whether you have the correct answer?
Research demonstrates that audiences are often entertained by a cognitive challenge or through conclusion curiosity. Although not as powerful as humor or performance entertainment, this technique is often the preferred choice of content marketers seeking to engage their audiences under a reasonable budget.
Among the most popular types of participation that perform the best on engagement are the following:
• completing the message;
• resolving the problem; and
• following a script.
Common to each method is a way to attract us with a mental motivation to finish the exercise. If successful, we can applaud our wits and talents at mastering the task. In the process, content marketers get us to ponder over the concept or follow the steps of mastery.
In so doing, they lay the trail that pulls us through their entire message. That is why this technique scores high on engagement. But content marketers face a tough challenge in their attempts to direct our cognitive efforts on a meaningful and well-understood brand message.
Consider the wave of eye tests and other mind games flooding our LinkedIn updates. Our attention to these games is evidenced by the inordinately high amount of comments as readers attempt the math or to solve the puzzle. But unless the game leads to a brand story or educational content, the game merely serves as a marketing gimmick.
One way to keep your audiences involved in your content is to fuel a debate. By leaving your blogs open ended (i.e., letting you audience decide for themselves vs you providing an answer), you can encourage readers to engage deeper into the content. This can often be accomplished with polls embedded in the blog that ask readers to cast a vote. In the process of stimulating a debate, the content marketer has an opportunity to keep the audience engaged in the content.
Making Content Entertaining
Without a doubt, the move toward entertaining content in B2B as well as B2C environments represents the most dramatic shift to how we market in a growing sea of content. Chapter 3 covers in more detail how the use of humor, astonishment, concept imagery, heartfelt moments, performances, and storytelling is critical to build an emotional connection that supersedes any content engagement at the cognitive level.
Deliverable Content for Audience Convenience
Much like the pressure felt by universities customizing their courseware for classroom, online and hybrid formats, content marketers are challenged with adapting all of their content to fit the social platform and device preferences of their targeted audiences.
Figure 1.8 Compatibility of Content with Most Popular Platforms
Chapter 9 discusses the need to embrace omni-channels especially in a growing population of mobile platforms that cannot accommodate many of the content formats used for desktop display. Chapter 8 also discusses the strong drive toward native advertising where content resembles surrounding advertising. Whether it’s a sponsored post or short-form advertorial, this requires content to be repurposed as microcontent that seamlessly blends into someone else’s news feed or feature article.
Perhaps the biggest challenge to content marketers is adapting the content to the tone, style, and audience expectations of all of the major social-media platforms. Each platform has a unique way to accept posts or links to your content. Moreover, some are more infotainment oriented, while others are more serious or instructional in nature. Shown in Figure 1.8 is an example of how the top platforms vary in their content expectations. This is a typical representation that does not apply to all industries.
Summary Model of Trusted Content for Education
In summary, for content to educate our target audiences, it has to be useful, trusted, and engaging. Shown in Figure 1.9 is a model of the relationships between each trust determinant to each other and the outcome variable education. Also shown are the content requirements to consider when developing your content-marketing strategy.
Figure 1.9 Summary Model of Trusted and Educational Content
1. “If Your Content Marketing is for Everybody, It’s for Nobody” by Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute (http://bit.ly/1nKb9R9).
2. About 97 million Americans drive to work alone in their car every day. The average commute is just over 26 minutes. Taken from “The Podcasting Facts: Why Audio Is an Untapped Content Marketing Opportunity” by Jennifer Tribe (bit.ly/1sL6i7r) and “Is Audio the Next Big Thing in Digital Marketing?” by CrazyEgg and Russ Henneberry (bit.ly/1wmYxmM).
3. Edison Research and Arbitron (http://bit.ly/1sL6i7r).
4. “Why Podcasting Should Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy” by Jo Hague (http://bit.ly/1lXdPe5).
5. Social Media Marketing World (http://dustn.tv/smmw14-keynote-michael-stelzner/).
6. Chris Brogan comment taken from “The Podcasting Facts: Why Audio Is an Untapped Content Marketing Opportunity” by Jennifer Tribe (bit.ly/1sL6i7r).
7. Marketing Week (http://bit.ly/1iDRZNC).
8. “What Makes a Link Worthy Post—Part 1” by the Moz Blog’s Casey Henry (http://bit.ly/1sDsBfb) posted to Link Building (bit.ly/1uLoPvK).
9. “How the Smartest Companies Leverage Visual Social Media” contributed by David K. Williams to Forbes (http://onforb.es/1lcsFZI) as a reference to ROI Research Study (slidesha.re/1t70Vyo).
10. “Video Metadata Drives Engagement Rates as Much as 300 Percent, RAMP’s CEO” in Beet. TV’s interview with Tom Wilde, CEO of content optimization platform RAMP (http://bit.ly/1lozoom).
11. 2013 B2B Content-Marketing Report sponsored by Spiceworks and others (http://slidesha.re/1voYuV2).
12. “Consumer Reviewers Wield More Power than Professional Critics in Driving Purchase Decisions” taken from Weber Shandwick press release (http://bit.ly/1pHyhnp).
13. Melissa Barker, Donald Barker, Nicholas Bormann, and Krista Neher. Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach. South-Western Cengage Learning. 2013. p. 91.
14. Jay Baer. Youtility. New York: Portfolio/Penguin. 2013.
15. “The Blog Economy” Infographic by Social4Retail (http://bit.ly/1o4zVtP).
16. “20 Powerful Ideas for Creating and Marketing Your EBook” by Jeff Bullas (http://bit.ly/1zlzJOo).
17. “Email Newsletter Design to Increase Conversion and Loyalty” by Neilson Norman Group (http://bit.ly/1nccPnh).
18. “Online Video 2013” by Pew Research (http://bit.ly/UGUyDZ).
19. “The Why and How of Video for Content Marketing” reference to Cisco contributed by SEJ’s Bernadette Coleman (http://bit.ly/Vm8X95); “5 Ways to Optimize Video for Search” by imedia Connection’s Diane Buzzeo (http://bit.ly/1phJkDA); “Why Video Marketing Is Key in 2014” by the Hayzlett Group’s Jeffrey Hayzlett (http://bit.ly/1lOzHrY).