Chapter 7
IN THIS CHAPTER
Grabbing attention with content — good, bad, and ugly
Checking out content marketing strategies that work
Trying user-generated strategies that build sales, not just fun posts
Writing content for trust, transparency, and results
Even in a society where many people have grown wary of media bias and opinion-based news over facts, media mentions on air waves, on web pages, in print, and radio still get noticed and still have influence. News media works because of frequency. You may not remember the details of stories you hear, but you will probably remember the names of those involved, or at least recall hearing a name when it pops up again in a subsequent story. Frequency creates familiarity.
According to the familiarity principle, an aspect of psychology that helps to explain human behavior, we align or engage with things we know. The more someone hears a name, the greater the sense of familiarity. Studies show that people will reply to emails and phone calls from salespeople whose names are familiar more often than to those that don’t seem familiar.
Getting mentioned on influencer blogs and media websites, in print media, on television and radio shows, on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn — you name it — matters, and it matters a lot, especially because consumers today place less trust in advertising to guide their choices and increasingly rely on what they hear from peers and news sources. As a result, content marketing and developing marketing content are key elements of a successful marketing strategy.
This chapter sets forth some insights on content marketing and marketing content strategies and tactics, and how to build successful marketing plans, no matter the size of your company. I help you put a plan in place for newsworthy, informative communications; prioritize your communications activities; improve your writing; spark dialogues, not just monologues; and more. Chapters 9 and 11 detail the technologies available to help you distribute your content across efficient and affordable channels.
Just what is content marketing? According to the Content Marketing Institute (www.contentmarketinginstitute.com
),
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
In a sense, content marketing makes us all journalists as we pull together information, ideas, and insights and share them objectively with consumers to position ourselves as leaders and spark dialogue that, down deep in our marketing hearts, we hope will generate sales or leads that our sales teams can convert to sales.
The goals of your content marketing should be to
If you achieve these goals, your ultimate goal of selling more and earning more will fall into place. You can accomplish many of them simply by giving your customers and prospects something worth thinking and talking about, and by providing targeted media more news to add to the information hole they have to fill daily.
Content marketing and marketing content may seem similar, but they aren’t one and the same.
Content marketing refers to the campaigns you execute around sharing informative rather than promotional content with customers and prospects. These campaigns typically consist of educational pieces like checklists and guidance that help consumers make informed decisions. A content marketing campaign helps position the leaders of your brand as subject matter experts, industry thought leaders, and authorities in their given field. Content marketing can position a social influencer or celebrity as the most popular source for ideas on a given topic or the best athlete or entertainer to follow, which adds to their social media imprint and career growth.
Marketing content refers to the assets you create to deliver your messaging, offers, and personalized communications. Your marketing content includes email campaigns, blogs, banner ads (ads embedded in a web page), digital ads, print ads, social media posts, signage, and so on.
Content marketing is instrumental to the success of many marketing initiatives, including the following:
Content built around objective and actionable information will better draw people to your brand by establishing your team as the authorities on the topic at hand and your brand as a company to trust. Your “objective” information can become your brand’s truth as long as it’s factual and presented in a way that doesn’t make your content a disguised advertisement.
Formats for educational and actionable content include:
With all forms of marketing, the message, tone, and persona of your content must be personally relevant to the receiver. And so must the channel.
Many marketers work hard to deliver relevant content — advertising and editorial — for all marketing channels only to deliver it across a channel that isn’t well suited for the audience or the type of information people seek on that channel. For example, posting personal milestones and news on Facebook is relevant to a channel created for personal stories. Posts about your kids or vacations aren’t relevant on business channels like LinkedIn and likely won’t drive your desired results.
Channels to consider for your content include:
Influencer marketing, or social media marketing by people with a loyal online following due to an interesting lifestyle or area of expertise, is not a passing fad. People get much of their news, information, and lifestyle ideas from people or organizations they like to follow online. This is not going to change as long as we have social media. Monitor influencers followed by your target audiences for ideas on topics of interest. Then, consider building content around those themes and share your content with influencers to get even more visibility.
For example, if you’re selling men’s high-end fashion and travel accessories, you may want to pursue relationships with bloggers that cover the following topics:
Instead of blasting out your stories and news releases to every blogger you find with a Google search, pinpoint those that run a lot of ads from respected brands on their sites and, of course, have the highest number of followers. For example, The Fashion Spot (www.thefashionspot.com
) has many big-brand ads, including spots by Volvo and Nordstrom, that the blog posts almost get lost. But it covers both men’s and women’s fashion, and its Best Products list is pretty credible and one you’d want your products to be featured on.
A lack of content is one of the biggest challenges facing marketing professionals today, and it’s the thorn in their side when it comes to using marketing technology efficiently. The best content is newsworthy, actionable, clear, consistent, attention-grabbing, persuasive, and accurate, all at the same time — no small undertaking. Once you have a handle on creating and channeling your content, you’ll need a plan for getting it out to consumers.
Before embarking on a content marketing program by writing articles, blogs, news releases, white papers, and more, and then pushing them out to consumers via social media channels in hopes that some of your efforts will get noticed, you’ll need to put together a plan that you can stick with every single week. A good first step toward an effective content marketing plan is a communications audit of your current programs and campaigns.
To start an audit of your brand’s marketing communications, begin by gathering examples of the ways in which you communicate to all your customer groups. Include everything: traditional advertising, mailings, online communications, packaging, signs, radio scripts, podcast interviews, and so forth.
After you’ve gathered your samples of all the ways you communicate, create a spreadsheet or table with the channels you use printed down the left side as labels for each row (for example, blogs, social media posts, articles in trade magazines, news releases, advertisements, brochures, emails, and so on). Then create columns for the following elements:
Do communications audits periodically to see which topics, themes, stories, and ideas pay off the most. Consumers’ interests, attitudes, needs change frequently, and so will the results of your audits. I recommend doing audits twice a year.
It's important to create high-quality communications for your own channels that others will want to include on their channels as well. This will help you build valuable links for your website that will boost your SEO and dramatically increase your reach.
Getting your content out on a regular basis is critical to content marketing success. If you send out valuable information or decision tools frequently, you are more likely to be seen as a partner that can be trusted for support and guidance.
Here are some tips for increasing and managing the frequency of your content distribution:
Work the news media appropriately. If you send a press release to news editors every week, you’re likely going to lose their interest and respect. News editors want news, not promotional messages disguised as news, which they are very good at picking out. Sending a press release to media outlets once a month, as long as it fits the topics they cover, is a good way to keep your name front and center for when they need a subject matter expert on your topic and for getting mentions about your brand in news reports.
Press release topics to consider as part of your content marketing mix include
Your marketing content needs to add value to a decision process, a job requirement, or one’s ability to live a better life. It also needs to align with your overall messaging strategy and reflect the same values and promises in your ads and sales materials.
Popular formats for content marketing material are white papers, reports, articles, and decision-support pieces such as checklists. As these formats are editorial in nature, they need to follow the same rules of writing for a news publication or industry journal.
This section provides some tips and tactics for writing content furthers your marketing strategy and is valuable to your readers at the same time.
Following are elements you should weave into your content marketing campaigns and pieces.
Call to action: Ads that only present a brand story are just that: a brand story that might get a smile but not likely a sale. Ads with a call to action get action. You need to provide compelling content and then a reason for consumers to contact you for more information or to close a sale. Calls to action include encouragement to
Your informative or journalistic content should also have a call to action, just not one that’s positioned as a call to engage in the sales process. Calls to action in white papers, industry updates on social media, and so on can be as simple as a prompt to call your team for a more detailed report, schedule a consultation on how the principles apply to your business, to participate in a survey to help with further research, or simply for additional information.
Reasons to engage: There are many reasons to engage with a brand beyond the products and prices it offers. Research from Cone (a Porter Novelli Company) shows that
If your passion is preventing animal cruelty or advocating for pet rescue, engage customers with stories and calls to action that support pets — theirs and those that are waiting to be rescued. If your team organizes local walks or other events to raise money or awareness for your cause, include an invitation at the bottom of your ad or blog for people to join you.
If 89 percent of customers are looking for brands that do good, give them a reason to choose you by mentioning your causes and inviting them to join you. It’s a pretty simple yet very powerful message.
Writing for content marketing needs to follow the same rules as writing for journalism. It’s helpful to review some of the rules journalists and news editors use to make sure they get the main message across and inspire readers to finish the entire story. These principles apply to writing informative materials, decision guides, ad copy, web pages, email and printed direct response letters, and more.
This is the basic rule for all news and editorial writers. You can never assume that your audience will read your entire article or social media post. So you have to start with the most important message you want them to understand and embrace. This formula is really important for writing press releases you want others to publish or post, because everyone’s time is limited, and if people have to read more than a few sentences to get the point of your message, they will check out and move on to something else.
When your writing follows the inverted pyramid format, your copy will flow along the following lines:
Headlines and titles that spark curiosity work for marketing content as well as editorial content. We act on headlines that make us realize that we may not know something we think we know, or that we don’t know something we definitely should know.
A good example of a title that captured the attention and sparked the curiosity of millions is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. People wanting to be successful eagerly read Stephen Covey’s book to find out what the 7 habits are and how many they practiced in their own lives, making the book a best seller for many years.
Without curiosity, we wouldn’t explore new ideas, test new concepts, work to invent new solutions, or take other actions that lead to the innovations that change our world. Adding headlines that create curiosity to your marketing copy can clearly help you increase your readership as well as your open and click-through rates.
Examples of headlines that spark curiosity include the following:
The best type of clickbait — a headline designed to get people to click on a link — that’s actually responsible and ethical is to lead with a timely and meaningful question that not only gets consumers’ attention but also sparks some of the emotional responses I talk about in Chapter 2. Asking the right questions can motivate consumers. Consider the following clickbait headlines:
If you create comprehensive ESP profiles, which I discuss in Chapter 2, you’ll better understand what types of questions or statements will get your customers’ attention and inspire them to act. For example, when working with a client that provides marketing services for small businesses, my team and I followed the ESP guide for what’s top of mind for small business owners. We crafted a subject line for our message accordingly and got a 49 percent open rate, well above average for email open rates in any industry.
Once you get consumers’ attention, you need to draw them into your sales pitch and motivate them to act. Again, you can do this by asking leading questions. Ask yourself, What’s a topic you’re an expert on, and how can you make it actionable by assigning steps for success?
Create digital and printed copies of your content marketing pieces that you can distribute on your website, at trade shows, during customer presentations, and on social media. A relevant theme with actionable steps may become the top page on your website and the most liked post on your social media pages.
Going back to the influence of authority in capturing people’s attention and motivating their behavior, facts and statistics about issues of interest to consumers tend to pull strong results. Instead of making your own claims about the growth of your product category or associated customer satisfaction trends, let the facts tell the truth for you.
Subscribe to emails and newsletters from research firms and associations that produce reports on your industry and share the findings that support your marketing messages and product claims. Some recommended resources for marketing insights include Nielsen, Edelman, Cone, and Deloitte.
Most businesses use testimonials at the end of a brochure or email, or as a secondary message in a marketing campaign. Try leading with testimonials to create a sense of truth, transparency, and quality up front. After you’ve laid that solid foundation, you’re more likely to get consumers to read the rest of your story or marketing message.
Instead of coming up with new weekly content for your social media sites and constantly tooting your own horn, let customers do the talking and posting. Campaigns that ask customers to share ideas for how to better use a product or how they’d design a new version, or to upload photos and videos of themselves using a product as intended or in creative new ways, produce some of the most powerful results.
Studies show that the majority of millennials and baby boomers actually want options that allow them to generate content for brands they love. According to other research, content created by consumers rather than ad agencies is the most trusted.
User-generated content (UGC) campaigns can be entertaining and profitable, but not always both. Meaningful content that showcases happy customers and encourages others to view their posts pays off the most. Successful UGC campaigns include photos and videos showing customers using a product and commenting on its value and their experience, and brand-sponsored contests that showcase a product.
Here are some examples of UGC campaigns that drive brand awareness and sales:
How you present content in your advertising materials is as important as how you present content in your educational and informative materials. You need to focus on compelling themes and apply strong writing skills when you craft your content.
You can break through the marketing clutter and get attention for your ads and action from your targeted consumers by
If you repeat a clear, focused message, people will eventually get it. Make sure you’re consistent in how you present your brand’s value and competitive advantages across your marketing content and channels.
Even if an individual ad, web page, mailing, sign, or other communication is clear and well-designed, it won’t be effective unless it’s consistent with your other communications. People remember what you say when you repeat yourself frequently, clearly, and consistently.
All forms of marketing content need pull power. Pull power may be a limited time offer, a QR code for a mystery deal, a chance for an experience that may not come again, and so on. Pull power includes strong emotional appeals that address the “wannabe” persona of your customers, create a sense of self-actualization, or solve an immediate problem or need.
To be an effective marketer, you need to understand the power of persuasion, which I discuss in Chapter 2. Persuasive skills are key to writing content marketing and marketing content copy with pull power.
Here are some guidelines to ensure all your written materials are persuasive:
Show your evidence through clear, simple language and illustrations. The way to be persuasive is to show that your product is a success rather than tell people it is. Share the statistics that prove how good your product is. Provide an example of what it can do. Quote a happy customer’s testimonial. Show and tell, with an emphasis on the show part, and your communications will be naturally persuasive. Just be sure to focus on the facts, not your opinions.
YouTube videos demonstrating product use are a great way to show and tell. Embed them in your Facebook business page, your website, and your blog.
If you do everything right, your communications will be naturally persuasive. Clear, concise, well-written copy is instinctively engaging. Accurate, informative messages are persuasive. Professional, clean graphics and designs are convincing. If you look, sound, and read like a top brand or a leading professional in your field, people will assume you are.
If someone has to tell you to trust them, you probably shouldn’t. Present trust and transparency through examples, offers, and testimonials, not hyped-up claims. Let the professionalism of your presentation show how good you are. Your people, customer service policies, overall experiences, honesty, core values, community support, and corporate social responsibility efforts say more than your words, so make sure the expectations you create through your writing support your brand’s reality. If not, it’s time to look at the core of your culture (which is a story for another book).
Here is some advice for maintaining professionalism in your content so people know they can trust your information:
Sloppy copy is unprofessional. Always have others proof your work. You can’t catch mistakes in copy you’ve written and edited many times over as easily as someone who has never seen your copy.
You can hire professional proofreaders for a nominal fee, and it’s well worth it. They’ll fix grammar issues, typos, spacing and layout problems, and other things that can make you look sloppy to customers.
Make sure your copy and content for all channels is conversational, your message inspiring, your promises real, and your offers actionable, and then be patient. Most content marketing is like a personal relationship: It takes time before you build trust and others are willing to commit the time to engage with you.
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