Separating content marketing from marketing content

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.

Creating content that engages

Content marketing is instrumental to the success of many marketing initiatives, including the following:

• Social media posts: Having a messaging strategy in place that defines relevant content to share with your followers will help your social media posts get attention and engagement. Without a plan for developing themes that add value for your customers and position your brand as a thought or market leader, your social media efforts become little more than a game of roulette — you never know where they’ll land or if they’ll pay off.
• SEO results: The content you publish on third-party websites and push out to social media networks will improve your search engine optimization (SEO) results and get your website ranked higher on search engines like Google. Additionally, the more consistently you put out content, the better your overall SEO results will be.
• Public relations: Media outlets are always looking for content to add to their websites and print publications. Links to media websites are some of the most powerful drivers for SEO results, brand awareness, and credibility among consumers.
• PPC ads: If you invest in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising models and build ads around links to your content, you’ll get more impressions (ad views) and more chances for clicks, both of which will generate a strong return on investment (ROI).
• Inbound marketing: If you want people to call you or visit your website, you have to give them a reason to do so by delivering content that supports their decision process and provides action items that lead to informed decisions.

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:

• White papers
• Webinars
• Newsletters and news briefs
• Industry trend updates and summaries
• Media releases
• Blogs
• LinkedIn posts and articles
• Feature articles, mentions, and guest columns in print and online magazines

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.

Channeling your content

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:

• Third-party online news sites (mainstream and industry news outlets)
• Broadcast media (TV and radio news outlets)
• News wire services (like PR Newswire)
• Blogs written by your team and posted on your website
• Blogs written by influencers and followed by your target audience
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Informational ideation websites, or sites that people go to for inspiration and ideas or dialogue with others (like Pinterest, Reddit, and Quora)

Leveraging influencer sites

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.

Be on the lookout for the newest and hottest online celebrities and influencers. New bloggers with new ideas can rise to prominence quickly due to the low cost of entry for social media journalism. When you find them, send these influencers product ideas to write about.

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:

• Men’s fashion: Connect with influencers who write about men’s clothing, accessories, and total looks.
• Travel tips: Target travel bloggers with tips for traveling light and fashionably.
• Minimalism: Look for fashion bloggers who cover minimalism, and a simplified approach to fashion that appeals to Generation Xers and millennials.

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.

Content is a relationship building tool. To engage customers and spark relationships that lead to sales and loyalty, you need to produce content that is meaningful to their lives beyond the products you sell. If your content is plain old promotional, it’s likely that customers won't engage with you.

Performing a communications audit

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:

• Messaging: What’s the primary message delivered on each channel? Is your messaging brand- or customer-centric?
• Purpose: What’s the intended purpose of each piece you push out? To share industry best practices? Engage prospects with compelling case studies? Educate and inform consumers? Establish partnerships? Are you seeking to establish your company leadership as leading authorities in your industry?
• Frequency: How often do you push out content on each channel?
• Expense: How much are you spending per month on channels like Google Ads, retargeting platforms (programs that follow your website visitors around the web and serve your ad on subsequent pages they visit) ads on social media pages like LinkedIn and Facebook, and so on?
• Response or engagement among target audiences: Are you engaging 10 percent, 20 percent, or more of the potential audience for a given channel? How many shares, comments, likes, retweets, pins, and so on do you get from your social media contacts?
• Usage: Are you seeing returns from printed handouts you produce for trade shows and live sales presentations or wasting money by producing too much printed material that isn’t being used?

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.

Quantity and quality are equally important in content marketing strategies. The goal of quantity or frequency is to get your marketing message out repeatedly to the majority of people in your potential market. On the flip side, quality reflects the relevance of the communication and its value to consumers in terms of providing them something they’re inspired to act on and potentially contact you to discuss further.

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 read

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:

• Create a monthly theme calendar for your content. Your themes should cover objective topics, like how to select a customer relationship management (CRM) system (see Chapter 11 for more on CRM platforms), how to get the most out of your data analytics, or nutrition tips for your tween who won’t eat veggies. Browse editorial calendars for your industry’s leading publications to get ideas of current interest to your target customers, and for ideas for articles they may want to publish.
• Promote your content across all your social media channels. Post your content regularly on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social channels frequented by your customer groups. If you are trying to drive web traffic, post a link to your website on your social page so that interested parties read it on your website. While there, they might browse other pages and ask for further information.
• Break up a long post into several quick reads. Coming up with content ideas is tough, especially if you plan to post weekly. A great solution to this dilemma is to pick sections out of a longer piece of content and post a few paragraphs at a time on your social pages or even your blog page. You can create links to the full report or piece of content so interested readers can get the full story if they’re interested.
• Seek out new media. You can place ads on various media websites that drive people to a given piece of content on your web page, and you can do it without spending a lot of money. Identify a range of websites to test and see which get the most traffic. Banner ads are usually low-cost and easy to monitor for clicks to your own site. Google Analytics allows you to monitor clicks and views of each page so you can easily see how many people read your content, and for how long.
• Promote your content pages on your website constantly. URLs for your blog and website should be in all staff members’ email signatures, on all digital ads you purchase, and in all content you distribute to third-party publishers, and so on.

• 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

  • Business news, such as product expansion, new locations, significant sales growth, and special events
  • Personnel news, such as new hires and promotions
  • Partnership, merger, and acquisition news
  • Information about charitable or volunteer projects that impact local communities
  • Information about new studies, research results, consumer trends, and so on

Essential elements of content

Following are elements you should weave into your content marketing campaigns and pieces.

• Positioning strategy: Your positioning strategy is a reflection of your emotional selling proposition (ESP) and addresses how you want customers to think and feel about your brand, product, or service. It describes how you want to be positioned in their minds in terms of the value you offer directly and the competitive advantages you offer over your competition.
• Emotional triggers: If you can attach emotional value to your products, even those as non-emotional as a stone driveway or a new ultrasound probe for a health care clinic, your positioning strategy will directly appeal to what drives your customers and your ROI at the same time. (See Chapter 2 for how to identify and develop your ESP and positioning strategy.)

• 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

  • Call for more information.
  • Go to a website to download a coupon or get a discount code.
  • Like a Facebook or LinkedIn post for a chance to win a prize.
  • Refer new customers for discounts or cash.
  • Schedule a demo or register to attend a webinar or special event.

  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

  • 89 percent of consumers will buy from a socially/environmentally driven brand.
  • 76 percent will donate to a charity supported by a trusted brand.
  • 72 percent will volunteer for a cause supported by a trusted brand.

  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 tips for better results

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.

Sparking interest with user-generated content

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:

• User Photos: Popular brands like Wayfair, Dover Saddlery, Burberry, and many others have encouraged customers to share photos of how they used their products. Selected photos are posted on their social media pages and websites. These types of programs get a lot of attention as consumers like to see themselves recognized. For example, Wayfair’s Instagram program, #WayfairatHome, had more than 55,000 posts at one point.
• Product Challenges: You can challenge users to come up with new ways to use your product or engage with your brand and hold contests for the most clever ideas. This concept applies to more than just products. Shakira, a popular singer, created a challenge for TikTok users to recreate a dance from her 2020 music video with Black Eyed Peas. It was a brilliant way to get a lot of views for her new song, Girl Like Me, and stay relevant in a trendy industry.
• Customer Recognition: You may remember the Share a Coke campaign, in which Coke cans and bottles were printed with people’s names or labels like Best Mom. Coca-Cola asked customers to post photos of their personalized bottles and cans on Twitter and other social media channels. Sales increased as a result, and the campaign likely helped Coke get to more than 100 million followers on Facebook. While this is similar to user photo campaigns, it actually came off more as a campaign featuring customers for who they are, not just what they use.

Be consistent

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.

Be as persuasive as possible

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:

• Avoid sales clichés. Don’t sound like everyone else out there. As obvious as that seems, it’s amazing how hard it is to avoid. Before finalizing your ad copy, review your competitors’ ads, websites, and social media. If your message sounds even slightly the same, find another way to say it.
• Steer clear of so-called power words from the books and seminars on how to be a winning salesperson or copywriter. Some examples include incredible, guaranteed, amazing, unlimited, immediately, proven, limited time, and exclusive. These power words are so incredibly overused that I can positively guarantee you’ll receive amazingly poor results and be incredibly disappointed by them immediately.

• 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.

• Present your brand’s persona. Show consumers that your brand reflects their personality, interests, and lifestyle through your copy, headlines, and stories. Use words and language that suggest a conversation among like-minded people rather than a sales pitch to the masses. Keep your copy and message simple and don’t try to be everything to everybody when presenting your persona. You’ll just confuse your audience and end up appealing to no one.

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.

Be professional

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.

• Another critical component of professionalism is to always source your sources. Don’t state research findings without including the source of the work. You can get in trouble if it appears that you’re taking credit for others’ work, and you risk your customers’ trust in you if they don’t see a third-party endorsement to back up a claim in your favor. You don’t want people to wonder if you are making up data to serve an agenda. This is an important consideration when you’re writing ads, white papers, and social media posts. If possible, include URLs that link to the actual studies you cite.
• Practice gets you closer to perfect than one attempt at anything. Keep writing and reworking, keep rethinking, keep boiling your words down until you have something that penetrates to your point with startling clarity in the fewest words possible. And then stop writing!

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.

It takes at least five touchpoints on average before consumers engage with a brand that is communicating to them. Keep your content and communications flowing as long as they’re relevant and meaningful. And whatever you do, don’t stop at touchpoint four!