If you’ve read this book starting from the beginning, I hope I’ve been able to convince you that web content sells. (If you’ve skipped ahead to this chapter, welcome!) An effective online content strategy, artfully executed, drives action. Organizations that use online content well have a clearly defined goal—to sell products, generate leads, secure contributions, or get people to join—and deploy a content strategy that directly contributes to reaching that goal. People often ask me: “How do you recommend that I create an effective ______?” (Fill in the blank with blog, video, white paper, e-book, email newsletter, webinar, or other product.) While the technologies for each form of online content are a little different, the one common aspect is that through all of these media, your organization can exercise thought leadership rather than simple advertising and product promotion; a well-crafted white paper, e-book, or webinar contributes to an organization’s positive reputation by setting it apart in the marketplace of ideas. This form of content brands a company, a consultant, or a nonprofit as an expert and as a trusted resource.

To create awesome content, the first thing you need to do is put away your company hat for a moment and—you guessed it—think like one of your buyer personas. The content that you create will be a solution to those people’s problems and will not mention your company or products at all! Imagine for a moment that you are a marketer at an automobile tire manufacturer. Rather than just peddling your tires, you might write an e-book or shoot a video about how to drive safely in the snow, and then promote it on your site and offer it free to other organizations (such as automobile clubs and driver’s education schools) to put on their sites. Or imagine that you run a local catering company and you have a blog or a website. You might have a set of web pages or videos available on your site. The topics could include “Plan the Perfect Wedding Reception” and “What You Need to Know for the Ideal Dinner Party for Twelve.” A caterer with a video series like this educates visitors about their problems (planning a wedding or a dinner party) but does not sell the catering services directly. Instead, the idea here is that people who learn through the caterer’s information are more likely to hire that caterer when the time comes.

Mark Howell, a consultant for Lifetogether,¹ is a pastor who works with Christian organizations and uses a thought leadership blog to get his information out. “My primary targets are people who are working in churches or Christian organizations that are trying to figure out better ways to do things,” he says. “So I keep my content to things that seem secular but have broad application to churches. For example, I did a post called ‘Required Reading: Five Books Every Leader Needs’ where I tie broader business trends and marketing strategies to churches.”

What makes Howell’s blog work is that he’s not just promoting his consulting services but instead is providing powerful information with a clear focus, for readers who just might hire him at some point. “My personal bias, and what I write about, is that for a lot of leaders in churches, the personal passion for what they are doing could be enhanced if they just got a taste for what more secular writers, such as Tom Peters, Guy Kawasaki, and Peter Drucker, say,” Howell says. “There are so many ideas out there, and if I could just give people a sense of what some of these thinkers are saying, then my hope is that they can see that there is application for church leadership.”

Ways to Get Your Information Out There

Here are some of the common forms of content you might consider creating (there may be others in your niche market). We’ve seen many of these media in earlier chapters, but let’s focus now on how they can help your company establish itself as a thought leader.

Important note: You don’t have to do all of these! This is just a list to get you thinking.

How to Create Thoughtful Content

While each technique for getting your information into the marketplace of ideas is different, they share some common considerations:

• Do not write about your company and your products. Content as a marketing asset should be designed to solve buyer problems or answer questions and to show that you and your organization are smart and worth doing business with. This type of marketing and PR technique is not a brochure or sales pitch and is not advertising.
• Define your organizational goals first (see Chapter 10). Do you want to drive revenue? Get people to donate money to your organization? Encourage people to buy something?
• Based on your goals, decide whether you want to provide the content free and without any registration (you will get many more people to use the content, but you won’t know who they are) or you want to include some kind of registration mechanism (much lower response rates, but you build a contact list).
• Think like a publisher by understanding your audience. Consider what market problems your buyer personas are faced with, and develop topics that appeal to them.
• Write for your audience. Use examples and stories. Make it interesting.
• Choose a great title that grabs attention. Use subtitles to describe what the content will deliver. The best titles and subtitles include keywords and phrases that your buyers are searching on, using search engines.
• Promote the effort like crazy. Offer the content on your site with easy-to-find links. Add a link to employees’ email signatures, and get partners to offer links as well.
• To drive the viral marketing effects, alert appropriate reporters, bloggers, and analysts that the content is available, and send them a download link.

Measure the results, and improve based on what you learn.

How Raytheon Uses Journalists to Create Interesting Content

I’m always fascinated by organizations that embrace brand journalism, the practice of hiring reporters to create content that serves both marketing and public relations purposes. For more than a decade, I’ve recommended that companies of all kinds avoid their peers’ boring old brochure-like approach. I think it’s far preferable to aspire to the likes of media outlets like Forbes, the BBC, or the New York Times. And that means actually hiring reporters and editors, not marketers and copywriters, to produce the content.

One look at the Raytheon homepage⁵ shows the company does exactly that. You’ll find real-time news features, images, and a top stories section. And Raytheon is a business-to-business (B2B) as well as a business-to-government (B2G) company!

“You can see our homepage is very much a news operation,” says Corinne J. Kovalsky, vice president of global public relations at Raytheon. “We’ve got feature stories and trend stories about cool products.”

I’ve engaged with Kovalsky for several years on social networks. I recently had an opportunity to visit with her and the team at Raytheon headquarters to learn more about their brand journalism approach to marketing and public relations.

“I’m an ex TV producer,” Kovalsky says. “I did national news up in Canada for the CTV network for a number of years. I produced the Canadian equivalent of Meet the Press, and I have very fond memories of having journalists on staff.”

Kovalsky worked with Pam Wickham, Raytheon’s vice president of corporate affairs and communications, to implement the brand journalism approach. Wickham recognized the opportunity to establish a more robust footprint in digital and social media for the company, an idea that resonated to the very top of the organization.

Once the pair had buy-in, Kovalsky brought on some very impressive talent. New managing editor Chris Hawley joined Raytheon from the Associated Press (AP), where he had won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting. His months-long series outlined the New York Police Department’s surveillance of minority and particularly Muslim neighborhoods since the 9/11 terror attacks. Now, as a brand journalist, he brings those in-depth reporting skills to Raytheon.

“I’m helping to build a news operation,” Hawley says. “We are working at Raytheon just like an AP beat to find interesting stories and tell the world about them in a way that engages. We have bureau chiefs in all of our four divisions. They have certain products that they want to talk about, so we try to find new and interesting ways of exploring those stories. And we refine the story ideas, assign writers, and do a lot of training on editing and getting those stories out.”

For example, Raytheon brand journalist John Zaremba, who joined the company from the Boston Herald newspaper, was digging through recent patents looking for stories. Zaremba found a patent by a Raytheon employee for a mouse that identifies you by the way you grip and move it. The invention was fascinating, so the team decided to use it as an example of cyber innovation, how Raytheon is constantly coming up with new ways of keeping data safe. The story, written in a journalistic style, appeared on the Raytheon site and inspired reporting by mainstream media, including Computerworld.

Hawley has also taken on the role of establishing editorial guidelines for Raytheon and teaching the staff about journalism. “We’ve tried to codify the writing and editing process,” he says. “We’ve come up with a checklist approach to writing a web story that goes through everything from selecting if it’s going to be a hard lead story [begins with “just the facts”] or a soft lead story [begins with an attention-grabbing quote or anecdote], right down to which scientific study I should pay attention to when I’m evaluating background information for an article.”

The content that Kovalsky, Hawley, Zaremba, and the others on the team produce serves to educate and entertain existing and potential clients. But it also serves the media, who with increasing regularity use Raytheon content for their own story inspirations. For example, Raytheon’s “Tiny Satellites to Give Warfighters a Bird’s-Eye View of the Battlefield” led to Gizmodo’s “DARPA’s SeeMe Satellites Are a Soldier’s On-Demand Eye in the Sky.”

There is strong evidence that the brand journalism approach is producing results for Raytheon.

“One of our big trade shows is the Association of the United States Army annual conference, which happens each October,” Hawley says. “In a recent one, we decided to go for quality content instead of quantity. We did only three stories compared to more than 20 the year before, but we really wrote the heck out of them. They’re really well written, and capture trends. And we increased traffic 451 percent over the year before.”

Kovalsky points to a story she worked on with Hawley called “Jam Session,” published on the Raytheon site. “It tells the story of a significant electronic warfare flight test milestone for a key contract of ours,” she says. “Now, electronic warfare or EW can be hard to explain, but in partnership with Chris we were able to tell the story in lay terms, and we were rewarded for it.”

Despite its publication late in the year, “Jam Session” rose to become the 11th-most-popular story on the Raytheon website that year. “We used it to drive traffic to our EW capabilities section on the website, which had recently been optimized for mobile,” Kovalsky says. The story was the most trafficked URL in Twitter discussions of Raytheon in that quarter, with more than 2,500 tweets referencing the story.

If you’re an organization looking to implement a brand journalism approach to content marketing, study what Raytheon does. Kovalsky believes any organization can do it: “A well-merchandised, simply written story with great photos can turn any brand into a successful publisher.”

Content Creation in Highly Regulated Industries

On the global speaking circuit, I frequently get pushback from audience members who work in highly regulated industries. They claim that laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States, which addresses the security and privacy of health data, and regulations like those from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (and equivalent agencies in other countries) forbid them from creating valuable content on the web or engaging in social media.

Nonsense!

This is just a fear-based excuse perpetuated by lawyers in the pharmaceutical, healthcare, and financial services industries who want to avoid risk at all costs. The fear is particularly shortsighted when considering the data on how people make decisions related to their health. I frequently present at healthcare-related events and have had an opportunity to meet many marketers who are happily reaching their audiences with valuable information. They’re living in reality, not according to their fears.

According to data presented at a recent National Healthcare Marketing Summit by Tim McGuire from Greenville Hospital System, Bill Moschella of eVariant, and Anne Theis of Salem Health, 80 percent of Internet users look up health information online. More than three out of four people use the web to make healthcare decisions! Yet 64 percent of hospital marketing departments devote less than 25 percent of their marketing budgets to interactive content. Even more telling is how hospital marketers spend their time: 83 percent of hospitals devote less than 30 percent of staff time to interactive media. This is ridiculous.

The fearful lawyers say no to the 80 percent of customers and potential customers who use the web to research health. This fear means that hospital marketers are busy making brochures and TV ads instead of creating thoughtful web content. If you work in a highly regulated industry, can your organization afford such a disconnect?

For an example of someone who ignores what people assume to be legal restrictions and instead creates thoughtful content, consider Chris Boyer, director of digital communications and marketing for Inova Health System,⁶ northern Virginia’s leading not-for-profit healthcare provider. Inova serves more than one million patients each year.

The company publishes content to reach specific buyer personas. For example, its “Life with Cancer”⁷ site contains valuable information for patients and their families. In a world where others are fearful of creating content, Inova publishes videos like “Phil Gilbert’s Story—Relief after Hip Replacement.”⁸

In the past two years, Boyer has transformed the Inova organization to focus more on creating relevant content. “We take a lot of time understanding who our viewers are and actually write different types of content for different types of users,” Boyer says. “Patients are using our patient and visitor information, so they’re looking for specifics about how to make their stay easier, and we write with them in mind. Other people view our services and all the different clinical stuff that we provide at Inova. They could either be referring physicians who want to research what we’re doing here or consumers who are actually shopping for healthcare. We want to provide them content that’s appropriate for them. It is written so that they don’t have to read through pages and pages of clinical content to get to the crux of what they’re looking for.”

Boyer manages the digital marketing and communications team, including a handful of editors and web graphics professionals as well as several part-timers. A full-time social media manager on the team focuses on social media channels, although there’s a lot of content interaction and cross-publication efforts; the lines between social media and the website are blurring tremendously at Inova, as at so many other organizations.

“The two main editors for our website are actually former journalists,” Boyer says. “So they have experience in terms of writing. Of course, they started in traditional media, but in the last few years they migrated over to focus exclusively on online journalism and communications.”

I wanted to know how Boyer has dealt with the whole “fear” thing. Why has he been successful in hiring journalists and creating content when so many other management teams and legal departments refuse?

Boyer says the main concern of Inova’s managers was that a shift to content marketing would mean a shift away from what they thought were the key differentiators of Inova Health System. Previously, their efforts had focused on attracting the best physicians. “It took a long time for us to educate that the existing content is not being lost. We’re just providing it to each audience in the appropriate places. There will be pages for consumers and pages for physicians who are looking to refer or be employed here. It took a while for them to be comfortable with that.”

The size of Boyer’s team means there are significant resources devoted to the Inova thought leadership effort. Boyer measures effectiveness in three areas:

1. New patients: How many people become patients who first connected online either through content on the website or through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter?
2. Savings: How much money can be saved by using online tools? For example, the existing Inova nursing communication is a printed newsletter that goes out to all nursing staff and costs $80,000 per year to produce. So converting to a blog means eliminating that expense and increasing readership.
3. Long-term patient engagement: How many patients (or potential patients) get involved in wellness programs? For example, Inova offers email content focused on how to have a healthy heart, how to eat well, and so on. It measures the number of people who stay healthy because of the information they consume and how that affects things like readmittance rates.

Boyer has taken a gradual approach in implementing these changes.

“Realize that you don’t have to transform your entire organization all at once,” he says. “I found a lot of success in focusing on areas where there were some obvious opportunities and used social communications in those areas. Try something and see how it’s working. You’re gaining valuable expertise and understanding how to use the tools. In most organizations, once you introduce social communications to your portfolio, very quickly you’ll start to see how they will augment, if not replace, some of the current ways that you’re communicating.”

As Boyer shows, content marketing and thought leadership can survive and thrive in highly regulated industries.

Leveraging Thought Leaders outside Your Organization

Some organizations recruit external thought leaders, sometimes referred to as “influencers” that buyers trust, which is an effective technique for showing your buyers that you are plugged in and work with recognized experts. You might have a thought leader from your industry guest-blog for you, be the author of a white paper, participate on a webinar, or speak to your clients at a live event. For example, Cincom Systems, Inc., a software industry pioneer, publishes the Cincom Expert Access e-zine that is read by more than 200,000 people in 61 countries. Cincom Expert Access delivers information from several dozen business leaders, authors, and analysts such as Al Reis, author of The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR; Dan Heath, author of Made to Stick; and Guy Kawasaki, author of Reality Check. Cincom Expert Access provides concise, objective information from personalities that Cincom’s clients trust, sometimes in an irreverent, humorous manner, to help readers do their jobs better.

Who Wrote That Awesome White Paper?

People often ask me a question that goes something like this: “Should white papers, e-books, and other content have a named author? Or can they simply state a company name or department as author?”

This seemingly small issue has big ramifications.

My strong preference is that content should have an author listed rather than be published without a name. It humanizes your company. It serves as a way for interested people to connect, and it facilitates extending your leaders’ expertise to other venues like speaking gigs.

It may be obvious, but the author of the white paper should be, well, its author! I’d rather see the real author of the white paper listed than some senior executive, which is what some organizations do.

If there are several people collaborating on the paper, it can have multiple authors. But you might also choose one lead author. This should be the person who will interact with those who are interested in the topic. The lead author should be good at doing media interviews and should speak at conferences and events on the topic. When these factors align, the author’s personal brand and the company’s brand align, and both benefit.

A person’s bio is a better way of showcasing expertise than a bland company or department description (no author) or some random big shot’s name and bio (unless, of course, the CEO actually wrote it).

The author’s biography, typically at the end of the white paper or e-book, should have links to the author’s social networking feeds, especially Twitter and LinkedIn, so people can follow and connect. It’s also important to give an email address for the author, which serves as an invitation to discussion that can lead to a sale.

How Much Money Does Your Buyer Make?

“I’m often asked, ‘Steve, how much should we be paying our product managers?’” says Steve Johnson, an industry expert on product management and Vice President of Products for Pragmatic Institute. “I used to just throw out a number that sounded about right. But I realized that my estimated salary figure was based on old data, back from the days when I hired product managers.” Because Pragmatic Institute conducts training and coaching for product management and marketing professionals, Johnson wanted to ensure the company stayed up-to-date on all things related to those job functions. This situation created a terrific opportunity for some thought leadership. “We realized that we didn’t really know current benchmarks, so we decided to find out.” After all, customer compensation is often a key demographic for understanding your buyer persona.

Johnson composed a survey to gather data from the thousands of people in the Pragmatic Institute database plus those who followed Steve on his blog and social media services. “We said, ‘If you tell us your salary and other information about your job via the anonymous survey, we will tell you everyone’s salary in the form of benchmarks,’” he says. The results were an instant hit with the Pragmatic’s buyer persona—product managers.

Johnson started this program in 2001 and it’s still running today, nearly twenty years later. Pragmatic’s email newsletter goes out to thousands and thousands of people. Pragmatic gets hundreds of responses in just a few days, aggregates the data, and then publishes the results on the web.⁹ In a recent year, for example, Pragmatic learned that the average U.S. product management compensation is roughly $122,000 in salary and that 82 percent of product managers get an annual bonus that averages $9,850. But they also learn other information, such as that product managers send and receive almost 100 emails a day and spend roughly two days a week in internal meetings—15 meetings per week. But 55 percent are going to 15 meetings or more each week, and 35 percent attend 20 or more meetings.

Johnson sees tremendous benefits in fact-based thought leadership. “First of all, the data is really useful,” he says. “With this information, I command the authority to say something like ‘93 percent of product managers have completed college and 43 percent have completed a master’s program.’ But more importantly, the buyers we are trying to reach recognize us as the thought leaders in product management because we have up-to-date information on what’s really going on with technology product managers. And the data that sits on our websites is fantastic for search engine marketing. Anyone looking for information about product management and marketing in technology businesses will probably find us.”

This is a new world for marketers and corporate communicators. The web offers an easy way for your ideas to spread to a potential audience of millions of people, instantly. Web content in the form of true thought leadership holds the potential to influence many thousands of your buyers in ways that traditional marketing and PR simply cannot.

To embrace the power of the web and the blogosphere requires a different kind of thinking on the part of marketers. We need to learn to give up our command-and-control mentality. It isn’t about “the message.” It’s about being insightful. The new rules of marketing and PR tell us to stop advertising and instead get our ideas out there by understanding buyers and telling them stories that connect with their problems. The new rules are to participate in the discussions going on, not just try to shout your message over everyone else. Done well, web content that delivers authentic thought leadership also brands an organization as one to do business with.