Have seen statistics on the amount of information available today … doubling every 18 to 24 months? Amazing isn’t it? That is why a content marketing guidebook can be extremely valuable.
Note that Statistic Brain says that our average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds – one second less than a goldfish! It is not surprising then that the battle over content marketing is getting more difficult every day.
All this available information and data is creating a battle for customer attention between brands, publishers, and each one of us who creates content. But more importantly, it’s forcing businesses to think and act much more competitively.
I think we can all agree that content marketing is both practical and potent. It’s the ultimate form of inbound marketing and makes total sense when you need to reach 21st-century consumers. I could even spout off a laundry list of stats that prove just how big of an impact content marketing can have.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing involves using writing to make customers and potential customers more aware of a customer’s brand. It also offers help and useful suggestions. This can be in the form of web articles, blog posts, eBooks, or white papers. Unlike newspaper and traditional magazine articles, good content marketing does more than just report, however. Good content marketing connects with readers and makes them want to use your client’s product or service.
Marketing content is all about making connections. Your level of success has a lot to do with how your readers react to what you write. People connect with the product or service that your clients sell because they relate to what you’re saying to them. They want to feel that your copy is specifically crafted with their interests and needs in mind. In other words, it should feel personal.
There are many content-type options available to you. You can create one type of content or multiple types.
Here are the top content formats that we have found to generate the most attention online:
E-books
This type is an electronic version of a book composed in or converted to digital format for display on a computer screen or handheld device. An e-book requires deep content (15,000 words or more) to be taken seriously. There are countless examples of brands getting razzed for releasing a 10-page “e-book,” so create something with depth.
If done correctly, your e-book will be so useful that it will get cited or referenced by other books written on your topic. Do a Google Books search for your content name (in quotation marks) to find out if your e-book has been cited!
Guides / Handbooks
Guides and handbooks help someone to make a decision or calculation, formulate an opinion or execute a strategy or tactic. This content may be best for audiences looking for content with the brevity and aesthetics of an infographic and the depth of an e-book. This is a great middle-of-the-road place to start if your organization is new to content marketing.
Studies
Studies are published results of a detailed investigation and analysis of a subject or situation. They are very good for highly educated audiences that want to learn something new that is based on facts and data. It must be based on credible research and contain citations from expert resources.
If done correctly, a study can be the most effective way to earn a high volume of powerful citations in a brief amount of time.
Mixed-Media
Mixed-media posts use a variety of media with the intent to solve problems and entertain. Examples include interactive infographics that can contain audio, video, and animation on demand. The right mixed-media combination may just be an ace in the hole for your brand campaign.
Cheat Sheets
A cheat sheet is a reference tool that provides simple, brief instructions for making a decision or calculation, forming an opinion, or executing a strategy or tactic. A cheat sheet is somewhere between an infographic and a guide. This format is especially useful if your problem is process based and the required content to solve the problem is very brief.
Videos
Video campaigns contain a Web-based video with the intent to solve problems and entertain.
People love watching videos online, and marketers are taking notice. Solving problems or educating your target audience online through video can be very effective content marketing.
Not all content is housed on your website. You can create a channel on YouTube or Vimeo that provides another access point to your business. Some content marketers upload videos to YouTube, then reposted on their blogs. Others create a video blog, or vlog, that lives on YouTube.
Apps
This content type is a self-contained program or piece of software designed to fulfill a particular purpose. Apps are great for building a more native and interactive user experience. Build only apps that truly take advantage of mobile functionalities.
Apps are also ways of supporting other marketing campaigns, such as event apps or loyalty programs. However, most apps that caught market attention did so in the same way as the other content formats–they solved a specific problem for the user.
No matter which content format you choose, just be sure to make a decision on the basis of data. Allowing your audience to make this decision for you will be the most likely path to success.
Blog posts
Think of articles that talk about issues related to your core message and secondary messages. They can range anywhere from 100 words to 2,000 words, depending on the format you choose and what your readers prefer.
Podcasts
Podcasts are audio articles or radio shows, often published on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, or Blubrry. Podcasting is gaining renewed popularity now because people who don’t have time to read can listen to articles while on their daily commute or for other activities.
Webinars and Teleseminars
You can present information to a live audience during webinars and teleseminars, then use the recording and slides as content on your website, in newsletters, and in programs/products.
Speeches, workshops, interviews
If it’s information, it’s content. And it’s easy to recycle this information, incorporating it into other content types to add value.
Powerpoint presentations
Offer them on your website. Turn them into infographics. Use them in blog posts. Upload them to Slideshare.
Tutorials
You can create a Web page that provides links to additional information, essentially making a lesson plan for learning something new. This is a great way to build authority in your area of expertise. Remember to tell people what to do if they need additional help.
Infographics
Infographics are creative presentations of facts and figures rather than dry-as-toast reports. If they’re well done, they are also very shareable. Visual.ly is a great resource for simple infographics.
White papers and special reports
People want useful information that helps them make better decisions. That’s why white papers, special reports, and other researched information make such great premiums and free offers. You can periodically offer these as a value-add to your followers, or you can offer them as an incentive for signing up for your email list.
Newsletters
Content marketing is about building relationships, as we have said. What better way than to send your content to people’s inboxes rather than making them visit your website every day? A newsletter also helps you build your email list, which allows you to make email offers as well.
To keep it simple, brands should start by asking two basic — but vital — questions. First, who is your target audience? And second, what do you want them to do? Whether you learned about marketing 30 years ago or 30 days ago, marketing starts with these fundamental principles.
These questions apply to all marketing, not just content marketing. And that is why you have seen us make this point in several sections of this guidebook.
Once you’ve defined the content foundation, consider how to build the most effective content strategy:
Educational
People come online for solutions, and they want to be informed of your brands’ products or services.
Economic
Money still matters. Whether it’s a coupon or a financial incentive on Twitter or Facebook, people are always looking for a good deal.
Entertaining
Mobile’s prevailing success stems from the notion that people, more than ever, want content that’s fun and gratifying — at a moment’s notice.
Engaging
Content should hold the consumer’s attention and stand the test of time. If you can engage customers, you’ll be well on your way.
Emotional
The most important, yet the most overlooked, factor is having an emotional connection with your customers through your content. We discuss this element many times.
You need to define strong values and establish clear boundaries in content messages to confidently show who you are, and where you’re headed. Simplicity helps in this regard.
Content marketing that connects with audiences and earns a high level of organic promotion isn’t an easy task. One of the important aspects of setting your content marketing campaign up for success is choosing the best format for your content.
Choosing a content format requires considerable research to discover what type of content your audience prefers. For example, an infographic may go a long way when targeting Millennials versus an e-book which is much better suited for executive decision-makers.
Some are always better than others, but in a general sense, there is no single format that outperforms all the others every time.
As the author of hundreds of blog posts, one question I often get is: How do you think of new ideas for blog posts?
I have had occasional writer’s block; but for the most part, coming up with ideas has never been an issue. If you pay attention to the world around you, do a reasonable amount of reading, and listen to people, you’ll get a flurry of potential ideas for posts.
Also, there are tools and tricks that will help you find even more ideas.
Before you start trying to brainstorm content ideas, it’s best to be in a problem-solving frame of mind. You’re attempting to solve the problems and answer the questions your target readers have regarding your industry.
In other words, you are looking for questions. It could be questions people ask aloud, things they search for, or things they simply ponder in their minds.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on social media design from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
If you’re a small business, a content marketing plan should serve as the backbone of your marketing plan. There are a huge plethora of prospective customers ready and waiting to be harnessed via the world of social media. In a recent study carried out by the Marketing Institute, over 80 of B2B marketing strategies follow a robust content marketing plan. In this fast-paced tech-savvy world, a content marketing plan isn’t optional – it’s essential.
No matter how small your business is, if you’re a startup or have been trading for years, you’ll always want to improve and refine your plan, so what should the ideal plan constitute? A content marketing plan should reflect your creation and distribution of valuable and relevant content to acquire, attract, and engage new customers from your target audience. The final goal will be to drive your viewers into satisfied customers.
Content strategy plan … laying the foundations
Before you get to work on your plan, you’ll need to don your analytical thinking cap, and put in the necessary groundwork. Failure to lay the foundations for your plan can lead to your its collapse, and failure to get your brand moving to its best potential, wasting your resources and opportunities.
Carry out competitor auditing and analysis. Your competitors have risen for a reason, so take notes of both their brand position and their content marketing. What are they doing well that you should be doing too? Don’t forget that the plan is a learning curve and you need to start learning immediately. Scan over your competitor’s landscape and see what they’re publishing, where and at what time. What channels are the most active on and how are they harnessing each channel effectively? You’ll ultimately want to offer the best content that will knock them off the top spot, but for now, you can start by emulating their success.
Perhaps through your analysis, you’ll spot what your competitors are NOT doing. Is there a gap in the content offered that you can fill? Maybe, you have the best in-house expertise and can offer a key solution. If you don’t find out, you won’t know; and you could be missing out if you’re not sure. Take time to review your company’s strengths and weaknesses when looking at opportunities for you to grow.
Mine data from your competition and your customers to understand how consumers interact with content. If you can work out what your ideal customer needs, you can come up with key questions that your customers will be asking and work to answer them; this can help inspire the content that you will produce.
Content marketing plan … your brand – your style
You may find that you have given your brand a lot of thought by now, but if you’re trying to deliver the best content you can, you’ll need to be aware of your brand’s position and how your content can be tailor-made. Take a moment to review these points:
Who is your target customer?
How can you provide proof of your benefit?
What problem can you solve and how can you get this across?
How can you make an emotional connection?
How can you create a line that sums your brand’s benefits up?
What do you want your brand to mean to people?
It’s important that you write down who your ideal customer is, and how you can tailor content to help them come to you for solutions to their problems. You’ll want to craft your content with the chosen audience in mind, narrowing down to your ideal customer. Think about some of these questions in your plan:
Where do your customers come from?
How old are they?
What are their demographics?
What’s important to your customers?
Where can you source your audience?
You’ll want to note down your brand’s visual identity. It’s important to stay true to this and your brand’s style without deflating or diluting it at any point. An eclectic and disparate look to your brand won’t help cement your identity in the minds of your audience. Refer to your logo and how it should be used, your colors and themes, your context, your written and visual approach. Your style will need to shine through.
What content?
What is a content plan?
There is a variety of different content for every business to tailor to their needs. Whether you’re looking to publish a blog or a podcast, make sure that it is informative and valuable for your users. You won’t want your content to make a hard sell, but the idea will be to have something that a user can take away so that they look to you in the future for providing more solutions to their problems. Each social media channel works best for different content publishing, so do some research and think about where you can publish for the best results.
Topics
Note down what kind of topics you’ll want to publish. There are a variety of ways to get ideas for topics:
Look at customer interactions online to help inspire new content – customer feedback, social media conversation, customer FAQ’s. If you’re looking to create blogs, you could look into websites such as com to outsource creative work and wiring decisions.
Carry out competitor analysis to see what content competitors are creating.
Carry out keyword analysis to align your content with SEO as best you can.
Format
There are numerous different formats to try out, each specific to certain social media. Make sure you note down which you’re using in your plan. Many options are available, for instance:
Blog posts
Podcasts
Videos
Guest blogs for other online websites
Slideshows
Memes and viral content
Infographics
Pictures
Whitepapers
eBooks
Downloadable templates
Newsletters
Guides
Budgeting
Most social media marketing can be done for free, but sometimes you’ll want to pay for a variety of different extensions for automation and analytics. You may also want to outsource some creative work to others to save you time. Make sure you put a detailed account of how much to spend for what purpose in your plan.
Now that you’ve laid the foundations and done the groundwork, you can get to the practical aspects: looking at goals, tactics, strategy and KPI’s for your content to be marketed. Where are you heading? How will you get there? What will success look like?
Time and Date
Create a content calendar so that you know what to publish and when. Both “what” and “when” are equally important – you’ll want your content to be as engaging as possible. Create a strict schedule for when to publish and adhere to this; to what audience, what tone, what platform and what kind of content?
A schedule of content publishing will help you plan and stay organized, amending your strategy and refining it along the way to keep optimizing. Of course, sometimes you’ll want to make room in your plan for spontaneous content.But with a strict schedule, you can make use of the correct social media management tools to automate sending of your content at appropriate times. This helps you to make the most of your content marketing resources.
Allocate a schedule to allow flexibility for content marketing that you can’t anticipate, e.g., time to respond to customer queries and content questions. You’ll need to think with your business mind and work out a decision that works best for your company. Similarly, work out how much time and resources you’ll be dedicating to ad-hoc content. Along with the deal example above, you’ll want to think about content sharing that you can’t anticipate, such as the following:
Business success stories;
Stories from satisfied customers;
Big news stories in your field;
Content that gets on board with viral trends.
How often should you rely on ad-hoc content and how valuable would it be to your brand? To what extent should it take priority and what can you anticipate? Each decision you plan should be specific to your business alone. Plan and allocate time in your calendar.
An ongoing learning curve
Marketing strategy is all about learning and refining over time. When you’re putting your plan into action, you may find that what you’ve planned doesn’t work, and you may discover different ways of doing things that work better for you. Make sure that with whatever strategy you follow, you keep note of what works best, and analyze results in an organized and detailed manner. You can use a whole variety of great third-party applications to help you do this, and you should, certainly, mention which to use and how to use them in your plan.
The bottom line
Stay patient and refine until you find a successful formula for you to use. It’s all a journey and a process of self-discovery, but whatever you do, make sure you work hard and plan smart.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing created by remarkable customer service. And put it to good use.
It’s up to you to keep improving your creative marketing strategies. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
