The Ivy League of Content Marketing
A generation ago, getting straight As and 800s on the SATs could assure a student a spot at an Ivy League university.
Today, judging from my vantage point of having completed dozens of alumnae interviews for my Ivy League alma mater, those credentials are barely enough to get you to the starting gate. To win the golden ticket, you'll need to lard on additional uber-impressive accomplishments. Winning a national debate championship. Dancing at a prestigious NYC dance conservatory. Having a parent who's a movie star. In recent years, these are the strategies that I've seen win people their spots at the nation's top schools.
The same is true of content marketing. Producing a white paper along with a few articles, case studies and blog posts is simply no longer enough to make an impression with admissions officers—namely, your potential customers. You need to not only up the quality of your core content, but also lard on the bells and whistles.
I recently spoke with several marketers who gave me tips for how they're bringing content to the Ivy League level. Regardless of content type, it should meet one or more of the following criteria:
The content should teach the reader something. Greg White, Director of Product Marketing at Commvault practices this method of improving content. "We've changed from the traditional types of content to more advisory white papers. We'll do things like "The Top 10 Things You Need to Think about X Topic. We also create more thought- leadership content."
Many marketers are concerned with creating engaging content. But what does this concept really mean? For Stacey Sayer, Global Manager, Social Media Marketing at Level 3, engaging content is content that invites an implicit or explicit response. For example, it could be controversial or it could ask for direct feedback.
Even in B2B marketing, Sayer suggests that marketers not be afraid to go for an emotional response. For example, Sayer says, "Try making people laugh. The worst thing is apathy. If people shrug their shoulders or yawn then it's time to rethink your content."
Create content specifically for each of your audiences. Sayer recommends, for example, that you, "have short form content for Twitter that only people on Twitter will see. Make the audience on each platform feel it was worth their time to hit the Like or Follow button by giving them access to something that they wouldn't get anywhere else. Make them feel like they're part of an exclusive club."
When dealing with any medium, but particularly social media, it's increasingly important for content to be visual. Think infographics, photos, podcasts, videos, SlideShares, and interactive experiences. Promote them over social media. Said Sayer, "The Internet is primarily a visual medium. My analytics tell me that if something is pretty to look at, it performs really well."
May 31, 2015 2:15:04 PM | Content Marketing, Marketing Communications, Marketing Strategy, Social Media
Paid Social—Hype or Help?
When marketers first started selling bottled water, they competed with free tap water by evoking images of pristine mountain streams. Over time, it became clear that bottled water was simply municipal tap water polluted with BPA from the plastic packaging. People were better off switching back to the tap.
Is the same true for paid social media? Is paid social any better than the stuff you can get for free? Or is it simply marketing hype?
The Benefits and Shortcomings of Organic Social
The answer lies in the benefits and drawbacks of organic social.
When marketers first adopted social media, one of the biggest advantages was that it was a wide open frontier. You didn't have to compete for attention. Better yet, once you developed an engaged following, you owned that audience. If you created content people loved, you could reach your followers directly, without fees and middlemen.
Social continues to offer free access. But now it's horribly overcrowded. As a result, response rates for organic social have plummeted, with average conversion rates for Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest standing at 2.3%, according to eMarketer.
Some marketers can continue to profit from an all organic strategy—if they provide unique value. For example, Interactive Intelligence's research found that it was unique among its closest competitors in providing educational content, while competitors mostly delivered promotional content. Because of the unique value of its offering, Interactive Intelligence has been able to achieve success with an all-organic strategy. Nonetheless, the company takes special care as it develops its content. As Denise Meyer, Social Media Strategist, Interactive Intelligence says, "An all organic strategy forces us to be more creative with timing, placement, images, and copywriting."
The Benefits of Adding Paid Social to the Mix
But many other B2B marketers are finding that a paid strategy is an essential complement to their organic social strategy. Paid social delivers three types of benefits:
1. Greater reach.
Paid brings your message outside your network. It puts your message in front of people even if they're not following you so you can expand your audience and reach. Then, if they find your content valuable, they have the opportunity to become more engaged.
2. Better targeting.
Paid search channels offer more flexible targeting. On Twitter, promoted tweets let you target followers of accounts similar to those of your company's competitors. You can also target campaigns using keywords based on known customer pain points. LinkedIn's sponsored updates options provide a number of options, such as the ability to target sponsored updates to your customer's key decision makers, based on, say, job function and seniority. The Skill keyword option pinpoints individuals who list particular skills in their LinkedIn profile.
3. Better Conversion.
Marketers are coming to the consensus that paid in combination with organic yields much higher conversion rates than organic alone. A recent study found that conversion rates for paid Twitter advertising are twice as high as for organic Twitter ads (3.9% versus 1.5%).
Paid social—hype or help? The answer is clear. Paid social does provide real advantages. But the key with paid social, as in every other type of marketing is to know your markets, create the right content, test, and measure results.
May 25, 2015 3:11:49 PM | Marketing Communications, Social Media
5 Ways Content Marketing Helps the Bottom Line
Content marketing. Brand storytelling. Social media. This trifecta is the darling of the digital-marketing world. Reams of posts and pages have been written explaining why you should use these tactics and how to put them into practice.
But at the end of the day, only one question really matters: How do these tactics help the bottom line?
Here are five ways marketers say content marketing, social media, and brand storytelling help them close more deals.
1. Develop Relationships
Any salesperson will tell you that most of their job comes down to building relationships with potential customers. Now that most customers forego talking to a salesperson until close to the end of their purchase process, companies are looking for new ways to inject the personal touch. Content marketing, brand storytelling, and social media help fill the gap.
"We've found that people who opt to engage with us through social media are much keener to work with us compared to those who come in through paid media tactics like banner ads," said Stacey Sayer, Global Manager, Social Media Marketing at Level 3 Communications. "It's a more personal touch. This approach acknowledges that the customer wants to feel like a human being responding to a real person rather than simply clicking on a banner ad."
2. Drive Conversions
In a multi-step B2B, selling process, content marketing, brand storytelling, and social media are unlikely to directly drive a sale, but they can—and do—drive customers to take the next step in the buying process.
For example, Skyword is a digital content services provider. To market its own services, the company has a destination website with all manner of useful content. It includes profiles of innovative content marketers, how-to advice on developing successful content-marketing strategies, and more. Potential customers get to know the company through this content.
Yet the customer may not be ready for a sales call after simply engaging with this content. So Skyword puts on events around the country and uses the content to drive customers to these events. The event in turn creates a face-to-face relationship that drives the sale.
"By that time," said Patricia Travaline, Vice President of Marketing at Skyword, "prospective customers know what they have to do, understand that we can help them become better storytellers, and want to work with us."
3. Direct the Sales Conversation
When marketers adopt content marketing, brand storytelling, and social media, combined with marketing automation and lead scoring, they can see exactly what topics and information prospective customers are interested in.
"With this knowledge," said Travaline, "when our salespeople do talk to customers, they can adapt the conversation based on the customer's behavior and interactions with us. This information helps define what questions salespeople should ask and makes for a more intelligent conversation."
4. Shorten the Sales Cycle
Ultimately, the sum of these personal conversations helps the prospective customer develop a relationship with the brand and learn to trust the brand as an advisor. "In this way, content marketing and social media tactics shorten the sales cycle," says Travaline.
5. Turn Customers into Advocates
Once companies reel in a customer, the job of storytelling has just begun. Now companies can use content marketing to provide additional value by helping customers become better at their job and enriching their lives. "This sets the stage for building loyalty and creating champions," said Travaline.
The trifecta of content marketing, brand storytelling, and social media helps marketers establish credibility with customers, drives them more quickly through the sales cycle, and not only keeps customers coming back for more—but turns them into your best sales resource.
May 17, 2015 7:16:34 AM | Brand Storytelling, Content Marketing, Marketing Communications, Marketing Strategy, Social Media
Beyond the Bullhorn: Social Media Morphs Into Brand Storytelling
Marketers have long used social media to promote content. They'll throw a white paper up on their website, blast a few promotions touting the paper to their Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn followers, and, with any luck, people will like, retweet, favorite, and otherwise amplify the message.
Think bullhorn.
Today, marketers are becoming more sophisticated in using social media as a brand- storytelling medium in its own right. As any good writer will tell you, it's better to show than tell. And marketers are using social media to demonstrate aspects of their brand that they'd be hard-pressed to get out to the mass digital audience any other way.
1. Show the Human Side of Your Organization
People do business with people they know, like, and trust. When used right, social media can show your company's human side to make you more relatable. For example, Sarah Grayson, Senior Program Manager, Social Media at Intel Security says her company holds public-service days and community-day fundraisers. "Taking pictures and posting about your events on various social media channels can show what the people and the culture of your company is really like," Grayson says.
Denise Meyer, Social Media Strategist for Interactive Intelligence says that her company has a work hard/play hard culture. The company uses social media to provide a window into this side of the company. Every year, Interactive Intelligence puts on a Summer Olympics, which is a contest with multiple teams doing things like relay races and posts pictures on Facebook.
2. Demonstrate that We're All in It Together
Another way to use social storytelling to connect with customers is to demonstrate that your company is there to help people in the trenches solve their problems. For example, Intel Security cultivates forums for people to share their experiences, challenges and solutions. As Grayson explained, "The idea is not to talk about a specific product or service, it's about discussing commonalities and joint industry challenges and what we're trying to do together to solve them. It's a collaborative effort."
3. Subtly Create a Perception About Your Brand
Sometimes companies want to talk not about the details, but to create a specific impression about their brand. Social media is a way to publish content that's outside the strict boundaries of the brand narrative that can tie your company to these broader themes.
For example, Level 3 recently published content on social media about scientific pioneers like Galileo and Marie Curie. It did another series of tweets with pictures around milestones for women in STEM. Said Stacey Sayer, Global Manager, Social Media Marketing at Level 3, "In these campaigns, we looked for opportunities to create interesting tidbits to put out to our followers that we weren't sharing in other media. We wanted to have a broader conversation about things the industry cares about. While it's out of the strict realm of our brand narrative, it's fun and liberating and part of the story we want to tell. It allows us to subtly tie our brand to innovation."
Speaking the Language of Social Media
One key to success for all of these efforts is to keep in mind that the medium should dictate the message. Tweak your content and the way you present it so it resonates with each social channel. As Sayer noted, "If a piece of existing content doesn't resonate in its current form, I go back and make it more palatable. That may mean visualizing something, changing the format, or making it shorter. If I'm handed a 15-20 minute video, I'll see if we can slice and dice it and get it down to two minutes max and tell the story that way."
Sayer also takes advantage of social media's unique abilities to engage customers interactively, participating in Twitter Chats, Google Hangouts, and other interactive social mechanisms to engage the audience in real time.
When customers make a purchase decision, the more they know you, like you, and trust you, the more likely they are to buy from you. Social media gives people a better view into your company's human side, how you help solve customer problems, and where you fit into the bigger picture.
May 9, 2015 12:17:33 PM | Brand Storytelling, Marketing Communications, Marketing Strategy, Social Media
Stop Interrupting What People Love, Become What They Love
The advent of social media and digital-content marketing means that every marketer can now be a media mogul. You now have a cost-effective way to serve your market a cornucopia of rich information to make them aware of and help them purchase your product in a more holistic and customer-centric manner.
"Previously, advertising messages had to be truncated. Now you can speak directly to your audience and engage with them in-depth rather than through sound bites," observed Michael DiLeva, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Bentley Systems.
But there's a dark side to this communication bounty. The easy online availability of all the content a customer could ever desire has trained people to expect information at the beck-and-call of a Google search. And they no longer tolerate interruptions by pesky ads or salespeople.
In addition, now that most (86%) of B2B marketers have jumped on the content-marketing bandwagon, according to the Content Marketing Institute, customers have reached the saturation point. And that means marketers must work harder to make their content more effective.
B2B Marketers need to create content that forges relationships with prospective customers.
Enter Brand Storytelling.
Using Stories to Forge Relationships
The concept behind brand storytelling, according to Patricia Travaline, Vice President of Marketing at Skyword, is that "Even when someone is purchasing technology, marketers should try to reach them as people. We have to figure out what they love, what keeps them up at night, and what they're passionate about. And then, to successfully connect, we have to stop interrupting what people love and become what people love."
And what do people love?
"They love stories," says Travaline. "Stories help people connect because, as studies show, when someone is telling a story, the brain patterns of the person telling the story are the same as those of the person listening. From a neurological perspective, storytelling is a great way to connect with people. Brands now have the power to do that well. B2B brand marketers are moving away from traditional marketing and moving into brand storytelling."
But what do B2B marketers mean by brand storytelling and how are they using it?
Three Types of Brand Storytelling
To find the answer, I did a (admittedly unscientific) survey of B2B technology marketers who called themselves brand storytellers in their LinkedIn profiles. I asked them what they mean by brand storytelling and how they're using storytelling to connect with customers and prospective customers.
Customer Stories—The most frequent response was that these marketers tell stories about customers. In other words, they were creating customer success stories—albeit with a modern twist.
Product Stories—Some companies define storytelling as a way to put their company's solutions into a larger narrative that explains what that their offerings mean for customers.
Problem-Solving Stories—A third type of brand storytelling is when companies research their markets' pain points and what keeps them up at night and then create some type of publication or portal that provides an ongoing series of useful content that helps customers address their challenges.
In my next three blog posts, I'll talk more about how companies are using each of these types of brand stories to develop stronger relationships with prospects and customers to advance their buying decisions.
Mar 1, 2015 11:30:32 AM | Brand Storytelling, Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Communications, Marketing Strategy, Social Media
4 Key Metrics for Measuring Social Media Success
One of the great things about social media marketing is that it's easy to measure the results of your efforts. But metrics in and of themselves are only numbers. They're useful only when you employ them to measure progress toward your business goals.
In recent interviews, I spoke with several marketers and asked what metrics they used and what business goals they addressed. There are four types of business metrics you can look at when using social media: audience development, engagement, content amplification, and leads/conversions.
1. Audience Development
When marketers first begin adopting social media, one of their first goals is to build an audience to help them gain awareness for their company and products. The metric marketers use to measure awareness is the number of new followers and subscribers.
Ideally, customers would not only follow your channel, but also read, pay attention to, and engage with your content. Marketers measure engagement by looking at the number of views, page likes, comments, clicks on the company website from social media, and content consumption driven by social media.
3. Content Amplification
Here's where social media really shows its power. Social Media allows organizations to not only reach their own followers, but to reach a much wider audience. One way they can do that is to insert hashtags which allows content to be found by anyone searching on that term. But what marketers are really looking for is for their followers to spread the word to their own networks because the number of people seeing the content that way has the potential to grow exponentially.
Ways to measure amplification include the number of shares and retweets. In addition, the content may end up on a syndication site which will spread the word further. Or, a reporter might find the post or tweet and write about it. As a bonus, amplification means that the original viewer was extra engaged with your content because they wouldn't spread the word if they hadn't read it and found it interesting.
One tip for improving the amplification of content, according to Joe Schwartz, Vice President, Digital of Kony, Inc., is to first identify the influencers by looking at their Klout Score. Klout is a website that gives people a score based on their social influence. Once Schwartz knows who the influencers are, he suggests sharing content that can help the influencers increase their own influence. Explained Schwartz, "Using Klout we can figure out how to adjust a document that we used in nurture to something different or change the name or some element to increase the reputation of the sharer. By producing content that helps the influencers boost their standing, you ensure that your content is more likely to be shared."
4. Leads and Conversions
The Holy Grail and end game for all marketing efforts, including social, is leads and conversions. Organizations that have marketing automation solutions that tie into their CRM system can generally track any leads from social media down the pipeline, tracking which content ultimately contributed to a particular deal. At the very least, organizations can track gated assets by giving them a unique campaign ID which can then be tracked throughout the sales process.
Feb 8, 2015 10:07:09 AM | Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Communications, Marketing Strategy, Social Media
Social Media Marketing: Try Stuff. Test. Repeat.
Ask any good marketer about their top five most critical best practices for any marketing program. Chances are most of them will include at least one lesson along the lines of: Try stuff. Test. Repeat.
After all, no matter how many best practices the pundits may spout, good marketing is highly bespoke. What works for one product may not work for others. Each marketer needs to find what's most effective for their own products.
This fact of life applies even more for social media. After all, social media is still relatively new, and marketers have had no choice but to try stuff and stumble upon best practices over the last couple of years.
The following are some of the challenges real marketers have faced using social media and how they addressed them.
1. Finding the right channel
Not every social media channel is right for every audience. While this may seem obvious with today's 20/20 hindsight, it wasn't necessarily the case in the early days of social media. And the only way marketers have been able to find that out was through trial and error.
That's what happened to BMC when they tried to establish a presence on Facebook. Said Alison Munn, Senior Social Media Marketing Manager for BMC, "We spent the better part of a year building up a Facebook presence. But we weren't reaching who we wanted. We had to put that on the back burner. Now, we use Facebook more for employee postings and are focusing on LinkedIn and Twitter to speak to customers."
2. Cutting through the Clutter
While social media was once the wide open prairie of marketing, it's become a crowded metropolis. As a result, even when marketers are on the right channel for their intended audience, all the interesting content out there can make it difficult for any one voice to be heard.
Marketers suggested these methods to overcome this information overload:
"Produce very interesting content that gets shared and picked up by the media," advised Andrew Spoeth Enterprise Social Media Marketing Director for CA Technologies.
"Paid social programs not only extend the life and reach of a piece of content, they also enable more precise targeting," Spoeth added.
"Identify the key advocates and build effective relationships with them so they'll help spread the word," noted Munn.
3. Building an Audience Organically
While paid social media can be useful in building an audience, not every organization has the budget or inclination to use that channel. What do you do then?
Creativity can save the day.
"I need to be more creative with timing, placement, images, and copywriting," said Denise Meyer, Social Media Communications Manager, Interactive Intelligence, which provides business communications software and services. "We also strive to be more educational and provide thought leadership, rather than promotional content."
4. Balancing Access to Channels
For some organizations, the social clamor comes not only from other companies, but from within. For example, at one time, Concur had had separate twitter channels for its various divisions, such as those targeting small businesses and enterprises. However, it recently consolidated its presence onto a single global Twitter and Facebook channel. While the new channel made sense from a customer perspective, it meant that multiple divisions had to compete to be heard on their company's own Twitter channel.
One solution, said Amy Higgins, Senior Manager of Content Marketing and Social Media, Concur, "was through paid social, because it can be highly targeted. We also now have a social media manager who carefully balances the priorities of all the different business units."
5. Limited Staff
Social media may not be expensive. But it can certainly be time consuming to create enough content to promote through social channels. This can be a big problem for companies with limited staff. For example, Meyer is the only person doing social media for her company in North American division. In order to put out the quantity of the content she needs, she's gotten creative about repurposing. Said Meyer, "I take elements of press releases, whitepapers, practical guides, etc. and carve out additional compelling messages and stories for use on social. In some cases, taking these pillar items and creating additional pieces like blogs and SlideShare presentations."
Overall, marketers stress that the only way to make progress in using social media to successful support their marketing efforts is to try new things and test them to see what works.
Jan 31, 2015 1:40:48 PM | Marketing Communications, Marketing Strategy, Social Media
Social Media's Hierarchy of Needs
If you've ever taken Psychology 101, you probably learned about Abraham Maslow and his famous Hierarchy of Needs model.
Maslow believed that people are motivated to fulfill certain needs. When one need is satisfied, a person moves on to the next one, and so on. As they move up the hierarchy they increasingly realize their human potential. In Maslow's original model, developed in 1943, these needs included physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self actualization. During the 60s and 70s, he expanded the model to include cognitive, aesthetic, and transcendence needs.
Similarly, when companies adopt social media for use in marketing, they also seek to fulfill a hierarchy of needs. As I interviewed marketers for this post, the stages came into focus. First, marketers look to achieve awareness, then amplification, then helping customers with research, then connection and conversations. At the highest levels, they're looking to use social media to create a personal brand and create a feedback loop that enables them to continually improve their marketing efforts.
1. Awareness
At its most basic level, social media is a bullhorn for companies to get the word out and promote content to create awareness for their company. As Joe Schwartz, Vice President, Digital of Kony, Inc., which offers a platform for delivering mobile aps, noted, "The original use of social media in marketing is as PR for your content."
At this level in the social media hierarchy, companies attempt to sign up followers so that they have an audience for their posts or tweets. The posts and tweets in this stage tend to be simple introductions with a link to more detailed content or straightforward promotions.
2. Amplification
Once companies have established an audience, it's time to look for that audience to amplify the message by passing it along to their followers, who will hopefully pass it to their followers and so on until the message picks up a life of its own. At this stage, said Andrew Spoeth, Enterprise Social Media Marketing Director for CA Technologies, "Marketers comment on influencer's posts in the hopes that they'll pass on their content so it'll go viral."
After content starts getting out there through social media, marketing uses social to ensure their content is available where customers are looking. As marketers are well aware, the sales process has changed so that it is driven more by customers going out and searching for answers to their problems online, rather than waiting for salespeople to call them. By making content available on social media, marketers are placing content where it will be found. As Alison Munn, Senior Social Media Marketing Manager, for BMC explained, "When buyers are going out and looking for information, they're looking on social media. Marketers need to be available and have a presence where buyers are researching."
4. Conversation
Eventually, companies realize that social isn't just about gaining a bullhorn, it's about connecting ideas and information to real people. "Social allows inspiration to travel among the network instead of just from the company to individuals," said Spoeth.
Companies facilitate the sharing of information with their customers by becoming conversationalists. Spoeth explained that "it's about replying to and favoriting tweets and becoming part of the conversation to engage with people and to set the tone for the community."
5. Personal Branding
The next level of social is all about helping key subject matter experts at companies create a personal brand to make a name both for themselves as individual and for the company with which they're associated.
BMC has used this concept to good effect. "One of our main areas of success in social," said Munn, "has been getting our executives to blog and promote thought-leadership through their Twitter accounts. We did this as a pilot project, but we've seen significant progress in followers, retweets and engagement. We've also succeeded in driving traffic back to the corporate blog. We've been really happy with the results."
In order to improve their marketing and social media strategy, marketers need feedback. Social provides that feedback because it's a two-way conversation. As a result, companies can improve their thought leadership efforts and the conversations they have with their customers.
One company that is using Social media for this purpose is Interactive Intelligence, which provides business communications software and services. Said Denise Meyer, Social Media Communications Manager, "We do listening activities to drive insights, identify key themes and topics and conversations to determine what thought leadership we can represent or look for opportunities to create new conversations."
As you embark on your social media efforts, think about where you are on the Social Media Hierarchy of needs and consider whether it makes sense to move on to the next level.
Jan 24, 2015 5:09:27 PM | Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Communications, Marketing Strategy, Social Media
Content Marketing: What's the Big Idea?
When people talk about good advertising, they often bring up "The Big Idea." They may dredge up the classic "Think Small" campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle. Or point to the legendary "Big Brother" ad where Apple successfully positioned itself against IBM. Or bring up the more recent Chipotle Back to the Start explainer video.
Now don't get me wrong. I'd be overjoyed to come up with a big idea for every piece of content I put out. But let's face it, even for biggest, most well-funded brands, big ideas are few and far between.
What's the poor content marketer to do?
As it turns out, real marketers are achieving very good success with the pretty-darn-good idea. Rather than settling for a plain-vanilla white paper or webinar or social campaign, the following marketers came up with one new twist. As it turns out, incorporating that one unique touch can make a demand- or lead-generation campaign pretty darn successful.
The More Experts the Merrier
Lots of companies work with analysts like IDG, Forrester, or Gartner to conduct research that they can then promote in thought-leadership reports. But Blackbaud put out a new spin on the old analyst thought-leadership report. Instead of including thought leadership from just one analyst, Blackbaud brought together ten to fifteen external industry experts to write about a topic of interest to the company's non-profit audience. It has used this technique to create a series of npEXPERT eBooks. The most recent installment shares tried-and-true donor-retention strategies, tips, and ideas.
The company has also repurposed the eBooks into a complimentary webinar series in which each author does his or her own webinar. These webinars are tied into a lead-nurture track that ultimately leads to one of the company's many products. Customers who register for a webinar are put on one of these lead-nurture tracks based on what the company knows about them from their registration form and from what they downloaded.
Overall, the company has been very pleased with the success of the campaign. Said Frank Barry, Director of New Growth Ventures and Partners in Blackbaud's global payments business, "The most recent eBook is the Number 1 asset we've ever published. We've downloaded over 15,000 copies."
Fun with Twitter
Recently, when CA was faced with the challenge of creating awareness for its new Mobility Management solutions, it wanted to come up with a fun and creative way to get the word out.
The company had decided to roll out the new solution at the GSMA Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona in February of 2014. This event is a combination of the world's largest exhibition for the mobile industry and a conference featuring prominent executives representing mobile operators, device manufacturers, technology providers, vendors, and content owners from around the world. CA had lined up speaking engagements and had a large booth on the show floor. A third part of its plan was to run a large social-media program to promote related content to people who were participating or interested in the event.
The company sent CA staffers to the conference and had them take pictures and sound bites that it could use to promote the company on Twitter. CA chose to focus on Twitter as it has become the default channel for real time activity at conferences, more so than Facebook or LinkedIn. Explained Andrew Spoeth, CA's Social Media Marketing Director, "Twitter's a very efficient way for people at conferences to share information quickly and find content that matters."
CA tweeted three types of content:
Product information for people shopping for what CA has to offer who were close to the purchase decision.
Content about ideas, trends, and thought leadership for potential future customers. These included blog posts and infographics that would appeal to a larger group of people.
Fun content for everyone. Said Spoeth, "We leveraged cartoons that tapped in to the conference experience. Those went nuts. We had thousands of retweets."
"Those three things worked together really well," said Spoeth. "As a result, CA ended up being one of the most popular Twitter accounts (retweets plus mentions) at the conference, and among 70,000+ Twitter accounts that were tweeting about the event in total."
Customer-Created Thought Leadership
What do you do when want to create a hugely ambitious thought-leadership program, but have only four people on staff and a lean budget?
If your company is a leader in Open Source computing, you get your customers and community to help with the heavy lifting.
I recently attended an American Marketing Association event that featured a talk by Jason Hibbets, the Editor and Community Manager of Red Hat's opensource.com site. Designed as a thought-leadership vehicle for Red Hat, said Hibbets, "The site publishes stories about the broader impact of open-source software and highlights how open source affects the world around us."
The site contains a wide range of content of value to the open-source community. Recent stories include case studies about how open source is used at Facebook, how it powers research at CERN, and how it's helping to save the Odia Indian Language. It covers news, development tips and tools, and recent presentations about open source. The site publishes themed content weeks, such as Women in Open Source or Back to School with Open Source. Evergreen resources include the "What is Open Source" page or the "What is OpenStack" page.
One of the key tenants of the open-source movement is that anyone can freely use, change and share the code. Moreover, the software is built by communities that volunteer. Red Hat thus doesn't build the software per se; rather they donate considerable resources to support the people that build its software.
Red Hat's Opensource.com thought-leadership portal used the same business model to create the content for the portal. The site's four-person full-time staff writes about half of the 18 new pieces that go up each week; the other half of the content comes from the community. In addition to actively soliciting stories from the community, the team has recruited ten external moderators.
Overall, the site looks to be meeting its goal of providing thought leadership and building community. The site has 20,000 followers on Twitter. It also receives significant traffic from search.
As these examples show, putting an interesting and creative spin on standard marketing tactics can be just the edge you need to achieve success with your content-marketing efforts.
Jan 17, 2015 10:37:52 AM | Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing Communications, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Thought Leadership
Spray and Pray 2.0
For today's marketers, "spray and pray" is the ultimate pejorative. Also known as "spaghetti against the wall," spray and pray 1.0 was when marketers would buy a huge list of, say, 5,000-10,000 names and send out an email blast hoping that someone, anyone, would bite.
Like its predecessor, spray and pray 2.0 is an attempt to blanket prospects with the vendors' message. But while spray and pray 1.0 sent minimally-targeted messages to large numbers of people, spray and pray 2.0 goes to a more targeted list in as many ways as possible—emails, white papers, webinars, articles, videos, infographics, tweets, LinkedIn, and more.
Spray and pray 2.0 addresses a couple of modern facts of life. The first is simply that different people learn in different ways—some are visual, some are auditory, some are kinesthetic learners. So it makes sense to present them with the type of information that helps them learn best.
The second is that buyers no longer make their way through their buying process in a linear fashion. Today's buyer's journey meanders across channels and social media the way teenagers wander around the state fair. They head over to the Ferris wheel, watch a little Nascar, take a detour through the heritage pavilion, throw a few bean bags to win the stuffed SpongeBob SquarePants, scarf down a deep-fried Snicker Doodle, milk a cow, then check out the baby chicks and the half-ton pumpkins.
The result is that campaigns need to be far more comprehensive. "It's a surround strategy," explained Todd Craig, an Atlanta-based marketing consultant and Oracle Modern Market Leader finalist. "You have to think in terms of multi-asset, multi-touch, multi-channel, multi-time period. You also have to reuse content by breaking it down and repurposing it so you can have an impact across all channels."
Multiple Touches
Virtually all marketers begin their spray and pray 2.0 campaigns by creating a multitude of content that they can push across multiple channels.
For example, BMC used to do a lot of white papers. But now, said Alison Munn, Senior Social Media Marketing and Engagement Manager, "We're doing more video, more eBooks, more bite-sized infograms, more blogs. Every time I create a piece of content, the first question I ask is, 'What images can I use to promote that over social?'"
Certain, Inc. puts the word out about its thought leadership, which explains how the company's event-management solution fits into the larger ecosystem of marketing automation, through webinars, partner webinars, articles in the press, social channels like LinkedIn and Twitter, and participation in industry events. As Michelle Schofield, Director of Marketing explained, "We take a cross-channel approach and use all these elements in a cohesive manner to create a successful campaign."
Different Learning Styles
Different types of content accommodate different preferences and learning styles. Blucarat, which offers a solution that brings social media to eCommerce channels, targets millennial social-media managers with short videos because this audience prefers video to longer white papers.
In contrast, Victoria Grey, Chief Marketing Officer at Gridstore, which provides storage solutions for Microsoft HyperV, uses not only videos, but also white papers and other written content. Said Grey, "We do everything. We do video, papers, customer testimonials and more because people have different preferences for consuming content. Some people only watch video, others like to read technical briefs or what another customer might have to say. For example, for me personally, if I'm in a meeting I can discreetly read, but I can't watch a video."
Concur Technologies is concerned with addressing different learning styles. Said Amy Higgins, Senior Manager of Content Marketing, "Everyone learns differently. Studies show that video and photos work best. The more interactive it can be the better. You rarely see postings on Google+ without a photo. Twitter is getting more and more into that. We might imbed a SlideShare in a tweet. As a result, our mix tends toward different learning styles. We're still playing with that. It's all trial-and-error and testing things out."
All Stages of the Buying Cycle
But spray and pray 2.0 goes well beyond mere integrated marketing. More marketers are looking to coordinate content-marketing and demand-generation efforts across the entire buying process. "We're evolving to get better at using content to address key buyers at the right stage in the buying process," said Frank Barry, Director, New Growth Ventures and Partners at Blackbaud.
Jessica Primanzon, Senior Campaign Manager at Deltek, has created a methodology that ensures that Deltek has the content it needs at each stage in the buying process. She performed an audit of all the content her group had produced and mapped each one to where it fit in the sales process. Said Primanzon, "I use that architecture assessment to see where I need to produce new content as well was what type of content I need to accommodate different learning styles. The content architecture allows us to take personal preference off the table and produce the content we actually need."
As companies master marketing automation, this mapping process will only become more sophisticated. As Craig explained, "Marketing automation is helping us assess impact. We can evaluate the complexion of every touchpoint. We can determine how many touches it takes to close a customer; for example, how many webinars they attend and so on. With this data, we can start to understand what it takes to go from prospect to customers and map content back to the buyer's journey. We'll eventually get to the point where we can create the right combination of content that speaks to multiple personas in an organization, develop a value proposition for each one, and come up with a compelling event that pushes them over to help us close a deal for with a $250 million manufacturer in Kansas."
Marketing over the Long Term
Because today's spray and pray 2.0 campaigns cover the entire buying process, they're far longer than older campaigns. While older campaigns may have run for three weeks and might have included one to three email blasts, modern campaigns take advantage of marketing automation and can run for six months.
Said Craig, "It's really powerful when you can map things out and have a program that lasts that long. You can really start to see which channels click, where you're moving the needle in concert, what kind of content, and what combination moves the prospect."
Nov 29, 2014 12:12:47 PM | Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Communications, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Target Marketing