Alternatives: Content Marketing

The Web is all about content, so this age-old marketing strategy has enjoyed a dramatic resurgence in recent years. 

What Is Content Marketing?

         Content marketing is the act of creating valuable and relevant content for your target audience, with three goals in mind:

1.  Establishing and strengthening your brand.

2.  Building trust in your authority.

3.  Driving sales.

         Essentially, you provide high-quality content for people to consume, and in return, they get to know, like, and trust you. That content could be anything from blog posts to how-to articles to books to e-books to videos. The key is that the content provides value to the consumer, and is presented and available free of charge. As consumers come to trust and appreciate the content, their feelings will transfer over into a perception of your company as an authority (which is a valuable thing on today's noisy Web), as well as conferring brand loyalty and higher sales on your business.

Getting Started With Content Marketing

         If you have decided that Content Marketing is the right approach for your business, you'll need to get started with a comprehensive strategy. The first step is defining your audience – what drives them? What interest them? What brings them together? The next step is creating content that will be meaningful to them.

         In a sense, you have an advantage as a small business when it comes to content marketing. Because you're smaller, you can focus tightly on a single niche and become a trusted authority – also, consumers within niche markets tend to have to overcome larger barriers of trust with large corporations. Consumers can buy into the idea that a small business owner wants to be a normal, functioning member of their niche community. They automatically (and probably rightfully) suspect the motivations of a large, corporate interest.

         But how do you create quality, meaningful content? That's an art and a science, and merits its own book, but the pillar is remembering the 5 W's: Who, What, Where, When and Why (and don't forget How, when necessary!)

Who Are You Making Content For?

         Who is your following? Are you sure you know who is really interested in the product you're trying to sell? If you don't, how can you create content they'll find relevant, valuable and useful? It's crucial to understand as much as possible about your customers so that you can provide them solutions – first in the form of content, and soon in the form of your product or service.

What Content Are You Delivering?

         For most folks, the term "content marketing" immediately conjures the image of a blog post. But that's not the way some folks prefer to consume content – they prefer videos, InfoGraphics, podcasts, images, memes, whitepapers – you name it. The more diverse and unique the media with which you make content available, the more people will find your content approachable. 

When Are Your Customers Consuming Content?

         If you're like most businesses, you'll notice that you get more interaction with your content around 9 AM and 5 PM in your own time zone. But what if you develop followers around the country? Or around the world? You'll need to experiment with the right times to publish or share content in order to maximize the amount of people who have access to it.

Where Are Your Customers At?

         Where are your customers going? If they're relatively young, you'll want to look for them on Instagram. If they're primarily female, you'll want to find them on Pinterest. You can find just about anyone on Facebook or YouTube – and now you're starting to get the point. Marketing 101 is "go to where the audience is." You've got to find out where they're at, and distribute your content on the platforms they're already using.

Why Are You Creating Content?

         That is, what are you trying to accomplish? If you're only content marketing "to make money for your business" people are going to realize that, and they won't want to consume and engage with your content. You've got to remember that the reason you're content marketing is to connect with people in an authentic way and build their perception of you as an authority. In order to do that, you've got to know what your customers are really interested in and build on that. 

         Also, are you sure your content is even any good? If you're not a naturally skilled writer, you might want to look into hiring a professional to freelance some posts for you. Ditto with any of your other content. If you don't publish quality, tangible content, you're reinforcing your voice and your brand – but in a bad way. Your content should communicate exactly in the way you want consumers to receive your business – so be sure to constantly evaluate the tone, message and quality of your content to ensure people not only derive significant value from it, but are interpreting it in the correct way.

The Importance Of Research

It's a dreaded word: Research. It's never anywhere near as much fun as writing a great blog post or making a content-rich video, but it's critical to the success of your content marketing efforts and the #1 most important task identified by professional copywriters.

The point of research is to build a profile of your ideal customer. What does he or she look like? What are his or her demographics information and consumption behaviors? What are his or her problems and pain points that you intend to solve with your product or service? Once you know what your ideal customer looks like, you can start building content that speaks directly to him or her.

Here is the step-by-step process for researching and building the profile of that ideal customer:

1.  Get out in the world. You didn't just start a business to make money – you started a business because you're passionate about your work, a buyer in your own industry, and a member of the community that uses your products or services. To effectively reach your market, you've got to get out among them and figure out what they're talking about. This means connecting with people on social media, other blogs, community forums and chat boards to figure out what people need – and don't need – from a small business in your industry. Once you've identified your customers, you can start putting out content that is relevant and valuable to them. Of course, if you're out there participating in relevant forums and social media platforms, remember that the key word is "participating," not "spamming." People don't mind advertisements and marketing – but they immediately label it as spam if it comes from outside their community, or it feels like someone is trying to take advantage of them. You need to contribute to conversations, take notes on things that people say that's interesting, figure out folks' pet peeves, what they think is cool and passé, and what their values are. 

2.  Find the right keywords. The days of Google feeding marketers data on keywords is over. Now, it's all about footwork and research to figure out what people are searching for. This can be confusing, especially when trying to separate the signal from the noise. But it's crucially important! You need to be able to optimize your web page for search engines, and you also need keyword data to help you set yourself apart in the market and get ahead of your competitors. Savvy keyword research will let you create content that solves your customers' problems before any of your competitors can. If you're offering quality, valuable content where others are throwing up useless, nonspecific information on the same topics, you'll establish yourself as a trusted authority in no time.

3.  Know your competition. You need to know more about your market than just what kind of customers are out there – you have to know about your competitors, too. What do they excel at where you fall behind? Where are you crushing them? In the same way you build a profile of your ideal customer, you have to also build a profile of your competitors. What kinds of products or services do they offer? What kind of content are they sharing on their blog or website? Are they marketing on social media? Are they any good at it? How is their SEO – and their ranking in the search engines results pages? What are their content marketing strengths and weaknesses? Also, remember that you need to find out more than just the big competitors – markets are never disrupted by large corporations. It's always up-and-coming small businesses just like yours that enter a market and upend everything. So be aware of which companies are launching what kind of content, and which bloggers in your sphere are starting to attract attention so you don't get blindsided by a major market disruption.

4.  Be consistent. Olympic athletes don't get to their level without constant practice, and you won't become a world-class researcher without doing it on a regular basis, either. At first, you'll be a little clumsy in your research, but the only way to get better is to do it, measure it, tweak it and iterate – on and on to infinity. If you're not constantly researching, moving and constantly changing, you're dead in the water.

What Great Copy Looks Like

         Far and away, the most common form of Web content is copy. Whether it's blog posts, white papers, InfoGraphics, how-to articles…you name it. Copy is what drives the Internet. 

         Copy has a bad name for good reasons. Most of it is absolutely awful tripe that barely manages to communicate without making a consumers' eyes glaze over. It's so much fluff without substance – all sizzle and no steak, if you like. Copy should work like a magic show – it should keep people focused on the "wow" factor while allowing the magician (okay, the writer) to keep the amazing stuff coming. Think about it – if you go to a magic show, a lot of people have paid for tickets to sit down and be fooled on purpose. They know it's not real, but they want to be amazed. Copy should also be magical – it's there to serve a purpose, which is to increase your sales and establish you as a trusted authority, but it has to do so in a way that doesn't insult the audience's intelligence and keeps them hooked for more.

         Here are the three elements of magical copy:

1.  The headline compels you to read the first sentence. When someone lands on your page, you've got a few seconds to capture their attention. That means your words have to act decisively and powerfully. The headline is one of the most crucial elements of content marketing. 

It's long past time that copywriters started taking a lesson from great fiction authors. Consider some of the great opening sentences of the greatest novels ever written. They are simple, but convey a promise of complexity. They are (usually) short, but take up a lot of metaphysical space. They happen in the present, but reach back into the past and extend into the future. Now, imagine crafting a headline that managed to convey the physical characteristics of your content, what it looks like, the demographic it's aimed at, the intangible qualities, and which also manages to convey something about the intangible qualities. Will anyone fail to move on to the first sentence? 

So let's take a very blasé headline, pulled from this article, which comes up on the first page of Google when you search for content marketing: "What is Content Marketing? – The Content Marketing Institute." Well. It seems to match a keyword well, which is good for SEO purposes. And we know who wrote it – it's apparently some sort of authority on content marketing, because they're an institute. But now consider this headline: "Write Content, Write Now: 5 Essential How-To Principles from the Content Marketing Institute." Look how much more this sentence is doing. There's a pun in the headline that causes someone to take a second look (a double-take is great for getting past the attention threshold with web surfers.) It's using a number, which sets reader expectations up front and gives them an idea of the length and scope of the piece. It tells people what the piece will be – a how-to, not some random article that looks like someone just took the Wikipedia entry and replaced a few of the words with synonyms. It uses a powerful adjective and noun combination – these are principles, not "tips" or "tricks" and they are essential, not "weird" or "strange." To top it all off, these "essential principles" are from a place called the Content Marketing Institute – this is an institute specifically formed for Content Marketing, not some schmo freelance "writer" who got hired to regurgitate someone else's copy in a slightly different form for $2/hour. 

See the difference? The only problem with this headline is that it may not conform to the best SEO keyword phrases out there. No problem. Write the headline first, then incorporate the keyword phrase afterward. Not the other way around. Ever. That will just get you boring, awful headlines. 

Writing a great headline is not easy to do, but mimicking a great headline is. Start paying attention as you surf around the web and start looking for formats that incorporate these guidelines. It's okay to replicate a sentence structure in your headline, so be shameless and write down the best, most compelling headlines you come across, then do your best impression of them when you're writing your own headlines. Remember that the headline has to do a lot of work in order to get someone to read that first sentence, so if you put the time and effort you need into a proper headline, you'll ensure people get there. And once you've gotten people to the first sentence, you're ready for the second element of magical copy…

2.  The first sentence compels you to read the second sentence. And the second sentence compels you to read the third, and so on. Ever watched a great television show like Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones? Even when things are slow and an episode is nothing but an hour's worth of dialogue, you can't rip your eyes away. The narrative has done such a good job of hooking you with every single line that not only do you keep watching, you get heartburn just thinking you'll have to wait another week to see a new episode. This is because each scene does one of three things: It makes a promise to viewers, raises the stakes on an earlier promise, or simultaneously delivers on a promise while making a new one. That's it. There's never a time where the audience isn't hanging on the edge, waiting for the fulfillment of an earlier promise. This is how great copy should read, as well. There's an amazing post I can't recommend highly enough to people called "How to Manipulate Your Audience Like Downton Abbey." Forget the negative connotations associated with the word "manipulate." That's exactly what a good writer does, but we do it for a willing audience (remember the magician example from before?)

3.  The sentences and words are highly readable. Most newspapers are written at between a fifth and eighth-grade reading level. Read that again – the New York Times writes articles that are plain and simple enough that a preteen can read and understand it. If you're curious, this article is written at about a ninth grade reading level for the same reasons. It's not because it's aimed at ninth graders, it's because if you make people work too hard to read something, they won't finish it. No one likes to feel stupid. If you never read an entire Wikipedia article in your entire life, read this one on readability (you can also enjoy the irony late in the article when it becomes highly difficult to read.) When you're considering the readability of your copy, at its most basic level, you need to pay attention to these three things:

a.  How many words per sentence? In general, the less words you have per sentence, the better. When you're writing copy, it's never okay to use a semicolon; since the point of that is to join two independent clauses, you should just make them a separate sentence. (Yes, that last semicolon was on purpose.)

b.  What's the average grade level of words? Never forget that you're writing web copy. Although there is something incredible and artistic and beautiful about discovering the perfect word for the perfect context, that needs to be kept to artistic literature, not the craft of copy, because you're not creating art. You're crafting copy in an artistic way. Contriving chichi prose as some sort of verbose odium to present your perspicacity is just garish and obdurate. See? It makes you look like a poser.

c.  How long are the words? English is a funny language – we have many, many synonyms for closely related words, unlike many other languages that rely on context to shade what we mean (except that English will also use context to shade meaning.) It's one of the most difficult languages to learn on the planet – perhaps the most difficult – because there are so many words that have such different meanings and so many random rules. Generally, English words have at least one short version of a word and at least one long version (though not in all cases. Again, with the haphazardness of English.) The short version is usually Germanic and used in everyday speech, and the long version is usually Latinate and better suited for very specific linguistic situations, like certain kinds of writing. Consider the words "love" and "adoration." They mean slightly different things, but they're synonyms. However, "love" is short and Germanic and "adoration" is long and Latinate. Whenever possible, go with short and Germanic. The better people's eyes can flow across the page, the better off you will be.

Crafting A Content Marketing Strategy

Crafting a winning content marketing strategy takes a light and deft touch. You need a wide assortment of different tactics just to effectively reach one niche, much less the entire population. But by developing a strong content marketing strategy, you can guide your approach in a sustainable way that gives your target audience the individual experiences they demand, that are appropriate to each niche you're trying to work your way in to, and that will ensure your content is seen and shared by a wide variety of people. 

Now, if you're interested in blowing through your precious marketing resources as quickly as possible without getting absolutely any gain, the best way to do it is through scattershot, gut-check marketing tactics. You know – trying a whole bunch of different things that "feel right" without unifying your tactics under goal-oriented strategies.

         When you're developing a content marketing strategy, use a simple acronym called PLACE:

1.   Planning. Every good strategy begins with planning. First thing first: You'll need to establish your vision and mission – that is, what do you want your strategy to do? It's the same as when you wrote your business plan. You need to set goals and steps to achieve those goals at the onset. You also need to plan how you're going to create and leverage compelling online content to accomplish all of these goals. You don't need to create all of the content yourself, and you shouldn't try! There are a lot of really good marketers out there making amazing stuff, and it costs you nothing to share that content and reap the rewards. However, don't think you can just pass around trite copy, pictures borrowed from the first page of Google Images, or useless how-to-boil-water articles. Forget what you've heard: Marketing might be a numbers game, but in this post-Hummingbird world, content marketing is not. It is a quality game.

 2.  Locating. You know your target audience and their appropriate demographic. You've got the content that will appeal to them. Now, go out and find them! They're out there, just a couple of clicks away. Use search engines, blogs and social networks to find the place your audience is already congregating online. Once you know where they are, you can join the discussions already in progress and begin to participate in the community. Once you're trusted, and not just a spammer, you can start disseminating links to your published content. Whenever possible, make sure that content allows the greatest possible leeway for consumers to take it and change it, run with it, take it to other platforms and, in as many ways as possible, interact with it. Images and memes are a great example of this. While you're in the locating phase, your important metrics are "friends" or "followers" on social media, visitors to your page and inbound links.

3.  Acting. You've got your target audience and they're in their sphere. Now, it's all about keeping them there. Your content hub needs to stay packed to the brim with engaging, relevant, useful material. This means updating consistently, and keeping up a steady stream of fresh stuff. Content is how you get permission from consumers to market to them and sell to them – by consistently providing them with content they'll return to again and again on your blog, website or online community, you'll earn that. Consider any successful newspaper or blog, how attractive would they be without engaging, relevant, useful content. The important metrics here are the amount of time people spend at your hub and how many leads you're generating.

4.  Converting. This is where you take all that customer goodwill, generated by providing them with useful and interesting content, and convert it into sweet, sweet sales. Make sure you're focusing in on re-marketing, Email automation, data collection about the personal likes and dislikes of customers and honing in on as many repeat sales as you can manage. Your important metrics at this stage of the strategy are your revenue, the average value of an order, and of course, how many orders you're getting (or how many are telling you they've come into your shop because of your web page.)

5.  Engaging. This is a step in the process that's absolutely crucial, but so many businesses fail to get it right. If your customer isn't uniquely thrilled by your product or services, you've failed to get them not only as a repeat sale, but most importantly, as an ally sharing their testimony on social media and through word of mouth. A lot of marketers see an incomplete cycle – they think that as soon as you've got the customer pulling out their cash, they've done their job. But marketing extends long after the point of sale – and a small business owner who doesn't understand that is a small business owner who won't stay in business very long. Your key metrics here are repeat purchases and new referrals from satisfied customers.

As usual please comment and let me know thoughts, ideas, or how you would do content marketing. Have a great week!