9 Steps to Continuous Content Marketing Improvement

Archive for the ‘content marketing’ Category

9 Steps to Continuous Content Marketing Improvement

Friday, May 6th, 2011

Closed-loop marketing has been the exclusive domain of major corporations until very recently. Smaller companies with limited resources can now also reap enormous benefits from it. Closed-loop marketing is the process by which market intelligence learned during a marketing campaign is fed back into the strategy and plan; resulting in more focused targeting, more effective messaging, and improved resonance.

Until the past couple of years, closed-loop marketing could only be achieved through expensive, labor intensive market research. Imagine being able to automatically feed your prospects’ reactions to your marketing content back into your strategy, messaging process and choice of delivery vehicles. It isn’t just doable… it’s within the reach of even the smallest companies. What follows is a brief overview of the Closed-loop Marketing Process. In subsequent CMI posts I’ll dive down into each of the processes and show you step by step how it’s done.

1. Research

At the launch of any marketing campaign, it’s ALWAYS a good idea to make sure you have a realistic understanding of your product, the marketplace, your value proposition and competitive positioning. In this closed-loop process, I’m depicting a research step only at the inception. The process itself will automatically deliver new, deeper market intelligence as you roll it out.

2. Strategy

A clearly defined strategy is essential to the success of your content marketing campaign.

What are the objectives for the campaign?
Who are your prospects?
What industry are they in?
What roles and titles do they have?
What business pains are your targets experiencing (related to your solution)?
How will your product or service solve those problems?
What are the resulting benefits?

3. Buyer-Centric Processes

You can’t build relevant and useful content unless you know exactly who you’re talking to. Refine your definitions of target prospects from Step 2 into actual personas (representative individuals). Construct a map of the steps that your prospects go through in making a buying decision. Prospects have different informational needs depending on where they are in the buy cycle. Message maps identify the key messages that must be successfully communicated to prospects to move them to the next step in the buy cycle. Click on this hyperlink for more detail on Message Maps.

4. Editorial Calendar

Content marketers are publishers. Publishers develop editorial calendars to give them a road map of where their publication is going – which topics are going to be covered and when. Today we publish in many different formats. Look at your message map and determine how best to deliver your content (via blogs, case studies, emails, magazine articles, podcasts, presentations, videos, web pages, webinars, white papers, etc.).

5. Content

Prioritize using all the information you’ve gathered in the preceding steps, and start building your content piece by piece. You don’t have to create everything from scratch. Odds are you can find existing in house or third party materials that are appropriate and effective. Don’t just appropriate the content, Curate it. That means you acknowledge the source, and then put the content into context by explaining how it relates to your solution. Optimize with SEO key phrases.

6. Promotion and Socialization

Once the content is built, you need to let your target prospects know that it exists. If you have a permission-based email list, or blog subscribers, you can deliver your content directly. Otherwise you need to pull your targets to where your content is located online, or push it to where your targets are congregating in social networks.

7. Feedback

Google Analytics, click thru tracking in emails, social media monitors and other tools enable you to cost effectively see how your targets react to your content.

Where do they immediately bounce off a page?
Where do they linger and learn?
Which pieces do they forward, post, or tweet about?
Where do they convert and take your desired action?
What do they have to say in their blog comments?

For more on this, see Scott Frangos’ CMI post “How to Get Results After Creating Compelling Content”.

8. Document

To leverage the valuable information you’ve collected in the previous step, you must gather the information, organize it, and store it where you can search it and sort on it. The more information there is (and tools like Google Analytics can generate tons of it), the more you’ll need automation in the form of an integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

9. Analysis

Once you have the market intelligence you’ve gathered in a format that’s easily manageable, it’s time to measure how you did. This is an analysis process that translates the market intelligence into action items to course correct and tweak your campaign.

Where did you do well?
Where could you have done better?
What should you change regarding your target descriptions, personas, message map, vehicles and content?

Today’s buyers are moving targets. Their needs and issues are constantly evolving. The economic environment is always changing. Technologies are continually being developed and upgraded. So it makes sense that our marketing campaigns should also morph in an attempt to keep up.

Closed-loop marketing is ideal for B2B marketers who need to nurture prospects over extended periods of time. By continuously analyzing customer responses and refining your communications process and messages, you can adjust your campaigns to deliver highly targeted, relevant and effective marketing content.

I’m a contributor to the Content Marketing Institute blog. This blog post first appeared there:

http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2011/04/content-marketing-improvement/

Look for my blog posts on the steps of the Closed-Loop Content Marketing Process and on Content Curation at CMI.

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Tags: B2B marketing, Bob Leonard, content strategy, custom publishers, relevant content, social media, useful and relevant information
Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, content marketing, content/social media marketing, market research, marketing strategy, new product launch, product marketing | No Comments »

Content Curation from Source to Influence in Five Steps

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

I’ve been doing “Content Curation” for years. Ever since the internet and email have been widely available tools, I’ve been sharing bits and pieces of information I found interesting, thought-provoking, or just plain entertaining; and I shared with colleagues, friends, clients and prospects. Over time, I learned that it’s a great way to keep top of mind with clients and prospects without being ‘salesy’. I deliver timely, relevant and useful information to them in easy to consume bites. The timing is serendipitous – it depends on when I happen to run across something meaningful. It might be a single day between curated missives, it might be a month.

My forwarded curations are also highly personalized. I rarely blast an item to a long list of people. The vast majority of the time I send a tidbit to a single individual, or a small handful of people. The information is highly relevant, meaningful, and hopefully valuable to these people. I’ve trained them to look forward to these tidbits so my ‘open and read rate’ is very high.

That’s on the personal level. Curated content can also be an important input into more formal marketing communications/content marketing campaigns designed to inform and gently persuade regarding products, services and solutions.

So how’s it done? Something like this:

Step 1: Identify Your Topics of Interest

What topics make sense for your company and product set?
What peripheral topics might be of interest to your sphere of influence? What industries are they in? What types of technology do they manufacture, purchase or use in their businesses? Are there political or regulatory issues that affect them?
Is there a specific niche in which you’d like to position yourself as a thought leader?

Step 2: Select Your Search and Aggregation Tools

There are many tools available online. I prefer to use a limited number of these, paying particular attention to the search terms I develop. The more ‘advanced’, selective and sophisticated your search terms, the fewer results you’ll get, but those results will be more valuable and relevant.

Google, the king of all things search, has many free resources that can help you to become an ‘advanced’ searcher. Spend two or three hours to learn this skill. It’ll save you hundreds of hours over the next decade.

Tools to use to find relevant information, aggregate it, organize it and deliver it to your constituents:

Addictomatic.com
Digg.com
DuckDuckGo.com
Google.com/Alerts
Google.com/Reader (set up via RSS feeds)
HootSuite.com
IceRocket.com
LinkedIn.com (group discussions)
Paper.li
Scoop.it
SocialMention.com
StumbleUpon.com
Technorati.com
TweetDeck
Twitter.com

There are many others. The point is to select the subset that you like, and then set them up correctly. They’re just tools. You want them to help you find the nuggets of gold hidden in the vast mountains of available information.

Step 3: Gather

Once your tools are set up, the information will be delivered to you daily. It’s up to you to skim and scan, trash and save, read and contextualize.

Step 4: Organize

You can get as detailed as you want about this. I think it’s a matter of personal style, plus the amount of data you’re dealing with. Obviously, the larger the amount of information, the more you’re going to need to categorize it, perhaps creating sub-categories and metadata to enable efficient searches. My personal style is not terribly organized, and I find this is helpful (in this context). My brain tends to sift information and make connections that wouldn’t normally occur in an organized taxonomy.

I do organize my curated content by target audience, though.

Step 5: Share

There’s no point in doing all the above (at least from a marketing perspective) unless you deliver the appropriate (and relevant) information to your various constituents (individuals, small groups, distribution lists). Remember – what’s useful and relevant to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next.

You might deliver to individuals in an informal, unscheduled way via email. For groups of people (aggregated by shared interests) you might use newsletters, social media (including blogs), podcasts, etc. and disseminate on a pre-determined schedule (once a day, week or month). What’s important here is to assess the content, and assess the audience; then select the appropriate vehicle and frequency.

Attribution

There’s an old adage – “If you take from one information source, you’re plagiarizing. If you take from twenty information sources, you’re researching.” There’s a spectrum of content curation ranging from direct quotes all the way to completely re-thought, re-contextualized, re-written material. All are equally valid… as you approach and reach the direct quote end of the spectrum, you should attribute the source including author and publication.

Did I miss anything? Are there any helpful tactics or tools that you can’t live without in your content curation endeavors?

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Tags: B2B marketing, Bob Leonard, business to business marketing, content strategy, execution, return on influence, social media, useful and relevant information
Posted in acSellerant, business to business, content marketing, content/social media marketing, digital relationships, execution, social media, trust | 1 Comment »

Content Curation – the Savior of SMB Marketers

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

We know content/social media marketing is highly effective, yet for SMBs it often doesn’t deliver the results that it should. Why not?

Consistent, Quality Production

Everybody who works in SMB B2B marketing is well aware of this. The agencies, the clients, the consultants, the gurus… everybody knows it. Smaller businesses just don’t have the resources available to create relevant and useful content on an ongoing basis. They start out with good intentions. They write a few blog posts, get increased traffic and some comments; but the real business payback doesn’t occur until after months of consistently publishing compelling content. Content that people consume because they want to… because there’s value in it.

It takes time, skill and energy to produce all that content. What if you don’t have the time, skill or energy?

Content Curation

I define content curation as the process of assembling, summarizing and adding commentary to information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience. I think this discipline is essential to content/social media marketing.

Today, we are drowning in information. Most of it is poor quality and of little value (i.e. not worth the time spent to consume it). There is tremendous value in sifting through the mountains of content to find those rare golden nuggets that are high quality, relevant, useful and (hopefully) entertaining. With the ever increasing volume of information we’re faced with, businesses can bring real value to their prospects and clients by serving as a filter.

Marketers can build trust by providing focused curation in areas that matter to their prospects and clients. Quality original content has always had value, but curation is coming to have nearly equal value. The key is to stake out unique topic areas. For SMB B2Bs, those are the areas that are of professional interest to the buyers of your products and services.

The information you curate should help your target audience make better buying decisions; and it should increase the benefits of using your products and services. It might include economic or regulatory news that affects their industry, and other adjacent but relevant topics. Your aim is to become the most trusted source in those areas. You don’t need a lot of time or money to do this. You just need to have a deep understanding of your chosen niche.

In this post I told you the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of content curation for SMB B2Bs. In our next post, I’ll discuss how to do all the above effectively and efficiently.

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Tags: b2b, B2B marketing, Bob Leonard, business to business marketing, content strategy, digital relationships, execution, relevant content, return on influence, trusted advisor, useful and relevant information
Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, content/social media marketing, digital relationships, execution, social media, trust | 1 Comment »

Message Maps Result in Quicker and Easier Content Creation

Friday, March 4th, 2011

This is the fifth blog post in our series designed to make content creation easier for SMB B2Bs. Consistent execution of content marketing and social media campaigns is the critical success factor for SMB B2Bs. These posts, when taken together, will vastly improve your execution and drastically reduce the amount of effort and resources required.

A message map should be created for each solution that a B2B marketer promotes. The maps identify the key messages that must be successfully communicated to target prospects.

Here’s how it’s done:

A brainstorming session is held among sales people, marketers, product managers and external agency people. Once everyone has shared their thoughts, key messages that truly differentiate the solution from the competition are generated. Validation of the messages occurs when supporting facts are delineated. Finally, and most importantly, the benefits to the customer are defined. The benefits should align with the needs of your target prospects. If they don’t, you have a product problem.

When there’s agreement on key messaging, the marketing team doesn’t have to define the message every time it creates new content. A message map provides the basic messaging for everything from articles to blog posts, podcasts to press releases, white papers to webinars.

Message maps make it easier and more cost effective to work with outsiders. If you outsource content creation, message maps give external resources the guidance they need to create material that supports and elaborates on your essential positioning.

Message maps can help keep the sales team on message. Some enterprising sales people may create materials for specific sales situations. By giving them the essential guidance they need in a useful, accessible and approved messaging document, you’ll make it easier for the sales team to create one-off presentations, individual letters and emails that are accurate and effective.

You’ll find that some of the sales team’s improvisations are entertaining and persuasive. The sales team interacts with your target audience on an ongoing basis. They understand the buyer. They know which questions must be answered and objections overcome to close the sale. They may discover information about target prospects’ pains and buying factors that you didn’t have before. By maintaining a common message map and soliciting sales input up front, you can integrate their market knowledge into your messaging.

A message map accelerates content marketing. Time spent up-front in developing the message map will be repaid in full during the content creation cycle. Fewer iterations and faster content development cycles will support a timely and successful content marketing initiative.

How about you? Have you deployed message maps? Have you experienced increased efficiency when using them?

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Tags: B2B marketing, business to business marketing, content strategy, execution, product management, relevant content
Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, execution, new product launch, product marketing, Sales and Marketing alliance, sales enablement, social media | 6 Comments »

Helping B2Bs Execute Social Media

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

Content Strategy Provides a Social Media Roadmap

Successful execution of social media programs is an issue for SMB B2Bs, but it can be done. Post Four in our series is Content Strategy. This is timely in that I’m doing just that – developing a content strategy and a blog post (editorial) calendar for a client this week. They didn’t understand the need for this step. I convinced them that what seems like an additional task will actually save significant time and effort over the long run. It is SO MUCH easier to come up with useful and relevant content each week when you’ve taken the time to map it out up front.

Development of a content strategy plays a key role in successful execution of a social media program. Whether you communicate to your audience via a blog, Twitter or social networking sites like LinkedIn, the only true way to build relationships with a growing network is to listen, engage and provide content they find valuable.

Capturing insight about your audience in a social media context can be accomplished through:

Participation in appropriate online discussion groups,
Social media monitoring tools, and
Surveys and polls.

If the objective for your social media efforts is to sell more products and services, become a resource to help your audience make smart buying choices regarding configuration and integration. Give them information re how to leverage your products and services in ways that will make them heroes in their companies. Give them information that’s relevant and useful to them in their business. Over time your knowledge and tools will help them accomplish their goals and, in turn, they’ll see your company as a valuable resource.

In this age of Web 2.0, those who are active in social media are essentially publishers. Content creation plays a key role in your social media strategy. One way to ensure you publish consistent, unique content that:

speaks compellingly to your target audience,
extends and amplifies your marketing messaging, and
aligns with your target keyword concepts;

is to create an editorial calendar. Social media publishing platforms like blogs can use content schedules (aka editorial calendars) to serve as a guide and keep messaging aligned with your overall content strategy.

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Tags: B2B marketing, business to business marketing, content strategy, digital relationships, execution, LinkedIn, relevant content, social media, social networking sites, trusted advisor, Twitter, useful and relevant information
Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, social media | 1 Comment »

Make Social Media Easier with Target Personas

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

Different Content for Different People

This is the third in a series of blog posts where I deconstruct the social media marketing process in order to solve the content development problem. The number one cause of social media marketing failure is poor and/or inconsistent content development. This is especially acute for small to mid-sized B2B companies. Why? Because…

SMB B2Bs don’t have the resources that large companies have to do the requisite content development.
B2Bs sell complex products and services to professional business people; so their content must be concise, compelling, relevant, useful and (hopefully) entertaining – not an easy task.

You can’t create compelling content if you don’t have a clear idea of who you’re communicating with. What’s relevant and useful to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next. Target personas should include current customers, as well as prospects. I develop one persona for both customers and prospects. If you have more than one type of product or service, you should create a persona for each product line (and probably a different corporate voice and SM profile for each too).

You Want More of Your Best

If you haven’t created a clear profile of your most desirable prospects, this process can help you do that:

Take a look at your list of current customers. Which are your most profitable? Which are the most fun to do business with? (It’s always interesting to see the overlap between these.) Put this subset of customers into a spreadsheet and score them on a list of demographics (age, location, industry, role/title, size of business, etc.) and psychographics (attitudes, beliefs, values, personality type, buying motives, etc.).

Let’s say, for example, you determine that your prime prospect has the following attributes:

lives in the Midwest
is between 35 and 55 years old
works in a small (10 to 50 employee) credit union or community bank
is the COO, VP, (person in charge) of Operations
is male
is married and has school age children
is active in his community
and makes buying decisions based on how they might affect his career.

You now have a good idea of who your best target is, what his interests and concerns are, and how you can motivate him. Some people even name their primary persona (I named mine ‘Erica’). Print out this list of attributes and tack it up where you can read it from your desk chair. Before writing a blog post, or tweeting, or contributing to a LinkedIn discussion, review that list to remind yourself who you’re conversing with. It makes the process much easier. Try it and see.

Please let me know if you have any other targeting tips that help you in developing content, or if you decide to try this process, let me know how it works for you.

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Tags: acSellerant, b2b, B2B marketing, Bob Leonard, business to business marketing, content strategy, custom publishers, digital relationships, execution, LinkedIn, relevant content, return on influence, social media, social networking sites, trusted advisor, useful and relevant information
Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, social media, trust | 6 Comments »

Leveraging Internal Company Resources for Content Development

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

This is our second week of diving down into specific facets of social media to see how we can leverage each to make the content development process more successful. We’ve been blogging about the difficulties that small to mid-sized B2B companies have in executing their social media strategies. This week’s focus area is:

Leveraging Internal Resources

Maximizing Internal Resources for Content Development

Almost all employees at SMBs are stretched to the limit. They have very little time or energy to spare. Yet, they are essential to the success of social media programs. So, how do we maximize their contributions while minimizing their exertion?

Start at the Top

Whether you’re an internal marketing professional, or an external marketing consultant, no social media campaign has a chance of success without the support of the CEO/Owner. Make it clear to that person that there’s no sense in embarking on the campaign unless s/he’s on board and publicly pledges support to the project. Employees need to know that this is important to the boss. Other input needed from the C suite includes the goals and objectives for the campaign. Everyone has to be clear on what constitutes success, so you know:

what you’re all working toward, and
when you’ve arrived.

The nature of social media is that it’s an ongoing process, so you want to develop an over arching long term goal; something like, “An average year over year growth rate of 40% for the next 10 years.” Then develop smaller, shorter term goals (e.g. “One conversion per week from a prospect pulled in via social media.”).

Depending on the executives and their personalities, they may also become contributors of blog posts, tweets, LinkedIn discussion group Q&As, etc. If you can position one or more of these executives as a thought leader in your niche, it could result in a significant increase in the ROI of your campaign.

Sales Leaders

Successful sales people are an extremely valuable resource. They are also typically the most difficult to track down and get information from. In addition to the direction from the CEO mentioned above, you must communicate to the sales people why they should spend their precious time with you, rather than with a prospect or customer. Here’s how:

be overt in communicating that you’ll respect their time, you value their contribution, and that the result will help them be even more successful,
tell them exactly what type of information you’re looking for (typical questions prospects have, objections that need to be overcome, competitive land mines that need to be defused), and
offer to make it as painless as possible – tell them you’ll spend a day with them to observe and learn from their interactions with customers, and to conduct your interviews in the car, as you travel from appointment to appointment.

Subject Matter Experts

These are the engineers and product managers that can give you nuts and bolts information about product/service features, new versions to be released, etc. You want to establish ongoing, symbiotic relationships with these people. The best way to do that (plus give them an understanding of the value of social media) is to do research for them. Use social media to answer questions they have about the competition and the market.

Going forward, maintain an ongoing conversation with them based on the two-way transmission of relevant and useful information concerning your industry, new breakthroughs, what’s on the drawing board (and the likely market reaction), etc.

If you have any other tips re leveraging internal resources in an effective manner to help develop SM content, please share in a comment to this post.

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, market research, marketing strategy, new product launch, Sales and Marketing alliance, sales enablement, social media, trust | 8 Comments »

Archive for the ‘content marketing’ Category

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Archive for the ‘content marketing’ Category

1. Research

2. Strategy

3. Buyer-Centric Processes

4. Editorial Calendar

5. Content

6. Promotion and Socialization

7. Feedback

8. Document

9. Analysis

Step 1: Identify Your Topics of Interest

Step 2: Select Your Search and Aggregation Tools

Step 3: Gather

Step 4: Organize

Step 5: Share

Attribution

Consistent, Quality Production

Content Curation

Content Strategy Provides a Social Media Roadmap

You Want More of Your Best

Leveraging Internal Resources Maximizing Internal Resources for Content Development

Start at the Top

Sales Leaders

Subject Matter Experts

Info re acSellerant

Pages

Latest Tweets

Subscribe for Blog Updates via Email

Archives

Search Blog Posts

Blogroll

Tags

Leveraging Internal Resources

Maximizing Internal Resources for Content Development