Content Curation

Posts Tagged ‘content strategy’

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?

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 »

User-Generated Content via Market Research

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

This is the third post in a series devoted to a pervasive problem experienced by SMB B2B companies. That problem is successful execution of their social media strategies. The best social media strategy on the planet is worthless if it isn’t implemented. The most difficult piece to execute for SMBs is the development of an ongoing stream of relevant and useful content. Poor quality content is cheap and easy to generate, but it does more harm than good.

In my last post, Getting Over the Social Media Content Hump, I listed all the ingredients of a successful social media campaign (that I could think of at the time). My intention is to take each of them – one per week – and delve deeper in an attempt to answer, “How can this facet of social media be leveraged to help develop and/or distribute quality, highly readable content.”

This week’s topic is Market Research.

Social media is a great tool for market research. You can research your clients and your competition, and improve your products and services via crowd sourced surveys. Knowing what your prospects and clients are saying, as well as what your competition is up to, is highly valuable in itself. Anticipating and validating product changes through social research, polls and surveys can be of extreme value. And these polls and surveys will also develop user-generated content.

This is a tactic that market research firms (e.g. Forrester, Frost & Sullivan, Gartner) have been using for decades. It’s no small task to develop a survey questionnaire that elicits valuable information, but there are consultants who specialize in this.

Can’t afford a consultant? Send an email around to your department heads: C-suite, Customer Service, Engineering, HR, Marketing, Product Management, Sales; and ask them for two or three market-related questions that each would love to have the answers to.

Then place these surveys on relevant sites like Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Twitter, and industry specific networking sites. The answers will give you a treasure trove of information that is, by definition, relevant and useful. The information came directly from your target audience!

Use this user-generated content to feed your blogs, group discussions, tweets, etc. And take another sheet from the research firms’ playbook – every year (or quarter, or month) update and re-post your polls and surveys. You’ll get more fodder for your content needs, and more up to date insight into the needs and wants of your clients and target market.

Beneficial side effects may include tighter alignment between your social media people and the rest of the company (and a new found respect for what social media can accomplish), and a closer digital relationship with customers and prospects. This blog post by Scott Frangos makes a crucial distinction between content and true connection (the kind needed to close high ticket B2B deals).

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Tags: b2b, B2B marketing, Bob Leonard, business to business marketing, content strategy, digital relationships, LinkedIn, new product launch, Twitter, useful and relevant information
Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, market research, marketing strategy, new product launch, social media, trust | 2 Comments »

How to Get Over the Social Media Content Hump

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

I wrote a blog post a week ago that obviously touched a nerve. “B2B Social Media’s Big Not So Secret” garnered the most traffic of any blog post I’ve ever written. David Meerman Scott tweeted the post – that certainly goosed my traffic. I also received a few comments and a flurry of phone calls and emails. 99% of the feedback was supportive of my premise, which was:

“Small to medium sized B2B companies are not realizing the benefits they should from social media marketing due to problems with execution.”

OK. Fine. I have agreement on the above premise. So what? How does that help the companies affected? Well, admitting to the problem is always the first step, isn’t it?

I’m going to devote the next several blogs to this topic. I think I have some helpful hints for the client companies, and the agencies and consultants working with them. I by no means have all the answers, though. So I invite all to comment with any insights you’ve garnered.

Here’s my editorial content list for this series of posts:

Research – the good news is that social media enables ‘lurking and listening’. It’s easy to find and listen in on the relevant conversations that are occurring. The bad news is that this is time consuming. The conversations evolve and you need to keep up to date. Ideally all stakeholders will have their ears and eyes on the appropriate conversations. A (formal or informal) back channel needs to be established for information sharing.
Involving client personnel in the process. This is a biggie. They’re busy people, and they’re crucial to the success of any content marketing or social media endeavor. They need to understand this (the best way is for the CEO to make it a priority). I specifically target sales people because they know what questions prospects need answered, what objections need to be overcome, and the competitive land mines that need to be defused.
Development of target personas. You can’t create compelling content if you don’t have a clear idea of who you’re speaking to. What’s relevant and useful to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next. Target personas should include current customers, and targeted bloggers/media/PR types in addition to prospects.
Determine your content strategy and who is responsible for executing each task. Include an editorial calendar, deadlines, information sources, etc.
Messaging – what specifically do you want to communicate to each target type, and what do you want them to do (what constitutes a ‘conversion’)?
Include distribution, outreach and socialization… the mechanics of how you’ll get your quality content in front of your target audience.
Develop a feedback loop. We’re back to listening here. Track blog comments and reply to them when appropriate. See who retweets or mentions your content in discussions. Make it somebody’s job to document and enter into the CRM system (there are tools available to automate this process).
Budget accordingly. Social media is an extremely cost effective marketing tool, but it isn’t free or even cheap. Understand that it requires a significant investment of time. Ensure that the people assigned are sharp and experienced enough to make this a successful endeavor.

Please let me know if I missed anything (I’m sure I have). We’ll take one topic at a time and within a couple of months, we should have a blueprint to follow to ensure our carefully developed social media strategies are executed successfully.

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Tags: acSellerant, b2b, B2B marketing, Bob Leonard, business to business marketing, content strategy, digital relationships, execution, return on influence, social media, social networking sites, useful and relevant information
Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, marketing strategy, Sales and Marketing alliance, sales enablement, social media, trust | 7 Comments »

Crucial Components for B2B Social Media Success

Sunday, August 29th, 2010

Success in B2B social media marketing is like success in every other endeavor. It requires thought, planning, time and effort. Your social media plan must:

1. Include input from Sales. If you haven’t already, align Sales and Marketing. You can’t afford not to. Sales should be immersed in the conversations taking place with prospects offline. That information is critical to success in migrating, extending and amplifying those conversations online.

2. Be no longer than six months. You can’t plan beyond that. The conversations you need to be having with suspects, prospects and leads is influenced to a significant degree by the environment. Things change in a hurry. Your plan should define how you’ll adapt, not predict the future.

3. Develop and define target personas. Who are you trying to reach? What are their interests, needs and wants? If your content isn’t relevant and useful to that person; it won’t be consumed, remembered or acted on. You have to know, specifically, who you’re engaging in conversation. What’s relevant and useful to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next.

4. Include search engine optimization (SEO), link building, and probably paid search, too. Place your QUALITY content where your targets are congregating online; and take the extra step to PULL others to your blog and website. If they can’t find you on Google, you don’t exist.

5. Have a content strategy that doesn’t assume ‘existing resources’ will do the development. Beyond the strategy itself, this is the most important piece of the plan. Hire someone (either permanent staff or an outside consultant) as a dedicated resource… someone who is an expert at content development. That means not only an excellent copywriter, but one who has SEO skills, and one who understands how to deploy multimedia to communicate your messages quickly, clearly and persuasively.

6. Include distribution, outreach and socialization… the mechanics of how you’ll get your quality content in front of your target audience (which includes not only prospects, but influential people in your industry, in the blogging world, in the media, etc.); and give them the tools they need to comment and distribute.

7. Build in an analytics plan. List key performance indicators (KPIs). What are your goals? They should include traffic, blog comments, retweets, and conversions. This last, conversions, are where the rubber meets the road. What action(s) do you want your targets to take after consuming your content? That must be clearly defined up front. Google Analytics will give you reams of data for free. You don’t want reams of data. You want the half dozen or so stats that will give you a good idea of how well the plan is meeting its goals.

8. Serve existing customers. It’s easier to keep existing customers than it is to obtain new ones. Does your social media marketing plan lay out how you’ll keep your current customers informed and happy? Social media isn’t only a marketing tool. It’s also an excellent research, customer service and PR tool. Make sure your plan leverages it across all those departments.

9. Include Facebook along with Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. There are so many people on Facebook you’d be crazy not to try to reach .01% of them. Also look at niche social networks that may aggregate your targets. Once the content is developed, there are tools that automate the process of distributing to these platforms.

10. Follow through. After the content is distributed, you have to follow through. Your social networks must be monitored; and questions and comments must be answered. That’s the essence of conversation. Listen.

11. Build your house list. It’s your most valuable marketing asset. Your plan should include integration of the various social media platforms into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

12. Include a feedback loop. You developed relevant and useful content for your target audience. You distributed it. You socialized it. You listened and gathered intelligence re what your target thinks of your messaging. You’ve seen which content drives traffic and conversions, and which doesn’t. Feed that information back into the plan. Tweak, and repeat.

13. Be reasonable. There’s a perception that social media is low cost. The price of admission is practically zero, but social media marketing is a process. It requires a significant investment of time. You must listen, participate, and converse over time. Budget money and other resources accordingly.

14. Do the math. The easiest way to check on #13 is to do the math. Your social media plan should put a dollar value on a customer, and provide a worst-case cost estimate for acquiring that customer. Your customer acquisition cost, using social media, should be no more than a few percentage points of the lifetime value of that customer. If it isn’t, something is wrong with either your plan or your pricing.

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Tags: acSellerant, b2b, B2B marketing, b2b sales, business to business marketing, content strategy, digital relationships, execution, LinkedIn, sales enablement, social media, social networking sites, Twitter, useful and relevant information
Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, marketing strategy, Sales and Marketing alliance, sales enablement, social media | 10 Comments »

Posts Tagged ‘content strategy’

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