Friday, June 30, 2017

Content Marketing Industry: What’s Happening in Hiring [Research]

content-marketing-industry-hiring-researchHiring a new member for your content marketing team seems like a great thing. After all, whether you’re expanding the team or replacing a departing employee, you’ll have more resources to execute a successful content marketing program.

But finding and attracting quality creative content team members is a job unto itself. It’s a challenge faced by 45% of advertising and marketing executives, according to a survey of 400 U.S. industry leaders by The Creative Group.


45% of ad & marketing execs are challenged by finding quality content team members. @CreativeGroup
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In this post, we dive deeper into the data about content marketing hiring. We will explore talent costs, regions with highest demand, and how companies work to retain employees.

Hot markets

Which U.S. cities have the greatest number of content marketing jobs? Here are the top 20 with the greatest number of content marketing jobs, according to Conductor’s Inbound Marketing Jobs Salary Guide 2017:

  1. New York
  2. San Francisco
  3. Chicago
  4. Los Angeles
  5. Boston
  6. Seattle
  7. Washington, D.C.
  8. Atlanta
  9. Austin
  10. Dallas
  11. San Diego
  12. Houston
  13. Philadelphia
  14. Denver
  15. San Jose
  16. Miami
  17. Phoenix
  18. Minneapolis
  19. Charlotte
  20. Orlando

Compensation figures

Starting salaries for content jobs are on the rise, as reflected in The Creative Group 2017 Marketing Jobs Salary Guide:


Starting salaries for #contentmarketing roles are on the rise, says @CreativeGroup research.
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Screenshot 2017-06-19 21.42.50

Content skills in highest demand

Data analysis, and content writing and editing are the most important skills companies are looking to hire this year, according to 2016 Digital Content Survey, Altimeter, a Prophet company.


Data analysis & #content writing/editing are most important skills to hire for. @AltimeterGroup #research
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Here’s how respondents who were asked the four most important skills they were looking to hire in 2017 listed priorities:

  • Data analysis – 67%
  • Content editing and writing – 59%
  • Program/project management – 53%
  • Graphic design – 50%
  • Coding/development – 50%
  • Video production and editing – 47%
  • Marketing automation/software expertise – 42%
  • Social media expertise – 18%

Multiple talents needed in one role

Roles in content marketing blend creative, technology, and analytics so companies seek individuals with more than one area of expertise.

As the authors of The Creative Group 2017 Salary Guide wrote:

Hybrid professionals are in demand. Creatives with skills outside their specialty are highly marketable. In addition, digital proficiency is becoming a prerequisite for many traditional roles. For example, graphic designers now need to be familiar with web layouts or social media, and copywriters must have knowledge of search engine optimization. Expect this pattern to persist as cross-departmental collaboration becomes the norm.”

That insight is mirrored in Conductor’s Inbound Marketing Jobs Salary Guide 2017, which reveals almost one in two content jobs (46.7%) requires SEO skills. These roles include content marketing specialists, content managers, content directors, and marketing manager positions.


One in two #content jobs requires #SEO skills, according to @Conductor research. #hiring
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HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
The New Era of the Hybrid Marketer

Employee retention

With content marketing talent in high demand, companies seek to reduce turnover. The Creative Group survey revealed that more than half of advertising and marketing executives (52%) said they are concerned about retaining their current creative staff in the next 12 months.

They also shared their talent-retention activities. Here are ones cited by at least half of the group:

  • Regularly evaluate performance and discuss career development – 78%
  • Regularly check in with employees to ensure that they are happy in their roles – 74%
  • Regularly benchmark compensation and benefits to ensure that you stay competitive – 71%
  • Have a formal retention strategy – 51%

Key content marketing roles

The Creative Group, an employment agency, reports that the following positions are fast becoming crucial assets on the marketing team.

Concept and Implementation

Creative technologist: Serves as a liaison between design and development teams; scopes digital projects

Digital project manager: Oversees the implementation of multimedia projects

Digital strategist: Develops user-experience (UX) strategies, including information design, online content strategy and lead generation tactics for web, mobile, email, social, and digital advertising media

Content

Content strategist: Develops content strategy based on a company’s business objectives and end user’s needs

Writer: Composes clear, concise, and grammatically correct content using different writing styles that appeal to various target audiences

Marketing

Digital/interactive marketing manager: Oversees the daily operation of a company’s website and email marketing program, and provides analytics review

Email marketing specialist: Runs email campaigns, including managing and segmenting contact lists using marketing automation software

Social media manager: Implements an organization’s social media strategy — developing brand awareness, generating inbound traffic, and encouraging product adoption

Conclusion

As you can well know, hiring and retaining creative talent is not an easy task. It requires a keen understanding of the marketplace – geographic, industry, skills – and a strategic approach to ensuring that you not only pick great talent but you also keep them engaged.

Research in this article is reprinted with permission of The Creative Group, Conductor, and Altimeter.

Want to learn more about these roles and others? See The Creative Group’s 2017 Salary Guide, available here.

A version of this article originally appeared in the June issue of Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our bimonthly, print magazine.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Content Marketing Industry: What’s Happening in Hiring [Research] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Bingeable Content: How to Move Buyers Through Your Sales Cycle Faster

bingeable-content-move-buyers-sales-cycle-fasterNot that you or I ever do it – plop down on the couch, put up our feet, click on the TV, and gorge ourselves on a full season of, oh, say, The Americans. Netflix has mastered the art of prompting us – I mean, prompting people – to binge on its streaming content.

Nick Edouard, co-founder and president of LookBookHQ, suggests that we marketers make like Netflix and entice prospective customers with content they can binge on. He made this point at the Intelligent Content Conference in his talk Never Waste Another Click: How Intelligent Content Experiences Can Accelerate the Buyer’s Journey.

What does Nick mean by “never waste another click”? He means, stop sinking all your energy into getting people to click through to single (“dead-end”) content assets. Instead, focus on keeping people engaged – hooked, even – after they click.

Why? Because your best prospects will move more than twice as quickly through your sales funnel – and are more than twice as likely to buy – when you reward their hard-won clicks with “bingeable” content, based on what Nick has seen with his clients.


Reward clicks with bingeable content and prospects are more likely to buy, says @nickedouard. #intelcontent
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All images in this post come from Nick’s ICC slides, and all quotations, unless otherwise noted, come from his talk.

Typical marketing approach: Single-asset content offers

Marketers are good at creating content that’s “one and done” – or, as Nick says, “one and dumb.” We create an offer that dangles a single content asset (white paper, presentation, etc.) in the hopes that people will click our offer and give us their contact info. Conversion! Score! We hand over the content asset. That’s that.

single-asset-content-offere-example

This approach has several weaknesses:

  • The content is often a dead-end asset. Where does someone go after the conversion?
  • The content looks the same for each person who clicks. Nothing about this experience is personalized.
  • Engagement with the content can’t be measured — you have no idea whether prospects even looked at it.

While “one-and-dumb” content may get the contact information you want to kick off a lead-nurturing process, it squanders the larger opportunity to give your prospects – and your company – more rewards per click.


Are you creating “one-and-dumb” content? @nickedouard #intelcontent
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Besides, B2B leads rarely result in sales. “The average end-to-end conversion ratio (initial lead to closed deal) for B2B marketers is 0.75%,” says Forrester analyst Lori Wizdo in her 2012 report.


The average end-to-end conversion ratio for B2B marketers is 0.75% via @loriwizdo @forrester.
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“If we don’t know that people are engaged with the content when we hand them over to sales,” Nick says, “sales is in no position to have an intelligent conversation with them.”

A smarter approach: Content-rich (bingeable) experiences

An “in-session, bingeable experience” offers visitors a set of related-content choices. Just as people binge-watch TV shows, they consume online content in concentrated ways when they’re engaged. People don’t wait for a marketing team to dole out a piece of content every two weeks; they click around looking for answers to their questions, following their curiosity for long stretches, never moving from their seats. As Nick says:

Marketers need to do a better job of accommodating this natural behavior. ESPN gets it. They aren’t happy if I read just one thing and then disappear. They want to hold my attention. They’re aggregating and promoting more relevant content to me in-session. They’re doing a lot of things to keep me engaged.

Like Netflix, ESPN essentially plays matchmaker between its content and each viewer. Our job as B2B marketers is to play matchmaker in a similar way between our content and each prospect.

Bingeable (match-made-in-heaven) content provides “in-session content sequencing,” as shown in this example:

content-sequencing

The left sidebar lists a set of content assets that people might want to select. For a walk-through of these content assets, in their listed order, people can click “next” in the promoter box on the right.

A set of content assets like this may be manually curated by marketers, similar to the way you might create an iTunes playlist. Alternatively, the set may be dynamically created by artificial intelligence– machine-learning algorithms – based on factors like the relationship between the content assets, data on how people have engaged with these content assets in the past, metadata, and so on.

If the click that brought someone to this URL came from a $15 ad expense, “the return on that $15 is now far higher” because your click-to-content ratio has rocketed from one to one, to one to many. Your prospects have access to a whole set of content assets to explore, not just one item to download.

Why bingeable experiences require intelligent content

It’s intelligent content – including artificial intelligence built into the content system – that enables Netflix to guess what programs its customers would enjoy. Here are some recommendations Netflix made based on what it knew about Nick:

content-discovery-example


Bingeable content requires an intelligent #contentstrategy, says @nickedouard. #intelcontent
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Netflix does its best to read our minds not only when we browse (as shown above) but in session too. For example, as soon as Nick finished watching Episode 3 of Narcos, Netflix immediately promoted the next episode, as you see in the lower-right-hand corner:

content-discovery-example-2

Want to offer content experiences that give your visitors a Netflix-like sense that you’ve read their minds? If so, your martech stack needs intelligent content delivery, shown in gold here:

intelligent-content-delivery

Here’s how Nick explains this intelligent content layer:

It needs to work with your marketing automation platform, with the database, with your CRM. It needs to use first- and third-party data. And it then feeds back into email. If Bob has already engaged with three or four content assets, let’s accelerate him through the nurture. You don’t need to send him emails two and three because he’s already engaged. Let’s move him to email four.

In other words, the intelligent-content layer enables you to “accelerate the buyer’s journey” by enabling prospects to “self-nurture.” As a result, in Nick’s experience, those prospects reach buying readiness sooner.

Intelligent content delivery has two parts:

  • In-session content options: The system must display related content that visitors are likely to find enticing. “We’ve done the hard work of getting Bob to click something. How do we allow Bob to binge on the right content while we have his attention? How do we let Bob self-nurture? How do we let him accelerate?”
  • Engagement analytics: The system must track individuals’ engagement with the content. “We have to be able to answer questions like these: Did Bob consume our content? If so, is he likely to be ready to go on to the next stage? What other content did he engage with after the first click? What do Bob’s choices tell us about his interests?”

Model for delivering intelligent content

Here’s Nick’s model for delivering intelligent content:

intelligent-content-delivery-model

This model requires us to answer these simple but challenging questions:

  • (Left) What do we know about this visitor?
  • (Right) What do we know about the content?
  • (Middle) How does this visitor engage with the content, and how does the content inform the visitor?

For a given visitor, your system’s ability to make welcome content recommendations – in other words, your ability to create a bingeable experience – depends on your answers to all three questions. And the usefulness of your answers to these questions depends on the usefulness of your metadata and your engagement metrics.

Wanted: Better engagement metrics

The problem with most analytics is that they tell us what people’s fingers did (what they clicked) – not what their brains did. Analytics don’t know whether people read the content. They don’t tell us whether people are now more informed or more engaged.

In fact, what people do on the destination side of the click is more important than the click itself.


What people do on the destination side of the click is more important than the click itself, says @nickedouard.
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Marketers typically treat the click as the measure of digital marketing, and “it’s not a good enough measure,” Nick says. We need to think like publishers. We need to ask, was the content consumed? By whom?

Nick gives the following example with fictional names – Mark Johnson and Skefington – representing people who clicked on a certain email.

marketing-engagement-report-example

In a marketing automation platform, both clicks would look the same. Here, however, we see that Mark Johnson (top row) spent only 32 seconds on the video. He got a bit of information, and disappeared. Skefington, on the other hand, watched the video for a minute and a half. Then he read the Forrester report for three minutes. He read about unified CX for five minutes 43 seconds. In all, he spent 10 and a half minutes across four content assets. We know that Skefington is better informed now. “He’s in a mood to get something done. He has to be at an advanced state of sales readiness,” Nick says.

Nick’s model for intelligent content delivery depends on meaningful engagement metrics like this. As a marketer, you need to know how engaged people are with your content. You need to know about the Skefingtons out there. All clicks are not the same.

What can you expect in return for creating the kind of content experiences Nick advocates for? His customers’ results show that in comparison with prospects who have minimal engagement with an organization’s content, the most engaged prospects are more than twice as likely to buy, and they move through the sales funnel at least twice as quickly.

Conclusion

Marketers would be wise to mimic what Netflix does in creating content-rich experiences that prospective customers and customers will find irresistible. How bingeable is your content? What is your content team doing to move from single-asset content offers to fuller, more content-rich experiences? What results have you seen? Please share what you’ve learned in a comment.

Here’s an excerpt from Nick’s talk:

Sign up for our weekly Content Strategy for Marketers e-newsletter, which features exclusive stories and insights from CMI Chief Content Adviser Robert Rose. If you’re like many other marketers we meet, you’ll come to look forward to reading his thoughts every Saturday.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Bingeable Content: How to Move Buyers Through Your Sales Cycle Faster appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

17 No-Cost Ways Writers Can Extend Reach of Their Editorial

extend-reach-editorialOn LinkedIn, a writer recently lamented:

The frustrating thing is, time spent on (promotion) strategies would detract from time spent doing my job, writing content for my clients. It feels like we are focusing more on the pot of gold, not the rainbow.

As a writer, do you feel the same way?

My take is that organizations need to look at how the team as a whole is spending its time to make sure there is ample time to promote. And the person who commented on LinkedIn is also right that writers need to spend most of their time writing. But, there are things writers and editors can do to extend the reach of the content they have spent so much time and passion creating.

In fact, this was the focus of a recent internal lunch-and-learn presentation that CMI Community Manager Monina Wagner and I put together. The tips were helpful to the companywide UBM team, and we wanted to share them here as well.

These ideas aren’t meant to be comprehensive of everything an organization can do to extend its reach. Rather, these are all things writers can do on their own or with the help of another team member (such as a designer or web person). We did not talk about things like email or paid promotions, which are valid ways to extend your reach as well.

The list below is practical – and, perhaps even better, everything on this list does not require any budget asks.

One additional note before we dig in:

This tip – as well as many of the others below – is about extending the reach of your best content. How do you know what your best content is? You can read about the key reports and the process I follow in Google Analytics to determine what content we want to prioritize for sharing. And, if you want to get yourself even more organized, use these insights to come up with your content essentials checklist.

Ideas using existing website traffic

We all spend so much time on our websites with the production of new content, it only makes sense to get as much from that time – and traffic – as possible. This first set of ideas covers how to do just that.

Click to Tweet

Click to Tweet is a snippet of text called out in your blog post that someone can easily click and tweet (as that name aptly implies). An example:

click-to-tweet-example

We’ve been using Clicks to Tweet in our blog posts for the past 18 to 24 months and have loved the results. As a writer, I anecdotally see my posts being shared on Twitter with those Click to Tweet statements.


Use @WordPress plugin Better Click to Tweet to make it easy to share your #blog post, says @MicheleLinn.
Click To Tweet


SUGGESTIONS:

  • Consider how many tweets you want to use per post. We typically include two to four.
  • Keep the Click to Tweet text to approximately 110 characters to provide ample space for the URL as well as retweets.
  • Include relevant hashtags and Twitter handles of authors as well as those mentioned in the text.
  • Review the stats from your Clicks to Tweet to see what is being shared. For instance, we find that tweets with stats and short, impact statements do best. Often, the first Click to Tweet in a post does well.

TOOL SUGGESTION: We use Better Click to Tweet, but there are several options available.

Include links to your best posts within blog posts

Have great posts you want to share more widely? Include them in your new posts. We have tried various formats, and here are two that work well.


Have great posts you want to share more widely? Include them in your new posts, says @MicheleLinn.
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Our “handpicked related content” callout simply includes a link to one or more related pieces of content, as you can see in this image:

handpicked-recommended-content-example

Like all blogs, we embed links within our posts to related content. Our general rule of thumb is to only include links that provide additional information to a reader when it would be helpful. We do not want to include a link simply for the sake of adding a backlink.

TOOL SUGGESTION: Wondering what is working well? Use your web analytics tool so you can see what people are clicking and what format works well. I love Google Analytics Chrome extension that lets me see what internal links are being clicked on any page in our website. This example comes from a recent post I created:

google-in-page-analytics-clicks

Add links to your best posts from older, high-traffic posts and pages

While adding links to great posts as you continue to publish may be somewhat obvious, remember that you can add links to older posts as well.

Andy Crestodina shared that Orbit Media always adds a link to a new post from an old post as part of the publication process. This is a fantastic idea!


Add a link to a new #blog post from an old post as part of your publication process, says @Crestodina.
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Even if you don’t go that far, consider how you can get traffic to your best content. For instance, whenever we publish an e-book, the author sends a list of updates for our web person to make, including updated links and existing articles, as well as updated calls to action on related posts. For instance, here is a snippet from an email that covers some of the changes to make when we published a new influencer marketing e-book.

cta-option-list-example

Have a popular-post widget on your site

Another simple thing to include on your website is a popular-post widget that makes it easy for readers to browse your best posts. If you work with outside writers, this is also a great place to point people when they want to see some examples.


Include a popular-post widget on your website to make it easy for readers to browse best posts. @MicheleLinn
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TOOL SUGGESTION: The popular-post widget we use is WP Tab Widget by MyThemeShop.

Organize your posts by category and topic

Another thing you can do to organically extend the reach of your content is to make sure you have a taxonomy in place, which often manifests itself as your website categories and tags.

This is a work in progress at CMI, and we are doing a lot of work on the back end that is not yet visible. The goal is to help our readers surface related content through breadcrumb trails or other pages – and extend the reach of what we have.

While this conversation could easily be a post in and of itself, if you are starting down this path, figure out five to seven key topic areas your editorial covers. It’s ideal if these areas don’t overlap. While this is not yet visible on our site, we are using the following categories to organize our content:

  • High-level strategy
  • Editorial process and teams
  • Content creation
  • Distribution and promotion
  • Measurement and reporting
  • Trends and research
  • General success tips

These topics cover the steps of the content marketing process plus two non-process categories. As such, these categories also serve as an additional checkpoint to make sure we are covering the topics that stay true to our editorial (i.e., if a topic doesn’t fit into one of these categories, then why are we covering it?)

Editorial outreach

Lisa Dougherty, who manages our blog, is a master of personal outreach. Each of the following ideas is taken directly from how she works with authors – those mentioned in our posts, as well as team members.

Send blog post previews to your authors

Lisa sends previews of upcoming articles to our blog authors approximately one week before scheduled publication. Not only does this give authors time to make last-minute corrections if needed, but it also gives them easy ways to share their posts. Below is an example :


Send previews to authors w/ ways to share their posts to help w/promotion, says @MicheleLinn via @Brandlovellc.
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post-email-preview-example

Lisa also follows up with each author after the first comment on the blog as a reminder when the post is live – and the author can easily refer to this message for sharing ideas.

TOOL SUGGESTION: Lisa uses Outlook’s Quick Parts to make templates for emails that are sent repeatedly. Google Mail has a Lab that has a similar functionality called Canned Responses. Both tools can be customized easily.

Email previews for roundup posts or mentions

Occasionally we run roundup posts with input from influencers (who are helpful for promotion, by the way). Lisa sends an email about a week in advance with the publish date, the URL, and pre-written tweets so it’s easy to share and schedule in advance as you can see in the example:

roundup-email-example

You also could send this after the piece is published. See what works best for you and your authors.

Celebrate your top bloggers

If you have contributors to your blog or other content, you can extend the reach by celebrating your top authors after their posts have been published. While we no longer do this, we used to have a top blogger badge we shared with our top authors each month as you can see in the example:

blogger-badge-tweet

This badge not only shows appreciation for your authors, but it also recirculates your best post. People love awards like this and often share them and/or post them as badges on their website or LinkedIn profiles.

And, as a side benefit, it also gently reminds your best authors to write for you again.

Reach out to individuals on LinkedIn

Another tactic Lisa uses to show our appreciation for our contributors and extend the reach of our posts is to share each post over several months on multiple social platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

For example, on LinkedIn, mention contributors by name with the @ symbol to increase post visibility. This example had 851 views for 15 minutes of Lisa’s time.

linked-in-social-mention

TIP: Long-form content is shared more than short posts on LinkedIn.

Email signature

Another easy thing to do is to include your best posts – or the best posts from your company – in your email signature.


Include your best posts in your email signature for additional exposure, says @MicheleLinn via @Brandlovellc.
Click To Tweet


Here is an example from Lisa’s email that includes a post that she has written as well as a list of our top posts from 2016.

email-signature-example

Make one-on-one asks

In addition to asking contributors to share their posts – and making it as easy for them as possible – we do the same thing for our team members.

Lisa is fantastic about reaching out to team members with occasional, specific asks. For instance, she’ll send me a chat message to ask me to share a specific article on Twitter or LinkedIn. As someone who can have tunnel vision, I appreciate how easy she makes this – and I’ll always share what she is asking.

While shooting an email or making a request to the entire team can also work well, I am partial to one-to-one asks because you don’t see a flood of people from the team all sending the same set of tweets (although that can be effective).

Republish content

This next set of tips extends the reach of some of your best content by publishing it again.

Bring back your best posts

I’ll be honest: Our team had several conversations on the validity of the bring-back approach, but I’m glad we tried it – and the results have been surprisingly good. Our Back by Popular Demand posts are often some of our top-performing posts for the month.

You can read about our process in detail, but here are a few notes:

  • We republish posts with substantial updates as well as those with few or no updates. In general, the results are equally good.
  • All republished posts are called out as such through an editor’s note as well as an image that includes the Back by Popular Demand branding.
  • We wait about a year to republish our posts.
  • We look at organic search traffic to decide which posts to handle.
  • As mentioned in the tip above, use Google Analytics to see which links are getting clicked on and update the post using that data. Remove the links that people aren’t clicking on and update the post with better information whenever possible.

Publish your print articles

Do you have articles in print whose life you can extend by publishing them digitally? At CMI, we have CCO magazine, and we republish many of the articles on our blog with a call to action encouraging readers to subscribe to the print version.

Share your best content with your team to see if there are additional opportunities

I also send monthly editorial updates to the team using this process and template.

However, I’ll share a quick story that may help simplify things: The end-of-the year holidays hit and I got busy. I dropped the team update from my to-do list and thought no one would notice – but several people asked about it. It was a great way to follow up and ask what was most useful about that report. Every person told me the slide on top posts was what they cared about the most.

How does the team use this info – and how does it help us extend our reach? Here is one example. I moderated a webinar in April with Aaron Orendorff. He had written a post about building your email list we published in September 2015. It did so well, we brought it back by popular demand in September 2016. That piece also performed fantastically, made this top-performing list, and we reached out to Aaron to present that same topic in April. That’s a lot of exposure that sprang from one post! And that would not have happened had the team not shared what was working well.

Content and social media

Content and social media are intersecting more and more frequently. This is no surprise to those on the front lines (like community managers) because they increasingly see the need for closer collaboration.

Quality content is the key to any successful social media strategy. Users who find content interesting, unique, and informative freely share it on their social channels, leading to higher engagement for the brand. In turn, analyzing that engagement can inform marketers on how their content is resonating with their target audience. It’s a cyclical relationship – informing and depending on each other. At CMI, we employ four tactics to help us extend our reach.

Curate

The first tactic is to curate. The way businesses do social isn’t much like the way consumers use social. Yes, our content appears on Facebook, but we use scheduling dashboards, link-shorten tools, image templates, and a lot of tools that the average person doesn’t use. We’re scheduling content well in advance at a much higher volume than most people realize (often dozens of posts per day).

In fact, when CoSchedule, a curating and publishing app, researched the idea of sharing content more than once on social media, it found it can increase clicks by over 3,000%.


Sharing content more than once on #socialmedia can increase clicks by over 3,000% via @CoSchedule.
Click To Tweet


Our social media content calendar organizes how we curate content. We keep it simple and straightforward. Our calendar guarantees that our audience will not hear the same message at the same time across all channels. For example, on the day of publishing, we craft three to five separate tweets that we’ll publish at different times.

social-media-content-calendar

Here, we post content from our blog on LinkedIn three times a day. These blog posts include items first published at least two months prior. This maximizes attention brought to the post and increases the chances of traffic to the website.

Our social media calendar also ties back in with the best posts that are shared each month. Once Monina, our community manager, receives the top-performing posts for a certain month, she adds them to a spreadsheet because we want to leverage popular posts as much as we can while they are relevant. This is where we can assign specific dates throughout the next three months to make sure they get play in our calendar.

social-media-best-performing-schedule

SUGGESTION: A few people on the Lunch and Learn asked about frequency of posts on each of the social channels. While trends change and you need to continually test, this is the frequency at which we post:

  • Twitter: Once an hour
  • Facebook: Three times a day
  • LinkedIn: Three times a day
  • Google Plus: Twice daily
  • Instagram: As needed

Create

Our next tactic to promote content is to create new content. You may be thinking: “What? You have to create content to promote existing content?”

Social media has historically been used for sending traffic to your blog, but a relatively new trend is people reading your content on social media itself. How do you use this trend and still promote your blog? By repurposing your blog post into social media content and linking to the original source. You can do this by creating assets in several formats.

Visuals have high viral potential. Images attract more attention in the news feed, and they can be shared more than any other type of content.


Images attract more attention in news feed & can be shared more than other types of content. @MicheleLinn
Click To Tweet


For instance, we pick several quotes from our blog posts (or from Joe Pulizzi’s books) and turn them into graphic quotes. One example:

graphic-quote-example

Quotes can be more effective than just including the title of your blog on an image. For example, we tweet a title and the blog post link as text and include an image with an interesting quote from the post, too.

graphic-quote-example-2

In addition to quotes, we pull charts from our research reports and add a question to engage audiences. Or we pull an image featuring a content marketing example. A link to the corresponding blog post or report is included with each of the images.

social-media-image-post-example

Leverage

Our third social media tactic for sharing content is not sharing our content but more supporting our community’s content. Specifically, we look to leverage the influencers. They can be existing community members, speakers, or sponsors. Think of it as building relationships so that when your brand – and content – comes up, they are more willing to listen.

Getting on an influencer’s radar is not easy, so we often share pieces of content written by our influencers that would be of interest to our community. When we share their content, they often notice it. And this encourages them to say “thank you” with a share of CMI’s content.


Share #content from your influencers to get on their radar, says @MicheleLinn via @MoninaW. #socialmedia
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To track what our influencers are creating, CMI frequently uses its Twitter lists that are organized by categories of influencers, such as speakers, sponsors, blog contributors, and CMI Twitter Chat participants.

Here, we share content from Jay Baer, a Content Marketing World speaker and friend of CMI. A few days later, Jay’s company, Convince and Convert, shared an article from our blog.

sharing-content-example

One trick to consider is using social-media listening to see who’s sharing your content and where they’re doing it. We monitor not just “@” mentions but also keywords and general conversations. It helps us stay in tune with what our audience is talking about and foster a community so they are more apt to share our content.


Use #socialmedia listening to stay in tune w/ what your audience is talking about. @MicheleLinn via @MoninaW
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CMI is the first to know when someone needs to take sick leave and we know who their favorite sports teams are. We know when they’ve graduated from Content Marketing University or when they’re excited for our events.

audience-engagement-social-media-example

Think of it as seeing what your audience’s lives look like – professionally and personally. Engage with them in a genuine way, even if it doesn’t have to do with a project you are working on. Forming this relationship with them leads to advocacy for your brand – and your content.

Discover

Our last tactic is to discover what the media is up to. You can follow trending news and industry topics to see how your content may be a fit.

At CMI, we follow top reporters from outlets where we’d like to get coverage. When we realize a reporter is talking about a topic we have intel on, we can reach out to them.

Social media is also great when pitching your content. Here we let reporters know about our latest research.

Also, just as you can with influencers, you can form a relationship with reporters via social media. Be on top of what’s happening with them and let them know you’re listening. When you know what they’re talking about, they’ll remember that the next time you call them with a pitch.

research-report-social-share-example

For each research report, we put together a targeted Google spreadsheet of influencers who might be interested in the report (you can download and customize this template). We pull the names from our substantial network of CMI bloggers, Content Marketing World speakers, Content Marketing Awards judges, and influencers who are friends of CMI.

For our research, we create a one- to two-page reference guide, which is a cheat sheet of all the information we plan to include in a press release about the research. This information includes: title of the research, a one-paragraph research summary, and other pertinent information. The goal is to make life as easy as possible for bloggers or journalists to increase the chance they will write about us.

amanda-subler-research-reference-sheet

Conclusion

While we suspect you already have been using some of these ideas to extend the reach of your content, we hope you picked up some new ideas as well. And we’d love to learn from you – what other ways can writers get the word out about their content?

Editor’s note: CMI Community Manager Monina Wagner and Senior Blog Manager Lisa Dougherty contributed to this post.

Subscribe to CMI’s daily newsletter for more tips, plus trends, insight, and more on content marketing.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

The post 17 No-Cost Ways Writers Can Extend Reach of Their Editorial appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

How Technology Content Marketers Can Earn Trust [Tips and Examples]

technology-content-marketers-earn-trustIn our tech-driven culture, you might think that technology brands should have it easy when it comes to marketing their products and services.

From self-driving cars to customer-service chatbots and smart refrigerators that place grocery orders to cloud apps that enable global teams to collaborate in real time, technology is the ultimate driver of beneficial change. It pushes the boundaries of what humans can achieve while simultaneously becoming more deeply entrenched in everything we do in our daily lives. In terms of both its potential and its current value, few industries offer a more universal appeal.

Not to mention that today’s consumers seem to have a boundless desire to stave off their FOMO by gobbling up the latest gadgets and gizmos the minute they come to market. This is the kind of demand “problem” that marketers in most industries can only dream of.

But along with the benefits of fueling our cultural evolution come some significant marketing challenges, including high industry competition, steep audience-learning curves, implementation-related privacy and security issues, and a lot of unpredictability at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Creating informative, engaging content marketing is a great step in the right direction, but only if it is properly positioned to reach the right audience at the right time to influence their decision-making process. And, compounding all these challenges, the buyers themselves are also changing – how they search for product advice, whom they trust to provide reliable recommendations, and how they filter and weigh the constant influx of data available to inform their decisions.

All of this puts the onus on marketers to provide the useful, valuable content the buyers need at the right time to drive a purchase, and to continually support customers’ needs after those purchases are made – a goal that is often easier said than done.

Let’s take a look at some of the challenges that impact tech marketers in more detail:

Different buyers mean different priorities and processes

One factor that heavily impacts tech marketing is that today’s buyer’s journey is less predictable than ever.

Technology products and services aren’t necessarily one-size-fits-all; naturally, each buyer has unique priorities and challenges that impact his or her selection criteria, as well as research method. All this variability makes it difficult for marketers to anticipate an individual buyer’s needs and deliver helpful content that will drive each one toward a purchase – even when those consumers access information on the brand’s owned media channels.

Behavioral trends also indicate that millennials travel another type of buyer journey. For example, Centerline Digital’s John Lane says millennials in the marketplace aren’t searching for “XYZ Company” as much as they’re directly searching for products or solutions. Not only do you need to create quality content that will draw their attention and provide the insights and information they seek, you also need a strong promotional strategy to make sure that content surfaces at the precise time and on the precise platforms they prefer at any given stage of their buyer’s journey.

An abundance of information channels complicates communication

Of course, getting audiences to discover your content at all – let alone at the right time and place – is no small task when you consider the sheer number of communication outlets they can use to find helpful, trustworthy tech advice.

Today, buyers can tap dozens of competing information sources with the touch of a finger – from posts in social media news feeds to third-party product reviews and advice from fellow consumers shared on YouTube channels, personal blogs, and more. And, the messages delivered on many of these media outlets often are beyond the brand’s control, making it difficult for businesses to overcome any negative perceptions audiences might encounter in their search.

Adding complexity is that buyers’ media preferences are often highly time- and situation-dependent – i.e., they may favor a certain platform for one part of their research process, then abandon it once they move to the next step.

Furthermore, a lot of variability happens on the platforms themselves. As Centerline’s Executive Creative Director David Baeumler points out, different channels (particularly social channels) have different conventions and interaction styles; and the popularity of each platform, as well as its rules of engagement, can shift quickly – and without much notice. Since messaging on every possible platform at once isn’t feasible for most businesses, he cautions marketers to make sure their content marketing strategy centers on the channels that align most strongly with their brand’s voice and values, and to pay close attention to the trends and behavior patterns shaping current conversations.


Center #contentmarketing strategy on channels aligned most strongly w/ brand voice & values. @sosundays
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HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
4 Secrets to Building Social Momentum

Influencers are everywhere – and they are taking over

Just because consumers may connect with your business on social media; willingly engage with your video, blog, or email content; or even share your messages with their own friends and followers doesn’t mean you’ve earned their undivided attention, their trust, or their interest in purchasing from you.

Tech has become a highly commoditized industry; it can often be difficult for vendors to distinguish their benefits from other vendors – especially if the brand can’t compete on price. And even if you are able to convincingly communicate your brand advantages, it may not translate to an initial sale, let alone ongoing loyalty. For instance, if a consumer happens to experience any friction or unforeseen delays on the path from consuming your content to converting into a customer, the consumer will likely move on to the next vendor on the consideration list without a second thought.

While conversion-ready moments can be triggered – or interrupted – at any time and place, John and David also point out that those moments are increasingly being driven by trusted influencers rather than the brands themselves. As they see it, this means influencer marketing should play an essential role in the overall marketing mix. They advise tech marketers to look for like-minded influencers in the space and engage them in the content creation process: “Find people who already have a large network and are well respected amongst your target audience, and build a relationship with them that will be mutually beneficial,” John says.


#Influencermarketing should play essential role in the overall marketing mix, says @johnvlane @sosundays. #tech
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David reminds marketers in this space that many of the most-accessed online channels are built on conversations rather than canned content. He recommends preparing your internal subject matter experts and content team to deliver ad hoc content on the fly when relevant opportunities arise. Doing so is an important step to becoming a proactive part of the influencer equation – rather than a silent witness to it. “The more prolific your internal experts become in participating in these conversations, the more they will elevate their personal brands – and your company’s – as a result,” he says.

4 tips to amp up your tech content

Find the humanity in your technology

Content marketing success often boils down to how well your business demonstrates its understanding of the audience’s needs and how well it convinces them that you offer the best solution. When it comes to the tech industry, the ability to translate highly technical concepts and complex details into clear, compelling storytelling is often critical to this mission. Marketing success in this industry may just hinge on your brand’s ability to frame its products and services in terms of how they impact consumers’ lives – or enable them to further their goals and dreams. Use their aspirations as your inspiration to focus on creating a relatable experience through your content.


Use your audience’s aspirations as inspirations to create relatable content experiences. @johnvlane @sosundays
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For example, John and David point to the way GE has used multiple channels to tell a connected story of “Imagination at Work” without letting the story overwhelm the strategy – or vice versa. “They’ve found ways to explore new channels in powerful ways … But regardless of channel, medium, and style of communication, they’re constantly focused on stories of value,” John says.

Example: GE’s Millie Dresselhaus video – Women’s issues are at the forefront in the media these days, making it the perfect time for GE to share this video-based vision of a world in which women scientists, like Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree Millie Dresselhaus, are as revered and respected as today’s rock musicians and reality stars. It’s an engaging “what if” story, yet it’s also a meaningful one, as the message directly ties to the brand’s pledge to increase its ranks of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) roles.

If you can’t originate, differentiate

While tech brands may be leading the charge when it comes to innovation – on both the business and societal landscapes – not every product or service can be the first of its kind in this industry. Fortunately, there’s plenty of room in the market for solutions looking to one-up the competition by offering benefits like advanced features, unique functionality, greater user-friendliness, or increased cost-efficiency. But to rise to the top, your content needs to make it clear how your offerings differ from those of your competitors.


Your #content needs to make it clear how your offerings differ from your competitors, says @joderama. #tech
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Example: Lenovo’s Think Progress – In the crowded B2B tech space, PC vendor Lenovo recognized it needed to move beyond price-based messaging to compete for a share of IT buyers’ attention. Its agency, King Content, developed an “always-on” integrated approach to creating and sharing original branded content – doing so in seven languages – on topics of interest to IT decision-makers. The content was hosted on a series of B2B sites called Think Progress, and was designed to engage the target audience on an emotional level, entertaining them and enabling them to explore the latest technology trends, while simultaneously demonstrating Lenovo’s unique understanding of their pain points.

Lenovo think progress

Use context – and exercise caution – in customization efforts

According to CMI’s 2017 Technology Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, tech marketers are high adopters of marketing automation tools – with 74% using them in their organizations. Among the benefits these solutions provide is an increased ability to customize the content distributed to leads and prospects. But just because consumers are becoming more accustomed to the presence of personalized ads and information in their news feeds doesn’t mean they want to feel like automation is overshadowing their individuality or getting a little too personal.


#Tech marketers are high adopters of marketing automation tools – w/ 74% using them in their orgs. @cmicontent
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For example, research indicates that buyers want content to be relevant to their jobs and roles, but they aren’t necessarily interested in — or susceptible to — being marketed to by the perceived stage in the buying process. Only 17% of respondents said they like that type of targeting.

John Lane takes this to mean that buyers are looking for more ad hoc, context-driven communication (via social channels, forums, and the like) rather than carefully planned content around queries that come up at particular stages of the buyer’s journey. “Pay attention to the conversations going on and create content to be a part of it, rather than trying to presuppose all the answers,” he says.


Pay attention to conversations and create #content to be a part of it, says @johnvlane. #tech
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Example: Autodesk’s Redshift blog – After the software company’s original standalone blog, Line//Shape//Space, grew too successful to continue to scale, Dusty DiMercurio, the company’s head of content marketing and strategy, recognized the need to evolve the original vision and expand its scope. Relaunched as Redshift, the blog now reflects a more modern editorial vision, which includes providing innovative ways for customers to shape the content experience to their current interests. For example, registered visitors can choose to follow particular authors and content categories, and they receive customized content selections based on the actions they take on the site during their visit.

autodesk-redshift blog

Don’t confuse content visibility with marketing victory

While a wildly viral content piece can rocket a tech company to the front of consumers’ minds, it doesn’t necessarily convince them to give their attention beyond that single moment of interaction, let alone offer up their hard-earned tech budget or discretionary income. To turn initial awareness into true conversions, brands need to focus on establishing a trusted, enduring customer relationship by delivering a consistent stream of quality content. As John and David remind us, winning at modern marketing is about continuity of engagement rather than pieces or campaigns.


Winning at modern marketing is about continuity of engagement rather than campaigns. @johnvlane @sosundays
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Example: SquareSpace’s Side Hustle Stories – Website tech company SquareSpace partnered with The Guardian to produce an ongoing content series that shines a light on non-traditional career opportunities in today’s gig economy. By informing the DIY set about ways to forge their own paths in pursuit of their passions, SquareSpace encourages the audience to follow their dreams while solidifying its own role in helping them come true.

side-hustle-stories

Want more insights, ideas, and examples on how your tech company can leverage content marketing to its best advantage? Register to attend the Technology Lab at Content Marketing World 2017. Use promo code BLOG100 to get $100 off registration.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How Technology Content Marketers Can Earn Trust [Tips and Examples] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.