The Science of Productive Content Marketing Team Meetings

If you want an easy way to help your marketing team produce better content, cancel a meeting. Better yet, cancel your first meeting of the day.

Studies have shown how lapses in productivity often trace back to an overabundance of team meetings. Schedule a status call for first thing in the morning, and a content marketer’s creative juices are virtually guaranteed to stop flowing.

Take a quick look at your calendar for the coming week. How much empty space do you see? If it’s minimal, you could be unintentionally making it difficult for members of your content team to produce their best work.

Allow me to explain.

Meeting predicament

Content marketing involves a lot of moving parts, from strategizing and planning to creating, analyzing, and promoting. Each process is highly involved and requires a lot of brainpower.

Much of it warrants high-level discussion. You can’t achieve higher conversion rates or increase your email ROI if your team isn’t united around a common vision and goals.

However, at some point, content creators need uninterrupted time to research, think, and create. And this is where problems can surface.

As a marketing manager responsible for proving the bottom-line benefits of content marketing, it can be tempting to rely on recurring team meetings and regular check-ins to keep your finger on the pulse of projects and progress. But when meetings evolve into habit, their value tends to plummet.

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When team meetings evolve into habit, their value tends to plummet, says @adeolonoh. ‏#productivity
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A Harvard Business Review article details how one weekly meeting drained a company of 300,000 work hours every year. VoloMetrix research outlines how easy it is for a company of 20,000 employees to waste $300 million on useless meetings. Still other research contends that companies lose $37 billion annually to unproductive meetings.

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Companies lose $37 billion annually to unproductive meetings via @ResearchDigest.
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“Sure, but that’s big business,” you say. “We’re in the niche of content marketing.”

True. But that doesn’t mean we’re in the clear. Something as mundane as a weekly strategy session has the potential to do real damage.

To see how this applies to the realm of content marketing, let’s take a quick look at a hypothetical example.

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When bad things happen to good content marketing meetings

Adam is a great senior content specialist. He’s smart, talented, and full of big ideas.

It’s 2:30 p.m. Thursday. Adam’s been working all week on a new campaign. He devoted several hours to researching, brainstorming, and scoping a potential project – and now it’s time to share his ideas via videoconference with his three-person content marketing team. Thirty minutes into the meeting, everybody’s on board and responsibilities have been divided. By Monday morning, the new initiative is in full swing and everybody’s devoting their most productive hours to prepping for launch.

If the average team member earns $100 an hour in wages and benefits, the 30-minute Thursday meeting cost the company $150.

Now compare Adam’s story to Molly, who has identified a need for an initiative to re-engage lost leads. She, too, works in a three-person team whose members earn the same wages and benefits as Adam’s group.

Molly hasn’t done any research yet, preferring to wait and talk through her half-formed ideas with two colleagues at this week’s strategy session. Hers is one of three ideas to discuss, which takes an hour. Afterward, an ensuing barrage of follow-up emails and group chat turns the one-hour meeting into nine hours of cumulative work.

Thus, the total cost of Molly’s meeting is $900 – a 500% increase over Adam’s 30-minute meeting and zero-related email chains.

The cost difference is not even the biggest issue. Each time marketers are pulled away from creating content to discuss content creation, they inevitably lose a dose of productivity. One study says it takes 23 minutes, 15 seconds to get back on track after a work interruption. NeuroLeadership Institute Director David Rock explains that these shifts in focus can cause people to make mistakes, forget good ideas, and lose valuable insights.

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It takes 23 mins 15 sec to get back on track after a work interruption, says @gmark6 @UCIrvine. #productivity
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That’s not to say you should avoid meetings at all costs. Some meetings are crucial for driving your content strategy forward. Interviews with customers or clients, quick calls intended to replace 25-deep email chains and regular one-on-one meetings all serve valuable purposes.

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Some meetings, customer interviews, brief calls to replace email chains are crucial. @adeolonoh #productivity
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You should be selective by differentiating between meetings that add value and ones that hold your team back. And you should make the meetings you do hold worth their weight in gold. Let’s take a look at how to do that.

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4 steps to productive content marketing meetings

Step 1: Tally your team’s meetings

First, assess the role meetings play in your content strategy and development processes.

If your team uses a shared time-tracking tool, pull those numbers into a spreadsheet. Then sort the columns to total the hours per week attributed to meetings. Or ask each team member to calculate and share his or her results.

Step 2: Scrutinize recurring meetings

When looking at the results, watch for patterns of routine to identify potential offenders. Are certain meetings occurring every week? Every month? Why are they recurring? Do participants come away with action items or are they simply attending routine meetings originally set up a year ago? (Hint: If you see longstanding meetings that go by names like “status check-in,” “daily standup,” or “team sprint,” there’s a chance they may have outlived their original purpose.)

If you need help assessing, ask the following questions:

• Did the content team already spend time thinking about the issues being discussed at the meeting?
• Was the face-to-face conversation needed to move forward on an important project or issue?
• Did people walk away from these meetings with actionable next steps?
• Do the issues at hand in the meeting have a direct impact on the content marketing strategy?

If you answer “no” to any of these questions, there’s a good chance the meeting is no longer needed.

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Step 3: Eliminate the excess

This is the most difficult, and likely the most intense part of the process. Once you’ve identified recurring content marketing meetings that need to go, take back those valuable productivity hours.

What’s the best way to do that? Hit “delete meeting.”

If you haven’t identified a single meeting to eliminate at this stage, you’re either the poster child for productivity or you’re in denial.

For example, do your content creators still brainstorm together? If so, here’s some food for thought. Studies show that too much data from too many people can be disabling. One of the first modern psychology experiments to test the effects of group brainstorming evaluated how effectively a group of four brainstorms to solve a problem versus how one person devises possible solutions. Ninety-six percent of participants produced more ideas when they worked on their own, often at a higher quality.

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Don’t do #content team brainstorming. It’s less effective than individual brainstorming, says @adeolonoh.
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Organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham puts it this way:

The evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.

If you aren’t on the group brainstorm wagon and still haven’t identified a single meeting to eliminate, there’s one last option to consider – experiment with a no-meeting policy.

For example, Asana bans internal meetings on Wednesdays unless it’s absolutely necessary. The goal is to give managers and team members more disruption-free time to focus on work.

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Step 4: Make the most of the meetings you keep

When it comes to charging your content team’s creative juices, some meetings do more good than harm. Here are two key ways to maximize the time you spend together:

• Schedule it at an ideal time (i.e., not the morning) – Behavioral scientist Dan Ariely says we all have a two-hour window when we’re most productive – first thing in the morning. Here’s what the Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics had to say about the subject in his popular Reddit discussion:

One of the saddest mistakes in time management is the propensity of people to spend the two most productive hours of their day on things that don’t require high cognitive capacity. If we could salvage those precious hours, most of us would be much more successful.

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We all have 2-hour window when we’re most productive - first thing in a.m., says @danariely. #productivity
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• Set a time limit – If you’ve heard of Parkinson’s law, you know work tends to “expand to fill the time available for its completion.” Later iterations (or correlations) of this scientific theory have essentially flipped it to say that work contracts to fit the time given it.
   
  Or, considered from another angle: Meetings expand or contract to fit the time scheduled. Book a meeting for an hour, and your content marketing team is likely to fill the hour. Constrict it to 30 minutes, and there’s a good chance you’ll cover the same information – minus the chitchat – in half the time.
   
  Another benefit is that meeting participants will get more out of the shorter meeting. Social scientists have proved that the human brain is wired to pay attention and absorb information for 10 to 18 minutes before it begins to tune out. In simpler terms, people mentally check out of even a well-planned meeting if it goes too long.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a way to make your content marketing team more productive, be deliberate about the meetings you hold. Taking a strategic approach to team meetings can yield some amazing results when it comes to creativity and output.

What about you? I’d love to hear your tips for making content marketing meetings matter. Please share them in the comments.

Want to make better use of your own time? Subscribe to the CMI weekly newsletter for a digest version of the daily email.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post The Science of Productive Content Marketing Team Meetings appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

How to Explain Content Marketing to Anyone

The concept of content marketing has been around for hundreds of years (see this example from 1672), and the discipline has gained incredible popularity since 2007, according to Google Trends.

But, when we recently launched a new e-book that answers common content marketing questions, we learned that many of our readers are just getting started. As such, we want to make sure we continually cover the basics. Whether you are new to the practice, need a new way to look at what you’ve been doing, or need help explaining this to your relatives, this post is for you.

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Content marketing as your family would understand

When people ask what you do, does your response receive a quizzical look? “So, what is it exactly that you do,” they ask after you explain your job.

My husband was in this camp until he told me about a newsletter that covers trends affecting financial markets. He looks forward to receiving it each day. He explained that the newsletters didn’t have anything to do with the funds the broker was selling, but the information was solid and valuable – and it was useful research for the investments he makes.

“That’s content marketing,” I explained. It was an aha moment for my husband’s understanding of content marketing – content marketing is educational but is not about the products the company sells. The vendor offers such good information that you become loyal to the brand.

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#Contentmarketing is educational, not promotional, says @MicheleLinn.
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I can share another example that is close to my daughter’s heart. American Girl uses content to transform something that is a commodity – a doll.

American Girl has so much content – and so many content experiences – for its audience, that it’s truly staggering. For instance, it offers:

• In-person events and experiences (lunch with your doll at the store café, special events such as painting or fireworks, or even hotel packages that accommodate your child and doll)
• Apps
• Games
• Videos
• Quizzes
• Movies

While all the ways American Girl connects to its audience are too numerous to cover in this one post, I’m particularly amazed by its print publications. For instance, The Care and Keeping of You is a book all about growing up for girls. It ranks second in its category (and 76th most popular among all books on Amazon.) It’s from a brand selling dolls – but the subject has nothing to do with the dolls.

American Girl Magazine is a top seller in several categories.

In short, American Girl’s content marketing focuses on how a child can interact with the doll or things that are important to this demographic.

For parents, think about BabyCenter. When I was pregnant and then raising my older daughter, I considered BabyCenter to be required reading. It’s a perfect example of content marketing. According to its website, it is the No. 1 pregnancy and parenting digital destination, and eight in 10 new and expectant moms online use BabyCenter each month. The site is owned by Johnson & Johnson, which sells products for babies.

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Content marketing explained to marketers

Hopefully, those examples make it clear that content marketing isn’t about the brand, your products, or your services. It’s about your audience. What do they care about?

And, more importantly, how can you be the one to provide something no one else is, which in turn elevates your brand from a commodity to something people embrace?

Content marketing is different than traditional product marketing efforts like sales collateral and other product-specific info. Content marketing includes things like educational articles, e-books, videos, entertainment, and webinars that answer specific questions people have and provide them with something they can’t get somewhere else. It’s the best way to turn your product, no matter how common, into something that is not like everyone else’s.

By becoming a credible, authoritative resource on topics that matter to potential customers, your business is more likely to get discovered by the right audience and earn their loyalty and trust – which, in turn, enables your brand to strengthen its customer relationships, grow an active and engaged subscriber base, and even increase its profits.

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Be a valuable content resource to prospects & your business is more likely to get discovered. @MicheleLinn
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How marketers find success with content marketing

While you may be shaking your head at this point and thinking, “Yeah, this is something I want to do,” content marketing isn’t for everyone – and you certainly shouldn’t adopt it because it’s the “in” thing to do.

Content marketing takes a lot of work, persistence, and patience – it’s not for everyone.

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#Contentmarketing takes a lot of work, persistence, and patience – it’s not for everyone, says @MicheleLinn.
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But, it can be an ideal approach if you truly want to provide a better experience for your customers while making a positive impact on the business in terms of its perception and its bottom line.

Here are the main reasons why marketers choose to put in the effort for content marketing.

To be found by the right people (potential customers)

People are asking questions and looking for information via search engines like Google, and you want your business to be at the top of the search results. Answering people’s questions via blog posts, e-books, videos, and other content assets is a key way to make this happen. Of course, showing up is only the first step, but it’s essential if you want to reap the benefits of content marketing.

EXAMPLE: River Pools and Spas changed its mission from being a pool installer to being “the best teachers in the world about fiberglass pools” — and then started to answer specific customer questions in blog posts. As Marcus Sheridan explained, that decision was “one of the most prosperous days of our lives,” as that was when customers started coming to them. View the case study:

To build an interested and engaged audience

Your content is only as valuable as its ability to attract audience members and compel them to engage with your business on an ongoing basis — as subscribers, customers, evangelists, or, ideally, all three. Once you have an addressable audience, your content efforts will help increase sales, gather valuable customer insights, and activate your most ardent followers as brand advocates.

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Your #content is only as valuable as its ability to attract & engage audience members, says @MicheleLinn.
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EXAMPLE: Sony’s Alpha Universe is a content platform dedicated to photography professionals. While its purpose is to drive product sales for Sony’s Alpha line of cameras, the content focuses not on Sony products but on providing information the audience will find educational and helpful. After starting as a blog, the brand diversified its content into a podcast and a training program.

To acquire new customers

Of course, generating revenue is a key goal for many marketers, and content marketing can be a powerful driver. When you build an audience that trusts you and wants to hear from you, they are more likely to purchase your products. For instance, we found CMI subscribers are more likely to take advantage of our paid opportunities such as attending Content Marketing World.

EXAMPLE: TD Ameritrade produces its print and digital magazine thinkMoney for active customers – those who can make trades as often as hundreds of times in a day. In its early days, TDA put the program under review to determine whether it was worth continuing to spend money on the magazine. The leaders persevered and, after approximately two years, received confirmation of its value: Subscribers and readers of the magazine traded five times more than non-subscribers. Simply put, those who subscribed to this magazine became better customers for TD Ameritrade.

To build increased revenue with existing customers

Another reason organizations use content marketing is to create more loyal customers, which has the potential to increase sales through cross-selling or up-selling. In some cases, the brand can monetize content itself.

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In some cases, brands can monetize #content as @SainsburysMag has done, says @MicheleLinn.
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EXAMPLE: Sainsbury magazine, is the top cooking magazine in the United Kingdom, with 3 million paid subscribers —a content marketing effort that pays for itself. But, what’s even more remarkable is that, according to a 2015 survey conducted by the company, eight of 10 readers have bought a product from Sainsbury’s after reading about it in the magazine.

To reallocate or reduce marketing costs

Organizations also use content marketing because they can see similar — or better — results when compared to a “traditional” marketing program.

EXAMPLE: Jyske Bank is a large Danish bank that now also functions as a media company. The company started using content marketing to get better results than its high-cost sponsorship marketing. It created Jyskebank.tv, which produces amazing financial programming, as well as compelling stories the bank believes are relevant to its core audience of younger consumers and small enterprises.

Today, Jyske works with businesses interested in leveraging its media expertise: Instead of laying out cash to support outside opportunities, Jyske receives media partnership proposals from other organizations — an attractive option made possible by the credibility and reach the bank’s content program has helped it to build.

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Do you have more questions about content marketing or do you need help explaining some concepts to your co-workers or clients? Download our e-book, 10 Most Common Content Marketing Questions.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Explain Content Marketing to Anyone appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

This Week in Content Marketing: Amazon, Facebook, and Google All Launch New Content Plays

PNR: This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose can be found on both iTunes and Stitcher. If you enjoy our show, we would love it if you would rate it or post a review on iTunes.

In this week’s episode

Robert ponders whether we can – and should – try to keep up with today’s pace of progress. On the news front, we take aim at Amazon’s new social platform, Spark (thumbs down); Google’s news feed (thumbs up); and Facebook’s decision to add branded sub-groups (jury’s still out). Our rants and raves include building something instead of measuring, and the craze of focusing on technology over strategy; then we close the show with an example of the week on Emily McDowell Cards.

Download this week’s PNR: This Old Marketing podcast

Content love from our sponsor: Smartling (38:50)

Going global with mobile app content – Learn how leading brands are leveraging mobile app translation to capture bigger shares of a fast-growing international market.

Did you know that global downloads across all app stores will increase 20% per year, reaching 352B total downloads in 2021?

In today’s fast-paced and global marketplace, using sophisticated translation software and services is one of the best ways for mobile app companies to distinguish themselves from the competition.

Download this e-book to discover why delivering a localized mobile experience matters to your business.

In this e-book, you’ll learn:

• Projections for mobile app growth and usage across the globe
• Why localization delivers a competitive advantage for mobile app companies
• How to simplify mobile app translation, modification, and distribution

Show details

• (00:01): An advertising blast from the past: “Sony Betamax could change your whole way of life”
• (00:27): Robert muses on this week’s theme: When can we be OK with being behind the times?
• (05:15): Welcome to Episode 193: Recorded live on July 24, 2017 (Running time: 1:04:31)
• (11:10): Content Marketing World 2017 – The largest content marketing event in the world returns to Cleveland on September 5–8. Register today, and don’t forget to use coupon code PNR100 to save $100 on the cost of registration.

The PNR perspective on notable news and trends

• (13:28): Amazon to pay publishers to post on its new social network. (Source: The Wall Street Journal)
• (22:50): Google aims to reinvent news discovery. (Sources: Inc., TechCrunch)
• (30:23): Media companies and brands can now create groups inside their Facebook pages. (Source: AdWeek)

Rants and raves

• (43:17): Joe’s rave: In a recent blog post, Seth Godin made an interesting point about measurement: Just because your stand-by metric is tried, doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s a great reminder that we need to start thinking about marketing in new ways and questioning the answers we come up with.
• (48:00): Robert’s commentary: While Robert found that this MarTech Advisor article rings true when it comes to describing the key challenges of orchestrating a customer experience technology stack, he explains why he wishes the discussion took a more nuanced view of the struggle.

This Old Marketing example of the week

(55:38): Emily McDowell Studio: Emily McDowell was diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 24. After experiencing a great deal of loneliness and isolation from her well-meaning friends and family, who were at a loss as to how to support her through her struggles, Emily McDowell came up with an idea for a line of emotionally direct sympathy cards to express the kinds of heartfelt statements she wishes she had received. Though I first learned of her powerful story from this Slate article, I did a bit more digging and came to discover a classic case of Content Inc.-style marketing done right. Not only did Emily start her entrepreneurial journey with a simple blog on a hyper-niche topic that she could cover better than anyone else, as her influence and audience support grew she then diversified her content, built a business around her communication philosophy, and is now achieving the kind of success that This Old Marketing examples are made of.

Image source

For a full list of PNR archives, go to the main This Old Marketing page.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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The post This Week in Content Marketing: Amazon, Facebook, and Google All Launch New Content Plays appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Zendesk Shares Keys to Creating an Outrageously Successful Brand Publication

Editor’s note: Monica Norton is a finalist for 2017 Content Marketer of the Year. We will be sharing insight from all CMY finalists in the blog before the winner is announced at Content Marketing World this September.

Many brands struggle to stay out of the spotlight in their content. They begin with good intentions to quietly wait in the wings, but over time the brand creeps back to center stage.

Zendesk, however, created a publication that hardly includes the brand. Its newest property, Relate, is all about improving professional relationships. In a growing library of content – articles, podcasts, print magazine, and in-person event – the SaaS company’s customer service product rarely makes an appearance.

Monica Norton, Zendesk’s senior director of content marketing and a 2017 Content Marketer of the Year nominee, says the brand publication, now in its second year, has been enormously successful. Relate’s website pulls in over 40,000 monthly visitors, boasts an email database 10,000 strong, and hosts in-person events that attract 2,000 attendees.

More than two-thirds (68%) of the Relate audience was not in the Zendesk database, meaning the brand now reaches readers who might not have encountered the company on other channels.

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68% of new publication @JoinRelate’s audience were not in @Zendesk’s database, says @monicalnorton. #CMWorld
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Lightly branded publications like Relate are ideal ways for brands to reach a broader audience, and even to turn marketing from a cost center to a revenue generator. For those looking to move in this direction, Monica shares her top takeaways from two years at the helm of Relate:

• Pick the right audience and topic.
• Get (and keep) executive buy-in for building the audience first.
• Focus on consumption metrics before moving to conversions.
• Make the right hires, but don’t rely exclusively on in-house, full-time employees.
• Don’t be afraid to go big.

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Talk to the right people about the right things

Picking the right audience and subject for a brand publication is crucial, for both its early success and its ability to eventually deliver business results. Monica stresses that you want a topic that’s communicated at a sufficiently high level to reach a larger audience, but it also must be something about which your brand can speak with authority.

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Picking the right audience & subject for a brand publication is crucial, says @monicalnorton. #CMWorld
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“Relationships are something we talk about at Zendesk,” she says. With Relate, “we were seeking areas where we could move away from customer service to elevate the conversation, but something where we felt we still had authority on the topic, like managing important relationships between your colleagues and your customers and partners. We cover everything except romance. That’s on you.”

The key is finding a topic beyond your brand and what you’re selling, but still within the domain of what your product is about. Otherwise there’s a disconnect. Zendesk, for instance, wouldn’t publish about the topic of marketing. Audience members familiar with the brand would be confused, and the content wouldn’t attract an audience that might one day become users for its customer-service software.

Monica says a well-targeted topic also helps content teams with internal positioning because it’s easier for employees outside of the content marketing team to understand how the publication fits in with the organization’s goals. Professional relationships are “a natural extension to what our business is,” according to Monica. She says an area “ripe for investigation” makes it the ideal topic for a brand to explore with content.

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Grow grapes, not radishes

Growing a brand publication like Relate is like cultivating a garden of grapes. The crop may take a while to get going, but the harvest will be worth it. Monica built this expectation into early conversations with her executives to make sure the new experiment would have plenty of time to blossom.

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Growing a brand publication is like cultivating garden of grapes. It requires patience. @monicalnorton #CMWorld
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“You won’t be able to show results within a quarter,” she cautions. “You’re not growing radishes that will be done in a month. It requires patience.”

Even before she took the job as senior director of content marketing, Monica got the lay of the land at Zendesk by interviewing the CEO about his views on content. Confident that the company understood the value of a long-term commitment to audience building, she secured a year-long runway for the Relate project to prove its value.

As new executives join Zendesk, Monica ensures that each new member of the C-suite understands how the brand publication fits in with the larger marketing strategy by meeting with them early on.

Internal marketing for these kinds of publications doesn’t stop once they’re launched, Monica cautions. To maintain momentum, you have to keep marketing in your own organization.

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Build trust before you try to convert

Keeping a running conversation is one of the best ways to ensure that a brand publication builds an audience and earns its trust.

A lot of companies want to advance quickly, says Monica, and the only way to build an audience rapidly is to create a site that’s totally about them: “If you go into it thinking about your end goal it won’t seem authentic, like it’s not for them but for you. Build the site for the audience first, and then figure out what percentage of that audience could be an actual buyer, and how to get them over to the company. That’s the key.”

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The only way to build an audience rapidly is to create a site totally about them, says @monicalnorton. #CMWorld
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At Relate, early data has focused on consumption metrics to make sure the content has resonated with the audience. Only now, nearly two years after its inception, is Relate moving toward a more conversion-centric approach.

And even as the focus shifts toward converting more readers into Zendesk customers, Monica and her team remain committed to keeping the connection authentic. Only content clearly about customer service links to the software, and there’s never a hard sell.

The content marketing team constantly hears stories from the sales team about Relate readers who had been consuming content for months or over a year, and then naturally chose Zendesk when they had a software need. Those kinds of stories prove that the loose connection between Relate and Zendesk is effective, but Monica believes now that the audience is established, the time has come to move from anecdotes to hard data.

Hire, outsource, and borrow in the right proportions

Relate is only half of Monica’s job; she also handles all Zendesk content marketing. Building the right team has played a huge part in its success.

Two editors report to Monica, one is in charge of Relate and one manages Zendesk content. The Relate editor was a “very last minute” hire – two weeks before the launch date. Monica says it’s hard to imagine how Relate could have been so successful without its editor.

Monica calls her a “unicorn” because the editor studied journalism and also worked in the customer service space. Her subject matter expertise means that not everyone who works on Relate needs to be an expert because the editor acts as quality control to make sure the content is accurate in addition to keeping the publication on track.

Of course, even with a great person in charge, resource allocation can still be a challenge. Relate and Zendesk both maintain healthy freelance budgets and are constantly experimenting with new writers to supplement the internal staff.

And even though Relate has only four full-time employees, the project generates so much excitement within Zendesk the team can pull in other resources as needed. Relate acts as kind of an internal start-up, Monica says, and being able to work on it keeps writers, designers, and even developers excited and energized.

“They love it more than anything else,” she says, “because it’s so different. They get to play around and use those creative muscles in different ways than they usually do. It benefits the whole company, because it helps us bring enthusiasm to all our work in general.”

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Big bets create big results

After its initial launch as an online magazine and in-person event, Relate expanded to include an annual print publication and a podcast. Over the last two years, Monica and her team have provided tons of outstanding content to an ever-growing audience while delivering results to their parent company at Zendesk.

She encourages anyone who can get sufficient lead time from their leadership to consider a similar branded content initiative. Even if the brand publication doesn’t succeed, the net results will almost certainly be positive.

“Even if we had to shut Relate down tomorrow, we could use 50% of the content on Zendesk because it’s so nicely connected,” Monica says. “If you can get runway it’s absolutely worth trying. If you work the right angle even a failed experiment is a net gain.”

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If you want to learn more about what the top marketers are doing, sign up for your free subscription to Chief Content Officer magazine.

Make plans to attend Content Marketing World Sept. 5-8 in Cleveland, Ohio, to hear who wins Content Marketer of the Year 2017 and learn from industry experts so you may create an award-winning content marketing program yourself. Register and use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Editor’s note: A special thanks to Ardath Albee who scoured the planet looking for the best-of-the-best content marketers. She was instrumental in helping us find our 2017 Content Marketer of the Year finalists.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Zendesk Shares Keys to Creating an Outrageously Successful Brand Publication appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

4 Simple Ideas for Great Blog Video Content

Contrary to popular belief you don’t need Hollywood-esque production value to create great video content for your blog. Frankly speaking some of the best blog video content stems from fairly simple ideas that are properly executed to create compelling content.

If you would like to create great blog video content, here are a few simple ideas that should give you a good place to start:

How-to guides and tutorials

Creating a guide or tutorial that shows viewers how to perform a certain task that they may be interested in or helps them to solve a particular problem is inherently useful. As far as informative content goes it is hard to beat a good guide, and if you get a bit creative you could really make it stand out. At the heart of every good guide is a simple set of step-by-step instructions, and once you figure out what those are the only thing you really need to do is decide on the best way to show the audience how to perform each step. Check out a great site called HowToGeek.com for more examples.

Interviews

Although often overlooked, interviews can be a great type of content. This guy built a whole website just with interviews! Bear in mind you don’t have to interview a ‘celebrity’ – anyone who can speak from a position of authority about the topic or has a unique perspective could make for a great interview. If it isn’t possible to record a face-to-face interview with a subject, you could even record footage from a video call instead.

Personal stories

Telling a story related to your blog’s niche can be a powerful way to foster an emotional response – particularly if the story is inspiring, humorous, touching, or something else of that nature. The video itself can either be a simple vlog, or it could incorporate other elements to help you to ‘show’ certain parts of the story.

Product reviews

Reviews have always been a popular form of blog content – video or otherwise. The advantage of recording product reviews as videos is that you can showcase the product better and pinpoint precise areas of interest to the viewer. As an added benefit product reviews are an excellent way to promote products that you feel are useful.

As you can see none of these ideas are particularly complicated, and most can be recorded with a simple video camera or a video recorder. Not only can it record the footage that you need but it also has a built-in editor that will let you edit and improve the videos that you record.

At the end of the day it doesn’t take dazzling special effects or a spectacular cinematic approach to create great blog video content. Initially you may want to experiment with different types of ideas, so that you can get a feel for what the audience on your blog responds to – and based on the ideas listed above you should already be able to come up with some topics worth pursuing.

Original post: 4 Simple Ideas for Great Blog Video Content

This post is courtesy of: https://www.dailyblogtips.com

How Content Influences the Purchasing Process: Tips for Content Marketers [Research]

Each year at CMI, we survey marketers about how they use content marketing and how they find success internally. The insights are useful, but what we also want to know is what’s going on in the minds of the people who consume the content?

So, we were happy to join forces with SmartBrief when approached about doing a joint research project on how content influences the purchasing process. The survey represents the views of 1,200 SmartBrief subscribers who are involved in the purchasing process. The research focuses on what type of content is most influential, how these decision-makers perceive content coming from a vendor, and more.

You can download the report or read on for a few ideas on what content marketers like yourself need to know.

Decision-makers rely on you for info

Perhaps not surprisingly, 81% of respondents conduct research before they bring you, the vendor, in to discuss a project.

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81% respondents conduct #research before they bring vendor in to discuss a project via @SmartBrief @CMIContent.
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But you may be surprised by how much decision-makers want to hear from you. The majority say they have no preference on where they get their information – including 40 percent who say the source of the content doesn’t matter, as long as the information is credible. And 24% prefer information to come from the vendor they’re considering.

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40% of buyers say source of #content doesn’t matter, credibility does via @SmartBrief @CMIContent #research.
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YOUR ACTION: The data confirms something most of us know (although it’s good to share with any naysayers): Decision-makers want to hear from you.

You have a substantial opportunity to provide insights and answer questions – and doing so helps information-seekers find you.

While much has been written on how to answer your customer’s questions – and get found on search – I like this common-sense (yet often overlooked) approach from Andy Crestodina. He walks through how to better understand a user’s intent when searching – and how to create something that your brand will actually rank for.

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Original research is considered highly influential

If you were to guess which source of information had the most influence on a purchasing decision-maker, you may hazard a guess that peer recommendations come in at the top – and you’d be right. But, right after word of mouth is original research.

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Right after WOM, original #research has most influence on a purchasing decision-maker. @SmartBrief @CMIContent
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Original research ranks as far more influential than many other types of content, including product-focused tactics such as product reviews, demos, third-party reviews, etc.

YOUR ACTION: I’m a huge fan of original research as I have seen tremendous results from the marketing side – and I was glad to see decision-makers look so favorably on this as well.

While tackling original research isn’t necessarily easy, it’s worth the effort – and it’s something I consistently suggest to people looking to build their audience. In a recent post about the challenges and opportunities facing professional services marketers, content marketing manager Christina Galoozis from consulting firm West Monroe Partners commented that these marketers consider research-based content the most effective content they produce.

Christina explains, “It’s because we have something original to say that the reader can’t get anywhere else. We are investing in more proprietary surveys this year than ever before.”

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#Research gives us something original to say to readers, says @Galoozis.
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Research has played such a critical role in CMI’s growth that we have a full-time research director, Lisa Murton Beets (who is sharing her secrets during Content Marketing World). Our PR consultant, Amanda Subler, offers step-by-step instructions as she spreads the word about our research, which gets written about or quoted at least once (usually more) per day every single day.

Decision-makers are sharing via email instead of social

It’s not news that social shares should not be your primary metric (Steve Rayson covers this really well), and the research gives us another way to look at this.

We asked decision-makers how they share information about purchasing decisions with their teams, and a whopping 82% say they send information via email. As you can see in the chart below, only a tiny percentage share information with their teams via social media.

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82% of respondents say they share info w/ teams about purchasing decisions via email. @SmartBrief @CMIContent
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This finding mirrors that of a study from RadiumOne which contends that 84% of the sharing that takes place is via dark social. If you are not familiar with the term “dark social,” it is everything that is shared from one person to another (think: email, instant message, etc.) This type of sharing is very difficult to track, but it’s useful to understand that when you track social shares you are likely only seeing a small piece of the puzzle. This post from Hootsuite offers a great primer on dark social if you want to learn more.

YOUR ACTION: First, if you are getting pressure to show social shares, share this research. If you are trying to reach the decision-maker, the number of shares for your content is likely not a good measure of your content’s effectiveness.

Beyond that, think about how you can make your content more shareable via email – or how you can craft something that can be shared during calls or as standalone documents. Toby Lee, chief marketing officer, legal business unit, at Thomson Reuters, also offers a good suggestion. Let’s say someone attends a webinar. Instead of communicating only with that individual, spark a conversation between that attendee and his or her manager who likely is the person involved in a purchasing decision.

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Think about how you can make your #content more shareable via email, says @MicheleLinn.
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Conclusion

Your audience really does want to hear from you, and you can make simple changes to your approach to ensure that you are giving decision-makers what they want.

Editor’s note: A special thanks to Lisa Murton Beets, CMI research director, and Nancy Reese, CMI research consultant, who created this research and helped with this post.

Download the full report on how content influences the purchasing process from SmartBrief and CMI.

Learn more about how to use research in your own content marketing at Content Marketing World, Sept. 5-8. Register today. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.

The post How Content Influences the Purchasing Process: Tips for Content Marketers [Research] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Should You Trust Artificial Intelligence to Drive Your Content Marketing?

Before breakfast, I check my Facebook and LinkedIn newsfeeds for a quick synopsis of the day. As I jump in the shower, I hit “download” on a recommended movie on Netflix, knowing I have a long flight this evening. While wolfing down my cereal, I click once to buy a gift for a friend’s birthday next week. My iPhone pings to tell me that I need to leave now if I want to make that early meeting 54 miles away. And as I get in my car, I use voice activation to play my favorite Spotify playlist, and Apple Maps informs me it will take five minutes to drive to the train station this morning.

With real examples of demonstrable value in the market, we can no longer sarcastically joke that AI means “almost implemented.”

We are all being conditioned to rely on technology in our daily lives, not just for communication, but also for decision-making. This ever-deepening interface with technology is rewiring our brains to process information differently, as Nicholas Carr writes in The Shallows. It is the same with our customers.

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The ever-deepening interface w/ technology is rewiring our brains to process info differently, says @roughtype.
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Popular consumer apps have led to the unconscious mass adoption of advanced, predictive technology. And yet … while we are increasingly outsourcing our cognitive processes to myriad consumer apps and tools, the enterprise is only now waking up to this new level of customer expectation. This lopsided adoption is most clear when we consider that we now trust a car’s built-in collision-avoidance system to protect our lives, yet still question whether a machine can recommend what to write next in a marketing program or which customer should receive a new product offer.

We trust artificial intelligence to drive our cars safely but not to recommend marketing strategy.

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We trust artificial intelligence to drive our cars but not to recommend marketing strategy, says @andjdavies.
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Inconvenient truth

Over the past 10 years, marketing automation has grown into a billion-dollar industry by promising to bring personalization and efficiency to marketing programs. The siren call of automated lead nurturing, lead scoring, and triggered responses to critical prospect activities has proved irresistible to B2B organizations: There were nearly 11 times more companies with marketing automation in 2014 than there were in early 2011 (SiriusDecisions), and 60% of companies turning over at least $500 million adopted marketing automation by 2014 (Raab Associates).

However, the inconvenient truth about first-generation marketing automation is that it is not really automated. It is a fantastic central workflow tool that can achieve scale, but it requires resource to set up, integrate, manage, and optimize. Indeed, in many B2B organizations, the phrase “feed the beast” has been accepted into marketing parlance as a way of describing the resource demands of marketing automation. Most fundamentally, there is the issue of rule creep. As you set up campaigns, you define business rules: “If A happens, then do B” or “If the individual has this characteristic, then put them in segment 4.” These can be simple to start with, but are always an inadequate reduction of complex and varied buyer journeys. So, you add more rules to make the campaign more targeted. And every time you measure results, the outcome is that more rules need to be written. Some of our enterprise clients estimate that they spend $500,000 per year on these manual elements of marketing automation – and that is disregarding the vital and significant investment in ongoing content creation.

While marketing automation promises the world, what it actually does is automate the execution of content marketing, while decision-making remains an impractically manual effort. It offers marketers a strong workflow and even insights, but fails to provide an automated way to act on those insights at scale. Fundamentally, the content in those systems is dumb; the system doesn’t understand what the content is about and who should read it. To track those looking at how to address this, Forrester recently started a new research theme it calls “content intelligence,” which it defines as “the use of artificial intelligence technologies to understand and capture the qualities inherent in any content.” As the marketing technology analyst David Raab says, “Something has to give: Either marketers stop trying to make the best decisions or they stop relying on rules.”

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First-generation marketing automation automates execution; decision-making remains manual effort. @andjdavies
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Expectation gap

In the face of relentlessly rising customer expectations, leading marketers are investing in AI-based tools – a category that encompasses everything from personalization tools that “learn” from individuals’ online behavior to recommend content more effectively, to tools that can detect minute patterns across massive consumer data sets and predict future behavior. These are some of the most interesting on the increasing list of potential applications for AI in marketing:

• Content strategy – recommending what content to create next
• Campaign strategy – recommending what sequence of communications to deliver
• Personalization – recommending the right content for each customer based on behavior
• Segmentation – clustering customers based on behavior or intent
• Copy automation – automatically generating subject lines and descriptions
• Lead or account prioritization – ranking leads or accounts by their likelihood to close
• Sales strategy – recommending the right product/service offering and content to use in sales
• Sales intent – predicting the right product offering, deal size, and close date
• Retargeting – recommending the right content within retargeted ad units

Since the major marketing suites have yet to fully deploy or productize their AI offerings, adopting AI usually requires a blend of point solutions and data sets.

Indeed, marketers are increasingly piecing together their own technology stacks from best-in-class point solutions, allowing the technology to be built around customer need rather than vendor features. Especially in complex customer environments – for example, high-touch relationship sales with long purchase cycles – the application of AI promises to start bridging the gap between customer expectation and actual experience. This is most pertinent in global businesses, as AI solves for (and relies on) scale.

For Byron O’Dell, senior director of marketing at IHS Markit, employing predictive machine learning rather than marketing automation has been about overcoming the challenges of scale. He explains, “enabling marketing relevance at scale is challenging, but predictive machine learning is giving us a path to achieve this.”

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Predictive machine learning is giving us a path to achieve marketing relevance at scale, says @byronodell.
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Initially, most marketers are considering two key use cases: personalization and predictive lead scoring. Personalization entails matching content to the evolving customer need, particularly when content is produced at scale and often poorly classified. Predictive lead scoring is driven by the insatiable desire for new sales conversations, where the signals that identify an interested account are difficult to identify or uncover.

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Insights-driven business

These new approaches address a fundamental challenge: The buying process has changed, with the buyer increasingly empowered, informed, and connected, but enterprises are largely selling in the same way they always have. Using content to attract, engage, and convert is part of the solution, but leading marketers are also using content to understand the customer.

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Leading marketers use #content to understand the customer, says @andjdavies.
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In an increasingly competitive world, any business that does not understand its buyers will rapidly lose market share as new digital-first competitors grow. Disruptors obsess about their customer; they focus on delivering a superb and seamless customer experience; they are unencumbered by obsolete technology and rigid processes. They appreciate that gaining and acting on deeper customer understanding build competitive advantage.

Forrester Research is building a body of evidence around what it calls “insights-driven businesses.” One definition of these businesses is that they have no friction between the point of understanding the customer and the point of delivering the next response. There is a feedback loop that is completely automated. The cohort of businesses Forrester defines in this category – fast-growing companies innovating based on customer understanding and experience – should be truly terrifying to incumbents.

Marketing AI promises unstructured, real-time customer interactions that deliver value. Current rules-based systems simply cannot scale nor can marketing teams complete a manual process in the time required to deliver relevance.

Success factors

As an increasing number of businesses are investing in AI-based approaches, the commonalities among successful projects are becoming clearer.

• Executive sponsorship – Time and again, clear executive sponsorship for the overall concept rises to the top of the list. While mid-level marketers may successfully buy point-solutions, larger organizations will find that to open the right data sets and drive overall business value, they eventually need an executive sponsor to champion a more automated approach.
• Defined outcomes – Early innovators had to make leaps of faith without a known objective. But as the vendor landscape matures and client examples are documented, every project can and should have objectives linked to valued and measurable business outcomes.
• Available data set – Most experts would agree a mediocre algorithm with a large data set always trumps a great algorithm with a small data set. Dig into the options available, clean up what you can, integrate new data sources, and run tests to see results.
• Team composition – Although the aim of AI systems is to reduce manual tasks, the technology still needs to fit into a team and business process that understands its value. Increasingly, non-technical business users are being served, but for the meantime, it is important to ensure that the team understands data and are technical enough to grasp the strengths and shortcomings of an algorithmic approach. Perhaps more importantly, they must be humble and eager to learn, and data-driven (i.e., willing to link activity to results).
• Vendor selection – Although there is a case for building in-house or using an agency for a bespoke application, the menu of options on the market from vendors is increasingly robust. To choose the right vendor, ask about the data set, try multiple competitive demos or trials, and push to understand whether the system is pre-trained or requires you to do it.

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Predictive enterprise

A shift toward the predictive enterprise requires an ideological and practical rededication to understanding the customer. The competitive advantage afforded by artificial intelligence is not based on the algorithm or the eventual application, but rather on understanding the customer in more depth – and acting on that insight in the moment.

The obvious obstacles are exclusively organization-centric: politics, technical roadblocks, resource constraints, and not-invented-here syndrome. Yet in a flat world, with disruptive new entrants focusing on a quality and seamless customer experience, the only sustainable option is to invest ahead of the competition.

To twist the overused Wayne Gretsky quote, it’s time to skate to where the market is going, not where it has been. The irony is that in this case, you don’t need to guess or rely on instinct. The customer already moved. As a customer, I expect a Facebook-inspired content feed, with the resultant privacy trade-off. I expect Amazon-like recommendations to be useful. And, a la Google, I expect you to anticipate my needs and offer help before I ask. Bring on the intelligent and predictive enterprise.

Thoughts on beginning

Initial forays into predictive marketing have hooked into the first-party profile data in large customer management and CRM systems. It’s not always clean data, but it is a good start. The deeper and more defendable approaches tackle a fundamentally harder problem: turning unstructured customer data into actionable insight.

Unstructured data, often called dark data, is largely unused within the enterprise, yet comprises 88% of all data gathered (IBM Research). At Idio, we summarize our approach to dark data with the thesis, “You are what you read.” What we mean is that the content you consume is highly indicative of your interests and highly predictive of your intent. AI-enabled tools analyze this dark data – essentially how your customers engage and behave with your content – to predict their interests and intent, and personalize their experience.

Consider using this project checklist to help your venture into predictive marketing:

• Do I have executive sponsorship for an AI-based approach?
• Have I defined several business outcomes?
• Is there an urgency and clear time frame to achieve those outcomes?
• Is there a data set to model?
• Has my team bought in to the project?
• Have I assessed the build-vs.-buy decision?
• Have I created a short list of vendors?
• Are their systems pre-trained or is there a lengthy training process?

Definitions of key terms

As you’re beginning to truly use the benefits of AI and predictive marketing, it’s important for everybody to be grounded with the same definitions. Here’s a brief primer:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is the science of building machines that do things that would be considered intelligent if done by a human.
• Machine learning is the subset of AI that allows computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. Common machine-learning use cases are optimization (over time choosing the best option to achieve a set goal), identification (extracting meaning from images or text), anomaly detection (isolating an event that occurs outside of the norm), and segmentation (clustering based on inferred or known characteristics).
• Content intelligence is the application of AI to content management, most notably the understanding and classification of content to improve targeting and measure performance.
• Predictive marketing is the application of AI to marketing, usually to identify prospects, predict what they might be interested in, and recommend the next best piece of content or product information.

Conclusion

With this understanding of AI and some tips on how to get started, it’s your time to turn “almost implemented” into an AI reality to improve your enterprise marketing and truly understand and connect with your customers.

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 Should You Trust Artificial Intelligence to Drive Your Content Marketing? appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.