Category Archives: Content Marketing

Is content marketing merely a PR exercise?

No, I’m not asking this question. Avinash Kaushik has raised this question in his recent newsletter. Actually, he has taken an example from a Think with Google web page and has dissected various sections of the page to illustrate that the writer has merely thrown around his verbosity without communicating anything concrete. Here is the web link to Avinash’s latest newsletter update.

The title of his newsletter is very apt: “Stop telling me Jesus was great”.

What it means to say is, through your content, stop telling something people already know. Stop telling that has been told thousands of times already. Tell something that I don’t know. If you are simply regurgitating everybody else’s message, through your content marketing you are just indulging in sophisticated PR exercise to get traffic to your website.

There is a reason why I’m talking about Avinash’s newsletter. The example that he has given is not of content marketing but of landing page copywriting.

From the landing page copywriting example, he has tried to deliver a larger message – your content marketing should be about communicating something which is highly useful, and hasn’t yet been communicated.

The Think with Google link actually makes no sense. It tries to deliver a very weighty message but in the end, ends up conveying nothing. The writer seems to be too impressed with himself or herself.

He first mentions three pointers published on the Google link: 1: Accumulate and integrate. 2: Unearth insights that matter. 3: Turn data into action.

Is there something new what is being said above? Doesn’t everyone these days tell you to use data to get insight? Aren’t organizations and even political parties using big data to decide what is the next step they need to take?

Anyway, I’m not writing this post to talk about what Avinash has to say about this particular link and it would be better that for that you read his update on the link above. I’m interested in the last para of his newsletter:

There is one major flaw in my analysis above. Perhaps the point of Content Marketing is to selfishly engage in Public Relations exercises. Hence, there is absolutely no attempt at understanding what the audience wants/needs and no attempt at creating anything that solve for anyone except the pimping company. The only goal is to cheat the audience of their precious attention. This strategy would be odd, but if that is your explicit strategy then nothing I’ve said above applies.

I can understand his general comment on the state of content marketing, that it is often used to create a senseless presence on the Internet to draw traffic from all over the web and when people actually arrive at the website, no purpose is solved. In that sense, you may like to read 3 Most Important Objectives of Content Marketing.

But pertaining to the Google link, it is a copywriting failure rather than a content marketing failure.

Content marketing is definitely not merely a PR exercise. It is an educational exercise. You educate people so that they can make a better decision.

I will give you an example from my client without revealing his identity:

My client is offering a service that is being offered by thousands of other service providers. But there are some features that only he is providing.

His problem is, his target audience doesn’t even know what problems it is facing. For his content marketing, he needs to

Make people aware of the problems they are having.
Explain to them what they are losing due to the problems they have.
Tell them that an efficient solution is available.
Tell them that that efficient solution is available with my client.
Convince people into going for that solution.

So, it is a complete educational process. Through ongoing education, I need to tell the prospective clients of my client what they are missing if they’re not working with my client.

Efficient content marketing empowers your customers and clients. It gives them solutions they’re looking for. It also gives them solutions they’re not looking for presently, but they need those solutions.

This should be achieved in very plain language unlike the Google link above. Live examples should be given rather than simply making claims.

Show, don’t tell, is the fundamental principle of content marketing.

12 Rules to Make Your Content Marketing Successful

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While trying to find some topics on content marketing on Quora, I came across this old question: Does content marketing work?

This is an old question and it was posted back in 2015 by Neil Patel, but still, almost daily I come across this question on various content marketing forums and blogs.

Publishing content and distributing it is an age-old form of content marketing. In his book Epic Content, Joe Pulizzi refers to The Furrow magazine that was published and distributed back in 1895. Here is the full story of how the company that sold John Deere’s new revolutionary steel plow used content marketing to sell the new equipment.

The Furrow‘s first issue was printed in 1895, and its reader base grew drastically in the immediate years that followed. The magazine focused on educating the farmers about the latest advancements in the field and also shared solutions to problems that existed then. Longtime Furrow art director Tom Sizemore associates the success of the magazine with their content strategy that focused on the farmer’s problems rather than on John Deere products.

It is said that the Star Wars movies have made close to $5 billion for its makers and promoters, but the merchandise sold in the name of the movie has done business close to $12 billion. This is one of the biggest examples of the success of content marketing – create a platform and then using that platform, generate business.

Just like any other field, content marketing has its clearly-defined rules. Follow the rules and guidelines and your content marketing is going to succeed. Ignore the rules and guidelines, well, at your own risk.

A few months ago I wrote The never changing fundamentals of content marketing. The fundamentals, the rules, the guidelines, or whatever you call them, keep you on the right path. It’s like, when you are cooking a recipe, there are certain ingredients you cannot avoid. Although you can experiment, the fundamental ingredients have to be the same otherwise you will be cooking something else and not what you originally intended to cook.

Want to make sure that your content marketing is successful? Aside from following fundamental guidelines I have mentioned above, here is a nice post that talks of The 12 simple rules of successful content marketing. In whatever context, in whichever language you talk of these rules, they hardly change. Even their digital existence doesn’t alter their behaviour. These are the rules the above post talks about:

Create unique content: The importance of unique content cannot be understated. The sole purpose of content marketing is to give you a unique identity. If you are publishing something that is available on every second website or blog, how are you going to stand out? You can stand out only when you publish something unique, something totally different from what the others are publishing. Publish fewer blog posts, web pages and social media updates, but always publish unique content.
Tailor your content according to the medium: Content marketing will require you to publish content on different media. For example, you may publish blog posts, web pages and articles on your own website. Twitter has its own limitation of 140 characters (although this limit is being raised up to 280 characters). Images and shorter updates do well on Facebook. The point is, in order to be successful in content marketing, publish content according to the medium you are using to publish it.
Create or write relevant content: Is your content useful to people? I publish a content marketing and content writing blog to share my knowledge of my profession. Suddenly if I start publishing film reviews or recipes, will it do any good to my business? I don’t think so. So, always create or write content that is relevant to your business.
Follow a content publishing schedule: Even when people don’t consciously realize it, they get used to hearing from you at a particular time or during particular days. Also, to optimize your content marketing effort, you should publish your content when there is the greatest chance of your audience coming across it. Suppose, most of the people who follow you on Facebook come online around 4-5 PM every day. If you don’t publish updates during this time, most of the people are going to miss them. Similarly, if you publish a new blog post every Wednesday, stick to the schedule no matter what. Irregularity makes your brand appear non-serious and non-committed.
Don’t just focus on your blog: Actually, this depends. If most of your business depends on an audience that prefers to read your blog posts, then definitely you should focus on your blog. But if you want to reach out to a wider audience, you should think beyond your blog when implementing your content marketing strategy. Also, it also helps if you publish your content on other platforms. I routinely try to publish on Medium and Quora.
Closely observe your metrics: Once you start publishing and distributing content on a regular basis, if you are using a tool like Google Analytics, you will start collecting metrics. Analytics data tells you what kind of traffic your content is attracting from search engines and social networking websites. Closely observe your metrics and make changes to your content marketing accordingly. If you are publishing and distributing wrong content (content that doesn’t bring you customers and clients) you will be wasting effort and money.
Optimize your content for mobile consumption: Your website or blog might be getting a big chunk of traffic from mobile phones. Publish your content in such a manner that it is easily readable from mobile devices. Although whether your content is accessible on mobile devices depends a lot on the structural layout of the website or the blog, there are many ways you can write content that is easier to consume on mobile devices. You may like to read How to do content writing for the mobile-first experience.
Take creative risks sometimes: To stand out, sometimes you need to write something totally contrary to what you normally write and there is nothing wrong in that. You don’t need to do it often, but sometimes you can take creative risks. For example, what are your views on the various Donald Trump policies and how can you incorporate your views in the basic messaging of your business? How can I connect content marketing and Donald Trump? How can I write on controversial issues without offending my core audience?
Keep it simple: This is especially important if you are writing for business or B2B. Your messaging needs to be to the point and simple. By simple I don’t mean that you publish content only for dumb and dumber. An average entrepreneur doesn’t have enough time to figure out exactly what you are trying to say. Keep everything straight forward.
Stick to your brand message: Vagueness confuses people. The above link gives the example of Nike’s “Just do it!” – their every campaign revolves around this message. Define your core message and then stick to it. For example, if I want to establish my brand for “quality content” then every piece of content that I publish should reflect that philosophy. On the other hand, if I want to establish my brand for “cheap content” then every message should convey to my audience that cheap content is available here.
Respond to feedback as fast as you can: When you publish content, when you express your views, there is bound to be some feedback. People are going to respond. Whether you publish content on your blog or on Twitter, people are going to respond in all sorts of ways. Some responses will be justified and some will be trollish. As you are known for the content you publish, you are also known for the way you respond to feedback.
Create content for your audience: If every piece of content you create and publish is to promote your business, along the way it begins to lose its charm. You desire to earn more and more business takes precedence and this begins to show through your content. Of course you want to grow your business, but let your content do the job.

Just like the proverbial “butterfly effect” there can be millions of factors contributing to success or failure of your content marketing. But, as mentioned above, there are some fundamental rules that are applicable not just to content marketing, but to every field. They can even be applied to your business in the conventional sense.

9 Content Marketing Trends for 2018, According to Neil Patel

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As the 2017 year-end approaches more and more digital marketing companies and content marketing experts will start coming up with their 2018 content marketing trends and predictions. Making a list of trends and predictions gives you an opportunity to show that you have your finger on the pulse of the latest developments in your area of expertise.

Neil Patel has just published his own take on the content marketing trends for 2018. As usual his post brims with valuable data and data graphics.

So, what is the year 2018 going to bring for content marketing? What changes are we going to experience? Is business perception of content marketing going to change? Will people eagerly invest more money in it?

Neil begins by quoting Content Marketing Institute that companies who have been investing in content marketing for years are finally reaping the benefits. This will certainly have a positive impact in the coming years.

According to this source, 60% B2B marketers believe that their content marketing strategies in 2017 have been more effective than the previous year. Every year content marketers are getting better results (experience can be a big contributing factor) and this trend may continue in 2018. The experience gained in the current year becomes useful in the coming year.

The graph given below explains to an extent why B2B content marketing success rate has been improving year after year:

As usual, Neil’s post is quite comprehensive, so, here I will briefly describe his take on the emerging trends in content marketing for 2018.

Single or a select few content formats are not going to work from 2018 onwards

Content these days is being created and published with multiple formats. Consequently, your content team needs to be adaptive and multi-talented. A typical content marketing team may have to handle jobs like

Video production and editing
Graphic design, illustration, and editing
Audio editing and production skills
Content optimization across multiple formats
Content distribution and promotion
Content marketing strategy, execution and campaign management
Communications and branding
Advertising and media buying
Analytics, metrics and reporting
Also add search engine optimization

Frankly, I think even presently content marketing teams have to take care of all these jobs.

But yes, as content marketing continues to evolve into its own entity, it is going to have its own, dedicated ecosystem of various formats and activities to bring a multifaceted approach to the table.

Just writing blog posts and publishing them is no longer going to work.

Having said that, writers are going to have the last word. Ultimately, it’s the message that counts.

Content marketers, in their zeal to present a very dynamic form of content marketing, somehow end up discounting the importance of content writers. This is not so. No matter how many formats you can handle, unless the message is convincing, no format is going to help you.

Content marketing for Internet of Things

Your content is going to be accessed using multiple devices and some of these devices may not even have a screen to show your content.

Take for example a device called Amazon Echo using a voice interface called Alexa. In Amazon Echo, everything is voice. The device just sits there in the corner and you have to speak to it and it provides you all the answers it can find. Want some recipe? Just ask Alexa and it is going to give it to you. Want to know the location of the nearest auto repair shop? You get it.

Soon a day may come when people’s refrigerators will be interacting with your content. You will need to carry out your content marketing in 2018 and the coming years keeping that in mind.

Transparency and trustworthiness is going to rule the roost

This trend has been going on for many years. Exactly this is why content marketing caught on. There is lots of mistrust, most of it justified, on the Internet. This is because the entry cost is negligible, and even zero, on the Internet. People with no stakes at all can set up a business and start hoodwinking gullible customers.

This is why people trust opinions of people they know. A Facebook recommendation may be far better than an advertisement for your brand.

Through your content marketing you need to make people trust you and this can be achieved by publishing relevant, useful and engaging content across multiple platforms.

Targeted content for your sales funnel

Since content marketing is totally going to take over your entire buying and selling process, you will need to create and distribute content to cater to different stages and phases of your sales funnel.

For more explanation on this, you may like to read Importance of content writing throughout the sales funnel.

Content from different media may need to converge to give you a consolidated presence

Normally a medium-sized company and a big company may have the following forms of content in their content marketing kitty:

Owned media
Paid media
Earned media

Content marketing in the coming years, including 2018, will need to be a well-balanced combination of all forms of media.

Further reading on this Main difference between paid, owned and earned content.

The undiminished importance of content marketing documentation

Most of the businesses that claim that content marketing doesn’t work for them, don’t have a documented content marketing strategy.

Documentation gives you the direction. It keeps you focused. It helps you set goals and then pursue those goals.

Read What do you mean by documented content marketing strategy?

Live video and interactive visual content are the other two developments that are going to gain prominence according to the 2018 content marketing trends being mentioned on various websites.

Distribution is a big part of content marketing

In 2018, it is being predicted, that a greater number of content marketers will realize the importance of distribution.

No matter how great your content is, unless you make it easier for people to find it, to come across it at the crucial moment, it doesn’t benefit you much.

Often, people confuse content marketing with relentlessly publishing content on their own websites and blogs and then occasionally sharing the links from their social networking profiles.

One needs to develop a system to make sure that you are able to disseminate or distribute your quality content. A big part of content marketing is, marketing your content.

So, these are the 9 content marketing trends for 2018 published by Neil Patel.

You may also like to read 5 content marketing trends in 2018, according to Salesforce.

Collaborative Content Marketing And Its Benefits for Your Business

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Here is a nice Forbes blog post on the concept of collaborative content marketing.

Whenever multiple people or multiple teams are working on a campaign or a project, collaboration is required.

These days collaboration is easier due to the availability of various online tools. From working on a Google Docs document to managing communication among thousands of employees using a tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams, collaboration among teams placed all over the world is a norm these days.

Any big content marketing team needs to collaborate. So, yes, collaborative content marketing would mean a big team working on your content marketing.

Does a small business require collaborative content marketing? It depends. If a single person is working on your content marketing (someone from your office, or yourself), there is little scope for collaboration. But if there are multiple team members then some sort of collaboration is bound to happen. Here at Credible Content we often use Asana to collaborate with different writers from different parts of the world.

The above blog post talks about why collaboration is better and what sort of content can be created and published using a team of content writers, graphic designers, SEO experts and marketers.

There are three benefits, according to the author, of collaborative content marketing, viz.,

Sharing of resources: When a bigger team works on your content marketing, resources can be shared. Expertise can be exchanged. Individual team members can contribute individual skills. Someone might be good at research. Someone might be good at creating infographics. Someone might be a good writer. They can all come together and create a formidable brand presence for you.
Availability of different perspectives: When a single person works on your content marketing there is a danger of a skewed perspective based on the knowledge, wisdom and biases of the person carrying out your content marketing. In collaborative content marketing on the other hand, different perspectives can give you a varied representation and your content becomes more authoritative.
Broadening of your audience: This is assuming your individual content marketing team members have their own followers and contacts on social networking websites. Suppose one of your team members has a strong presence on LinkedIn and another has a strong presence on Twitter. When they help you with your content marketing, they can use their respective social networking profiles to give you an edge. It depends.

What kind of content can be created by collaborative content marketing team members?

Basically, the usual content formats. I wouldn’t like to rewrite the entire post so if you are really interested in knowing more about collaborative content marketing, go to the original Forbes blog post.

Good content marketing example: Lifestyle and FilterCopy video

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I was working in my room when my 12-year-old daughter and wife called me to the other room to show me a video of a pair of mother and daughter arguing with each other about clothes, fashion sense and other stuff.

This is the video

The FilterCopy video was published on the occasion of Mother’s Day. Its title is “Fashion Conversations with Mom”.

FilterCopy seems to be a nice website by the way, if it doesn’t end up pursuing some political and ideological agenda that I have seen many other such websites ending up following.

Although I wouldn’t watch this video on my own because I find such videos very sappy and more than sappy, clichéd (showing the parent always baffled and out-of-sync and showing the kid always cool and updated), the fact that my daughter and my wife really enjoyed it, made me think, it is a good content marketing example.

Throughout the video daughter and mother are quarrelling with each other and there is harmless bantering about the daughter’s fashion sense.

The plot of the video moves very fast and once you start watching it, although it doesn’t seem to be leading up to something, you tend to watch it.

The presentation is sleek and the friendly arguments don’t put you off.

Anyway, I’m not writing a review of the video. All I wanted to briefly say is, that it’s a good example of content marketing by an Indian apparels store called Lifestyle.

Instead of following the traditional advertising path, they have used interesting storytelling to deliver their marketing message.

Throughout the video the mother and daughter are arguing and eventually they end up in an apparels store where, in conclusion, they advise the viewer to go to the Lifestyle website and buy clothes. By the time this message is delivered, the viewer is already relaxed, in a happy mood and is receptive to such a message.