Tag Archives: Content Marketing Strategy

Using negative storytelling as an effective content marketing tool

Photo of the dog named Eddie the Terrible

Here is the story of a dog named “Eddie the Terrible” who isn’t for the fainthearted, and this is a good example of negative storytelling as an effective content marketing tool. Who says stories that need to sell something (in this case, selling the idea of adopting this dog) have to be positive and full of praises for what is being promoted? The cute-looking dog that has been put up for adoption isn’t your typical cuddly and sweet dog you would love to run to and squeeze or cuddle with. The description of Eddie begins with

We know, we know. He is adorable. All small and yellow and fluffy. A little bit tubby which makes him seem more softer somehow, like a dog you can trust with your secrets. Don’t be fooled. Yes, he is a great listener. But inside that innocuous adorable blonde package exists tons – indeed, whole square miles – of naughty.

Then the copy goes on with describing how, although till now he has never attacked other dogs, he isn’t quite friendly. He isn’t even friendly with kids so the copy of the ad says that if you want your kids to grow with their toes and fingers intact, you better not adopt Eddie.

2) Want your kids to grow up with a full complement of fingers and toes? Not the dog for you.

Some dogs love kids. We have a bunch of child-lovin’ dogs. Eddie the Terrible, however, is not one of them. Honestly he’s a little whiffy with some adults, too. Not in an eat-them sort of way but in ‘this makes me very nervous’ sort of way. Eddie’s never actually bitten anyone but we’re not saying it could never happen.

What is the writer of the ad trying to achieve by saying so many negative things about the dog that is being put up for adoption?

First of all, all his naughtiness is being cutified. Then, honesty is the best policy when it comes to creating convincing copy. All the peculiarities the dog has have been put in the copy so there is no scope for confusion, misunderstanding and even a libel suit. Just imagine if the dog actually bites and the family with small kids adopts him and then the dog bites off the finger of a toddler. Not only a kid will be maimed for life, but the dog adoption agency will be shut forever for hiding this crucial information.

Nonetheless, if the agency has been able to keep the dog so can someone who knows about his peculiarities. So there must be some family around who would be fine with his misbehaving nature (misbehaving according to us humans, for dogs it might be just OK to act like Eddie). In case you’re worried, a brave couple has adopted Eddie the Terrible.

Photo of the couple that has adopted Eddie the Terrible

Does negative storytelling work as an effective content marketing tool? I don’t think there is anything negative about the whole story. The writer was just being honest in a funny, adorable way. Especially in this case it was very crucial to be honest because adopting such a dog for a family who might think that dogs are all fluffy and cute might be dangerous. You must’ve seen all those dog videos on YouTube where you see dogs being extremely patient with small kids. Such videos can be misleading. Dogs being animals, their behaviour cannot be predicted. So it would be very dangerous to write a honey-coated copy just so that people adopt such a dog. In fact, it is an effective marketing tool in the sense that people will appreciate the fact that the adoption agency is being honest.

So it is not about negative storytelling, it is about being honest. Can this also work if you’re trying to sell a product or a service instead of encouraging people to adopt an unpredictable dog?

Although you shouldn’t focus on the negativities of a product or a service while formulating your content marketing strategy all the time (if there are so many negative things about the product or service, better not sell it, no?), you should be honest about what your product or service can do and what it cannot do. People will really appreciate that. Provided the pricing is right and provided your product or service does exactly what it claims to do, even if there are some problems and even if there are some features missing, you are going to find your customers and clients. Negative storytelling or whatever, make your content honest. Provide the right information to your audience. It will always be appreciated.

Why your content marketing strategy might be failing

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Wondering why your content marketing strategy isn’t working the way it should have? This Inc.com article uses some advice from Joe Pulizzi to throw some light on why many companies fail at their content marketing.

Content marketing, as Joe rightly puts it, isn’t just about creating content and publishing it indiscriminately on your own blog/website or on social networking websites. It means a regular broadcasting. It means ongoing interaction with your audience. Here are a few things that make your content marketing strategy click:

Let people subscribe to your updates: No matter how great your content is you cannot assume that people will come to access your content on their own. You need to remind them on an ongoing basis simply because there is too much content on the Internet to get their attention. This can be achieved by encouraging them to subscribe to your regular email updates. They can also like your Facebook page, or follow you on Twitter or even subscribe to your RSS feeds. The basic idea is, getting people to subscribe to your updates is an important ingredient of your content marketing strategy.
Create brand evangelists: Take for example Apple. Most of its business happens because it has got millions of brand evangelists. When you create brand evangelists for your content marketing strategy, people promote your content on their own. But of course, in order to create evangelists your primary focus must be not just creating high-value content but also making sure that the content reaches the right audience.
Help your content writers coordinate with each other: If your business employs or works with multiple content writers, make sure that there is coordination between them, otherwise they will end up producing lots of duplicate content or something totally irrelevant to your core content marketing strategy.
Content marketing, keep in mind, is a different specialty: Just because a person has had a career in advertising and marketing doesn’t mean that he or she knows a lot about content marketing. Content marketing is a totally different ball game. Rather than marketers, as the above-linked article says, put your trust into the hands of publishers because content marketing on the Internet is more about publishing and distributing high-quality content rather than stuffing it down people’s throats.

You can read the remaining points in the original article.

Content marketing thoroughly explained in the periodic table of content marketing

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If I remember I came across this periodic table of content marketing last year but back then I was quite preoccupied so I couldn’t go through it properly. Now that I have had a look at it, so far it is the best collective information and content marketing I have ever come across. Kudo’s to the person who created this periodic table.

As it happens in the classic periodic table of elements, the content marketing elements in this periodic table are arranged according to the priority demanded by each aspect of content marketing. For example, the most important aspect of content marketing is strategy. How you are going to implement your content marketing strategy in order to achieve what? As the above-mentioned link correctly says, your strategy is the fundamental key to your success. It helps you plan and it gives you focus.

The importance of knowing your content marketing KPI

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Content marketing is more effective if you know your KPIs – key performance indicators. What exactly do you want your content marketing to achieve for your business?

Engage your visitors
Improve your search engine rankings
Increase your revenue (this is something broad, actually)
Get more visitors from social networking and social media websites
Improve your conversion rate

These are the basic KPIs that you need to keep in perspective while working on your content marketing strategy. This way you know exactly what you are trying to achieve. Remember that the narrower your KPIs are, the better you will perform. This will also help you optimize your resources.

Why is it important to know your content marketing KPIs?

The problem with content marketing is most of the people don’t know exactly what they are trying to achieve. They know that it works. They know that it is working for other businesses. But all they know is, people are publishing one blog post after another, one article after another, and taking social media and social networking websites by storm with their “killer” content. Somehow they cannot figure out how to add method in the content marketing madness. Exactly what is happening? What sort of content gets you what? How does it actually get you more business?

As I mentioned in the above bullet, having a KPI like “Increase your revenue” is quite broad because by the end of the day, even if you have performed 1000 activities, you want to increase your revenue. Every for-profit business wants to get more revenue. This is an existential truth nobody can escape. So you can take “Increase your revenue” out of the bulleted list.

When you have figured out the KPIs of content marketing in your case, you don’t worry about other aspects of your business.

Suppose the most important KPI for you is, getting more newsletter subscribers. It doesn’t matter how your search engine rankings are. It doesn’t matter the level of engagement you can manifest on social media and social networking websites. Heck, it doesn’t even matter what sort of conversion rate your website enjoys. What matters is, if you were getting 5 newsletter subscribers per month previously, after you have set your content marketing ball rolling, and after it has been awhile since you set your content marketing ball rolling (for, it needs some time to show results) you should be getting 50 newsletter subscribers or 500 newsletter subscribers every month. If you set this as your KPI – getting more newsletter subscribers – then your content marketing is working for you. Once you have figured out that your content marketing is working for this particular KPI, if you want, you can put in more resources to get even better results. This is why it’s important to know the KPIs of your content marketing.

Some good examples of content marketing KPIs that you can set for your own business

People begin spending more time on your pages and blog posts: It means they’re finding what they’re looking for. It also means that they’re not being distracted by other things while they’re visiting your website. The more they stay on your website, the better will be the prospects of them turning into your customers and clients. If this is the KPI you have set for your content marketing, it can be good indicator of its success.
You’re getting more unique visitors to your website: Of course repeat visitors are good, but they will become repeat visitors if they come to your website for the first time, right? So the more unique visitors you have, the more repeat visitors you will get and repeat visitors are the ones who normally do business with you, the most. If you’re getting more unique visitors and if this is a KPI that you have set for your content marketing, you’re going in the right direction.
More people download your e-book, case study or report: Suppose the growth of your business depends on the number of people downloading your e-book, your case study or the report that you have prepared so that you are known as an expert in your field. If you have set this as your KPI, you will be publishing content accordingly.
You are getting more subscribers for your newsletter: Building your mailing list is a timeless piece of wisdom. The more people hear from you (without feeling annoyed) the more eager they will be to do business with you. This is why many businesses solely focus on building their mailing list and getting more subscribers for their newsletters. This sort of content marketing KPI would be perfect for those who are looking for long-term business development goals. They want to establish relationships and communication channels so that eventually these relationships and channels metamorphose into business partnerships.
You are getting more inbound links: There was a time when inbound links were extremely important for your search engine rankings. Although this no longer is the case, why solely depend on search engine traffic if you can get traffic from other websites? In fact there are many businesses that completely ignore search engines – something that I don’t advise – and completely focus on getting inbound links from high-traffic websites. Having this as your content marketing KPI will keep you focused on publishing highly useful and high-quality content so that people voluntarily link to it from their own websites and blogs.
Your search engine rankings are improving: Which business doesn’t want better search engine rankings? By the way having better search engine rankings as your primary content marketing KPI doesn’t always help because eventually it is the conversion rate on your website that matters. So, yes, aim at improving your search engine rankings but not at the cost of quality, meaningful content.
More people are engaging with you on social media and social networking websites: 82% people in the USA are engaging with their preferred brands on websites like Facebook and Twitter. I’m getting decent amount of work from LinkedIn. Some businesses are targeting Google+. No matter what social media or social networking channel you plan to target, eventually it is engagement that matters. If you’re simply posting content to fill your profile with information, it doesn’t help your business. People need to regularly interact with you, and this is a worth pursuing content marketing KPI.

Again, why haven’t I included things like “Increased revenue”, “more leads”, “more sales” and such terms as your KPIs? Because, no matter how important they are – in fact, the most important for any business – they are a by-product of the KPI attributes mentioned above. If your content marketing takes care of those KPI attributes, you naturally begin to get more revenue, more leads and more sales.

What’s better, owned content or sponsored content?

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First let’s understand the difference between owned content and sponsored content. Owned content is the content that you produce, write or get written on your own and then publish it on your website or blog (or on a third-party website or blog with complete attribution to you or your brand). Publishing a series of blog posts, articles and informative webpages under your own website or blog is a good example of owned content. Sponsored content is content that talks about you or your brand as a reference and then that content is published on a third-party website or blog. Your name or the name of your brand appearing in a New York Times articles is a good example of sponsored content. Which should be an integral part of your content marketing strategy?

I think both have their own place. When you have just started creating content you don’t have any audience. It takes time to build that audience and unless you have built the audience, you cannot leverage owned content. So what do you do? You go for sponsored content. Sponsored content helps you build audience while you’re creating your own content.

Besides, sometimes you want to reach an audience that doesn’t directly come to your blog or website no matter how much owned content you have. Sponsored content helps you achieve that.

Do you stop investing in sponsored content when you have created a considerable inventory of owned content? Depends on your marketing strategy. Do you want to reach out to a diversified audience? Or are you simply happy with the sort of people coming to your website or blog at the moment?

Benefits of investing in owned content

Gives your brand its own unique content
Strengthens brand identity
Prospective customers and clients don’t have to scour the web in order to find content relevant to your product or service
Your website or blog becomes a resource hub – you give people a reason to come to your website or blog repeatedly, or refer your links to the family and friends, or share your links on social media and social networking websites
You generate more targeted traffic that can give you more leads, sales and even repeat sales
As a personal brand you become an authority figure

Benefits of investing in sponsored content

You can target bigger audience from the word go (although it’s not recommended to go for sponsored content from the word go because the exposure will go waste if you have got nothing substantial to offer on your own website or blog)
You can build an audience for your brand much faster
You increase respect among your own audience by appearing on reputed publications (the New York Times example, for instance)
You can leverage the reach of well-established blogs and websites