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As content marketing goes mainstream it is becoming more and more difficult to stay ahead of the pack or to use another cliché, stand out. Since everybody seems to be using content marketing to promote business people tend to think that it must be quite easy. Yes, it is easier and more economical compared to native advertising, but just because you can run your content marketing strategy practically for free if you have got lots of time to spend on it, it doesn’t mean it comes easy. Companies like Coca-Cola are spending billions of dollars on their content marketing. The more businesses use it, the more difficult it gets to compete.
So naturally, the content marketing copywriter needs to have exceptional skills to give your business the sort of leverage it needs. Surely, content marketing doesn’t just mean writing stuff. It also means creating high-quality videos and visuals but since I am a content writer by profession, I am more interested in the writing part rather than the video and graphic part.
Undoubtedly, copywriting is a big part of content marketing because whenever there is marketing and selling, there is copywriting. You should know how to put your point across convincingly and compellingly. You should know which words to use to convey which emotion and for what effect. According to the blog post written by Neil, the essential content marketing copywriting skills are
Great writing skills that allow you to create easy-to-read content and organize your ideas in order to make complex topics simple and convincing.
An ability to create trustworthy and compelling headlines.
Awareness of user experience.
Authority and specialization.
Awareness of the only marketing fundamentals and an ability to tailor content accordingly.
Influencers play an important part in your content marketing. They are the ones who often promote your content, share your links and talk about your products and services to their friends, families and colleagues. They take interest in your insights, reach out to you and talk to other influencers in your niche. If you want your content to go viral on the Internet, you need a big team of influencers constantly engaging you and paying attention to your blog and social media updates. A big part of content marketing is attracting as many influencers to your business as possible and then keeping them engaged.
Decide who are your influencers from the onset of content marketing itself
As described above, influencers are people who would be interested in hearing from you and spreading your message voluntarily. They don’t always have to be your customers and clients. Even if they never buy from you or do business with you, they can be highly beneficial to your content marketing strategy. They are like evangelists, but unlike evangelists, they may not always use your products and services.
So who might be your influencers?
People who have an active social media presence
People who have lots of followers, connections and readers
People who show interest in your updates and what you have to say
People who write blog posts and articles in a field that relates to your business interests
The main attributes should be their unwavering interest in your own field of interest, their ability to communicate convincingly and regularly and their reach. These are the people that you have to target through your content marketing.
Targeted content marketing for your influencers
You need to publish content that caters to the interest of your influencers and then use the channels that enable you to broadcast your content to your influencers.
Decide your channels first because you will be creating and publishing content based on the dynamics of your distribution channels. For example, the content that you publish on Twitter will be totally different from content that you publish on Facebook and the same goes for LinkedIn. On Pinterest you will be posting visual content. On SlideShare you upload slides. There is a website where you can upload PDF documents. On YouTube you upload videos. So define your strategy that reaches out to your influencers according to the publishing and broadcasting channel that you’re going to use, and then start creating content.
Creating content for influencers
In order to target influencers, you need to create content that is entertaining, captivating and useful. Remember that influencers not only go through your content, they react to it, which is very important. People who simply consume your content are not your influences. Your influencers leave comments on your blog. They write blog posts in response to your blog posts and articles. They respond to your social media updates. They post links to your blog posts and articles on their own timelines. They broadcast your videos and images using mobile apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. So you must create and publish content that interests them and makes them feel that sharing your content would be useful to their family and friends and even if not useful, it will be cool to share it.
Most of your influencers are high-performers and this is why they are influencers. They themselves influence people. People pay attention to them. They become influencers because when they talk about you, people pay attention. This is why it is important you create high-quality, relevant content that they can appreciate. Remember that they will pay attention to your content only if it suits their purpose – it provides value to their audience. They don’t necessarily have to agree with you. Even if one of your influencers publishes a blog post as a rebuttal to what you have written it is going to benefit you (unless you have written something totally crappy). Your content must move them to take an action. You should create and distribute content that is
Original
Thought-provoking
Relevant
Packed with information
Helpful
Well-written
Uses references from highly reputed sources
Created/written in a friendly tone
Easily shareable
Finally, there is no hard and fast rule – you just need to be regular, persistent and quality conscious. It will take some time before your influencers begin to notice you. You need to interact with them as and when opportunity strikes (don’t just butt-in for the sake of it). Write them an email if you have something genuine to say. Connect with them on Twitter and Facebook (or whatever channel you are influencers prefer). And once again, persistence is the key. Most content marketers fail here.
A powerful content marketing strategy may carry different connotations for different marketing needs but its fundamental purpose is to give you the results you want. It doesn’t matter whether you want to generate more leads, more sales, more subscribers for your email updates, more blog readers to generate ad revenue, get more donations for your charity organisation, get more students for your school or college or further your political career, a powerful content marketing strategy can help you create an impressive presence on the Internet. Again, impressive presence means that it’s easier to find you for the stuff you should be known for and what people find is compelling, relevant and useful – it solves the purpose.
This Huffington Post blog post on creating a powerful content marketing strategy lists 5 steps that can help you create one for your business, although it misses the 2nd step, which I will try to incorporate here. These 5 steps are
Know your audience
Prioritise and plan your content publishing and marketing
Assign roles and responsibilities if you have a big content marketing team
Set goals and track performance
Focus on the long-term (the point that I feel is missing)
Points 1-4 are explained in the blog post so I will throw some light on the 5th point.
Although content marketing is one of the most effective ways to project yourself (or your business) it also takes time and effort, and money if you want to work with a content writer. Many small business owners mistakenly believe that since content marketing seems to be free (because hey, everybody can write blog posts and articles) it should be quite easy and low-investment.
Yes, exceptions are always there. There are many small-business-owners who are doing a great job doing their own content marketing and many small businesses have transitioned from small to medium and even big. But for every small-business turning into big-business there are thousands of businesses that never grow or evolve. In fact, a majority of businesses shut shop within the 1st year because they get disillusioned. If everything is so easy and free on the Internet, why doesn’t it work, they wonder?
Well, just like any other marketing medium, content marketing is for real businesses and when it comes to real businesses, you need to spend money, time and effort.
You want to achieve success in your content marketing? Then prepare a long-term plan. Don’t expect a jump in your targeted traffic or your social media exposure within a couple of months unless you have a million dollars to spend. Content marketing requires a strategic, focused and sustained effort. Only then it shows results.
Content marketing – mostly B2B – is usually considered to be a very serious affair but it doesn’t have to be that way. There have been many instances of content marketing where businesses try to make their prospective and present customers and clients laugh.
Everybody loves humour. Back in the late 90s I was writing course material for computer training centers that were sprouting everywhere in India. The For Dummies books were my inspiration. I applied their style while preparing lessons on DOS, dBase, COBOL and FoxPro (many of you haven’t heard of these, right?) and some of the training center owners loved the way I wrote (and so did their students). I was also known to use humour in my journalistic writing for quite some time. Sadly, I lost this touch but I’m trying to regain it and hopefully within a few days you will be able to see it on my blog and elsewhere.
Humor has a relaxing effect. No matter how tense a situation it is, when people are exposed to funny anecdotes, jokes and situations, they forget about their troubles and shift their focus to the funny thing that is taking place in front of them. According to this Forbes article,
Dozens of surveys suggest that humor can be at least one of the keys to success. A Robert Half International survey, for instance, found that 91% of executives believe a sense of humor is important for career advancement; while 84% feel that people with a good sense of humor do a better job. Another study by Bell Leadership Institute found that the two most desirable traits in leaders were a strong work ethic and a good sense of humor.
You may think what amusing you can write for a, let us say, plumping website, or a refrigeration spare parts website, or even a church website. Well, here is what I came across while reading “writing bloopers” in The Sense of Style (the writing guide I’m reading these days):
The sermon this morning: “Jesus walks on the water.”
The sermon tonight will be: “Searching for Jesus.”
This was written on a church noticeboard somewhere.
Here is another one
The patient has been depressed ever since she began seeing me in 2008.
This was written by a psychiatrist probably in a case study.
These are just examples of how humorous material can appear even at least expected places.
Various industries are mistakenly categorised as “boring” and “exciting”. For example, according to popular perception, you may categorise fashion, cookery, modelling and music as “exciting” industries (just to name a few to give you an idea). On the other hand, you may consider healthcare, automobiles, accounting, legal and real estate as, according to the convention, “boring” industries. Of course, something that makes you money, something that is your livelihood, cannot be termed as boring but here I’m not writing this from your perspective – the business owner who runs an accounting firm – I’m writing from the perspective of your clients. How do you keep them interested in your content without boring them with numbers and concepts that they may come across only on an annual basis while trying to file their returns?
Here is an exceptional example of using humor to educate people even when it’s a matter of life and death:
Dumb Ways to Die is an Australian public service announcement campaign by Metro Trains in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia to promote rail safety. When my 10-year-old daughter mentioned the video I was sort of pissed at what sort of videos she was watching on YouTube. Then I saw it, did some research and to my pleasant surprise, found out that it is an awareness campaign.
As you can see by the number of people who have watched the video and a slew of video games and proceeding videos that have been uploaded onto the Internet what a hit the campaign has been. Safety is a life-and-death matter but it doesn’t have to be very serious.
Trying to implement a content marketing strategy meant to deliver results without documenting the various steps you take and the results that you get is like driving around without knowing where you want to go. Whereas it is fun to drive without knowing your destination you aren’t actually reaching somewhere. You are just burning fuel and if your time means anything to you then you are wasting precious time. The same goes with content marketing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, and still you are doing it, you’re wasting time and money and worse, you might also be harming your business by publishing content that you shouldn’t be publishing.
They have a clear understanding of what successful content marketing looks like
They have a well-documented content marketing strategy
They have a clearly-defined editorial mission statement (and they stick to it)
There is a smooth flow of communication between different content marketing team members
The focus of this particular blog post is documentation and I’m going to stick to that for the time being.
Why does content marketing documentation matter?
According to the report mentioned above, fewer B2B content marketers are documenting their content marketing compared to the previous year (32% vs 35%) despite the fact that 79% of respondents among the successful attribute their success to documentation.
A big reason for the decrease is that content marketing is going mainstream and when a particular trend goes mainstream, even people with, let us say, less expertise, start using it either because of herd mentality (it is working for them so it should also work for me) or they have an idea what they are doing but they have no idea how they are doing it and hence, documenting their steps seems either cryptic or waste of time.
Content marketing is still taken as a publishing activity (strategically placed marketing is missing big time). Keep publishing blog posts and articles that should be “search engine optimized” and then keep posting them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google +. This is the basic approach that more than 90% B2B content marketers follow. There is no content marketing editorial calendar. They just have a rough outline of what they should publish in order to cover their keywords.
Is it bad?
It is not as bad as not pursuing content marketing but yes, a lot more can be achieved with little bit of documentation.
What is documentation? Preferably, it is real-time recording (noting down) of events and actions that are happening, how they are happening, what results are being obtained, and what are the changes being implemented based on the results.
Documentation helps you keep track of what needs to be done, how it should be done and what should be done in case the results are not what you expect. Without documentation you lose track of what you’re doing and exactly what you’re trying to achieve.
Is content marketing documentation important only for big businesses?
In order to understand this, you need to first understand what exactly is documentation vis-à-vis your business. Even if you create a small note in Google Keep to schedule your weekly postings and content marketing success metrics that you can observe, it is documentation. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an elaborate document consisting of scores of pages and notes. The entire purpose of content marketing documentation is to help you reach from point A to point B without losing direction and objective. Documentation can be done in writing, by voice recording, by drawing, by taking photographs and by creating videos. The purpose is to help you.
