Content Marketing

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Class Slides: Content Marketing

Content Marketing: What is it?

• It is content that is created and distributed by a company to engage customers versus traditional interruption marketing
• It is persistent
• It is (mostly) Public Relations, Owned Media
• Its focus is mostly branding and long term engagement, not direct selling
• Paid media can be used to amplify content marketing (Facebook for example)
• It is not new, but internet, social media and mobile access have significantly increased its importance
• Not all digital marketing is content marketing

Content Marketing: design content

• to engage audiences: stimulate free marketing
• to build relationships, build trust
• to increase reach (existing customers first): organic versus paid reach
• to stimulate action (shares, RTs, comments etc.) which increases reach
• to cultivate advocates: How To Really Transform Loyal Customers Into Brand Advocates (brand co-ownership). Convert brand loyalists into brand advocates.
  Example: students at University, brand advocates for School
• to stimulate user generated content: Increase in Mobile means greater access to content AND more User Generated Content: How to Encourage Fans to Create and Share Visual Content
  stimulate content on review sites (Yelp, Amazon)
• deepen the brand connection and knowledge (Red Bull for example, brand engagement versus transactional) Also: How GoPro and Tesla hacked digital marketing
• to improve SEO (keywords and links)

Key aspects of a Content Marketing Program

1. Brands are Publishers -- think and act like a publisher
2. Business Objectives / Goals drive Strategy for Content Marketing: What stories do you want to tell ?
3. Support the brand messaging

4. Know your customers (consumer behavior)
5. Targeting new customers, and existing customers, at all stages of the funnel?
6. Consider your SEO goals, and the important keywords, core and long tail. A key driver for SEO
7. Select vehicles (where is your target audience(s)), include Blogs?
8. Listen: industry, brand, competitor brands (ex. Google Alerts)
   • To understand brand (JPMorgan’s Twitter Mistake)
   • To respond directly
   • To improve messaging
   • To change product / service (CVS)
   • To source content (example: tweeting a new review)

9. Content strategy, PLAN
10. Types of content, by theme
11. Types of content
    • planned (proactive: Fridays From The Frontline)
      routine content versus campaign content
    • real time, reactive:
      • Oreo Cookie example)
      • Ben and Jerry's Example
      • So You Want To Newsjack The Super Bowl? Here Are 6 Rules Brands Can’t Forget
      • react to own content responses versus wider conversations / environment
12. Types of content, images versus text, infographics (5 Ways to Make Shareable Images That Drive Traffic): most retweeted: If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars
13. Types of content, appropriate signal to noise ratio
14. Content curation strategy
    • Source additional content
    • Contribute and engage with others' content
15. Content, use of hashtags
    • Twitter and Instagram
    • Own hashtags, branding (consider sponsored tweet with a branded hashtag), how are your customers using hashtags to discuss your product / market
    • Hashtags of other conversations (industry wide, etc)
16. Appropriate voice: humanize the voice, versus salesly self promotion spam
17. Timing (proactive content): A Scientific Guide to Posting Tweets, Facebook Posts, Emails, and Blog Posts at the Best Time
    • Time of day
    • Day of week
18. Incentives / contests?

19. Content approval process?
20. Nimbleness versus overly produced content

21. Frequency of content
22. Write for
    • Engagement (write for action, i.e. Share, RT, Like)
    • Amplification

23. Integration across different SM platforms, different media
24. A consistent DIAlogue (include follower strategy for Twitter, Instagram etc.)

25. What is the value you are providing, for your target audience(s) ?
26. Review against goals, Key Performance Indicators (Edgerank Checker): Google Analytics, Facebook Insights etc.
    The World of Social Media Monitoring And Analytics - infographic

Indirect Content Marketing

The above is conducting content marketing via channels that are "owned". There may also be industry-related channels that are not directly owned by the brand, but allow for participation.

Examples include industry discussion boards (ex: MBA applicant site, where MBA applicants compare experiences, important for MBA admissions offices).

It is important to determine an appropriate level of participation on these indirect channels.

Business to Business

Good example from SAP, with slide deck: 8 Questions To Help You Define Your Content Strategy

Goals:

• Generate leads
• Impact consumer markets
• Grow brand
• Recruit employees
• Education
• Thought Leadership
• Partner Engagement

Vehicles

• Facebook
• Blogs
• LinkedIn
• Google+
• Twitter
• YouTube (demonstrations)
• Pinterest / Instagram (Visual)

5 (Relatively Simple) Steps To B2B Social Media Marketing Success
The Top 8 Social Networks For Business

Managing Issues

Much like a great content marketing strategy can be amplified, blunders also get amplified: Top 10 Social Media Marketing #FAILS of 2013 [INFOGRAPHIC]

Don't Walk Offstage — The Internet Will Eat You Alive, includes "But it also speaks to a fundamental shift in the rules of how our world operates: When a stone drops, the ripples are supposed to fade away, not turn into tidal waves."

G.M. Uses Social Media to Manage Customers and Its Reputation

Crisis Management:

• Understand it
• Get in front of it
• Be transparent
• Be responsive

Media placement

Interruption model, versus content marketing. Content marketing can include paid media, but increasingly a balance of owned media; both to stimulate earned media.

• Paid, rent space on media for messaging. Traditional, which itself was an innovation that began with newspapers

• Paid, Search engine ads (content marketing) versus display ads on social (interruption)

• Owned, creation of own content on media. Internet enabled significant growth in owned media (web-site, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter account) Growing, greater flexibility and control over delivering content

• Earned, content shared or created by third parties; Consumer Generated Content. Word of Mouth, Growing and Permanent Record that is Searchable

Earned Media coverage

• Nurtured by effective content marketing strategy (direct earned media)
• Indirect earned media, consumers discussing brand experience
• Not directly controlled by marketer
• Free marketing, as in freedom speech, and free as in price
• Need to listen
• Word of mouth, more effective than paid advertising
  • More targeted
  • more pursuasive

Because of increasing importance of earned media coverage (free marketing), content marketing needs to be:

1. Transparent
2. Engaging

Content marketing is deployed through a variety of media and social media vehicles, with a deliberate strategy for engagement.

Free Marketing is earned media

• Direct earned media
  • triggered by owned media
  • triggered by paid media
• Indirect earned media
  • triggered by brand experiences
• Free, as in freedom of speech
• It is free too, but so is owned media