Driving Inbound with Disruptive Discussion

Content Marketing isn’t just about content.

You’ve read Inbound Marketing and all the other books out there. You’re dutifully churning out ‘remarkable content’, but it’s still not working. Traffic is flat, or perhaps it’s up but it’s still not converting into real business. What’s wrong?

The short answer is that simply writing a ‘bunch of content’ and hoping it gets noticed is not a strategy. To build an effective content strategy to drive inbound you need to get the most relevant content in front of your audience at the right moment.

Listen first, write later.

To start, you need to stop writing and listen. Track the conversation in your relevant marketplace. Listen to what competitors, thought leaders, and customers are talking about. Deeply understand the issues they are facing. Continuously follow these trends and find the opportunities where you can make a meaningful contribution to the discussion.

This approach might seem obvious, but all too often content marketers get caught up in their own messaging and don’t pay attention to the discussions in the marketplace. Don’t start with your messaging. Start by listening and find the topics that are ripe for a ‘disruptive discussion’. If you don’t, you run the risk of writing a lot of irrelevant or uninteresting content.

As an example, my marketing team was looking for new topics to write about in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) space. We noticed there was a lot of talk about millennials and how having a CSR program is good for attracting them to the corporate brand. It was considered a given, yet there was no explanation, no real statistics given to support the claim, and certainly no results or case studies. That was an opportunity to write something meaningful that would get noticed.

As another example, a prominent competing software vendor launched a new product with the crafty tag ‘Greater Insight. Greater Impact.’ It was the classic pitch, ‘buy this software and boom, you’ll have all this insight and impact, all your problems will be solved’. As anyone who has worked in CSR knows, you don’t get insight or impact by buying software. There’s another real opportunity to change the story.

Write Awesome.

The next step is to write engaging content that adds real value and depth to the discussion. The mistake many content marketers make here is to write trivially about the topic. A ‘me too’ article is not going to get noticed.

I like to think of approaching the discussion as a ‘content craftsman’. Think deep about what is being said in the marketplace. Can you build on the discussion or take it to another level? Are there assumptions that haven’t actually been validated? You need not agree with what is being said, a healthy discourse can certainly be disruptive and get the attention of your target audience. Once you have that attention, then insert your message in a relevant way.

The mistake many content marketers make is to write trivially about the topic. A ‘me too’ article is not going to get noticed.

Back to my CSR and millennials example, I came up with a simple way to dispel the prominent notion: there are plenty of companies built on the backs of millennials that have no CSR efforts at all! I went on to explain how those companies retain millennials in other ways and then delivered the real message we were trying to get across. You can read the original article here on Medium.

Likewise, with the competitive example, I explained that ‘buying software’ is not a strategy to achieve insight and impact. One needs a plan, and in addition to the software, a partner that can help them create and execute that plan. See how the discussion changed dramatically and the offering was positioned as what they actually need?

Distribute, then Promote.

The last step is to distribute and promote the content. The best content is useless if no one reads it. Unfortunately most content marketers simply promote the content on the company’s own channels or worse ‘throw it over the wall’ to the social media team. Chances are your corporate blog doesn’t have that big of a readership and you’re probably trying to build your social media following too. Tweeting on the company account ‘hey come check out our awesome new blog post’ isn’t really distributing your content now is it?

You have to take the content to the reader. Post it where they are. The good news is if you were listening to the marketplace in the first step, you should already know where they are. Pitch those publications and industry blogs. If it truly is a trending topic and you truly have something disruptive to say about it, they’ll be interested in picking it up. It’s for this reason that the content writer should take an active role in the content distribution. Think about it, instead of that lame ‘check out our blog’ tweet, wouldn’t you rather tweet ‘check out this really big and awesome publication that picked up our post’?

For the CSR and millennials example, the original discussion was out there on industry publications and blogs, so we pitched them. It was a huge hit! Not only did they pick it up, they came back asking for more articles!

In the case of the competitor messaging example, the target audience was very specific. We weren’t just trying to hit prospects, but specifically our competitor’s prospects. We choose to fold the response into many of the collateral pieces going out to prospects, including a particularly prominent flyer at an industry conference the competitor was attending. ‘In your face!’

More than simply creating remarkable content, listening for disruptive discussion opportunities, crafting an engaging response with depth and value, and delivering the content to your audience is key. These steps build on each other and synergistically create an effective inbound strategy.

Scott Davis is an experienced marketer that focuses on strategy and analysis for digital, social, content and lead funnel management. Reach out if you’re looking to turn your marketing programs into ‘disruptive discussions’.