Helping content break out of the marketing department
Content marketing was named the biggest digital marketing trend for 2015. But the very term “content marketing” can set you up for failure. Attempting content marketing with a traditional marketing approach may be a mistake. If content is created solely to covert an audience into customers you may head in the wrong direction before a single word is written.
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” — Content Marketing Institute
In the past, traditional marketing campaigns were driven from within the marketing department. Each was crafted with the purpose of interrupting customers, distracting them from their gossip mag, newspaper or TV show. Once we have their attention we would tell them what’s great about us. But customers are overwhelmed with brand messages on a daily basis. Interruptions have become steadily harder and less effective.
In contrast, content marketing focuses first and foremost on providing value by answering their questions, solving their problems and sharing your knowledge.
This means it’s no longer appropriate for content to be solely the domain of marketers. To best help our customers and provide value we must seek out the experts in our companies. Then we must leverage their brains to create valuable, relevant materials.
Marketing should be about engaging prospective customers first. Chasing awareness is a fools game and for those with deep pockets. Pull the modern marketing levers hard — own your digital expertise, go hard on marketing automation, drive content hard. — Andy Lark, CMO, Xero
Customers want content not advertising
According to the Roper Public Affairs, 80 percent of business decision-makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus an advertisement. Seventy percent say content marketing makes them feel closer to the sponsoring company, while 60 percent say that company content helps them make better product decisions.
It’s time to shift from creating interruptions to valuable content.
Content is bigger than one department
To create valuable content you need to start with your customer’s problems. What’s keeping them up at night? What’s the thing they need urgent help with?
Next look at how to solve this. This might be with a product, service or just sharing expertise. Identify your company’s experts, the people best positioned to help our customer. If you run a weather website, valuable commentary about a severe storm will come from your forecasters not your marketing team.
One of the best examples of this is IKEA’s “Home Tours” campaign, which assembled a squad of employees from IKEA stores around the world to visit their customers’ homes and document their experiences.
Unless you happen to be a marketing company, your customer’s probably don’t want to know how your marketing manager would solve their problem!
The new role of marketing
The new world of content requires marketers to evolve. In the traditional marketing world we were the creators. We created the briefs, scripted the advertising copy and wrote the web content.
We must adapt to being the facilitators, curators and champions of content. We must find the people who can answer our customer’s most pressing problems and then package and promote their answers.
But convincing staff outside marketing to write, blog, talk and create content can be like drawing blood from a stone. The marketing department’s biggest challenge is creating a culture of content.
So here’s some tips on getting started…
Creating a culture of content
Creating a culture of content starts with a single, shared purpose that unites everyone involved in creating content. This helps each person understand how their day-to-day tasks impact the big-picture business goals of your company. For our company we’ve started with the simple goal “show the world the awesome things SilverStripe developers are building”.
A culture of content exists when the importance of content is evangelized enterprise- wide, content is shared and made accessible, creation and creativity are encouraged, and content flows up and downstream, as well as across various divisions. — Altimeter Group
Weaving content into daily tasks makes content creation more natural and less of a burden. For example, sales teams can start conversations early and let client know you’d like to write a case study when new projects kick off. It’s far easier to create a quality case study if team members have this in the back of their mind during the project.
It’s a much harder task to get people to remember the details of a project after they’ve moved onto the next challenge.
Not everyone in your company will be a content creator, but everyone can contribute ideas. Customer support and sales teams are great at providing tips and ideas about potential story ideas, strategies, and pain points.
Management won’t necessarily create content, but their support is crucial to its implementation. They need to be on board with the marketing efforts in order to fund projects and back ideas that might go against the status quo.
Be transparent
If you want everyone to be involved in content then make it easy and transparent. Sharing content planning and creation tools sends a clear signal that all employees have the potential to be publishers. At SilverStripe I use a Trello board for content ideas, sharing tips and guides and tracking the progress of content.
Results speak louder than requests
Once you get content going use the results you gather to show non-believers what is possible. Tie your metrics into company and team objectives. Develop simple metrics everyone can easily use and follow. Start with a small number of important stats rather than overloading people with data.
Make these as visible as possible. Consider the results your own content and package them in a way the answers your internal client’s (the rest of the company) biggest problem. For example, show the sales team how content brings in more qualified sales and reduces the need for cold calls. Or show your support team how content has helped reduce frequently asked questions.
Sharing results is far more effective than just saying, “Hey, can you do us a favour and write a blog post this month?”.
Make it easy
Some people might have the expertise but not the time or skills to turn it into great content. That’s when marketing’s role becomes content facilitator. Make it as easy as possible for experts to share their knowledge.
Our role is to package expert thoughts in a customer friendly way. There’s an art to doing so in a way that retains the expert insights. Sometimes it is appropriate to ghost write pieces based on interviews or bullet points from your expert source. Better yet, if they aren’t comfortable writing, maybe a short video or visual infographic is a better format.
Content comes in all shapes
Keep your eyes open for content, it won’t always be packaged nicely in a white paper or blog post. At SilverStripe we host Show & Tells, Think and Drinks and Hack Days where staff share the personal and professional projects that they are working on. These provide great fodder for content and give people the opportunity to talk about what excites them.
This excitement naturally leads to great content. When you have a clear idea of your customer’s pain points you can constantly be on the look out for ways to solve these through your company’s knowledge.
Collaborate with other industry experts
Another secret is combing forces with experts outside your organisation. New Zealand tech company Vend creates retail POS software for inventory management, e-commerce and customer loyalty. Their customer base is largely small and medium retailers.
They created The Retail Digest to offer their customer helpful (and free advice) to improve their businesses. Topics range from taking great e-commerce product photos to tips for implementing retail technology. Vend leverages over 100 contributors that are key influencers in the retail industry. Turning a company blog into an unbiased industry blog.
Get started!
Content marketing can be daunting. The hardest part can be getting started. A successful content strategy requires commitment, determination and persistence to get results.
But you can’t learn until you start. Try lots of content ideas and use the results to improve next time. Share those results to start gaining buy in and shifting your company towards content.
This article stemmed from my personal blog The Envy Collection. A previous post “Stop calling it content marketing” had strong traffic results. From this, I received messages asking how to encourage company experts to create content. Which in turn lead to this post. Content has a funny way of snowballing once you get started!
