What if you removed every trace of self-serving-ness from your marketing content? What if you filled your blog, white papers, newsletters and technical articles with content that completely benefited your readers, with no apparent benefit to you?

Would your boss let you publish it?

Thanks for the content. What’s in it for you?

I happened onto a blog a couple of months ago run by Joe Hage, an expert in medical device marketing. It includes interviews with industry analysts, reviews of social media tools, announcements about conferences, medical device compliance information, and ideas gleaned from other online marketing experts.

I had read his posts for about five minutes when the question popped into my head:

How does this guy make money?

The content was that good, and it was almost completely devoid of apparent self-promotion.

Of course, after a few more minutes, I fell off of the blog and onto his site. His About, Services and Contact pages made it pretty clear how he makes money, but this follows the natural order of valuable content: Let your readers consistently enjoy the full value of what you publish, and when they one day feel an itch, they know whom to call to scratch it.

Other examples:

• Copyblogger – The pre-eminent site for content marketing. Daily posts from Copyblogger staff and contributors embody clear thinking about online marketing, and the site itself embodies very strong content marketing. Follow it for a while and see whether you can tell how they make money: Consulting? Software for WordPress? Instructional products?
• The Grateful Dead – David Meerman Scott has co-authored an entire book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. He often cites the way in which the band encouraged fans to tape and photograph their concerts, then trade tapes and photos with other fans. With fans enjoying this much value, plenty of them were surely asking how the band made money; when fans felt the itch, they scratched it by paying for concert tickets.
• Obsolete TV Support Group video – This Fortune 500 company has an important point to make in this video, but they camouflage it quite artistically behind an entertaining skit. Watch it, and see if you don’t find yourself asking, “Which company made this, and what does it have to do with how they make money?”

A new definition of “valuable content”

This is different from divulging all the secrets of your success. It’s easy to find experts on the Web who are giving away everything you need to know to be as successful as they are. Their content does completely benefit you, but it’s mostly advice. People will keep coming back for good stories and good information, but advice can get tiresome.

It’s a new definition of “valuable content”: Content that benefits your readers, with no apparent benefit to you.

It’s like the content that religions and governments provide, except that you actually want it, and you’re not suspicious of it.

Do you think you could do it? How would your readers react?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Beck Tench

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Marketing managers: If you’re trying to understand content marketing, you need to follow these three sources:

• Marketing Charts – thought-provoking data and useful factoids served up daily
• Content Marketing Institute – most of what you need to know about the mechanics of using valuable content in your marketing
• MarketingProfs - webinars, forums, lessons and list-posts for anybody with the word “marketing” in his/her title

These three FREE resources sometimes converge to give you gems like this:

In other words:

Six reasons you can’t get your content marketing to work

Which of these do you need to fix in your organization?

1. Producing engaging content – 42%

You put content out, but its boring. Nobody comments on it, nobody is quoting or re-using it, it’s not helping you in the search engines, and it’s not moving the sales-needle. Whether it’s blog posts, case studies, white papers, podcasts or video, it’s just not adding up to an engaging story. It probably isn’t valuable (meaning “valuable to your prospects,” not “valuable to you”).

Try this: Have your marketing communication writers write for a real human being, not for a demographic or market segment. And since nobody cares about your products, have them write about your customers’ problems instead.

2. Producing enough content – 20%

How much content is enough? If you’re serious about getting onto the first search engine results page (SERP), you need to put out valuable content with masterful use of relevant keywords about five times per week. Hey, what marketing manager can’t do that, especially with legal reviews of the content?

Try this: Cross-examine yourself. If you land on page one, will you necessarily attract qualified prospects and the kinds of customers you want to have? Or will you attract tire-kickers, time-wasters and people who wannabe you? If you can’t generate enough content to get above the noise in your keyword-space, then generate enough to look credible to prospects who find you through other means. That’s a different “enough,” but it’s an important “enough.”

3. Budget to produce content – 18%

This goes hand in hand with #2. You ask the VP of marketing or engineering for budget to write a white paper, or to hire a marketing writer for a series of case studies or blog posts, and she tells you “no dice.” It happens a lot in a soft economy.

Try this: Find content other people are already producing about you and ride those waves. Here’s the Yelp listing (B2C) for a nearby restaurant with hundreds of reviews; that represents acres of valuable (because user-generated) content that nobody needed budget to create. Here’s the Facebook page (B2B) of Johnson Controls, with a mixture of free content they want and free content they don’t want. They may not have a white paper budget, but they can use this as a starting point for producing content.

4. Lack of executive buy-in – 12%

Yes, some execs still haven’t gotten the memo, or don’t yet consider it dangerous that their competitors are consistently generating valuable content. Content marketing can be a tough sell, especially if you have to justify return on investment (ROI).

Try this: You may not be able to get attention around producing new content, but nobody in his right mind would ignore things – both good and bad – that other people are saying about your products and services. If you can’t sweet-talk your execs with terms like “content marketing,” then shake them up a bit with “reputation management.”

5. Producing a variety of content – 7%

Limited resources, unlimited possibilities: video, podcasts, white papers, case studies, eBooks, newsletter articles, blog posts and more. But especially on a small team, it’s hard to produce every kind of content you want and do it consistently and well. Or, maybe you’re accustomed to just one or two kinds and haven’t tried any others.

Try this: Do a six-month rotation, generating two types of content per shift. At the end of a couple of years, you’ll know which types are the best match for your organization.

6. Budget to license content – 1%

Instead of generating your own content, you decide to shore up your website with somebody else’s content. Or, maybe you want to license a report with independent (favorable) information about your products. That’s not so much “content marketing” as it is “someone-else’s-content marketing.” Fortunately, not many of you face this predicament.

Try this: Build your own brand with your own content instead. And get your customers to rave about you so that you don’t have to pay industry analysts to do it.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Sign up for his Content Buffet Newsletter and get the free eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Toronto History

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Consider a Japanese approach to content marketing in which the content disappears after about a day. What can you learn from that?

American content marketer extraordinaire David Meerman Scott wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, which is now available in Japanese and enjoying brisk sales.

Scott has partnered with Shigesato Itoi on the localization and publication of the book, and saluted the real-time nature of the content on Itoi’s site, Hobonichi. In an interview with Itoi, Scott comments:

A particularly interesting aspect is that daily content is available for only 24 hours, and then disappears. There is no archive of the daily information. This unusual content strategy is exactly the opposite of what SEO experts would tell you to do and therefore, because it is unique, is a very Grateful Dead approach.

Whether you’re Japanese or not, transitory content feels more like a conversation with your readers. As Itoi says,

Maybe it’s because it allows me to discuss the same theme over and over again. It’s natural: don’t we do that every day? Perhaps I wanted to replicate this behavior.

It’s not important to show people what you and your organization were thinking six months ago, or even last week. The important thing is to take what you’re thinking TODAY and turn it into engaging content. That would be easy, except that today becomes yesterday (then last Tuesday, then last month, then last quarter…) awfully fast.

This Japanese take on content marketing spans both this Content Buffet blog and my Localization Project Management blog, which focuses on international product marketing. Isn’t it surprising how people in other parts of the world think about and relate to content? What if it’s only in the West that time matters to content marketing?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

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From MarketingProfs comes this post about the YouTube Creator Playbook for planning, posting and maintaining video on the site.

Have a look at it to see what they mean by “playbook.” It’s a very clever hybrid of:

• user guide
• how-to
• samples gallery
• collection of blog posts

from a company that knows something about content marketing. For that matter, it looks as though they may have created it in their parent company’s own humble Google Docs Presentation app.

Most of us in marketing would probably have called it a white paper. Why?

• It reveals a lot of technical detail.
• It explains how users can get the most out of the product.
• It describes the product in sufficient detail even for people who aren’t yet using it.
• You put it down and think, “These guys are giving away a lot of useful information for free.”

Most important, it persuades without trying to persuade.

For homework tonight, forward this playbook to several of your co-workers in sales, executive management and PR. My hunch is that, within a few days, at least one of them will walk into your office and announce, “This was really good. We need a white paper just like this.”

Fine. Get a good marketing communications writer to create it for you. Use it in your next content marketing campaign.

Just don’t call it a white paper. You can be more creative than that.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

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How does your organization use case studies? Do you realize how potent a tool they can be in your Content Buffet?

[Quick factoid in case you want to be convinced: Eccolo Media's 2011 B2B Technology Collateral Survey finds that 68 percent of respondents rated case studies as "very” to “extremely influential” in 2011, as compared to 39 percent of respondents in the 2010 survey (page 8).]

Why do case studies work?

They work because people don’t want to feel alone in taking a chance on your product. Whether you’re selling mixing bowls, gas turbines or a college education, nobody wants to be the first to try your product.

So keep that in mind when your marketing communications writer is creating your case studies. Instead of describing how cool your product is, tell a story in which your prospects can see themselves so that they don’t feel they’re taking a big risk by sending you their check.

Of course, you can’t calm everybody’s nerves with one case study, so organizations with a content marketing strategy create a series of them and give them titles that make it easy for people to find one in which they can see themselves.

What’s in your prospect’s head?

Depending on how your marketing communications writer executes your content marketing strategy, your case studies will trigger one of these thoughts in the brain of your prospect:

1. “These guys have some big customers.” Sometimes you want a case study that drops names. Who can resist that temptation? If you landed the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company and made them happy, trumpet that from the rooftops and put that idea into your prospect’s head. Most of the time, though, the namedropping is pretty transparent and it’s wrapped around a frankly rather dull Problem-Solution-Result structure. It’s not pretty, but if you have to get the piece approved by a phalanx of your client’s reviewers, you may need clinical, succinct copy.
2. “This is the same problem I have, and these guys understand it.” If you want to plug the reader right into your socket, show that your customer actually had multiple problems – they always have, somewhere – and that you didn’t stop asking questions when you reached the first one. Explain how you fixed them, in as much detail as you can get away with.
   
3. “If these guys can frim the jim-jams for them, maybe they can frap the krick for us.” For this, you need to drive imagination with a case study that tells a real story, especially a story about an unexpected use of your product. You have to show your readers what your customer accomplished with your product, then put them in the frame of mind to think one step removed. That accelerator was designed for a robot? What if we used it in a history-making tchotchke?

What kind of ideas do your case studies plant in your prospect’s mind? Does it align with your content marketing strategy?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: gurdonark

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“So I have good news and bad news,” the director of marketing started off.

Just when I thought we were out of the tunnel on this campaign…

“The good news is that we’ve shown an early draft of the business-benefits piece to our CEO, and he quite likes it. In fact, he himself wrote a paper for a C-level peer at one of our customers a few months back that draws the business case around our product, and he’d like to provide it as material for our project.

“Obviously, that’s also the bad news.”

He laughed. I laughed. The agency laughed.

Drat.

Managing executive expectations for marketing content

As a kid, I spent a lot of time at Milne Brothers Bike Shop on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, California. Mr. Jenkins had a sign on the wall in the service department out back that read:

Labor Rates

$5.00/hr.

$7.50/hr. if you watch

$12.00/hr. if you help

I’ve thought about that as a model for managing customer expectations and involvement, but I doubt most businesses would get very far with it.

The point is that people who do know what they’re doing, don’t generally welcome the involvement of people who merely may know what they’re doing.

So consider these levels of involvement for the executives of your client-companies:

1. “Let me make sure we’re on the same page.” – When, as in this case, the CEO has devoted some time, thought and potentially high-value perspective to his own material, you cannot afford to have your marketing content run afoul of how your CEO sees things.
1. It’s probably better if you can convince the exec to let you review his material, instead of having him review yours.
2. “Let me just approve what you’ve written.” – This is smart. One of my favorite CEOs did this with all the content we generated beyond datasheets and product briefs. He never rewrote our copy, but he had his fingers on its pulse, and we knew that he had the ultimate say.
3. “Let me help.” – This is a pain for everybody. Execs rarely have time to help on these projects, and they become bottlenecks, if well-intentioned bottlenecks. Writing a paper or a thought-piece with a VP or C-level exec is usually very difficult. You’re better off recording her at a conference and turning that into a paper.
4. “Let me butt out.” – Optimal for most parties concerned, in the short run. Really, though, you should try to make your work visible to the execs, if only to justify your effort.

The sound marketing director

“I’m just kidding,” continued the marketing director. “I plan to manage the process so that we can keep our campaign moving ahead without delays. The CEO told me he’d like to see the early direction of the piece, and I’ve told him that I would like to review the material he put together.”

Whew. Option 1.1.

“He wants to be in the loop on this piece. I think he’ll have useful input, and he’ll be receptive to our description of business benefits. It’s a win for us, so long as we manage the changes smoothly.”

The sound marketing manager can make things like this work well. How do you handle it when execs want to help?

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Kelvyn Skee

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“But I’m not much of a writer,” you moan. “How am I supposed to get a content marketing campaign going without spending a jillion dollars on great content?”

That’s true. Great content isn’t just great content; there’s usually an entire, time-consuming, arduous process wrapped around great content. There has to be, to yield something that you won’t look at in four months and think, “I’m so tired of that paper.” If you’re thinking that, your prospects probably are, too.

Can’t have great? Choose good.

All right, then, make good content the centerpiece of your marketing campaign to start with.

David Meerman Scott (whose work I often coattail) posted last week on how smart people who are poor writers create great content. He offers three ideas, the first two of which are potentially rather expensive, but the third of which almost any marketing manager can do:

Talk your ideas through and then transcribe the results.

It doesn’t take long to build a library of content from this approach. Sure, it’s humble, and it doesn’t tell the story as well as a professional marketing communications writer will, but it gets the ball rolling.

One of my clients in IT service management is building a huge library of case studies similarly. Its own customers are glad to describe in presentations, keynotes, interviews and testimonials their own IT problems and how the product has helped them, and my client records them. We transcribe and edit them, then produce them as case studies that go onto the Website for SEO.

The marketing managers look at each piece and think,

Well, it’s not exactly the messaging we’d use, but it is exactly the way at least some of our customers talk, so it’s good content. It’s a 15% solution.

They know that there’s no such thing as a 100% solution, and even a 30% solution would cost a lot more than twice as much.

Do you let great content become the enemy of good content? Let me know in the comments below.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: eddiedangerous

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It’s rare that I post on the mechanics of content marketing, but I think this entry is overdue.

Last year in Social Media Guide and Social Media Examiner, I read about a way to embed a retweet button inside a PDF. Since much of my content ends up in PDF, it looked like a good value-add for my marketing communications clients, and I began using it liberally.

It involves placing in the PDF (or even in the source document) a hyperlink to Twitter that populates a tweet with the text you want moving around the twittersphere, passively glorifying your content.

For example (and to glorify my client’s content), this link in your PDF:

can yield this:

It’s an easy way to spread your message via social media and introduce a little bit of reader engagement.

I was happy with it, my clients were happy with it, and readers were indeed retweeting the PDFs.

But then…

…something broke.

On a new project last week, I had cloned the same hyperlink that had worked properly all last year, then spent an hour or more fruitlessly trying to get it to populate the What’s Happening field in Twitter. I went back to PDFs I’d created for other clients and tested them: they, too, had stopped working properly.

My neat hack had become a casualty of the New Twitter. In short, the Old Twitter required

/home/?

in the hyperlink for retweet to work. It had also required plus-signs instead of spaces between words. New Twitter doesn’t like those. It took me another hour searching for this information – frankly, I don’t remember where I found it anymore – so I’m summarizing it here for posterity, and so that I remember how to do it.

So, to get this:

enter this hyperlink in your source file (MS Word .docx file, InDesign, FrameMaker, etc.):

http://twitter.com/?status=Mobile developers - Get Qualcomm Web Technologies white papers - http://developer.qualcomm.com/webtech | (via @qdevnet)

Note that some applications will spontaneously replace the spaces with %20, but it does no harm. Note also that this probably won’t work at all for users stuck on Old Twitter; I assume that they’ll be forced to update eventually and that your retweet links will work for the lion’s share of your readers.

Whew. I can retweet again.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

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When people look at a column of your tweets, can they tell who the intended audience is?

When they land on your Facebook page, can they scan your posts and figure out whether you’re talking to them or to the other half-billion people in the Face-sphere?

We expect that our followers in social media know something about us and our brand, and will be receptive to our tweets. If you’re Souplantation, you can assume that visitors know you’re making offers to hungry people, most of whom have hungry families to feed.

Addressing the envelope

But suppose you’ve been developing and writing to buyer personas, as Michele Linn and David Meerman Scott have enjoined you to do all these years. You put in place a content marketing campaign aimed at your ideal readers, then use tweets and posts to point them to it.

Are you making it drop-dead easy for them to know that you’re talking to them?

Are you addressing the envelope?

Sacrifice a few precious characters in the name of targeting. For example:

• Sysadmins: Security holes in Windows 7; plug ‘em now http://… #hashtag
• MobileAppDevelopers: Still time to register for devconf at http://…
• Mktgmgrs: You tweetin’ to me? Huh? http://… #hashtag1 #hashtag2
• AngryBirders: Two new cheats revealed http://…
• navyseals: Thanks, good job. Don’t tell us – we don’t want to know how you did it

What happens when you don’t address the envelope like this? People assume you’re talking to your “following” – whatever that is – but what about those of us who don’t yet know whether we’re in your following?

Explicitly addressing your tweets and posts is an easy way of qualifying the members of your audience and letting them know whom you’re trying to attract to your following. If I’m not a mktgmgr, sysadmin or navyseal, then I know your message doesn’t apply to me.

And we all appreciate anything you can do to help us cut through the clutter.

*(With apologies to Robert DeNiro as Travis in “Taxi Driver”)

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: sludgegulper

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Marketing managers tread the razor’s edge between sending followers too much content and sending them too little.

Here’s research from Exact Target and CoTweet:

The most frequently cited (44%) reason Facebook users give for “unliking” a brand is that it posts too frequently.

Oops, marketing managers. Better not post too often. It looks like nagging or chest-thumping, and that’s not what we want to see on Facebook.

On the other hand – and we should always be thankful we have one of those – is research from MailChimp and Hubspot on the Science of Email Marketing. It draws conclusions from 9.5 billion (with a “b”) e-mail messages sent in campaigns worldwide:

• The click-through rate at one send per month is 6%, and the click-through rate for everything from 2 to 30 sends per month varies from 5% down to 2%. Not much of a penalty for sending a lot of e-mail. (Slide 40)
• If you send 1-5 e-mail messages per month, your unsubscribe rate will be between .7% and .2%. Any more frequently than that and it drops as low as .1%. This fairly encourages more contact. (Slide 41)

Hubspot’s takeaway:

Don’t be afraid to send too much e-mail.

And, when it comes to blogging, the decisions you make about posting frequency are much more subtle, depending on whether you’re after influence, traffic, comments, pagerank or reader engagement.

Of course, this assumes you’re not posting/sending the same content over and over. If that’s your strategy for wooing followers, you’d better try Twitter instead.

So, don’t worry if you and your marketing team are having doubts as to how much content marketing volume to push in social media, because each channel marches to the beat of its own drum. And even then, it’s as much art as science.

If you wanted hard-and-fast rules, you should have gone into engineering.

This is marketing, and that’s why we call it that.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

photo credit: Serge Melki

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