Content marketing workshop presentation from Joe Pulizzi from the Content Marketing Institute - presented at IACC's annual meeting. Contains the 10 steps to success in content marketing.
10 Steps to Content Marketing Success - Content Marketing Workshop at IACC
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Content Marketing:
The Workshop
Joe Pulizzi (@juntajoe)
Founder, Content Marketing Institute
Co-Author, Get Content Get Customers
and Managing Content Marketing
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To help transform marketers into publishers.
Less renting, more owning.
EVENTS MEDIA CONSULTING
Sept 4-6, 2012
Columbus, OH
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Today
• First 30 minutes: Lecture
• Second 30 minutes: Discussion
• Rest of time plus 30 minute break: creating your
content marketing plan.
• THERE IS NO ONE RIGHT WAY – NO SILVER BULLET
• GOAL – 3 ACTIONABLE IDEAS TO
START TOMORROW
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Marcus Sheridan
CEO, River Pools & Spas
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2007
• $4.5 million in Sales
• $250,000 advertising spend
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2007
• $4.5 million in Sales
• $250,000 advertising spend
2010
• Sold more fiberglass swimming pools than any
other pool retailer in North America.
• $40,000 in advertising spend
• Won 15% more bids
• Cut sales cycle in half.
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Why?
• Great blog content makes us sound
interesting and positions us as experts
• Search engines love blogs
• Social media loves blogs
• Your customers read blogs
• Non-sales touch
• Minimal investment compared to outbound
marketing options
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Search Engine
Social Media Optimization
STORYTELLING
Lead
Generation
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The problem…
content marketing
is super hard.
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• Who exactly are you targeting?
–B2B/B2C
–Age
–Title/Function
–Their Internet Preferences/Patterns
• What do they think about you?
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A Buyer Persona For Every Group
• Job title, Vertical, Power in organization
• Different products or services?
• It’s the WHO you are marketing to
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EXERCISE
Put your Journalist hat on:
• WHO is the persona?
• WHAT does she do? What does her day look
like?
• WHERE is the gap in his needs/wants?
• WHEN does he need to close this gap?
• WHY does he care about us
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Jeremy The IT Buyer
Jeremy
• Mid 30’s – Coffee lover
• Works at a bank
• Responds to email, phone
not so much.
• Frustrated because his
company is growing too
fast to keep up with support
• USP: Enable Jeremy to be 25% more effective!
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Secret Sauce Matrix
The leading provider • Latest research on
of lean shipping trends
manufacturing • How to integrate lean
information for small marketing into a traditional
manufacturers in mfg environment
North America. • Ongoing training for lower-
level personnel specific to
floor managers
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Managing Editors
THE single point of contact… the actual day-to-day
storytellers… the ones who can make it compelling.
But… not always the “source” of the content – the thought
leaders.
This role is sometimes outsourced.
Responsibilities include:
Content creation/production, scheduling, consistency
Mechanics of publishing and management (SEO etc..)
Tagging, images, style, approvals, etc.
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Example….
Michelle Linn
Content Development Director
“Coordinates, manages, writes and serves as editor for content on
CMI and coordinates with contributors. If you have content
marketing questions that you would like our contributors to
answer or if you are someone who wants to write for us, let me
know..”
Barb Schmitz
Managing Editor / PTC
In addition to having her own company, serves as outsourced
managing editor for PTC’s blog creo.ptc.com
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Where is Content Happening?
• Customers (including sales calls)
• Internal experts
• Events (yours and industry events)
• All employees
• Current content and reports to be
storified!
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Choose Content Tactics for the
Plan
• Small Content – consistent, everyday advice.
• Big Content – pieces of research and larger
information that people want to talk about.
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• THINK
MULTIPLE
• Podcasts (2)
• Print Article
• Digital Article
• Tweet
Schedule
• Facebook Posts
• Blog Posts
• Guest Posts
• White Paper
• Case Study
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Headline Tips
• Think about the Problem
• Focus on a Keyword Search (Google
External Search)
• Numbers Rule
• Be VERY Specific
Ways to Increase Your Stock Returns
10 Ways to Make More Money with Small-Cap Stocks
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Where are your customers
HANGING OUT?
Target the top 10 – 15 blogs or websites in
your niche
Read and get active…start commenting
Where else are your customers online?
Be the LinkedIn/Yahoo! Answers expert
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Where Are Your Customers?
• LinkedIn Groups
• Yahoo! / LinkedIn Answers
• Google Groups
• Niche Online Communities (Ning?)
• Twitter/Facebook
• StumbleUpon
• BusinessWeek Xchange
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OPC
• Over 200 blogs, Over 200 Webinars
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Tip #1 – Try not to answer the question
Focus on what your audience cares about…
and that’s it.
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Tip #2 – Be Democratic
• Mix in other’s content, not just your own.
• Use title, then via @ so the person knows you
are talking about them.
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Create Employee Rock Stars
• Set up blogs for your employees on your platform.
• Create a Social Media Policy (see IBM’s for an
example)
• Teach them how to leverage social media
(ACTUAL TRAINING)
By Giving Up Control You
Can Take Back Control
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Blogging (36 hours @ $45/hour) = 3
posts/week
Chunky Content (16 hours @ 36/hour) = 1 big
piece/quarter
Social Media and Community Building (10
hours @ $45/hour, per every 10 employees)
Listening and Measurement (24 hours/month
@ $30/hour)
Total annual labor costs for a 50 person firm =
$62,280
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Hard measures
• Number of marketing-produced prospects who
purchased
• Number of sales-produced prospects who
purchased
• Dollar amount of deals
• Margin on the deal
• Length of time in marketing-to-sales process
• Customer lifetime value
Ardath Albee
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Measuring Engagement
• Time spent through online research or by
using analytic measures on eNewsletter.
– Engaged visitors
– Open rate/CTR enewsletters
20% rule
• APA 25 minutes research
www.25minutes.co.uk/
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ROO Tactics
• Using Distinct 800 numbers for print and online initiatives
• Using unique URLs for different content projects
• Leveraging bit.ly for specific content projects
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ROO Tactics
• Ensuring every print or web page has a call to action
• Measure what works best, and use more of those kind of
calls to action.
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Always Forget???
• Call to Action
• Blog to What???
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From Debbie Weil
• Download our white paper
• Join us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube,
etc.
• Ask us a question
• Download our e-book
• Sign up for our free webinar
• Request our visitor’s guide
• Sign up for our e-newsletter
• Request a virtual demo
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Follow What’s Working
• What content is working? Why? Should you develop more
of that content?
• Tie to conversions/goals
143. Social Media Measurement
@juntajoe
Visitors from Social Media
Visitors Leads Customers
SEO 5,289 754 12
Social Media 834 72 3
YouTube 511 28 1
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User Indicators (“the doers”)
• Web traffic increases
• Increase in page views
• Decrease in bounce rates
• Tweets or Facebook shares
• Search engine rankings
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In Summary
• This is not easy…but it can support your
long-term marketing and business goals.
• Content strategy before social media.
• Dedicate resources.
• Temper expectations.
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QUESTIONS
Joe Pulizzi
joe@contentinstitute.com • @juntajoe on Twitter
September 4 – 6, 2012 – Columbus, Ohio
CODE “JUNTAJOE” TO SAVE $100
Editor's Notes
Our goal today is to be the trusted expert for our customers. That’s how we will grow our businesses.
Before consumers make a buying decision, they go online, either to find vendors or to confirm a purchase.
Think of online content like the lottery…the more tickets you have, the more opportunity for your customers to find you.
More tickets = more opportunities.
According to the Custom Content Council, companies that provide helpful information as part of their marketing are 60% more likely to get the sale versus those that do not provide valuable information.
According to the Custom Content Council, companies that provide helpful information as part of their marketing are 60% more likely to get the sale versus those that do not provide valuable information.
So, the idea is simple then. Create really valuable content, syndicated in a variety of ways (found in search engines and social media) to attract and retain customers.
DIRECTION The Magnet blog then pushes out to FB, Twitter and LinkedIN. SCRIPT Next, we set up your social networking identities on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN, and connect them to your blog site. Those become your outposts – places where we can spread our great content and drive customers to your blog site.
And let’s start by discussing how we help buyers make better purchasing decisions. Because before we can truly understand what we do for vendors like you, it’s critical to understand what we do for the buyer community.
Who exactly is our target buyer? Get a mental picture for who they are. What information do you have? What do you need to get?
So… developing our Buyer Personas…. Now, before we get started here just know that there’s not just one way to skin this cat… There are a number of great methodologies out there for developing buyer or target personas… I’m going to show you one quick way to do this today – but there are others out there as well…. Just find what works for you… So, let’s start by understanding that You need one persona for every group you are marketing to. For instance, and just to keep this simple… Let’s stay with our WIMPY Technology solution…. We’re the marketing manager in charge of marketing for a technology company – oh and by the way our WIMPY solution stands for Widget-Integration-Management-Program (or WIMP)…. That acronym was there when you joined the company…. So… okay the Solution is marketed to the Director of IT and the CFO at financial service companies, you would have two WIMP buyer personas: a Director of IT at a Regional Bank, and the CFO at that bank. Of course as I’ve said, if you have multiple products or more personas you would identify them separately…. To keep things simple for this lesson we’ll keep it to one product with two buyer personas…
Okay, that’s quick – but you get the idea… What we’re identifying in building a Persona is the following… And the way I do it is to remember my old Journalism rules of Who What where When and WHY WHO is the persona – let’s get emotionally attached by giving him a name and making him real. WHAT does he do. What does his day look like – W hat is his normal routine WHERE is his Insight Gap – in other word where’s the gap with our target with and without our solution. How would our solution close that gap WHEN does he he need to close this gap… Is this immediate or is this not a critical piece to what he needs to live his life…. WHY does he care… This is the USP to this target. What can we uniquely to help this person out.
We have Two Buyer personas here – our Director of IT and The CFO at Financial Services companies… We want to really understand these people… Let’s draw a bit of a personality profile… You can do this by interviewing customers… Or, by interviewing sales people, or talking with prospective customers – or usually some combination of all of that…. So, through that process we might determine that: Our Director of IT – his name is Jeremy – and he’s young (mid 30’s) and he works at an Insurance company. He comes in every day and supports the organization through desktop support – working on their computers and he’s the typical geeky IT guy… Responds well to Email, but not so much on the phone… He’s frustrated because he can’t tie all his office computers together into one dashboard… With his company growing so quickly – he seems to continually be chasing his tail and behind in fixing computers… So, he could see BEFORE a computer crashes that it’s going to crash… That’s where your WIMP solution comes in…. If he could just have that – he’d know BEFORE there were problems and could fix or replace broken computers… So, what’s the GAP with Jeremy – well he doesn’t really know how to build a business case for this. He’s not a business guy – and while he’s seen the Web site for the WIMP solution – he doesn’t really know much about it. So, the USP (or our Unique Selling Proposition) to Jeremy is that our WIMP solution will uniquely enable him to save more than 10 hours per week in saved calls, repair time and waiting for replacement parts. That means we can make Jeremy look like a rock star (his personal win) to his colleagues while we enable him to be 25% more effective at his job…
Okay, that’s quick – but you get the idea… What we’re identifying in building a Persona is the following… And the way I do it is to remember my old Journalism rules of Who What where When and WHY WHO is the persona – let’s get emotionally attached by giving him a name and making him real. WHAT does he do. What does his day look like – W hat is his normal routine WHERE is his Insight Gap – in other word where’s the gap with our target with and without our solution. How would our solution close that gap WHEN does he he need to close this gap… Is this immediate or is this not a critical piece to what he needs to live his life…. WHY does he care… This is the USP to this target. What can we uniquely to help this person out.
Google Alerts is a free tool. The first thing you need to do is create a gmail (or google mail account), which is also free. Once you have a Gmail account, go to www.google.com/alerts. Then, just type in your keywords. In this screen, you can see I typed in content marketing, which will search for the words content and marketing being in close proximity of one another, and send you an alert as google picks it up, once a day or once a week. You can set up as many words as you want.
Develop out your secret sauce matrix.
Develop out your secret sauce matrix.
Develop out your secret sauce matrix.
Where to find the great content?
Okay, that’s quick – but you get the idea… What we’re identifying in building a Persona is the following… And the way I do it is to remember my old Journalism rules of Who What where When and WHY WHO is the persona – let’s get emotionally attached by giving him a name and making him real. WHAT does he do. What does his day look like – W hat is his normal routine WHERE is his Insight Gap – in other word where’s the gap with our target with and without our solution. How would our solution close that gap WHEN does he he need to close this gap… Is this immediate or is this not a critical piece to what he needs to live his life…. WHY does he care… This is the USP to this target. What can we uniquely to help this person out.
Ok, now we can start to talk about content. Focus on two types of content.
Okay, that’s quick – but you get the idea… What we’re identifying in building a Persona is the following… And the way I do it is to remember my old Journalism rules of Who What where When and WHY WHO is the persona – let’s get emotionally attached by giving him a name and making him real. WHAT does he do. What does his day look like – W hat is his normal routine WHERE is his Insight Gap – in other word where’s the gap with our target with and without our solution. How would our solution close that gap WHEN does he he need to close this gap… Is this immediate or is this not a critical piece to what he needs to live his life…. WHY does he care… This is the USP to this target. What can we uniquely to help this person out.
But now let’s look at the Buying Cycle – which is almost always more complex than the Sales funnel… And remember this is how our customers buy from us… What’s their process… For your product or service it might vary by product – or by Persona…. And we’ll talk about that in a minute… But here what you want to do is MAP out how your customers buy from you… And again just as an example and just to keep things simple, and again coming back to our WiMPY Widget company for an example… The customer’s buying cycle looks like this… I’ve represented here as a concentric venn diagram because it’s not necessarily linear – but their focus on what they want becomes more pronounced and what they’re looking at becomes more limited as they go through each phase… Awareness/Education - meaning they’re trying to just understand that there’s the existence of this thing… Information Search / Vendor Selection – Now they’re searching for information and finding solutions for this… this may be the first time you get a phone call RFI’s Pricing / Vendor Information – okay we’re identified – what makes us better… What is our pricing for this solution Purchase Decision – Now a purchase decision… See – in this case and this is a great lesson… Purchase decision making isn’t always the last step… Many times people will go through researchign a solution to their needs – and then decide to NOT make a purchase… But then once they have… they go BACK to vendors and do a Competitive / Alternative Searching – this usuallty ends up with a Short List – where the solutions are looked at very closely and then a contract for the sale… So – that’s our buying cycle mapped out…. Quickly I know – and I’m sure you can see how you could spend a lot of time on this… And how different buying cycles can exist with different products – or even different personas…. This will be up to you to know when to create separate maps for your content… But generally this is a great indicator… If you identify different buying cycles for yoru products – you can bet that you should have a different map to which to apply your content marketing… Okay… so, now let’s move on and talk about putting these things together…
So for example let’s go back to our good friends at the WIMPY technology company… Remember that one of the White Papers we keep talking about was one focused on Efficiency and saving money… Since it had to do with dollars and cents – we plugged it into Cheryl’s persona – and we made it top of the funnel – where a CFO looking for a solution will probably come in and want to educate themselves… But here’s the thing… Remember, Jeremy’s path through the same buying process is a little different…. At some point a little deeper in the funnel, he’s going to have to go get permission from Cheryl (or somebody like Cheryl) to spend this money…. Jeremy may need to also build a business case… And that may be something we want to test… So, let’s just look at that white paper – make sure that we’ve got the content in an appropriate tone for Jeremy – and let’s just retitle it so that A) we know it’s different… And B) so that it’s appropriate for that persona… and, we can then simply plug it into the top Middle of the Funnel – in the Information search part of the buying cycle… We’re helping Jeremy to ultimately facilitate a purchase decision… So… Okay…. We’ve now learned how to build our grid and start filling in the content holes…. Now we need to measure what’s resonating and show our success…. Let’s take a look at that…
Identify where your customers are hanging out at…
Besides blogs, where are they. Get your list together and figure out the five or so communities that you are going to be super active in.
And let’s start by discussing how we help buyers make better purchasing decisions. Because before we can truly understand what we do for vendors like you, it’s critical to understand what we do for the buyer community.
Listen first…here are some great examples of listening…not only to gather information and research, but to truly show you are human beings. The comcast guy now has a book out.
Leveraging Tweetmeme
And let’s start by discussing how we help buyers make better purchasing decisions. Because before we can truly understand what we do for vendors like you, it’s critical to understand what we do for the buyer community.