A few weeks before the start of the New Year I led a workshop on content marketing for about 50 small-business CEOs and operations managers. They came from all different industries. Some were consultants. There was a plumber and a representative from an HVAC company present. Pest management? Check. A few small manufacturing companies, a nonprofit, and a jewelry store rounded it out. In other words, it was a diverse group of companies.

What wasn’t diverse were the ways they were marketing their companies. Most had e-newsletters. All of them had Facebook pages. Every one of these senior leaders was concerned about search engine rankings.

Another consistent characteristic? Not one of them was happy with their marketing. This is not unusual. It’s predictable that senior leaders are often disappointed with their marketing. Why? Mostly because they believe it should be easier than it is. They also feel they are just one secret-sauce answer away from Utopia. I mean, how hard could it really be? (Don’t answer that.)

And that’s what I heard about their content efforts as well. Their blog posts weren’t getting much traffic or converting. Their email newsletters weren’t getting opened. Their customers were ignoring them on social media. Finding themselves on the first page on a search engine listing was equally hard.

Changing course

I’d heard enough. After the last complaint, I stopped my presentation. This is something I don’t normally do. I’ve been doing this particular workshop for a while, and the flow works well with small businesses. The last thing I wanted to do was alter course.

But I did alter it with this one simple question, “Is the content you are creating and distributing for your customers any different than anything else out there?”

I looked around at the business leaders. You could have heard a pin drop.

I repeated the question.

“Is the content you are creating and distributing for your customers any different than anything else out there?”

I then rephrased and asked the question to each one directly. I asked the jewelry store executive with the e-newsletter if what they sent to customers was any different. They sent coupons and articles that you could find literally anywhere.

I asked the plumber. He promoted content from the manufacturer on his YouTube page and his blog. I also found out that about 300 other plumbers used that same content.

I asked the financial consultant. He said he purposely kept his articles general because he didn’t want to give away any intellectual property without compensation. “How’s that working for you?” I asked.

“Not very well” was his response.

At one point in the workshop, I told them that if they aren’t going to take this seriously, they should all just go out and buy advertising (and I meant it).

Why should your customers care?

For the rest of the morning, we focused on answering one simple question: “Why should my customers care?”

That e-newsletter you are sending out. Why should they care?

Your Facebook post? Why should they care?

Your blog post, video or (God help us all) Snapchat?

You get the point.

Our job, as marketers, is not to create more content. It has never been about that. It’s about creating the minimum amount of content with the maximum amount of behavior change in our customers (hat tip to Robert Rose). For that to be possible, what you are creating has to be valuable, useful, compelling and, yes, different.

Marketers: Create the min amount of #content with the max amount of behavior change in your customers.
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The content tilt

Somewhere along the line, we marketers became infatuated with the tools and less concerned about what we put inside them. This, my friends, has got to change.

Of the six-step process of the Content Inc. model (from my latest book), the most important step is the second, the content tilt.

The content tilt is that area of little to no competition on the web that actually gives you a fighter’s chance of breaking through and becoming relevant. It’s not only what makes you different, it’s so different that you get noticed by your audience. That audience rewards you with their attention.

The content tilt is what will separate you from everyone else in your market area. Andrew Davis, author of Town Inc., calls this “the hook” – a simple twist on a familiar theme designed to entrap or ensnare your audience. Without “tilting” your content just enough to truly have a different story to tell, your content will fade into the rest of the clutter and be forgotten.

How to find your tilt

The real goal of this little story was to get you to ask the question – Is my content different? The majority, like over 99% of marketers, do not have differentiated content. They are not telling stories that are different.

If you are like most marketers, then, your next question is “How do I make it different?”

One question marketers should ask before creating #content: Is my content different from my competition?
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This is easier said than done, but it is possible to tell a different and compelling story looking at different data points. Here are some things to consider:

• Audience – Are you really niche enough with your audience? “Pet owners” simply is too broad as a target audience. What about “homeowners who like to travel with a dog in their recreational vehicle and live in southwest Florida”? That may be too niche, but probably not. To be truly relevant with your story, you need to focus on a very specific reader. As Stephen Kings says in On Writing, you should think about this person every time you create content.

• How you tell the story – Content marketing has been around for years and has been called many different things. But we at the Content Marketing Institute were the first to call it content marketing. That made a difference in how the audience responded.

• Platform – One of the HVAC contractors in the workshop told me there are a thousand blog posts a day on energy efficiency. We also learned that there were few, if any, podcasts about saving energy. Opportunity? I’m not sure, but it’s worth a look.

• Subject matter – Using tools like Google Trends, you can uncover breakout terms for which there are few instructional resources. Take this quote from Jay Baer as an example:

It’s like, ‘Hey I like knitting, and I’m going to start a knitting blog.’ Really! There are 27 other knitting blogs. Why would anybody read yours? What is different? What is unique? What is interesting? Why would anyone stop reading the knitting blog that they’ve been reading for the last three years and read yours ever? And if you can’t articulate that, you need to go back to the drawing board. And most people I find who haven’t been doing this for a while just don’t go through that competitive calculus, and it’s dangerous.

From the subject matter standpoint, knitting might be too broad. Are there certain types of knitting that are underserved, where you could be the leading expert in the world?

What if your content was gone?

Let’s end with this thought.

Let’s say someone rounded up all your content and placed it in a box like it never existed. Would anyone miss it? Would you leave a gap in the marketplace?

If the answer to this is no, then you have a problem (and this article is directed at you, bub).

We want customers and prospects needing … no, longing for our content. It becomes part of their lives … their jobs.

Today, it’s harder and harder to buy attention. You have to earn it. Earn it today, tomorrow, and five years from now by delivering the most impactful information your customers could ever ask for. “Good enough” won’t win the battle for customer attention. Be great.

Want to learn tips, trends, and more to help you tilt your content? Subscribe for the free daily or weekly CMI blog.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post One Thing Is Killing Content Marketing and Everyone Is Ignoring It appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

How are bloggers approaching their work in this age of content marketing—and how do marketers’ efforts compare?

WEBINAR: Cisco shares its best brand journalism and social media tips.

A survey by Orbit Media Studios says that bloggers spend more time creating blog posts, with the average post taking about two and a half hours to write.

More than half (54 percent) of the 1,000 bloggers surveyed said that they can knock out a blog post in an hour or two.

As for frequency, nearly a quarter of bloggers publish between two and six posts per week, with the second highest percentage of bloggers posting weekly.

When it comes to length, 500-1,000 words is still the sweet spot; 61.3 percent of respondents said that’s where they keep their posts.

For more insights, check out the Orbit Media Studios infographic below:

No one liked Pinterest when it first launched. 

The founder, Ben Sildermann, struggled to find investors who were on board with his vision when he approached them at the outset; no one thought his project would amount to much.

And while Ben may have been frustrated then, I have a feeling he’s laughing now. 

Because that little project no one was interested in investing in? It’s gone from 5,000 users to a whopping 180 million users in just 5 years.

Pinterest has become an inspiration resource, a search engine, and a fantastic outlet for businesses to market their offerings. It’s filled with gorgeous, high-quality photos of everything under the sun. It’s a visual feast.

While the statistics of Pinterest’s growth are shocking and inspiring, they’re even more telling of just how powerful visuals are today and will continue to be in the future. They’re indicative of the direction things are moving when it comes to marketing your business and getting noticed by potential customers.

There are many different visuals you can use to promote your products and services - from infographics to animated videos and everything in between - but photos are one of the most effective. 

And while we know that subconsciously, we don’t always take the time to consider why. 

So now’s a great time to take a few simple minutes to consider these 3 big reasons you should be making every effort to capture high-quality photos to promote your offerings.

1  |  Photos help people visualize what it would be like to use your product/service

We all do it, and probably without realizing. 

We’ll scroll through high-quality images of delectable desserts, gorgeous homes, and stylish outfits on Pinterest or Instagram and consider what it would be like to eat that blueberry crostata with vanilla bean ice cream, snuggle up on that comfy couch with the colorful pillows, or wear that plaid button-down with black skinny jeans. 

We subconsciously place ourselves in the photo.

That’s so important to understand as a marketer. And yes, if you’re a business owner (especially if you’re a solopreneur), you have no choice - you’re also a marketer. So you might as well learn all you can and be a darn good one.

By using photos, you’re helping people visualize what it would be like to use your product. You have the opportunity to make that fictitious experience seem excellent with your photography if you approach it the right way.

So take that into account when you’re taking photos of your products. 

Consider your lighting, the objects that are in the background, the props you use. Take an objective look at your images and ask yourself whether they’re portraying the right kind of experience for your audience.

2  |  Photos provide visual proof

Last week in my post on creating a winning marketing concept, I mentioned that providing proof encourages belief; it helps build trust with your potential customers. And in order for people to buy things from you, they have to be able to trust you.

To help you build that trust, you have to give people reasons to believe (RTBs) - proof that they’ll actually obtain the benefit you’re promising them.

Photos provide visual proof. You can use them to demonstrate your product in action, show up close details and features, and display the outcomes of using your product.

Would you buy a new pair of shoes online if you weren’t able to see detailed photos of them? Probably not. You want to know exactly what you’re getting, especially if you’re buying them online and can’t see the shoes in person. 

Photos build trust with your prospective customers by helping them see exactly what they’ll receive once they buy from you.

The same is true for any other product or service; you want to understand exactly what you’re going to get before you click the big red buy button.

Make it easier to win over prospective customers by helping them get a great idea of what they’ll receive once they buy from you. Use high-quality images to demonstrate your offering in action and provide visual proof.

3  |  Photos convey messages quickly

I’ll give you a second to let this image sink in.

What were your first thoughts when you saw it? Surprise? Disgust?

That’s exactly what the marketers behind this campaign for smoke-free dining wanted you to feel, and they were able to convey their message within a second or two because of this clever photo.

When you’re trying to marketing your offerings - especially among busy people with short attention spans - you only have a short window of time to get your point across.

You can’t sit down with each person you come into contact with and explain the ins and outs of your product for a half hour. You have to convey your message within a second or two.

Photos give you the ability to share a story quickly. 

The marketing campaign above wouldn’t have been quite as effective if they had tried to paint the picture in your head of a woman eating a hamburger full of cigarettes over the radio or in text, would it? It also would have taken much, much longer. 

But because they used a photo, they were able to catch your attention and convey a message quickly and develop an emotional response from their audience. That’s great marketing.

Before you take the time to capture images for your products and services, consider the message you’re trying to portray to your audience. Go back to that clever concept you created and brainstorm creative ways that you can carry that concept out in your photos. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how to create high-quality photos, don’t miss our upcoming ellechat on Thursday, January 21st at 8pm EST with Chaitra from PinkPot. 

We’re going to be covering helpful tools for capturing and editing photos, the basics of the exposure triangle, and there may even be some free cheat sheets involved… It’s free and totally for your benefit, and I would love to have you join in. 

And if you’re interested in learning more about how to utilize visuals to boost your sales (and want first access and a discount to our upcoming visual marketing course), be sure to register for our biggest ellechat to date, How Visuals Can Take Your Sales from “Blah” to Booming, on Thursday, January 28th at 8pm EST.

In the meantime, be sure to follow along with the Elle & Company blog throughout the month of January for more helpful content on visual marketing. 

How big of a role do photos play in your marketing efforts? What are your biggest struggles when it comes to taking high-quality images for your business?

Last year, I interviewed IBM’s Andrea Ames, whose job title alone makes me tired: enterprise content experience strategist, architect, and designer. In this article, I share some steal-worthy ideas from that interview – ideas that can help you, as a marketer, scale your content processes and provide your customers with more remarkable experiences.

Create content that builds customer relationships (Content is the new salesperson)

Today more than ever, we build customer relationships not face to face but through content. Andrea points out that in 2011 technology buyers’ engaging with content encompassed 56% of the sales cycle and 21% talking with salespeople. “When you realize that content has a bigger relationship-building potential than talking to a person, that’s huge. Your content is your sales opportunity,” she says.

Your #content is your sales opportunity. Your readers are influencers by @aames via @cmicontent
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The people who read your content aren’t researching just for themselves. As Andrea explains, “They curate it. They share it with executives, who send it out to their evaluation teams. Your readers are influencers.”

Every customer journey includes pre- and post-sale phases. Typically, the final phase is called advocacy, IBM’s term for it, or a similar synonym. Here’s what Andrea says about this coveted phase:

You don’t get to advocacy unless customers feel like they have a relationship with you, your company, your software, your hardware, your woodworking patterns, your cookbook, whatever it is. You’re not going to have someone write a blog post saying, ‘That was the best cookbook I ever read’ or ‘IBM software is the bomb’—you’re not going to get that level of advocacy unless you have a relationship.

And you don’t get a relationship by saying, “Hello, IBM customer. How do you like your product? Please go to this online survey.” IBM knows who its customers are. IBM knows what they bought. To build customer relationships, Andrea says, marketers “need to target our content so that people feel like we know who they are.”

Create #content that builds customer relationships by @aames via @cmicontent #contentstrategy
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Set up your content to get to the right people (This takes serious planning, and it’s worth it)

Marketing’s holy grail is getting the right content to the right people at the right time. It’s simple in theory, but not necessarily easy to achieve. Making it happen requires planning and coordination.

Marketing’s holy grail is getting the right #content to the right people at the right time via @MarciaRJohnson
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For starters, Andrea says, you must structure content in consistent ways. You must identify elements – titles, paragraphs, numbered lists, and so on – in such a way that not only people but also machines – computers – can recognize what those elements are.

In other words, you must tag content with metadata – information about the content, like what kind of content it is, who the intended audience is, when people need that content, what department it belongs to, who created it, who needs access to it. When you set up your metadata appropriately, you enable machines to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time.

Andrea gives this example. We might say, “Give me all the content that’s intended for cooks, and pull it together into a cookbook.” A machine can do this instantly if the content has been set up for this request.

Magnify that example by all the personas for which your company develops content experiences – IBM has 60 or 70 – and you can see why you must plan metadata thoughtfully if you want to deliver content that’s relevant and, to an extent, personalized (adaptable).

“We don’t want to deliver administrator information to a developer,” Andrea says. “We don’t want people to have to sift through 50 million things to find the five things they care about.”

Prepare to scale your personalization (Manual methods don’t scale)

To deliver highly relevant content on a massive scale – and, Andrea says, even a small company with a single content person is looking at a massive scale if he or she has 10,000 chunks of content to worry about – it’s not practical to use manual personalization methods. Manual methods don’t scale.

The kind of setup required to automate your content personalization may seem like too much to ask, Andrea says, “but marketers have to face up to customers’ expectations.”

To underscore this point, she tells this story:

My nephew is 23. He takes for granted the Amazon plus-plus-plus kind of experience, where the company knows what he’s interested in. Like many his age – the 35 and unders – he expects that kind of personalized experience. In exchange, he’s willing to share a whole bunch of information about himself.

All companies face the reality of high expectations for personalized content. If you’re among those who are moving toward an intelligent content approach, you have the best chance of meeting those expectations – and of reaping the reward: customers who trust you enough to share information that money can’t buy.

From a marketing perspective, Andrea says, “that’s pure gold.”

Coordinate with other content teams (This effort is complex – and necessary)

I can’t tell you how to coordinate with other content teams at your organization, but a peek into what IBM is doing may spark some ideas.

Like other companies, IBM has multiple customer-facing systems: A knowledge center for documentation, a support portal, DeveloperWorks (a web-based resource center for software developers, IT pros, students worldwide), and more. “The same impetus that creates those channels also creates the various back-end systems that manage that content,” Andrea says.

Internally, since IBM acquires a number of companies every year, it also ends up with many content management systems and authoring tools. Andrea is part of the team that owns the strategy and enablement for all these systems.

You thought you had silo challenges?

As IBM’s content groups encounter issues and needs, they go to Andrea’s group to talk through the content-experience issues. Another team handles the technology strategy, the vision for how to deal with all those systems.

We look at the systems in a hybrid way. We don’t have a mindset of ‘we’ve got to have everything in one place.’ We have to be flexible and agile with managing content on the back end.

IBM has the same problems that most companies have. For example, marketing information may live in one system while technical documentation lives in another. The systems might sync or give a virtual view of multiple repositories that make it look like there’s a single repository – or they might not.

Coordinating across content teams is a complex effort. “It takes a lot to get your brain around this stuff at any company,” Andrea says. “In a large enterprise like IBM, the problem is bigger by orders of magnitude. It can seem overwhelming. It’s also fascinating.”

Find out what keeps your management up at night (Then you’ll know how to pitch your content ideas)

Marketers must understand their managers’ dreams – and their nightmares. Learn what’s driving your marketing executives, Andrea says. What’s keeping them up at night? What are their biggest issues and biggest goals? Typically, those goals involve developing customer relationships, getting customers to advocacy, and – surprise – boosting sales.

Does a certain executive want to build more one-on-one customer relationships? Good. Look into what that takes. Present your ideas and results in terms that that executive can relate to.

To win the support you need for your content ideas, tie those ideas to your boss’ boss’ goals and worries.

Go to conferences (People’s stories give you ideas for what to try and what to avoid)

All these things that Andrea talks about require that content professionals keep learning. She suggests “scooping up some of the industry-success data that’s available,” especially at conferences, where you can learn from people who are sharing their stories.

Go to the case-study sessions, where people say, ‘We did x, y, z. This is how it turned out.’ You’ll get ideas for what might work for you – and ideas for what not to do.

You can find webinars and other information sources for free, of course, but, for Andrea, there’s nothing like an in-person conference to bring together a lot of these stories from all kinds of companies.

Summary

Of all the insights I took away from my conversation with Andrea, six stand out as especially relevant for marketers. Steal these:

• Create content that builds customer relationships.
• Set up your content to get to the right people.
• Prepare to scale your personalization.
• Coordinate with other content teams.
• Find out what keeps your management up at night.
• Go to conferences.

You’re already doing some of these things. Which of them call to you as next steps for your team? What will you do today to move in those directions?

Andrea Ames will give a keynote talk at the Intelligent Content Conference March 7-9 in Las Vegas. I’ve seen her on stage many times; she always inspires me. I’ve also looked forward to ICC since I first attended in 2012 (even before I worked for CMI) and can’t wait to see you there this year.

Cover image by Siyan Ren, Unsplash, via pixabay.com

The post 6 Content Ideas Every Marketer Should Steal From IBM appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.