Saturday, 20 March 2010
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
Sunday, 14 March 2010
11 Steps towards an online content strategy
Posted 10 March 2010 17:54pm by Rebecca Lieb
IBM recently published research showing that about 80 percent of those who begin a corporate blog never post more than five entries. And that's just blogging. The Internet is littered with near-tweetless Twitter accounts, expressionless Facebook pages, no-one-home YouTube channels. In the rush to adopt social media as a tactic, too many marketers leave strategy in the dust.
Increasingly, marketing isn't about buying media, the advertising model. Media is cheap -- or often even free. But rolling your own media brings with it a new set of challenges: coming up with enough content to fill all those blank pages, blog posts, profiles and such....and doing so on a regular basis, not just in a one-off burst of Week 1 enthusiam.
In short, brands are media. Marketers are editors, or at least need to start thinking like editors and producers if they don't want to come up short-handed. So herewith, 12 steps toward editor-think to help marketers get beyond that accusatory Blank White Page and start thinking like an editor.
1. Know your audience
Couldn't be simpler or more self-evident, but the importance of knowing who you're producing content for cannot be overstated. Customers? Prospects? Fans? Industry peers? Colleagues? The media? Some or all of the above? Selecting topics and tailoring messaging is a whole lot easier when you know who's on the receiving end.
2. Define key themes and messages
Now that you know who you're addressing, what is it, broadly speaking, you want to communicate to them? Don't just focus on your product, service or business here, but do some thinking as to how it relates to an audience's real-world concerns. If you're a local business, you may want to weave broader local themes into your content. If you're hawking something with a high consideration curve, education and learning may be part of your messaging. Use your knowledge of your audience, your tone-of-voice, and the broader informational environment in which you reside to inform themes and messaging.
3. Establish a frequency framework
Half the journalists I know say the write for periodicals because they need deadlines in order to produce. In the trade, it's called feeding the beast. You may not need to blog, or write, or tweet, or status-update every day, but once per month is probably not enough...and you risk the whole endeavor tipping off the cliff. Create a schedule for content updates and adhere to it. Map out potential stories, features, or other content in advance so that when the deadline looms, you'll have a sense of what's due. Falling into a rythm beats falling out of visibility altogether.
4. Create an editorial calendar
An editorial calendar plugs directly into the frequency framework. Just as your local newspaper has a fod and dining feature on Wednesdays, an expanded entertainment section on Friday, and home and gardening on Thursdays, mapping a type of content to your frequency framework is a great step forward in terms of making relevant content happen on a reasonably frequent schedule.
5. Develop regular features and rubrics
Creating a few regularly-appearing content elements is one of the oldest editorial tricks in the book. Comics, horoscopes, weather and film listings all help round off a newspaper's offerings and keep readers coming back for more. Moreover, once you've got these regular features, they're all but auto-populating. Highlights of the week, links out to other relevant content, a quote of the day are just a few down-and-dirty ideas to keep the flow of content coming.
6. Interview
Interviews probably belong up in item #5, but are notable enough to warrant discussion on their own. Are your own ideas drying up? Talk to someone else! Experts in your field, enthusiatic users, people in your company. Make a list of potential interview subjects, and consider making interviews a regular content feature.
7. Go multimedia
Content isn't limited to text alone, of course. Images, photos, video and audio all expand and enhance your content offerings. Blogging? Posts accompanied by a graphic image draw attention to themselves. Don't take my word for it, give it a shot -- web metrics bear this one out.
8. Enlist contributors and provide them with guidelines
You don't have to go it alone. Look around at your coworkers, colleagues, professional network. There are lots of potential content contributors out there. Often, all you have to do is ask, either for one-off contributions or regular features. User-generated content is, of course, a whole new route to ensuring content is created for you, be it comments, ratings and reviews, or contests. With clearly defined guidelines and expectations, and a little bit of polite asking, you may be surprised at how much content is created for you rather than by you.
9. Opine and editorialize
A frequent stumbling block to content creation is when the creators think they're obligated to be first to break a piece of news. It's a big internet out there and news is traveling at the speed of fiber optic cable. This is a losing game. Leave it to the pros. Divest yourself of the notion that you're a reporter and instead become an expert observer and interpreter of what news means to your audience. Establish youself, your company or your brand as a thought leader, not a deadline reporter.
10 Turn on comments and feedback
Whatever digital platform you're creating content for, ensure comments and feedback mechanisms are in place, easy to use, and monitored. This not only creates a platform for participation, it's a gauge of how well you're doing, what excites and interests your audience, and will doubtless feed in ideas for shaping and improving future content.
11 Listen
Listen to what others in your space are saying, and do so outside the parameters of your own comments section. Set up topic alerts for your relevant themes. Get out there and participate in what others are saying within your arena of expertise. It's the social media equivalent of leaving the house.
IBM recently published research showing that about 80 percent of those who begin a corporate blog never post more than five entries. And that's just blogging. The Internet is littered with near-tweetless Twitter accounts, expressionless Facebook pages, no-one-home YouTube channels. In the rush to adopt social media as a tactic, too many marketers leave strategy in the dust.
Increasingly, marketing isn't about buying media, the advertising model. Media is cheap -- or often even free. But rolling your own media brings with it a new set of challenges: coming up with enough content to fill all those blank pages, blog posts, profiles and such....and doing so on a regular basis, not just in a one-off burst of Week 1 enthusiam.
In short, brands are media. Marketers are editors, or at least need to start thinking like editors and producers if they don't want to come up short-handed. So herewith, 12 steps toward editor-think to help marketers get beyond that accusatory Blank White Page and start thinking like an editor.
1. Know your audience
Couldn't be simpler or more self-evident, but the importance of knowing who you're producing content for cannot be overstated. Customers? Prospects? Fans? Industry peers? Colleagues? The media? Some or all of the above? Selecting topics and tailoring messaging is a whole lot easier when you know who's on the receiving end.
2. Define key themes and messages
Now that you know who you're addressing, what is it, broadly speaking, you want to communicate to them? Don't just focus on your product, service or business here, but do some thinking as to how it relates to an audience's real-world concerns. If you're a local business, you may want to weave broader local themes into your content. If you're hawking something with a high consideration curve, education and learning may be part of your messaging. Use your knowledge of your audience, your tone-of-voice, and the broader informational environment in which you reside to inform themes and messaging.
3. Establish a frequency framework
Half the journalists I know say the write for periodicals because they need deadlines in order to produce. In the trade, it's called feeding the beast. You may not need to blog, or write, or tweet, or status-update every day, but once per month is probably not enough...and you risk the whole endeavor tipping off the cliff. Create a schedule for content updates and adhere to it. Map out potential stories, features, or other content in advance so that when the deadline looms, you'll have a sense of what's due. Falling into a rythm beats falling out of visibility altogether.
4. Create an editorial calendar
An editorial calendar plugs directly into the frequency framework. Just as your local newspaper has a fod and dining feature on Wednesdays, an expanded entertainment section on Friday, and home and gardening on Thursdays, mapping a type of content to your frequency framework is a great step forward in terms of making relevant content happen on a reasonably frequent schedule.
5. Develop regular features and rubrics
Creating a few regularly-appearing content elements is one of the oldest editorial tricks in the book. Comics, horoscopes, weather and film listings all help round off a newspaper's offerings and keep readers coming back for more. Moreover, once you've got these regular features, they're all but auto-populating. Highlights of the week, links out to other relevant content, a quote of the day are just a few down-and-dirty ideas to keep the flow of content coming.
6. Interview
Interviews probably belong up in item #5, but are notable enough to warrant discussion on their own. Are your own ideas drying up? Talk to someone else! Experts in your field, enthusiatic users, people in your company. Make a list of potential interview subjects, and consider making interviews a regular content feature.
7. Go multimedia
Content isn't limited to text alone, of course. Images, photos, video and audio all expand and enhance your content offerings. Blogging? Posts accompanied by a graphic image draw attention to themselves. Don't take my word for it, give it a shot -- web metrics bear this one out.
8. Enlist contributors and provide them with guidelines
You don't have to go it alone. Look around at your coworkers, colleagues, professional network. There are lots of potential content contributors out there. Often, all you have to do is ask, either for one-off contributions or regular features. User-generated content is, of course, a whole new route to ensuring content is created for you, be it comments, ratings and reviews, or contests. With clearly defined guidelines and expectations, and a little bit of polite asking, you may be surprised at how much content is created for you rather than by you.
9. Opine and editorialize
A frequent stumbling block to content creation is when the creators think they're obligated to be first to break a piece of news. It's a big internet out there and news is traveling at the speed of fiber optic cable. This is a losing game. Leave it to the pros. Divest yourself of the notion that you're a reporter and instead become an expert observer and interpreter of what news means to your audience. Establish youself, your company or your brand as a thought leader, not a deadline reporter.
10 Turn on comments and feedback
Whatever digital platform you're creating content for, ensure comments and feedback mechanisms are in place, easy to use, and monitored. This not only creates a platform for participation, it's a gauge of how well you're doing, what excites and interests your audience, and will doubtless feed in ideas for shaping and improving future content.
11 Listen
Listen to what others in your space are saying, and do so outside the parameters of your own comments section. Set up topic alerts for your relevant themes. Get out there and participate in what others are saying within your arena of expertise. It's the social media equivalent of leaving the house.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
Excellent article from McKinsey & Co - Behavioural Economics
If you haven't yet registered for articles from McKinsey , then I recommend that you do... a regular source of thought provoking FREE marketing and business updates.
Like this one...
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/A_marketers_guide_to_behavioral_economics_2536
Like this one...
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/A_marketers_guide_to_behavioral_economics_2536
Tuesday, 10 November 2009
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Social media - Friend or Foe?
Steven Fry - King Tweet
I have recently been embroiled in several forums discussing the business use of 'Social Media'. These seem to be the new 'known unkown' of B2B and B2C copmanies marketing departments.
Opinions seems to be split 3-ways:
1) Waste of time - will dilute the core brand. One correspondent even went so far as to claim it would 'destroy' brand equity. Twitter gets the harshest criticim.... 140 characters... what's the point?... ok for riots and revolutions... no use in real business situations.
2) Wait and see.... or... don't know... or... it will be the next big thing... tomorrow.
3) Absolutely essential as part of the market research proposition... where real customers can have their say. (They're saying it anyway so why not actively engage?) Can also be used as a marketing comms channel. Great for viral campaigns.
I am firmly of the 3rd opinion. Wheren esle can you get real time feedback, communicate with whole segments of younger, web savvy, mobile consumers and customers? For free!
Companies that don't get it are missing out!
Marketing the Substance - not the Spin
Excellent article by my friend Richard Groom of the Peterborough Copywriting Bureau.
Contact details below and link to his excellent company the right... thanks Richard
Finding the substance
A year ago in the Chartered Institute of Marketing's 'Marketer'magazine, David Taylor wrote an excellent article about the needfor telling 'compelling brand stories based on substance'.
He was especially referring to the need for marketers to stay onthe right side of the 'Consumer protection from unfair tradingregulations 2007', which came into force in May 2008 andspecifically prohibit misleading consumers.
David cited some examples of brands that have relied on spin oversubstance and others have come to light since then. In April forexample, a campaign by Australian parents targeted 'CerealOffenders': producers of children's breakfast cereals usingmarketing spin that allegedly conflicted with nutritional facts.
(Kellogg's Nutri-Grain cereal was top of the list, with its claimto 'help fuel growing boys' said to be at odds with its 'lowfibre content and high levels of sugar and sodium'.)
Closer to home, earlier this month EDF Energy faced a backlashfrom consumers and competitors when it ran its 'Green Britain Day': the company was accused of spinning its green credentials.
So how can you avoiding relying on spin - or just falling back on the same old tired claims about your product's benefits - whencreating your marketing materials?
The answer is surely to reallyunderstand the product, and to do that you have to find the rightpeople.
I like meeting marketing people in my clients' companies but Ioften find that they are focused on the 'promotion' bit of themarketing mix. Even though they usually have a good understandingof the product, there are sometimes others who know more.
So I want to talk to the people who designed the product, thepeople who made it, the people who sell it and, ideally, thepeople who use it. When I do, I almost always uncover somegenuinely positive information about what the product does andhow well it does it.
If you can get a detailed understanding of the product there'susually no need to bamboozle customers with spin or flowerymarketing-speak.
Sure, well-crafted words are important. But it's the meat thatmatters, and although getting to the meat requires effort andpassion about what you are doing, it is always the bestfoundation for writing compelling marketing messages.
So who are the product experts in your organisation? Buildingrelationships with them is essential for anyone who wants tobecome an effective marketer or copywriter.
Until next time . . .
**************************************************
Peterborough Copywriting Bureau16 Mansfield Court, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, PE1 4NE,England
Contact details below and link to his excellent company the right... thanks Richard
Finding the substance
A year ago in the Chartered Institute of Marketing's 'Marketer'magazine, David Taylor wrote an excellent article about the needfor telling 'compelling brand stories based on substance'.
He was especially referring to the need for marketers to stay onthe right side of the 'Consumer protection from unfair tradingregulations 2007', which came into force in May 2008 andspecifically prohibit misleading consumers.
David cited some examples of brands that have relied on spin oversubstance and others have come to light since then. In April forexample, a campaign by Australian parents targeted 'CerealOffenders': producers of children's breakfast cereals usingmarketing spin that allegedly conflicted with nutritional facts.
(Kellogg's Nutri-Grain cereal was top of the list, with its claimto 'help fuel growing boys' said to be at odds with its 'lowfibre content and high levels of sugar and sodium'.)
Closer to home, earlier this month EDF Energy faced a backlashfrom consumers and competitors when it ran its 'Green Britain Day': the company was accused of spinning its green credentials.
So how can you avoiding relying on spin - or just falling back on the same old tired claims about your product's benefits - whencreating your marketing materials?
The answer is surely to reallyunderstand the product, and to do that you have to find the rightpeople.
I like meeting marketing people in my clients' companies but Ioften find that they are focused on the 'promotion' bit of themarketing mix. Even though they usually have a good understandingof the product, there are sometimes others who know more.
So I want to talk to the people who designed the product, thepeople who made it, the people who sell it and, ideally, thepeople who use it. When I do, I almost always uncover somegenuinely positive information about what the product does andhow well it does it.
If you can get a detailed understanding of the product there'susually no need to bamboozle customers with spin or flowerymarketing-speak.
Sure, well-crafted words are important. But it's the meat thatmatters, and although getting to the meat requires effort andpassion about what you are doing, it is always the bestfoundation for writing compelling marketing messages.
So who are the product experts in your organisation? Buildingrelationships with them is essential for anyone who wants tobecome an effective marketer or copywriter.
Until next time . . .
**************************************************
Peterborough Copywriting Bureau16 Mansfield Court, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, PE1 4NE,England
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