How to build a content strategy - Introduction

Can a blog be used as a proving ground for writers - a sort of dry run for articles, whitepapers, reports, and other documents?  Why not?  So here goes - the first in a series, soon to become a whitepaper, on a topic near and dear to my heart - the practical steps for building a content strategy. Here we go....

Introduction:

Studies from Marketing Sherpa and others tell us that the biggest challenges in a content marketing strategy are creating high quality content, and creating enough content.  Quality and quantity are the challenges.  The good news is that quality content can be re-purposed.  Therefore, a smart content strategy starts with high quality content, and then replicates it in a number of venues, providing a consistent message, and maximizing content ROI.

Before starting on the steps, here are two rules for high quality content, whether in text, audio, or video format:

-It must be a reflection of existing conversations in customer communities.
-It must be of sufficient quality to repay the audience's time investment in reading, listening to, or viewing the content, whether or not the person buys from you or not.
 
 A unified content strategy is holistic - it encompasses PR, marketing, and sales support.  That's why it is so powerful.  In the next post, we'll look at the first step - Finding the Conversation.  Stay tuned!

Panda logic

It's interesting to follow the conversations about the so-called Google Panda algorithms, and how this approach has usurped many companies' cherished (and often hard won) position on the page one of Google search results.  A number of posts have cried out for 'transparency'.  "If we've been penalized, tell us what we have to do to regain our ranking," they say.

What Google appears to be saying is that their algorithms are none of anybody's business, and it's hard to blame them. Tricking Google's algorithms is big business, and does not serve Google's best interest.  If I'm searching for information on Google, I hope to find sites that other visitors and / or organizations have demonstrated approval for, not the sites that use the most effective SEO tricks.  If Google can't deliver, I'll try another search engine.  Which is precisely what Google is worried about.

Introducing CaaS

Inventing new acronyms in a world with too many acronyms is NTC - not too cool - but I have to do this, really.  Here's the concept - everybody's talking about how quality content is an essential marketing strategy, because people are sick of traditional marketing stuff, so you have to deliver material - text, audio, or video - that contains the kind (and quality) of information that people will actively seek out.

But there's a catch here.  If we really want to play in this league, we have to follow the rules of good content.  It's not hard to learn these rules - simply peruse the editorial guidelines of any highly respected publication.  What will be quickly apparent is that the rules of content are quite different from the rules of marketing. 

So why not cut to the chase and admit that content is not marketing? 

Okay, you ask,  if content isn't marketing, what is it?  Since there's no term available, I'll have to make up an acronym (somebody had to do it).   It's called Content as a Service, or CaaS.  The idea is that if we create content that is truly valued, we are providing a service.  If there's no charge, it is a free service.

So why would anybody want to provide a free service?  Ask Google.

Sacred cows...

Thanks to the pending release of the film "Moneyball", lots of people are reading the book.  Already a fan of author Michael Lewis, I picked up a copy that's been going the rounds in our household.  This one is an intriguing yarn about the role of statistics in the business of baseball, and it's full of surprises.  Who'd have thought, for example, that batting average is a highly over-rated indicator of a player's contributing to winning ballgames?

This begs the question, of course, of whether some web performance statistics are over-rated.  Let's take the the first page of Google rule for key words phrases.  There's no question that if you have something straightforward to describe, like hotel rooms in San Francisco, then this would be essential.

But what if your search terms aren't so straightforward?  What if you're selling software or consulting services that help businesses do things that they haven't done before.  Sure, we can use search terms that we know, but would our customers know and use them?  Probably not -  businesses are much more likely to define their search in terms of the problems they are experiencing.  And as we say to customers in the B2B world, "your business is unique."

Henry Ford once quipped that "if we'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."  It seems to me if you help businesses identify and solve problems, you'll need a better strategy than SEO to ensure people can find you. 

Playing to the galleries

Many years ago, when IBM revered its salespeople above all other employees, an uncle of mine had IBM as a major client.  A successful IBM salesperson told my uncle his formula for successful sales calls, which went something like this:  "For the first twenty minutes, I let the customer say what they want to say, and for the last ten, I tell them what they want to hear."

By adjusting our message according to the feedback we get, isn't this what we're doing?

Calls to action

Calls to action (CTAs) are essential to building ongoing conversations, and as the social web matures,  we are looking at a much richer variety of "next steps" - subscribing to a newsletter, responding to a post, joining a discussion group, or downloading a whitepaper, to name a few. 

In a sense, all good presentations, be they written, recorded, or live include CTAs.  TV shows use CTAs to get listeners to stay past the commercial break.  Novels use CTAs to draw us along to the next chapter.  The key is to keep the reader "hooked" or, to put it a little differently, engaged. 

CTAs are really about continuing the conversation. To paraphrase the old sales motto "ABC - Always Be Closing", we might say "Always Be Calling for action."

The most powerful brand of all

For some of us, there is no brand more powerful than the Boston Marathon.  Every year, tens of thousands of die-hard runners toil for hours on end, often in impossible weather conditions, to achieve that elusive "BQ" (Boston Qualifier) - a marathon time that qualifies them to participate in that exalted race, and of course, to proudly wear the Boston Marathon jacket after the event.

Ironically, there are much better marathons out there, and you don't have to qualify for them.  Boston is not particularly well marshaled, the course is not particularly scenic, and lines for buses and toilets are uncharacteristically long.  All of this is unimportant, though - what any runner will tell you is that there is only one Boston.  It seems to me that this epitomizes what branding is all about.