If you are doing everything manually (without tech) it can be time consuming and resource hungry. Consequently it may be difficult to see it as something that should become core to the way a company operates.

What I want to do now is take one particular aspect of CM and show how our view of it has to change. A fundamental of CM is the mantra — ‘attract, engage and retain’ — the process of building a relationship with your target market. Let’s examine what we understand by ‘engaging with your target market’.

For the marketing team this is often seen as devising ways to identify individuals as prospects (lead-gen). Having set up ways that leads can be identified and possibly qualified the engaged prospects would then be passed on to the Sales team.

The Sales team has learnt to think in terms of a Sales Funnel — a process that takes them to the point where they are converted to a customer! At this point the Customer Service team engages with the Customer and the Sales team moves on to engage (or close) the next hot prospect.

What is revealed here is a situation where each department has a different angle on the purpose and process of ‘engage-ment’; meaning for each team ‘engagement’ can be seen as a separate department-dependent process. This becomes even more evident when you consider that IT has another view (data to be stored and analysed) and the Account Exec sees engagement as focused on up-selling to a prospect!

Think back and its easy to see where this thinking came from. In the days when prospects were entities that were herded at will it did not matter if each department had a different engagement process as long as it achieved their goals. Now we are dealing with a new type of prospect; the ‘connected consumer’ is able to make informed purchase decisions without even visiting your web site. The new ‘prospect to customer’ journey is no longer a linear progression. Now it is circular process that the ‘connected consumer’ can dip into and out of at will. To make that a coherent experience demands consistency of approach across all touch points. A confused user experience will lead to disengagement!

Expanding this confusion across dysfunctional ‘attraction’ and ‘retention’ strategies will aggravate the problem. Unfortunately this is not something that can be remedied by doctoring your content strategy. The only way to go is to ensure that there is a coherent cross-departmental content strategy based on co-operation and an acceptance of shared-ownership of the prospect/customer.

There are already forward looking companies out there that are appointing CDO’s (Chief Digital Officers) who have a brief to co-ordinate all online interactions with ‘connected consumers’. I think that might be a tough but interesting job to pick up. Some will win but some will be held back by digital Luddites!

What’s the dif­fer­ence between an Invent­ory and and Audit? Depth of information.

An Invent­ory will give you access to the external inform­a­tion avail­able — things like the author’s name, date writ­ten, how many times the doc­u­ment has been accessed (if you are lucky) and other meta-data that has been attached to the file.

An Audit should also give you an idea of what subject-matter is covered in the document.

In these excit­ing days of con­tent mar­ket­ing con­tent has taken on sig­ni­fic­ant import­ance and it is essen­tial now to know not just what con­tent you have but also what that con­tent is about. How can you ser­i­ously use a doc­u­ment as part of your con­tent strategy if you are not sure what that doc­u­ment is about?

What we have to con­sider now is, if you have inform­a­tion that tells you what the subject-matter of a doc­u­ment is, how much can we rely on that inform­a­tion being use­ful? Lets look at this in stages.

First, there are dif­fer­ent ways that your con­tent might give clues to the con­tained sub­ject mat­ter. If each author has included a con­cise sum­mary or abstract describ­ing the subject-matter and that abstract is access­ible sep­ar­ately from the main body of the con­tent — you have what you need. How­ever, unless you are deal­ing with aca­demic papers this is a very unlikely situation.

What is more likely is that each author has been required to add into meta-data a num­ber of word-tags that identify the most sig­ni­fic­ant themes in the doc­u­ment. Super­fi­cially this may sound very use­ful but there are a couple of prob­lems that make this inform­a­tion pos­sibly worse than useless.

The first case is where a recom­men­ded list of tags has been pre­pared and the author is required to use only those tags to describe his work. Unfor­tu­nately we have all grown up with dif­fer­ent life exper­i­ences and don’t come equipped with a per­fect defin­i­tion of the real mean­ing of each word avail­able in such an approved list. This means each author was forced to use tags to describe their writ­ing that have no real shared mean­ing from author to author. A recipe for confusion!

The second case is where there is no limit on the use of ‘approved’ tags. Here we have an ever expand­ing list of tags that allows authors to use whatever tags in their view fit best. Often res­ult­ing in com­pletely dif­fer­ent tag­ging on con­tent that might actu­ally be on exactly the same theme. Another disaster!

In short, human tag­ging is unreliable!

If you have a rel­at­ively small quant­ity of con­tent (up to 300 – 350 pages) then I would advise you to stick to a manual audit and get someone com­pet­ent to read your con­tent and assess it in the light of what you want to use it for.

If you have a lot of con­tent then the only way you are going to get a really use­ful and reli­able audit is to use spe­cial­ist tech­no­logy! Does it exist — yes! In our next post we will dis­cuss what you can expect from a tech based audit and why its likely to be use­ful and reliable.

In traditional marketing a ‘brand’ was often established as a vision that the brand owner wanted to portray to consumers. Now online marketers are faced with conforming to a new set of standards. The connected consumer wants to know what they are dealing with. Is it just a projected image or is there a real company behind the brand that actually believes in the values embodied in the brand messaging? You may ask why this is important but the connected consumer will question whether a company that manufactures in the Far East using ‘slave’ labour can really care about a brand image that relies on a ‘vision’ of quality and value!

On the other hand traditional publishing is no poster child for other industries looking to embrace change. Especially traditional news publishers who have been dragged online kicking and screaming, desperate not to change their culture or business model. These old school dinosaurs are not the publishers your brand needs to emulate.

There is a new breed of online publishers that has developed new ways of working, adopted new business models and understands what it is that audiences value. Your brand needs to know how these publishers operate.

So what is it that successful online publishers do? What should your brand learn from them?

Know your audience

First and foremost successful publishers understand who their readership is and what it is readers want to read. Can you say the same? Do you know what will make a transient site visitor come back to you on a regular basis? Do you know what it is that could turn visitors into a targeted market segment?

Tell, tell, tell

Next, a publisher’s business is to inform. They do this in several ways. They keep their community up to date with what’s new and what’s changed. Then they explain. It could be by summarising or simplifying what is complex or it could be by presenting and commenting on a range of opinions. It could include criticism or recommendation.

Not sell, sell, sell

What you can’t do is present pages of text that are preaching the merits of your brand’s products or services. Yes, you could argue that’s also informative but it has to be seen as valuable by the potential consumer as well. No connected consumer is going to take your word for the excellence of your wares without checking out you and your competition using search or their trusted social network contacts.

No one is suggesting your brand’s web site should contain criticism of your brand or recommendations for your competitors. There are many ways to tell your story and now there are many ways that transparent technology can make this a viable way of operating.

Above all else there is something that successful online publishers excel at — telling stories. They write quality content that is attractive and engaging.

That’s not to say marketers can’t write. They can but what content marketing needs is planning, structure and dedication. Most content marketing efforts fail because of lack of persistence. If you are going to attract and engage there has to be a solid content strategy with dedicated resources. Don’t be fooled – it is hard work keeping to an editorial calendar.

So, let’s summarise. On the face of it there would seem to be a lot to take on and significant increase in the amount of work to be done. However, there is technology that can take away much of the burden, leaving you to concentrate on getting your marketing strategy fine tuned.

For example, you probably have a good idea about where your market is. But do you know if there are market segments that you are not catering to? And do you know what all your market segments talk about; what concerns or interests them? There are tech, tools and strategies that will give you the the information you need to make sure you are hitting the right targets. That will help you deliver the right content in the right place to the right targets, help you increase referral traffic, automate organic SEO; even own the destination that hosts the ‘conversation’ that your audiences value.

Remember your expertise is marketing; the right technology partner can let you focus on that while deliver-ing transparent technology to do the heavy lifting.

Increasingly online consumers are doing a lot more research before they make contact with vendors. They will use their social network contacts to learn from the valuable information and experiences shared by others. This social research can even enable the consumer to create a short list of preferred vendors without even visiting your web site! Even the smartest marketing automation system can’t help you nurture prospects you never get to meet!

This is critical for marketing automation systems; in order to track and effectively deliver the right action opportunities to a prospect marketing automation needs to be able to identify a prospect. This might come from a white paper download or some form of registration but it does need positive action on the part of the prospect. Unfortunately prospects now realise that such action on their part will lead to a herding process where vendors will be trying to directly influence the prospect in many ways; some of which are close to the interruptive, disruptive methods used traditionally in ‘old school’ marketing.

Some of the more subtle marketing automation companies realise this is a problem and are beginning to employ technologies that use content marketing strategies; creating an attractive, engaging volume of relevant content that is placed to good effect. This, however, introduces another problem for your brand, “Who takes the responsibility for implementing, maintaining and running the technology?”

Asking a marketing team to take on this task does not work. First, it calls on skill sets that marketers don’t normally have and the acquisition of these skills and the build-up of experience are major distractions; no to mention the additional cost involved.

Another option is to turn this task over to the corporate IT team — again not a very successful strategy. The in-house IT team already have well defined functions in a company and, unsurprisingly, running obscure technology for the marketing department does not come high in their priorities; especially if the marketing team needs real-time response to change in order to maximise the benefit that the technology can offer.

In short, specialist technology that is not part of the IT department’s core functionality is a problem. The solution is ‘transparent technology’ run by a 3rd party vendor and designed to allow marketers to do what they need to do without understanding how or why it works. After all, how many car drivers understand the workings of a combustion engine but still manage to drive very well?

We have already touched on ‘what is next’ for marketing automation; this is the blending in of content marketing strategies; but this is much easier said than done. Content marketing done well can be a complex time-consuming burden. While the better marketing automation vendors have already realised the power of the right sort of content to promote attraction and engagement, this brings with it the difficulty of delivering the right content. The ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘where’ with regard to quality content is critical to achieving the best effect. If there is the possibility that prospects can delete your site from their short list of potential vendors then how else can you get close to your market?

The answer is again ‘transparent technology’. Technology designed to do the heavy lifting in the background while it leaves you to comfortably manage not just short-terms campaigns but also implement a new long-term culture that allows you to identify your relevant market segments and get close to them.

Two examples of this valuable content are the 2011 CMO Report and the 2012 CEO Report. For these they get PriceWaterhouseCoopers to interview a few thousand CMO’s and CEO’s and compile the results to reflect the problems, prospects and strategies that are currently impacting their businsses. Both CMO’s and CEO’s reveal that one thing they are looking for is technology to assist them in the transition of marketing from something akin to a ‘caveman’s courtship’ into a process that will enable them to get close to ‘connected consumers’ who now dictate the rules of game.
This is not just an IBM/PWC idea – take a look at the thriving, proactive CMO-Council in the USA and you will find the same demands from CMO’s. It’s time for Admen and Techmen to join forces!

The following are 5 tips on what to look out for in your search for the right technology that will enhance your ability to implement a long-term content marketing strategy:

1. The traditional problem with implementing technology is, “Who is going to look after it?” If you have to rely on your in-house IT department then it is unlikely to work. The IT people have a traditional job to do – delivering and maintaining standard services to every desktop, tablet and mobile. Learning the ins and outs of complex software that only the marketing team needs to use disrupts the status quo. Not only that the marketing team will need as near instant updates and changes at any time so that they can deliver the right experience for their target market. The IT team is more used to planning changes to fit in between the regular work they already have scheduled.

   What you need to find is ‘transparent technology’! This is where the tech has been designed to be run as a service by a specialist tech partner. It is also made available to the Marketing team in the form of simple to use tools that don’t demand that the marketer has to learn new skills and understand how the tech works. All you need to know is what it does to help you!

2. Content Marketing is all about content! Not just any old content but quality, engaging content that is made available at the right time to the right people. This can be done two ways – manually or automatically. You need it to be done automatically most of the time but easily curated when required.

   You need to be able to set up your carefully crafted content so it has the best impact. The ideal way to do this is to be able to use automatic contextual comparison so that the right piece of content is triggered and placed prominently in response to a query. This ability is important to your strategy because it delivers a response that shows you are listening!

3. Many marketers think they are doing content marketing when they setup and manage a campaign. In fact, they are not even halfway there! Campaign marketing relies on planning your content placement for a finite period. Once the campaign is finished unless you have built and own a dedicated destination site you will probably lose any long-term benefit that a real content marketing strategy could give you.

   If you are going to take on board technology to help you then be sure that it can give you the means to build a self-publishing destination site that is focused on serving a specific target-market segment. The attraction, engagement and retention of a valuable audience is a 24/7 activity that will not happen if you are only focused on campaign marketing.

   Note that this is not saying that campaign marketing is not good – it can still be a very effective process if it is part of a long term content marketing strategy.

4. The adoption of technology can become a real can of worms if you are not careful. There are many tech companies offering solutions to particular problems and these can be very effective. However, the piecemeal approach to solving your problems can mean you end up with a number of solutions that are not designed to co-exist. This means you could end up with duplication of functions or even conflicts in the way that the solutions are delivered. You could end up increasing your workload unnecessarily.

   On the other hand, be careful of the tech vendor that insists that you need to start with a complete platform solution that solves all your problems in one go. That approach may be good for salesmen’s commission payments but there should be an integrated pathway that lets you into tech adoption at the speed that you want to do it.

5. Technology can help the marketer in many ways. One area that seems to be neglected at the moment is Content Auditing. Now be careful most companies when talking about this subject do not differentiate between Content Auditing and Content Inventory. They are two different animals.

   A content inventory will tell you what documents you have, who wrote them, the title and there may be some metadata including arbitrarily applied tags that only reflect an authors thinking and can’t be relied on to consistently categorise the contents of each document.

   A content audit, however, should allow you to know the subject matter that each document covers and to identify documents that have related subject matter. Not only that but it should also allow you to identify what subject matter gaps there are that need to be filled. This is increasingly more essential as the size of your content archive grows.

Technology is available to help you get a hold on what you have to offer your target audience – manual audits are just not viable if you are looking at more than a couple of hundred documents. If you have thousands, then tech is the only answer.

• The Secure Border Initiative Network (USA);
• The NHS Care Records Service (UK);
• The Social Insurance Agency (Japan);
• Lufthansa Future Airline Core Environment (Germany).

These are just a few of the major project failures that have accounted for an incredible waste of money in the last decade.

Dare we ask why? The answer is simple — poor communication!

So how do we prevent this happening?

Firstly, we recognise that our marketing expertise is focused on the optimisation of strategies whereas your marketing expertise is centred on the development of strategies. It may seem a subtle differentiation but actually it isn’t. Unfortunately an expert’s knowledge and experience is often worn like a flak jacket to protect status. Such a stance is often the beginning of a failure to listen because experts tend to assume they are well versed in all aspects of their trade.

Our experience has taught us that to be able to deliver effective technology we have to not only listen to our clients but draw on our clients experience to be able to implement the most effective solutions. For example, working with publishers like Cnet, Metro and The Independent we designed ways that we can automate the organic SEO process so that it can radically increase referral traffic from web search engines. No-one asked us to develop a better way to handle organic SEO because our clients did not question traditional SEO best practice. Advances like this only come about through the sharing of experience, knowledge and insights.

Second, we are committed to the long term. We have been in tech development for a long time and one thing we recognise is that you are only as good as your last version. To stay ahead of the competition we, like you, have to innovate and improve all the time. We see that happening as we work together with our customers as their Strategic Technology Partner. We need your insights on marketing best practice so we can continue to move forward ahead of the crowd!

We are certain that there is still a lot more that can be done to accelerate Content Marketing Strategies and it can be identified through good communication.

Third, we understand that very few revolutions are overnight affairs. The changes in the marketing industry in the last decade have probably been the most significant for generations. We see the shift of power to the online consumer that has forced marketers to rethink strategies as beneficial, not just for Ultra Knowledge but for all of us. We see this new environment as an opportunity to work with our clients to innovate and stay ahead of the game!

Whether you are already a customer or not, we would be pleased to hear from you?

In these days of information overload there is a lot of material being written and shared on the web on a daily basis. Whilst everyone has a right to their opinion and has a right to express that opinion there are few people who are able to consistently develop their message and who are capable of reaching out to all levels from newbies up to gurus.

A Content Marketing Evangelist

Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 and the Content Marketing Institute is a guru worth following! The CMI site is a good place to start your journey if you are just about to dip a toe in the CM water.

Content Marketing Books

If you are already on the path then possibly you are ready to look at Joe Pulizzi’s book Managing Content Marketing. This is not just a dry tome on theory, it is possibly the first book that takes you through the practical adoption of content marketing as a core marketing strategy. It is written in a way that you can tell the advice given has been tested and not just once! It starts with suggestions as to how you can build a business case for adopting content marketing and how you can assess your progress. Definitely worth a read. Especially at the price of the ebook version! Oh, for the sake of clarity, let’s be clear – we don’t have a commission deal!

Other authors to look up are Brian Solis and Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter.

Content Marketing VC

Next, we want to talk about a totally different group of people who have adopted content marketing successfully. For them it is a question of brand building – not something you immediately associate with a venture capital company.

Open View Venture Partners has a relatively small, niche target market – growth-stage technology companies. By ‘growth-stage’ we are talking about companies wanting to raise more than $5m that expect to be significant players in the USA. So, not exactly a ‘deal a day’ business. However, Open View is grade-A exponent of content marketing best practice. They create content, not masses of it, but sufficient to put across the message they want to get out to the world. Although they might not take on too many clients in a year, their newsletter attracts more than 10,000 subscribers because the content they write is insightful and valuable. It also enables them to get to know and track people and companies that they might want to do business with someday.

To illustrate how switched on this VC is Joe Pulizzi is now a Senior Advisor with Open View and consults their portfolio companies on content marketing strategy.

Open View are a good example to all you people who didn’t realise Content Marketing is for more than just lead generation!

Lastly a disclosure – Ultra Knowledge is not a portfolio company of Open View and we have never sought funding from them – we just recognise good practitioners when we see them!

Content Marketing Agency

Now off in another direction – marketing agencies. If you think content marketing is a thing of the future then take a look at Velocity Partners. Real advocates of content marketing who produce some extremely well written content (Blogs, eBooks, etc) that talk very plainly about content marketing. Good stuff for checking that you are maintaining your focus as you get wrapped up in your strategies.

Content Marketing in the Fast Lane

Lastly, we have to mention a couple of small companies who have some interesting things to say. Take a look at these two videos www.youtube.com/watch?v=LerdMmWjU_E and www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiwIq-8GWA8. Get an insight to ‘Coca Cola Content 2020’ — one of the world’s biggest brands adopts content marketing — full on.

Then take a look at www.zeromomentoftruth.com/ and see how the world’s largest ‘search engine’ is spending a lot of effort researching the changing face of marketing. Download their free 47 page eBook (available in most formats)!

Conclusion

If you are interested in content marketing then you are lucky because anyone out there who understands the subject also knows that they have to spread their knowledge if they are going to be successful practitioners. That means the only problem you have is finding the ‘nuggets’ of information as opposed to the misinformation that surrounds it.  More on that in future posts!

Read the official press release below.

The NewsWall Pro product which charts all the latest news in the run up to the royal wedding has been launched by leading web technology firm, Ultra Knowledge, in partnership with the Press Association, the UK’s national news agency.

Driven by images, the NewsWall provides an engaging visual representation of all the latest royal wedding news from PA. Users are able to select an image on the NewsWall and read the full story. As the news is constantly updated, so the NewsWall constantly evolves and changes.

The Royal Wedding NewsWall helps online and mobile publishers to increase user-engagement and encourages readers to share content through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In addition, the NewsWall offers exciting sponsorship opportunities to commercial partners.

Andrew Lyons, co-founder of Ultra Knowledge, said: “The Royal Wedding is undoubtedly going to be the most spectacular, multimedia-rich event of the year.

“With 2.5 billion people set to tune in to the Royal Wedding, Ultra Knowledge — in partnership with the Press Association — decided to use its NewsWall technology to help focus people’s attention in the build up to 29 April.”

Alan Marshall, Head of Digital Production at the Press Association, said: “The Royal Wedding NewsWall provides a unique opportunity for websites to stream our content directly in an interesting way that engages readers, keeps them online for longer and encourages them to share the news through social media.

“Using this product is an excellent way for brands to maximise their online exposure by offering readers an innovative new way to engage with one of the news highlights of the year.”

Royal NewsWall fever has been quick to spread across the pond, with Canadian-based company, 2 For Life Media, using Ultra Knowledge’s NewsWall technology to power its Royal Wedding 2011 iPad app.

The app delivers users the latest information about the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton with a live feed of pictures and news, as well as a guide to royal etiquette and other royal trivia.

2 For Life Media President, Diane Hall, said: “The combination of Ultra Knowledge’s technology and the Press Association’s content makes it possible for Royal Wedding enthusiasts to follow every single development as it happens, all beautifully presented on the iPad”.

The NewsWall product is a fully hosted service from Ultra Knowledge, which requires zero maintenance. It can also visualise publishers’ own content or aggregate news from other sources and is designed to be easily integrated into any third party website.

As well as the content partnership with the Press Association, the Ultra Knowledge NewsWall is also used by the Independent, one of the UK’s leading newspapers, for presenting its online breaking UK and World news.

© 2011 by Press Association. All rights reserved.