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Content driven marketing: using editorial content to gain traffic, trust and reputation

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 15:09:00 GMT

People these days can tell when they are being sold to. They know that what they’re seeing is promotial, and they don’t trust that content.

Here's how and why to solve this using content driven marketing. It's about using editorial content, delivering it online, and gaining traffic, trust and reputation.

I heard a saying once: No matter how the surface looks, the real value will shine through. And that is true for your content as well. When your readers scan the first few paragraphs of copy off your ads, they know that this is all marketing, and their brain goes “blah blah blah”, while they’re skipping ahead.

Because of this, your ads don’t work very well. Especially online, where people have the attention span of little squirrels, they are quick to dismiss any content they perceive as less trustworthy or otherwise low-value.

But as a marketer, you need something to get your message across to the readers. You want to engage them, make them feel something, make them aware that your type of product exists, and tell them how you are better than your competitors.

How on Earth do you do this, when people online are banner-blind, and dismiss any content that they feel is promotional?

You have to shift your focus, from promotional to editorial.

Let’s think about magazines for a little bit. Trade magazines, these old paper-based publications, filled with rich and relevant content, catering for a specific niche, where they are the most important sources for information about an industry.

These magazines are dying, like newspapers are dying, like all the other paper-based publications are dying. As we all know, the internet is killing them. Their readers keep going online, expecting the content to be free, and they keep up with their industry using a multitude of sources, as in blogs, online magazines, digital communities, and discussion with their peers in online communities, and social media. Because of this decline in readership, subscription and advertising revenue is plummeting.

By the way: If you know someone who works in a dying publication, please point them to this article I wrote about how newspapers can avoid a slow and painful death, most of it applies to magazines as well.

But my point is that the trade magazines are dying, they are not keeping up with this internet thing. Since you are here, it means that you’re interested in marketing your business online. This means that you carry a big advantage over them. Maybe you don't really need these magazines at all? Because the trade magazines are dying, your niche has a need for content that needs to be filled in a new way, and that need is currently being fulfilled by enthusiastic experts in your industry. This fragmentation offers great opportunity for you.

Now, maybe you used to advertise in these magazines. Maybe you even got editorial coverage. When you read through these journals, they have a lot of interesting stuff, some of it is news, other things might be how-to articles, or coverage of some new technology or trend. They cover promising products and companies, and current events. This kind of content is what the readers in your industry desire; and a lot of this content should actually be provided by you.

There are a number of reasons to why you should do this, and I’ll go through them one by one.

Number one, you will build amazing credibility within your industry.

Your readers will start trusting your company more than your competitors. Remember, your competitors are probably still spewing out promotional content, that your readers block using their “internal spam-filter”. Meanwhile, the content you provide is actually useful and valuable to the reader, giving them a better impression of you compared to your competitors.

Secondly, this is the kind of promotion that has the greatest potential to work online.

And as you know, online marketing will just get more and more important in the years to come.

What is special about online marketing? It’s all about great content.

Here’s how online marketing works:

Search engines are great to get traffic to your websites. Well, the search engines are usually not looking for pages with promotional content, they are looking for the content with the highest value. They prefer long and detailed content that people refer to as credible and interesting, like reports, analysis, documentation, specification, videos and rich media.

The same kind of content does very well in social media, social bookmarking, blogs and newsletters. If you have high-value content, then your message will tend to spread well in these channels.

The third reason, is that this content can often be best written by you!

Now, I do realize that creating a magazine is beyond what most businesses are capable of. After all, your employees might be working with industrial equipment, on computers using specialized applications, spreadsheets or large documents. They are not really writers, and you don’t want them to spend all their time creating content instead of doing their jobs. After all, marketing is usually done by dedicated marketing people.

But in this crowd of employees, there just might be someone who knows more than anyone else and who also likes to talk shop. If you can find this one bright mind, one who has a deeper interest and passion about his work, then you might have struck gold. He might be a mechanic or a desk worker, a consultant or a project manager. But he manages to get in touch with people in his field. He’s the guy who would still be standing in the parking lot for half an hour after a conference, talking shop with his peers.

People like this should power your content. They know what is really important, and what’s considered cool within their field. Get someone who knows how to write (probably from marketing, or even hire a journalist to help you) in touch with these guys, and they should be able to find a bunch of interesting stuff to write about, stuff that your customers and partners would enjoy end find useful.

The ideal vehicle for this content is a “magazine” themed website, in most cases running on blog software. I like to use blogs, because blogs allow people to subscribe using RSS, and I can follow up on posts using the comment fields.

Mixing promotional and editorial content

Experiment with different ratios between promotional and editorial content. Try something like half and half, or one promotion every two or three editorial stories. Also, there is a huge gray area between editorial and promotional content that should be explored. For example, if you have an e-commerce shop about hiking equipment, create a buyer’s guide about what to consider while choosing the perfect backpack, then highlighting the different products available with links to buy.

There is an ethical debate about mixing editorial and promotional content. Journalists are meant to be neutral and don’t really like to be motivated by anything other than bringing interesting stories to the readers. I think the focus has to shift from neutral to fair, accurate and truthful. Journalist: As long as your content is truthful, accurate and fair, you should be able to convey your opinion when you write! The same applies to these stories meant to help selling products or promoting your company. If you are talking the truth, then you’re ok.

Benefits of content driven marketing

If you can keep high-quality content flowing steadily, powered by the perspective and insight of the brightest minds, then you have the good stuff that Google loves, and is craved by your targeted people in social media.

Promote this content using your existing channels, and get people to subscribe to it. Build a newsletter, get subscribers to your blog, and get followers on your Facebook Page and Twitter. After a while, you will have a huge list of people that really listen to you.

The listening part is the key here. Earlier, you were only contributing promotional content to your subscribers, and they had their spam-filter turned on. By providing them with editorial content as well, you make them eager to consume your content and they will find it useful. This turns off their spam filter, and instead they trust your message.

By Øyvind Henriksen on 14. September, 2010

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How newspapers must change to avoid slow and painful death

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:22:00 GMT

As we all know, traditional paper-based newspapers are dying rapidly. The Internet is killing them, and they are facing almost certain doom. Because news are suddenly available for free online, and the content online will always be better updated and fresher, the paper based newspapers just cannot keep up doing what they used to do.

I have a few suggestions on how to embrace the modern web and social trends, allowing them to provide the best value to the readers, online as well as offline. I hope this will be useful to some newspapers that are looking for a way forward.

Focus the content on local and unique stories

Because of the Internet, every story is usually multiplied a million times, and the “big” news stories are usually already covered by someone else. And if it’s not, they will copy your article in minutes. Either way, you will not be able to compete in unique content of “general” interest.

A lot of papers rely on news agencies for general news stories, and just publish articles unchanged from that pool, thinking it might be relevant to their audience. This dilutes the quality of the content, makes the publication lose its focus, and does not really provide any real value to the reader. Let the reader find that content in the big news websites instead.

If the content is somehow extra relevant for your readership, write your comment about it, and then link to the original article at a bigger site. The key is to provide as much unique content you can, this way you can’t lose readers to others.

Curate a pool of local or niche bloggers and publishers

Blogging is exploding, and suddenly everyone is a publisher. Now, there are many kinds of bloggers, but you probably know a few that talks about something relevant to the local community and to the readers of your newspaper.

I think you should reach out to these publishers, subscribe to their blogs and get a close relationship with them. When they publish something that you think should be in your paper, pay them like freelancers (or something similar), edit the content to fit your style, and publish it with the author’s name and link to their blog.

Encourage the citizens to collaborate with you in this way, and you will have access to a wealth of rapidly updated and locally relevant content. When you curate these sources, you will be able to provide additional high quality content to your readers

Differentiate strongly between the subscription and free content

A lot of papers cross-post exact articles between their website and the print edition. If you publish the same article every time, people can access your content online. You might consider dividing your content into categories, some free and some requiring paid access.

Of course, the articles requiring paid access should be the long, unique and interesting articles that so many journalists love spending days on, and that offer the best value to the readers. Give the first part of the article for free to everyone, but require them to pay for access to the full version.

Give the subscribers all their content online

Luckily, most local newspapers have a lot of subscribers already. So when you require your readers to pay for your best content online, most of them already have a subscription.

A subscriber should be able to access his content either online or offline. Every piece of content on the print paper should be available on the web edition as well, just protect it to restrict the access to subscribers. Either print a daily access code on every newspaper, let the visitor enter their subscription number, or find some other easy way to allow paying users to access the protected content.

Give the visitor several ways to buy access to your article

Readers, who want the full story, should not be forced to buy a whole expensive subscription. When people got used to buying individual tracks for a dollar on iTunes, they will get used to paying for good content as well.

I remember when there was no way to buy an mp3 online, and instead downloading mp3 files to my mp3 player because it was faster than ripping my old CDs. Now of course, there are a number of ways to pay for music, personally I am a huge fan of Spotify, and I gladly pay money to legally listen to any music I want.

The big issue with getting payment for “consume-once” content like this is not the amount of money, because who really cares about spending that one dollar. The huge problem is the hassle to give away credit card information, contact information, or set up an account with a payment provider.

PayPal has announced a new micropayment system that not only allows for smaller fees (5% + $0.05), but also allows the user to subscribe without leaving the page.

I think there will be huge growth within this field, and within a few years most visitors will already be signed up to a payment service of some kind, allowing them to easily pay small amounts. Facebook already has Credits, which allows people to pay small amounts for virtual things like games and gifts. And they have Connect, which allows your website to integrate with Facebook. This might grow into a “Pay with Facebook” feature that you can use.

Another payment option is Apple’s store, which I already use to buys Apps, or Amazon where I have an account to buy books. If they find a way to allow users to authenticate to their account on an external website, that would also make this easy for readers to pay for content.

For now, I suggest allowing people to use the existing micropayment service from PayPal, then evolving the payment feature as the products and services become available and widely adopted.

Of course, you should sell different kinds of subscriptions as well. Allow the visitor to get complete and instant access to all the protected content and maybe even the newspaper in the mail the next day.

Embrace tablets, people actually read on them

Tablets are here to stay, as the success of iPad and Kindle has shown. Amazon reported that digital books for Kindle is outselling hardcover books. And Apple has sold millions of iPads, who can get content from both the iBooks store and Kindle store.

People use tablets in a few ways, which you should embrace:

People sit by the kitchen table and read. And on the couch. And on the bus. They browse the web, and read stories there. Well, at least I do that a lot with my own iPad, but I think a lot of people use it the same way. Make sure your online publication works well on these devices.
People subscribe to RSS feeds, and sync the subscriptions to the iPad using blog readers. Give your subscribers their unique subscription URL, with the subscriber code as part of the URL. And make sure they get the entire article in the feed, not having to click through. Also (of course), make a RSS subscription to your free content, so people who use blog readers can get to them.
Another way the iPad is being used is to surf Facebook and Twitter. Make sure your content is published on these platforms.
Today, creating custom apps for your content is expensive and difficult. But in a short while, I think there will be lots of services that allow you to create your very own reader app, which acts as a custom reader for your content, and distributes to the different app models. So grandma just has to click the icon with your newspaper’s name on it to access your content on her iPad.
Reading newspaper subscriptions on Kindle and Kindle app is another way the content can be distributed. However, as of now there are only a few large newspapers doing this, so I imagine it is probably difficult to use this service for smaller papers.

Integrate well with Facebook

Facebook has hundreds of millions of users, and chances are, a lot of your readers are on it and use it quite often. You should allow your content and the activity around your content to be available via Facebook.

You can authenticate your users with Facebook using Facebook Connect, so they do not have to create an account on your service just to access their subscription. Also, readers can like, share and comment on your content, and this activity can be published on the readers’ Facebook profiles.

Showing the activity around your content on Facebook gives your content increased visibility, and engaging your readers in this way makes your presence and your content more important to them.

Having a Facebook Page for the newspaper is also important. People who “like” your Facebook page become your Facebook subscribers, and you can send them unobtrusive “Updates” for the content you publish. Also, the Facebook Page has a lot of useful community features, allowing you easy discussions using the wall, comments on your posts and even a separate discussion area. Your Page can even be customized with apps, so there really is a lot of opportunity here!

Have a very active web presence and voice

Your newspaper should have a strong voice and be visible in the online world. Give the journalists instructions on how to engage the Internet community, and allow journalists to comment on other pages and their own pages. Vary the format of your content, not using only the tried-and-true old article formats. Short comments and messages allow you to provide content faster, and better engage your readers in discussion.

Your Facebook page is a good place for this, if you can get your readers active on your wall, then you have a nice way of engaging them and knowing what they feel is important. Also, Twitter is well used for “official” follow-ups from journalists, even if it difficult to have a proper discussion on Twitter.

One thing I see a lot of newspapers do, is allow for blog-style comments on their articles, but then just leaving it up to the readers to contribute comments! I think journalists should reply and follow up on their own posts when they get feedback from their readers. And it would be great if other journalists could weigh in their opinion too.

Stop being neutral, let us talk about it instead

Opinion is the key word here. Journalists often present the news in neutral way, because they seek objectivity. They try not to have an opinion about what they write.

But because of the open nature of the Internet, objectivity does not have to be practiced like this anymore. As long as the article is fair and accurate, the journalist should be able to be honest about his opinion. It’s not like the subject is unable to respond, the comment field is right there, and if the journalist is out of line, you can bet that word of it will spread on Facebook.

I want journalists to start having an opinion, and engaging their readers using Facebook, blog comments and any other way. This allows the readers to weigh in, criticize and discuss the matter further, giving the content even more value than if it was just static piece of text.

Allowing the writers to show more of their passion and emotion will also make for more interesting stories, and consuming the content will be a much better experience for the readers.

How will this save the newspapers?

I think this is all about value. The newspaper has to maximize the value they provide to the readers, and find a way to get paid doing so. If the paper can focus on creating unique and interesting content, and forge a stronger relationship with their readers, then I am confident that the readers will accept that this is worth paying for.

The technology is already here, I just hope the newspapers still have the strength to adapt and change and stay alive.

And if I’m wrong about all this, please let me know in the comments!

By Øyvind Henriksen on 31. August, 2010

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How to market your business successfully using Facebook

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:20:13 GMT

Facebook is by far the biggest social network in the world, and is growing rapidly. It has a several tools and features to get all these users to interact with your brand. I recommend you start with setting up a proper Facebook Page for your business. Here's how you can set it up yourself, and more importantly: How to use your Facebook Page once you have it!

How the Facebook Page works

The Pages feature allows you to set up a “home page” for your business on Facebook, with its own wall, pictures, discussion and other content you add yourself. Users on Facebook can then “Like” your page, and this allows you to publish content to them in a few ways. These pages were called “Fan pages” back in the day, so the people who Like your page are usually referred to being your “fans”.

Publish some exclusive content on the Facebook Page

One of my favourite ways to get subscribers is to first create great content and then promote said content. If you have something great to share, and it is only available on your Facebook page, then the visitors will clearly see the value of becoming fans of your page.

One example of this is the Norwegian sports and outdoor equipment shop of Komplett Fritid, based in my home town of Bodø, Norway. They have hired Lars Monsen, the famous explorer to contribute on their blog, and on the Facebook page they feature something very unique and interesting: Lars Monsen is currently on an expedition in Canada, and every day he phones in with his satellite phone to record a quick status update.

These short audio clips are published every day on the Facebook page, allowing the fans to take part in the expedition and see how it is going (btw, yesterday they faced heavy weather and got stuck because they could not use their canoes). He has also started doing equipment reviews, for some of the items he brought with him. This exclusive content quickly brought them from about zero to a few hundred fans. Once word of this spreads, more followers will undoubtedly come naturally.

Promote your content, the spam-free way!

When a user becomes a fan of your page, you get to send her nonintrusive “updates”, which show up in her News Feed (also called "stream"). These updates contain a subject and a short text, and can contain video and links, and a thumbnail for an image on the link or in the video.

The great thing about these updates is that they are published with a lot of intelligence, and instead of disrupting all fans with their messages, Facebook tries to make them "fit in" with the way the fans use Facebook. This allows you to send updates frequently, without annoying your fans.

Screenshot of an update from Spotify, finally they got folders for their playlists!

Updates do not work like e-mail newsletters or a direct Facebook messages to the users, where recipients get a new unread message in their inbox every time you publish something. Instead the updates just show up in the fan’s Facebook stream, and if the fans are not logged in for a few days, the updates lose relevance and “float by”. This way, the fans will at any time see your latest content, without being swamped by updates piling up.

But if your fan clicked “Like” or commented on your previous updates, then your next updates will be more visible to her, and might make it into her "Top news". And if she has a friend who was also a fan, and the friend clicked “Like” or commented on the update, then the update will also likely show up in her Top News.

Facebook help says the following:
« How does News Feed determine which content is most interesting?
The News Feed algorithm bases this on a few factors: how many friends are commenting on a certain piece of content, who posted the content, and what type of content it is (e.g. photo, video, or status update). »

Also, the Facebook Blog has a useful explanation about the difference between Top News and Most Recent. The exact mechanics on how much attention an update needs to cross over to "Top news" for a user is unfortunately not generally known. But if you happen to know something specific about this, please send me a link!

Screenshot of the Send an update feature in Facebook

To send an update, go to “Ads and Pages” on the menu to the left in Facebook, and click “Edit Page”. On the next page, find the “Send an Update”

Make a contest or sweepstakes that adheres to the Facebook rules

There are a lot of strict rules to prevent people from spamming and abusing Facebook, so tread carefully when creating your promotions. One example is that it's illegal to create sweepstakes (chance-based contests) for users in Norway!

One option is to use the Wildfire App, which gives you access to almost ready-made sweepstakes, contests or competitions that you can use, and that should fit with Facebook’s rules. These contests are a very strong way to build awareness for your content, and get more traffic and fans to your Facebook page. I have not used Wildfire personally (yet), but I think it's a great idea.

Get a custom front page for your Facebook Page

By default, the wall feature is the front page for everyone of your Facebook page, but that does not really give the visitors any real information about who you are, what you do, and why they should become fans.

Luckily, this can easily be changed. What you want to do is create a custom web page on your website, and have this custom webpage displayed as the front of your Facebook page. Hook this page up to your website’s content management system, so that you can maintain this front page yourself in the future.

To do this, you (or your web designer) must complete these four steps:

Create a nice looking web page on your website, make sure it fits within 520 pixels width, and will look good as a part of the Facebook page. Note: This page must be only static HTML, CSS and flash, which means no JavaScript and no server-side tools.
Add the application “Static FBML” to your Page, using the “Browse more” link at the bottom of the “Edit page” screen. This is all well described in this excellent video
Click the Edit button next to the FBML application on the “Edit page” screen. Give it the name of “Welcome” or something similar, and insert the HTML for the web page you just created.
Go to your existing front page (your Pages’ wall page) and click on “Options” and then “Settings”. Select the “Welcome” tab as Default landing page for everyone else.

Create exclusive offers for Facebook fans

It is incredibly easy to set up a Facebook specific offer on Facebook. Tell your fans that you will publish special offers on Facebook, which will only be available from the Facebook fan page. And make sure to tell them to subscribe to get updates about the offers as they get published.

Use the same method as when you got a custom front page, but this time we can take it a bit further:

First, create a hidden Facebook offers page on your website, and find the address to it, for instance http://websitesadvanced.com/facebook-offers.
Then, create a nice banner of about 520x520 pixels, featuring the items on sale this week, and telling people to click the “Like” button to receive updates about offers each week. Upload the banner to your website, the banner should also get a fixed URL, that you can remember easily.
Install another Static FBML application on the page, call it “Special offers on Facebook” or similar.
Add a link to your Facebook offers page, and insert the banner image that's on your server, using the URLs you created earlier. When people click on this banner, they will be sent to your Facebook offer page.

When this is set up, you can just use your website's publishing software to update both the banner and the content on your Facebook offer page. This gives you a powerful way to sell your products on Facebook, and such a page is a great incentive for visitors to become fans!

Set a custom address for your Facebook Page

When you first create your Facebook page, the URL will be really ugly, with all kinds of codes and such. You should create a shorter address to the Facebook page, to make it easier to link to your page, and to type in your Facebook page address directly.

You must have at least 25 fans of your page before you can do this, so if you are just getting started and are short on fans, I recommend that you just invite some of your friends. Otherwise don’t worry. It’s perfectly fine to wait until your page has more fans, and change the address then. The old link will still work, and send the users to the new address.

Important: Read the instructions thoroughly before you save anything, as the interface can be confusing. One of my friends set her company’s name as her personal username, and had to jump through some loops to get it all fixed.

Screenshot of the Username feature of Facebook. As you can see, I do not have enough fans yet, as I just created this page today!

To change the address of your Facebook Page, go to this address: http://www.facebook.com/username/ and click “Set a username for your Pages”. It will show a dropdown box with all your pages, and allow you to enter a username for each.

Let your website visitors use your Facebook features

Facebook has a “Like Box” that you can put on your web page, which works well as a tool to show your visitors what’s up on the Facebook page.

Screenshot of the tool for customizing your Like Box

Facebook has a tool for customizing the Like box where you can decide to show portraits of the fans, latest stories, and how big the box should be. Play around with it a bit, then click “Get code” to get the code for your webpage. Embed it yourself if you can, or send the code to your web designer.

By the way, send your designer this link, so he can style the Like Box if he wants to: http://www.daddydesign.com/wordpress/how-to-customize-your-facebook-fan-box/

Also on your web page, there are two other Facebook tools you should use:

The Like button can be added to any page, allowing people to click Like if they think the article is good. You have probably seen the Like button with a small Facebook logo, and “1843 people like this. Be the first of your friends to like this” text right next to it. Liking content in this way is very non-spammy behavior for a Facebook user, and people tend to click these quite a lot.
Share on Facebook buttons allow the visitor to post a link to the current page on their wall. This is very effective and very visible, and can get your content published in thousands of people’s streams for free.

Mention your Facebook page in e-mail and offline

Since your Facebook page now has valuable and exciting content, it is important to let people know, or they might miss it. So include the link to the Facebook fan page on all your emails, and in your e-mail newsletters.

If you have a physical presence, promote your Facebook fan page on your brochures, magazine ads, letterheads, posters in your store, and so forth.

Upgrade the fans to valuable prospects

Getting a person to “Like” your Facebook page is not very demanding of the customer, he only clicks a small button and does not even have to fill out a signup form. And they do not even get disrupting messages from your email newsletter.

The downside to this is that sadly, your fans will not see every update you send them. But you can do a few things to get a closer relationship with the customer over time:

Put an e-mail newsletter signup feature on the Facebook page, trying to upgrade your Facebook fans to e-mail subscribers.
Build a blog with comments, and try to move some of the conversation from the Facebook page to the blog, and get the fans to become blog subscribers.

Let users “suggest your site to friends”

There is a “Suggest to friends” link in the left-side menu of your Facebook page. I have seen this used with great success, when properly motivated.

But, this is a little spammy so be careful with it! People will be put off when users suggest irrelevant pages to them. And if you decline a suggestion to become a fan of a brand, only to have the same brand suggested once more the day after, then their perception of your brand will turn to spam and hate. Not exactly what you wanted, right?

You may encourage users to suggest the page to their friends, but make sure it is only suggested to friends it might actually be relevant for, and please don’t ask people to use it again and again.

Also, please note that it is against the rules to require users to suggest the site for a benefit, such as sweepstakes, so you basically have to tell them to do it just to make you happy (or of course, because the page is actually great). If you break these rules, your page can get deleted, so be careful!

Have someone in charge of the Facebook page

The main reason so many businesses fail at Facebook is that they do not put one person in charge of following up on the activity.

If you take charge and get great content out there, and engage with the comments you get, then your Facebook presence will prosper!

I hope this was useful to you, please let me know if you have any questions!

By Øyvind Henriksen on 25. August, 2010

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