In the past few months, we’ve conducted numerous interviews with marketers in order to understand their vision of content marketing. We also studied the expectations of consumers to get their points of view. Based on what we found, we wanted to share some of our ideas for making better content planning a more understandable and achievable goal.

Content marketing’s objectives

To get started, focus on your content strategy’s objectives. We’ve found four main objectives for using a content strategy to create value for your company:

• Make yourself known as an expert in your sector. Relevant and strong content reinforces your company’s positioning. Show that you follow the trends, read interesting articles, and launch innovative campaigns. Content marketing is not just about content creation but also well-executed curation. By sharing useful articles on topics that are relevant to your industry, you show the world that you are up to speed on the latest insight, and by commenting on blogs of other experts, you can further extend the reach of your own expertise. Get your name out there, and others will begin to view you as an expert. As a result, your company’s general renown will increase.
• Maintain a positive relationship with your customers. Sharing your content regularly will keep your clients and consumers in continuous touch with your brand. It’s best not to bother them with offers or discounts, but rather to offer them something that will add value. For example, if you work in the research business, offer your audience research results they can use in their business plans instead of promoting your newest methodology. Once you are known for the value you provide, you can launch more promotion-driven efforts once in awhile without turning your audience off. (We recommend a 95 percent/5 percent split, as discussed in Matthijs van den Broek’s blog post on the content curation sweet spot.) 
• Get new customers. If the content you share with existing customers and fans is strong enough, they will share it with their friends and business contacts. In turn, this helps your company get in touch with new leads. The relevant content you provide can generate interest and encourage them to get to know your company better.
• Increase your reach on social media platforms. Just as in the point above, good content will also help you extend your reach across social media sites. A wider reach makes it easier for you to realize the other three objectives, as well.

How do you get started?

The world is swamped with information, so it is extremely important to make the content you offer relevant to your intended audience. Furthermore, the choice of the topics you focus on can largely determine how successful your content will be. In order to make good decisions, you will need to conduct an internal analysis of your company’s strengths (what is your company good at, and what makes it different than other companies), as well as an external analysis to determine what subjects interest your audience.

To start, think about what topics your company can offer unique content in. This content needs to be in line with the company culture and vision, obviously. It is sensible to think about your top areas of expertise and where you are unique in your market.

For example, Coca-Cola claimed happiness as a theme. Without content marketing behind it, it feels a little strange that a soft drink can provide happiness. In the last few years, Coca-Cola began executing acts — like The Happiness Machine — to make happiness tangible. By creating content about what happiness means, Coca-Cola claimed the theme, and made it relevant to its target market.

Secondly, investigate the market’s needs. Find out what topics your target group is looking for more information on. There are different ways to do this. For example, you can monitor online conversations and see what people are talking about. You can also organize research to measure all current conversations and see what information is missing to determine potential opportunities. Finally, Google offers tools that help you see which search terms score high for your industry. By making these analyses, you can get a clearer view of what the market desires.

Once you have combined the internal (level of uniqueness) and external (what people are looking for) dimensions for your content efforts, you will find that most of your ideas fall into four categories:

• Focus topics: These are topics on which the market is looking for information, but competitors are not offering satisfactory solutions for or sufficient information on. Content in this area will work best to help your company make a difference. Sixty percent of your content should be dedicated to coverage in this category.
• Competitive topics: Once in awhile, it is necessary to create content that the market is asking for, but that is not unique to your company’s experience. Take into account that competitors will also write about these topics, so limit your efforts in these areas to 25 percent of your total content.
• Niche topics: These are topics that may interest fewer people, but that your company has a unique perspective on. Even if some of your content is only relevant to a smaller group of customers, if you have a unique story to tell it’s worthwhile to cover these topics to help foster trust and build more loyal interest from an often-overlooked part of your clientele. For example, for a company in food service, there might be a small part of the audience that is interested in the origins of the foods they sell. Content on the production process or on the geographic location where the food originated would be considered a niche topic in this market. Invest 15 percent of your content efforts toward addressing information in this category.
• Topics to avoid: Don’t waste time and money creating content on topics that your company doesn’t have a unique perspective on or that aren’t likely to generate much interest in your business. Naturally, none of your content should fall into this category.

Planning your content around the three content levels

After determining your topics, the next step is to effectively plan the specific types of content you will create. When doing this, your ideas can be divided into three levels: content updates, content projects, and content campaigns.

• Updates: Updates are short messages sent on a regularly scheduled basis. For updates, it’s best to use a combination of formal content (company data, news, hiring information, etc.) and informal content (company culture information, employee updates, etc.). These are small “pinpricks” of content that will keep employees informed about what’s happening at your company.

Updates are shared mainly via social media, and work well to keep your company at the top of your customers’ minds. For example, an update can consist of a daily blog post, a Facebook update, or several messages on Twitter. Frequent updates are more likely to drive up your audience numbers, so make sure the schedule you set for updating your content is manageable on a long-term basis.

• Project outreach: Projects involve activities that will provide value over a longer period of time and are usually created around a given theme. An example of a project could be Christmas-themed outreach (if that time of year is relevant for your company), the ongoing activities of a new department you’ve launched, data from an important survey you’ve conducted, or details on a major customer event.

Typically, a project outreach cycle will last for a few weeks and will speak to one specific company objective (the type of content you choose to create will be determined by this objective). For example, white papers, webinars, or PowerPoint presentations are projects you can build content on.

Here, information is mainly shared via online channels and can be supported by other media. For example, during the project weeks, a company can publish a series of posts on its own blog, or distribute them through related industry blogs. Then, these posts can be further highlighted by posting brief daily updates (created, as well as curated) on your social media platforms.

• Campaigns: Campaigns are similar to projects but are shorter in duration and more intense. Campaign content creates an awareness of the company or is used to spread information around important company news,, such as a product launch. A good campaign will also trigger conversations about the brand.

Campaigns are often supported by offline media, which can be used to drive a short-term result (usually renown and sales). But above and beyond your choice of media, it is important to make sure that the content you share through offline channels is also conversation worthy. Through your campaign content, you should see a strong growth in short-term reach. Remember, campaigns are the most labor-intensive of the three content levels, and are, therefore, the most expensive — use them meticulously, and at the right moment of your sales cycle!

This approach and the three levels we’ve defined as content streams don’t constitute an exact science — they are only guidelines. But they can be used as the foundation of your own content planning, depending on your objectives. Dividing your content creation efforts into these three content sections will help to ensure a gradual increase in reach and engagement.

If you are interested in learning more about the content marketing insight that we distilled from our studies, you can download the full paper through the SlideShare link below.

SLIDESHARE
http://www.slideshare.net/stevenvanbelleghem/a-six-step-content-marketing-model

The study reports:

• More than two-thirds of retailers have not optimized their sites for tablet commerce. Instead, they are hoping their traditional websites are “adequate enough” for tablet shoppers.
• While some retailers have developed iPad apps, 25 percent of those don’t allow consumers to make purchases directly through the app.

The push to develop mobile shopping platforms (i.e. smartphones) in retail has been in high gear over the last twelve months, but the Zmags survey suggests too little attention has been paid to the surge in tablet adoption. This is notable because in October 2011 comScore reported:

• “Tablet owners exhibited significant use of their devices throughout the entire online shopping process – from doing the initial planning, conducting product and store research, making price comparisons, to finally transacting.”
• Almost 50 percent of tablet owners had completed a purchase on their tablet.
• More than half of tablet owners (usually iPads) “looked up product or price information for a specific store (56 percent) and read customer ratings and reviews while on a tablet (54 percent).”

Gilt Groupe, Disney, Urban Outfitters lead

While optimization for tablets among retailers is still fairly low, some are jumping on the opportunity to provide differentiated shopping experiences. Gilt Groupe, Disney, and Urban Outfitters are ahead of the pack in supporting commerce and marketing apps on most or all mobile devices, including iPads. In addition to providing a rich shopping experience with more touch-screen capabilities, these retailers also use their mobile platforms to promote events and distribute free music.

For Gilt Groupe, the return on investment is relatively easy to understand. When the luxury online retailer launched its iPad app in April 2011, it quickly found—within two working days, in fact—that the tablet app was generating three percent of the company’s revenue.

Since then, Gilt Groupe has found that tablet order values are 30 percent higher than the company’s iPhone or standard website counterparts.

Nike also way ahead

Only one top-100 Internet retailer, Nike, is fully taking advantage of the tablet’s unique interface capabilities, study authors said. Nike’s native iPad app offers a rich interface to browse shoes and engage Nike’s rich media library.

More than half of the surveyed retailers have created simplified mobile sites for smart phone users, but few are developing native iPad apps like Nike’s. The findings should not be surprising, given the newness of the tablet phenomenon, and the uncertainty about which devices are “must-support” channels.

Most retailers are using their existing websites to display tablet content, which translates into a clunky and often frustrating shopping experience for consumers, the study suggests. Among the issues: slow loading times, unavailable content and Flash-related issues.

Opportunities for Marketers

Considering the adoption rates for tablet users, as well as the fundamentally different navigation experience of the tablet versus the laptop or PC, marketers must decide whether tablet optimization makes sense and what types of content make the most sense to distribute through tablet-ready sites.

What’s more, marketers must develop a better understanding of tablet shoppers. ComScore reports that in the U.S., tablet users “display the characteristics of early technology adopters.” That is, young high-income males. That said, it’s not clear how quickly these demographics are changing, nor whether tablet shoppers differ from the universe of tablet users. 

Tablet image via Shutterstock.

“Your web content will never take care of itself”

If you tell your boss or client that their web content has issues, they will want to know what kind of issues you’re talking about and why they are issues in the first place.

Knowing the answer to the question, “How do you know if your content is any good?” may not be easy. But it’s important if you want to:

• Retain your audience
• Understand how your site measures up against the competition
• Know where your content needs improvement

In order to diagnose problematic content you should analyze it periodically (at least every six months) and measure it against specific content qualities. Those qualities are:

• Usefulness and relevance
• Clarity and accuracy
• Completeness (of sentences, thought, ideas, and logic)
• Influence and engagement
• Findability (SEO)
• Branding consistency
• Intended audience
• Consistency with business priorities

Maintaining your content

Perform a content analysis of your website every six months.

Content must be maintained to be successful, and that takes a lot of hard work! However content problems arise precisely because owners don’t take the time to do maintenance. 

In fact if you haven’t performed a content analysis of your website in the last six months, chances are high that there are content issues that need fixing. Some of those issues include:

• ROT (Redundant, Outdated or Trivial content)
• Broken links
• Missing meta descriptions
• Policy changes that might affect content
• Inconsistency with branding style
• Weak calls to action

The process of content analysis

To do a content analysis of your site, start with a content inventory to figure out what your web content currently looks like. The easiest way to do this is to use a simple spreadsheet that looks like this:

Go through every single page on your website and record what you find using the above format. Be sure to make careful notes and to add more columns as needed.

Keep in mind too that content is not only text but also video, photo images, audio, infographics and everything else that lives in your website. (For tips on creating more informative content audits, take a look at this article by Ahava Leibtag.)

Dedicated oversight

Once you have performed your content inventory, you’ll have all the information you need to manage your site accordingly.

Unfortunately, when your main focus is to consistently create content that engages your audience, it is an enormous task to go back and evaluate what was created in the past to ensure that it is still relevant to your audience.

But as Arnie Kuenn says in his book, Accelerate, “Responsible content delivery includes dedicated oversight.” It is very important to have high content quality on your website, not only to optimize user experience but also to ensure that your brand is consistently held in high regard.

The last thing you want is for your credibility to be undermined simply because a user came across a broken link on your site. So if it means hiring someone to perform content maintenance, or having to take the time to do it yourself, make sure that your site receives dedicated oversight.

Quick takeaway

Of all the things that will impact user experience on your website, content is the most important factor. Make sure that it is always updated, organized, and relevant. Yes, it’s a lot of hard work, and the more content you generate the more content you will need to maintain. But the quality of your content is not something that you want to compromise.

Over to you: How much effort will you make to maintain your web content this year? 

Content will need to be honed for a smart phone and a tablet because both have more limited space and bandwidth than a laptop or computer, said John Squire, a spokesman for the Smarter Commerce team at IBM. Smarter Commerce is a new platform that integrates a variety of technologies to help retailers create a seamless process from the moment an order is placed to the time it is shipped to a consumer.

For example on an iPad, the ability to scroll or swipe through content on a page is a different form of interaction with a consumer than on a laptop. The beauty that the tablet can showcase on its display is also sharper, Squire said.

“For some types of media, it’s not about the products but about the experience and the types of content they can bring that extends what you can learn about the product, and what you can learn about the retailer,” Squire said.

Willing to Share

IBM research found that consumers are looking for more ways to communicate with retailers through their preferred media channels and a more personalized shopping experience. Consumers are also increasingly willing to share information with their favorite retailers to educate them on how, when and where to approach them.

IBM’s Smarter Commerce platform gives retailers access to technologies including Unica, which offers 1:1 personalized messaging to consumers; Coremetrics, which offers digital analytics and marketing; and DemandTec, a leader in pricing and promotions. Retailers can choose between using the entire suite of services or implementing single program elements into their own system.

The purpose of the system is to help retailers follow every click a consumer makes across a site, and use the insight collected from the patterns to connect customer demand all the way through the supply chain – even up to the procurement of raw materials.

“Smarter Commerce is about how we tie together the concepts of how businesses have to buy or acquire services, and how they end up thinking about marketing those beyond just price,” Squire said. “It’s about placement, promotion, relevancy and the ability to do one-to-one marketing on any channel.”

Tapping the Power of the Story

On the marketing end, a consumer’s clicks can lead an individual into a system of personalized emails, display ads and direct mail. They also can provide access to other content customized to buying decisions.

For example, if a customer is shopping for jeans, a retailer might suggest other types of jeans or styles that are specific to them based on what they’ve done in the past on a site and what the retailer knows about the person. Using customer data, the retailer might also tap content such as a video or information on how the product is made.

The manufacturing process is “important to certain consumers concerned about things like sustainable farming or the use of organic cotton,” Squire said. “The ability to tell a story is powerful in retailing.”

Redefining Loyalty

Content marketing also will allow retailers to redefine loyalty programs, which until recently consisted mainly of points and other buying incentives. By using content to connect with consumers, retailers have an opportunity to encourage them to spread the word about their brand, and business, through social media channels.

“Consumers are turning the tables, saying that you as a brand have to be loyal to me,” Squire said. “Consumers are saying, ‘Send me something that is interesting – content, video, information – that helps me make a purchase decision or helps me reconfirm my affinity to your brand. Why should I be loyal to your brand and why are you loyal to me?’”

The challenge lies in encouraging consumers to see a brand in a positive light and spread the word in all channels, Squire said. 

Mobile image via Shutterstock.

Outreach is an important part of any content marketing campaign, but even a robust outreach strategy can have lackluster results if it is simply tacked on at the end of a campaign. Instead, you need to embed outreach into your marketing strategy every step of the way.

Here, we’ll take you through some best practices for integrating outreach considerations right from the start of your content marketing strategy. We’re using an infographic as our content example, but keep in mind that this process can be applied to most forms of content creation — from articles to apps and more.

Traditional content marketing campaigns

A typical marketing campaign for an infographic consists of (roughly) the following phases:

1. The content brainstorm: You and your team start coming up with ideas for an infographic.
2. Content research: Data is gathered, and your team’s concept is finalized.
3. Content creation: The idea and content are handed over to the designer.
4. Content outreach: You launch your work and reach out to third parties to help you promote the content.
5. Content tracking: You follow up on your launch efforts and measure how successfully your content performed.

If you only start thinking about your audience at Step 4 of your creation process (as in the phases above), you’ve already missed some key opportunities to connect your content with your audience.

How to embed outreach into every step of your strategy

1. The content brainstorm

Why outreach planning makes sense here: If your primary purpose for developing an infographic is to attract a lot of visitors and/or gain a lot of links, it makes sense to have a clear picture of your target audience before you even start brainstorming.

What you should be doing: Make sure there’s someone on your team who understands the internet and knows what messages spread easily. Think about who is most likely to be engaged, and build a profile of them — where do they spend time online, what are their interests, and what do they value (humor, transparency, freshness, etc.)? If you do not have someone on your team experienced in outreach, consider using market research to get to know your audience better.

As you brainstorm, check your ideas off against these user profiles, and either eliminate or tweak any that wouldn’t be appealing. Be tough — it can be hard to ditch an idea you love, even if it doesn’t fit your audience.

You can also estimate how far your infographic will spread based on your user profiles. For example, if you are working with a niche topic, either confirm that your client/boss will be happy with a small but focused reach, or come up with ideas that can broaden the scope of your subject matter.

A tip from the pros: Anything that is cause-based usually does well (e.g., the environment, poverty, and animal welfare subject matter). The reason? People want to spread the word in order to affect change.

2. Content research

Why outreach planning makes sense here: With an idea in place and a profile of your audience developed, gathering data that speaks to your outreach targets is essential in ensuring your project is a success. If you gather data that alienates readers, your efforts will have been for naught.

What you should be doing: Consider what you know about your audience: What do they tend to write about? Are resources and credibility important to them? Do they prefer information that is funny or information that is to the point?. Apply these questions to the data and only use the information which results in positive responses.

A tip from the pros: Have a third party review your data to get honest feedback. Have them pick apart the data and ask tough questions, no matter how minute their concerns may be. Thinking about your content from all angles and covering your bases ahead of time will effectively help pave the way for the outreach phase and prepare you for any curveball thrown your way.

You may also want to test your outreach plans on the people who were sources for your data. This is a form of egobait, in which you build relationships with the people who helped build the infographic in hopes of getting coverage for your piece on their sites.

3. Content creation

Why outreach planning makes sense here: There are many approaches you can take to present information in an infographic, from fun to no-nonsense. A businessperson is not going to share something that looks unprofessional with peers, no matter how engaging the content, so you’ll want to keep your audience in mind as you develop the look and feel of your content — including your design, tone, and voice.

What you should be doing: Use your audience profiles to create a brief style guide for your infographic. Consider reaching out to a few people that fit within your audience and use their feedback to help you edit and perfect your project. This phase can also create a bit of buzz.

A tip from the pros: Determine whether you’re presenting this content in the right way. For example, infographics are fun but expensive and they work best for presenting data-heavy information that is more digestible in a visual format. If your source material doesn’t fit that description (i.e., you find your infographic is essentially blocks of text telling a story), you’ll get a better ROI if you go with something simpler, like a data-rich article.

4. Content outreach

Why outreach planning makes sense here: This one’s obvious! You need to conduct outreach so that people know about your project. You want to acquire new traffic or linkbacks. So if you only post your content on your own website, only your current audience will see it.

What you should be doing: Use as many different tools and methods as you can to source prospective contacts. For example, use advanced queries to find bloggers who are discussing your project topic. You should also use social media platforms to find people who are talking about your infographic. For example, maybe people are tweeting about your content, but aren’t hosting it on their sites. Reach out to them and ask them to host it. Remember, using your infographic’s organic social success will help you find new leads and develop creative ideas for getting more coverage.

A tip from the pros: Make your audience’s lives as easy as possible — it will greatly increase your conversions. For example, you can give contacts an embed code so they can easily post your infographic on their websites and social profiles, and even suggest some intro copy, if appropriate.

5. Content tracking

Why outreach planning makes sense here: There is no point in just watching from the sidelines as your infographic gets going online. If you know your audience well (which you should by now), you’ll be well positioned to get involved and push it a bit harder in the right places.

What you should be doing: Keep an up-to-date record of who you’ve reached out to during your launch, and make sure to follow up with anyone who hasn’t responded. Use language that’s appropriate to your profiles and, if the situation is right, consider picking up the phone instead of emailing.

A tip from the pros: If after all your attempts you still do not succeed in getting coverage from a specific contact, ask them for constructive feedback on why they aren’t interested. This will help you better understand your audience and hopefully create more successful projects down the road! 

Todd Wheatland, Kelly OCG

Kelly Outsourcing & Consulting Group (KellyOCG), a division of the workforce solutions giant Kelly Services, has adopted storytelling and content marketing as their core marketing philosophy. Of course, that philosophy has concrete implications for resource allocation.

“We don’t do any business-to-business brand advertising at all,” said Todd Wheatland, VP and head of thought leadership and marketing at Kelly OCG.

Instead, the company spends about 60 percent of its B2B marketing budget on the creation, distribution and promotion of its content, designed to provide useful information to executives about staffing and outsourcing.

“In the past give years, pretty much every company has redirected money away from traditional advertising toward digital, says Wheatland. As those advertising budgets shrink, the strategy behind advertising has also changed.

At Kelly OCG, “we’re spending much less on advertising, and what advertising we will do this year is fully oriented around content.”

For that reason, the distinction between “advertising” and “content marketing” is not an absolute. Both have the objective of supporting the organization’s revenue objectives. “When does content promotion become advertising?” Wheatland rhetorically asked. “Is it just when you have to pay?” 

Content Marketing is Digital Currency

In fact, Wheatland thinks content marketing should be thought of as a “digital currency for those relationships.”

“What we used to think of as vendor or buyer relationships with publishers are now much more partnerships, for example,” he added.

“What I would say is that content marketing has greatly infused our marketing approach across the board,” Wheatland said.  “Selling’s still essentially the same process, content’s just found a resurged role that influences most elements of that process.”

“We’re spending less money on events, but we’re attending more events than ever.” for example.

“What’s changed is that instead of approaching events as sponsors, we’re getting in front of topics and developing content that will bring some unique value to that event,” he said. “Instead of sitting around a booth in an exhibitors’ hall, we’re doing video blogs with fellow speakers.”

Nor does Wheatland think Kelly OCG fundamentally faces challenges that are so different from most other large businesses. “The increased need for education, for ideas, for innovation, you could apply that to the clients of pretty much any company,” Wheatland said.

As for the “goals” Kelly OCG was attempting to achieve by using content marketing, Kelly OCG began with the “usual suspects” of thought leadership, branding and positioning. “But we’re essentially interested in influence and lead nurturing,” he said.

“We measure and report on any number of activity metrics, but if we can’t show a financial impact through directly attributable revenue then, well, you probably wouldn’t be interviewing me next year,” Wheatland quipped. “ Content marketing’s about sharing expertise generously, but you’ve got to build a profitable business model to allow you the joy of doing that.”

Does Sales Cycle Actually Work?

Some would argue that content marketing needs to be geared to prospect information needs at different parts of a sales cycle, but Wheatland isn’t so sure that is the right way to look at content marketing tactics.

“I’m not a believer in a typical buying cycle to be honest,” Wheatland said. “As much as marketers wish we could shove prospects into funnels and squeeze them out the other end, buyers are people and seem to get a bit bored reading the script.”

In other words, traditional sales funnels might not be conceived of in a way that actually fits the world we now confront, and will face, in years to come.

“The way I think of sales funnels is that it’s like we’re using Newtonian physics in a pre-Einstein world,” Wheatland said. “We know it’s not really working, but it seems like it broadly should.”

That’s a key insight. Despite the widespread sense that sales funnels “should work,” he argues they actually do not work very well at all. “ And there’s nothing better to replace it with yet,” he added.

Technology will change the funnel

But that should point practitioners in a helpful direction, which is to remain open to potentially big changes. “With so much technology evolution underway, I’m optimistic there’ll be something better coming down the line one day.”  

“For now, we’re pretty much doing what everyone else is doing: embracing lead nurturing,” he said. Social media seems to be a bit of a wild card at the moment, from Wheatland’s perspective.

“It’s fair to say we’re in ongoing review on many of our social channels,” he said. “Within the very wide gulf we have in audiences, from job seekers in Denmark to a company looking for a global outsourcing partner, we’ve pretty much taken every approach you can imagine.”

Tongue in cheek, Wheatland added that “of course Pinterest is huge for targeting Fortune 100 CEOs.” He seriously added that the joking comment might yet prove to be true, though at the moment Pinterest, for example, offers a potential promise not yet realized.

What does seem clear is that nothing will negate the long-term shift of the buyer education process to online sources. Despite the flood of content now available online, “one of content marketing’s great saving graces is that, increasingly, it’s the good content that really stands out,” Wheatland said.

“If you genuinely know your stuff about a topic, and you share that knowledge generously, then it takes some pretty incompetent marketing to squash the business potential of the opportunities that are created,” Wheatland said.

Ironically, content marketing isn’t new. It is, however, a philosophy that has big implications for all marketing channels, he added. “There’ll be another buzzword to replace it, but I don’t see the need for telling stories to make human connections going away any time soon.”

That might be the best way to summarize Wheatland’s thinking. Content marketing is a philosophy about story telling in general.  “Content is infusing our entire model.”

Creating great content requires more than skilled writing. It requires market research and personal conversation so that your content will anticipate the audience’s needs and be well targeted to address those needs.

Before you start to write, you need to know what information your readers will want to see on your blog, website, or social networking campaign. You need to know what will be relevant and important enough to command their attention.

So, how will you learn what’s on their minds?

You will ask, of course. But also offer a premium to thank them for their time and show that you value their input. Their information is vital to your business, so it’s in your best interest to offer something of value in return.

Luckily, this is relatively easy to do: Think of ways you can make their lives easier, more fun, more informed, or more efficient. Here are five ideas to help you learn more about your content’s audience:

 1. Create a contest

• It helps you inform clients that an event is coming up, that there is a fee to attend, and that they can reduce their costs if they register online in advance.
• You promote the seminar, your expertise, your questionnaire, and your business all at the same time, and offer clients a money-saving opportunity to increase their knowledge.

As you read these ideas, we hope you were thinking about marketing, because that is what it all boils down to: hard-as-nails internet marketing. Call it content or whatever else you want, but don’t lose sight of the fact that the purpose is to make you and your business more well-known, more of an asset to your clientele, and more successful, overall.

One last thing: Be sure that you treat your content and social networking campaigns like a ball of string — an integrated effort where finding any part of it leads you to the whole. Ain’t nothing better than that.

If you’ve used any of these techniques, let us know how they worked for you by sharing your story in the comments below. 

Marketers are increasingly recognizing the need to become storytellers to attract and keep their audiences engaged, the study by analyst Rebecca Lieb found. Altimeter, based in San Mateo, California, interviewed 56 individuals who are “actively” involved in content strategy development and work at agencies and consultancies, as well as at 38 companies, some of which are members of the American or Global Fortune 500.

“Marketers are beginning to recognize that while written content can be very effective, it’s not necessarily effective for every audience. It’s not necessarily an immersive experience,” Lieb said in this CMI podcast interview. “Video and mobile are flashier, newer, more attention getting. And I’m also seeing a rise in other forms of visual information, which in a way can be taken as quick informational hits.”

Brands as Media Companies

Emerging digital technologies, platforms and channels now allow any brand to function as its own media company. Marketers must think and function as publishers, producers and community managers as they develop strategies for presenting the content. Internally, content creators need to act like beat reporters, continuously traveling within various departments in search of stories and ideas.

Since a true content strategy must function in real time, its success depends on leveraging the expertise of individuals across an organization, not just within a single marketing department. The role of a content campaign is to entertain, beguile and inform an audience in order to “pull” them to the brand. Traditional advertising is known as a “push” strategy since it only sends out messages and doesn’t require an audience to engage in a communications relationship.

If an organization is interested in developing an integrated content marketing strategy, they must take four fundamental steps, Altimeter said: 

1. They must understand that content marketing is not free. Effective content initiatives require a significant investment in internal staff, as well as production and distribution resources.
2. They must be willing to educate and train staff in new digital skill sets across an organization, not just within a marketing department.
3. They must integrate content marketing with advertising so that the two strategies can fully express a brand’s story.
4. They must balance the desire to try new techniques, such as video, with the use of fundamentals such as email newsletters and blogs.

Aim to Run

Altimeter developed a content marketing maturity self-audit form that companies can use to determine at what stage their program is. The research group said that in general, companies fall in five stages: Stand, Stretch, Walk, Jog and Run. The final stage, “Run,” is when a company’s content marketing is inspired and inspirational, and is characterized by content that can be monetized. This means that the organization has become a bona fide media company in its own right, with highly polished and innovative content that is either branded or related to the brand proposition. A company that is “running” can often sell or license its content based on standalone merit, and would have a division for the content with separate profit & loss responsibility.

Altimeter Content Marketing Maturity Self Audit

Content marketing is “about breaking down silos within organizations, and between companies, their partners and their constituents, and finding the stories that need to be amplified and told – and doing so continually,” Lieb said in an interview. “Good content marketing just keeps on going forever and that is very difficult to sustain without strategy.”

“As the report suggests, and in line with what we are seeing from major brands like Coca-Cola, more senior level marketers are making the push toward content marketing,” says Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute. “But, since we are battling decades of mass media structure and culture, most brands are at the very beginning stages of content marketing implementation.  If content marketing were a baseball game, we are just getting out of the dugout for the first inning.  That said, the report shows promise and marketing executives are heading in the right direction.”

According to Altimeter, Red Bull, an Austria-based energy drink company, is an example of a firm that’s achieved this level of content maturity. Red Bull runs an e-commerce website, RedBullContentPool.com, that allows users to license clips from its extensive video library. The company also allows users to download photos for editorial purposes, owns a record label, and publishes a print magazine. This content distribution model allows Red Bull to generate revenue and impact global culture, in addition to supporting its energy drink brand. 

Interview with Rebecca Lieb from Altimeter

Built for internal communication, intranets don’t serve the traditional content marketing goals of educating customers and prospects. But they do function as portals to valuable tools and information that employees need to be productive. So in a very real way, intranets are designed to share useful, informative content — just like the best B2C and B2B content marketing sites do.

Thinking about intranet content

Intranets are unique providers of content. Although the audience is captive, the content still needs to engage the readers so the site becomes a useful and vibrant center of a company’s internal community.

To create content that engages employees and helps them feel like vital and valued members of your team, here are a few guidelines to consider:

• Focus on providing useful documents and tools. Intranets serve as repositories for a lot of internal data, and no one wants to spend time searching for the right form or template they need to do their job. Organize documents and tools into useful, intuitive categories that will make searches easier by job function, geographic location, most frequently used, etc.
• Format the content like you will be using it to sell to your customers. Employees will want to spend more time on your intranet if the content there is interesting or fun to use. Consider incorporating some of the same design ideas that your public-facing internet page or popular consumer products websites use, such as graphics, widgets, or blogs.
• Provide easy ways for employees to respond to and interact with each other. As consumers of social media in their personal lives, employees will likely be familiar with activities like commenting on blog or news posts, liking or voting on content, and emailing or sharing interesting articles. Adding these types of functionality to your intranet will give your employees more ways to become engaged in your corporate community.
• Don’t forget the fun. Intranets are usually created for serious business purposes. But remember that the employees using it are the very same people who play video games, interact with social media sites, and watch videos or listen to podcasts in their free time. Adding an element of fun on an intranet doesn’t necessarily mean posting a game that might distract from work, but it could certainly include some not-so-serious content like a poll on non-business topics, a quote of the day, employees’ favorite recipes, or even a buy-sell page to help employees trade their season tickets more easily.
• Mobile is the new black. Employees are not always in the office, so creating a mobile version of your intranet site can help ensure that they always have access to the tools and information they need no matter where they are doing their work — at an off-site meeting, a home office, or even another branch of your company.

Is your intranet doing it right?

As a rule, internal communications are proprietary. So it isn’t easy to find examples of how other companies are creating and managing their intranet communications. But next time you are looking to improve your company’s current intranet — or to build a new internal site — try using these questions to help guide your efforts:

Content:

Authorship

• Who creates the content? The human resources or communications department? An internal team? External consultants? Are authors identified for individual pieces of content?
• Is content marked with date or time stamps, so users can tell how current it is?
• Does the site include links to source materials or other helpful resources?
• Is content curated effectively, with the best and most recent information made available most easily?

Organization

• How is content organized — by job function, geography, etc.?
• Is your organization scheme intuitive, based on how users are most likely to search according to their specific job needs?
• What will be the balance between content designed for anyone in the company (such as HR forms or staff directories) and content designed for specific groups (such as a form for a single business unit or a template for senior managers)?

Content types

• Does the content include the basic tools employees need — such as HR forms, templates, or reference materials like articles or white papers?
• Is necessary information on employees posted — like rosters or organization charts, staff news, or updates on your management team?
• Is information about your customers available — such as customer feedback, links to recorded customer service calls, or feeds from your social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter?
• Do you have a news feed? Is it about your company, specifically, or your industry as a whole? Is the source internal or external?
• Are there different types of information available, such as videos and podcasts or interactive content, as well as text-based content like articles, blog posts, and reports?

User experience:

• Does your intranet site have its own search engine? How does it present results? Is the navigation intuitive and consistent from page to page?
• Is the site architecture consistent (i.e., does clicking a link on the navigation bar take you to the same level page? Does the text make it clear if you are linking outside the site or about to download a file)?
• Are there broken links or files that do not download properly?
• Is it easy to get help or provide feedback about the site itself?

Format/Layout:

• How closely does the design of your intranet site align with your company’s external brand presence?
• Is the layout of the site and all its content easy to read and navigate?
• Does the design use a mix of text, graphics, video, and audio content?

Social media:

• Are you using internal blogs? Who writes them, and can users comment or submit posts?
• If your company has external presence on social media sites like YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook, have you set up feeds to pull this information onto your intranet site?

Conclusion

Intranets shouldn’t be thought of as just the poor second cousin of your company’s public-facing websites. As valuable tools that educate and inform your employees, the ultimate goal of an intranet site is to help them be as productive as possible. What do you think makes the best content for an intranet? What are your thoughts about how companies can improve employee engagement through the content they offer?

Image Credit