We’re exposed to 15.5 hours of media per day. So by now, you’re probably listicled out.
Content for the sake of content cannot grow a business. Marketers swear that more content equates more leads, and to be fair, traffic is important to any inbound campaign.
But your goal shouldn’t be to drive passive traffic to clichéd content when you can drive intentional traffic to a thoughtful offering.
In the marketing world, content has continually been championed as the next big thing. Well, perhaps it was — in 2007. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 report, 86 percent of B2B marketers employ this practice. But staying ahead of the competition requires a fresh approach.
Modernize Your Content Strategy
Content — blog posts, templates, whitepapers, etc. — should not double as your breakup sweats, stretching to fit bloated concepts and practices.
To be a progressive, business-building content marketer, you must approach the crowded content world like a social media network.
When Twitter recognized the problem with saturated user timelines, it introduced “While you were away...” This feature served to shrink the platform’s output into a focused package of content that users would find the most pertinent and poignant.
In recent years, marketers have improved at building strategies and crafting editorial calendars to fill their consumers’ news feeds with content. Strategy is essential. But like a slogan does not win a campaign, a strategy does not ensure a fine-tuned brand message.
The goal of a focused content strategy is engagement. Between 54 and 58 percent of B2B marketers say that producing engaging content is a challenge. So where does this challenge begin and end?
A number of factors affect marketers’ innovation impasse:
- A clouded brand voice
- Professionalism at the expense of candor
- Poor choice of metrics
Unsurprisingly, all of these factors are related.
Finding Your Brand Voice
Jimmy John’s is not a content marketing firm. But over Father’s Day weekend, the sandwich savant showed mastery of its brand voice.
With one tweet, Jimmy John’s captured more than 67,000 measurable impressions — 67,000 “real applewood smoked ham and provolone cheese garnished with lettuce, tomato, and mayo” impressions.
Brand voice, or “the tone of your communications and the style of your writing,” is where marketers must begin when honing their content strategy. How many of us would kill to craft a campaign that garners as much attention as this one tweet?
Mastering a consistent voice across different social media channels — while still serving that channel’s primary nuance — is central to differentiating your thought leadership from the nearest competitor’s.
Social media is a forum, not a corkboard. Marketers can’t expect to maximize these channels by solely posting their own content. Start conversations, and highlight the successes and questions posed by those in your industry and target market.
Valuing Candor at the Expense of ‘Professionalism’
Dan Lohman, CEO of Pushup Social, recently wrote a post for The Knowledge Bank on the death of professionalism.
Central to his vision of a candid company is “baking” humor and personality into your marketing strategy. “Baking” can take many forms, ranging from inter-brand interaction (e.g., the Jimmy John’s tweet) to the use of euphemisms and cursing in copy.
Marketers often forget one chief tenet of salesmanship: Consumers are humans. Communicating with them like they’re real people is not only natural, but also paramount to forming lasting relationships.
Now, it’s essential that candor doesn’t come at the expense of brand voice. Neither of these two elements can live without the other. Plus, not every brand is Jimmy John’s. A keen understanding of brand voice lends itself to appropriate candor, which creates engaging content. But to gauge the success of your strategy, you have to measure it
Choosing the Right Metrics to Measure
According to CMI, 63 percent of content marketers say website traffic is their foremost metric for measuring content success.
Frankly, this sort of thinking is archaic. Fifty-five percent of visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds on your website. These impressions — if we can even call them that — are not lead generators.
The sole, empirical proof of a focused content strategy is your content’s ROI. When our team measures content ROI, we primarily look at two metrics: leads and sales generated. Mark Hodges, our analytics expert, recommends using Google Analytics to measure the two.
But not all leads are created equal. It takes exceptional content to nurture the sort of leads that, well, lead to an educated phone call with your sales team. Top-notch content answers questions before anyone needs to ask. “Sales call quality” may be a hazy metric, but when leads have baseline knowledge of your industry and offering before getting on the phone, it leads to richer conversations and catapults your sales cycle.
ROI is the culmination of cultivating a brand voice that sells. Like all focused content strategies, developing and implementing this brand voice is a long game. Communicating this to your C-suite can be challenging, but the long-term prospects for engaging consumers with specific, focused content are enormous.
Simply having a content strategy will not help you cut through the clutter. To usher in a new and improved era of content marketing, marketers must reimagine the ways brands and businesses communicate with their target markets.
How does your brand refine its voice to create more focused content?
