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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Podcasts Thrived in 2020, Year’s Top Search Terms, Fast Food in Pompeii??

Happy New Year, y’all! Welcome to 2021! Time to turn the page and start into a new year and I am ready for it! I bet you are as well! Before we get to today’s Marketing Minute, tomorrow night’s #ContentCircus will discuss how to do a content audit. It’s a process I’m going through now, and we will be discussing tomorrow night at 7pm Central on Twitter. Additionally, I will have a VERY robust post up here tomorrow on my process for auditing content. It will tie in nicely with tomorrow night’s #ContentCircus, so look for that as well. As they say in the circus, on with the show!

 

This surprises me a bit, but podcasts continued to have remarkable growth in 2020. Downloads surged by almost 50%, and spending on podcast ads hit a whopping $780 Million! There was some concerns that growth of podcasts might slow in 2020 as we spent more time at home, and less time driving to work. But the stellar growth of the format in 2020 proves that we love listening to our podcasts, and not just while driving to work.

 

It’s always interesting to look back at the top search terms for the year. As expected, most of the terms revolved around the pandemic and how it has impacted our lives and daily workflow. One of the big topics I’ve talked about here the last few months is how customer behavior will change as a result of spending more time working from home. I think the shift in search term usage reflects that.

 

Ok, it’s hard to restart from a nice Christmas break, even for the Marketing Minute! I thought this discovery of an ancient ‘fast food stand’ in Pompeii was absolutely fascinating! And look at the artwork on the site of the stand! It’s two thousand years old! I can just imagine this being in the corner of a bustling market, where patrons could go and get a hot meal while shopping.

 

That’s it for this edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute! See you back here in a week, and be back tomorrow for my post on how I audit my content, then we will discuss at #ContentCircus tomorrow night at 7pm Central on Twitter!

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#ContentCircus 12-15-20 Recap: How to Create Content For Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Last night we had our second #ContentCircus chat, and our topic was How to Create Content For Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey. We had a wonderful discussion and I wanted to share some of the key takeaways.

For buyers who are Unaware, your content should focus almost completely on the customer. Think about it, you are trying to connect with buyers who do NOT know who you are or why they should buy from you. Why would you try to sell to such a buyer? Your content should focus completely on the buyer, what’s interesting and relevant to them. Figure out how your product or service fits into the lives of your buyer, and create content around those intersection points.

Once you move buyers to being Slightly Aware of who you are, then you create content that helps these buyers understand how your product or service fits into their lives. You create content that illustrates how you can solve problems for them, or help them in some way.

When you reach the Interested stage with a buyer, it’s finally time to SELL them on your product or service. These buyers are doing final research before they decide on which product or service to buy. So they want detailed content that talks about the products or services they are considering purchasing. This is the ONLY stage where you should directly sell via your content.

When the buyer is ready to make a purchase, the only job your content has is to show them how to complete the sale. No need to keep selling them, the buyer is ready to buy.  Just take their money!

Now, what about after the purchase?  What type of content should you create then?

 

Another great #ContentCircus comes to a close! Here’s the transcript so you can read all the tweets. The first two chats have focused more on strategy and tactics for the more senior content roles like Chief Content Officer or Director of Content Strategy. Our next #ContentCircus on 12-22-20 will focus on our favorite content creation tools! This will be more helpful for Content Marketing Managers and Content Strategists who are more directly responsible for content creation.

Thanks again to everyone for joining, see y’all next Tuesday for #ContentCircus, and back here tomorrow!

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Improve Your Content Marketing By Doing These Three Things

content marketingAbraham Lincoln famously said that if you gave him 6 hours to chop down a tree, he would spend the first 4 sharpening his axe. The point is that when you improve your process, you get better results.

Too many companies today are in a rush to ‘try something new’ when they aren’t getting the results they want from their content marketing efforts. I always advise companies to first look at their current processes and see if they can improve what they are already doing. Often, I find that companies complaining about not getting the results they need from their content marketing efforts also don’t have clearly defined strategies and proven tactics guiding those efforts.

To get the best results from your content marketing, you need an efficient system in place to produce your content. Think of your content marketing as a water hose, with the goal being to have as much water as possible flowing through that hose. If you have a 50-foot hose attached to a faucet and that hose is a tangled mess, what happens when you turn the faucet on?  Not much, right?  Maybe a small amount of water would drip out.  But as you start working out the kinks in the hose, more and more water comes out, and when you completely straighten the hose, water will be gushing out of the end of the hose.

If your content marketing isn’t getting the results you want, you probably have a lot of ‘kinks’ in your hose that you could remove and get more water flowing. There’s probably a lot of things you could be doing to improve your existing content marketing efforts that would net you better results. Let’s be honest, today more than ever, it’s better to improve your current efforts, than spending money on something new that may not work. I’d rather see you spend less to get the same or better results.

Let’s start with three areas you can work on to improve your content marketing efforts.

Define Your Who, What, and Why. 

Let’s follow Simon Sinek’s advice and Start With Why. The ‘why’ as it pertains to your content marketing, is your strategy. Why are you using content marketing, what are you trying to accomplish, and who are you trying to connect with. The ‘why’ comes first because it encompasses and guides all elements of your content marketing efforts.

The role of strategy development for your content marketing will fall to your Chief Content Officer in a more developed company with a larger content marketing team. For smaller companies with smaller teams, the strategy development function would fall to the most senior role on your content team, or perhaps to the most senior position on your marketing team. In terms of hierarchy within the organization, the Chief Content Officer will usually either report to the Chief Marketing Officer, or possibly report directly to the CEO.

Regardless of who has the responsibility, it is vital that your company’s content marketing efforts are guided by a solid strategy. This only ensures that your content marketing efforts will be more effective and efficient. That means less time on content creation and execution, along with better results. The head of your content marketing team will work with the head of your marketing team to ensure that your company’s content efforts are in sync with the company’s larger marketing strategy.

It all goes back to planning. The more planning you do, the better results you will achieve. So when fleshing out your content marketing strategy, ask and answer these three questions:

  1. What are we doing? (Why are we using content marketing?)
  2. Why are we doing it? (What do we hope to achieve?)
  3. Who are we doing it for? (Who is the audience we need to reach via our content?)

 

Now let’s look at ‘What’

In terms of your content marketing efforts, the ‘what’ refers to the tactics you will use to execute your content marketing strategy (the ‘why’). Many marketers get strategy and tactics confused. Tactics are used to execute the strategy. The strategy is what you want to accomplish, the tactics are how you will accomplish it.

The Director of Content Strategy will be responsible for helping to develop the tactics to support the larger content marketing strategy, and they will work with the Chief Content Officer toward this end. The Director of Content Strategy will also work with the content marketing team to execute the strategy through those tactics. For smaller companies with less developed content teams, this responsibility can fall to the Content Marketing Manager. In general, the Chief Content Officer designs the strategy, the Director of Content Strategy then determines the tactics that will be used to execute that strategy.

What does tactics include in this context? Anything that is used to deliver content marketing to the end audience. It could be certain digital tools, like blogs or podcasts. It also be certain social sites such as Twitter or Facebook. It could even be formats, such as white papers, or pamphlets to be included in print newspapers.

Think of tactics as being the battle plan to execute the strategy. Let’s say you are a war general and you are tasked with defeating an enemy city. You decide that the best way to do this is to cut off supplies to that city.  That is your strategy. To execute this strategy, you decide to position your navy in the harbor to block supplies from coming into the port. The naval blockcade of the port is the tactic you are using to execute the strategy of cutting off supplies to the enemy city.

So the Director of Content Strategy works with the Chief Content Officer to develop the tactics to execute the content marketing strategy, and they then work with the content marketing team to help facilitate content creation via those tactics. Based on the size and cope of your content marketing team, the Director of Content Strategy may or may not be tasked with actual content creation.

 

Finally, let’s look at ‘who’.

So ‘why’ is the strategy for your content marketing efforts, and ‘what’ are the tactics you will use to execute that strategy. ‘Who’, is the audience for your content marketing, the person you are trying to reach. The determination of who the audience is will come from your content marketing strategy, and tactics will be chosen based on who you want to connect with and what actions you want them to take as a result of interacting with your content. The ‘who’ is listed last simply because the members of your team tasked with content creation will have the most direct contact and engagement with your intended audience. Thusly, positions such as Content Marketing Manager or Content Strategist for smaller teams, will fill this role. In general, these roles will focus on content creation, but will also assist the Director of Content Strategy and Chief Content Officer in the development of content tactics and strategy.

So the workflow could look like this; The Chief Content Officer develops the strategy, the Director of Content Strategy develops the tactics, then the Content Marketing Manager creates content for those tactics, to reach the desired audience. This is the level where your content creators will live, so obviously, having multiple content creators with experience creating content via multiple mediums (audio, video, written, print, etc), is a big plus.

Now, when we are talking about ‘who’, the importance of creating quality personas to accurately define your ‘who’ cannot be overstated. Your content persona is your best ‘guess’ or summary of who the person you are creating content for really is. It can and should be as detailed as possible. The persona can include characteristics like:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Occupation
  • Martial status
  • Where they live
  • Income
  • Number of children
  • Pain points or problems they are facing (this can be focused on either home life or workplace, as relevant)
  • Type of content they enjoy and prefer

The best buyer personas give the content creator an accurate view of who will be interacting with the content the manager or strategist creates. It tells the content creator ‘this is who you are writing for’. Personas that are an accurate representation of the desired audience can be a huge asset for the content creator.

 

A Well-Defined Content Strategy Pays For Itself

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 57% of B2B companies have no content marketing strategy. That’s a staggering stat. If you have no strategy guiding your content marketing efforts, then you will get worse results.

To improve your content marketing results, define your why (strategy), your what (tactics to execute that strategy), and who (people you want to reach via your content).

Need help designing a content strategy for your company or improving your current one? Email me, I can help with that.

 

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#ContentCircus 12-8-20 Recap: Where to Post Content

Last night we had our first #ContentCircus chat on Twitter! #ContentCircus happens every Tuesday night at 7pm Central, and we discuss a variety of topics, focusing on content creation, strategy and execution.

Our topic for last night was ‘How to Decide Where to Post Content’. One of the things I always try to do with all my content; whether it’s a post here or a Twitter chat discussion, is I want you to think strategically about the actions you are taking. If you have a sound strategy in place that guides your actions, that means you get better results, with less time and resources required. Thinking strategically about your content creation efforts will be a topic we will revisit often at #ContentCircus.

We had a great discussion last night and I wanted to highlight a few of the wonderful points made by participants:

I loved Becky and Paul’s answers here because they cover two important areas to consider when deciding where to create content. In general, it’s always best to create content that will connect with your desired audience. If you are a business, this is current and potential customers. But Paul makes a great point as well: If your goal is to build awareness and establish thought leadership, then you may want to post on sites with an established audience. Creating long-form content on sites such as LinkedIn and Medium has become popular in recent years because it can ‘fast-track’ your efforts to gain exposure and build an audience for your work. I think this approach can absolutely work, my caveat would be as your exposure grows, try to steer that audience’s attention back to platforms that you own, such as your blog or website.

 

This has always been a pet peeve of mine: Companies and content creators who try to create content for too many channels. It’s always better to focus on FEWER sites and channels, not more. Content creation is a bit of an art, and you can achieve better results when you focus your efforts. I love Becky’s point about focusing on fewer channels, and after you nail down your efforts there, then you can experiment with new sites or channels. I’ve seen so many companies burn themselves out on content marketing over the years by trying to do too much in too many places. Start with fewer sites, nail down the content creation process, then once you are seeing the results you want, experiment with new sites and channels. It will simply take time for your content creation efforts to gain traction, so grow slow and grow smart.

 

Social media channels are not ‘one-size-fits-all’ when it comes to content. Every channel is different with a different audience and its own expectations for the content there. The culture on Reddit is not the same as the on Twitter or the one on Line. It’s important to know the differences between the userbase for each channel.

 

So those are a few of the fascinating discussions we had in #ContentCircus last night.  Here’s a transcript of last night’s #ContentCircus, hope to see you there next week!

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Content Case Studies: How Wistia and Evernote Leverage Customer Stories to Promote its Products

One of the most effective ways to market your products and services is to have your current customers share their experiences with other customers. The reality is, we trust other customers more than we trust your brand. So if you can find a way to let your customers market for you to other customers, you want to be smart enough to do so. One way to do this, is by creating case studies or testimonials from your current customers and using those in your content strategy. I have testimonials on my homepage, I have short case studies from my clients here.

I wanted to look at how Evernote and Wistia are using Customer Stories to highlight how their customers and clients are using their products and services. I wanted to specifically highlight the efforts of these two companies ,because I think both are doing some things well, and I also see some areas for improvement. If you were to combine the best elements of both efforts, I think you would have a fantastic mechanism for sharing customer experiences.

Before I show you what these companies are doing with their customer case studies, I wanted to talk for a moment about the actual value of case studies. Case studies can be a wonderful learning tool IF you use them correctly. Case studies are so popular because we want to see what works for other companies similar to our own. But the potential problem from a presentation point of view can be that the audience will take the case study and understand how the case study applies to that company, but not be able to make the connection to how the same concepts could apply to THEIR company. In other words, they may understand how your product helped Apple achieve great results, but they don’t understand how to take what worked for Apple, and make it work for their brand.

You overcome this by including abstract examples that highlight the key concepts that you want the audience to understand. You spell out the key takeaways from the case study, and help the audience understand why and how your product or service helped another company, so the audience can better understand how your product or service could help them as well. Just remember that the brain is more likely to learn a concept if you give both literal (case studies) examples of the concept, as well as abstract (here’s an example of how your company could use…) examples.

 

Let’s first look at Evernote:

Evernote has a collection of short customer case studies which they are calling Customer Stories.

evernote customer stories

Here’s what I like about Evernote’s Customer Stories: You can immediately spot the feature of these Customer Stories that I really like: They include the industry the customer is in, as well as the size of their company. This helps establish the relevance of the Customer Stories. If I have a company running a fleet of 5 food trucks in the Atlanta area, the, Guayaki story on the right will immediately grab my attention because it’s coming from a similar background as my company.

Speaking of Guayaki, let’s look at their Customer Story:

As you can see, it’s pretty short. There’s not much information here. Oddly, it does include a link on the right to Download a PDF of this page, and that version actually includes another paragraph of information and also clarifies that the company used EverNote to cut training time. I’m not sure why that additional content wasn’t included on the website.

Here’s What Needs Improvement: I’ve already touched on how short these Customer Stories are. I think some additional information, especially speaking to a business problem that the customer solved by using Evernote would be helpful. I also think that some short videos from the customer talking about how Evernote helps them in running their business, would be great. Ideally, I’d like to see some screencasts from the customer showing them using Evernote as they do in their daily routine. This would help the audience understand how they too could use Evernote successfully. Plus, video content has such high engagement levels, I think some video content from the customers themselves would really take these Customer Stories to the next level. In fact, Evernote could even do a video podcast with their customers talking about their experience with using Evernote, and then post on a video hosting site such as YouTube, then embed the video on that Customer Stories page for each customer.

 

Now let’s switch gears and look at how Wistia is using Customer Stories on its site:

wistia customer stories

Here’s What I Like About Wistia’s Customer Stories: Wistia has dozens of Customer Stories on its site. Unlike the Evernote Customer Stories, the ones on Wistia’s site are really in depth for each company. Each Customer Story includes plenty of quotes from the company, carefully explaining how it has benefited from using Wistia. And the Customer Stories also include video content! Sometimes it’s an interview with someone at the customer’s company, other times it’s examples of work that the customer has created by using Wistia. I think the Customer Stories do a great job of explaining who the customer is, what they do, but also helps the audience understand how they are using Wistia to be more successful. Wistia has done a really nice job with their Customer Stories.

Here’s What Needs Improvement: I think the Customer Stories would be more useful to the audience if they followed Evernote’s example and gave us information about the customer’s industry, and number of employees on the front page for the section. But honestly, that almost feels like nit-picking at this point, since Wistia has done such a good job with the content on each Customer Stories entry.

 

And if you are curious, I noticed that both EverNote and Wistia have a Customer Stories entry for CoSchedule. So you can check out both and see which one you prefer. Here’s the CoSchedule page on Evernote’s site, and here it is on Wistia’s site.

 

So that gives you an idea of how your company can integrate customer testimonials into your site’s content. Just remember to help the audience understand the important concepts that you want them to learn, and also make sure the customer talks about how they are using your products or services to grow their businesses. And finally, use the testimonials as a way to promote the customer. Give them some link love, let them brag on themselves a bit. After all, they are helping your company, by agreeing to give the testimonial. I think one of the companies I looked at in this post did a much better job with this than the other one. Look for yourself and see what you think.

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Introducing #ContentCircus!

Starting one week from today on December 8th, I will be launching a new Twitter chat called #ContentCircus! #ContentCircus will be focused on three areas:

  • Content Creation
  • Content Strategy
  • Content Execution

#ContentCircus will be every Tuesday night at 7pm Central. We will have a topic related to each of these three areas every month, and the last Tuesday of every month will be OPEN MIC, just like we had with #Blogchat!

Helping companies improve their content strategies and creation efforts is the work I love. I love teaching companies how to create content that resonates with customers, while also achieving desired business outcomes. And while I will always be partial to content created on blogs, content in 2020 takes on so many forms across so many tools and platforms. I think there’s an opportunity to create a robust Twitter chat with content as a focus that can benefit both content creators as well as the companies that hire and work with them.

So why not just bring back #Blogchat? 

I started #Blogchat on a whim in 2009 as a way to better catalog a Twitter conversation around a blogging question I asked on Twitter. It quickly grew into one of the first chats on Twitter. It WAS the first Twitter chat to monetize with a sponsor, and ended up being live at events like South By Southwest, Content Marketing World and Blogworld and New Media Expo. Companies such as Dell, Adobe, Club Med, Pilot Pen and others have sponsored #Blogchat. Every important thought leader in the blogging and digital space co-hosted #Blogchat during it’s 10-year run and at its height, #Blogchat was generating 25 Million impressions in one hour on Sunday nights!

#Blogchat soon took on a life of its own, and was a wonderful way to connect with new and emerging bloggers, and give them valuable guidance on how to improve their craft. You sense the ‘but’ is coming, right? But…my clients weren’t individual bloggers. So over time, the audience for #Blogchat and my desired audience began to become fractured. But I loved doing #Blogchat so much, and I felt an obligation to give back and do all I could to help bloggers become better bloggers. But over time, #Blogchat began to become a big time sink and other than sponsorships, I really could get enough money back from it to justify the time I needed to spend with the chat to continue its success.

So in 2019 I finally decided to end #Blogchat. But I didn’t end my love of Twitter chats. I still believe that chats are the best source of value on Twitter. And I always had in the back of my mind maybe I could bring #Blogchat back, at least for a one-shot.

Then one day it hit me: Why not do a Twitter chat focused on content? Boom! That would allow me to cover a topic that’s more in line with my desired client base and which would let me better promote my business services. Additionally, we could cover content creation using tools other than just blogs. So since the topic would be more closely aligned with my business, I could justify spending more time with the chat, to help it grow and be more valuable to as many content creators as possible.

What will be the focus of #ContentCircus?

The topics for #ContentCircus will all fall into 3 buckets; Content Strategy, Content Creation and Content Execution. In most months, we will have 4 Tuesdays, so 4 topics.  We will pick one topic from each of these buckets, and the 4th topic will be OPEN MIC, held on the last Tuesday of the month. OPEN MIC is something I started with #Blogchat. During OPEN MIC there is no set topic, everyone can discuss anything they want related to content. It’s a great chance for anyone to ask questions on content topics that we haven’t yet touched on.

We will also be focusing on these buckets as they relate to content tools and platforms as well.  For instance, we might talk about how to create more engagement on Twitter one month, and how to take better photos for Instagram the next month.

Over time, as the community grows, we will bring in co-hosts who are subject matter experts. One of the things I loved about seeing the #Blogchat community grow was that it gave me the opportunity to bring in popular thought leaders who could not only offer valuable insights to the #Blogchat community, but the exposure from co-hosting #Blogchat was also great for the co-hosts. A true wn-win.

And yes, we will have sponsors for #ContentCircus. Lining up sponsors honestly is not a concern at this point, that will take care of itself later on. As with #Blogchat, any sponsorships with #ContentCircus will be structured so they add value to the community, and aren’t a distraction.

So I’m excited about #ContentCircus and I’m looking forward to creating another community that can help others become better content creators. See you next Tuesday at 7pm Central on Twitter!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Pinterest’s Growth, B2Bs Leveraging Content Marketing

Happy Monday, y’all! Here’s a few marketing stories that caught my eye over the last week.

Social media may be taking it on the chin right now, but Pinterest is an exception. The site is benefiting from people spending more time at home, and I have to admit, I’ve spent more time on Pinterest in the last 5 months than I did the previous 5 years. The challenge ahead for Pinterest is how they can continue to give sellers opportunities to sell through the site, while not compromising the user experience. In fact if done properly, Pinterest could actually add more sales opportunities for sellers and ENHANCE the user experience. We’ll see how well they navigate this.

 

KIND bars are making an interesting move to stand out from other health bars like Cliff. The company is trying to change customer behavior and have customers eat their bars before working out and not as a snack. To this end, they offered $100 to the first 1000 people that submitted a receipt for their products OR a competitor.  The $100 is to help with fitness expenses for customers. It will be interesting to see if KIND has a strategy in place to stay connected to those 1000 customers. This could be the start of a larger and long-term advocacy effort, and it will be interesting to see if KIND is thinking that far ahead.  I suspect they are, given the amount of money spent just on the giveaway.

Mixed results on how content marketing is working for B2B marketers, according to new research from CMI/On 24 and Marketing Profs. On the one hand, more marketers (75%) are reporting that content marketing has helped them generate leads this year versus last (70%). On the other hand, the percentage of marketers who generated sales/revenue through content marketing also dipped slightly (51% in 2020 vs. 53% in 2019). You can review the study here.

 

Thank you so much for reading, I greatly appreciate it, and will see you here tomorrow!

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Three Ways to Create Content That Connects With Customers

create contentIt’s really tough to create content that consistently connects with customers. Part of the problem is simply staffing; Most companies hand off content creation to mid or lower-level digital people. If they do a good job, they often get promoted into more marketing-oriented roles. So there can be a constant talent-drain happening for your content team.

One way to avoid this is to have good processes in place. Part of this is having a system for the type of content that you should be creating to connect with your customers. Today I wanted to talk about three different roles that your content can play. This will help you think about how you can quickly and easily create content that has value for your customers.

 

Be a teacher. Think about how you use search engines. If you have a problem, you’re searching for a solution, right?  Here’s some of the basic search terms you’ve probably used before:

“What’s the best way to…”

“How do I get rid of…”

“Which (product) is best to solve (problem)?”

 

Often, when we use search engines, we are really searching for the answer to a question or the solution to a problem we are having. So apply this to your customers; What problems do they have, and what solutions do they need?  Once you have those answers, then create content that answers those questions and provides those solutions! This not creates valuable content for your customers, but it also creates the content that search engines will serve up when other customers when they search for those same terms!

So how do you figure out what questions your customers have?  First, look at any feedback you are already getting from your customers. This could be emails feedback on social media channels, or even letters. Next, talk to your customer support team, and see what are the common issues that customers are having. Is there a certain product feature that many customers are having trouble understanding how to use? Is there a common complaint that customers have, and maybe you can create a blog post that helps explain the issue to customers?

Finally, look at product reviews, not just for your products, but also your competitors. For instance, if you see that reviews for a competitors product are constantly complaining that the competing product does not have a certain feature that your product does, then you should point that out in your content. But all of these types of customer feedback give you very valuable insights into how you can create content that helps your customers and which also helps address issues they are facing.

 

Be a storyteller. I am a sucker for case studies and ‘real-world’ examples. I love hearing how people ‘just like me’ are using a product or service and hearing how its helping them. This helps me understand how I could use the product or service as well, and its honestly a more effective way of selling and promotion than simply coming directly from the brand. The reality is, we tend to trust other customers more than we do brands. It is the central lesson behind my book Think Like a Rock Star.

So you can create content that showcases how your customers are using your products or services. This will help other potential customers better understand how your products work, and can also address concerns they have about your products. In fact, you can take customer feedback you get from creating content that teaches in the above example, and use it here. Let’s say you write a ‘teaching’ post that shows customers how to use your product in a particular way.  Sarah leaves a comment on your Facebook page saying thank you, and says that your post solved a problem she was having and now she loves using your product. You could contact Sarah and learn more about how she uses your product, then use her experiences as a ‘case study’ post to show other customers how your product helped Sarah.

 

Be inspirational. So we’ve talked about creating content that teaches your customers how to better use your products, and content that showcases how current customers are benefiting from your products. These are great ways to create engaging content for your customers, but these methods are focused on what’s happening today. What if you wanted to create content that shows customers how their lives or daily routines could be changed for the better, by purchasing your product? What if you could create content that could paint a picture for customers of how their lives would be better, if they owned your product?

Here’s an example of how this could work. I have always been a car owner. I hate trucks and SUVs, simply because when I drive one, it feels like I’m driving a slow tank and I’m gonna run over everything and hit every car. I love driving cars because it feels like I’m more in control, like I have better vision and they are just more fun for me to drive.

So I’m not in the market today for an SUV. However, what if you could paint a picture for me of what my life could look like if I owned your SUV? Let’s say you have an SUV you want to tell me about.  “Sorry, I don’t like SUVs, I drive cars.”

“Hear me out!” you say.  “This SUV is different”.

You then tell me about how your SUV has a dedicated wifi router in place, so it is in effect a ‘rolling hotspot’.  The SUV gives the driver a constant, high-speed internet connection. The center console comes with a laptop docking station and multiple USB ports. The back row of seats feature enough room to comfortably sit and the back of the driver and passenger seats have monitors for taking video calls. Finally, the roof has an attachment that allows you to install a green screen so you can create and record videos, with the included interior cameras. Basically, this SUV is a ‘mobile office’, that would allow me to do any of my normal business and content creation functions, no matter where I am.

Would that make me interested in your SUV?  Well…it wouldn’t hurt! By showing me how your SUV could help me perform most or all of my daily business functions even while on the road, that adds a great deal of value for me. If you can paint a picture for the customer via your content of how the customer’s life can be changed for the better TOMORROW by owning your product today, that gets the customer’s attention.

 

So that’s three ways you can create content that will connect with your customers.

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Red Bull Creates Better Content Than You Do, Here’s How They Do It

Red Bull’s marketing is one of my favorite case studies from Think Like a Rock Star.  In the book I call them this generation’s Nike, and they really are.  What separates Red Bull from most brands is its customer-centric marketing.  Everything about the brand’s content, marketing and communication efforts is about its customers and what’s important to them.  The product itself is secondary to the activities that the customer engages in, and cherishes. Red Bull’s content marketing follows a simple formula; Don’t sell the product, sell what the product allows you to do.

First. watch this Red Bull video:

There’s a couple of things you need to know about that video:

1 – It’s a 30-second broadcast commercial.

2 – It currently has over 2 million views on YouTube.

 

But notice something else; the product (Red Bull energy drinks) is barely shown. Instead, the majority of the commercial focuses on the athletes and the amazing activities they are engaged in.

The product has become secondary to the activities that Red Bull’s customers enjoy.  

Red Bull understands that its customers are young and active.  The brand is targeting the younger end of the highly desirable 18-34 demographic, and they understand that customers in this age range are extremely savvy when it comes to advertising.  So instead of trying to market its product to these customers (which would be a turnoff to them), Red Bull focuses its content on the activities they love.

Red Bull is a Giant on YouTube

In fact, Red Bull does a fabulous job of re-purposing (or as my friend Ann would say ‘re-imaging’) its content.  Red Bull creates long-form content and videos chronicling how these amazing athletes prepare to engage in their activities.  This is for the hardcore extreme sports fans that want to learn more about these athletes and how they train for and perform these amazing jumps, stunts and tricks.

Then Red Bull takes the actual footage from the event and shows it by itself, and also works it into its commercials as well.  Red Bull got a ton of publicity from Felix Baumgartner’s ‘freefall from space’.  The brand divided footage from that amazing event into a highlight video that currently has over 40 MILLION views.  Additionally it posted videos from test jumps Baumgartner made, and of course his successful space freefall closes out the broadcast commercial above.

 Red Bull's YouTube engagement

We’ve got your Facebook engagement right here!

With over 40 Million ‘fans’ on Facebook, Red Bull is one of the most popular brands on the world’s largest social networking site.  And consistent with the content it creates on other online channel, the product itself is almost never promoted or even mentioned.  Instead, the focus is on the athletes and the amazing feats they are engaging in.  Most of the content is delivered via stunning visuals with text to describe what’s happening.  But the brand is promoting the activities and athletes directly, and the brand itself very indirectly.

In 2012, Facebook did a study into how its most popular brands drive engagement via its Pages.  Specifically, Facebook found that brands create three types of content on its brand pages:

Messages about the product or service

  • Travel brand example: Our new resort just opened! Book your trip today.

Messages related to the brand

  • Travel brand example: I decided to go on my first cruise because______.

Messages unrelated to the brand

  • Travel brand example: Hang in there everybody. Monday will be over before we know it!

Of these three, updates related to the brand but not about the brand were the only type of updates that “were the sole universally significant predictor of all types of engagement.”  Those three types of engagement are Likes, Shares and Comments.

This is the exact type of content that Red Bull nails on all its social media channels, but especially on Facebook.  In fact Facebook clarified in the study that if a brand’s goal was to generate Shares that the brand should “Use photos, photos albums and videos”.

RedBullFB

Sponsor the Love

One of the ways that a brand can create passionate fans and brand advocates is to help facilitate and align itself with events, communities and functions that its customers are passionate about. You see this often at conferences and events, where a company will sponsor a ‘recharge’ area where attendees can recharge their smartphones and laptops, and refreshments might be present as well. Or another example could be a crafting company that builds an online community for crafters, the idea being that the brand is creating something of value for its customers and associating itself with events. functions and communities that the customer is already passionate about.

Red Bull does this with extreme sports.  The brand has long been heavily invested in extreme sports, helping to fund the events themselves, then later funding teams for major events such as ESPN’s X-Games.  Red Bull has even been a sponsor in NASCAR for several years.

These sponsorships communicate to its customers that Red Bull loves these events as much as they do.  Which gives its customers another reason to love the brand itself.

 

Telling a Compelling Story and Making the Customer the Hero  

Red Bull’s content marketing is all about telling a story.  It’s about personal achievement, about pushing the envelope and going farther than you thought you could.  These ideals speak to the heart of extreme sports and these special and fearless athletes.

Yet what makes this content marketing so compelling is that Red Bull is telling a story where the customer is the hero.  The content is positioned so that the customer sees these athletes performing these amazing activities yet feels inspired to push themselves to go farther.

Consider the final line of Red Bull’s broadcast commercials:

“If you believe in it, then anything is possible.”

“The only limit, is the one you set yourself.”

“You can dream about it, or you can go out and make it happen.”

The content inspires you to do more and to accomplish more than you thought you could.

Yet the secret is, Red Bull isn’t selling an energy drink, it’s selling what happens after you drink it.

Do you want to learn how Mack can create a world-class content strategy for your company like Red Bull has? Contact Mack with this form and he'll be in touch with you shortly!

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The Blank Space on the Calendar

I talked last week about how I’m enjoying using the Editorial Calendar plugin to help organize and plan my content here. It’s helped me plan out my content this week and last as I rededicated to blogging 6 times a week.

Well all last week and all this week, there’s been a blank spot on Friday, Sept 11th. I simply couldn’t decide on a topic for today’s post. Now in the past, my blogging philosophy has always been if I can’t write something awesome, don’t write anything at all. Which sounds like a good idea. The problem I would often run into was, if I missed one day, it seemed to increase the pressure to make sure I got a post out the next day. But it also had to be an ‘awesome’ post. So if I couldn’t come up with an idea for an ‘awesome’ post on that 2nd day, just wait till the 3rd.  After I had gone 2-3 days without blogging, it was very easy to justify not blogging again till I had that ‘awesome’ idea.

As you can imagine, that often led to gaps of a week or two between posts.  Sometimes longer.

When I was planning out the ‘relaunch’ of my blog over the last few weeks, it came after I saw this wonderful interview given by Kobe Bryant. What really struck me was this portion here Kobe talked about how he had to show up every day:

Kobe’s comments about showing up every day and being faithful to the people who were paying to see him resonated with me.  I was thinking of two separate stories that relate to the value of showing up, and what happens when you don’t.

When I first started blogging in 2005, I had no idea what I was doing, and I wanted to study how other people were blogging in order to improve my craft. I would use Technorati’s blog search (remember them?) to find new blogs, and I wanted to find great blogs that weren’t yet ‘known’, but I also wanted to see how other new bloggers were growing their blogs. I found this one blog, and I started with the first post on the blog. For the first couple of weeks, the blogger had a new post every day like clockwork. Then starting on the third week, the posts came every other day. Then one post the fourth week.  Then a couple of weeks later, the title was the post “Why isn’t anyone commenting on this blog???”

That was the last post on the blog. I knew at that point I’d just seen this blog die. Anyone that’s started a new blog knows that it typically takes months if not years to build a decent and engaged readership. Especially in 2020.

Here’s the second story that Kobe’s comments reminded me of. I talked yesterday about how Twitch content creator Nickmercs is using YouTube to create new content. Nick regularly gets over 100,000 viewers for his Twitch streams. That’s in 2020, so keep that in mind when you see this tweet from 2014:

Here’s Nick in 2014, 6 years ago, happy that he had 170 viewers for that day’s stream. From 170 to 100,000 in 6 years. Not bad.

So I think there’s value in creating the best possible content you can, but it’s also important to show up as often as you can.

Or as Seth Godin likes to say “Done is better than perfect.”

Well today’s post is Done. The blank space on the calendar is filled. On to tomorrow.

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