My hope after you read this post: You think really, really hard before you take shortcuts on your content. I want to leave you inspired to put in the time and energy to create value through content, and to do it in a way that sustains and pays dividends for years.

To that end, a quick refresher or primer on competitive advantage: The firm (aka “your business”) creates a competitive advantage in large part by offering something or some set of things that are Valuable, Rare, Inimitable, and by being sufficiently Organized, ready, and able to capitalize on the big ideas and big resources behind your company doors.

“Competitive advantage” to “Content Strategy” shouldn’t be a shocking leap if you’re even marginally familiar with Portent. We spend a lot of time waving the banner for investment in quality content, building a content production system that you can actually sustain, and being willing to produce “10x Content” from time to time that’s both attention-worthy and tough for competitors to imitate.

Remember: V.R.I.O.

So, how does content and content strategy relate to each of the V.R.I.O. elements?

“Valuable Content”

Do you or someone at your company know a lot about something that’s valuable to your target customer? I hope so, otherwise I’d be a tad worried. Let’s write about it.

“Rare Content”

Do you know more about this topic or have a unique perspective that your target market hasn’t heard before? I hope so, otherwise you’re going to be spending a whole lot of money to try and differentiate yourself from the pack by sheer repetition and volume.

”Inimitable Content”

This is where things start getting interesting, and where the decisions you make about whether to invest your team’s time can have a huge impact.

Part 1: Do you and your team have a perspective that’s informed through A) your unique set of experiences and B) any innovations that go into making your business awesome, which would be tough for competitors to copy? I’d be willing to bet that you do.

Part 2: Are you willing to make the investment in getting that knowledge out of your team’s head and sharing it with both current and prospective customers in a way that screams

• “We understand you!”
• “We care enough to translate this subject matter into something you can understand!”
• “We care enough to present these ideas to you with enough production value and quality that you can tell we actually spent time on this!”

Oooh. Now we start to see the tradeoff.

The lion’s share of the web is full of the same generic, crap blog posts, heavily concentrated around topics or products that businesses are trying to sell.

At best, this is an artifact of bygone days when Google would simply look at the number of times you used a keyword in a web page, and presto, you “ranked”. For a while.

At worst, it’s a sign that too many marketers still think that chumming the waters of the internet with keyword-dense blog posts will do anything for their brand, their prospective customers, or their organic search rankings.

You will not be successful in creating value and ultimately in being discovered and loved by more customers if you are producing the same pulp that already exists in overabundant supply.

There are over 4.5 billion web pages in existence at last count. Hacking out the 1,500th blog post on “How to change a flat tire” to sell tire irons is not going to work. This is not inimitable.

By contrast: Creating an amazing interactive visual with a unique take on the best ways to change a tire in specific conditions, might get closer. Better still, anticipate additional customer questions by virtue of your experience in the field of tire change-ry and weave in those thoughtful answers at the exact right moment. Your uniquely amazing approach to the work, or product, or service, becomes the “Inimitable” part of your content.

And before you even think it, this is not unique to simple products or services. It holds just as true for cloud computing services, technical consulting, or any other enterprise that’s profitable enough to draw in new or incumbent competitors.

A brief rant on growth hacking

Before we get any further, I have a confession and a rant that’s important to this idea. I hate the term “growth hacking”.

Not because the practice of an iterative approach to marketing when you’re in uncharted waters lacks merit. Not at all. It’s because the statement “we’re into growth hacking” always seems to precede arguments about why paying a pittance to strangers to create blog posts, or exclusively curating other people’s content, or some other shortcut, is somehow a better idea than putting pen to paper and sharing your unique and valuable perspective on the thing you supposedly do.

Putting that rant aside, let’s talk about being Organized.

“Organized Content”

“Content Strategy” is perhaps one of the most sought after yet least understood practices I’ve seen marketers chase in the last few years. Everyone wants to be “strategic.” I get that. Plan the work, and work the plan.

Most marketers (who haven’t been under a rock for a decade) also know that content is important. It’s a key part of the Marketing Stack. Frankly, if you don’t have content in your marketing, what do you have? A blank ad? A home page that says nothing? An empty Facebook account? You get the idea. Content is everything you do and say. It’s not just your blog.

Where people tend to get lost is in conflating “Content Marketing” and brainstorming what they could write about with “Content Strategy.”

Content Strategy does include elements of brainstorming, topic research, user journey mapping, etc. You have to know what your audience cares about and when to nurture them with the next piece of valuable information.

But Content Strategy (capital “C” capital “S”) also includes two heaping scoops of planning: editorial process and governance. By definition, Content Strategy is “a repeatable system that defines the entire editorial content development process for a website development project [or other large marketing endeavor].”

Without this step of planning how to sustain the work that must be done, that big shiny idea sputters out. Whether you’re planning out what it will take to create two colossal pieces of content, or two years’ worth of editorial calendar, organization creates the inertia and structure for you to be successful both immediately and longer-term.

Where to from here?

There is so much more to be said about both Inimitable and Organized that we’ll likely do a follow up post or two.

For now, I hope I’ve convinced you to think very hard before you reach out to a “content mill” or any other stranger promising “Quality content for low, low-prices.”

Content marketing is an extension of your firm’s competitive advantage, and it simply cannot be as good or effective if it’s not heavily infused with what makes your company and your people great in the first place.

PostScript

If you’re looking for more on sustainable (and frankly awesome) approaches to content, I recommend Kristina Halvorson’s book Content Strategy for the Web, 2nd Edition. Portent released an exhaustive ebook for “content teams of one” called Lean Content. Also, special thanks to distinguished Portent alum Misty Weaver, without whose love of pure Content Strategy and sustainable process I would surely have perished under a pile of overdue blog posts.

The post Content Strategy as Competitive Advantage appeared first on Portent.

So if it’s all about the living room and the way consumers search for answers or products, why does Facebook’s introduction of a “dislike” button or emojis even matter to marketers?

It matters because the short-hand language of digital sentiment is being created, right now, right in front of us. And it has everything to do with sharing.

Owning the search data for an entire household is enormously powerful; no argument. But measuring a user’s emotional engagement with a written post, or a video, or a specific product requires that we go beyond surface metrics like searches, clicks, and time on page. Yes, even voice-searches through my Google-robot-butler.

Does my content win hearts and minds? Surfacing sentiment today.

For a lot of us in digital, today that means evaluating our strongest conversion paths, and making post hoc assumptions about whether a series of page-views in a certain order means “happy,” “needs convincing,” “not finding what I want,” etc.

We rightly evaluate this data against our user journey maps, and adjust our models based on how accurately we predicted some final outcome (hopefully a huge conversion). Rinse and repeat.

But all content marketing best practices aside, I’ll wager that if I offered you the ability to have a face-to-face conversation with a prospective customer, while they were exploring your content, immediately after they’d voluntarily taken a healthy dose of truth serum, you might be interested.

Hint: Listening to customers talk to each other about your products in a store is really similar.

If you had the choice, would you simply stop at “yes, or no?” “Buy, or don’t buy?“ “Like or Dislike?”

Today, Facebook is talking about how to let its users express themselves more fully or accurately, without opening the door too much wider to the troll in each of us.

But see this move for what it truly is: step one toward a quantum leap forward in sentiment mining for marketing.

Text analysis is well and good, but if Facebook can iterate its way to a set of communication tools including “like” buttons, “dislike” buttons, and other more subtly positive or negative stickers, it stands to make huge gains in its on-site advertising program, which, by the way, revolves entirely around its data offering to marketers.

The biggest question on my mind at this point is still whether Facebook can act patiently enough to make these new emotional signs a social norm, or if they’ll rush in and create a passing fancy.

If the holy grail of digital marketing is surfacing sentiment, at scale, and turning that into truly actionable insight, the process of collecting it must be at worst benign. It can’t be blunt. And it can’t get in the way. It has to be a truly useful set of tools that fit our lives and bend to our moods, good and bad.

Oh, and by the way, whoever does pull off creating the shorthand language for sharing sentiment between people wins social media for the next ten years.

The post Mixed Emotions – Facebook grapples with the art of surfacing sentiment appeared first on Portent.

MMM. Piiiii.

It’s just a few hours till the annual Pi Day celebration at the Portent Interactive offices. About 3.14 hours if you’re into the whole brevity thing.

Somewhere, my cardiologist is yelling at this monitor. One can only assume there’s no better way to spend an afternoon as a highly paid medical professional than reading a rambling diatribe about digital marketing. Right?

Twenty years of Pi for Portent? Man, time flies.

We could probably even do the gratuitous “Fifty Shades of Pi” reference, but our CEO Ian would start throwing lemon meringue out the windows of the Smith Tower’s 17th Floor. Seriously.

No, instead we’re going to sit back with a warm slice of good old apple, geek out about digital marketing, SEO, hell maybe even a little bit of web analytics.

Things might get crazy.

And in the meantime, we invite you to honor the geeky spirit of the day too.

1. Pay a compliment to your favorite Google Analytics Wizard by trying to stump her. We dare you.
2. Ask your SEO Team what they think about Google’s latest algorithm change (hooray responsive design, and future-proof web development strategy!)
3. (.14) Ask your Social Media Strategist about the one killer metric they think everyone ignores.

However you celebrate the day, we’d love to hear about it.

Hit us up on the Twitters. @portent #Pi.

Let your geek flag fly.

The post Happy Pi Day from your Friends at Portent Interactive appeared first on Portent.

No doubt, many of you have already read the headline from TechCrunch. Or maybe you caught it coming down off the mountain from Google. Google is formalizing its stance on “mobile-friendliness” as a ranking signal worldwide. Not only that, but they’re boosting content from indexed apps in organic search results.

Commence the obligatory avalanche of one-star apps. Sweet!

On the one hand I couldn’t be happier. In my time at Portent, I’ve had the pleasure of working on digital marketing and strategy with some amazing companies that are flat out crushing it with their native apps. And they have been for years.

For this, Google, we tip the cap and say, “Welcome to the party, pal.”

For businesses that have been paying any attention to user experience in the last few years, offering the right extension of their storefront or their brand within mobile has likely come up in every, single, last marketing strategy meeting.

Shel Israel and Robert Scoble wrote a great book last year titled Age of Context, talking about the critical importance of meeting users right where they are. With exactly what they want. Presented in the medium or technology best suited to the task.   Tom Webster took an in-depth look at what that same kind of UX-first mindset could or should look like for mobile commerce.

The big thing I’m pulling from both in this moment is that it’s about utility, and tailored user experience. As digital marketers, it’s about adapting our message, our content, and ultimately our product offering for the user, based on where she is at that second.

It’s about being anticipatory, and helpful to her. What is she trying to do that’s different, when she’s not sitting at a desk? How can we make that task easier, or more productive with the right bits of our content or specific tools?

Apps, dynamically personalized sites, and all the rest, are supposed to be about helping users take a shortcut to the perfect parts of your content, tied up with a bow. And having every subsequent step make perfect, contextual sense.

If making that happen lends itself to repackaging and rearranging your content in an app, outstanding. Code away. If however, you’re twisting a suspiciously evil-looking moustache and thinking that is going to take your competitors a while to catch up and manipulate this … <Deep Sigh>

This is not about crushing the search results page. At least it shouldn’t be. But it probably will. At least for a little while.

I feel like I should end with my best Seth Godin impression: For the guys that have been showing up and putting in the work, day-in and day-out for years, this is great news.   For the guys that see this as a shortcut to profit, through organic visibility they didn’t earn the right way (thanks Ian), this’ll be a short ride.

Postscript: There’s a lot more to say here. What do you think about the potential for Google to actually do some good with this move?

The post Mobile & App Content Will Rank Higher. Shenanigans Likely. appeared first on Portent.