The central challenge of content marketing is getting people to engage with the content you publish or, to put it simply:

The secret to success in content marketing is to create content people care about.

But how does a marketer go about creating content people care about?

By taking the time to care about the people they are marketing to. By knowing who these “people” are, where they can be found, what they need, and when and why they need it. By surfacing the right message at the right time in the right place to the right person–a state I like to call Content Nirvana.

Finding Your Audience: Research

Creating content without knowing your audience is a surefire strategy for campaign failure. This is why audience research should always play a part in the process of developing new content and/or a content marketing strategy. It equips marketers, content creators and decision makers with hard data from real people so they can make informed decisions about what kind of content to produce and where to distribute it.

There are multiple ways to gather data on your audience and, ideally, you would pull data from multiple sources to create a detailed composite of your target group. Analytics, surveys and interviews are three of the most common ways to do audience research.

Analytics

By far the easiest and least expensive way to gain insights into your online audience and their behaviors is to review your site metrics. Even the most basic data logs can yield useful insights into your audience demographics and behavior by displaying clear trends in:

• Geographic location
• Preferred time(s) of day to interact with the site
• Referral channels (how they reached your site)
• Preferred content formats
• And so much more!

Sometimes the results can be a real surprise. For example, a client based out of Asia was working with the Portent team to optimize its online marketing efforts as it moved into new markets. The client was looking to expand into English-speaking countries, choosing to focus heavily on North America.

However, after conducting a review of user data in Google Analytics, it was revealed that a fair number of website visitors were coming from India. This insight enabled the client to not only develop targeted marketing messages for their Indian audience but also led them to reconsider whether they had their sales team located in the right places.

Surveys

While analytics provide a wealth of quantitative data, there is a limit to its insights. Surveys yield personal quantitative data and qualitative insights that often can’t be found through search engine or browser histories. Conducting a visitor survey via email, website or social media channels can be an effective way to define the basic demographics of your core audiences, including personal data points such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Marital status
• Race/ethnicity

Audience research surveys that use open-ended questions can also be particularly helpful in validating (or debunking) popular beliefs about why your customers choose to work with you. Ask your audience questions such as:

• How did you first hear about us?
• Why did you visit our website?
• How satisfied are you with our customer service?
• How easy was it for you to complete your purchase?

Behavioral questions like these allow marketers to put together a clearer picture of why and how customers interact with a particular product, service or business by exploring the personal stories behind the actions. I once worked with a client who had been in business for several decades, amassing a very loyal following in the process. This client was relatively new to digital marketing and asked that I evaluate their website.

The results of their audience survey showed that nearly a quarter of respondents had first gained brand awareness from hearing the client speak on his weekly radio show–that had ceased broadcasting in 1987! This came as a real shock to the client, who had canceled the broadcast due to dwindling ratings but, in light of these findings, was now reconsidering whether to start it up again by broadcast or podcast.

Only by looking beyond basic transactional data and delving deeper into each audience member’s personal history was I able to go back in time and identify this new place to distribute content. When there’s a match like this–between audience, place, and time–that’s content nirvana.

Interviews & Observation

One of the oldest methods of data collection–pure observation–can be an invaluable tool for determining how people interact with a product. Personal interviews, conducted either in person or over the phone, can supply the “why” behind consumer interactions. Combining in-depth interviews with observation, such as with a focus group or user testing session, can allow you to view human interactions with your product/service and speak directly with your audience members to determine the thoughts behind their actions.

Interviews are the place to solicit in-depth, truthful feedback. Seek clarity on the interviewee’s thoughts and feelings about your organization:

• What do you think of our product/service?
• How could we improve your online experience?
• What do you like/not like about our website?

Aim to interview a minimum of 5 people who are representative of your personas in age, race, gender and other demographics. Avoid the common pitfall of interviewing family and friends of your organization. These people are too close to your organization to provide unbiased opinions and are often less representative of your audience groups as a whole. An easy way to find interview subjects is to include a “request to contact” question in your audience survey to identify people willing to speak with you. Offering a small token of appreciation, such as a $5 gift card or company schwag, can be an effective motivator as well.

The goal of audience interviews is to get people to share their innermost thoughts, not tell you what you want to hear. Expect answers to be long and rambling–in fact, encourage this! It often produces the most original insights. Case in point, one client I worked with had a rather dated-looking website and wanted me to conduct interviews with users of their current site before developing a new design. When asked what she thought of the current website, one interviewee exclaimed:

“1997 called. They want their website back!”

This got a lot of laughs from everyone involved–including the client. It was also a useful way to describe in greater detail what people thought of the website beyond that it “looks ugly/old.” It even became the yardstick against which our creative team compared elements throughout the design process: “Does this look too 1997?” they would ask.

Putting It All Together: Audience Personas

So what do you do with all this audience information once it’s been collected? Start building personas! Audience personas act as representative archetypes of your core audience groups; a unified symbol of the diverse set of individuals who comprise your audience. Offering an easily digestible snapshot of audience demographics and behaviors, personas are a powerful tool used by editorial, marketing and design teams to quickly and efficiently convey key information to freelancers, vendors, executives, stakeholders and each other.

Start by looking for trends across the data and group audiences together by shared demographics, actions and/or motivations. This will lay the foundation for evidence-based audience personas. As you comb through the data, you should be answering questions like:

Is my audience clustered in specific regions of the country or globe?
Do older people prefer a different set of products than other age groups?
Are there demographic similarities between the people who come to my site from Facebook vs. search engines?

Building Your Personas

Think of each persona as a mini style guide that outlines questions to answer, key phrases to use and which channels are best for content distribution for that particular audience. A good audience persona should address the four elements needed for content nirvana: person, place, time and message.

Person
Simply giving the persona a first and last name immediately humanizes him or her and enables content creators to better visualize the person they are writing for. Give your persona a job, a family, a hometown. Provide a personal backstory that explains how specific life circumstances have led to your organization.

Place
Always try to include a discussion about which channels are best for reaching that particular audience. Depending on your specific organization and business goals, this could be as narrow as a few pages on a website or as broad as a comprehensive list of all online and offline media outlets.

Time
Knowing what stage of the sales funnel your audience is at when viewing your content is critical to producing the right message. Include a list of interactions this person could have with your organization and a short description of how and why they do so.

Message
Be sure to include key messaging, phrases to use and avoid, and potential calls to action in your personas. This will help align content with marketing goals and strategies by providing a standardized terminology and clear value proposition, as well as cut down on the back and forth of the editing process. Developing editorial guidelines are very helpful for content creators, especially if the language has been previously vetted by stakeholders.

Aim to create 3 – 5 one-page personas to represent your core audiences, with the one that represents the largest group of people designated as a “primary” persona. Having fewer than 3 personas risks discounting secondary and tertiary groups who, when combined, may account for a significant portion of your total audience. Having too many personas risks diluting your message.

Example Persona

Here is an example of an audience persona for a technology company that licenses its customer relations management (CRM) software.

Note how everything fits neatly onto a single page; this is intentional. The goal is to produce a document that people will actually use. I’ve had content creators tell me they’ve printed out their personas and posted them next to their workspace for easy reference while they’re developing content.

Download a copy of this audience persona template.

Find Your Content Nirvana

Many successes in history can be attributed to the simple coincidence of being in the right place at the right time. But times, they are a changing, and as Secrets of the Millionaire Mind author, T. Harv Eker, puts it, “It’s not enough to be in the right place at the right time. You have to be the right person in the right place at the right time.” Or, in the case of content, you have to send the right message to the right person in the right place at the right time. When all of these elements (place, person, time, message) align, you will have achieved a state of content nirvana.

Remember the secrets I shared with you at the beginning of this post:

The secret to success in content marketing is to create content people care about… And the way to create content people care about is to care about the people who are viewing it.

Or, as marketing guru Lewis Howes succinctly states:

“Know your audience.”

The post How to Achieve Content Nirvana appeared first on Portent.

Content-as-marketing isn’t new. The promotional tools, though… Those are new. We’ve never had as cool a toolset as we have now. It’s easy to get drunk on the possibilities. Sober up:

Promote Lightly-Branded Content at Top of Funnel

Lightly and non-branded content is a top-of-funnel vehicle. Don’t promote it to a high-intent, bottom-of-funnel audience. You’ll see limited results.

I, uh, tested this while helping out a friend & colleague with a local political campaign.

In our current political environment, I will not share names, but it wasn’t a national candidate, so cool your jets.

She wrote a great piece about a broader political issue in her campaign. We promoted it to everyone except her fans, and it hit a home run. Likes, shares, comments, clicks. I was like Eli Gold.

Then, for some stupid reason, I promoted it to her existing fans. It was a complete dud. No likes. No shares. No comments.

Campaign 101 is to get your name in front of the voters as much as possible. But people closer to the top of the funnel need to see the lightly branded stuff.

It seems obvious in hindsight: The almost converted want answers to product/service questions. They’ll come back for the lightly-branded information later.

Don’t spend dollars pushing lightly-branded content to the bottom of the funnel.

Promote Heavily Branded Content at Bottom of Funnel

Do amplify heavily-branded content at the bottom of the funnel. You’re already directly promoting your product or service (or candidate). But do you promote heavily-branded content that’s not a product description?

Say you run PPC ads for your $900 gaming mouse. You say it’s a great value. You say it’s lighter. You should also promote the case study about a video games star who won a tournament using your product. And the piece about your product research team.

Heavily-branded content seals the deal with almost-customers. Promote it to them.

Create Layered Retargeting Pools

Content of all types is your best retargeting pool builder.

Use lightly-branded content to build one retargeting pool. Then promote moderately-branded content to that audience.

Use moderately-branded content to build another retargeting pool. Then promote heavily-branded content to that audience.

Use heavily-branded content to build your final retargeting pool. Run conversion-targeted, direct-response ads for that audience.

Great Promotion Won’t Sell Rubbish

It’s a tired-as-hell principle because everyone says it: Great marketing won’t sell a crappy product. I promise that the moment brands follow it, I’ll stop talking about it.

Promote the unique stuff. Teach me something. At some point, we all have to produce content that says “be authentic.” We don’t have to waste money promoting it.

Market the well-executed stuff. I’ve never done this (cough), but if you raced to publish something and know it lacks polish, think twice before you spend money on promotion.

Don’t waste money promoting garbage. Content is a product. Promotion helps if you create great stuff, not if you ooze informational mucus.

OK, All Done

I hope this isn’t a tired rehash of things people have read elsewhere. If it is, I apologize, particularly after that last principle. But I rarely see huge content promotion budgets. Spend carefully, and follow the principles.

The post Principles of Content Promotion appeared first on Portent.

Like it or not, you’re a content marketer: Content is your product. But no one notices it. No one consumes it. So you’re a frustrated content marketer (as am I).

What’s going on? There are plenty of interested people out there. You create good stuff. You have a distribution problem. You lack the network to distribute your product to the people who want it. So promoting it is like this:

Content marketing without a distribution network. Good luck with that.

How do you solve a distribution problem? Find those who own strong distribution networks and need your product to grow them. Find dealers.

Working with dealers, content promotion is more like this:

Content marketing with a dealer: Soo much easier

The best dealers are sites that grow through curation of material related to them:

• Content sharing networks, like SlideShare
• New and growing toolsets, like Piktochart
• Industry-specific, user-generated content sites and publications, like Moz or MarketingLand

Instead of beating your forehead flat against the brick wall that is Twitter (or Facebook, or LinkedIn), find great dealers. Love them. They’ve already chipped away at the wall. They’ll deliver your content to their audience for you, getting you the exposure you need. They are your dealers.

Some of my favorites:

Content sharing networks

I spend most of the rest of this article talking about content sharing networks. There’s a reason: These are the best dealers. These sites have built distribution networks. Their purpose in life is to host and distribute fantastic content. Their networks are well-maintained, and they’re very deliberate about promoting the best stuff.

They need your great content to keep those networks happy and growing. In other words: They need your products. You need their distribution. It’s a match made in heaven.

SlideShare

SlideShare is a huge library of presentations and presentation-style content.

Audience oomph: SlideShare always tweets and posts their favorite presentations. They share with their 232,000 Twitter followers and over 400,000 Facebook friends. And their own site is a social network in itself. Hundreds of thousands of SlideShare users search for great content every day.

Why I like it:

• Home page placement isn’t purely vote driven. While lots of views certainly help, SlideShare editors feature their favorite content, so the site avoids the popularity contest you sometimes see on other sites.
• They support embedded content. You can embed any presentations you upload on your own site. I’ve had featured presentations get 100,000+ views. 20% of those views came via the embedded slideshows on the Portent site. Onsite visitors promoted using a huge content distribution network? Sign me up.
• You can generate leads using their built-in lead forms: Place a mandatory or optional lead generation form at the start of your presentation, in the middle or at the end.

SlideShare needs great content, day-in and day-out. They need a great product. Without it, they’re an empty storefront. If you create presentation-style content, SlideShare is your perfect dealer.

Tip. Convert your presentations to Acrobat PDF before you upload. Otherwise, any non-standard fonts you use may turn to gobbledygook.

LinkedIn Pulse

I have to be honest: I’m ambivalent about LinkedIn Pulse. There’s a lot of verbal vomit on there. On the other hand: LinkedIn. Larry Kim uses Pulse as well as anyone out there. Have a look at his work.

Audience oomph: It’s LinkedIn. If you can get into the LinkedIn Pulse—that’s the LinkedIn feed for Pulse (confusing, I know)—you end up in front of about 200 million users give or take.

Why I like it:

• Publishing is very straightforward. There’s no expectation around content length. Alas, there doesn’t appear to be any standards, either.
• You can leverage your LinkedIn networks to get views.

Like I said: Ambivalent.

Tip: Keep at it. LinkedIn favors persistence. The more good stuff you publish, the more people like/view your content. That seems to increase attention, getting you more likes/views, and so on. LinkedIn is more of a popularity contest, but it’s one where you have a chance.

By the way: It’s not obvious where you go to write for Pulse:

On LinkedIn, this means 'Write for Pulse'

Medium

It’s hard to classify Medium by type of content, but they’re definitely a great network. Authors publish long-form-ish content across a dizzying array of topics, from marketing to LGBTQ issues to football.

Audience oomph: Medium has a mind-boggling 1.6 million Twitter followers and 145 thousand Facebook friends. Your chances of a social share are small, but still better than getting a direct ‘home run’ on a major social network, and the upside is huge. Like SlideShare, they have a big internal network. I published a story, told colleagues and friends about it and got 900+ reads (not views – full reads) in two months, generating 8,800 visits to eigene-homepage-erstellen.net. That’s higher than my average on the Portent blog.

Why I like it:

• Medium is first and foremost a writing tool, not a marketing tool. They make it easy to create some really nice-looking pieces. Anything you publish and share will be easy for your audience to consume.
• The site allows highlighting and paragraph-by-paragraph commenting. That ups user involvement.
• Readers can recommend content, thereby boosting it within the Medium network.
• You can designate other Medium collaborators. Not really a marketing thing, but I like the ability to give credit to those who help you write.

Tip. Get your pieces edited before you publish. Polish is always important, but it will take you far on Medium.

Bonus tip. Tag carefully. This site’s all about categorization. Aiming for the ‘biggest’ category isn’t always the best idea.

More options

Content sharing networks aren’t your only option. Yes, they’re great. But some of the other dealers offer huge opportunities. Don’t ignore them:

Emerging tools

Always look for companies that are trying to gain a foothold for their tools. These companies often build content sharing networks to distribute the great stuff their users create. They have a very strong incentive to distribute your work—it may be the best way to grow their user base. Plus, you get to play with all manner of cool new toys.

Haiku Deck is an online toolset for creating gorgeous slide decks. Far easier than Powerpoint and usually with better results. They aren’t that new in Internet terms, but they’re definitely growing. They have an onsite gallery and feature the best slide decks. They also respond in social media and clearly understand the product-dealer virtuous cycle-upward-funnel-good-news-thingie.

Piktochart is a slick design tool great for creating infographics and presentations. They publish their favorites at magic.piktochart.com. They also write blog posts and tweet about stuff they like.

Tip: Support the dealer. When you post about a new piece you published on a content sharing network, don’t just link to it. Mention the content sharing site where it’s located. They’ll appreciate it, and you’re repaying their help distributing your content.

Industry-specific sites

Look at industry specific sites and publications, too. In marketing, for example, write something great for MarketingLand, Moz or another site, they’ll distribute it to gigantic audiences.

If you shrug and say “Yeah, that’s only for marketing,” you’re missing out. Whatever your industry, there will be sites looking for great content.

Tip: Find sites using Google. Search for [TOPIC] “submit a story” and [TOPIC] [TOPIC] “contribute”.

Bonus tip: Don’t spam. If you build a list of sites and start submitting everything you write to every site on that list, you’ll get yourself in trouble. See Not Crap, below.

Not crap

Be aware that your results depend on quality. Dealers need good products. If you provide them with lousy content, one of three things will happen:

1. They’ll stop accepting your work
2. They’ll continue accepting it, but stop promoting it
3. They’ll promote it, thereby publicizing your ability to produce crap

There’s another, even bigger downside to spamming dealers: You’ll create copyright and ownership issues. Some of these sites want exclusivity. They’ll be pretty unhappy if they see your article pop up on multiple sites.

Continuously build your dealer network

By the way: At some point, you’ll be tempted to dump the dealers and distribute 100% of your content ‘direct.’ I don’t recommend it.

Definitely transition more content to direct. The benefits are clear: Better brand recognition, links, direct social shares, etc.

But you’ll still need those content sharing sites to amplify and re-amplify your content. The more successful you get, the more sharing sites pay attention to your content. They’ll offer better distribution deals because they want your stuff. You can still help each other.

Your content is a product. Work to make it great. Then build and maintain a healthy dealer network. It pays off.

A quick note: You may notice I use the phrase ‘content marketing’ in this post. I surrender. The term makes me cringe, but after five years of fighting it, I beg for mercy. I’m jumping on the bandwagon with as little sarcasm as possible. Please support my cowardice by not saying anything.

The post Need to Crush Content Promotion? Love Your Dealers appeared first on Portent.

This article is about how we help people navigate our marketing and websites. We start with breadcrumbs. Metaphorical ones. The first little morsels of interest are “breadcrumbs” because, as content, their reach is limited.

These are small, temporal bits of information you distribute for customers to find you online. Your ads, social media, blog posts, brochures, a team member making an elevator pitch or encouraging people to visit a booth at an event – breadcrumbs. They’re all moments in time meant to draw attention.

Moments are not enough.

Think of Hansel and Gretel. They wandered through the forest, having lost their path of breadcrumbs home, until they found a delicious gingerbread house. Unfortunately, there was a witch inside who wanted to cook them in her oven. Breadcrumbs did not serve them well on their journey.

Breadcrumbs disappear. They are not enough to get your customers from where they are to where you want them to go. But who doesn’t love a giant house made of candy and cake? It’s alluring, attractive. However, if you really want to lead people to your company’s equivalent of a  gingerbread house, you need to light the path back, forward, and from any side.

To compete online, you need to provide breadcrumbs AND signposts — those permanent content anchors that help people towards their goals. Then, make helping customers* achieve their goals the focus of your content marketing.

Everything you do, from content to design, UX to marketing, sales to actual product or service delivery should have one primary goal: Build trust with your audiences. Trust must be earned.

In short, if your marketing points people towards a gingerbread house, there actually needs to be an enormous quantity of gingerbread at the end of your path. But if your house is made of black licorice, don’t hide that information from people on the path. Avoid risking the disappointment of licorice haters, knowing that the devotees will be so thrilled to have finally found you!

Use smart content marketing strategy to demonstrate your credibility. Breadcrumbs and signposts are small examples of how content and architecture will help you guide people through a path towards a goal without hovering or interrupting the journey.

*Note: I say “customers” but I mean anyone you want to reach. Be you nonprofit, government, or education, small business or gigantic enterprise – think of customers as people who convert. That can mean making a sale, receiving a donation, or even learning a piece of information you want to share.

Moving on from the Witch: Where’d the trust go?

When it comes to brands and marketing, Hansel and Gretel is a cautionary tale for our time. Most consumers don’t feel empowered. They feel consumed. So many brand promises turn out to be for the company’s benefit with no real value for the consumer. “Give us your eyeballs, email address, time, money,” marketers cry, “and tell everyone how great we are!” Even the good guys do this. What are we giving people in return for their engagement?

Think about your own time online. How often do you check a social media channel to see what your favorite brand is doing? Or are you there to check on friends and family? Get resources and advice from colleagues and professional heroes?

Maybe you’ll accept a commercial as long as you’re entertained.

Entertained.
Not interrupted.
Not irritated.

If you want your marketing to work, you’ll need to entertain without making people feel like you’re blocking their progress. With all these branded breadcrumbs being thrown around, it’s hard to get anyone’s attention. You do need to create value through content and promote it on every channel your customer regularly visits. But in a world of irritated people, what are ads good for now?

They’re still relevant. They remind people you’re out there. You have a lovely gingerbread house down the path and it’s full of tasty, delightful things they want, maybe even need. Plus, it’s real. Use ads–and other breadcrumbs–as attractive signals in your master marketing plan: Point these signals to even more useful, engaging chains of content.

Show people that your marketing is here to provide for them, not consume them.

How It’s Done: 3 steps to creating the path

Start by knowing the architecture of your content, from the central point to the temporary promotions. To succeed, you need to be sure that the labels, paths, and links are all clear. The content on the pages should be helpful and directional, not just aesthetically pleasing.

Know what content you want to share? Awesome, let’s map a path to it. (Bonus: Eventually, you can create as many paths as you like, as long as you understand your own content map.)

Consider your customers’ needs, language, and channels, then…

• Choose your central point (house)
• Create relevant anchors (signposts)
• Plan your promotion (breadcrumbs) for the channels customers actually use

Your Central Point (Gingerbread House)
This web page or point of sale will fully describe the product/service available and provide a way to take action. It’s useful and functional. Best case scenario: it answers customer questions, helps them make a decision, and makes it easy for them to take the next step.

For most of us, this is the ultimate conversion point to which we are guiding people.

Content Anchors (Signposts)
Evergreen content on your website moves people forward to the central point. It answers questions, aids decision-making, and points towards desired action.

It can also point them to pieces of information they may need in order to make a decision. It must have a clear call to action, but its message is helpful, not sales-focused. We’re not at the “close the deal” stage. You can use blog posts, webinars, slides, one-sheets, or useful guides and tools as anchors – as long as they subtly lead to the central point.

Evergreen also means you will maintain these assets. They will remain accurate, up-to-date, and functional at all times.

Promotional Content (Breadcrumbs)
Now we can have fun! These are temporary points of contact that lead people towards the lights or the house. Make informative entertainment over interruptions – from banner ads to meta descriptions, social media posts to landing pages. It’s okay to be playful. This means help someone enjoy the work it takes to learn something new. Be that fun teacher, the one you still admire.

Action Plan: An example content path

This is sample campaign model in which I am selling gingerbread-house themed cupcakes. They feature an adorable little candy house on top of a delicious cake.

House: Order form. My website has a kickass order page and cart. The shopping system is intuitive. It is quick, easy, and provides the right information for someone to understand how to order and how/when it will be delivered. You can easily access ingredients and preparation information from the form.

Signposts: Web pages. I have a page dedicated to the gingerbread cupcake – the images are mouth-watering, the messaging is clear, the tone is fun-loving. If you want to order these for your holiday party, school function, or a dozen for your own darn self – our page outlines the options clearly and makes it easy to get to the next step. We also have multiple evergreen pages showcasing these and other cupcakes.

From our story in About Us to content about ingredients to our party planning guide, we appropriately point to the order form on each page. We make it very easy for people with allergies or food-sourcing and preparation concerns to see how we work. And if you don’t like gingerbread, it’s always easy to navigate to our other selections.

Breadcrumbs: Winter is the season for gingerbread houses. Our planning and content creation started in August for a November launch. After Halloween, we began teasing the cupcakes through appropriate ads, social media posts, contests, and free samples at our locations.

We gathered testimonials from last year’s customers and showed this year’s creations being made in our test kitchen (bring on the Vines!). We even taught people how to make their own versions on our blog and YouTube channel. We offered an email sign-up list for notifications. At launch, we held and documented a party where our first customers decorated their own cupcake tops.

And we subtly pointed to our signposts in these posts. After launch, we were able to send some ads and posts directly to the order form.

The central theme here is: If you are looking for gingerbread cupcakes, you can find us. If you’re excited about gingerbread cupcakes, we will help you make them or make them for you. We’ll be transparent, helpful, and quick from time spent viewing content to final product delivery.

Content Marketing: Findable, useful, and generous

Content Marketing just means drawing people to you with your content. To do that, you need to structure images, language, and code so that your work is findable. You will prove that you are useful by creating content based on what your audience wants and needs to get done. In drawing them to you, you make a promise with all of your content points that you want them to succeed.

Online, you can’t hold someone’s hand throughout their journey. Getting their attention and leading them to your conversion point is difficult. Mistrust. Competition. Information Overload. Other people are getting in the way of your ideal customer. Be better than that.

Provide clear paths to content by planning first, creating second, and drawing it together with a cohesive map. In all of your content, seek to be clear and helpful. When someone sees your ad, clicks your link, gets to your destination – make sure they will find exactly what they thought they would. Every time.

Be the gingerbread house, not the oven.

Map your path: From central point to promotional venues

Find your signposts and plan your next breadcrumbs with a content inventory and strategy: https://www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net/data/content-inventory/

Need help? Contact us for a UX Content Audit or Story Package that helps you build evergreen and promotional content.

More Content Marketing Resources

Map your Content with the Content Analysis Tools for Inventories and Audits: https://www.content-insight.com/

Content Marketing and Strategy: GatherContent
Content Strategy: The Content Strategy Toolkit by Meghan Casey

The post Realistic Conversion: Guiding Paths in Content Marketing appeared first on Portent.

Let me start with a disclaimer. If you haven’t started blogging, get a plan together and start. Don’t write just for the sake of writing, but create a strategy around what you’ll write about and then actually do it. Publishing content on a regular basis benefits search engine visibility and audience building.

If you are already consistently publishing content but haven’t made any changes to your blog’s structure in the last few years, I’ve got a painful truth to share:

Your blog is boring.

It’s not the content I’m talking about – it’s the layout. It’s the way that I can’t find what I want before you push the latest five posts on me. It’s that it isn’t fun anymore.

The formula for setting up a blog is simple. How many times have you seen this layout?

The problem here is that the format doesn’t encourage interaction. The setup is almost exclusively one way – you telling the customer – and it doesn’t help users find the answers to their questions.

Now this isn’t to say that anything is fundamentally wrong with blogging this way. Heck, as of this moment this is the baseline format that we use at Portent. Creating fresh and relevant content helps customers find you.

But lots of times, those same visitors come to your site looking for answers to questions. And that’s where your business has the opportunity to shine.

Once you’ve published a certain volume of content and established a diverse set of audiences, it’s an ideal time to change the organization of your blog to focus on the answers your visitors seek. If you’ve established a blog structure that looks like the one above, let’s take it to the next level.

Why is a hub better than a blog?

Content hubs focus on the customers’ needs and interests. That’s what it’s all about: making the content and answers your customers need easy to find, visually appealing, and entertaining.

Here’s a potential content hub. I say potential because hubs should be very customer centric and change depending on your audience.

Simply put, this is more fun. It’s interactive and gives you the flexibility to present lots of different types of content to your users. It’s modular, letting you plug various components into the layout for a cleaner aesthetic and better usability, giving the users more relevant choices instead of asking them to scroll.

With the intense amount of content being produced every day, anything that isn’t relevant is just noise to be quickly ignored or forgotten. We all see this. The millions of blog posts and videos uploaded daily are overwhelming.

Don’t contribute to information overload. Instead, help your users navigate your content. Whatever you put in front of your visitors needs to have immediate, obvious value or else it gets ignored.

There’s a reason Google doesn’t simply include the very latest news articles or blog posts on their home page. Users coming to their site have a question. Google doesn’t presume to know that answer before you ask it. (At least not until you type the first word, and it starts contextually guessing questions for you).

Some content hub examples

To give you a better model, these companies are doing it right. In fact, this article took me longer to write because I kept getting distracted diving deeper into these hubs.

Home Depot

Any DIY fan can use this resource. Whatever your project is, you can quick search for topics and tips from the pros to make your renovation shine. What I love about this content hub is the giant search box guaranteeing you will get an answer. It doesn’t assume the visitor’s interests.

And from a research standpoint, think about all the data you can capture in this search box. You will get useful insights into what people look for when they come to your site that you can turn into an endless stream of content topics and ideas.

Porch

The Porch layout is really, really ridiculously good looking. Like Derek Zoolander good looking.

It also has just about everything that someone would want in a content hub, and then some. My favorite part about this content hub is how modular it is. There are blocks of content that each serve a different purpose and can be swapped in and out based on context, user queries, CRM data, etc. Testing content blocks to the extreme is possible with this layout.

REI

With images that actually make you stop and appreciate the scrolling header, the REI content hub does not disappoint. It includes a few suggested blog topics on the left-hand side, but what I enjoy most is the clean design. It keeps the user focused on the emotional, visual story in the pictures, but also on the search bar at the top where you can get your questions answered.

GE Reports

I never thought I could be so interested in a B2B content page, but I find myself clicking-through page after page on the General Electric hub. One item that I find unique, but fun, is their use of GIFs as featured images. The page feels alive with the moving pictures and makes me stop to read more.

How to start building a content hub

Reworking your blog into a content hub takes some initial research and planning.

• Step 1: Take an inventory of your current blog posts.
• Step 2: Find our what your audience is searching for through search logs.
• Step 3: Determine what content pieces your audience is reading from analytics.
• Step 4: Talk to your customers to gain more insight into their questions.
• Step 5: Identify strengths and gaps within your current knowledge base.
• Step 6: Create a content strategy.

When done right, a content strategy surfaces content that is the most relevant, most useful, and most engaging to your customers. That’s what I love about it: getting the right content in front of the right audience in an engaging and fun way.

A content hub isn’t replacing your blog with a glorified search bar. It is about creating the best possible user-experience, specific to your audience. Remember, always begin with a content strategy, and the humility to ask your users what content is most valuable at that moment. Eventually, you’ll place the most relevant content at the front, and build a repository that will grow and support your users.

If you’d like to learn how Portent is playing with the concept of creating better user experiences, check out this post about our new contextual site search.

The post Your blog is boring. Upgrade to a hub appeared first on Portent.

Back in September, Starbucks rolled out its first global brand campaign via YouTube called “Meet Me at Starbucks”. An ongoing brand narrative stitching together real life stories of people meeting together at Starbucks in 28 countries shot in just 24 hours. It created a powerful story of convergence where shared commonality, memories, new ideas, business meetings, and romantic moments are interwoven to tell the human story within one common meeting place. They aligned this with their campaign slogan, “Inspiring and nurturing the human spirit – one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.” This isn’t the first campaign of its kind for Starbucks, but it is the first time they have done it to this scale.

One of the toughest things for companies to learn with regards to delivering digital narrative is that when you first launch it, it is simply the beginning of the journey. As with driving SEO, a consistent stream of relevant and engaging  content is essential towards building credibility with your audience. One of the great hallmarks of Starbucks success is in how they build their brand around both themselves and their audience’s stories. Taking cues from their success, here are 3 elements to an online presence that incorporates storytelling:

1. Tell true stories

Try telling your brand story through your audience’s real life conversations. Whether it’s featuring video testimonials on your site or blogging about an event you hosted for loyal clients, your audience will find empathy and trust in the faces of your customers. Retelling these narratives can provide a human element that engages your online audiences.

2. Your brand is only as strong as the stories people tell about you

Two common responses you’ll hear about online retailer experiences are, “I bought it online” and “I bought it on Amazon”. To use the company name as opposed to the vehicle of purchase implies a good example of brand loyalty. One of your goals should be providing an online experience that is both effective and memorable.

3. Every storyteller has a brand and every brand has a story

A storyteller can’t be separated from her story. If you Google yourself, you’ll see that you already have a virtual branded identity, whether or not you created it consciously. Companies need to ask if there’s anything memorable about the stories people are telling about them. People remember stories more than they remember names. Take a careful look at the stories being told about you online. Do they reflect the story you wanted or expected?

In order to help propel the brand story you envision, here are 3 questions that can help you focus your brand narrative:

Am I Relevant?

Do you have a target audience in mind? As in the Starbucks brand campaigns, are you making your audience the hero of the story? How are you serving, supporting, and empowering your audience to overcome their obstacles?

It’s important to shape your audience’s holistic user experience in a way that effectively connects their personal needs to the value of your brand and services.

What is my Origin?

Every memorable brand has a great origin story. The quality of that narrative can be established in any number of creative ways. The unique basis of your manufacturing process. How and why you got your company name. Where and why you use the ingredients that you do. One of the best ways to legitimize your brand is by anchoring it in the past.

One step would be to have a robust, creative, or innovative “about us” section, for example a car part distribution owner blogging about their first exotic vehicle purchase coupled by a single point of measurable engagement that links the origin to their audience such as, “When I was kid, my dream vehicle was…?”

Is it Authentic?

There is an age old marketing adage that “content is king” but that is only part of the truth. If content is King than trust is the empress. If you can’t answer the question why your audience should trust you, than you should reconsider your approach. How are you making yourself real, accessible, approachable, and so on?

Remember this…

A memorable story helps you get beyond the numbers to breathe life and meaning into the value of your audience. To do that, you need to create an effective online experience that incorporates elements of humanity and empathy. Now is the time to get personal! People forget facts, but they never forget a great story.

The post Starbucks stirs the heart: Strength in the Brand Story appeared first on Portent.

Marketers need to fill the gap between the past and the future, and find those moments that capture the greatest number of conversions, conversations, and connections. This happens over, and over, and over again. Data, innovations, information – they’re only part of the story. Marketers must spin data into gold, and, as a recent PandoDaily story pointed out, not all marketers are capable of doing so.

PandoDaily calls attention to a recent Contently’s The State of Content Marketing Measurement report. Contently surveyed 302 marketers and found some depressing statistics: 91 percent of marketers surveyed were uncertain whether the content performance analytics they used were helpful.

That stings. For more than a decade, marketers have prided themselves on their data acumen. They’ve touted data as a way to prove ROI. This report shows that over 90 percent of marketers are unsure of data measuring one of the biggest marketing tools: Content. Unfortunately, we’re not surprised.

“Paralysis by analysis” is a fatal marketer disease. It’s a challenge we’ve all faced for years. It’s why so many companies build customer dashboards and analysis toolsets. All these new tools have yet to marry to strong interpretive techniques that clear away the data ‘cobwebs’ and get to what matters: the next action.

The post Marketers Dying By A Thousand Data Points appeared first on Portent.

It ended up being a top-to-bottom guide on how we do content strategies at Portent. We put it into a custom format so it’s easier to read:

Read it: [How to: Create a Content Strategy in Only 652 Steps ]

I look forward to your adulation/catcalls…

The post The Humungous Guide to Content Strategy appeared first on Portent.

When he’s not streaking through the Danger Zone on an Impossible Mission, the world’s biggest movie star (yes, still arguably) veers Far and Away from his core competency, occasionally taking a mega-risk with his Eyes Wide Shut.

Corniness of that opening sentence aside, Tom Cruise makes for a compelling model of how to run a brand: while his trademark relates to an über-successful motion picture career – and yours (likely) doesn’t – there are many things a business can learn about reputation management and content strategy from him.

And just what is the “content strategy” of Tom Cruise’s career?  It’s fairly simple.  Mr. Cruise delivers to his core audience while attracting new fans with moderately risky creative choices, still keeping himself fresh for critics and colleagues with strategic, iconoclastic roles that challenge the core Cruise brand.

70-20-10

My boss Ian Lurie subscribes to a 70-20-10 approach to on-site content (a slight refining of Jonathan Mildenhall of Coca-Cola’s famous value and significance strategy).  I also subscribe to this philosophy for the following reasons:

1.)    It is a deliberate and thoughtful method of planning useful, entertaining and responsive branded material.

2.)    He’s my boss.

Just what is the 70-20-10?  Per Ian:

• 70% of our content should be solid, standard stuff: Basic how-tos and advice that’s very safe and is easily justified as supporting SEO and other efforts.
• 20% of our content should riff on the 70%, but take some chances. This is the content that expands on 70% content, but may flirt with controversy, or try appealing to a new audience, or otherwise be moderately risky. It may also take a bit more effort. It also offers a higher potential payoff.
• 10% of our content should be completely innovative: Things we’ve never done that, if they work, could become part of the 20 or 70%. 10% content often requires a lot of work or audience interaction. Or, it’s just risky. Most of the 10% will fail. You still have to do it. It’s really important, because without it, the entire strategy stagnates.

Graphically represented:

Tom Cruise’s 70-20-10

• 70% of his roles represent The Movie Star.  The Tom Cruise™ brand:  That cocky, loveable scoundrel who is exciting and risky, but inevitably on the side of right.  These Cruise personas – Maverick in “Top Gun,” Ethan Hunt in “Mission: Impossible” – often have tragic backstories that enable us to look past their initial conceit, waiting for a denouement which always proves the Cruise character to be heroic, self-sacrificing and truly good.
• 20% of his roles represent The Actor.  Tom is still Tom – generally looks like him, sounds like him, acts like him – but he’s taking a chance.  Maybe it’s a period film like “The Last Samurai,” or working in an unfamiliar genre like “Minority Report” or spending half the movie in a mask (“Vanilla Sky”).  Tom does these films both to challenge himself AND to increase his “brand reach” to various demographics who may find his 70% films cloying or predictable.
• 10% of his roles represent The Iconoclast.  Tom isn’t Tom.  In fact, Tom is trying to tear down Tom Cruise™.  Here’s where the “art” happens.  He takes big risks like ranting about his manhood in “Born on the Fourth of July,” or playing a misogynistic, manipulative motivational speaker in “Magnolia.”  Both of those films landed him Oscar nominations.  There is a HUGE upside to 10% content, but the downside is just as large.  This also is where you can fall on your face (see “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Rock of Ages”… on second thought, don’t).

Awesome infographic by Jess Walker.

I should care because…?

Like Tom Cruise, you must manage your brand identity through choices in content. The days of the “EAT HERE” ad campaign are no more.  There are too many alternatives.

Like it or not, everyone is now in the content business.  Involve and evolve… or dissolve.

But 10% content scares me…

Risk mitigation doesn’t mean you don’t TAKE risks… It means you manage them, deciding where to pull your punch, and where to hit ‘em with a massive uppercut.

I’m sure 10% content scares Tom Cruise, too… And do you what?  Those movies generally DON’T do as well… at least at the box office.  But what they do REALLY well is improve his brand – its reach, its durability and its reputation.

The role of Les Grossman in “Tropic Thunder” SAVED Tom Cruise after the notorious couch-jumping incident.  The performance made him accessible; it showed people he could laugh at himself.  Now they’re talking about developing a Les Grossman movie… and having tried and succeeded with that role, Les Grossman no longer represents 10% content for Mr. Cruise.

The most successful 10% content can (and should) be replicated, joining the 20, and sometimes even the 70 (for a good example of that, consider Tom Hanks… from comic goofball to two-time Oscar winner).

The takeaway

Unless you are happy with your business’ status quo (and OK with the risk that status may decline), you need to put out content that occasionally scares you.  Not foolishly, but strategically, deliberately, measurably.  The audience gets bored of the same old, same old.  Growth can be painful, but it’s worthwhile.

Let Tom Cruise be an example for your content strategy, or understand that you’ll never attain A-list status.  Instead, you and your business will be relegated to the direct-to-video shelf.

But, then again, maybe you like Jean Claude Van Damme.

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