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Getting Started With Whitepapers

December 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment

A quick glance through the most popular search terms that brought you and other readers to my site in the last day, last 30 days and even of all time, has made it clear that ‘papers’, ‘whitepapers’ and ‘white papers’ are clearly on your mind. A post I wrote “13 ways to Promote One Whitepaper” is a must-read and has been read at this point thousands of times. I hope it is helpful and you are taking away some value to apply at your own company. But perhaps I put the cart before the horse with this one because to promote a whitepaper would assume you have already created one. So let’s talk about the first part; how to get started with whitepapers.

Start with an idea

Everything starts with an idea even your whitepaper. I look at this a couple ways. First I look at what trends are appearing in the market. In a previous company, we were targeting e-commerce professionals who were challenged with building a shopping cart on their Facebook page. I conducted some research and found articles and blogs that talked slightly about the topic but nothing that was truly addressing it. This would be a great idea for content but I felt that we could do more here and create a guide or whitepaper that really consolidated all the information and provided e-commerce professionals with something they could use.

Can you solve or help with the problem?

Now just because I had identified a problem that was not being addressed and a clear audience to consume this whitepaper, didnt mean I necessarily had the ‘right’ to write about it. Who was the authority on the topic? Me? Certainly not. Could I find enough of and the right resources and information to pull it all together into a succinct paper? Yes, I could.

Draft the outline

Everyone’s outline will be different based upon your topic and audience and the overall goal or takeaway you want your audience to have. But you must start with a summary of why the paper exists and why the person should read it. Next, outline the layout of your paper. In this example, my outline looked like this:

  • Why Facebook cannot be ignored by e-commerce professionals – data
  • What are the solutions that currently exist? How can a retailer get started today?
  • What do consumers want? Is any method working to convert Facebook users into paying consumers?
  • What does the future look like? What should be available that currently is not?
  • Case study of how our product solved this problem

Start writing or hire a copywriter

For this particular guide, I combined a copywriter’s skills with internal resources. I knew I did not have the time to do all the research involved to write the paper but I also knew that we had to add our side to validate certain points (especially our predictions for the future). It’s up to you how you want to approach it but you can hire some great writers for very cheap money.

Edit and lay it out

Once we had the paper back from the copywriter, we edited it so it sounded like it came from our company. We then added more verbiage based on our experiences and point of view. As a final step, we worked with internal designers to lay out the paper in a fun, easy to digest manner. Keeping in mind our target audience of e-commerce professionals, we knew the design was an important consideration and we could have a bit of fun with it (may be different if you are targeting bankers for example).

Now go promote your whitepaper! See link in first paragraph for some ideas :)

 

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Mapping the Customer Journey and What This Has To Do With the Media You Buy

December 3, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I read on AdAge about new research that suggests marketers are not spending their budgets wisely. Are we really getting worse or are we not attributing media spend properly? Do we focus on filling the funnel rather than moving people through it?

The big ‘elephant in the room’ on this debate was that marketers are not spending enough on social media. In addition, the popularity of online display ads has inundated the market so much that their value is flat and/or declining. Yet we still do more of the latter and not enough of the former.

I want you to consider for a moment the phrase ‘there is a time and a place for everything’ as we think about traditional vs. digital media and how we connect and engage with our prospects throughout their journey to become a customer.

Chris Gorell Barnes states ‘Marketers must stop considering each element of their advertising campaign, and budgets, in silos and start to consider the entire customer journey and the best medium to engage with them, whether that’s social media or video.’

Regardless of B2B or B2C, social media has a place in the funnel. You need to determine where your customer is in the process when they engage with your brand via these channels. That should map your strategy and allocation of budget to proceed. Whether they are in the discovery phase or the decision phase, you need to run some analysis and determine where buyers are when they are spending time with your brand on social media.

Same goes for display or traditional media. I have typically seen these effective in 2 ways. The first is to position your brand in front of people who are at various stages – hey, remember us, click here. And the second is to re-target prospects who took an action at one time however you haven’t seen them in awhile.

Sit with your sales team and map out the customer journey. Similar to how we think about the types of content we use at various stages (whitepapers early on, datasheets and product demos later), consider the media you would use to reach people in various stages. The way you reach a cold prospect and the type of conversation you have may be entirely different than how you place your brand in front of someone who is heavily considering you.

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What’s Next for The Content Cocktail

July 30, 2012 by 11 Comments

About a month or so ago, I signed up for Stan Smith, author of Pushing Social’s Blog Review. It was probably the best $47 I have spent in awhile. (if you haven’t done it and you have a blog, I highly suggest you contact Stan today) Now while Stan didn’t praise my blog 100%, he gave me some great foresight into how I could make it better and I’m going to dedicate myself to doing just that.

I started this blog about a year ago after I got laid off. I knew that I loved content and inbound marketing and knew I had the knowledge and how-to’s that other marketers craved. I didn’t start The Content Cocktail to sell anything. I started it because I wanted to share what I know with the intent that you would either run with it or it would spark some unique ideas of your own.

We have come a long way baby!

As you all know, the field of content marketing is competitive. There are already numerous, highly acclaimed ‘voices’ in the industry who know it a lot more than I do, so what can I bring to the table? Today I am going to share with you some of my ideas and formulate some structure to this blog so that I am constantly providing value to you, my readers, because that is what I want to do.

Posts Based on Search Terms

I’m kicking this off with a post about how to do this for yourself. Without getting into it too heavily here, your search terms are a really cool and easy way to not only get ideas for content but to satisfy what people are searching for. So each week, I will have a post based on a search term that drove someone to my site.

Thirsty Thursday Video

You asked for it so you’re getting it; more video!! I want to do more video, I just need more structure around what the videos are and create a theme. Thirsty Thursday seems appropriate considering. :)

Unconventional Ways to Think About Creating Original Content

An idea I got from Stanford was how to think about my approach to content marketing. I clearly have a passion for it but I don’t want to replicate what is already being done – and being done very well I may add. Then I read this study today that shows the #1 problem marketers face is their inability to create original content. So each week I will dedicate a post to help you create original content and how to go about doing so.

How does this sound? Appreciate your feedback because you are the one I want to reach with this blog. Thanks for being here!

 

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Don’t Forget the ‘Marketing’ in Content Marketing

July 18, 2012 by 3 Comments

This is an excellent content post over at the Copyblogger site called ‘Content Marketing Checklist‘. One of the items that resonated with me was this idea of ‘don’t forget the “marketing” in content marketing’. So let’s discuss just that. When we are creating content and conceptualizing ideas for content, that is different from the marketing piece of it. It certainly will play into our overall strategy but let’s not think about the creation piece today. Let’s focus on what we are going to do with our content.

1. Define the goal

What is your goal for this particular piece of content? Is it lead generation? Awareness? Market leadership? Placement in a publication? Define your goal(s) for each piece of content before you do anything else. This will help set the stage for defining your audience and also deciding how much – if anything – you are going to spend on media placement and promotion.

2. Make sure there is an offer or connection to your product in every piece of content

With the exception of placement in a publication, I truly believe that every piece of content you publish should have some tie-back to your company and the solutions you provide to the market. This doesn’t have to be obvious and it doesn’t have to be smothered all over the thing, but it should be there somewhere. Couple things I have done is to place related case studies in the back of the content (whitepapers), offer links to related assets (blog posts) or insert related quotes and benchmarks (presentations). All of these examples enable me to provide a great piece of content but also leave the person with knowledge about my company.

3. Be consistent with your offers and messages across channels

Now I am not saying that you should be consistent with all your content here. What I am saying is that when you consider 1 piece of content, you should decide what your goal is related to that specific piece. Then, stay consistent across all channels. If you are promoting on pay-per-click or email campaigns or related websites, the offer and messaging should be consistent. It should look and feel and sound like the same offer from the same company.

4. Match the content to the audience

Now don’t go out and promote a whitepaper about IT service desks on a website like the Economist because I’m not sure you would resonate or get your return. Who is the audience of a whitepaper about IT service desks and who is the audience at the Economist? Match? If no, then do no pass go. Consider who is the audience for your content then define how you reach them – where do they hang out? where would they go to find this information? How do I put this paper in front of that audience?

5. Cross collaborate within your organization

What is your sales team up to? Could they use this content you have created? How dos it fit into the sales cycle? How does it fit into the upsell process? How does it fit into the customer experience your company delivers? Think of how you can market your content bot within your organization and also through other departments disbursement.

6. Take advantage of existing real estate

There are a few things I do each and every time a new piece of content is published; I update key strategic traffic areas with the new offer. A few ideas are product log-in screens, email signatures and CTA buttons on your website. All of these ideas don’t require much more than some simple artwork (you can use the cover image of your content too) and some help from the webmaster and product team. A quick easy way to use what you already have to market your content.

7. Setup a reporting system to track the success of each piece of content

No matter which path you choose to market your content, don’t ever forget the reporting aspect of it. I was just talking about adding the content to email signatures so if you do this, make sure you have a unique URL or are able to track traffic from email servers (you can usually see Outlook, Gmail etc. and get an idea that way). Go back to your goals and measure against them. Do you get the reach you wanted? How about leads generated? Did you hit the mark or miss it?

Does that help? Are you remembering the ‘marketing’ piece of content marketing? Don’t create and publish it and then just forget it. You should have a strategic marketing plan related to your content.

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Filed Under: Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy

Should Content Be Branded or Vendor Agnostic?

July 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

It’s an interesting question and I could go either way with this one (even though I preach constantly about brands not branding their content). Should your content be branded or vendor agnostic?

When we consider branded content, this would consist of:

- Case studies
- Product reviews
- Testimonials
- Product datasheets
- Product spec sheets
- Company PowerPoint decks
- Demo videos

Seeing the word ‘product’ here a lot right? Now while all of these forms of content are useful and genuinely helpful to customers and prospects, they are really selling something. A person needs to be really engaged with a brand or have raised their hand with a problem in order for any of these to be relevant. Sending one of these to someone in your first interaction is kind of like someone you meet for the first time at an event giving you their elevator pitch. Gross!

Now vendor agnostic content is a bit different because while it may be someone at your company that is writing and publishing the material, you are really not talking about your company at all. The purpose is to educate your audience on a topic you perceive yourself to be an expert at – and by ‘yourself’, I am talking about your brand/company. These would consist of:

- Best practices videos
- Whitepapers
- Analyst reports
- Webinars
- Blog posts
- eBooks
- Articles

What is right for you?

I don’t think the question is so much ‘what is right for you’ as it is ‘what is right for you right now and for this person’. Consider this for a moment. You need branded content and you need vendor agnostic content. You really cannot survive with one and not the other so don’t make that the question.

Make the question about the customer and where they are in the buying process and what is right for them at that moment.

Make the question about the medium and how you want to engage with an audience through a certain channel.

Make the question about your company goals – sell or convert?

Stop asking the ‘or’ question and start asking when.

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Filed Under: Blog, Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Marketing, Strategy

5 Content Ideas That You Can Use For Lead Nurturing That You Already Have In Your Back Pocket

June 11, 2012 by 3 Comments

As an inbound marketer for the last several years, I often forget that some of my friends and colleagues are not yet developing whitepapers, eBooks, webinars or even a blog to engage with prospects. But it’s true. Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with these companies, but when it comes to building lead nurturing programs, they struggle to figure out what to use for content.

Here are 5 content ideas to use in lead nurturing programs you may not have considered but you already have:

1. Web content

You have a website – right? Now I am not suggesting you copy and paste text from your website into an email and send it off. What I am suggesting is that you have content that is already written which you can repurpose rather quickly into an email communication piece.

2.       Testimonials

People are talking about your company whether you are a B2B or a B2C. Curate this content from the channels and create nurturing emails that contain ‘our favorite tweets about us’ or ‘what people are saying’. This works two-fold; we love to hear what others like us are saying and we love to see our own name in print.

3.       Questions from the community

Are people asking questions about your product, your company or your industry? Take those questions and answer them in an email format. If one person has a question, you can be sure someone else has the same one.

4.       Your newsletter

We tend to think of our newsletter as a separate piece of communication than our nurturing programs but it can absolutely be a key component so use it!

5.       Curated content from the industry

Who said you had to create original content yourself? As a member of LinkedIn, I receive an email which contains links to all the popular articles shared for a given week – I love this! Do something similar for your busy readers and pull together popular news articles, helpful blog posts and other content you find across the web. Package it up for them and hit the send key.

Once you have set down the path to create and execute a lead nurturing program, don’t let the notion of ‘we don’t have any content’ stop you in your pursuit. You have the content you need to get started, you just may not realize it.

What types of content are you using? Love to hear all your ideas in the comments!

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Is Content Marketing and Paid Media an ‘Either/Or’ Conversation?

June 4, 2012 by 3 Comments

I feel the need to blog about this because I have been hearing some scary things from peers in the industry who may have misinterpreted or understood things incorrectly. Content marketing and paid media is NOT an either/or conversation. You cannot generate leads and survive 100% off of content marketing nor can you create an awesome paid media campaign without it.

When you consider paid media such as emails run via 3rd party, sponsored webinars, pay-per-click via  search engine, display campaigns, sponsored newsletters, etc., what would you advertise if not content? Wrong answer if you said something about your product datasheets, demos or anything to the like.

Now let’s consider all that great content you created. The whitepapers, the ebooks, the webinars, the blog posts. What exactly are you going to do with them to get them out there? Social media? Great! Does everyone know where to find and connect with you to get your stuff? Probably not and if they already do, chances are you are not generating any ‘net new’ names there.

So why do we think we can create content and people will naturally find us without us having to spend money? Why do we feel we can pay someone else to generate leads for us without having to create any compelling content to draw them in.

It’s not an either/or situation. It’s an and/and. You simply cannot be successful in one without the other.

There. That’s off my chest.

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13 Ways To Promote One Whitepaper

April 8, 2012 by 1 Comment

I haven’t done a list post in awhile and I know we all love lists. More than that, we all love new ideas on how to use just one piece of content. For all the work that goes into writing, constructing, designing and building a whitepaper, I thought I would start here.

As an Inbound Marketer, whitepapers are something I use constantly to drive prospects to my company. While I am not the one that is necessarily writing them, I work closely with the team to consider concepts and topics that may be of interest and then build a strategy on how to get the paper into the hands of the people we think would get the most use out of it.

So here is your list of 13 ways to use and promote just one whitepaper:

1. Feature it on your homepage. Seems obvious but I see so many brands that don’t do this. They are churning out content like there is no tomorrow and don’t often think to just update the homepage. This is just one page on your site that you can set aside some real estate and simply swap out the latest and greatest each week/month/quarter.

2. Put it in the newsletter. Your newsletter doesn’t have to be just news. It doesn’t need to be links to articles you collected from all over the web. It can contain video links from your YouTube page, perhaps an interview with a colleague and it should feature your newest whitepaper. Take it a step further and use the topic of your whitepaper to create a theme for your newsletter for that particular month.

3. Promote it through third parties. Find out who your target audience reads and what they subscribe to. Is it CMO.com or perhaps Mobile Marketer or maybe MarketingProfs? Learn what opportunities there are to promote you content to their audience (I have found great success in third party email campaigns. It comes from them but points people back to you. A win win).

4. Launch a pay per click campaign. We often want to use Google AdWords to send people straight to our product but what we often miss is the opportunity to pay very little for long tail keywords that drive people to our content.

5. Start a LinkedIn discussion. Don’t just post a link to a form for your whitepaper. Ask a question about the topic to a group that is relevant. Then post a link ‘in case they are interested’.

6. Share it on Twitter. Of course this is ONLY if your audience is on Twitter. Doesn’t make much sense to me to setup all these tweets promoting something that your audience will never see.

7. Use it as leverage to gain registrants for a relevant webinar. Not only should you use this as bait to get people to register and attend your webinar (if you register, you get this fabulous whitepaper), you can use it as a basis to create your webinar content.

8. Print it out and use it as a leave behind in sales calls. You are probably thinking that print materials are outdated but wouldn’t it be just great to see your whitepaper all printed out on the desk of a prospect? Printing it out also makes it easier for them to pass it along.

9. Have your sales team send out a PDF version. Your sales team is sending emails constantly either as a follow-up, check in or to get down to business. Why not encourage them to send out the whitepaper. (keep in mind that your sales team may not actually read the whitepaper, so provide them with an overview and a couple sentences to share about it in an email to help them sound good)

10. Write a blog post or series of blog posts about it. This has been a no-brainer for me. I may even take just a simple excerpt from the paper, add a beginning and an ending and voila blog post! (link to the post in the end too J )

11. Write an advertorial. These are often paid but it allows you as a brand to get a topic in front of your target readers. The bonus is that readers don’t often realize these are advertorials since they look like articles in the magazine. Take an excerpt and turn it into an advertorial.

12. Issue a press release. Like your newsletters, you don’t need to be announcing a new product, a new leader or the latest innovation to issue a press release. You can issue one about your latest whitepaper and the point of view of it.

13. Use it to nurture leads. Last but finally not least is that you have an awesome, new whitepaper so this needs to be incorporated into your nurturing process – stat! Define who the ideal audience is and where that fits into your nurturing flow. Create the email, landing page, etc. and start using it to turn leads into converted opportunities.

I have a few more ideas but hopefully that gets the juices flowing! How do you promote and use whitepapers? Love to hear all your ideas!!

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Defining Heuristic Rules for Your Content

April 6, 2012 by 1 Comment

Heuristics are defined as ‘experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery’. There are several types of heuristics such as the recognition heuristic that forces your decision based on familiarity. So if you are not familiar with me but are familiar with someone like Chris Brogan, then you most likely will turn to him for help.

There are also availability heuristics that influence a decision based on history and likelihood. So for example, you would not be inclined to worry about blizzards in Los Angeles but you would be cautious about earthquakes. A blizzard could happen but because your mind cannot tie a past occurrence or threat, you don’t think the event is able to happen.

So what does this have to do with content?

When we create content in whatever form we choose, we make an attempt to reach an audience and immerse them in it. We often think of what type of job our target prospect holds, or where they are located or maybe even what they do in their spare time. But we don’t often think of how the mind will process what we are trying to tell it.

We all have heuristic traits whether we recognize it or not. I recently bought new tires for my car and was presented with 2 options: Toyo and Continental. Now I have never heard of Toyo so my natural instinct was to choose the Continental even though they were more expensive and the sales person said he preferred the Toyos. My mind led me to what was familiar.

Now there are plenty of ways we can train ourselves to be more open-minded and branch out from the familiar, to dare to consider the impossible. But how can we create content that reaches people when they block it out?

The simple way to overcome and conquer heuristics that exist is to create some rules for your content. This means your website, your blog posts, your print collateral, everything. Here are some ideas to get you started on creating your own set of rules:

1. Remove the guesswork. If your users are trying to guess what you want them to do next, when your system will be back on, why something didn’t work, etc. then you are enabling them to come to their own conclusions. Remove the guesswork and enforce transparency.

2. Become recognizable. In your content, be consistent with look and feel and even the images you present. Changing or updating your logo every few months is not going to help. Consider how to make things recognizable so your audience is instantly connecting items that were meant to be connected.

3. Keep it simple. I love a great design as much as the next guy or gal, but I value simplicity a little bit more. By keeping things simple, your audience is navigating and consuming in a natural way without distraction.

4. Make connections easy. It’s been said but I will say it again, you should have an easy way for people to contact you on each and every single thing you put out. And please don’t just use a wed form. Give them your phone number and an email.

5. Define the rules for finding content. Have you conducted a usability test? If not, then start doing some research and set one up. Determine 5-10 things that you intend for people to do on your site whether that’s read your latest blog post, sign up for a newsletter, watch a demo, etc and make some assumptions about how long it should take from start to finish to complete the task. Were you right?

When searching for a solution, we will gravitate towards the familiar and leave the unknown un-clicked. Or worse, we may never be able to figure out what it is you want us to do or click on because we are making a decision and your answer doesn’t match. Try defining some rules for your organization and see how your content marries up.

Are you passing the heuristics test? What are you going to do about it?

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Maybe It’s Not the Actual Topic of Our Content, But The Perspective Of It

March 30, 2012 by 8 Comments

Something I read over at Marketing, Musings and Other Morsels the other day struck me. Margie Clayman blogged about how we should ‘avoid the temptation to write something popular’. In her post, she lists the 4 most popular topics as 1) content marketing, 2) Pinterest, 3) Google (SEO or G+) and 4) Facebook Timeline.

Now you all know that I focus on content marketing on this blog and how we can leverage it to generate leads and engagement that will lead to revenue and genre leadership so I really didn’t know what to think when I read this.

I have been thinking of a way to respond to Margie that makes sense to me. I know that there is plenty more we can say on the topic of content marketing and I feel very strongly that we have not hit a glass ceiling or even found ourselves redundant. So what is it?

Then, I read about some new research results that revealed an increasing amount of men are seeking content focused on diet and health. Now what’s interesting is not the fact that they are seeking this type of content but that there is tons of it on the web yet over 65% claim they are not finding what they are looking for.

A quick search of Google for ‘diet advice for men’ reveals over 300,000 results. 300,000 results! And men want more stuff about the same, exact topic that has been covered hundreds of thousands of times.

So what if we are all writing about content marketing and Pinterest and what Google is up to today? There is plenty more to be said about different way of looking at the same thing. There are plenty more conversations to be had about the future of the newest, coolest social network and how businesses can leverage it. There are plenty more people entering the industry every day that are just learning this stuff and they want more content.

What do you think? Should we start writing about something else or continue to address the latest, greatest, hottest topic at hand?

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