Digital
Marketing
ALL-IN-ONE
Contributing Authors
Ryan Deiss
Stephanie Diamond
Russ Henneberry
John Haydon
Cat Lincoln
Corey Padveen
Stefania Pomponi
Deborah Ng
Kristy Sammis
Shiv Singh
Sangram Vajre
Jan Zimmerman
Digital
Marketing
ALL-IN-ONE
by Stephanie Diamond
Digital Marketing All-in-One For Dummies®
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935455
ISBN 978-1-119-56023-4 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-56025-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-56024-1 (ebk)
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents at a Glance
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Book 1: Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . 5
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
CHAPTER 4:
CHAPTER 5:
CHAPTER 6:
Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Grabbing the Attention of Your Customer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Discovering Your Business Model and Brand. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Deciding which Marketing Campaign to Create. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Crafting Offers That Sell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Planning B2B Campaign Success. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Book 2: Uncovering the Customer Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . .
117
Interacting with Customer Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Uncovering Buyer Personas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Structuring the Buyer Journey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Embracing Sales Enablement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
119
131
151
171
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
CHAPTER 4:
Book 3: Dipping into Content Creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
181
Creating Your Content Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reviewing Content Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding the Customer’s Intent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Creating Content That Tells a Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Defining Your Content Framework Using
Processes and Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
183
197
219
241
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
CHAPTER 4:
CHAPTER 5:
CHAPTER 6:
253
Targeting Content for Your B2B Audience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269
Book 4: Reaching Your Millennial Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
293
Figuring Out Millennials. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Looking at the Influence of Millennials. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Pursuing a Data Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Finding Millennials on Traditional Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Experimenting with the Share Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Developing the Brand Experience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
295
307
317
337
349
361
Book 5: Implementing Channel Promotions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
383
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
CHAPTER 4:
CHAPTER 5:
CHAPTER 6:
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
CHAPTER 4:
Identifying Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385
Using Search Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401
Making Content Shareable. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
Considering Email Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443
Book 6: Connecting with Influencers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 469
Communicating with Influencers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Collaborating to Win . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Engaging Influencers Using the “Three Cs” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Succeeding with Influencer Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Getting Creative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Working with an Agency. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
471
489
509
523
533
543
Book 7: Facebook Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
549
Delving into Facebook Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Creating a Facebook Marketing Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Selling Products and Services Using Facebook Offers. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Uniting Facebook with Other Social Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Getting into Instagram. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Promoting Advanced Customer Engagement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
551
561
583
591
607
617
Book 8: Deploying Other Social Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
641
Leveraging Social Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Working with Twitter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Looking at YouTube. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reviewing Pinterest. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
643
659
673
685
Book 9: Analyzing Data for Success. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
711
Looking Back at Your Business Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reassessing Your Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reviewing Ongoing Improvement for B2B Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Achieving Maximum ROI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
713
723
731
741
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
755
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
CHAPTER 4:
CHAPTER 5:
CHAPTER 6:
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
CHAPTER 4:
CHAPTER 5:
CHAPTER 6:
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
CHAPTER 4:
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
CHAPTER 4:
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
About This Book. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Icons Used in This Book. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Where to Go from Here . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
BOOK 1: CREATING YOUR DIGITAL
MARKETING STRATEGY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
CHAPTER 1:
Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Understanding the Components of a Digital Marketing Strategy . . . . . 7
Determining the company strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Uncovering the customer experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Creating quality content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Developing channel promotions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Deploying check-back analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Communicating Your Mission. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Crafting your statement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Reviewing real mission statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Establishing Your Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Uncovering your goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Picking KPIs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Expanding Your Corporate Mindset. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Creating a culture of content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Thinking about reputation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Using content to serve customers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Dipping into User Design and Habits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Recognizing the importance of UX design in your strategy . . . . . . 26
Observing product habits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
CHAPTER 2:
Grabbing the Attention of Your Customer. . . . . . . . . . . 29
Focusing on Attention. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Seeking the “attention web”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Looking at attention triggers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Making Your Content Easy to Consume. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reading in patterns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Considering design elements and typography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Deploying Interactive Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Table of Contents
30
30
35
36
36
38
42
vii
CHAPTER 3:
Discovering Your Business Model and Brand. . . . . . . . 45
Separating Your Business Model from Your Brand. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Understanding the business you’re in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Looking at some popular online business models. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Considering the freemium model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Analyzing Your Business Model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56
Discovering Your Brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Benefitting from attention to your brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Knowing your current brand reality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Solidifying the Look of the Brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Considering design components. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61
Using a digital asset management tool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Developing Success Measures for Your Brand. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Producing Engaging Branded Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
CHAPTER 4:
Deciding which Marketing
Campaign to Create. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Establishing Marketing Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Defining a Digital Marketing Campaign. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding the Three Major Types of Campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Campaigns that generate new leads and customers. . . . . . . . . . . .
Campaigns that monetize existing leads and customers . . . . . . . .
Campaigns that build engagement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Balancing Your Marketing Campaign Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Choosing the Campaign You Need Now . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Viewing Your Digital Marketing through the Campaign Lens. . . . . . . .
CHAPTER 5:
Crafting Offers That Sell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Offering Value in Advance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Designing an Ungated Offer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Designing a Gated Offer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Zeroing in on what matters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Generating leads with educational content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Generating leads with tools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Filling out the gated offer checklist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Designing Deep-Discount Offers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using physical premiums. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Employing a book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Leveraging the webinar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Selling software. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Splintering a service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Brainstorming “little victories” to offer your leads. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Filling out the deep-discount offer checklist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Discovering your deep-discount offer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
viii
68
69
71
72
74
75
76
77
78
Digital Marketing All-in-One For Dummies
80
81
82
83
85
87
89
92
92
92
93
93
93
93
95
96
Maximizing Profit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Making an upsell or cross-sell offer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Building bundles and kits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Tacking on a slack adjuster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Recurring billing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
96
97
98
98
99
Planning B2B Campaign Success. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
101
Setting Key Performance Indicators. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Attributing metrics at the account level. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Comparing cost per click . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Showing impressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Expanding your audience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Engaging accounts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Testing Your Campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A/B creative testing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Trying new content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Combining your offers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Knowing You Aren’t Wasting Money. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Budgeting the right amounts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Attributing advertising spend to revenue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Showing engagement in the buyer journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
102
102
107
108
109
110
111
111
112
113
113
114
114
115
BOOK 2: UNCOVERING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. . . .
117
CHAPTER 6:
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2:
Interacting with Customer Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
119
Understanding Big Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Looking at different kinds of big data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Looking at problems with big data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Uncovering the Role Big Data Plays in Content Marketing. . . . . . . . .
Improving your content marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using real-time content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Discovering the Internet of Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reviewing IoT market size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Impacting content marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Visualizing Big Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
119
120
121
122
123
123
124
125
127
129
Uncovering Buyer Personas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
131
Reviewing Persona Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding how persona creation improves content. . . . . . .
Taking action to understand your customers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Collecting Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Finding different data types. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Deploying listening tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Conducting one-on-one interviews. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Documenting your personas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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132
134
136
136
137
140
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Avoiding Common Mistakes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Looking at How Generations Differ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding Millennials. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Meeting Gen C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Identifying a Prospect’s Emotions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Keeping Up with Trends. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
142
143
143
146
146
147
Structuring the Buyer Journey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
151
Harnessing the Customer Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Looking at the customer experience from both sides. . . . . . . . . .
Benefitting from an omni-channel approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Uncovering Commercial Intent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Defending Against Competitors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Researching competitors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Analyzing your competitor’s content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Identifying the Stages of the Buyer Journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding the buying process and journey map. . . . . . . . . .
Benefitting from the journey map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Focusing on content for each part of the journey . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Personalizing Your Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
152
152
154
156
159
159
161
164
164
166
167
169
Embracing Sales Enablement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
171
Discovering Sales Enablement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Gaining a competitive advantage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Evaluating your current status . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding the new role of sales reps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Training Your Salesforce. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Coaching Your Reps to Become Winners. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Checking Out Sales Enablement Blogs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
172
172
173
176
177
178
179
BOOK 3: DIPPING INTO CONTENT CREATION. . . . . . . . . . . . .
181
CHAPTER 3:
CHAPTER 4:
CHAPTER 1:
x
Creating Your Content Plan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
183
Evaluating Your Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Benefitting from a content plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Determining content maturity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Assessing Your Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Interviewing your stakeholders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Conducting a content audit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Visualizing Your Sites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mapping your content ecosystem. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Picturing website content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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184
186
187
188
188
190
190
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Creating Your Plan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
Focusing on Specialized Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .194
Creating pillar content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
Utilizing evergreen content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
Using graphics and other visuals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
Going viral. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
Reviewing Content Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
197
Dipping into Content Categories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Working with Original Short- and Long-Form Content . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using Curation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Examining five curation models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding how to curate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Making Use of User-Generated Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding the positives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Dealing with the negatives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Repurposing Content to Add Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Benefitting from repurposing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Planning goals and picking content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Viewing Aggregated Visual Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Dealing with Live Video Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Extending Business News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Offering Online Courses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Managing Content Formats. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
197
199
201
202
202
204
204
205
205
206
206
207
208
209
210
212
Understanding the Customer’s Intent. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
219
Knowing the Dynamics of Content Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Finding Your Path to Perfect Content Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding the marketing funnel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Exploring the prospect’s intent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Providing a path to the next step . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Segmenting your marketing with content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Appearing everywhere your customerexpects. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Customizing your content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Executing Perfect Content Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Step 1: Choosing personas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Step 2: Brainstorming content assets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Step 3: Choosing the vehicle and channel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Step 4: Planning for ascension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Distributing Content to Attract an Audience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Marketing through email . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Capturing leads through search marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using social media to drive traffic to your site . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Paying for traffic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
220
221
222
230
231
232
233
234
234
235
235
236
236
236
237
237
238
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CHAPTER 4:
CHAPTER 5:
CHAPTER 6:
Creating Content That Tells a Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
241
Storytelling to Engage Your Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Seeking the science behind stories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Finding your product stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Structuring Your Content Using Stories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Crafting the story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Incorporating copywriting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
241
241
244
249
249
250
Defining Your Content Framework
Using Processes and Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
253
Organizing the Content Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Benefiting from a defined framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Examining the systems needed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Determining Roles and Responsibilities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Managing the Workflow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Finding and assigning writers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using an editorial calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Documenting Your Policies and Procedures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Content managers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Editors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Writers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Designers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Content system administrator. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Web administrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
253
254
255
257
258
258
260
264
265
265
265
265
266
266
Targeting Content for Your B2B Audience . . . . . . . . .
269
Creating a Content Library. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
Storytelling and its importance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
Taking a BtoB lens to your content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276
Producing content by industry vertical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
Basing content on personas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
Humanizing Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
Demonstrating thought leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
Addressing wants, needs, and pain points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Personalizing your message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
Developing a brand identity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
Reaching Through Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
Employing a content strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
Delivering content on the right channel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .289
Cross-promoting your content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289
Measuring your content’s effectiveness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
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BOOK 4: REACHING YOUR MILLENNIAL AUDIENCE. . . . . .
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
293
Figuring Out Millennials. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
295
Discovering Why Millennials Matter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
There is power in numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Millennials influence the economy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They’re a connected generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Leveraging Millennial Influence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Identifying key influencers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Nurturing relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Meeting Millennials Where They Are . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Communication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sharing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Decision-making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
295
296
297
299
300
300
301
302
303
304
305
Looking at the Influence of Millennials. . . . . . . . . . . . .
307
Understanding the Marketer’s Perception of Millennials . . . . . . . . . .
Examining standard definitions that marketers use . . . . . . . . . . .
Reviewing what marketers get right. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Looking at what marketers get wrong. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Recognizing common flaws in marketing campaigns . . . . . . . . . .
Finding the roots of the most common mistakes. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Millennial Mindset. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Defining the Millennial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Identifying preferred Millennial media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Grasping the importance of relationships. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
307
308
311
312
312
313
314
314
314
315
Pursuing a Data Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
317
Recognizing the Value of Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Raw data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Cooked data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Social media user data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Customer lifetime engagement data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Brand profile data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Visualized data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Big data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Small data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Competitive data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Transactional data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Pinpointing Key Indicators in Your Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Outliers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Peaks and valleys. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Correlations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Industry trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Waste. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
317
318
318
318
319
319
320
320
321
322
324
325
325
326
327
327
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CHAPTER 4:
CHAPTER 5:
xiv
Using Your Data as the Foundation of Your Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Identifying Data Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Data from your owned media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Data from social media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Data from public channels. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Analyzing Your Data on a Regular Basis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
328
329
329
332
334
335
Finding Millennials on Traditional Media . . . . . . . . . .
337
Taking Advantage of Television (With or Without the Budget). . . . . .
Looking at Millennial TV viewing habits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reaching viewers with the second screen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Targeting Millennials with Print Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reaching Millennials in magazines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Connecting with Millennials through the use
of newspapers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The case for investing in print media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The case for abandoning print media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Incorporating Email into Your Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Creating messages specifically for email. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Tying email into your traditional and new media strategies. . . . .
Building subject lines and headings that generate opens. . . . . . .
338
338
339
341
342
343
344
344
344
345
345
346
Experimenting with the Share Economy. . . . . . . . . . .
349
Positioning Your Brand Around Sharing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You have an active community forum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You have a peer-to-peer opportunity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
You can afford short-term opportunity costs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Your product or service has an online component . . . . . . . . . . . .
Establishing a Voice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mapping your target audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Creating a content strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Running a Niche Campaign for the Share Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Encouraging Audience Participation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reaching out to your existing database. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Leveraging native video ads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Targeting ads to the share economy audience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Developing incentivized adoption schemes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Measuring Results. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Is the goal to build a new community?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Are there secondary goals that extend beyond
the share economy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Should you place a timeline on secondary goals? . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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350
350
351
351
351
352
352
355
356
356
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CHAPTER 6:
Developing the Brand Experience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
361
Creating a Brand Experience Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
What is the ideal medium for a first interaction?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362
Where will your efforts to educate switch to efforts to sell?. . . . . 363
Will you invest in establishing multiple entry points? . . . . . . . . . . 363
How does the experience differ from prospects
to customers?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364
An example road map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364
Identifying Touchpoints for Your Audience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365
Checking Off Elements for Each Touchpoint. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366
Developing a Customer Relationship. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
Engaging users with conversational content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
Sharing useful information that highlights your expertise. . . . . . 368
Offering first-time customers specials, freebies, or deals. . . . . . . 368
Building trust by sharing third-party content that
mentions your brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368
Segmenting Your Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
Creating experience-specific content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 370
Unifying your content across every channel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 372
Integrating the Experience for an Omni-Channel Strategy. . . . . . . . . 373
Creating an identifiable theme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374
Using a tracking mechanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374
Repeating the campaign title or slogan on all media. . . . . . . . . . . 374
Facilitating movement in any direction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374
Ensuring that all assets are easily discoverable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
Tracking the Brand Experience Across Different Media . . . . . . . . . . . 375
A tag management system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376
Trackable links. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376
Segmentation of data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376
Running Brand Experience Campaigns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377
Increasing brand engagement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .378
Driving brand awareness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
Building a new, segmented audience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
Selling more product. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
Garnering customer loyalty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380
Fostering relationships. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380
Launching a well-rounded campaign. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380
BOOK 5: IMPLEMENTING CHANNEL PROMOTIONS. . . . . .
383
Identifying Paid, Earned, Shared,
and Owned Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
385
CHAPTER 1:
Understanding Types of Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 386
Reviewing each media type. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387
Determining your needs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388
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Utilizing Paid Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388
Discovering retargeting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388
Dealing with native advertising. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 390
Considering programmatic buying. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 390
Finding out what you need to know from advertisers. . . . . . . . . . 391
Championing Earned Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391
Enhancing Shared Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393
Amplifying Owned Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394
Looking at the role of press releases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394
Spreading the message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395
Creating a Framework for Achieving the Right Mix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 396
Section 1: Owned channels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397
Section 2: Shared media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 398
Section 3: Paid ads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .398
Section 4: Earned media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399
Section 5: Evaluate and revise. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399
CHAPTER 2:
Using Search Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
401
Knowing the Three Key Players in Search Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 402
Understanding searchers’ needs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .402
Knowing what search engines want. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 402
Targeting Search Queries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 404
Defining a search query. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406
Choosing the right queries to target. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407
Satisfying searchers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 409
Optimizing Your Assets for Specific Channels. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411
Optimizing for Google. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 412
Optimizing for YouTube. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 414
Optimizing for Pinterest. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417
Optimizing for Amazon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 418
Optimizing for iTunes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
Optimizing for review sites. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .420
Optimizing for search engine robots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
Earning Links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 422
Step 1: Cross-link your own content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 422
Step 2: Study your competitors’ links. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
Step 3: Create generous content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
Step 4: Create content worthy of a link . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
Step 5: Publish primary research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424
Step 6: Keep up with the news . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424
CHAPTER 3:
Making Content Shareable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
425
Embracing Shareability as a Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
Understanding sharing patterns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 426
Sharing as a bottom-line issue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
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CHAPTER 4:
Uncovering the Five Ws and One H of Online Sharing. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Knowing who shares content, and why. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Considering what they share. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Discovering when they share. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Observing where they share . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Looking at how people share content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Adding Social Bookmarking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Making SEO a Priority. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Deploying Hashtags to Encourage Sharing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding hashtags . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using hashtag tools. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
429
430
431
433
433
434
435
436
438
438
439
Considering Email Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
443
Understanding Marketing Emails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Promotional emails. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Relational emails. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Transactional emails. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sending Broadcast and Triggered Emails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Broadcast emails. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Triggered emails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Building a Promotional Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Cataloging your products and services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Creating an annual promotional plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Developing a marketing plan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Creating a 30-day calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Creating a 90-day rolling calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Creating Email Campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Indoctrination campaigns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Engagement campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ascension campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Segmentation campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reengagement campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Writing and Designing Effective Emails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Harvesting proven email copy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Answering four questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Knowing why people buy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Writing effective email subject lines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Writing body copy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Cuing the click . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Getting More Clicks and Opens. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ensuring Email Deliverability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Monitoring your reputation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Proving subscriber engagement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
444
444
445
445
447
447
447
448
448
450
451
452
453
453
454
456
456
457
458
459
459
460
460
461
462
463
463
466
466
467
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BOOK 6: CONNECTING WITH INFLUENCERS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
469
Communicating with Influencers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
471
CHAPTER 1:
Defining Influencer Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 472
Identifying the Primary Influencer Platforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473
Blogs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473
Instagram. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 474
Twitter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
Facebook. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475
Pinterest. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 476
Video. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 476
Engaging Stellar Influencers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .477
Starting with women. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 478
Finding people who create great content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 478
Perfecting your pickup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479
Signing a contract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479
Paying influencers for their time and effort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 480
Measuring the right stuff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481
Making Influencer Marketing Work for You . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482
If you’re an established consumer brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482
If you’re a small to midsize consumer brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485
If you’re a startup brand. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 487
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
xviii
Collaborating to Win. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
489
Discovering the Evolving Role of Influencers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding the six principles of persuasion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding why influencers ­matter more now . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding how to measure expert influencers . . . . . . . . . . .
Recognizing Influencer Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Finding the Right Influencers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Discovering the influencers you need to target . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Developing a system. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Uncovering New Influencers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Influencing with Customer Advocacy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Enhancing Word of Mouth (WOM) with Advertising. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Connecting with your audience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Identifying factors for WOM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Paid Influencer Programs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
489
490
492
494
494
496
496
499
501
501
504
504
505
505
Engaging Influencers Using the “Three Cs” . . . . . . . .
509
Communicating Like a Pro. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Making your communication personal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Making your offer compelling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Keeping it real: Do’s and don’ts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
510
510
511
513
Digital Marketing All-in-One For Dummies
CHAPTER 4:
Upping Your Game: Creating an Influencer Contract . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Setting expectations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Controlling what you need to control. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Protecting yourself and your brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Compensating Influencers Fairly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding why you need to pay influencers. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Avoiding compensation pitfalls. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Looking at the going rates for influencers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
514
515
515
516
517
518
519
521
Succeeding with Influencer Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . .
523
Secret #1: Set Realistic Campaign Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523
What are you trying to achieve? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524
How will you assess your achievements? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524
How will you achieve your goals? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525
When will the campaign run?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .526
Secret #2: Know Your Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527
Who’s talking about you?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527
Where are they talking about you?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 528
Secret #3: Stay on Message. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 528
Marketing plan = Rocket ship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529
Messaging = Flight plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529
Social media = Rocket fuel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529
Secret #4: Be Agile. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529
Secret #5: Recognize the Power of Emotional Stories. . . . . . . . . . . . . 530
Secret #6: You Get What You Measure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 531
CHAPTER 5:
CHAPTER 6:
Getting Creative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
533
Getting Creative and Letting Go . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Walking the walk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Are you having fun yet? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Go for it! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
What If It All Goes Wrong? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Preventing a crisis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Managing a crisis (if it happens anyway). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
533
534
535
537
538
538
540
Working with an Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
543
So, You Want to Hire an Influencer Marketing Agency . . . . . . . . . . . .
May I borrow your relationships?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
How it works: Self-service versus full-service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Deciding Which Type of Agency Is Right for You. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
One-Off Events versus Continuity Campaigns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Making a big splash for maximum effect. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Putting in the hours for a long-term relationship. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
543
544
545
547
547
548
548
Table of Contents
xix
BOOK 7: FACEBOOK MARKETING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2:
549
Delving into Facebook Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
551
What Is Facebook, and Why Is It So Popular? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding the Marketing Potential of Facebook . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Leveraging the power of word-of-mouth marketing. . . . . . . . . . .
Using marketing tools for all kinds of businesses . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding Why Your Business Needs a Facebook Page. . . . . . .
Attracting new fans who are friends of customers . . . . . . . . . . . .
Changing first-time customers into repeat customers . . . . . . . . .
552
553
554
556
557
559
559
Creating a Facebook Marketing Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
561
Understanding the Power of Word of Mouth on Facebook . . . . . . . . 562
Understanding Your Facebook Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 563
Defining Your Marketing Goals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 565
Building awareness of your brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 566
Driving sales. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 567
Forming a community with a Facebook Group. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 568
Listening to feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569
Developing Your Content Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 570
Encouraging Audience Engagement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 572
Creating a rich, customer-centric experience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 572
Appreciating your fans and growing your base . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573
Monitoring and Reporting Page Activity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .575
Using Insights for Pages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 576
Creating benchmarks and setting goals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 577
Keeping an eye on key metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 578
Integrating Your Online and Offline Campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 579
Deciding on a media budget . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 580
Hiring an online writer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581
CHAPTER 3:
CHAPTER 4:
Selling Products and Services Using
Facebook Offers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
583
Understanding Facebook Offers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Creating an Offer for Your Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Getting the Most from Your Offer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Promoting Your Offer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Promoting your offer on your Facebook Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Promoting your offer with Facebook Ads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Promoting your offer through other marketing channels . . . . . .
584
585
587
588
588
589
589
Uniting Facebook with Other Social Media. . . . . . . .
591
Making Facebook Part of Your Marketing Mix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 592
Posting content new fans can engage with. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593
Choosing a custom Facebook username. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593
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Digital Marketing All-in-One For Dummies
Cross-promoting your Page. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Leveraging your Facebook presence via email,
website, and blog. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Promoting Your Facebook Presence Offline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Networking offline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Placing the Facebook logo on signs and in store windows. . . . . .
Referencing your Page in ads and product literature . . . . . . . . . .
Optimizing Your Page for Search Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using search engine optimization to drive traffic. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Driving more Likes to your Page. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Integrating Instagram into Your Other Marketing Channels . . . . . . .
Making a plan for Instagram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Utilizing Instastories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Getting Inside Your Customers’ Heads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CHAPTER 5:
CHAPTER 6:
595
596
597
597
598
598
598
599
600
601
601
602
604
Getting into Instagram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
607
Promoting Your Brand on Instagram. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using Your Instagram Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sharing photos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Controlling notifications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Determining What Is Photo-Worthy for Your Brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using Hashtags in Your Instagram Posts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Finding Friends and Fans on Instagram. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using Instastories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
608
609
609
611
612
613
614
615
Promoting Advanced Customer Engagement. . . . .
617
Using Facebook Messenger to Communicate with Customers . . . . .
Benefitting from Messenger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding guidelines for Messenger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Enabling Messenger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Developing a Better Customer Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Providing customer service with chatbots. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using Messenger chatbots. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Developing chatbots. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Advertising with Messenger. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Getting Started with Facebook Live . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Looking at the benefits of live streaming. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding the guidelines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Setting up Facebook Live . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Creating broadcasts that connect with customers. . . . . . . . . . . . .
617
618
618
619
619
620
620
628
628
630
631
631
632
638
Table of Contents
xxi
BOOK 8: DEPLOYING OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CHAPTER 1:
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
641
Leveraging Social Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
643
Thinking Strategically about Social Media Integration. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Integrating Social Media with E-Newsletters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Gaining more subscribers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Finding more followers and connections. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Finding and sharing content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Integrating Social Media with Press Releases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Setting up an online newsroom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Cultivating influencers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Distributing your news. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Emphasizing content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Pressing for attention. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Measuring results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Integrating Social Media with Your Website . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Coupons, discounts, and freebies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Contests and games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Microsites. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Private membership sites. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
643
644
646
647
647
649
650
650
651
653
654
654
655
656
657
657
658
Working with Twitter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
659
Finding the Right People to Follow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Finding Out Who Is Talking about You on Twitter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Responding to Tweets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Searching on Twitter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Tweeting Like a Pro. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Articulating in 280 characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sharing on Twitter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Knowing when to @reply and direct message . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Retweeting and being retweeted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Blocking people. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Creating a successful Twitter campaign. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using keywords in your tweets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Following the Twitter Rules of Etiquette . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Hosting a Tweet-Up. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
659
660
661
662
663
664
665
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
Looking at YouTube. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
673
Looking at YouTube Basics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .674
Benefitting from social media marketing on YouTube . . . . . . . . . 674
Attracting subscribers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 675
Promoting on YouTube. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 676
Always create a customized channel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 676
Create custom content for YouTube . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 677
Tag and categorize all your clips. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 677
Promote your video with YouTube Email and Bulletins . . . . . . . . 678
xxii
Digital Marketing All-in-One For Dummies
Leave video responses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Include a call to action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Have some fun, too. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Seeding a Viral Campaign. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Advertising on YouTube. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
679
680
680
680
683
Reviewing Pinterest. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
685
Understanding Pinterest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Getting Started. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Navigating Pinterest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Setting up your Pinterest profile. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Getting on Board. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Planning your initial boards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Creating your first board . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Pinning on Pinterest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Pinning an image. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Tagging. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Following on Pinterest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Following friends. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Following folks you don’t know. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sharing on Pinterest. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sharing other people’s pins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using share buttons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Driving Traffic with Pinterest. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Being descriptive but brief. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using keywords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Building Your Pinterest Community. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Collaborating with group boards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Commenting on pins. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Playing nice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
686
687
689
690
692
693
694
695
695
699
699
699
700
700
700
701
702
704
705
706
706
707
708
BOOK 9: ANALYZING DATA FOR SUCCESS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
711
CHAPTER 4:
CHAPTER 1:
Looking Back at Your Business Model. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
713
Validating Business Models. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Looking at change. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Revising your business model canvas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reexamining your brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Enhancing your business models. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reviewing Your Brand Status. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Refreshing Visual Branding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding what your branding means . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Surveying about brand awareness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Locating a survey company. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
714
714
715
716
716
717
718
718
720
721
Table of Contents
xxiii
CHAPTER 2:
CHAPTER 3:
CHAPTER 4:
INDEX
xxiv
Reassessing Your Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
723
Allowing for Failed Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Looking Back at Your Digital Marketing Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reviewing goals and KPIs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Assessing content maturity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Reevaluating your ecosystem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
723
725
726
726
727
Reviewing Ongoing Improvement
for B2B Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
731
Ongoing Account Maintenance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Delivering reports and results. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Creating a review process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Executing on tasks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Gauging Potential Opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Limiting the margin for error. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Anticipating future needs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Building an engagement report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Providing Added Value. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Living up to expectations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Continuing to improve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
732
732
734
735
736
736
737
737
738
738
739
Achieving Maximum ROI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
741
Understanding Split Testing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Following the split test guidelines. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Selecting Page Elements to Optimize. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Considering qualitative data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Using qualitative tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Getting Ready to Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Developing an optimization hypothesis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Choosing the metrics to track . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Calculating your test timeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Preparing to Launch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Defining goals in Google Analytics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Checking that your page renders correctly in all browsers. . . . . .
Ensuring that you have no testing conflicts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Checking links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Keeping variation load times similar or identical. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Calling a Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Knowing How a Test Performed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Analyzing the Test. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
742
744
746
746
747
748
748
749
749
750
750
750
750
751
751
751
752
752
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 755
Digital Marketing All-in-One For Dummies
Introduction
A
ccording to Statista, in 2018, 4.2 billion people were active Internet users
and 3.4 billion were social media users. That means that no matter what
business you’re in, it’s pretty likely that you can reach your audience
online. You can move slowly and add digital marketing tactics and social media
platforms as you go, or you can jump in and make digital marketing priority one.
Either way, you can’t avoid the journey. You need to have a digital marketing plan.
Your competitors have one.
So where do you start? Well, first you have to create a strategy and then determine
the tactics that will support it. With Digital Marketing All-in-One For Dummies,
you can sort out all the “should dos” and “nice to dos” from the “must dos.” You
need a clear path that will prevent you from spending too much time on the things
that don’t matter. The most beautiful website is a great ideal, but if you don’t do
essential tasks such as create great content, effectively target your audience, and
collect key data, you’re not going to be successful.
About This Book
To make sure you have all the information you need, this book includes 9 books
that cover the following major topics:
»» Book 1: Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy: Examine your overall
goals and determine the strategy that will help you reach them.
»» Book 2: Uncovering the Customer Experience: Look at the impact that the
right customer experience can have on converting prospects to loyal
customers.
»» Book 3: Dipping into Content Creation: Great content gives you a competitive advantage, so you look at the keys to making your brand memorable.
»» Book 4: Reaching Your Millennial Audience: Millennials now make up the
largest block of consumers. Find out what they want and how to deliver it in a
way that gets their attention.
Introduction
1
»» Book 5: Implementing Channel Promotions: See what type of promotions
suits your audience and how to use search and email marketing to reach
them.
»» Book 6: Connecting with Influencers: Working with influencers is gaining in
popularity as digital marketers find that it’s a fast way to break through the
noise. See what you need to do to work with the right influencers.
»» Book 7: Facebook Marketing: You can’t ignore Facebook. See how you can
use its marketing capabilities to the fullest.
»» Book 8: Deploying Other Social Media: Find out which other social platforms
your audience uses. Is it Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube? See what you
need to do to find and engage.
»» Book 9: Analyzing Data for Success: The right data makes the difference
between a good campaign and a failure. See what metrics you should be
tracking.
Icons Used in This Book
Throughout this book, you see different icons. Here’s what they mean:
The Tip icon showcases information that can make doing things easier or faster.
The Remember icon points out things you need to remember when searching your
memory bank.
The Warning icon alerts you to things that can be harmful to you or your company.
Where to Go from Here
Like all For Dummies books, you can read the chapters in any order you prefer. Start
anywhere you like. However, if you’re new to digital marketing you’ll ­probably
want to start with Book 1 to learn how to lay the foundation for your overall
strategy. Then consider reading Book 2 that shows you why and how your
­customer’s experience is crucial to your success.
2
Digital Marketing All-in-One For Dummies
If you want to focus on specific audiences, go to Books 4 and 6 to find out more
information about targeting millennials and influencers respectively.
The rest of the books (3, 5, and 7-9) focus on the mechanics of content creation,
the use of social media, channel promotions, and data analytics.
There’s also an online cheat sheet. Go to dummies.com and type Digital M
­ arketing
All-in-One For Dummies in the Search box to find it. On the cheat sheet you will
find information about resources to monitor your brand reputation, reasons to
work with influences, how to track your content performance, and other useful
information.
Introduction
3
1
Creating
Your Digital
Marketing
Strategy
Contents at a Glance
CHAPTER 1:
Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy . . . . . . . . . . 7
Understanding the Components of a Digital
Marketing Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Communicating Your Mission. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Establishing Your Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Expanding Your Corporate Mindset. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Dipping into User Design and Habits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
CHAPTER 2:
Grabbing the Attention of Your Customer. . . . . . . . 29
Focusing on Attention. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Making Your Content Easy to Consume. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Deploying Interactive Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
CHAPTER 3:
Discovering Your Business Model and Brand. . . . . 45
Separating Your Business Model from Your Brand. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Analyzing Your Business Model. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Discovering Your Brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Solidifying the Look of the Brand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Developing Success Measures for Your Brand. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Producing Engaging Branded Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CHAPTER 4:
Deciding which Marketing Campaign
to Create. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Establishing Marketing Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Defining a Digital Marketing Campaign. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Understanding the Three Major Types of Campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . .
Balancing Your Marketing Campaign Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Choosing the Campaign You Need Now . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Viewing Your Digital Marketing through the Campaign Lens. . . . . .
CHAPTER 5:
68
69
71
76
77
78
Crafting Offers That Sell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Offering Value in Advance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Designing an Ungated Offer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Designing a Gated Offer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Designing Deep-Discount Offers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Maximizing Profit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CHAPTER 6:
46
56
57
60
64
65
80
81
82
92
96
Planning B2B Campaign Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Setting Key Performance Indicators. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Testing Your Campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Knowing You Aren’t Wasting Money. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Formulating your business goals
»» Picking your key performance
indicators (KPIs)
»» Catching customers with the Five Cs
»» Serving your customers using content
»» Building product habits
Chapter
1
Developing Your Overall
Digital Strategy
C
ompanies have finally recognized what their customers have always known.
If they can’t find the content that makes your product easy to use and enjoy,
they are off to seek out your competitor. You’ve missed the opportunity to
impress them or, in some cases, even get on their radar screen.
This chapter covers what goes into creating a digital marketing strategy. Without
it, you can’t get the traction you need to beat the competition. You also discover
each of the “Five Cs” that must be included to make your strategy complete.
Understanding the Components
of a Digital Marketing Strategy
To understand how the pieces of a digital marketing strategy fit together, the components are organized into a framework called the Five Cs. They are (1) ­company
strategy; (2) customer experience; (3); content creation (4), channel promotions,
and (5) check-back analysis.
CHAPTER 1 Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy
7
Working with the Five Cs framework helps you cover all the bases as you create
your digital marketing strategy and implement your plan
Determining the company strategy
The first C is company strategy. To create a digital marketing strategy, you need
to begin by looking at your company’s business goals. The question to ask yourself and your team is, “What do we want the company to achieve and how do we
make it happen?”
You should direct your attention to your goals and business case for undertaking
this effort. To that end, Book 1 covers the following topics:
»» Create a digital marketing strategy. Several components go into a successful marketing strategy. Keep reading this chapter to find out more as well as
the subsequent chapters in this book.
»» Get your customers’ attention. Marketers are fiercely competing for your
customers’ attention. Find out how to capture it in Book1, Chapter 2.
»» Understand your business model and your brand. Learn about a variety of
business models and how to determine what “job” your product does. You
look at brand components in Book 1, Chapter 3.
»» Decide which marketing campaign to create. After you understand your
goals, you can choose the right marketing campaign. See what to consider in
Book 1, Chapter 4.
»» Develop the strongest offers. You look at how to turn leads into customers
by crafting winning offers in Book 1, Chapter 5.
Uncovering the customer experience
The second of the Five Cs is customer experience covered in Book 2. You need
to learn what your prospects will think, feel, and do when interacting with your
brand. The question for your marketing team to ask is, “Who are our prospects
and how will we serve them as customers?”
You must define your audience and analyze the customer experience. You do this
with the following:
»» Collect and analyze customer data. Before you define your audience, you
need to evaluate the kind of data you will use. In Book 2, Chapter 1, you look
8
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Developing Your
Overall Digital Strategy
at the benefits and challenges you may face when dealing with big data to
analyze your audience.
»» Create personas. You define the characteristics of your perfect audience by
investigating several different types of information. Find out what actions you
need to takein Book 2, Chapter 2.
»» Develop the buyer journey. You want to understand the journey your
prospect takes from being interested in your product to sold on it. Book 2,
Chapter 3 looks at the buyer’s mindset and gives you a model to help you
document your customer’s touchpoints.
»» Assist with sales enablement. Your sales team is facing an empowered
customer. Find out in Book 2, Chapter 4 how your content can assist in
making the job easier and more powerful. You can also determine where
your company falls on the content maturity scale.
Creating quality content
The third C is content creation, which is covered in Book 3. You need to focus on
creating quality content (based on your story) that you know your customers want
and need. The question to ask is, “How will we create quality content, who will do
it, and what will that content be?”
You need to develop a strategy for content, define your messaging, and establish
your systems and governance rules. The chapters in tBook 3 take you through:
»» Create a content strategy. You should have both a content plan and a
content marketing strategy. In Book 3, Chapter 1, you see how to take an audit
of your content to determine what you have and how you can leverage it to
develop a true corporate asset.
»» Develop content types. You want to ensure that you take full advantage of
all the types of content available to you. Book 3, Chapter 2 covers various
types including long- and short-form original content, curated content, and
visual content.
»» Know what your customers want. You learn how marketing funnels help
you reach your entire audience. See how in Book 3, Chapter 3.
»» Write and storytell. You have a story to tell that will connect with your
audience. How do you incorporate it into your content? See Book 3, Chapter 4
to get a feel for the science behind why stories work and how to develop your
own powerful corporate stories.
CHAPTER 1 Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy
9
»» Create processes and systems. You know that without a documented
workflow and procedures, your content marketing efforts fail. Book 3,
Chapter 5 spells out the roles and responsibilities of your content team and
shows you the benefits of using an editorial calendar.
»» Target content for each audience. Your company needs to build a resource
library that customers can access without contacting you. Find out what you
should put in that library in Book 3, Chapter 6.
Developing channel promotions
The fourth C is channel promotion, which you find in Book 5. To have your content
make the greatest impact, you want to decide where and by whom your content
will be distributed. The question to ask is, “How will our prospects and customers
find our content so that they can choose us?”
You want to make your content easy to find and share. You need to know how to
promote your content so that prospects can find it.
»» Use paid, earned, shared, and owned media for maximum reach. Making
the most of all types of media is the only way to ensure that your brand voice
will be heard. Look to Book 5, Chapter 1 to learn about the value of these
types of media and why earned media is gaining in importance.
»» Use search marketing. Although search marketing is constantly changing,
you can’t ignore its value. See Book 5, Chapter 2 to see what you need to
know.
»» Create sharable content. Sharing is key to any content plan. Book 5,
Chapter 3 looks at why you should embrace shareability as a strategy and
borrow from journalism’s five Ws and one H (who, what, why, where, when,
how) as applied to sharing.
»» Add an email marketing campaign. Everyone loves and hates email. But it’s
still a very important tactic to use to reach customers. See what you need to
do to use it effectively in Book 5, Chapter 4.
Deploying check-back analysis
The fifth C is check-back analysis, which is covered in Book 9. The focus here is
on the metrics you choose to determine successes or failure. The question to ask
is, “Have we met our goals?”
10
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Developing Your
Overall Digital Strategy
DON’T BE LEFT OUT
When creating your strategy, knowing what other companies with high growth do is
helpful. According to a study done by Accenture called “CMOs: Time for digital transformation or risk being left on the sidelines” a large percentage of high-growth companies:
•
•
•
Use data and analytics to improve the impact of their marketing (86 percent)
Know that digital channels are of strategic importance (84 percent)
Make sure that customers get a similar experience across all channels (80 percent)
You want to reevaluate your plans and make revisions as necessary:
»» Reassess your business model and brand value. You know that it’s important to frequently assess how things are working. Find out how you can
determine whether business model changes are warranted and whether
you need to revise brand plans in Book 9, Chapter 1.
»» Reexamine your content marketing strategy. Obviously, a determination
of how well your content marketing strategy is working is essential. See why
even failing is a springboard to success in Book 9, Chapter 2.
»» Measure success. If you’re tracking key accounts you need to reassess your
goals for each one. See what you need to do in Book 9, Chapter 3.
»» Track metrics. It’s helpful to gauge potential new opportunities as you track
your metrics. See what’s involved with that in Book 9, Chapter 4.
»» Optimize campaigns for return on investment (ROI). Using split testing
and analyzing the speed of your pages is key to optimizing your campaigns.
Find out how how do this in Book 9, Chapter 5.
So that’s an overview of the Five Cs. Each of the books encompassing them includes
far more information and working plans than listed here. If you do the hard work
required to create and implement your plans, you can expect to be on the road to
content marketing success.
Communicating Your Mission
When you hear the term mission statement, you probably want to skip to the next
section in this chapter. Completely understandable. At some point while you were
in school, you were taught about mission statements and you found it boring.
CHAPTER 1 Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy
11
But the good news is that now, when you look at communicating the reason your
company exists, a mission statement becomes important and personal.
Crafting your statement
In his book Epic Content: How to How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the
Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less (McGraw-Hill Education, 2013),
Joe Pulizzi, “the godfather of content marketing” and founder of the Content
Marketing Institute (see Figure 1-1), offers an easy way to craft a content marketing mission statement.
FIGURE 1-1:
Content
­Marketing
Institute.
Pulizzi says to break down the statement into three parts:
»» Whom you will serve: The core audience you’re targeting
»» What solution you will offer: What you will deliver to that audience
»» The outcome: How it will make them better
12
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Developing Your
Overall Digital Strategy
Here’s a breakdown of what goes into each of these sections:
»» The target audience: Before you determine the characteristics of your
personas (Book 2, Chapter 2 covers personas in detail), you have to identify
the niche(s) that work best for you. Aside from doing market research, you
need to pick a very narrow group to target. When defining their niche, some
companies are afraid to rule out anyone. They think that they may eliminate
an important customer segment. But narrowing down the target is exactly
what makes this tactic so powerful. By defining your niche carefully, you
know that you’re speaking to the people who are interested in hearing
your message.
You can always add segments later, but remember this: When you target
everyone, you don’t connect with anyone.
»» Your solution: This may seem like the simple part of the formula, but it’s only
deceptively simple. You know what your product does. But in your mission
statement, you want to communicate the solution as a promise to meet your
customer’s needs.
»» Your desired effect: In this section, you want to spell out what need your
product satisfies. Clearly identifying this need is key to determining whether
customers believe you fulfilled your promise to them.
As you look at your company’s goals, you want them to align with your content
marketing strategy. If those goals don’t align with your strategy, you need to
determine what revisions to make.
Reviewing real mission statements
Now that you’ve looked at what goes into creating a mission statement, you can
see how it plays out in real life. In her article “12 Truly Inspiring Company Vision
and Mission Statement Examples,” as shown in Figure 1-2, Lindsay Kolowich
gives some examples to work with (http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/
inspiring-company-mission-statements).
You can deconstruct a few that hit the mark by looking at their mission statements and seeing how the formula fits.
CHAPTER 1 Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy
13
FIGURE 1-2:
HubSpot blog.
»» Patagonia mission statement: “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis” (http://Patagonia.com; see Figure 1-3).
•
•
•
Who the company serves: People who love outdoor activities
What the solution is: High quality clothing to fight the elements
What the outcome is: Deliver excellent clothing under superior working
conditions that do not damage the environment
This is an effective one-sentence mission statement that is clear and defines
Patagonia’s commitment to its customers and the environment.
»» Warby Parker mission statement: “Warby Parker was founded with a
rebellious spirit and a lofty objective: to offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially-conscious businesses”
(http://warbyparker.com; see Figure 1-4).
•
•
•
14
Who the company serves: Fashion-forward eyeglass wearers
What the solution is: Designer eyewear at a revolutionary price
What the outcome is: Fairly priced eyewear to customers and a program
that teaches people in underdeveloped countries to prescribe free
eyewear to those in need.
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Developing Your
Overall Digital Strategy
FIGURE 1-3:
Patagonia.
FIGURE 1-4:
Warby Parker.
CHAPTER 1 Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy
15
This is another one-sentence mission statement that succinctly communicates
Warby Parker’s desire to provide well-priced designer eyewear and a commitment to help fund socially-conscious businesses.
»» Ikea mission statement: “At Ikea our vision is to create a better everyday life
for the many people. Our business idea supports this vision by offering a wide
range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low
that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.”
•
Who the company serves: People who want well designed products but can’t
afford expensive items.
•
•
What the solution is: Functional home products at low prices
What the outcome is: Create a better everyday life for as many people as
possible.
With this statement Ikea clearly communicates its desire to help people afford
well-designed products.
These companies make crafting mission statements look easy. But they probably
spent a lot of time and effort to get them just right. A mission statement can help
employees serve their customers and feel pride in their organization. So for both
your employees and your customers, consider adding your mission statement to
your website.
In her article, Kolowich quotes Simon Sinek, author of the book, Start With Why, as
saying, “Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.”
Establishing Your Goals
After you’ve established your mission statement, you can focus on your company
goals. In Book 1, Chapter 3, you take a close look at your business model and create a business model canvas. Doing the exercises in that chapter should prepare
you to articulate your goals. The following sections give you a brief look at how to
formulate goals.
Uncovering your goals
When looking at formulating your own goals, it can be useful to see what other marketers report were their top goals achieved for B2B content marketing. According
to the 2019 report by the Content Marketing Institute/Marketing Profs, (https://
www.slideshare.net/CMI/b2b-content-marketing-2019-benchmarksbudgets-and-trendsnorth-america) (see Figure 1-5), the top organizational
goals achieved by B2B content marketing are the following:
16
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Developing Your
Overall Digital Strategy
»» Brand awareness: 81 percent
»» Educate audiences: 73 percent
»» Build credibility/trust 68 percent
»» Generate demand/leads: 68 percent
»» Nurture subscribers/audiences/leads: 58 percent
FIGURE 1-5:
2019 ­Benchmarks,
Budgets, and
Trends — North
America Survey.
The report indicates that 2019 was the eighth year that brand awareness came in
at the top spot.
Next you find out how to set measures to track your goals.
Picking KPIs
After you establish your goals, you need to develop key performance indicators
(KPIs). KPIs are the measures you choose to help you determine whether you’re
reaching your business goals. You need them to keep your strategy on track. If you
CHAPTER 1 Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy
17
don’t measure yourself against your business goals, you won’t know whether your
content marketing strategy is working and supporting your larger business goals.
To help you think about how to craft your KPIs in relation to your marketing
goals, check out Table 1-1. You can apply the table to your marketing plan as well.
List your goals and then choose some metrics. Then refer to this list when you
check your progress.
TABLE 1-1
Choosing KPIs
CMI/Marketing Profs
B2B Top Goals
Suggested Metrics
Increase brand awareness
Social media shares, social media likes, email forwards,
referral links
Lead generation
Lead nurturing
Blog signups, blog comments, conversion rate, form
completions
Increase engagement
Comments, page depth (how many pages consumed),
downloads, page views, back links, time on site, click
through rate
Grow sales revenue
by X percent
Revenue influenced by content (which content was
consumed before sale), offline sales
Improve customer
retention/loyalty
Bounce rate, followers, retention rate
Encourage customer
evangelism
Social media shares, comments, follower count,
word of mouth
Increase upsells/cross-sells
Measure conversions in shopping cart and on landing
pages, number of conversions
Expanding Your Corporate Mindset
Every company has its own culture. The culture dictates how and why tasks get
done. If your culture is a positive one, you’re probably focused obsessively on
serving your customers, and you’re proud of your reputation. Have you thought
about how your culture, reputation, and customer service impact your content
marketing strategy? You can examine that next.
18
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Does your company have a culture of content (CoC)? Content creation and marketing is front and center in today’s businesses, so it’s no surprise that it could
become part of an organization’s DNA.
The term CoC was popularized by the Altimeter Group’s authors Rebecca Lieb and
Jessica Groopman in their study cited here: http://rebeccalieb.com/blog/2014/
12/04/the-three-components-of-a-culture-of-content. (See Figure 1-6.)
FIGURE 1-6:
Rebecca Lieb.
So what is a culture of content? It’s one in which:
»» Content is championed.
»» Content is shared throughout the organization.
»» People are encouraged to be creative with content.
»» Staff from every department can contribute content.
»» The company has a tolerance for risk and failure with content.
CHAPTER 1 Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy
19
Developing Your
Overall Digital Strategy
Creating a culture of content
Does this sound like your organization? Or a better question might be, “Wouldn’t
you like your organization to function like this?” Trying to move your organization in this direction would be worthwhile. Your organization can benefit from a
CoC in several ways. It can get:
»» Better quality content (and quantity): People who are encouraged to be
creative and become part of a content team create better content and
contribute more often.
»» More content sharing: People who are proud of the content the organization
(and they) are creating are more likely to share it.
»» A competitive edge: A company that champions content and places a high
value on its creation stands out from the crowd.
»» More valuable data to analyze: More and better content provides
valuable data.
How can you foster a CoC? Dawn Papandrea details in her article, “How to
Create a Culture of Content Marketing from the Top Down” (http://www.
columnfivemedia.com/how-to-create-a-culture-of-content-marketingfrom-the-top-down; see Figure 1-7), some of successful entrepreneur Marcus
Sheridan’s (https://marcussheridan.com/) steps for creating a content culture.
FIGURE 1-7:
Column Five
Media.
20
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Developing Your
Overall Digital Strategy
Here are a few of those eight tips:
»» Get buy-in from the top. Make sure to have support from your executives if
you’re going to undertake a content marketing strategy. No project can
survive the disinterest of management.
»» Share the same vision. All good company cultures thrive because they have
a shared vision of what they want to achieve. This is especially crucial for a
culture that needs to rely on content contributions from staff.
»» Appoint a Chief Content Officer. You need a champion to encourage
content marketing efforts. Have a person dedicated to the program’s success.
It’s important to show employees that you’re investing in the program.
»» Support and maintain the content culture. Make sure that everyone on the
team is convinced of the importance of content and keeps the culture at the
forefront.
Most companies that have a content culture agree on one important ingredient:
training. They believe that without training their staff to recognize, create, and
share content of value, they will not succeed.
Thinking about reputation
The importance of reputation is obvious to almost everyone. But you probably
don’t think about how your company’s reputation contributes to the acceptance
of your content and vice versa. When readers see your branded content, they need
to make an immediate decision. They have to decide whether you’re trustworthy
enough to continue reading. If they decide that you’re not, they click away. If they
see a review of your business, they can be swayed by negative comments. But how
much does this really matter to your bottom line?
According to a press release by IC Media Direct, shown in Figure 1-8, “It has been
calculated by the Harvard Business School that each star in a Yelp rating increases
a business’ sales by 5 to 9%. And a bump up from 3.5 to 4 stars on Yelp typically
results in a 19% increase of restaurant bookings during peak business hours.”
That’s quite an impact. Yet companies are typically very lax about reputation
management as part of their content marketing strategy.
CHAPTER 1 Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy
21
FIGURE 1-8:
IC Media Direct.
You need to monitor online content to ensure that your reputation stays intact.
Here are a few habits to consider building into your content marketing strategy:
»» Continually listen. The conversation about your business is going on 24 hours
a day. You need to be ready to respond to anything that could affect your
customer’s perception of you. Make sure to read review sites and other
user-generated content about your business regularly, right along with your
customers.
»» Monitor your brand names and products. Set up alerts for your product
and brand names. You don’t want to miss a brewing problem.
»» Link to all your sites to create a wide perspective. Don’t make your
customers dig for information about you. Be sure to link to all your owned
media and social media sites.
»» Maintain strict content governance. You should have a content governance
system set up. Make sure that your system is in force so that erroneous or
poor quality content doesn’t have a lasting effect on your reputation. It’s just
good common sense as well as a security defense. Why open your company
to lawsuits or negative press?
»» Create and distribute case studies and testimonials. Blow your own horn
so that others can form a positive opinion about your company. Case studies
and testimonials should be a staple on your website.
22
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Get ready to hear something you won’t like: You need to make customer service a
part of your content marketing strategy. Marketers tend not to like thinking this
way because it’s not as sexy as creating great blog posts that get you buzz, and it
requires extra effort.
If your organization takes this section’s advice to heart, though, you will see
­several important benefits including:
»» An increase in customer loyalty and retention
»» Happier, more educated customers
»» A better understanding of your customer’s problems
»» An opportunity to provide real solutions
All these benefits go straight to the bottom line.
Tony Hsieh applied this customer service strategy to his company Zappos (http://
zappos.com), and it was acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion. Perhaps you should
consider trying it.
So how should you apply your customer service strategy to your content marketing strategy? Think for a moment about how you provide customer service
now. You probably provide data sheets, product documentation, email support,
and, if you’re ambitious, social media platform support. But here’s the truth: This
approach is wholly inadequate for the content-intensive world you live in today.
You need to look at your website, your other owned sites, and your social sites to
see how you can focus on adding customer service content to each one.
You likely believe that customers are at the center of your strategy. However,
you might have that wrong. You might be customer centric rather than customer
focused, according to J-P De Clerck in his article, “Content marketing: a customercentric manifesto” (http://www.i-scoop.eu/content-marketing-customercentric; see Figure 1-9).
De Clerck cites Peter Fader’s book Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers
for Strategic Advantage (Wharton Digital Press), which says that customer centricity means focusing on the high-value customer and marketing to that segment. This is not to say that you completely ignore your other customers. It means
that you focus a great deal of effort on the customers with the highest potential
­customer lifetime value. Customer lifetime value (CLV) refers to the profit you
expect to make over the lifetime of a specific customer.
CHAPTER 1 Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy
23
Developing Your
Overall Digital Strategy
Using content to serve customers
FIGURE 1-9:
I-Scoop.
Monetate’s infographic cited in the article is found here (https://www.
monetate.com/infographic/what-does-it-mean-to-be-customer-centric).
(See ­Figure 1-10.) Monetate is a customer analytics firm.
So what should you do regarding customer service content after you identify these
high-CLV customers? You should create content that addresses their specific
needs and distribute it on the following:
»» Support sites: Look at the content you provide for support sites. Is it dull and
boring? Your customers want to be entertained as well as educated. Think
about how you can make this content more appealing.
»» Social media platforms: You may already answer support questions on these
sites, but do you provide links to interesting help content? Probably not. Try to
think about putting links to all the content you create for your customers.
»» Guest postings: You’re probably not thinking about customer service when
you send guest posts. But aiming your post toward customer service isn’t hard
to do. Just make it something that is “in service” to the reader.
»» Webinars: You likely have webinar content that serves customers. Repurpose
it as podcasts or video to spread your message.
Your strategy should include content targeted at helping your most valuable
­customers find the information they need.
24
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Developing Your
Overall Digital Strategy
FIGURE 1-10:
Monetate’s
I­nfographic
­showing what
it means to be
c­ ustomer centric.
Dipping into User Design and Habits
Two additional issues to be aware of when you’re constructing your content marketing plan are the user experience (UX) and your customer’s habits. Both are
related to content in a very specific way:
»» The UX: This UX is not about the buyer journey that the user takes on the
road to making a purchase. (The buyer journey is covered in Book 2,
Chapter 3.) The UX is the experience the user has while navigating your sites
and reading your content. It’s about the design elements you employ to
communicate your content marketing strategy.
»» Habits: Your customer’s habits impact the adoption of your product. When
you know how to attach the use of your product to customers’ habits, you’re
more likely to persuade them to buy. The content you create to get your
customers on board with your products will have a big effect and must be
part of your strategy.
Read on to find out how both of these issues impact your content.
CHAPTER 1 Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy
25
Recognizing the importance of UX
design in your strategy
When you think of developing a strategy, issues about design probably don’t
immediately come to mind. Yet when you look at conducting business online, you
can find evidence of design choices in everything you do. Not only is the product
itself impacted by design, but the way you have customers interact with the brand
is completely driven by design.
This point in driven home by John Moore Williams in his article, “The New
Design Process: Why Designers Should Be Shaping Business Strategy,” in the
InVision blog (http://blog.invisionapp.com/why-designers-should-beshaping-business-strategy/).
Williams makes a very important point that’s worth quoting in full: “Designers
understand the business landscape differently than the business guys. Where an
exec sees lifts in conversion rates, a designer sees a more delightful user experience. Where an exec sees increased time on site, a designer might wonder if
some interactions could produce less friction. Where the business guy sees users,
designers see people.”
Are you guilty of the narrow vision that Williams describes? You do need to think
about metrics. But the key is to keep an eye on metrics and the UX at the same time.
Your user experiences content visually, and design either impedes or enhances
that experience — and enhancing it makes all the difference.
Observing product habits
Most habits develop without you realizing it. You perform some of the same routines every day without much thought. In fact, stopping a habit is more difficult
than starting one, as you’ve probably discovered.
Having the topic of habits may seem strange in a chapter on strategy, but it really
isn’t when you look at how habits impact your customers’ use of your product. Do
you know whether using your product requires a habit change? If it does, you’re
going to have an uphill battle luring customers. Conversely, if you can attach the
use of your product to an existing habit, you will find fostering product adoption
much easier.
An interesting perspective on the benefits of habits as they relate to products was discussed by Dina Chaiffetz in her article series on the InVision blog
(http://blog.invisionapp.com/how-to-build-habit-forming-productsbuilding-on-the-loop/).
26
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Doesn’t that sound good? Habits can help you develop an ongoing relationship
with your customer that will be hard to break, plus you can become a part of your
customers’ everyday life.
So how can you add habits to your strategy? Nir Eyal tackles this question in his
book Hooked: How to Form Habit-Building Products, in which he presents the four
steps to product habit formation.
You can find an example of this process in Nir Eyal’s SlideShare presentation
that diagrams how a Pinterest habit is formed at http://www.slideshare.net/
nireyal/hooked-model (see slide #110).
Here’s how the Pinterest habit is formed:
»» Trigger: First, you need to have both an external and internal trigger that
cause you to use the product. An external trigger might be that you’re reading
your emails online, so going to another site is easy. The internal trigger could
be your boredom or desire to socialize.
»» Action: You log in to a social platform and look around for something
entertaining.
»» Variable reward: While on the platform, you’re rewarded by discovering something of interest, or sometimes you find nothing and you log off. The key to this
reward is that it doesn’t happen every time; it’s on a variable interval schedule.
A variable interval schedule is a concept borrowed from behavioral psychology.
It refers to the fact that you’re more likely to keep going back for a reward when
your reward is given intermittently, rather than each time you do something. If
you’re used to getting a reward every time and then you miss one or two, you
will stop going back. If you’re unsure when you will be rewarded because it’s
variable, you keep trying again. Slot machines work on the same principle.
»» Investment: You make an investment in the product by personalizing it. In the
case of Pinterest, you might pin things and share other pins. You’re not only
investing your time but also building a body of content, so you’re likely to return.
So now you see how easily a product habit can be formed if it has the right
­ingredients. It helps you understand why your friends play certain games until
they drop. You can find more about habit formation by looking at Stanford
­Professor BJ Fogg’s work on changing behavior: http://www.foggmethod.com/.
CHAPTER 1 Developing Your Overall Digital Strategy
27
Developing Your
Overall Digital Strategy
Chaiffetz points out two significant benefits of focusing on habits: (1) when your
product establishes a habit, you establish a permanent relationship with a customer; and (2) if you know about a habit your customer already has, you can
piggy-back on that to become part of the customer’s routine.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Looking at the “attention web”
»» Changing the way we measure
attention
»» Making content easier to consume
»» Using interactive content
Chapter
2
Grabbing the Attention
of Your Customer
D
o you know the thing that all marketers desperately want? It’s
customers’ attention — to what they have to say and sell. Since the advent
of the “always on” culture, the competition for attention has been fierce.
In fact, most of the content created by companies is never seen by its prospects.
It wasn’t always hard to get people’s attention. In the previous century, when you
wanted to get a customer’s attention, you would send him your marketing material and give him a call. The prospect was usually receptive because you were the
keeper of all product information. Those days, however, are over.
But conversations do help develop relationships, and relationships help you get
and keep your customer’s attention. So what can you do to compete with other
producers for consumers’ attention? There is no shortage of content from your
competitors that identifies each one of them as the one to choose. Your content
probably does the same. How do consumers decide?
In this chapter, you look at how getting prospects’ attention involves developing
the kinds of conversations that help your prospects say yes to you. You may or
may not have the opportunity to meet your customers face to face, but you must
engage them with quality content that addresses their needs and provides valuable information.
CHAPTER 2 Grabbing the Attention of Your Customer
29
Focusing on Attention
Unsurprisingly, technology has negatively impacted attention span. The Statistic
Brain Institute defines attention span as “the amount of concentrated time on a
task without becoming distracted” and reports that attention span in 2000 was
12 seconds but has currently gone down to 8.25 seconds.
The Statistic Brain Institute also reports that an office worker checks her email
approximately thirty times per hour. That’s a shocking statistic if you multiply
that by an 8-hour day. Two hundred and forty times a day!
Seeking the “attention web”
So why should the attention span and distractibility of the average customer
­matter to you as a digital marketer? Obviously, it matters because you want to get
your prospect’s attention, and doing so becomes more difficult with each passing
day. In addition, what marketers have come to believe about engagement metrics
(that they consist of measures like page views or clicks) may not be true. That’s
why marketers started to consider whether the time people spend engaging with
content or the scrolling they do might be better ways to measure their interest.
This led to what is called the “attention web” movement that involves selling ads
based on attention measures rather than sheer numbers (of clicks, for example).
An article on Time.com looks at the myths poeple hold about how they consume
online content. Authored by Tony Haile, formerly CEO of Cheatbeat (http://
Chartbeat.com), it’s called “What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong”
(http://time.com/12933/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-web-iswrong; see Figure 2-1).
Haile derived his findings based on an investigation Chartbeat conducted by
reviewing 580,000 online articles. Central to Haile’s argument is that fact that
using the click as the most important measure of attention is flawed. Following
are two of the four myths he presented:
»» Myth: We read what we’ve clicked. This seems like a common sense assump-
tion, but it may not be true. You assume that the reader clicks the article with
the intention of reading it. This may be true, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that
the reader actually spends time reading that article. She may glance at it and
move on. The content marketer rejoices in the number of clicks he gets, but the
reader may actually make no connection with the brand. The content marketer
then creates more content just like it in the mistaken belief that his reader was
engaged. You can see how this would negatively impact your entire content
program.
30
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Grabbing the Attention
of Your Customer
FIGURE 2-1:
Time.com.
»» Myth: The more we share, the more we read. You would expect that a
person would share only an article that he found compelling. This is another
fallacy. People share for all kinds of reasons. Haile found no correlation
between the amount of time spent with an article and its number of shares,
once again shattering the assumption that such articles have hit their target. It
may be more likely that people share articles based on their headlines and
source. From these factors, they make a guess about how pertinent the
content is to their audience.
You probably find this information disheartening, as most serious content
­marketers do. So what can you do to deal with audience members with short
attention spans? Tonya Wells provides some suggestions in her article “Micro
Content: Capturing Readers with Short Attention Spans” on the Infographic
World blog (http://infographicworld.com/blogs/micro-content-capturingreaders-with-short-attention-spans/; see Figure 2-2), a graphic design firm.
Wells suggests using the following:
»» Mini-graphics: These would be graphics that focus on only a piece of data
rather than present a long infographic. This approach has value because it
uses a visual to capture attention but doesn’t make the reader spend a long
time figuring it out.
CHAPTER 2 Grabbing the Attention of Your Customer
31
FIGURE 2-2:
An Infographic
World article
about short
attention spans.
»» Short lists: A short list appeals to someone who is on the go. You impart
information in small chunks, like a bite-sized snack.
»» How-to articles: Again, you can see how to make this format work for a
reader with a short attention span. You can do what you did with the minigraphic and focus on learning how to do one thing.
»» Tips and tricks: This is a popular format for all audiences. By limiting the
content to a few items, you have captured attention but not slowed down
your reader.
»» Frequently asked questions (FAQs): Keep them short and answer one
specific question in each one. That way, you help readers make progress and
don’t slow them down with fluff.
»» Social media posts: By definition, some of these posts should be short and to
the point. Don’t miss an opportunity to write short content that links to a
longer form post if the reader is interested.
Aside from specifically developing content for short attention spans, marketers
and researchers have been looking for ways to improve their metrics so that they
can gauge true reader interest. One example of this effort is the work of Christoph
C. Cemper, the CEO of Impactana http://impactana.com, shown in Figure 2-3.
Impactana version 2 is a software tool that measures buzz versus impact.
32
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Grabbing the Attention
of Your Customer
FIGURE 2-3:
Impactana.
Cemper explains his approach to buzz versus impact in his article on the
­Marketing Land blog, as shown in Figure 2-4 (http://marketingland.com/
measuring-real-impact-content-marketing-131823).
Cemper says that each marketer should ask herself, “Did our content resonate
with the audience?” This is exactly the question content marketers must ask
to ensure that their content strategy is hitting the mark. Here’s the difference
between buzz and impact:
»» Buzz: Buzz is something that all content marketers like to have. It highlights
their brand and gets the attention of their peers. It clearly has value. But if
you’re looking for true engagement, you need to go further than likes
and retweets.
»» Impact: Impact is measured by the amount of attention your reader gives
your content. For example, comments on a blog post or downloads of content
signal real interest. That’s because the reader stopped to write something in
relation to the content or downloaded content that he wanted to look at later.
Cemper’s prescription is to evaluate these concepts on a matrix, as shown in
Figure 2-5. The original matrix can be seen on the article on Marketing Land
(see Figure 2-4). The matrix shows that you obviously want to aim for both high
buzz and high impact, but that average buzz can still be valuable if you have high
impact.
CHAPTER 2 Grabbing the Attention of Your Customer
33
FIGURE 2-4:
Marketing Land.
FIGURE 2-5:
Matrix of
­Christoph C.
Cemper
­explaining
buzz vs. impact.
34
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Looking at attention triggers
Although some may treat attention as an unknowable commodity, there are actually codified ways to capture it. In his book Captivology: The Science of Capturing
People’s Attention (HarperOne, 2015), Ben Parr, former Mashable editor, details
seven triggers that you can employ to get attention.
These triggers have been drawn from the fields of psychology and neuroscience
and help you understand how and why people pay attention (sometimes without
a conscious thought).
Grabbing the Attention
of Your Customer
The triggers are
»» “Automaticity”: This trigger relies on the automatic response people have to
sensory cues, such as color.
»» Framing: This trigger gets people to pay attention by challenging their world
view. This means that when you present something in a way that is unexpected or doesn’t match people’s understanding, you get their attention. You
have framed the problem in a way that doesn’t match their understanding.
»» Disruption: When you use the disruption trigger, you upset a person’s
expectations, which causes them to pay attention.
»» Reward: By using the reward trigger, you tap into the inherent desire people
have for rewards.
»» Reputation: This trigger relies on the fact that people believe the words of
experts and will give them their attention.
»» Mystery: When people are unsure about what will happen or they don’t
understand something, they pay attention until they get an answer.
»» Acknowledgement: People freely give their attention to those who nurture
and support them.
In looking at this list, you probably think that getting attention is less mysterious
than you thought. The problem you have when creating content is the fact that
you have to know your audience well enough to know what constitutes a trigger.
Table 2-1 lists questions you can ask yourself to determine the triggers for your
audience.
CHAPTER 2 Grabbing the Attention of Your Customer
35
TABLE 2-1
Parr’s Captivology Triggers
Trigger
Some Questions to Ask
“Automacity”
Are there specific senses related to your persona that you want to tap into, such as
school colors or songs?
Framing
How can you change your personas’ view to convince them that you are the only right
choice to solve their problem?
Disruption
Can you challenge expectations? Shatter some myths?
Reward
What constitutes a real reward for your personas? For example, perhaps you can offer
access to your new product in advance instead of a discount.
Reputation
Have you done your homework on influencers? (See Book 6 for more about
influencers.) If so, you will know who your personas take advice from.
Mystery
Can you develop a series of stories about your topic that will keep personas coming
back for more?
Acknowledgement
Can you provide valuable customer service that goes beyond the expected?
If you have completed the development of your personas (see Book 2, Chapter 2),
you will be able to ask yourself specific questions directed at each one.
Using these triggers as the basis for your content should help you get more attention for your brand. Give this list of questions to your teams to help guide them.
Making Your Content Easy to Consume
Do you want to help readers consume your content? Then make it easy! Readers
give up in frustration when an article isn’t readable. Readability isn’t just about the
logical sequence or writing style, but rather to the design elements. If your article
font is too small or lacks skimmable headings, you’re sending your reader away.
Reading in patterns
A good starting point for making your content alluring to readers is to understand
how people read. Eye-tracking studies have determined that people use two eye
patterns when viewing content, as follows:
»» The Z pattern: Picture a Z. Using this pattern, readers’ eyes move from left to
right and then down, and then left to right again.
36
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
»» The F pattern: Using an F pattern, readers’ eyes move left to right, and then
back moving from right to left, and then right, and then down. Both patterns
are shown in Figure 2-6.
You can find the original images at Smashing magazine (https://www.
smashingmagazine.com/2015/04/design-principles-compositionalflow-and-rhythm/).
Grabbing the Attention
of Your Customer
To further clarify, three versions of the F pattern as heat maps are shown in
Figure 2-7. The originals can be seen at http://www.nngroup.com/
articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/.
FIGURE 2-6:
The F and
Z patterns.
When you’re composing your blog posts and web pages, it’s helpful to know how
readers will be scanning your content. Using either an F or Z pattern, you know
they will start at the top and read the headline. Then their eyes will scan down and
across in some fashion. Put the most important content in the area of the page
where you know they will look first.
Instead of trying to force your readers to read every word, facilitate their need for
speed. Your readers aren’t likely to spend a long time poring over your ­articles.
According to the Nielsen Norman Group, they’ll read about 27 percent of the
words on a page. Therefore, one of your jobs as a content marketer is to make
your articles easy to skim.
CHAPTER 2 Grabbing the Attention of Your Customer
37
FIGURE 2-7:
The F pattern on
a heat map from
the Nielsen Norman Group.
Considering design elements
and typography
This chapter focuses on holding your reader’s attention by using good design.
So what are some things you can do to help your readers focus their attention?
Consider using the following:
»» Headings and subheadings: You want to make it easy to read your headline.
(For more on the importance of headlines and tools you can use to improve
them, see Book 3, Chapter 4.) But after your readers’ eyes move from the
headline, they’re going to be skimming your headings and subheadings. If you
leave these out, your reader will have to try to pick out words or phrases that
have meaning to them. You shouldn’t make them have to guess what and
where those words are. If you do, you’re banking on the fact that your reader
has all the time in the world to assess your content. Considering the short
attention spans, that’s not likely.
38
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
»» Short paragraphs: Keeping your paragraphs short really helps readers make
progress through your article. When they see a dense article with no breaks,
they’re inclined to click away. It’s not a conscious choice. They make a quick
assessment about how long it will take to read an article, and they either
commit to give it a try or move on.
»» Bullet lists: Some people are afraid to use bullets because they have seen too
many bad examples. If you thoughtfully organize your material (as in this list!),
bullets are a great way to help the reader quickly understand complex topics.
»» Numbered lists: Everyone loves lists. It’s one of the most popular formats on
Grabbing the Attention
of Your Customer
the web. Readers can instantly understand how the material is organized and
gauge the amount of time they need to spend with it. In Figure 2-8, you can
see the effective use of a list right in the blog post by Larry Kim (http://blog.
hubspot.com/marketing/design-content-remarketing-campaigns).
It sets up the content and provides structure to the post.
FIGURE 2-8:
Numbered list
example on the
HubSpot blog.
CHAPTER 2 Grabbing the Attention of Your Customer
39
»» Type size and font color: Designers often forget about differences in readers’
vision. Some readers can’t see tiny type. If the type is in a light color, it compounds the problem. It may look great in the design as a whole, but it can be a
turn-off to many readers. Figure 2-9 shows a great example of an article by
Maya Luke in the Influence & Co. blog that doesn’t require you to squint or
make your text larger (http://blog.influenceandco.com/3-bulletprooftechniques-to-avoiding-writer-s-burnout).You can’t see the font color
in this book, so go to the link here if you want to check it out.
FIGURE 2-9:
Type size and
font color on the
Influence & Co.
blog.
»» Visuals: Using visuals is a well-known way to advance understanding. If you
can provide a photo, a map, a graph, or some kind of diagram, your reader
will more easily connect to it. In the BarkBox blog (https://barkbox.com/),
shown in Figure 2-10, you can see a wonderful example of a picture that
works perfectly with the headline. It demonstrates a love for animals while
displaying the “BarkGood For a Good Cause” banner.
»» White space: The Contently blog is designed to make great use of white
space, as shown in Figure 2-11 (http://contently.com/strategist/
2015/09/04/13-stats-that-should-terrify-cmos/).
40
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Grabbing the Attention
of Your Customer
FIGURE 2-10:
Visuals on the
BarkBox blog.
FIGURE 2-11:
White space on
the Contently
blog.
CHAPTER 2 Grabbing the Attention of Your Customer
41
Deploying Interactive Content
Before moving on from the topic of attention, you need to think aout how to develop
your interactive content. It’s a content type that can really grab your prospects’
attention. This content type is popular because it’s easy to create with some tools.
It’s popular with customers because you don’t have to require an email address.
Some examples of this type of content are
»» Interactive infographics
»» Quizzes and assessments
»» Interactive whitepapers
»» Advanced calculators
»» Polls
»» Interactive videos
»» Interactive shopping catalogs
You gain several benefits from using this type of content, but two key points are
»» Higher potential to develop a long-term customer: When prospects make
an investment in your content by answering questions or providing their own
content, this content becomes their asset. They may return to your site often
and possibly purchase something.
»» Knowledge about your audience: When prospects answer questions, fill in a
quiz, or take an assessment, they’re providing information about themselves.
This information is given to you freely, so they don’t feel coerced.
Several companies can help you create this type of interactive content. Here are
some examples:
»» Ceros (http://ceros.com; see Figure 2-12): This company’s platform helps
you create interactives for formats including infographics, lookbooks (a
collection of photos showing different aspects of something), and microsites.
»» SnapApp (http://snapapp.com; see Figure 2-13): SnapApp helps you create
ten different types of interactive content, including contests, quizzes, and
infographics.
»» Ion Interactive (http://www.ioninteractive.com; see Figure 2-14): This
company specifically targets content marketers and provides support or
services to create interactive content.
42
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Grabbing the Attention
of Your Customer
FIGURE 2-12:
Ceros.
FIGURE 2-13:
SnapApp.
CHAPTER 2 Grabbing the Attention of Your Customer
43
FIGURE 2-14:
Ion Interactive.
44
BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Discovering the “Jobs To Be Done”
concept
»» Understanding what drives revenue
»» Uncovering what your brand means
»» Recognizing brand goals
Chapter
3
Discovering Your
Business Model
and Brand
Y
ou may be asking yourself why a book about digital marketing strategy
has a chapter about business models and brands. There’s a good reason for
that. You can’t really begin to determine your content marketing strategy
until you determine how your company generates revenue and retains loyal customers. After you understand that, you’ll know what your customers find valuable
in terms of products and content. You’ll be able to deliver the kind of content that
keeps your customers engaged and buying.
Oddly enough, some companies don’t really understand the business they’re in.
That may sound counterintuitive, but it’s true. Your company could be one of
them. Many C-level managers fully understand what their product does, but not
what “job” (or jobs) it does for their customers. If you don’t know what job your
customers are hiring your product to do, you won’t fully understand what your
customers want.
In this chapter, you look at what you need to know about your own business model
and how to present your brand effectively.
CHAPTER 3 Discovering Your Business Model and Brand
45
Separating Your Business
Model from Your Brand
This section starts by defining two important concepts: business model and
brand. After looking at the meaning of each of these concepts, you’ll find it easier
to effectively address each one.
»» Your business model: Your business model describes how you make money.
This concept is inward facing, meaning that you look inside your company to
see what drives your revenue. You consider operations, suppliers, and all the
things that go into delivering a sound product.
»» Your brand: Your brand is what your company means to your customers.
Regardless of how you make your money, your brand is defined by the
connections it makes in the minds of your customers. You take into account
things like customer data, retention, and buying habits to determine what
your brand stands for. You can declare what your brand means to your
customers, but you can’t make them believe it. They tell you. On social media,
this message is amplified a hundred-fold.
Here’s an example of how a business model and a brand go hand in hand. Apple
(http://apple.com) makes its money by selling electronic gadgets that help
consumers do things, such as communicate with the world in myriad ways.
­
Apple’s current mission statement reads as follows: “Apple designs Macs, the
best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes
online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone
and App store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices
with iPad.”
When you buy an Apple product, you find that it employs cutting-edge design
and performs well. This helps you see the value of purchasing other Apple products, like an iPad or a MacBook Air. Why? Because they work seamlessly together.
­Furthermore, you see the value of using the iTunes store to buy apps that work
with your products. Apple would be a successful company by virtue of the products
it creates. But by making its products work together in their own “ecosystem,”
Apple has created a strong business model that makes it the world’s most valuable
brand, according to Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/
2018/05/23/the-worlds-most-valuable-brands-2018/#7aae8c14610c ).
Almost no one disagrees.
So what does the Apple brand mean? To understand that, you have to look at
Apple customers. They are extremely loyal and see themselves as belonging to a
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world-wide community of people who think differently. They have a relationship
with the company that can’t easily be damaged. They stand in long lines to wait
for newly released products, hoping to be able to snag the latest model.
Apple clearly understands the role its products play in the life of its customers.
Do you understand your company’s role? This understanding is critical to being
a successful company. If you don’t understand the brand value of your company,
you will have weak content marketing efforts.
Understanding the business you’re in
Christensen illustrates how companies can find the solution to the JTBD problem by detailing how he dealt with this problem for a fast-food company. After
analyzing its customers’ demographics and asking them about their favorite
milkshake ingredients, the marketing department of a fast-food company still
couldn’t figure out how to increase milkshake sales. The company asked Christensen to help. He and his team proceeded to determine what customers “hired”
the milkshakes to do with extensive interviews. (You can find more details at
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html.)
Christiansen’s team found that customers all had a similar purpose for buying
a milkshake. They had long, boring commutes to work. On their commute, they
wanted
»» Something interesting to do with their free hand as they drove
»» Something that would help them stave off hunger until 12 p.m., when they
could eat lunch
These are the jobs they hired their milkshake to do. So, they bought a milkshake
to serve as both entertainment and sustenance.
You can see that by framing the problem this way, the fast-food marketers could
come up with unique solutions to satisfy their customer. They needed to provide a
product that would do the right jobs.
CHAPTER 3 Discovering Your Business Model and Brand
47
Discovering Your Business
Model and Brand
To understand the role your products play in the life of your customers, you need
to grasp the concept of Jobs To Be Done (JTBD). It was developed by Clayton
­Christensen, who is well-known for his theories on corporate innovation and disruption. As his website explains, “Customers rarely make buying decisions around
what the ‘average’ customer in their category may do — but they often buy things
because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve.”
With this information in hand, the fast-food company proceeded to
»» Create thicker milkshakes: The company needed to offer shakes that took
longer to finish so that they would last during the entire commute.
»» Develop more interesting milkshakes: The company added pieces of fruit
to the shake that provided a chewing experience along with the fluid.
The milkshake was already perfect for a customer’s free hand, so that aspect
­wasn’t changed.
Christiansen’s marketing team also uncovered some information about what parents wanted in a milkshake product for their kids. Parents wanted to buy their
kids a milkshake as a treat during the day. This called for thinner children’s milkshakes that wouldn’t take too long to finish. So the fast-food company needed
both thicker and thinner milkshakes on its menu.
You can see that by following the “what job is the product hired to do” line of
exploration, the marketers arrived at very different solutions than they would
have using a classic demographic analysis.
Christensen classifies the reasons for customers to buy as your brand purpose. He
recommends naming your product after that purpose so that customers will know
that your product meets their needs.
Mark W. Johnson (Clayton Christensen’s business partner) says that “you know
an innovation is disruptive when a new population has access to products and
services that previously were only affordable for the few or the wealthy” (http://
blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2015/01/23/weekend-read-disruption-isnot-about-slaying-giants-but-about-serving-new-customers/).
Your offering to the customer should disrupt the status quo. For example, your
product could do the job in a new way, as Airbnb (http://airbnb.com) does by
offering local homes to travelers who don’t want a hotel experience. Or it could be
more convenient but not necessarily less expensive, such as Uber (http://uber.
com), which is a service that quickly provides a taxi when and where it’s needed.
Looking at some popular
online business models
The Internet has spawned a host of business models that couldn’t have existed
before its inception. The following sections describe some of the most popular
ones that don’t require a bricks-and-mortar store to support it.
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Affiliate model
Affiliates are people who agree to sell a product (or service) online for a fee. The
key to creating a successful affiliate business involves developing an audience
interested in a particular topic and then finding and recommending products you
think they will like. The less work that you put in on the effort, the less likely you
will be able to sustain a business that relies on people trusting your recommendations. Affiliates can also promote one specific product and provide content that
supports and enhances it.
Discovering Your Business
Model and Brand
An example of a market in which you can find affiliate products is ClickBank
(http://www.clickbank.com), shown in Figure 3-1. Vendors put their products
on display and list their accompanying fee for a sale.
FIGURE 3-1:
ClickBank offers
affiliate products.
Membership model
A membership model has two characteristics. To run it, you have to
»» Charge a monthly (or annual) fee
»» Supply content that keeps your members interested
CHAPTER 3 Discovering Your Business Model and Brand
49
The content you supply can be informal, or you can organize into specific courses.
One successful example of this type of site is Lynda.com (http://lynda.com),
shown in Figure 3-2. This site was purchased by LinkedIn and has different
­business courses in a variety of formats, with video being the most popular.
FIGURE 3-2:
Lynda.com
supplies course
content under
the membership
model.
Peer-to-peer e-commerce site model (a community
of makers or freelancers)
A peer-to-peer e-commerce model allows people with similar skills to access a
business framework to display and sell their goods or services. This framework
allows people to avoid having to set up their own shopping carts and customerservice mechanisms. A successful example of this model is Etsy (http://etsy.com),
shown in Figure 3-3. Etsy has thousands of vendors who hand-make their goods.
Online retail model
Online retailers are the model you’re most likely familiar with. A vendor offers
goods available online and ships them to a buyer. The vendor may also have a
group of vendors who supply his goods, which he then ships. One good example of this model is 1-800-FLOWERS.COM (http://1800flowers.com) shown in
Figure 3-4, which provides flowers for all occasions. Before this type of vendor
existed, you had to go to a florist and order flowers, which in turn had to be sent
or referred to a local vendor.
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
FIGURE 3-3:
Discovering Your Business
Model and Brand
Etsy is a thriving
example of the
peer-to-peer
e-commerce
site model.
FIGURE 3-4:
The online
retailer 1-800FLOWERS.COM.
CHAPTER 3 Discovering Your Business Model and Brand
51
One variation on the retail model is the “Long-tail” model introduced by Chris
Anderson in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future Of Business Is Selling Less of More
(Hyperion). The long tail refers to a niche audience that buys many products with
low volume. For example, eBay vendors sell a large number of different products
to very niche audiences. A china vendor can have many different patterns of vintage plates, teacups, bowls, and other similar items and sell them to people who
collect one specific pattern. The model works because the niche audience continues to buy for its specific collection.
Service model
This online version of the service model is becoming very popular because it
allows time-starved customers to order something they want and get it delivered quickly without having to leave their house. One example of this is Seamless
(https://www.seamless.com), as shown in Figure 3-5. It’s your local take-out/
pickup restaurant on a grand scale. You go to the site, enter your zip code, and
choose food from local vendors. It’s all handled from one site. Then you have it
delivered or you can get it yourself. Rather than have one option, you can choose
from a variety of local options.
FIGURE 3-5:
Seamless
­ rovides a foodp
delivery service.
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Subscription model
Discovering Your Business
Model and Brand
The subscription model is not new, but the advent of the web has driven it to much
greater heights. With this model, you join a site that offers ongoing access to something you want, and you typically pay a monthly or annual fee. One well-known
example of this model is Netflix (http://netflix.com), shown in Figure 3-6. You
can access the site’s content as long as you remain a member. It’s similar to the
membership model, which requires you to pay a fee to have access to a club or site,
but you might not have access to content.
FIGURE 3-6:
You pay a
monthly fee to
access all
the ­content
on Netflix.
Considering the freemium model
Another business model worth noting is the freemium model, which is used for
online software products. Companies who use this model provide a free version of their software with the expectation that some customers will want to pay
for a premium version. Some business owners are leery of this model because it
involves a risk that doesn’t apply to a standard retail model. Instead of having
customers pay as they go, you need to have the strong conviction that some customers will upgrade.
CHAPTER 3 Discovering Your Business Model and Brand
53
You should consider a freemium model if you’re convinced that
»» Your product is integral to a business process. Tools that make it easy for
a user to do tasks that are part of her daily routine have a good chance of
succeeding. Examples of such tasks are storing and sharing files. Dropbox
(http://Dropbox.com), shown in Figure 3-7, gives you a free account and
charges for additional storage space.
FIGURE 3-7:
Dropbox offers a
freemium service
for storing and
sharing files.
»» Your paying customers will be able to support the nonpaying ones.
In this case, a good example is LinkedIn (http://linkedin.com), shown in
Figure 3-8, which provides a variety of career search services in addition to a
free networking service.
»» You can provide quality customer service to all customers, not just the
premium owners. An example of this is Evernote, the information storing
and organizing platform (see Figure 3-9). The Executive Chairman of Evernote,
(http://evernote.com) Phil Libin, has been quoted as saying, “The easiest
way to get one million people paying is to get one billion people using” (Fast
Company). From the very beginning, he was prepared to give everyone who
used Evernote a quality experience. Currently the company offers a free
version, a Premium version, and a Business version.
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
FIGURE 3-8:
Discovering Your Business
Model and Brand
LinkedIn offers
free and paid
services.
FIGURE 3-9:
Be sure to
add value to
­customers’ lives
with your free
services,
as Evernote
strives to do.
CHAPTER 3 Discovering Your Business Model and Brand
55
WHAT ABOUT FREE TRIALS?
When you think of free, you can’t overlook free trials. Companies use this tactic to entice
customers to try and then buy. A success story using this tactic is Beats Music, the subscription streaming music service (purchased in May of 2015 by Apple and now called
Apple Music). Unlike other services, such as Spotify and Pandora, Apple Music doesn’t
have a free version; members pay $9.99 a month, students pay $4.99 a month, and the
family rate is $14.99 a month.
According to Bloomberg Business, Apple Music was able to turn seven out of ten free
trial users into paying customers without a free version.
Analyzing Your Business Model
Because of the availability of online tools, you have a great advantage when analyzing your business model. All sorts of visual software tools are available to help
you figure things out. The most popular of all the business model tools is the
one presented by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur in their book Business Model
Generation.
The tool is called the Business Model Canvas, from Strategyzer (see Figure 3-10).
To analyze your business model, you use a visual “canvas” to lay out all the components that make up your business. What makes the tool so powerful is that it
prompts you to look at each part of your business and see how it works with the
other parts to bring in revenue. To learn more about the business model canvas,
you can go to https://strategyzer.com/canvas?_ga=1.164112764.256400004.
1437491350.
Here’s a brief look at the components you need to document on the canvas:
»» Customer segments: List the clearly defined niches you serve.
»» Value propositions: This term refers to what you provide to customers to
solve their problems. What are the specific products and services you
offer — the value you promise to exchange with your customers for their
payment?
»» Channels: List the communication (social platforms and so on), distribution,
and sales channels you use to reach customers.
»» Customer relationships: Describe what you do to maintain an ongoing
relationship with each of the customer segments you serve.
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
FIGURE 3-10:
The Business
Model Canvas
from Strategyzer.
Discovering Your Business
Model and Brand
»» Revenue streams: List the ways you make money based on the products and
services you offer.
»» Key resources: Identify the resources you must have to run the business.
»» Key activities: Name the actions you must perform to run the business.
»» Key partnerships: Includes the vendors and partners you need to run the
business.
»» Cost structure: Includes all the money you need to spend (expenditures) to
run your business.
Businesses can have more than one business model at a time. In today’s marketplace, startups and small business owners in particular find having several
revenue streams desirable.
Discovering Your Brand
At company headquarters, your brand is looked at and understood in a certain
way. Often, it can be mixed up with the product itself. But your brand and your
product are two distinct things. The product is created by your company. But your
brand is created in the mind of your customer. It is what customers feel when
CHAPTER 3 Discovering Your Business Model and Brand
57
they use your product, including whether they perceive that your brand is authentic. Because prospects can’t make a face-to-face determination about your company’s truthfulness and ethics, they rely on your content. An authentic brand is
one that seems truthful, transparent, and cares about its customers’ satisfaction.
Want to know what Interbrand (https://www.interbrand.com/best-brands/
best-global-brands/2018/) says are the top five global brands in 2018? They are
(1) Apple; (2) Google; (3) Amazon; (4) Microsoft; and (5) Coca Cola. Not too surprisingly, three out of the five are technology companies. They are cited for their
ability to innovate and adopt change to become more agile.
Benefitting from attention to your brand
Marty Neumeier, a recognized branding expert, says that a brand is “a person’s
gut feeling, because brands are defined by individuals, not companies, markets,
or the public.” As much as people like to think that they choose brands for logical
reasons, all the research on brand choice says that they operate on emotions. It’s
these emotions that you need to identify and respond to.
According to Buffer’s State of Social Media 2016 Report, (https://blog.
bufferapp.com/social-media-2016), marketers using social media say that one
of their key objectives is to increase brand awareness.
Branding is so important because it does the following:
»» Helps you differentiate yourself from your competition. For example,
several tablets are on the market, but in 2018, Apple held the majority share
at 26.6 percent.
»» Can live on while specific products may be phased out. The goodwill that
comes with loving a brand isn’t easily destroyed.
»» Helps customers talk about a brand to their friends and family. You want
the social media army to actively recruit others.
»» Creates loyal customers. Loyal customers are “money in the bank.”
»» Is an asset. Although it seems intangible, brands have equity. Brand names
help products get into retail stores and attract attention.
»» Creates value for employees. Popular brands make their employees proud
and encourage employee retention.
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IS THIS THE APPLE STORE?
Want to know how to recognize a loyal customer? According to Robert Passikoff,
founder of Brand Keys (http://brandkeys.com/about), a branding consultancy,
loyal customers are six times more likely to: “(1) Engage with your brand; (2) Pay
attention to your marketing and advertising messages; (3)Think better of you; (4)
Buy (and re-buy) your products or services; (5) Resist competitive appeals (attribute, benefit or dollar-based); (6) Recommend your product or service to others;
(7) Invest in your company (if it’s publicly traded); and (8) Give your product or
service the benefit of the doubt in uncertain situations.” Doesn’t that sound like
the customer you want to retain?
Try as you might, you don’t really influence what customers experience when
they use your product. You may want them to feel really excited, but the customer
might reply with a yawn. Unless you can refresh the brand in some significant
way, it’s locked in customers’ minds in a particular way.
According to Loyalty360 (http://loyalty360.org), 72 percent of U.S. customers
drop a brand if they have had three bad customer service experiences. Brand
loyalty is great, but you can’t count on mistreating your customers and hoping
they forget.
Knowing your current brand reality
Critical to understanding how to increase brand value is to understand what your
customers think about your brand today. This is something you don’t want to be
guessing about. You can’t improve something unless you establish a baseline.
So what can you do to create a twenty-first century brand that delights customers
and encourages growth? Roxana Strohmenger, Tracy Stokes, and Chelsea Hammond at Forrester Research, created what they call the TRUE Brand Compass
Framework.
CHAPTER 3 Discovering Your Business Model and Brand
59
Discovering Your Business
Model and Brand
An example of a company that didn’t understand its brand was J.C. Penney. In its successful past, J.C. Penney was perceived as a well-priced store where families would
stock up on their clothes for the year. Unfortunately, it lagged behind the times and
competitors overtook it. In 2011, in an attempt to reinvent its brand, Penney’s hired Ron
Johnson, a former Target and Apple executive, to spin some magic in Penney’s retail
stores. Johnson’s goal was to make the stores more like Apple retail stores. His attempt
to revitalize the brand failed, and he was ousted in 2013. Several reasons were cited
for his failure, but the main complaint from customers and management alike was that
he just didn’t understand the brand. They continue to close stores as the brand limps
along, but as of 2017 they still operate 900 stores.
What makes a brand TRUE? It should be
»» Trusted: Is transparent with its customers, including showing its flaws
»» Remarkable: Gets people talking about the brand
»» Unmistakable: Creates a category of one (no one competes with it)
»» Essential: Is irreplaceable in your customers’ lives
These measures can be a recipe for evaluating what your current brand reality is
and how you can redirect your actions. The following table provides some questions you can ask yourself.
Measure
Questions to Ask
Trusted
Do our customers think of us as trustworthy and transparent? What
evidence do we have of that? What are we doing to reinforce our
brand’s authenticity?
Remarkable
Do our customers find us worth discussing with their friends? What
evidence do we have of that? What are we doing to make it easy for
customers to tell about their great experiences with us?
Unmistakable
How well do we differentiate ourselves from the competition? What
evidence do we have of that? Can we list our competitors and describe
the ways we are different?
Essential
Do we have a place in our customer’s everyday life? What evidence do
we have of that? What can we do to make our products become part of
a customer habit?
Earlier in the chapter, multiple business models are described for you to be aware
of. But what about managing multiple brands? You can see that managing multiple brands is a very complex problem. A major company like Proctor and Gamble
has multiple brands and successfully manages all of them. If you’re a small business, you need to think carefully before you spread your resources too thinly to
support more than one brand.
Solidifying the Look of the Brand
So far in this chapter, you’ve learned about issues surrounding what your customers and employees think about your brand. Now it’s time to look at what they
see. Chances are, when you visualize a brand, you either see the product in your
mind, like the iconic Coke bottle, or a logo, like the Nike swoosh. A great deal of
time and effort goes into establishing the look of the brand, and companies don’t
always get it right.
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Considering design components
Design and color play a tremendously important role in the branding of a company. Every year, companies spend millions of dollars to update and refresh their
brand. Here are the design elements that distinguish a brand:
»» Tagline: A tagline can help your potential customer understand the essence
of your brand. Think American Express’s tagline “Don’t leave home without it.”
American Express wants its customers to feel that their credit card is essential
to their everyday life.
»» Design: Design of online properties is a critical component of branding
because it can convey a sense of modernity (good) or irrelevancy (not good!).
Also key nowadays is a design that allows mobile devices to display the design
correctly on smaller screens.
»» Logo: As you see in the sidebar about logos, a logo can be critical to a brand.
Discovering Your Business
Model and Brand
But don’t think that it must be complex. Actually, simpler is often better.
Consider the IBM logo (http://ibm.com), shown in Figure 3-11. It’s nothing
fancy, but it has stood the test of time.
FIGURE 3-11:
The IBM logo is
simple but classic.
»» Icon/avatar: This is the little design that you see in the upper left of a browser
page or website. Because the icon or avatar is viewed so often, it makes a
lasting impression. Don’t overlook its importance.
»» Graphics and photos: Visuals communicate ideas that you can’t express in words.
Your graphics are very important, so stay away from stiff stock photos and clip art.
»» Fonts: Fonts are the lifeblood of brands, but people don’t think about them.
They just accept the feeling they convey. If you think of iconic fonts, you’ll
arguably find none more iconic than Disney’s (http://disney.com), shown in
Figure 3-12. No company would dare use something remotely similar for fear of
confusing its customers or legally infringing on the rights of the particular brand.
FIGURE 3-12:
The iconic
Disney font.
CHAPTER 3 Discovering Your Business Model and Brand
61
CAN AN INEXPENSIVE LOGO SUCCEED?
To answer the question in the heading, if you’re the iconic hot lips logo used by the
Rolling Stones, it can. That logo has been in service for almost fifty years and counting.
Major brands create logos with great care and buckets of money. If you’re a small business of any kind, your funds are generally restricted to paying vendors and meeting
payroll with very little left over to pay yourself. But does the lack of funds matter? Could
an inexpensive logo be just as good or better? That depends on how well your designer
can capture the essence of the brand.
In 1969, Mick Jagger went to the London’s Royal College of Art and asked a fledgling
artist, 24-year-old John Pasche, to create some visuals for his band. Rather than use
Jagger’s suggestion of a Hindu idol, he went with his own instincts. He chose what
he felt was the most outstanding feature of the man in front of him — “the size of
Jagger’s lips and mouth” (http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/
how-mick-jaggers-mouth-became-rolling-stones-legendary-logo-165928).
Pasche got £50 ($77) for his efforts, and the rest, as they say, is history. So don’t be
­discouraged if you can’t afford an expensive, focus-grouped logo. You might be
better off.
»» Color: Color sets the mood for brands. Very few brands have done a better
job of pairing a color with the idea of luxury than Tiffany and its little blue box
(http://tiffany.com).
Using a digital asset management tool
Digital asset management (DAM) companies provide a tool to help you manage
your brand assets online. DAMs provide a central repository for company assets
such as documents, photos, and videos. If you have a small shop, you may not need
a system like this. But if you have multiple assets and multiple locations, using a
tool like this can be a productive way to help your employees manage their work.
WebDAM (http://www.webdam.com/), owned by Bynder, shown in Figure 3-13, is
a well-known digital asset management company. It has a cloud-based system
that makes it easy for your employees to manage your brand assets from anywhere.
IntelligenceBank helps companies manage digital assets (see Figure 3-14). The
company, which is noted for its pleasing visual interface, provides a calendar and
planner (http://www.intelligencebank.com/).
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
FIGURE 3-13:
Discovering Your Business
Model and Brand
WebDAM.
FIGURE 3-14:
IntelligenceBank.
CHAPTER 3 Discovering Your Business Model and Brand
63
If you’re looking for major brand assets like logos needed for blog posts and
other content, you can probably find them at Find Guidelines on the Web (http://
findguidelin.es), shown in Figure 3-15. This is a portal site run by Arno Di ­Nunzio,
whose purpose for the site is “to ease the life of us graphic designers by creating the
largest collection of brand guidelines in one convenient central location, with just
the right amount of functionalities.” It’s a great resource. Rather than have to go to
each site individually, you can find the assets you need in one place.
FIGURE 3-15:
Find Guidelines
on the Web.
Developing Success Measures
for Your Brand
Management expert Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets
done.” In the case of branding, you’re dealing with a set of measurements about
your brand from which you must extract conclusions. The measures that you use
to evaluate your brand are tied to customer perceptions and the actions you take
to fortify them.
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Unlike measuring the number of followers or the amount of Likes you get, these
measures are a bit more complex. You have to determine whether the actions you
take support, advance, and enhance your brand.
Brand measurement can be a bit complex. Book 9, Chapter 1 looks at the fifth
of the Five Cs (see Book 1, Chapter 1 for a list of the Five Cs), called check-back
analysis. This term refers to the notion that for every measure you look at, you
should look back to evaluate the data you collected and possibly revise it. With all
the data available, you should mine it for information that will actually increase
the likelihood of success.
If you are new to digital marketing, it makes sense to develop some gross brand
measures that you know are available and can be evaluated. Following are some
possible measures to choose from. Many measures are available; these are just
suggestions:
Producing Engaging Branded Content
Next you look at branded content. You want to know how to create content that
solidifies your brand awareness. After you have all your brand elements in place,
you need to communicate them at every customer touchpoint.
Marc Blanchard, Global Head of Experience Design at Creative Agency Havas
Worldwide (http://havas.com/) proposed a great framework to help analyze
brand engagement. You can use this framework to figure out how to develop custom content for brand engagement. The model prompts the following questions:
»» Exposure: What kind of content would you like potential customers to see
when they meet your brand?
Unfortunately, you can’t control how a prospect first sees your brand. With all
the social platforms, landing pages, and messaging tools available, you just
hope they find you. But you should give some thought to the possible
touchpoints. You can look at a few basic venues to determine what your
CHAPTER 3 Discovering Your Business Model and Brand
65
Discovering Your Business
Model and Brand
»» General company measures: Market share; ROI; gross revenue
»» Brand awareness: Reach; engagement with social media
»» Brand loyalty: Retention; frequency of purchases
customers will see. Those venues are Google search results, your main
website, and your brand pages on all the social platforms. Make sure that all
the platforms are cohesively branded and convey the standards that you hold
for your brand.
Content suggestions: The content you create for brand exposure should
introduce your potential customer to the solutions you offer. Develop content
like webinars, ebooks, and thought-leader posts that clearly present the value
of your product or service. Demonstrate that you have a community of
satisfied customers that you would like prospective customers to join.
»» Response: What customer emotion does your content trigger?
What do you want your prospects to feel after they learn about you?
Determine what content you need to create to get your prospect moving
in your direction and away from your competitors.
Content suggestions: Offerings such as comparison charts, demos, and free
trials help customers invest time and effort in you.
»» Experience: How do you help customers convince themselves that the
experience you have makes you an expert?
You know that your customers will make an emotional decision about you
and convince themselves that it was a rational one. Make sure to provide
anything customers might need to feed both the emotional and rational sides.
(See Book 3, Chapter 4 for more details about customer motivation.)
Content suggestions: Convincing content can be testimonials that speak to
people’s emotional side as well as data sheets with features and benefits that
assuage the needs of the logical side.
»» Outcome: What action do they take?
You have an intended outcome in mind. Make sure that it’s clear to your
prospects what you want them to do next. Although you wish otherwise, you
may not get them to buy without taking smaller steps first to get to know you.
Content suggestions: Create things like free lead generators (information in
exchange for something) and free newsletter subscriptions to get them to give
you an email address or perform another action, such as attend a webinar.
Monitor how well the content performs, and increase your use of ones that make
a difference.
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Defining the goals of your digital
marketing
»» Utilizing the three main digital
marketing campaigns
»» Learning which digital marketing
campaigns you should employ,
and when
Chapter
4
Deciding which
Marketing Campaign
to Create
D
igital marketing is a broad term that can mean anything from posting an
image of your product on Facebook to crafting an email subject line to
optimizing a blog post for search engine traffic. Digital marketing involves
many seemingly disconnected tactics, and that’s what makes this chapter so
important.
This chapter helps you understand what a marketing campaign is. You learn about
the three different types of campaigns and how and when to use them so that you
can use these strategies effectively in your digital marketing campaigns.
Every business is interested in generating leads, making sales, retaining the customers they have, and selling them more of the company’s products or services.
Achieving each of these goals requires a different approach, however. In this
chapter, you decide what you want your digital marketing to accomplish by identifying your business objectives, because those objectives are what should dictate
the campaigns you construct and, ultimately, the tactics you employ.
CHAPTER 4 Deciding which Marketing Campaign to Create
67
Establishing Marketing Objectives
Before you start a blog, open a Pinterest account, or start gathering email addresses,
you need to choose your business goals. When you know what you want to accomplish, you’ll be able to direct your energy into the right marketing campaigns and
employ marketing tactics that move the needle on the right business metrics.
Here are six common goals that your digital marketing strategy can affect:
»» Increasing problem and solution awareness: Your online marketing can
help prospective customers become aware of something they need, an effect
called problem awareness. Your marketing can also make prospective customers aware that your company provides a solution to a problem — called
solution awareness. Your objective is to help people realize that you can take
them from the “Before” state, in which they have a problem, to the desired
“After” state, in which they have obtained a positive solution.
»» Acquiring new leads and customers: Gaining more leads and customers is a
primary objective of most businesses. Without generating new leads and
customers, your business will never grow beyond what it is now. You need to
bring in new blood to scale your business.
»» Activating leads and customers: If you’ve been in business for more than a
few months, you likely have leads and customers who have yet to buy or haven’t
bought in a while. You can use your digital marketing campaigns to encourage
people to buy from you for the first time, as well as to remind past customers
who haven’t purchased from you lately of the value you bring and why they
should buy from you again. Your digital marketing campaigns can activate these
dormant leads and customers and help keep your business in mind.
»» Monetizing existing leads and customers: Acquiring new leads and
customers is expensive and time consuming. Don’t forget to create digital
campaigns intended to sell more products and services to those new leads
and customers. Monetization campaigns employ upsell, cross-sell, and other
types of offers to encourage more sales from your best leads and customers.
»» Onboarding new leads and customers: New leads and customers deserve
special treatment simply because they’re new. They need to be taught who
you are and how to be successful with what they’ve purchased. To achieve this
goal, create content such as welcome emails or welcome packets that tell
people how to use your product or service, what they can expect, and where
they can go if they need help with their purchase.
»» Building community and advocacy: To move prospects, leads, and custom-
ers beyond a shallow, transactional relationship, you need to build campaigns
that create communities of advocates and brand promoters. One of the most
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
effective ways to achieve this advocacy is through social media, such as
through a Facebook Group or a Twitter page. Here, people can reach out if
they have praise for or questions about your product or service. By creating
an outlet, you help to cultivate a sense of community for your customer base,
which leads to increased satisfaction and loyalty. Find more on social media
tactics in Books 7 and 8.
Defining a Digital Marketing Campaign
Meeting your business objectives and moving a customer through the buyer journey (discussed in Book 2, Chapter 3) from ice-cold prospect to raving fan requires
actions. Those actions, if coordinated properly, are called campaigns. Digital marketing campaigns, as defined in this book, have a set of specific characteristics.
Digital marketing campaigns are
»» Objective based: Digital marketing campaigns are coordinated actions
intended to achieve a specific business goal.
»» Multiparted: Every digital marketing campaign requires assets like content
and landing pages, as well as tools like email software or web forms. But
those assets aren’t enough to ensure the success of your campaign; you need
the ability to make those assets visible. In other words, you need traffic. Yet
another part of every campaign is the measurements you track so that you
can determine how it’s performing.
»» Seamless and subtle: It’s worth pointing out that these multistep, multipart
Deciding which Marketing
Campaign to Create
campaigns are most successful if you walk the prospect gradually through the
buyer journey. To help move people through the buyer journey, you need to
include a call to action (CTA) within your campaign. A CTA is an instruction to
your audience designed to provoke an immediate response. Usually, a CTA
includes an imperative verb to convey urgency, such as “buy now,” “click here,”
“shop today,” “watch this video,” “give us a call,” or “visit a store near you.”
Next, a well-oiled marketing campaign removes the friction between the
prospect and the action you want that prospect to take. An extreme example
is to ask an ice-cold prospect to buy a $10,000 product or service. Such a tactic
would be neither seamless nor subtle.
»» In flux: While the word campaign often refers to an initiative with a short
lifespan, a campaign can be something your business runs for as little as a day
or as long as several years. The advantage of digital campaigns over physical
ones (such as direct-mail campaigns) is that small tweaks and even wholesale
pivots are much simpler in a digital environment. As a result, you can optimize
digital marketing campaigns on the fly to achieve the best results.
CHAPTER 4 Deciding which Marketing Campaign to Create
69
The most important takeaway from this section is that a campaign is a process,
not a single event that is made up of numerous steps and parts. Digital marketing
campaigns might seem complicated to you now, but rest assured that campaigns
can be extremely simple.
PUTTING TOGETHER A GOOD-LOOKING
DIGITAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN
Consider the digital marketing campaign of a company like LasikPlus, which offers the
Lasik corrective surgery for eyesight. As are most companies, LasikPlus is interested in
acquiring new leads and customers for the procedure.
In this company’s marketing campaign, a prospect might first encounter an advertisement, such as the banner ad shown in the following figure.
Clicking the ad shown in the first figure takes the prospective customer to a landing page, shown in the next figure, that explains the benefits of doing business with
LasikPlus and makes a call to action to schedule a consultation.
Source: http://www.lasikplus.com/lasik-affordable-250_quiz
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Selecting the call to action to schedule an appointment takes the prospect to a page
where the prospect chooses the most convenient LasikPlus location for his or her consultation. After that location is chosen, the prospect is taken to a calendar page where a
time for the consultation can be chosen, as shown in the final figure in this sidebar. The
last step in setting the appointment is the entering of name, email, phone number, and
birth date to confirm the appointment.
Source: https://www.lasikplus.com/am/#/Austin/schedule?
latitude=30.352204&longitude=-97.7504
Understanding the Three Major
Types of Campaigns
Although you may have many business goals that you want to affect through
your digital marketing, you’ll find that you can meet most objectives with three
broad categories of digital marketing campaign: Acquisition, Monetization, and
Engagement.
CHAPTER 4 Deciding which Marketing Campaign to Create
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Deciding which Marketing
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But it doesn’t stop there. The LasikPlus campaign continues via email. Separate emails
are sent to confirm the consultation appointment, teach the prospective Lasik candidate
a bit about the procedure, and to remind the prospect of his upcoming appointment.
Also, notice that LasikPlus graduates the prospect from a cold lead to a consultation
rather than asking the person to pay for the procedure immediately after seeing the ad.
This campaign moves the prospect seamlessly and subtly toward the conversion.
Each of these types of digital marketing campaign has a very specific role to play
in your business, as follows:
»» Acquisition campaigns acquire new prospects and customers.
»» Monetization campaigns generate revenue from existing leads and
customers.
»» Engagement campaigns create communities of brand advocates and
promoters.
The following sections explain these types of campaigns in much more detail.
Campaigns that generate new
leads and customers
If your goal is to raise awareness for the problems you solve or the solutions you
provide, or if you’re just looking to acquire new leads and customers, you need an
Acquisition campaign.
The role of your marketing is to help move a prospect, lead, or customer from the
awareness stage of the buyer journey to brand promoter. You deploy Acquisition
campaigns to do the work on the front end of this journey, taking the prospect
from Aware to Converted (see Figure 4-1).
FIGURE 4-1:
Acquisition
campaigns move
prospects from
the Aware to
­Converted stages.
The stages of the buyer journey that Acquisition campaigns complete are the
following:
»» Make Aware: To bring in new leads and customers, you need to reach out to
what amounts to complete strangers. You should structure Acquisition
campaigns to reach prospects who are completely unaware of the problem
you solve or the solutions you provide.
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
»» Engage: The movement from Make Aware to Engage is often accomplished
by providing value to the prospect, usually in the form of entertainment,
inspiration, or educational content, before asking her to buy something or
commit a significant amount of time. This is known as content marketing, a
strategic marketing method focused on creating and distributing valuable,
relevant, and consistent material designed to attract, retain, and ultimately
drive a customer to a profitable action. Content marketing consists of a broad
spectrum of activities and types of content, including blogging, videos, social
media updates, images, and more. Content marketing is covered in more
detail in Book 3.
»» Subscribe: At this stage, the prospect has given you permission to market
to him. At the very least, he has connected with you on social channels
(Facebook, LinkedIn, and others) or, ideally, has become an email subscriber.
The Subscribe state is a critical stage to reach in the relationship because you
can now continue the conversation with more content and offers.
»» Convert: The transformation of a prospect from being merely interested and
subscribed to converted is the final stage of an Acquisition campaign. At this
point, the prospect has placed trust in your organization by giving you either
money or a significant amount of her time. Don’t forget that your marketing
should be gradual and seamless, particularly online, where you must often
build trust with someone you’ve never actually met. If this final stage of your
Acquisition campaign involves a sale, it shouldn’t be a risky (think expensive or
complex) purchase. The goal here is to simply transform the relationship from
prospect to customer.
Most of the campaigns that you create to acquire new leads and customers can
also work to activate leads and buyers who have never purchased from you, or
haven’t purchased from you in a while. Those are Activation campaigns. A healthy
business has a large number of recent and, if applicable, frequent buyers. Deploying campaigns to activate dormant subscribers and buyers is a good use of time
and effort. Book 1, Chapter 5 includes more about these the types of offers that can
activate these leads and buyers.
CHAPTER 4 Deciding which Marketing Campaign to Create
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Deciding which Marketing
Campaign to Create
Note that Acquisition campaigns are not about profit. Although you might be
making sales at the Convert stage, the goal of those sales is not return on investment but on acquiring leads and buyers. This idea can seem counterintuitive, but
keep in mind that customer and lead acquisition is different from monetization.
These two campaign types have different goals, tactics, and metrics.
Campaigns that monetize existing
leads and customers
If your business objective is to sell more to the customers you already have or to
sell high-dollar, more complex products and services and profit maximizers (as
described in Book 1, Chapter 5), you need a Monetization campaign. In short, the
goal of a Monetization campaign is to make profitable sales offers to the leads and
customers you acquired with your Acquisition campaigns.
Don’t build a Monetization campaign first if your business has no leads, subscribers, or existing customers. Monetization campaigns are meant to sell more, or
more often, to those who already know, like, and trust your business.
The stages of the buyer journey completed by Monetization campaigns and shown
in Figure 4-2 are the following:
»» Excite: You target Monetization campaigns at customers who have already
spent time learning something from you, or have already purchased something from your business. Savvy digital marketers build campaigns that
encourage prospects or customers to get value from the interactions they’ve
already had with your business.
»» Cause customers to ascend: For every group of people who purchase
something, some percentage of them would have bought more, or more
often, if given the chance. For example, for every buyer of a Rolex watch,
some percentage would buy a second (or third or fourth!) watch, or would buy
the most expensive Rolex watch if presented with the opportunity. This
concept is critical not only to digital marketing but also to your business goals.
Your Monetization campaigns should capitalize on this concept by making
offers that increase the value of your existing leads and customers.
FIGURE 4-2:
Monetization
campaigns ­create
­excitement
and cause
­existing leads
and ­customers
to ascend to a
higher level of
purchasing.
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Campaigns that build engagement
If your business objective is to successfully get new customers on board and move
new leads and customers from being prospects to fans of your brand, or to build
a community around your company, brand, or offers, you need an Engagement
campaign. The most beloved companies create online opportunities for customers and prospects to interact with each other and with the brand. Companies that
build engagement into their marketing enjoy the benefits of customer interactions that go beyond the simple transaction of buying goods and services.
The stages of the buyer journey completed by Engagement campaigns and shown
in Figure 4-3 are the following:
»» Advocate: You can create marketing campaigns to give your best customers
the ability to recommend your business through testimonials and customer
stories. These advocates defend your brand on social media and recommend
your products and services to their friends and family when prompted.
»» Promote: Customers who actively seek to promote your business are worth
FIGURE 4-3:
Engagement
campaigns create
brand ­advocates
and brand
promoters.
Creating brand advocates and promoters begins with having a superior product or
service, coupled with a customer service experience to match. Word travels fast in
the digital world, and if you aren’t providing value, you find that your marketing
creates the exact opposite of advocates and promoters. Instead, your marketing
only speeds the spread of information about the poor experiences your customers
have had. Before attempting to build engagement and community, optimize the
amount of value you bring to your customer.
CHAPTER 4 Deciding which Marketing Campaign to Create
75
Deciding which Marketing
Campaign to Create
their weight in gold. These are the customers who create blogs and YouTube
videos about your products and services. They tell the story of your brand and
their success with it on social channels, and do everything they can to spread
the good word about the value you provide. These people are your brand
advocates.
When done right, Acquisition, Monetization, and Engagement campaigns
­seamlessly move people through the buyer journey. These three strategies help
people go from their “Before” state in which they have a problem to their desired
“After” state of having gained a positive outcome through your product or service. Figure 4-4 shows all the stages a person goes through, ideally, in the buyer
journey. Use the Acquisition, Monetization, and Engagement tactics discussed in
this chapter to help move people down this path.
FIGURE 4-4:
Use Acquisition,
Monetization,
and Engagement
campaigns to
move people
through the
buyer journey.
Balancing Your Marketing
Campaign Calendar
You may be thinking, “Which campaign should I be using in my business?” This
is the wrong question, however. The right question is, “Which campaign should I
be using in my business right now?” Every business should deploy each campaign
type at different times to different people. So consider a few questions:
»» Do you want more leads and customers for your business?
»» Do you want to sell more to the customers you have or activate customers
and leads who haven’t purchased in a while?
»» Do you want to turn customers into raving fans willing to buy anything you
offer, and give you testimonials and referrals?
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
The answer, of course, is yes on all accounts.
But this point is critical to understand: One campaign can’t replace or do the job
of another. An Acquisition campaign can’t do the job of a Monetization campaign.
Likewise, a Monetization campaign can’t do the job of an Engagement campaign.
Each campaign excels at meeting one particular goal. To maintain a healthy, sustainable business, you need to allocate time on your calendar for all three major
campaign types.
If you run nothing but Acquisition campaigns, you’ll never be profitable. If you run
nothing but Monetization campaigns, you’ll never add new leads and customers
and, as a result, you won’t grow. If you run nothing but Engagement campaigns,
you’ll have a loyal audience, but you’ll never convert your audience into customers.
If you have no sales but do have a massive following on social media, a popular
blog, or podcast with lots of subscribers or downloads, you have mastered the
art of creating Engagement campaigns. The good news is that you have accomplished one of the most difficult tasks in digital marketing: building an audience.
By adding Acquisition and Monetization campaigns to your marketing mix, you
can transform that audience into a profitable business.
Choosing the Campaign You Need Now
»» If you’re starting a brand new business or have no existing leads or subscribers, build an Acquisition campaign.
»» If you have existing leads and customers, but they aren’t buying as much as
you would like, build a Monetization campaign.
»» If you’re happy with the number of leads and subscribers and the monetization of those leads and customers, build an Engagement campaign.
If you simply don’t know where to start, begin by building an Acquisition campaign, because every business needs to understand how to acquire fresh leads and
convert new buyers. In the rest of this book, you can find a number of ways to
develop awareness for your brand, products, and services and convert that awareness into leads and customers.
CHAPTER 4 Deciding which Marketing Campaign to Create
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Your business needs all three campaign types: Acquisition, Monetization, and
Engagement. To run a sustainable, healthy business, you need to be acquiring new
leads and customers, monetizing them, and engaging customers who advocate
and promote your brand. That said, if you’re new to creating digital marketing
campaigns, you should focus on building a single campaign first:
Viewing Your Digital Marketing
through the Campaign Lens
From this point forward, plan your digital marketing strategy and tactics by
aligning them with the goals of the three major types of campaigns: Acquisition,
Monetization, and Engagement. Never again will you decide to open a new social
media account without knowing the ultimate goal behind it. Most entrepreneurs
and marketers who are frustrated by digital marketing don’t see the big picture.
Frustrated digital marketers don’t understand, for example, that blogging is an
outstanding tactic for growing awareness but less effective for monetization.
They don’t realize that posting and communicating with customers on a business
Facebook page can create an engaged community, but better, more effective ways
to generate leads and customers are available.
As you continue on your quest to master the art and science of digital marketing,
stay focused on what really matters: growing the business.
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Gaining more leads by deploying the
gated offer
»» Turning leads into customers
»» Increasing your bottom line
Chapter
5
Crafting Offers That Sell
W
hether you’re asking people to buy something, give you their contact
information, or spend time reading your blog, you’re making an offer.
The way in which you make your offers — and perhaps more important, the sequence in which you make them — will make or break you online.
You should think of creating and nurturing relationships with your customers in
the same way that you develop relationships with your friends and family. Your
business might sell business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C),
but all businesses sell human to human (H2H). Real, individual people are buying
your products and services.
Consider how perfect strangers become a married couple. The marriage proposal
is an offer that is made after a sequence of other offers are made and deemed successful by both parties. Sure, the occasional marriage proposal on the first date
occurs, but most relationships begin with a series of positive interactions over a
period of time.
Although most people aren’t likely to propose marriage on a first date, many
businesses do the equivalent of that with their prospects. They ask cold prospects
to buy high-ticket, complex, and otherwise risky products and services before
the relationship is ready for that offer. On the other hand, a customer who has
received tremendous value from your company over a period of time is much more
likely to make a high-dollar, complex, or otherwise risky purchase.
CHAPTER 5 Crafting Offers That Sell
79
This chapterhelps you to know the different types of offers you can make, the
goals of those offers, and the order in which you should present them to prospective, new, and loyal customers. The offers explained in this chapter focus on
Acquisition and Monetization campaigns (discussed in Book 1, Chapter 4).
Offering Value in Advance
Doing business online is different from doing business in person or even over the
phone. In many cases, the prospective customer has no further information about
your business than what is presented to her online. To acquire new leads and
customers, you need to build trust and lead with value to build a relationship with
your prospects or customers.
A successful relationship is a two-way street. Both sides of the relationship must
benefit from the relationship, and because your company wants to begin this new
relationship with a prospect, it makes sense for you to provide value first. Prospects won’t become loyal customers if you don’t first provide some value that
builds trust in advance of asking them to buy. The good news is that you can provide this value with something as simple as an insightful, informative blog post or
podcast that helps them solve a problem. You offer this value for free and with no
strings attached to begin a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship.
Acquisition offers that lead with value are entry point offers, or EPOs. An EPO in a
dating relationship equates to offering to buy someone a cup of coffee. This coffee
offer, which has begun many healthy dating relationships, is a relatively risk-free
proposition that provides value upfront. When your goal is to acquire a customer
(and not a spouse), the EPO is a way of allowing large amounts of prospective customers to get to know, like, and trust your business without much risk.
There are three types of EPOs:
»» Ungated: You usually present this type of offer in the form of a blog post,
video, or podcast, and it doesn’t require contact information or a purchase
to get value.
»» Gated: A gated offer requires contact information (name, email address,
and so on) to get value.
»» Deep discount: This offer requires a purchase but at an extreme discount,
usually 50 percent or greater.
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
The goal of your marketing is to transform people from being completely unaware of your products or services to being raving fans who promote your products
and services to anyone who will listen. The foundation of the relationships you
build with your customers is built on offers that provide value in advance of the
purchase.
Designing an Ungated Offer
Offers that require no risk on the part of prospective customers are the most powerful way to begin to cultivate strong relationships with customers. An ungated
offer such as an informative article, video, or podcast gives value without asking for contact information or a purchase. That said, these are still offers. You’re
offering value to prospects in exchange for their time. And for many people, no
other resource is more precious than time.
The value provided by the business is generally made available to prospects using
content such as blog posts, social media updates, or videos. Successful digital
marketers make free content available that provides one of the following values:
»» Entertainment: People pay a lot of money to be entertained, and content
that makes a person laugh is content that is likely to be remembered. It’s why
commercials try to make you laugh (think the gecko from Geico or Flo from
Progressive); they have only 30 to 60 seconds to cut through all the noise and
get you to remember their product or service. Poo-Pourri’s video advertisements on YouTube and Friskies’ and Buzzfeed’s “Dear Kitten” campaigns are
prime examples of marketers providing entertaining content that gets their
message across.
»» Inspiration: People are highly moved by content that makes them feel
something. The sports and fitness industry taps into this sentiment with
taglines like “Just do it,” by Nike, or Fitbit campaigns showing everyday people
(as opposed to celebrities and professional athletes) achieving their goals
using Fitbit. Weight-loss businesses also use inspirational content by using
successful customer testimonials and “before” and “after” images.
»» Education: Ever go to YouTube to watch a how-to video? From DIY projects to
how to rebuild a car engine, you can easily find educational content online.
People want knowledge, and providing it helps build trust. Entire blogs, sites,
YouTube channels, and businesses are built around educating people, to great
success. That’s why Wikipedia gets roughly 16 billion page views a month.
CHAPTER 5 Crafting Offers That Sell
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Crafting Offers That Sell
It pays to provide tremendous value to your prospective customers when you’re
trying to gain their trust. This idea can seem counterintuitive to some people
because they don’t see the immediate return on this investment.
The first two value propositions (entertainment and inspiration) can be difficult
to execute. But the third is within the grasp of every company.
The production of content by brands is at an all-time high. An absolute glut of
content is produced on blogs, YouTube channels, and social media sites every day.
That said, an insatiable demand still exists for great ungated content. Don’t make
the mistake of thinking that because this content is free, it doesn’t deserve the
time and energy of your other offers. An ungated offer is, in many cases, the first
transaction that a prospective customer will have with your company, and you
should make it a successful one.
Designing a Gated Offer
To graduate someone from the stage of prospect to lead, you need a gated offer
that requires prospects to submit their contact information to receive value. A
gated offer provides a small chunk of value that solves a specific problem for a
specific market and is offered in exchange for the prospects’ contact information.
That contact information is typically an email address, at a minimum. Returning to the dating relationship analogy earlier in the chapter, a gated offer is the
equivalent of a first date. A gated offer might take the form of a white paper, a
case study, or a webinar. For example, Figure 5-1 shows how OpenMarket makes
valuable information available in the form of a whitepaper that requires contact
information.
FIGURE 5-1:
OpenMarket
asks for contact
information in
exchange for this
white paper.
Source: https://go.openmarket.com/enterprise-sms-solutions-ebook/?utm_source=google&utm_
medium=ppc&utm_campaign=BL%7CUS%7CGeneric%7CSMS%7CBroad&infinity=ict2~net~gaw~ar~
312516238453~kw~%2Bmobile%20%2Benterprise%20%2Bmessaging~mt~b~cmp~BL%7CUS%7CGeneric%
7CSMS%7CBroad~ag~mobile%20enterprise%20messaging&gclid=CjwKCAiAl7PgBRBWEiwAzFhmms
LWMdQDCfJxov2tpmyKweQjmLETpQq_v5EHfbGrqQe9bR2A1qNbZhoC5isQAvD_BwE
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BOOK 1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Revisit the definition of a gated offer (“a gated offer provides a small chunk of
value that solves a specific problem for a specific market and is offered in exchange
for prospects’ contact information”) — and pay particular attention to the
“specific” parts. Specificity is the key to a successful gated offer because it
makes your offer more relevant to your audience. A lead form that simply states
“­Subscribe to our newsletter” is not a gated offer that will get you high conversions because it doesn’t solve a specific problem. You can convert your gated offer
prospects by making the offer specific in terms of problem-solving, which will
make your gated offer more relevant to your audience.
Zeroing in on what matters
But what does making the offer specific and relevant entail? High-converting
gated offers include one, or a combination, of the following five aspects, in a
specific form:
»» A promise
»» An example
»» A shortcut
»» A solution
»» A discount
Including at least one of these five items will help your conversion rates. The following sections take a look at each of these items.
Making a specific promise
Making a specific promise is one of the simplest things you can do to increase
the number of leads you receive from a gated offer. Look at the offer that you’re
delivering and think about how you can make the benefit of the offer more evident.
Consider how you can speak to the specific desired end result of your prospect.
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Crafting Offers That Sell
A gated offer is an exchange in value. No money changes hands; instead, you provide your new lead something of value in exchange for the right to contact the lead
in the future. Gated offers are free, and a common notion among digital marketers
is that because they’re giving the gated offer away for free, the product or service
offered doesn’t have to be of high quality. That’s a mistake. Free does not mean
low quality. When someone exchanges his contact information and gives you permission to follow up with him, he has given you value, and a transaction has taken
place. This prospect has given you something that’s typically private, as well as
some of his time and attention. You need to return that value if you hope to build
the relationship that is required for lifelong customers. The end goal of a gated
offer is to gain leads so that you can nurture them into customers over time.
Craft a clear promise and then make sure that your promise is in the title of your
gated offer. Generic or clever titles generally decrease the conversions on your
gated offer. Many marketers are guilty of coming up with cutesy titles or using
industry jargon in the title that your market may not understand. In your gated
offer’s title, talk less about your product and more about your target audience.
Specifically communicate, in the gated offer’s title, the benefit the gated offer will
provide that target audience. Speak to the conversation that is going on inside the
mind of your customer, not the one that you’re having around the business table.
Ask yourself, what are your target audience’s concerns, fears, or desires? Think of
the desired end result that your customer is seeking, and put that in the title. The
gated offer shown in Figure 5-2 delivers a specific promise that resonates with
its market.
FIGURE 5-2:
Copyblogger’s
gated offer
clearly states
what ­people
can expect
when they input
their ­contact
information.
Source: http://my.copyblogger.com/free-membership/
Giving a specific example
The best way to give a specific example in your gated offer is to deliver it in the
form of a case study. If you have examples of real customers and prospects who
have overcome problems with your product or service, these can work well as
gated offers.
For instance, if your company sells surveillance cameras to universities, you might
create a case study entitled “How State University Reduced Campus Crime by
73 Percent” that details how the university used surveillance camera technology
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Offering a specific shortcut
A gated offer that can save a person time is appealing and often converts well.
For example, a gated offer that delivers a list of healthy snacks a person can eat
throughout the day is a useful shortcut for someone looking to eat a more nutritious diet.
Answering a specific question
The fourth way you can make your gated offer more specific is by raising and
answering a specific question. If the answer to the question is valuable, your prospects opt in to get the answer to that specific question, and after you’ve answered
the question, you will have delivered on your promise and helped to establish
yourself as an authority on the subject, which in turn helps build trust and moves
the prospect closer to becoming a customer.
Delivering a specific discount
Price discounts can be a great way to spur sales, and many companies offer coupons that slash prices in the hope of creating a buying frenzy. But instead of handing out discounts, consider asking a prospect to opt in to receive the discount. For
instance, your gated offer might say, “Join our Discount Club and receive 10% off
any order.” This wording is effective because it specifically tells the prospect how
much she’ll save.
Generating leads with educational content
Your gated offer can take five different forms. These gated offers offer value by
educating the lead on a particular topic related to your brand while also highlighting features of a solution, product, or service you provide.
Your gated offerdoesn’t have to be the length of a Tolstoy novel. Besides being
ultraspecific, gated offers should be easy to consume — they should not be a
14-day course or a 300-page book. Rapid consumption of the gated offer is important because you want to provide value to your lead as quickly as possible. The
faster your gated offer provides value, the quicker a lead can become a paying
customer. Because most gated offers can be sent digitally, they can be delivered
instantly, which allows the lead to receive the value of the gated offer quickly. Ideally, prospects receive value from your gated offer within minutes of giving you
their contact information. Speedily delivering value helps to build a positive relationship with leads, as well as to quickly move them through the buyer journey.
(Turn to Book 2, Chapter 3 for more information on the buyer journey.)
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to reduce acts of crime on the State campus. This headline clearly states the benefit and uses an example to add specificity to the gated offer.
Free reports
Reports (also called guides) are among the most common types of gated offers
and are usually mostly text and images. Reports usually offer facts, news, and
best practices that are relevant to your industry and your target market. If you
use a report as your gated offer, however, be careful. Reports can be lengthy and
complex, thus they often take more time to be consumed, which means that the
report will take longer to deliver on its value. Therefore, whenever possible, keep
your reports as succinct and specific as possible so that they can quickly deliver
their value and help to establish or reinforce a positive relationship with your lead
or customer.
Whitepapers
As is true of a report, a whitepaper is an authoritative guide that concisely informs
readers about a complex issue and aims to help leads understand an issue, solve a
problem, or make a decision. Although the whitepaper helps to educate your prospects, it also helps to promote your business’s products or services. Whitepapers
can often be very effective at generating business-to-business (B2B) leads.
Primary research
Primary research is research that you or your business collects. It can include
interviews and observations. When you take the time to create new research,
you’re providing a service and saving others from having to do their own primary
research, which is why people opt in to a gated offer of this nature.
Webinar training
If you’re an expert in your field, or can partner with one, you can host an online
training via a webinar that teaches or demonstrates a topic that is relevant to both
your brand and to your target audience. You create a gated offer that requires
prospects to fill out a registration form for the webinar, thus capturing prospects’
contact information and allowing you to follow up with them after the webinar
takes place.
Sales material
In some cases, the most desired pieces of information for your market are pricing
and descriptions of your products or services. This information helps people who
are interested in buying your product or service make informed decisions. The
sales material gated offer tends to be longer, in text and content examples such
as images or customer testimonial videos, than the other examples in this chapter
so far. However, this length is necessary because a person generally needs more
information before making a purchase, especially if a big-ticket item is involved.
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IKEA provides a wonderful example of the sales material gated offer. The Scandinavian chain collects contact information in exchange for its catalog, which lists
all its products. Figure 5-3 demonstrates IKEA’s gated offer, and because IKEA
can deliver its catalog digitally, it speeds up the delivery of value to the new lead.
FIGURE 5-3:
IKEA’s sales
catalog is an
ideal example of
a sales material
gated offer.
Source: https://info.ikea-usa.com/catalog/
Generating leads with tools
Tools make powerful gated offers because they often deliver value much faster than
the educational gated offers discussed in the previous section. Although whitepapers, reports, and case studies require someone to invest time in order to receive
value, a tool is often immediately useful.
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However, this also means that anyone who opts in is more likely to be a qualified
lead. A qualified lead is someone who is actively seeking more information about
your products or services because he or she is interested in buying from you. (An
unqualified lead may not have been nurtured enough to make a purchase yet, or
isn’t sure of what your company does or even what solution he or she seeks.)
Handout or cheat sheet
Though similar to a free report, both handouts and cheat sheets provide a different value to prospects. A handout or cheat sheet is generally short (one page
or so) and cuts straight to an ultraspecific point, making the information easily
digestible. You can deliver handouts and cheat sheets as checklists, mind maps, or
“blueprints,” to name a few examples. Figure 5-4 shows an example of a handout
as a gated offer.
FIGURE 5-4:
A handout is a
prime example
of useful content
that can be gated.
Source: https://www.leadpages.net/blog/blogging-for-businesses-
should-you-blog/
Resource list
If people are learning to do something that you’re an expert in, chances are they’ll
want to know what tools you’re using to get it done. This type of gated offer makes
a list of tools or resources (be it of apps, physical products, hardware, or other
items) available to the new lead or prospect. The toolkit or resource aggregates the
list so that the lead doesn’t have to keep searching for more information.
Template
A template is the perfect example of a proven, well-tested shortcut to better
results and can make a tremendous gated offer. A template contains a proven pattern for success that requires less work on the part of the person using it. It might
come in the form of a spreadsheet preconfigured to calculate business expenses.
Or it can be a layout for designing a custom home. Templates make powerful gated
offers because the prospect can put the tool to immediate use.
Software
Software can work well as a gated offer. You might, for example, offer full access
to a free software tool that you developed or a free trial (that lasts for 14 days,
perhaps) of your software in exchange for an email address. Software companies
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Discount and coupon clubs
Discount and coupon clubs offer exclusive savings and early access to sales. This
is an effective type of offer that acquires contact information and allows you to
continue the conversation by reminding members of specials and rewards available to them.
Quizzes and surveys
Quizzes and surveys are fun and engaging for people to take and can be a great
way to generate new leads. For instance, a beauty company might offer a “What’s
Your Skin Type” quiz. These types of content are intriguing to members of your
market because they want to know the results of the quiz or survey. To obtain the
results of the quiz or survey, the prospect must first opt in by entering an email
address. If the quiz or survey results provide value to your market, this type of
gated offer can be powerful.
Assessment
You can develop a gated offer that assesses or tests prospects on a particular subject. At the end of the assessment, offer prospects a grade and information on
actions they can take to improve their grade, which would likely be a tool or service that you provide. For example, this assessment can serve as a rubric for grading a blog post. Figure 5-5 shows an assessment offer that has been generating
leads for HubSpot, a company that sells marketing software, for years. Leads can
use the assessment from HubSpot to grade their marketing and make it better.
Filling out the gated offer checklist
You can improve your overall level of success by making effective gated offers
with the eight point checklist in this section. You don’t have to check off every one
of the factors in the checklist, but if you find that your gated offer meets very few
of these criteria, you have reason to be concerned.
Point 1: Is your offer ultraspecific?
The more specific the promise of your gated offer is, the better it will perform
after you provide that promise. By delivering on your promise, you have given
value. This, of course, assumes that the promise you’re making is compelling to
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often offer a free trial of their software as a gated offer. A software gated offer
can turn a lead who is on the fence about purchasing the product with a risk-free
means of acquiring it, while also providing the company a way to follow up with
that lead.
the market you’re approaching. Make sure that your gated offer isn’t vague and
that it offers an ultraspecific solution to an ultraspecific market.
FIGURE 5-5:
HubSpot
­generates leads
with its gated
offer of its
­“Website Grader”
assessment.
Source: https://website.grader.com/
Point 2: Are you offering too much?
Believe it or not, your gated offer will perform better if it delivers on “one big thing”
rather than a number of things. Your prospects live in a multitasking world, so you
want to be sure that your gated offer focuses on one topic or theme and provides
one path for your lead to take. If you include too many paths or offers, your leads
can get distracted and go off course as they try to follow all the ideas presented in
your gated offer, thereby causing them to not opt in. If possible, offer a single solution to a single problem rather than numerous solutions to numerous problems.
Point 3: Does the offer speak to
a desired end result?
The members of your market are searching for solutions. What does your market
really want? If you can craft a gated offer that promises that solution, prospects
will gladly give you their contact information (and their attention) in return.
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Your market wants a solution and wants it now. Establish and communicate how
long it will take your leads to consume and derive value from your gated offer so
that they know what to expect. If it takes days or weeks, your gated offer is not
delivering immediate gratification — not by a long shot.
Point 5: Does the offer shift the relationship?
The best gated offers do more than inform; they actually change the state and
mind-set of your prospects so that they’re primed to engage in business with your
company. After your leads have taken advantage of your offer, determine whether
the value it provides will actually teach the leads how and why they should trust
and buy from you. For example, if you sell gardening tools and supplies, a checklist entitled “15 Tools You Need to Create a Successful Container Garden” educates
prospects on the tools they need while simultaneously moving them closer to
purchasing the products you sell.
Point 6: Does the offer have a high
perceived value?
Just because your gated offer is free doesn’t mean that it should look free. Use good
design through the use of professional graphics and imagery to create a gated
offer of high perceived value in the mind of your lead.
Point 7: Does the offer have a high actual value?
The right information at the right time can be priceless. The gated offer that
delivers something priceless will enjoy very high conversion rates, but if you’re
promising value, you have to deliver on it. A gated offer has high actual value when
it lives up to its promise and delivers the goods.
Point 8: Does the offer allow for rapid
consumption?
You don’t want your gated offer to be a roadblock in the buyer journey toward
becoming a customer. Before customers buy from you, they want to receive value
from your gated offer. You want the gated offer to help move the lead to the next
step, so ideally the gated offer should deliver value immediately. In other words,
avoid long ebooks or courses that take days or months to deliver their value.
Why is it important that your gated offer be quickly and easily consumable?
Because after your gated offer has been consumed, you want to make the next
offer whenever possible. There is (usually) no better time to make an offer than
directly after someone has taken a prior offer. However, few will buy from you if
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Point 4: Does the offer deliver
immediate gratification?
they haven’t received the value from the last offer you made — your gated offer.
So be sure that your gated offer quickly delivers value, allowing you to then make
an offer to purchase something.
Designing Deep-Discount Offers
Acquiring leads is the goal of the gated offer discussed in the previous section,
but how do you acquire buyers? Remember that the key to success online is the
sequence of the offers you make to new leads and customers. The best way to
acquire buyers is by making an offer at such a deep discount that it is difficult
to refuse. A deep-discount offer is an irresistible, low-ticket offer made to convert
leads and cold prospects into buyers.
The goal of a deep-discount offer is not profit. In fact, selling deep-discount offers
may come at a net loss to your company. Offering deep discounts may therefore
seem counterintuitive, but the goal of this type of offer is to acquire buyers. Deepdiscount offers change relationships; they turn a prospect into a customer, and
that’s a big deal. After a prospect makes a successful purchase with your company,
she is far more likely to buy from you again. Deep-discount offers bring you one
step closer to achieving your goal of converting a prospect to a repeat buyer and
possibly even a raving fan.
Using physical premiums
As the name suggests, physical premiums are physical products. Offer something
that your market desires and discount it deeply. DIY Ready, a company in the DIY
and home décor space, offers a $19 bracelet kit for free. The new customer need
only enter his or her credit card to pay for shipping and handling to receive the
bracelet kit. This is a physical product that do-it-yourselfers find highly desirable.
Employing a book
A physical book can make an excellent deep-discount offer. Books have an
extremely high perceived and actual value. If you need to establish authority and
trust with your market before making more complex or higher-ticket offers, the
book is a great deep-discount offer to employ. Consider offering the book at a
steep discount, or free plus shipping and handling. A physical or digital book isn’t
the best idea when you want to generate leads, but it’s a highly effective way to
convert prospects and leads into customers. Remember, the objective of a deepdiscount offer is to change the relationship with a lead or prospect and turn the
person into a customer.
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Webinars are one of the most versatile offers available to digital marketers. You
can conduct free webinars to generate leads, plus you can offer a webinar as a
product. Remember that when you’re charging for anything and particularly a
webinar, you should deliver value beyond what you’ve charged to attend.
When employing a webinar to serve as a deep-discount offer, you may not want
to use the term webinar in your offer. People generally associate that term with
something free. Consider calling your deep-discount-offer webinar a teleclass,
online training, or boot camp instead, and it can be prerecorded or held live.
Selling software
Software and application plugins are effective deep-discount offers because software saves people time and energy, so these are highly sought-after commodities.
When you use software as a deep-discount offer, the deep discount price is likely
to cause a “buying frenzy,” resulting in a highly successful acquisition campaign.
Splintering a service
If your business has a high-dollar product or service, you can take a small piece
of that product, also known as a splinter, and sell it à la carte. The key is to offer a
piece of your service that can stand alone at an incredibly low price.
An example of a company that uses this approach is Fiverr, an online marketplace
that offers tasks and services starting at $5. Figure 5-6 shows one of these Fiverr
services, which include creating business logos. This is an excellent example of
offering part of a highly sought-after service at a deep discount that will help turn
a lead into a customer and can ultimately lead to more sales. After a person has
bought from you, he’s likely to buy from you again.
Because you’re breaking out a part or splinter of your service, you don’t have to
create a new service. Instead, you’re offering a portion of an existing product or
service.
Brainstorming “little victories”
to offer your leads
Because deep-discount offers are low priced, low risk, and highly desirable, they
help your leads overcome doubt about your business or product. Less monetary
risk is involved for the leads, so they’re willing to take a chance and become
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Leveraging the webinar
customers. However, it can be harder for a marketer or a business owner to overcome the self-doubt that leads may have about themselves or their ability to reach
the “After” state that your product or service promises to take them to. That’s
why the best deep-discount offers lead the customer to a “little victory.”
FIGURE 5-6:
Through Fiverr,
larger services
can be splintered
into smaller,
single projects.
Source: https://www.fiverr.com/gfx_expert2/create-retro-vintage-logo
A “little victory” is something that helps inspire your leads and gives them confidence that they can accomplish whatever solution or goal you’re offering, as well
as the confidence that your product or service will help to get them there. A little
victory gives your prospects hope and a taste of achieving the whole thing — of
making it to the other side of the tunnel, so to speak. Keep in mind that little victories are usually quick to achieve and help deliver value to your customer.
For instance, if you’re in the fitness world, you can offer your seven-day juice
cleanse at a deep discount as a deep-discount offer. When describing the offer to
potential buyers, you state that completing this juice cleanse is the hardest part of
your program — because getting started is often the hardest part. If they can get
through your seven-day cleanse, they’ll know that the toughest part is behind them.
As you go through your products and services to determine which will make the
best deep-discount offer, ask yourself what little victory this product or service
can provide your customers. Brainstorm how it will give them hope, how it will
help to get them over the hump of self-doubt. Helping your customers see that
success is possible not only for the smiling customers in your testimonials but
also for them, personally, will help make your offer more potent and enable you to
build positive relationships with your newly acquired customers.
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Previous sections talk about the various forms your deep-discount offers could
take and the importance of little victories. Next, look over the five-point deepdiscount offer checklist, presented in the following sections, so that you can
ensure that your offer can convert leads and prospects into buyers.
Point 1: Does it lower the barrier to entry?
To start, your deep-discount offer should be low risk. The offer shouldn’t be
expensive, time consuming, or difficult to understand. The best offers at this
stage are often impulse buys, like the pack of gum you grab while you wait in
line at the supermarket. The price of your offer depends on your market. Leads
shouldn’t have to pause to consider whether they can afford your deep-discount
offer; the price should remove that barrier. Again, the purpose of this offer is not
profit. A good rule is to make these offers at $20 or below.
Point 2: Is the value clear?
Make your deep-discount offer easy to understand. You want to be able to quickly
explain the value and entice the lead into buying. Therefore, your deep-discount
offer shouldn’t be complex. Impulse buys are not complicated offers.
Point 3: Is it useful but incomplete?
The keyword here is useful. Your deep-discount offer should not be a bait-andswitch offer. If the deep-discount offer doesn’t deliver on its promise, you’ll tarnish your relationship with that customer. You may have gained a quick sale with
the deep-discount offer but lost a potential lifelong customer. This offer must be
useful in its own right, but it is not the whole package.
Point 4: Does it have a high perceived value?
As with the gated offer before it, use good design to create a deep-discount offer
with a high-quality look and feel. You don’t want your new customers to feel
ripped off; instead, you want them to feel as though the deep-discount offer they
just bought from you was a steal.
People don’t buy products and services online, but rather buy pictures and
descriptions of products and services online. If you want to sell online, you need
to employ design and copywriting that communicate the value of the products and
services you’re offering.
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Filling out the deep-discount offer checklist
Point 5: Does it have a high actual value?
Be sure that your deep-discount offer makes good on its promise and delivers
value. This situation builds trust with your new customers, and when they’re
ready to buy again, they will remember the positive experience they had with you.
Discovering your deep-discount offer
The offer you use to acquire customers likely exists inside your core offer, which is
a higher-priced or more complex product or service. Your core offer is often your
flagship product or service. Look at your core offer and see what piece or pieces
can stand on their own. What can you splinter off and still deliver value with that
piece?
Here are some questions to ask to help you discover your deep-discount offer(s):
»» What’s the cool gadget that your market wants, but doesn’t necessarily
need? What’s your impulse buy? What’s your stick of gum?
»» What’s the one thing everyone needs, but doesn’t necessarily want? This
can be a product or service that people know they need but aren’t exactly
excited about. The product may not be “sexy,” but it’s critical to a process that
people engage in. For instance, if someone has a candle-making hobby, the
wick may not be as fun or interesting as the colored waxes or scented oils, but
it’s an essential ingredient.
»» What’s a valuable service that you can perform quickly and inexpen-
sively, one that will deliver results in advance and get your foot in the
door? This idea goes beyond giving someone a free quote or estimate; it gives
customers a taste of how you can positively affect their lives. For example, a
roofer could offer a deep discount on gutter cleaning as a deep-discount
offer. After completing the job, the roofer could point out any necessary
improvements that the roof or gutters need. That’s a deep-discount offer that
provides value first and then gets your foot in the door.
»» What little victory or victories does your deep-discount offer provide?
How do you help the customer overcome self-doubt?
Maximizing Profit
As this chapter explains, you use ungated, gated, and deep-discount offers to
acquire new customers and buyers. But when do you actually make a profit?
The cost of acquiring new customers is often the most expensive one that
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The marketing campaigns you employ to sell more, or more often, to the leads and
customers you’ve acquired are called Monetization campaigns, and these campaigns have a number of different types of offers to employ.
Most companies are running Monetization campaigns (making high-dollar and
complex offers; see Book 1, Chapter 4) directed at ice-cold prospects and brand
new leads. Although it would be fantastic to be profitable without needing to warm
up a prospect with ungated, gated, and deep-discount offers, making that work is
very difficult. The sequence of the offers you make to people is extremely critical
to avoid being the business that is asking its prospects for too much, too soon.
Making an upsell or cross-sell offer
The first type of monetization offer is the immediate upsell, and it’s one you’re
probably already familiar with even if you’ve never heard the term. An example of
the immediate upsell is the famous “Do you want fries with that?” offer made at
McDonald’s. Upsells offer customers more of what they already bought. The purchase they are currently making and the upsell should lead the customer to the
same desired end result. In the McDonald’s example, adding fries to your order
gets you a bigger meal. The cross-sell offer, on the other hand, makes an offer
related to the first purchase. For example, a clothing retailer might offer dress
shoes to a man who just purchased a suit.
Amazon.com (and virtually every other successful online retailer) uses upsell
and cross-sell offers to increase the number of items people purchase. Amazon’s
“Frequently Bought Together” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also
Bought” sections contain immediate upsell and cross-sell offers to help ensure
the sale and possibly increase the basket size.
In Figure 5-7, the item being searched for is Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and
Amazon offers some related Harry Potter books that would serve as an upsell and
increase the basket size from $17.98 to $44.96. But Amazon also offers cross-sells
in the form of other fantasy books that may appeal to a fan of Harry Potter because
they’re of the same genre.
Because the cross-sell may not be as relevant to the first purchase, a cross-sell
can feel like it’s coming out of left field, which can be jarring to and unwanted
by the customer. That’s why you have to be careful with cross-sells, or you risk
annoying your customers. Imagine buying a Mac computer and having Apple ask
before you’ve even left the store whether you want to buy an iPhone or an iPad.
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businesses incur. After you have a buyer, asking that buyer to buy from you again
makes sense. You want to turn that customer you spent so much time and money
acquiring into a repeat customer.
That said, if the cross-sell truly complements the initial purchase, your customers
will welcome the offer, and you’ll welcome the additional revenue.
FIGURE 5-7:
Amazon expertly
uses upsells
and cross-sells
to increase the
basket size of its
customer and get
the sale.
Source: https://www.amazon.com
Building bundles and kits
Bundles and kits are other forms that your monetization offer can take. A bundle
or a kit is taking one of your stand-alone products and combining it with other
like items that you or one of your business partners sell. For example, if you sell
men’s razors, you might bundle the razor with a shaving kit that includes all the
essential items a man needs to shave with, from the brush to the after-shave. This
“essential shaving kit” will cost more than an individual razor, which increases
your revenue per sale. Do you have products or services that you can combine to
create a new value proposition?
Tacking on a slack adjuster
Slack adjusters can have a dramatic impact upon the bottom line. A slack adjuster
is a product or service that you offer at a price point much higher than your typical offer. The price is generally 10 to 100 times higher than your usual offers.
Although this product or service will appeal to only a very small portion of your
market, those that do make this high-ticket purchase will have a dramatic impact
on your revenue.
For example, Starbucks sells cups of tea and coffee, but the company also sells
coffee makers. The coffee maker is far more expensive than the $6 cup of coffee.
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Recurring billing
Sometimes called a continuity offer in digital marketing circles, a recurring billing
offer charges the customer periodically — usually each month or year. This may
take the form of a club or some other type of membership, or a subscription such
as a monthly gym membership. In the latter case, the gym charges a membership
fee 12 times a year. You also find recurring billing in content and publishing with
subscriptions to Netflix or Cosmopolitan magazine, and in e-commerce with products like Dollar Shave Club and Birchbox. Look to your products or services and
consider how you can make a sale once and get paid over and over again.
Recurring billing can be a difficult sell because of the commitment that goes along
with it. To overcome this issue, clearly communicate the advantage provided by
the recurring billing offer and lower the perceived risk by clearly communicating
the cancellation. For instance, the cooking delivery company Blue Apron often
states in its offers that you can cancel anytime. In the dating analogy earlier in
this chapter, a recurring billing offer is akin to a marriage proposal. Customers
must decide whether they want to commit to you for an extended period.
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Most people stick to their usual beverage and ignore the coffee maker, but a few
buy the coffee maker. When a product is that much more expensive than the core
offer, only a small number of slack adjuster sales is needed to make an impact.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Setting goals for campaigns
»» Managing your campaigns and
activities
»» Monitoring metrics through KPIs
Chapter
6
Planning B2B
Campaign Success
M
easuring the success of your marketing campaigns depends on your
business goals and the type of campaign you’re running. Sales and marketing work for the same company and therefore need to have the same
goal: generating revenue. Generating more revenue begins with creating more
quality engagement within your target accounts.
Your marketing team is focused on driving awareness, influence, and engagement from within your target accounts. This engagement is driven through strategic marketing campaigns and activities aimed at individual contacts in those
accounts. To create this engagement, you must know what’s working. Are you
seeing your accounts move to the next stage in the buyer journey? Is your marketing creating velocity and putting new opportunities in pipeline?
In this chapter, you see which metrics to measure for your campaigns. You look
at how to test your message, graphics, and creative content to help drive more
engagement within your target list of accounts. You also see how to review your
metrics to know you’re efficiently using every dollar dedicated to your campaigns.
Before you can tackle the topics in this chapter, you need to set up a Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) system. Your CRM serves as a centralized place
to store and manage all your customers’ contact information. All your data should
be stored here instead of spreadsheets, as this can cause data silos. Data silos are
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a problem because they make it impossible for your team to access and update
information in real time. The good news is that modern CRM platforms have a
robust application programming interface (API). The API lets your systems “talk”
to each other.
Setting Key Performance Indicators
To measure your goals. it’s important to have key performance indicators (KPIs).
The KPIs let you know whether you’re on track to meet your goals and whether
your sales and marketing team is focused on the things they need to do to grow
more revenue. For more information about KPIs and campaign tracking, see
Book 9.
The most important KPI is the movement of your target accounts through the
buyer journey. This is measured by using data in your CRM. Your sales and marketing teams need to define what the next meaningful stage or status that these
accounts go to, with the ultimate goal of making these accounts your customers.
Here is an example of the stages through with your accounts and the associated
KPIs might progress.
»» New/Prospect: The number of accounts that were qualified as a best-fit with
your ideal customer profile and persona criteria.
»» Qualified: The number of accounts generated by marketing that went
through a discovery call or demo to become a revenue opportunity.
»» Opportunity: The number of accounts that became revenue-generating
customers.
The number of opportunities added to pipeline through marketing activities is
called marketing-sourced pipeline.
»» Customer Upsell/Cross-sell: Customer accounts that will purchase more
from your company, or purchase a better/upgraded version of your offering.
»» Customer Advocate: The number of customers who serve as advocates for
your brand, refer new business, or collaborate for marketing.
Attributing metrics at the account level
Account-level attribution means you can see the activity at each of the accounts
you’re targeting. You must know which content and marketing activities are creating velocity and advancing accounts to the next stage of the buyer’s journey.
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Because there will be different activities at each stage of the buyer journey for
accounts (versus an individual customer), you need to examine all of the touchpoints that influence an account. You can’t say “This account closed because they
came to this event,” but it’s a combination of all the activities that lead to revenue.
If marketing tried to report which leads turned into customers, there were many
missing pieces. That’s because marketing was focused on an individual lead or
contact, not on all the contacts in the account. With lead-based marketing, it was
a hope that one of the leads that came in became a customer. But leads don’t pay
your company money. Your accounts that became customers are what keeps the
lights on at your office. This is why, as a marketer, you need to look at the activities that helped generate new customer accounts.
Lead-based attribution reporting doesn’t give marketers enough credit for all
their activities. If a lead came through from downloading an ebook two years ago,
but the lead’s company just became a customer, how do you know which touchpoint to credit with a deal? You wouldn’t. The initial lead may have downloaded
an ebook, but you wouldn’t know that one ebook download started the journey to
becoming a customer.
What marketing wants to know from account-level attribution is how the contact’s action impacted this deal being closed? Account-level attribution is about
getting more insight into all the account’s activities. Part of this influence is getting your message in front of the right contacts in the account. One of the C-level
executives you’re targeting is much less likely to click an ad to download an ebook
or fill out a form.
This is why account-level attribution is so important. You need to examine the
activities of all the contacts in the account to find what’s driving them to progress to the next stage and purchase from your company. Account-level attribution
should recognize any and all of your sales and marketing efforts. Your efforts
include the activities and content that are used to create velocity and accelerate an
account through the buyer journey to generate new revenue.
When starting with your first account-level campaigns, revenue won’t come
immediately. It takes time to grow your business by developing opportunities in
your best-fit accounts.
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Before marketers were able to report on account-level metrics. B2B marketers
were used to lead-based metrics. This caused a lot of friction with the sales
­department. Sales didn’t report on what happened with the leads they got from
marketing. The sales team reported on accounts that became customers.
Account-based sales and marketing is about identifying the path your best-fit
customers take, and replicating it again and again. There’s good news: other KPIs
determine whether you’re on track to meet or exceed your revenue goal. Using
metrics and KPIs, you can track the success of all your activities and campaigns.
These metrics show you what’s working to generate velocity in accounts. KPIs
also help demonstrate where campaigns can be refined for success in the future.
Here are the smaller KPIs to check:
»» Timeline of stage-progression: From the first touch as a prospect, the
amount of time for the account to become an opportunity
»» Engagement in accounts: Showing an uptick in the account’s score in your
marketing automation system
»» Expanded engagement in accounts: More contacts from a targeted account
coming to your site and engaging with your content
It’s important to watch the progression of accounts. This information can be
found using reporting in your CRM.
However your CRM is organized, you need to set progression rules. Progression
rules are a specific type of feature in the CRM. Your sales database administrator or
marketing operations manager would need to set up a workflow rule or automation rule. These progression rules will let you know whether accounts are moving
from one stage to the next. When you’re running a targeted advertising campaign
at qualified accounts who have completed the first discovery call or demo, then
your KPI will be how many of those accounts turned into opportunities.
The results of your marketing activities and campaigns will be different for every
B2B organization. There’s no right or wrong answer. The question to ask is how
do you measure influence? What are you doing to drive awareness and engagement
in accounts?
Whatever phase or stage you’re looking at, the KPI you need to monitor is the time
it typically takes to move to the next stage. This is part of the calculation of sales
velocity.
The formula is distance/time=sales velocity.
The sales velocity is what marketing wants to create to progress the account to a
revenue-generating customer. All of marketing’s daily activities should increase
the number of appointments or demos sales can set. Your marketing is running an
advertising campaign in conjunction with sales activities such as calls and emails.
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The efforts from marketing include monitoring web engagement with your advertisements and contacts downloading content. The “sales and marketing” efforts
all come together to impact the movement of that account from one stage to the
next of the buyer journey to becoming a customer.
In your CRM, you can run reports to see how many accounts are in which stage.
Because your sales team should be updating the CRM every time an account moves
to the next stage in the purchase decision, you can run a report on this progression. Every week, the reports your team runs should include
»» Content downloads
»» Demo request forms completed
»» Inbound demos scheduled
»» Inbound demos completed
»» Inbound opportunities created
»» Inbound closed/won opportunities
The goal is to monitor and report on the progression of accounts, and illustrate
how marketing activities are contributing to this progression. You can consolidate
these metrics into a single Excel spreadsheet to show your sales and marketing
team. Table 6-1 is an example of the weekly sales and marketing metrics report
for the number of accounts and their stage-based progression.
TABLE 6-1
Example Report of Inbound Marketing
Activity for Account Progression
Week Ending In
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Content Downloads
19
22
10
9
30
Demo Request Form Completions
8
4
7
5
5
Inbound Demos Scheduled
8
5
2
6
14
Inbound Demos Completed
5
7
7
2
0
Inbound Opportunities Created
3
2
6
1
0
Inbound Closed/Won Opportunities
5
3
1
1
1
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Run weekly reports in your CRM to show how marketing is working to progress
your target accounts to the next stages.
All your account-based marketing campaigns should be focused on progression
from one stage to another. The goals for your campaigns include
»» Generating demand within your target prospect accounts
»» Increasing number of accounts moving into qualification, such as marketing
qualified accounts (MQA) or sales qualified accounts (SQA)
»» Increasing the number of opportunities in your qualified accounts
»» Increasing Closed/Won deal size
»» Increasing revenue or increasing contract length
»» Decreasing in time from initial contact to Closed/Won, resulting in a shorter
sales cycle
»» Decreasing churn (the number of customers who came on board, then didn’t
renew or continue doing business with your company)
»» Increasing the number of customers who successfully adopt and implement
your solution
»» Creating new customer advocates
Attributing metrics at the campaign level
Each campaign will have metrics you need to monitor. When you’re running
an advertising campaign targeted at your accounts, you look at these two main
metrics:
»» Impressions: The number of times your ad appeared to a contact in your
target account. Every time your message appears, it’s counted towards the
impressions.
»» Clicks: The number of times contacts you’re targeting clicked on the CTA (call
to action) in your ad. It’s all about getting your message in front of the right
people.
The success of your advertising campaigns should be measured by impressions,
not clicks. What you need to show is how a targeted advertising campaign provided an uptick in engagement. It’s this engagement that will help progress the
account further in the purchase decision. You’re running targeted advertising
campaigns, according to the stage in the buyer journey for the account. By showing how many impressions you had for a certain campaign, you can correlate this
to a progression of the account.
Here is an example: You’re running an advertising campaign that targets accounts
in the opportunity stage. These are high-priority opportunities targeted to close
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The campaign runs for a full month. You set the campaign to run for one month
because you want to close these accounts in 30 days. At the beginning of the campaign, you check how many accounts are in the opportunity stage. At the end of
the campaign, you check how many of those accounts turned into Closed/Won
customers. This helps show whether the advertising campaign worked to create
velocity and progress the opportunity to closed/won.
Because you’re running this campaign from an account-based marketing platform, when the deal comes in it becomes a Closed/Won customer. The contacts in
that account will need to be removed from the campaign.
Your B2B campaign is synced with your CRM. Because the stage of the account
has been updated in your CRM, and your campaign is running based on the stage,
the account will be removed from an opportunity accelerator campaign. However
your data is organized in your CRM, set this as a progression rule. You can target
these companies with advertising for a certain amount of time (such as 30 days
for accounts that a high priority to close). In 30 days, you want to progress those
high-priority accounts from the SQA or opportunity stage to becoming a customers.
At the end of 30 days, examine how many of these accounts have moved to a
­progressed stage.
Comparing cost per click
Every marketing team has a budget. The budget is set by the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of your company. The CFO wants to see a retrun on investment from the
amount of money the company has invested in marketing initiatives. One of the
big questions B2B marketers always get is “How many leads did you generate this
quarter?” But that’s a vanity metric, because the number of leads generated
doesn’t correlate to the amount of new revenue the company brought in.
Your CFO should be delighted that you’re going to cut costs by taking an accountbased approach. An B2B approach to your digital campaigns means rethinking
your metrics. If you’ve run search engine marketing or other digital advertising
campaigns before, you know the two big metrics are
»» Cost-per-click (CPC): How much you spent to get a person to click the
advertisement.
»» Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM): How much you spent to get your
advertisement to appear 1,000 times.
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within the next 30 days. Because these accounts are associated with a revenue
opportunity in your CRM, you can pull this account list and run an advertising
campaign to accelerate these accounts. This is called an opportunity accelerator
campaign.
These metrics worked for a lead-based approach, but they weren’t targeted. If you
were running an SEM campaign, there were many wasted marketing dollars.
­Marketing must bid on each click and impression, and you can’t get accountlevel attribution with most SEM campaigns. This is because the campaigns are run
through search engines. It doesn’t make sense to continue investing marketing
budget in clicks and impressions, especially when marketing can’t tie that investment back to an account they’re trying to nurture for sales.
What makes more sense is to run a targeted advertising campaign through your
account-based marketing platform. Because the B2B platform is synced with your
CRM, you know exactly who you want to target. You can get in front of the decision maker with an impression, even when he doesn’t click your ad. Marketers,
especially those familiar with SEM, know this isn’t typically what they’re used to
doing with advertising and retargeting.
The account is more important than getting a lower CPC or CPM. Because you
aren’t running advertisements to anyone who searches your keywords, the overall cost will be much lower. In 2018, the average click-through rate for standard image ads was 0.05 percent, according to Smart Insights (https://www.
smartinsights.com/internet-advertising/internet-advertising-analytics/
display-advertising-clickthrough-rates/). This means that you get 5 clicks per
10,000 impressions. Talk about a waste of money when you look at how much you
spent on CPC for leads that ultimately would never turn into customers.
Showing impressions
Dynamic CPM is another option that is far less expensive for targeting at the
account level. The dynamic CPM is based on the value of each impression. Using
your account-based marketing platform, you can bid for a flat CPM at the beginning of a campaign. This dynamic CPM is based on impressions (not clicks) for
the individual contacts you want to target in the account. You’re running targeted
advertising campaigns according to your account’s industry, the job roles of contacts in the account, and the stage of the buyer’s journey. The key metric here is
the number of impressions within your target accounts: How many times your
message appeared throughout your account-based advertising campaign. The
reporting you’ll need to show includes:
»» Number of accounts you actively targeted
»» Number of contacts reached
»» Total number of impressions from your campaign
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Planning B2B Campaign
Success
This reporting will show how your campaign surrounded your account with your
message to achieve a halo effect and keep your company top of mind throughout
the purchase decision. Figure 6-1 is an example of a campaign report showing the
number of targeted accounts, contacts reached, and impressions achieved.
FIGURE 6-1:
Report of
­impressions from
a campaign.
Traditional lead-based success metrics were such numbers as clicks, click-through
rates, and form completions. These generated more leads. But it’s truly about
what’s business-centric: increasing revenue by bringing on the right accounts.
These accounts fit your personas and are the best fit for your business.
Expanding your audience
With account-based marketing, you don’t go after just one contact in the account.
You must get in front of as many stakeholders as possible. You can expand your
audience by using an account-based marketing platform that pulls in data on your
accounts and personas.
The power of an account-based platform for advertising is the ability to sync with
your CRM. You plug in the company names you want to target. This is accomplished by syncing the contact information in your database with cookie- or IPbased targeting of all the devices that meet the criteria and expand on what you
have in your CRM. This will give you the capability to show account-level attribution across digital channels because your platform is integrated with your CRM.
If you only have one contact for the account in your CRM, you don’t have enough
information to proceed. You need to reach more than one person at the c
­ ontact’s
company to move the purchase decision forward. You may be reaching the
right person, but you need to also expand your audience to connect with all the
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decision-makers involved. It’s about reaching all the contacts in the account on
their own terms.
Engaging accounts
You only have a few seconds to engage a contact and keep their attention, so more
than one activity is needed to grab their attention for the entire journey.
For a full view of engagement in an account, you must marry the data in your CRM
and marketing platform with your automation system. That system is tracking all the
activities for the contacts in your accounts. The data from your marketing platform
and automation system can also be transferred into your CRM to see an account score.
Your reporting needs to show whether a specific activity or interaction triggered
a stage progression of the account. At the account level, you need to see whether
marketing created the halo effect to influence individuals.
Everything is truly focused on progression of accounts. The faster you can progress your accounts, the quicker you can accelerate your accounts through the sales
pipeline to generate more revenue.
Engaging accounts continues after you have landed accounts as your new customers. Marketing must continue to nurture them and develop them into customer advocates. Advocate marketing helps you to retain your existing customers.
By developing your customers into advocates, they become “champion” users of
your business. Customer advocates also help you create awareness in more new
accounts through word-of-mouth referrals.
MEASURING ENGAGEMENT IN MINUTES
Founded by Marketo co-founder Jon Miller, Engagio is an account-based outbound
marketing platform for B2B companies with complex, enterprise sales. Engagio’s
ABM platform complements marketing automation platforms (such as Marketo), with
account-centric capabilities. It helps companies engage target accounts, expand customer relationships, and deepen sales and marketing alignment.
The company’s first solution integrates with marketing automation and Salesforce to
streamline account-based reporting and analytics. By matching leads to accounts, the
solution helps companies know which marketing investments work best to reach target
accounts and accelerate deals, understand which accounts have the best engagement
and opportunity for growth, and measure the impact and ROI of your ABM programs —
all without spending tons of time in Excel.
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To know whether you’re effectively engaging your customer accounts, you need to
see an increase in moving your customers through the their journies. It’s all about
the increase in revenue within an account, or creating a new sales opportunity in
your customer account. These types of customer engagement metrics can include
Testing Your Campaigns
Marketing is a science. Before starting a marketing campaign, you have a hypothesis about it you think will work. There’s a goal you want to achieve. You’ll test
the marketing message and creative, like a scientist would test a hypothesis, then
modify them as needed.
When you plan your account-based marketing campaign, you likely already know
which group of companies you want to target, and the roles within those companies. The next step is to develop a persona with the needs, wants, and desires of
the target roles.
A/B creative testing
Many traditional marketing strategies don’t allow you to optimize until after a
campaign has run its course. But advertising at the account level lets you optimize your campaigns on the fly through A/B testing. You can see which advertising creative and marketing messages are falling flat with your target audience
as the campaign runs, then replace copy or ads that aren’t having much success.
The success is measured by the number of clicks on your advertisement that take
the contact to your landing page.
A/B testing is a common capability in marketing automation platforms. It allows
you to test two versions of an email or landing page to see which one delivers
better engagement. You can do A/B testing with your account-based marketing
campaigns to see how your advertisements are performing.
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»» New sales opportunity, such as an upsell for a new product
»» Cross-selling the same product to a different business unit in the account
To make sure switches are seamless, have alternate messaging and creative ready
to go for your advertisements. In your account-based advertising platform, you
can load two variations of the same advertisement. These variations include simple changes, such as
»» Slight revisions in the copy, or the message on your content
»» Graphics, such as design, images, color, and font
»» CTA (the call to action, such as “Read More” and “Learn More”)
Figure 6-2 shows A/B testing of an advertisement in an ABM platform.
FIGURE 6-2:
Example of A/B
testing your
advertising
creatives.
Trying new content
Content marketing is a much softer way of selling. With content that educates
your prospects and contacts about your thought leadership position, your brand
stays top-of-mind when it’s time for a purchase decision. In a non-pushy way,
this content helps educate your contacts about your business.
The marketing campaigns you’re running should be linked to a piece of content.
You can replace the content in the campaign by changing the link. When you’re
running an advertising campaign, the CTA will be linked to a piece of content.
When you’re running an email campaign, a CTA to download content will be
included, too.
After you’ve performed A/B testing to find which graphics, message, and creative content works best for your targeted audience, you can test which content
resonates the most. When you’re running an advertising campaign designed to
progress qualified accounts into opportunities, you can test different pieces of
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content; for example, comparing a .pdf customer case study to a customer video
testimonial.
Combining your offers
A comprehensive marketing strategy means you’re offering lots of different content and activities to the contacts in the account. When you need to build awareness in a new account, you have the sales department sending emails, marketing
running advertising campaigns, and the account may be on a nurturing drip, too.
You’re driving your message and your name brand in multiple places. How do you
know what’s working in this combination of activities?
It comes back to the time required for the account to move to the next stage of
the buyer journey. Because you’re running campaigns and emailing content, and
sales reps are calling and emailing accounts, you know that one activity doesn’t
necessarily mean that’s what triggered the account to progress to the next stage.
Account-based marketing has many activities and efforts that make up a comprehensive strategy.
Knowing You Aren’t Wasting Money
There’s a famous quote from advertising legend John Wanamaker: “Half the
money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
The allocation and attribution of advertising spend are hot topics for marketers.
The incredible part of account-based marketing is that you can be laser-focused
on where your advertising dollars are going, and directly connect this amount
with engagement metrics for each account.
You need to show a return on investment to prove to your executive and leadership and finance team why account-based marketing works to drive business,
not leads. Lead generation was an easy sell, because it gave marketers the ability
to demonstrate tangible, quick results. “Look, we generated 1,000 new leads this
quarter.” But, according to Forrester Research, less than 1 percent of leads actually close. That’s a lot of wasted money. Marketing to only the right accounts will
have a much more significant impact on revenue. You won’t be wasting 99 percent of your money.
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From your test group, which subset of accounts saw more progression to the
opportunity stage? Did the accounts who received the CTA to watch the video testimonial progress to opportunities faster than the accounts who downloaded the
case study? Testing different pieces of content in the same campaign can provide
you with these types of insights.
At the same time, you’re likely facing greater pressure to show return on investment from your ad spend. Simply put, your ad campaign success is important.
Here’s how to look like a hero.
Budgeting the right amounts
Account-based targeting doesn’t require nearly as much of an investment as other
types of digital advertising, such as search engine marketing. You’re focusing only
on the contacts in accounts you want to get your message in front of, so you can be
more conservative with your advertising spend. When you’re preparing a budget
for how much you want to invest in your account-based advertising campaigns,
consider the following factors:
»» The number of accounts you’re targeting.
»» The stage of the accounts you’re targeting (MQA, SQA, opportunity, or
customer).
»» The industry (or number of industries, if you’re targeting one type of job role,
such as a CMO).
»» The number of job roles, if you’re targeting one type of industry. For example,
if you’re targeting marketing managers, directors, and CMOs of marketing
technology companies.
From here, you will set a daily budget for your advertising campaigns. The daily
budget is the maximum amount you want to spend to get your advertisement to
appear to those contacts in your target accounts.
Test a smaller group to determine how much budget was needed, then scale from
there.
Attributing advertising spend to revenue
With your targeted advertising campaigns, you can show a direct correlation
to how much you spent at the account level and whether the account became a
customer.
This is a significant proof point for account-based marketing. If your company
is currently making any type of search engine marketing or CPC investment, you
know you can’t attribute how much you spent on digital advertising to grow revenue. You don’t have enough visibility into targeting accounts. Using an accountbased marketing platform for targeted advertising, you can run reports to see
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the performance of your campaigns. These reports will show you the following
metrics:
»» How much you invested (dollars spent)
»» The number of impressions (how many times your advertisement reached
one of your targeted contacts)
»» The number of clicks (how many times a contact clicked your advertisement to
Using your CRM platform, you can see how many accounts in these campaigns
progressed to becoming your customers, ultimately tying back your advertising
dollars to new revenue generated.
Showing engagement in the buyer journey
Gathering feedback from your sales team is an important part of the optimization
process. It should happen continuously as you run your campaigns. The goal of
your campaigns is to move accounts faster through the buyer journey. To know
just how fast accounts are moving through your pipeline, you can use reports in
your CRM to see the number of days an account moved to the next stage.
At the account level, you want to demonstrate how your advertising campaigns
created a halo effect. A halo effect describes how a contact in an account is surrounded by your message. This increased messaging helps to keep your brand
top-of-mind and progress the account through the various stages of the buyer
journey to close a deal.
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go to a landing page)
2
Uncovering
the Customer
Experience
Contents at a Glance
CHAPTER 1:
Interacting with Customer Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Understanding Big Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Uncovering the Role Big Data Plays in Content Marketing. . . . . . . 122
Discovering the Internet of Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
Visualizing Big Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
CHAPTER 2:
Uncovering Buyer Personas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Reviewing Persona Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Collecting Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Avoiding Common Mistakes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
Looking at How Generations Differ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Identifying a Prospect’s Emotions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
Keeping Up with Trends. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
CHAPTER 3:
Structuring the Buyer Journey. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Harnessing the Customer Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
Uncovering Commercial Intent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
Defending Against Competitors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Identifying the Stages of the Buyer Journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
Personalizing Your Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
CHAPTER 4:
Embracing Sales Enablement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Discovering Sales Enablement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
Training Your Salesforce. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Coaching Your Reps to Become Winners. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
Checking Out Sales Enablement Blogs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Looking at big data problems
»» Recognizing why data is crucial to
digital marketing
»» Discovering different types of data
Chapter
1
Interacting with
Customer Data
A
re you drowning in data but don’t have enough useful information? Most
companies today are encountering big data problems. (Big data is the term
used to describe all the analytical information collected from digital content.) A book on digital marketing would not be complete without a discussion of
data. But before you look at specific content measurements, you need to understand the impact technology has had on data and the opportunities and problems
it presents. In today’s marketplace, data plays a key role in every part of your
online business and is critical to your success.
The good news is that both small and large companies can collect the data they
need to make smart decisions. The bad news is that so much data gets collected
that making sense of it can be hard. In this chapter, you look at the types of data
that are available to you to gather, and the problems you may run into when trying
to harness their value.
Understanding Big Data
To expand on the brief definition of big data from the introduction, it’s really a
massive digital collection of structured and unstructured data. (Both types are
defined a little later in this chapter.)
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Thanks to technology, reams of customer data available from customer relationship management systems (CRMs), and even more is being collected on social
media platforms and generated by users in the form of ratings and reviews.
The first instance of the use of the phrase big data was said to have been used in
a paper written by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
in 1997.
Big data is a valuable commodity for marketing. It lets you see data patterns that
you may have missed and allows you to make predictions about the content your
customers want. But you need to ask yourself a question before you launch a big
data effort. That is, what are the business goals for the data you are collecting?
Your content needs to tie in to your overall business goals — and your big data
effort needs to tie in as well. You want to be sure that the questions you want your
data to answer are crucial to the success of the business itself.
Big data collection and analysis can be expensive. Your company will quickly sour
on the effort if it doesn’t deliver on its promise to increase revenue and satisfy
customers.
Looking at different kinds of big data
Marketers have always been able to extract some form of data for marketing
efforts. You could get such things as a customer list with locations or a list of
purchases by amount. So why is data collection an issue now?
The answer is that there is more data now than ever before. Smartphones, social
networks, websites, and factories with data sensors on machinery, and more all
have data. All of it must be useful — but how to harness its value?
To understand some of the basic concepts that underlie big data, you can start by
looking at the kind of data you can extract. Table 1-1 shows the model that IBM
follows.
TABLE 1-1
Types of Data
Data Types
Description
Examples
Descriptive
“Who” data
Geo-demographics, attributes, characteristics
Behavioral
“What” data
Transactions, payments history, and orders
Interaction
“How” data
Emails, web clicks, chat transcripts
Attitudinal
“Why” data
Market research, social media
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You can look further at how to understand the who, what, how, and why designations by looking at descriptive data, behavioral data interaction data, and attitudinal data as follows:
»» Descriptive data: This is your “who” data. You analyze it to find out who your
customers are.
»» Behavioral data: This is your “what” data. You analyze it to find out what
interactions your customer has had with your company.
»» Interaction data: This is your “how” data. You analyze it to find out how your
customers interact with your company. It helps you understand their reasoning for interacting with your brand.
»» Attitudinal data: This is your “why” data. It tells you why your customers are
interested in your brand.
Aside from the types of messages that can be extracted from big data, you also
need to recognize that you are dealing with two different categories of data —
structured and unstructured. Structured data has been around a long time, but
unstructured data has become available with the advent of social media. Here’s
how they differ from one another:
»» Structured data: In previous years, all the data that companies collected was
structured. The data fit into neat categories and could be presented on a
spreadsheet. For example, think about a list of customer deliveries. Each cell
in the database had predictable information — location, date of delivery, and
so on. Computers were programmed to collect this data, and everything was
very straightforward. When data scientists received this data, they knew what
to expect and how it would be analyzed. This is still true.
»» Unstructured data: With the advent of social networks and user-generated
content, you now have a mountain of data that isn’t structured. You have
reviews, comments, and ratings. You also have a variety of formats — photos,
live streaming data, and video. This data is more complex and requires
different ways of analyzing and extracting meaning from it.
In addition to the structure, businesses have other problems to confront. Marketers have dubbed these problems “the Four Vs” of big data.
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Looking at problems with big data
The problems are related to the following:
»» Volume: Information scientists believe that 90 percent of the world’s data has
been created in the last few years. Dealing with all of it in an effective way has
been difficult for both large and small companies.
»» Variety: Smartphones, tablets, computers, networks, and even watches
generate data. Some is structured and some is not. None of it fits into a neat
little package that can be easily analyzed.
»» Velocity: Data is coming at an incredible rate. Not only are there vast
amounts of it, but the problems are compounded by how fast new data is
created.
»» Veracity: Can the data be trusted? Do managers want to stake their reputa-
tions on the fact that all the data that is flowing in is accurate? Common sense
suggests that not everything collected can be used to predict customer
behavior. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff?
According to Paul Theriot, president of Alesco Data, a data management services
company, a McKinsey analysis found that “. . . companies that put data at the center
of their marketing and sales decisions improve their marketing return on investment (ROI) by 15 to 20%” (https://www.dmnews.com/data/article/13036917/
when-big-data-and-small-data-work-together).
Uncovering the Role Big Data Plays
in Content Marketing
When you think about your content, you probably focus on what topic to write
about and where you will distribute it. Those are important questions. The way
you answer those questions, and many others, is by analyzing your data. When
content marketing was in its infancy, many companies flew by the seat of their
pants. They believed that they instinctively knew what kind of information their
customers wanted.
They proceeded to send steady streams of content, only to find that much of it was
greeted without enthusiasm. That’s when managers decided that big data really
did matter. Now they know that they need to use data to tell them how to beat the
competition and get customers’ attention. There’s no time to waste sending content that doesn’t hit its mark.
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Improving your content marketing
So, as a marketer, you want to know how using big data will improve your content
marketing efforts. You should be happy to know that it enhances your effort in
several ways. It helps you:
»» Be more effective against your competition. By analyzing a variety of data,
you can understand your competitors in ways that you couldn’t before. This
understanding helps you create content with quality that surpasses that of
your competition.
»» Find new ways to compete. New data may allow you to find and explore
new business models and niches. This exploration helps you create content
that expands your customer base and creates new revenue streams.
»» Zero in on your targeted audience. With more data telling you about
channels, you know how and where to communicate with your customers.
You can create the content that customers value and distribute it to the places
they will look.
»» Interact with your community. By knowing where your customers congregate, you can create a community of like-minded people who will help guide
your content marketing efforts by providing feedback.
»» Analyze your wins and losses. By quickly showing you what tactics are
Interacting with
Customer Data
succeeding and failing, you can make revisions to content that improve
website traffic and customer satisfaction.
For more information about analyzing data, see Book 9.
Using real-time content
Obviously, the desire by marketers to provide customers with exciting real-time
content is strong. It’s a way to capture attention and customers have come to
expect it. The key to using this content effectively is to keep your customers at the
center of all your efforts.
The focus of this book is the idea of creating content that speaks to specific personas on the buyer journey. Don’t get sidetracked by providing real-time content
that doesn’t speak directly to your customers.
Customers have grown used to having their smartphones and other devices with
them so that they can communicate as needed. Companies should expand their
content messages as much as possible to take advantage of real-time content.
(See Book 3 for more information about content types.)
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Here are some other ideas that can expand your real-time reach:
»» Use Facebook Live (https://live.fb.com/). Facebook Live makes it very
easy to set up live streaming. You can interact with your customers and learn
exactly what they care about. (See more about Facebook in Book 7.)
»» Stream YouTube Live (https://www.youtube.com/live). You can set
reminders to catch YouTube sports, music, and games. (See more about
YouTube in Book 8, Chapter 1.)
»» Create Instastories (https://help.instagram.com/899271546851408).
Instastories have become very popular and are featured at the top of your
Instagram feed. They are photos or videos that tell a quick story or show users
something you’re doing. They disappear from the site after 24 hours. (See
more about Instagram in Book 7, Chapter 5.)
»» Conduct Twitter chats. Don’t only rely on tweets. Twitter chats are available
in real time to all interested parties. You may be able to interest new users in
your company by appealing to them from this channel. In addition, the
transcript (content) will be available to them after the live chat. (See more
about Twitter in Book 8, Chapter 1).
»» Host Google Hangouts: Developing a webinar (an online seminar) for Google
Hangouts is a quick and easy way to target customers on Google, the web’s
most popular search platform. It also lets you create content that can be
viewed later.
»» Newsjack: Newsjacking is defined as the art of using news stories and
celebrities to create timely content for your customers. You’ve probably seen
content with titles like “What [insert rock star name] can teach you about
[insert concept].” The trick with this content is to actually make the information valuable, as opposed to just using a celebrity name to get attention.
Some marketers argue that getting attention is what newsjacking is about, but
your audience will tire of it if you keep providing content attached to famous
names and events that’s just not useful.
Discovering the Internet of Things
Are you curious about the Internet of Things (IoT) and how it relates to data?
You’re going to hear more about the IoT as time goes on. The IoT is a network
of items that communicate their data to people and things without the need for
human interaction. Included are such things as sensors in machines, appliances,
and electronics.
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Reviewing IoT market size
Interacting with
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Technology writer Walt Mossberg of Recode, shown in Figure 1-1, describes the IoT
as “a whole constellation of inanimate objects [that] is being designed with builtin wireless connectivity so that they can be monitored, controlled, and linked over
the Internet via a mobile app.” Mossberg says that users can install these objects
in the home “without changing wiring or hiring a professional” (http://recode.
net/2014/01/28/smartthings-automates-your-house-via-sensors-app/).
FIGURE 1-1:
Recode.
What are examples of how the IoT benefits both business and consumers?
»» Business: In the enterprise space, your factory floor can have machines that
tell your managers when they need maintenance or need to have parts
replaced.
»» Consumer: As a consumer, you can be alerted when someone comes to your
front door or when your appliance is out of warranty.
So how big a market will the IoT be? Annual revenue from IoT sales is forecast to
hit $1.6 trillion by 2025 (from just $200 billion in 2018) as shown in Figure 1-2.
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FIGURE 1-2:
IoT sales
­projections from
Priceonomics.
(https://priceonomics.com/the-iot-data-explosion-how-big-is-the-iotdata/) Does that get your attention?
In addition, Intel projects that in 2020, the IoT will have two billion objects (see
Intel’s infographic, shown in Figure 1-3 and found at http://www.intel.com/
content/www/us/en/internet-of-things/infographics/guide-to-iot.html).
FIGURE 1-3:
The Intel
­infographic
on IoT.
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Clearly, you should not ignore this trend. What you need to know is how it will
impact your customers.
Impacting content marketing
To help you understand how the IoT will affect your customer’s experience, here’s
an example to consider. Your customer can receive your content in a myriad of
places. She is no longer confined to gadgets such as her laptop and iPhone. For
example, her refrigerator can alert her to problems with food temperature. This
capability affects your touchpoints (points of contact between the customer and the
company) and the customer journey, and requires you to develop new messages
for customer consumption based on the device customers are coming from.
Interacting with
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Following are some specific ways in which the IoT impacts content marketing
and the customer experience. In March of 2015, Altimeter produced an excellent
report called “Customer Experience in the Internet of Things: Five Ways Brands
Can Use Sensors to Build Better Customer Relationships” by Jessica Groopman
(https://iot.do/new-research-customer-experience-in-the-internet-ofthings-2015-03; see Figure 1-4). This report discusses a variety of ways the
­customer can be affected by the IoT, including providing support and rewards.
Four in particular have a direct impact on content marketing.
FIGURE 1-4:
­Altimeter’s
­Customer
­Experience
Report.
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Following are ways to provide consumers with information and affect their
decision-making:
»» Environment and proximity data: You can send consumers your product
messages based on factors like location, weather, and product interaction.
Retailers, for example, can send targeted messages about what to wear or eat
to beat the heat.
»» Location-based information: Another way to use location data is to determine the customer’s proximity to the product itself. Companies can guide
shoppers to find nearby products and to choose the specific product when
they are in the retail store itself.
»» Monitoring data: The product can monitor and send a variety of data from
the device itself. An example is a health device that reports current heart rate
to the user.
»» Breaking news: Companies can alert users to important announcements and
emergencies right from their devices in real time. Such alerts provide a public
service as well as benefits to the user.
IT’S MAGIC
A great example of a company utilizing the IoT with big data to impact the customer
experience was reported by Conner Forrest on ZDNet (http://www.zdnet.com/
article/ten-examples-of-iot-and-big-data-working-well-together).
Disney created a wristband called MagicBand for use at Disney World. It has an RFID
(radio frequency ID) chip inside it and connects a visitor and his family to all the services at Disney World. After you check in with your MagicBand, much of the annoyance
associated with traveling and getting around is alleviated. You can enter the park, make
restaurant reservations, track your luggage, and make purchases. All your activities are
recorded for you by your MagicBand. In addition, it provides people with experiences
personalized just for them.
Disney made a considerable investment in developing the technology. It’s one of the
first forays that Disney has made in the IoT, but the company is betting that customers
will be delighted by the seamless customer experience and will return often.
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Visualizing Big Data
One of the ways in which companies are coping with the influx of big data is to
create visual displays that help them make sense of the data. For example, you’ve
probably seen infographics that attempt to simplify the data. You can also use
tools to create dashboards, mock-ups, and simulations.
So how do you decide whether your data would lend itself to one of these visualization types? One way is to ask yourself the purpose of your visualization. Jim
Stikeleather writing for the Harvard Business Review, laid out three reasons to
visualize data.
Stikeleather recommends data visualization for
»» Confirmation: If your purpose is to confirm your assumptions, you want to
display visuals (possibly on a dashboard) that help you determine whether
you are correct. Visualization also helps you to look at how your present
model works and whether you need to make changes.
»» Education: If your goal is to educate, you can take one of two routes: simply
report on your findings, or gather new insights about what you are seeing.
»» Exploration: If your purpose is to explore new relationships and processes,
Use this list as a guideline when you are deciding whether visualization will
enhance your data. After you understand your purpose for creating visuals, you
can help others understand your findings.
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you should create visuals to predict and manage the data.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Understanding how personas
enhance marketing efforts
»» Uncovering data types to investigate
»» Collecting the right information
Chapter
2
Uncovering Buyer
Personas
N
othing is more important for you as a digital marketer than understanding your customers. Without such understanding, you can’t develop content or make your product indispensable. Enter the use of buyer personas.
Marketers have a love-hate relationship with them. They know that they need to
create and use them, but they find personas difficult to develop.
Creating personas can be tricky. You can’t treat them like lifeless customer profiles that are created once and pulled out only for quarterly meetings. Buyer personas represent who your customers are. You have to understand who they are
and what they care about. When you create persona documents, you should realize
that they change as your company changes.
In this chapter, you look at how to develop personas that play a critical role in your
content marketing efforts. You also see how to avoid making common mistakes.
Reviewing Persona Development
The persona concept is not a new one. It was first mentioned by Alan Cooper in his
1999 book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum (SAMS). In the book, Cooper talks
about how one needs to discover customer personas rather than create them from
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untested assumptions. When you create a persona, you mix your own customer
data with your understanding of the marketplace to represent your ideal buyer.
This is key because if you make assumptions without having real data to back
them up, you risk derailing your marketing efforts.
If you’re like many marketers, the concept of personas makes you uneasy. Chief
among the reasons for this uneasiness is that personas aren’t easy to create or
maintain. Your customer constantly changes her opinions, likes, and behaviors.
You therefore have to keep abreast of her needs and wishes.
According to a 2015 joint study done by Quantcast and Forbes, 54 percent of companies agree that for audience targeting, identifying the proper personas is their
biggest challenge. So you’re not alone in your quest to get personas done right.
They are complex and can’t be tossed off quickly.
You can’t sell to everyone, of course, so understanding your niche is crucial before
you create your personas. You’ve probably heard the term niche used all the time,
but what does it actually mean? Your niche is the special corner of the marketplace
that is interested in your products and services. When you understand your niche,
you help your company reach its most interested buyers.
It’s important to recognize that customer profiles and personas are not the same
thing. You can easily create a standard customer profile and think that the job
is done. A customer profile will get you only so far, however. You can know a
­person’s age or gender but still not know what truly entices that person to buy
your product. To know that, you need to dig deeper.
There is some controversy of late about the value of personas for content marketing. Some marketers argue that your creativity is stifled because you’re essentially
using cookie-cutter descriptions. That’s exactly why you should look at the bigger
picture of your marketplace and the potential to find new niches and customers.
This effort won’t be wasted.
Understanding how persona
creation improves content
The work of developing personas involves a combination of art and science. You
need hard data to justify your conclusions. You also need a sense of how that data
translates into customer emotions and actions. If you have a poorly constructed
set of personas, you may do more harm than good.
The first question you may have as a marketer is whether your content benefits from using buyer personas. Does it really matter if you haven’t developed
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personas for your teams to focus on? The good news is that developing personas
greatly improves the content you create. Read on to see how.
When you use personas, you can:
»» Tap into feelings and emotions in your copy. After you understand how
your buyers want to feel when they use your product, you can evoke those
feelings with your content.
»» Use buying triggers in emails and real-time messaging. If you know your
personas’ buying triggers, you can send your emails and messages at the right
time to interest buyers. You can also make sure that the same content is on
your website and anywhere else where your buyers find you.
»» Directly address problems customers are experiencing. Solving problems
for your customers is key to revenue generation. Your content, in all appropriate formats, should focus on problem solving.
»» Use influencers to persuade customers. Obviously, knowing who your
customers respect and listen to is an important piece of the content puzzle.
You want to include influencer endorsements in your content when possible.
Want a great way to find out which influencers resonate with your content?
Onalytica (http://www.onalytica.com), shown in Figure 2-1, lets you upload a
file or add a link to your content and then sends back a roster of influencers who
would be interested in that content. It’s also great for finding influencers and
new Twitter followers. Onalytica has lots of interesting uses and is free to try.
»» Rank content priorities. Personas can tell you what is most important to
your customers. This is helpful when you have to create an editorial calendar
that reflects true customer interest. Some content topics can be categorized
as “nice to have” and others a “top priority.” For more information on editorial
calendars see Book 3, Chapter 5.
goals drive customer behavior. If your product can be linked to those goals,
you will have attention-getting content.
»» Focus on what your customers want instead of what they say they want.
When you understand persona motivations, you can focus your content on
what they really care about rather than what customers say they want.
Customers don’t always know what they want until they see it. By focusing on
content that fits buyer personas, you won’t waste time.
Initially execuatives may laugh at the notion of creating personas. But their attitude changes when they realize that personas can help them stay laser focused
on real customer needs. It helps prevent them from wandering off when someone
suggests a tactic that doesn’t relate to the people they want to serve.
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Personas
»» Speak to life goals that customers care about. Personas tell you what life
FIGURE 2-1:
Onalytica.
Taking action to understand
your customers
One of the main reasons that personas are hard to create is that you just can’t sit
quietly in your office and look at data. You need to take action to gather everything
you want to know.
Here are some actions you need to take:
»» Meet actual customers on a regular basis. Customer feedback is crucial.
You need to know what they think, how they view your company, and how
and why they use your products. Meeting real customers can be frightening to
some. You don’t want to say anything that might upset them. But if you can be
regularly in touch with some of your clients, you can learn almost everything
you need to know about how to make your products better.
»» Dig for special data. You need to look at the data that is currently being
collected by your company. Unfortunately, you may not find what you need.
For this reason, you must be proactive and request the type of data that you
require. Don’t assume that it doesn’t exist. The more likely scenario is that no
one has ever requested it before.
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»» Look at content consumption. One key piece of data for every piece of
content that you own is what the prospect has done with it. For example, if
it’s a video, was it watched to the end? More than once? Was it forwarded to
a colleague? When you see how the content was consumed, you can get a
better handle on whether it hit the mark and how interested the prospect is
in receiving more.
»» Review sentiment analysis. What is sentiment data? It’s user-generated
content about your company and its services. This is also called opinion
mining. You can set up a formal system to analyze this data, or if you are
working on a smaller scale, you can look at actual customer comments.
For example, you may have lots of comments about your customer service
on Twitter. If you see that the majority are complaints about how long your
company takes to get back to customers, the sentiment is negative. On social
platforms, not all publicity is good publicity.
»» Do what you ask your customers to do. This should be a hard-and-fast rule.
You may think it’s only tangentially related to content creation, but if so, think
again. You and your team should use your websites, landing pages, and blogs
in the exact way you ask your customers to use them.
Although this seems like common sense, you’d be surprised at how little most
marketers know about the actual workings of their own sites. For example, if
something is hard to understand, you want to add content right in that spot
online that makes it easier. If you haven’t used the site, you don’t know what
you need to add to make it better.
»» Make sure that content creators know your keywords, and keep content
creators updated about any revisions you make. It’s important that all
your content creators know what keywords you’re using. It helps them
shape the content they create and makes them aware of what you’re trying
to accomplish. Also make sure to keep them abreast of changes. This may
seem like a small detail, but it will help them generate new ideas suited to
your audience.
»» Make support people and sales your front line for feedback. When
Uncovering Buyer
Personas
you get your customer service people and sales reps to give you constant
feedback, you’re giving yourself a competitive advantage. You want to
continually create content that solves problems. By knowing what people
are struggling with and by providing answers, you are directly affecting
customer satisfaction.
»» Talk to all your company stakeholders. The last thing you want to do is
miss out on the wisdom that other departments can provide about your
customers. Engage them and let them know what you’re doing. You will also
establish some good will around the company by seeking out others’ advice.
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Collecting Information
What types of data should you mine to gather information for your personas?
The list goes well beyond the usual prescription to conduct one-on-one ­interviews.
If you take the time to collect different types of data (see the upcoming Table 2-1),
you gain the added insight you need to serve your customers.
TABLE 2-1
Data for Persona Development
Data Type
Examples
Suggested Places to Find It
Demographic/
socioeconomic
Age, gender, education,
income, standing in
the community
Customer surveys, government data, Quantcast,
comScore, Nielsen, Experian Simmons
Psychographic
Habits, values, hobbies
One-on-one interviews, social media platforms,
customer surveys, buying patterns, forums, blog
comments, Google Analytics
Trend information
Popular culture
TrendSpottr, Trend Hunter, BuzzSumo, magazines,
online news sites, TV shows, Google trends,
customer surveys
Questions/
pain points
Questions customers
are asking/jargon
they are using
Quora, Yahoo Answers, Stack Exchange, Wiki answers,
blog comments, internal customer support, Google
Analytics, customer events, conferences, sales team and
other internal departments
Social
media content
Twitter, Facebook, others
Social Mention, Google Alerts, TweetReach,
Internal
customer records
Buying patterns,
product usage
Internal company reports, CRM systems
Search
Keywords
Google Analytics, Google Autocomplete, Ubersuggest
Gated content
Lead generators
Top-ten lists, tool lists, ebooks, PDFs
Finding different data types
Table 2-1 shows some recommended types of data that you should seek out when
creating your personas.
Table 2-1 contains a reference, in the last row, to gated content. That is content that requires an email address in exchange for viewing it. This type of
content is being used for a variety of content. According to MarketingCharts,
shown in Figure 2-2, data from KoMarketing, Huff Industrial Marketing, and
BuyerZone indicated that customers are willing to complete a form to get the
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BOOK 2 Uncovering the Customer Experience
following type of gated content (http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/
b2b-vendor-websites-whats-important-and-whats-lacking-53697/):
»» Trial offers
»» Product demos
»» Product evaluations
»» Research
»» Brochures and data sheets
FIGURE 2-2:
To find persona information on some of the top brands, you can search YouGovProfiles (https://yougov.co.uk/find-solutions/profiles/). If you think that
your company has a similar type of user, you may learn some interesting things.
Deploying listening tools
Smart content marketers know that listening to their customers is crucial. That’s
why good listening tools are available online. A listening tool is a tool that helps
you find out what your customers are saying online about you and your brand. For
example, if someone mentions your brand in a tweet, you want to know about it.
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Uncovering Buyer
Personas
MarketingCharts
data from
­KoMarketing,
Huff Industrial
Marketing, and
Buyer Zone.
These tools help you find those mentions and comments. Here are a few tools that
will help you stay in touch with what your customers are talking about:
»» Social Mention (http://www.socialmention.com): Shown in Figure 2-3,
this is a great, free, real-time tool that monitors the web and social media.
Type your topic and you get back information on sentiment, top keywords,
top users, top hashtags, and sources of content.
»» Google Alerts (http://alerts.google.com): This tool, shown in Figure 2-4,
is very easy to use. Put in the names or product brands you are interested in,
and you’ll be notified when they show up.
»» TweetReach (https://tweetreach.com): This tool helps you monitor
everything happening on Twitter related to your search (see Figure 2-5).
It includes your topics, hashtags, competitors, and accounts.
»» Quora (http://quora.com): This is a different kind of listening tool (see
Figure 2-6). Use it to see what people are asking about your topic. It gives
you a good perspective on how people approach a topic and what really
concerns them. You will also find interesting answers to these questions
from other users.
FIGURE 2-3:
Social Mention.
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FIGURE 2-4:
Uncovering Buyer
Personas
Google Alerts.
FIGURE 2-5:
TweetReach.
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FIGURE 2-6:
Quora.
Conducting one-on-one interviews
Interviews with your customers can be the cornerstone of great persona creation. If
your company has the time and inclination to approve this activity, don’t hesitate
to jump in. Meeting and asking your customers for their thoughts and opinions
will help solidify your understanding of how your products are bought and used.
The wrinkle in your plans may come from other departments, such as sales. Sales
may welcome an opportunity to introduce you to customers — or that department
may be less than enthusiastic. If you’re in a small company without a sales force,
this may not be an issue. Marketing and management may be one and the same.
Obviously, the best thing to do is to follow the guidelines your company sets. If
prohibited from interviewing customers directly, you can still create personas that
can be useful by using some of the tools listed previously in Table 2-1.
When you’re conducting an interview with your customers, you want to ask them
questions that will put them at ease and capitalize on their experience with buying
and using your product. Make sure to probe for the meaning behind the answers.
You also want to make sure that you collect all the pertinent demographic data
such as age, job title, income, and other information. You can then move on to
questions that pertain to your products. Of course, your specific questions relate
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to whether you’re speaking to a B2B customer or a B2C customer. Typically, you
will want to know your customers’ questions about the following:
»» Life goals and personal motivators
»» Goals for using the product
»» Things they don’t like about the product or your company
»» People who influence their buying behavior
»» Triggers that cause them to buy
»» Where they consume their information and how they find new products
»» What other products they tried before choosing yours
Make sure to capture real customer quotes so that you can add them to your persona documents. This helps give the staff using the documents the feeling that
your personas represent how real customers think.
Key to the development of your personas is to look at behavior patterns. It’s just
as helpful to know what your personas don’t like or wouldn’t do as it is to know
what they would.
Documenting your personas
If you have a skeptical audience that resists the idea of using personas, you may
want to start with a document that doesn’t use the word persona and gives a generic
style title and no picture. For example, you call it a customer profile and give it a
name that reflects their characteristics, such as Anxious Parent. This would not be
your preferred method, but getting acceptance is key to moving forward.
Unfortunately, some people do strongly resist using personas, so you’ll want
to move slowly. You’ll know pretty quickly if you’re dealing with this kind of
audience.
If you’re just getting started documenting your personas, you may want to start
with a helpful tool like Make My Persona from HubSpot, shown in Figure 2-7,
which walks you through the process. You can find this tool at https://www.
hubspot.com/make-my-persona.
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The way you present your personas will go a long way toward getting internal
acceptance. If you have a receptive audience, you can use a typical template that
includes a name, a picture, and details.
FIGURE 2-7:
HubSpot’s Make
My Persona tool.
Avoiding Common Mistakes
As mentioned previously, creating personas is not easy. You and your team can
make several mistakes along the way. Here are six common ones that you can
make when creating your buyer personas:
»» Mistaking yourself for the customer. You begin telling your manager or
colleague about a solution to your customer’s problem. You have researched
the data and the marketplace and believe that this information should be
added to your persona. Your manager shoots down your idea because he
doesn’t believe that you’re right.
He bases his opinion on the fact that it’s not how he thinks about the problem.
He forgets that he’s not the customer. This is a very common problem. People
who work closely with products begin to think that they are the customers. In
reality, they would never be a purchaser of the product.
»» Listening to what someone’s relative thinks is a good idea. Someone’s
relative has a strong feeling about something, and your colleague is swayed
by their opinion and wants to make it part of the persona. But your “favorite”
features should not be based on what your colleague’s cousin likes.
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»» Forgetting to collect data about the customers who didn’t complete their
purchase. You can often learn just as much from customers who didn’t
complete the purchase of your product as you can from those who did. You
need to know why your customers abandoned their shopping cart in mid-buy.
This is extremely helpful because you want to know where you’re falling short
and what you can do to plug that leak. This data should be included in
persona information.
»» Thinking that understanding the features and benefits that personas
prefer is the whole picture. Most product managers love their products.
That’s a good thing. But customers unknowingly want you to appeal to their
emotions. When you don’t understand how the product makes them feel, you
miss an opportunity to grab their imagination and create a customer for life.
»» Not understanding what entertains your customer. You spend time
collecting information, but you don’t find out what your customer finds
entertaining. If you know more about this, you can create great content pieces
that will engage your prospects. You also need to know where they consume
information and in what format.
»» Ignoring what people don’t like about your product. Obviously, you focus
on what they do like so that you can appeal to prospect. But you also want to
know what they don’t like so that you can fix it and retain customers.
According to Adele Revella, the founder of Buyer Persona Institute (http://
buyerpersonainstitute.com), a study from ITSMA says that 44 percent of marketers surveyed say that they have personas but 85 percent of them don’t believe
they’re using them effectively (http://www.itsma.com/research/increasingrelevance-with-buyer-personas-and-b2i-marketing/). It’s important that
you take the time to integrate your buyer personas into your content marketing
efforts.
Every generation puts its definitive stamp on society. In this section, you look
at two groups that have a major impact on your content marketing efforts —
Millennials and Generation C.
Understanding Millennials
According to a Pew Research Center study, shown in Figure 2-8, 2015 was the
year that Millennials became the largest generational group in the United States,
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Looking at How Generations Differ
surpassing baby boomers (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/
16/this-year-millennials-will-overtake-baby-boomers/). Millennials are
defined as those who were ages 18 to 34 in 2015. The oldest millennial was born
in 1981.
FIGURE 2-8:
Pew Research
Center study.
Much has been reported about how Millennials differ in their attitude toward
marketing and technology. They have grown up with digital gadgets and aren’t
intimidated by them. They can easily spot hype and are resistant to it in marketing
messages. They like to be asked to participate by companies and are more likely
to take the advice of another millennial they don’t know rather than be influenced
by a popular brand.
According to a 2016 eMarketer article about Ipsos research, Millennials spend
an average of 53 hours per week online, more than any other generation
(https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Among-Affluents-MillennialsSpend-Most-Time-Online/101461).
In an attempt to understand how Millennials view content, NewsCred conducted
an important study called “The Millennial Mind: How Content Drives Brand
­Loyalty” (https://www.newscred.com/wp-content/themes/newscred/assets/
downloads/guide/NewsCred_Millennial_Mind.pdf); see Figure 2-9).
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FIGURE 2-9:
The NewsCred
Millennial study.
Here are some of the study’s key findings:
»» A majority of the Millennials surveyed favor content that is tailored to their
»» Thirty percent don’t read content unless it educates or entertains them.
»» Forty-one percent abandon content that is too long.
»» Seventy percent share content that makes them laugh.
»» Google and Facebook are the top platforms they use to find content.
»» Fifty percent share content about a cause they believe in.
»» More than 50 percent prefer to engage with brands on their company
websites or social media.
So what does this mean for your content efforts if you’re targeting Millennials?
Obviously, they’re a discerning group. They want the content they engage with
to be age appropriate and to have some intrinsic value. They won’t normally sit
through long content, but you can catch their attention when you discuss their
favorite causes. One interesting finding is that they will engage brands on their
websites, not just on social media networks. This is an opportunity for you to beef
up content on your website.
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age, location, and cultural interests.
Meeting Gen C
An offshoot of the Millennials is a group called Gen C. Unlike Millennials, Gen C
isn’t really a generation in the true sense of the term, but rather a construct made
up of people who live their lives connected to their devices. They could be from
any age group, but they have distinct characteristics. Sixty-five percent of them
are under 35 but the rest are spread among the other generations.
Google identifies Gen C as consumers who care about the following:
»» Creation: They like the act of creating content — taking pictures, giving their
opinions, and sharing them online.
»» Curation: They like gathering others’ interesting ideas, photos, and articles
and sharing them with their friends.
»» Connection: They want to stay connected, and 76 percent watch YouTube
videos every day.
»» Community: They want to belong to groups that do things they support and
admire.
Surprisingly, Gen Cers interact directly with brands. If you’re a content marketer,
you want to make sure that you engage these prospects by asking them to participate and take action.
Identifying a Prospect’s Emotions
The shift in control from marketers to prospects has created a strong need for
marketers to figure out what a prospect needs at every stage of the buyer journey.
(See the next chapter for more about the buyer’s journey.) One of the things that
is central to your investigation of buyer personas is how your customers feel when
they buy and use your products. It’s imperative to use emotional language in your
content — that is, language that evokes feelings. Moods and emotions impact
buying habits. People joke about shopping — dubbed retail therapy — as a way to
soothe themselves. That’s proof that customers are influenced by their feelings.
Both B2B customers and B2C customers are influenced by emotions even though
business buyers would like to think otherwise. An awareness of emotions that
affect your buyers can help you seek them out in your customers.
Here are some common emotions that influence buyers:
»» Fear: You want to know what concerns and fears your customer may
have so that when you write your content, you can show how your
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product would impact that fear. Will it help alleviate it? That’s a great motivator to buy.
»» Guilt: Customers don’t always buy your product for positive reasons.
Sometimes it will be bought to assuage someone or make up for the lack
of something. Your content could highlight that emotion.
»» Concerns about status: Of course, this is a big motivator. If you’re selling a
luxury product, you want to make sure that you tap into the notion that the
purchase of your product will elevate a buyer’s status. Conversely, if you’re
aiming at a frugal buyer, you want to ensure that your content targets that
mentality.
»» Desire to mitigate risk: Whenever someone makes a purchase, they worry
about taking a bad risk. If the product cost is small, the concern is lower, but
it’s always there. If you can mitigate that risk in some way, such as by adding a
money-back guarantee to your content, you can help your customer say yes.
»» Desire for instant gratification: If this motivation is present, your content
should focus on it. Every marketer loves an impulse buyer.
»» Fear of Missing Out (FOMO): This is a relatively new addition (or addiction).
People who are plugged into their devices have a fear that if they aren’t paying
attention to online activity 24/7, they’re missing out on what’s happening. They
want to know about the latest products, trends, events, and gossip. They want
to know what their friends are doing and how they themselves compare. To
capitalize on this phenomenon, your marketing can provoke users to feel that
they have to have your product or risk being left behind.
Keeping your eye on trends is an important part of a marketer’s job. You want to
know what your customers are seeing, hearing, and thinking about in the wider
culture. Sometimes trends come in with a huge flourish. Other times, they sneak
up on you. Keeping yourself in touch with popular culture helps you know what
your customers might want next or what they will reject.
Here are a few sources in addition to the listening tools discussed earlier in the
chapter, in “Deploying listening tools,” to help you plug in to what’s happening
around you:
»» Google Trends (https://www.google.com/trends): This is a free tool that
lets you know what’s popular on Google, which is a sure way to know what
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Keeping Up with Trends
people are interested in. Here’s a look at the term content marketing
(https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=content%20marketing).
As you can see the trend spikes upward starting in 2011, as shown in
Figure 2-10.
»» Trendspottr (http://trendspottr.com): Shown in Figure 2-11, this tool
allows you to create alerts for the topics you care about. It’s a real-time tool
that keeps you on top of trends by monitoring web content, including that of
Facebook and Twitter.
»» Trend Hunter (http://www.trendhunter.com): Shown in Figure 2-12, Trend
Hunter is a community of people who report on the latest trends. The site has
lots of interesting information on what’s trending and why.
»» BuzzSumo Trends: BuzzSumo has added a trends section to its search
capabilities, as shown in Figure 2-13. It shows you content that is trending
for major topics or the specific topics you set up. To create your own trend
search, go to https://app.buzzsumo.com/trending and set up the topic
of your choice. You can see what’s trending in 2, 4, 8, 12, or 24 hours.
FIGURE 2-10:
Google Trends
for content
marketing.
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FIGURE 2-11:
Uncovering Buyer
Personas
Trendspottr.
FIGURE 2-12:
Trend Hunter.
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FIGURE 2-13:
BuzzSumo Trends
for content
marketing.
If you want to learn about how to uncover trends, check out Non-Obvious: How
To Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict The Future, by Rohit Bhargava (Ideapress
Publishing, 2015).
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Understanding the buyer’s mindset
»» Unearthing your touchpoints
»» Using an omni-channel approach
»» Creating the right content to
influence a purchase
Chapter
3
Structuring the Buyer
Journey
T
he guidelines for the best customer experience continually change. The only
aspect that remains constant is that buyers are empowered and define their
own journeys, and you need to accommodate them. Some customers like to
check prices on mobile devices in retail stores; others spend hours online collecting information before making a decision. Your job is to make sure that your customer has all the information she needs to choose your product without becoming
confused or annoyed.
As you begin to create your buyer journey, understand that no book or article can
tell you how to map your buyers’ exact journey — so don’t be frustrated. Your
customers are unique and will take the journey that makes sense to them. You can
look at what your customers are doing now and extrapolate from that. However,
you can’t ensure that they will take the path you choose for them. In addition,
your business is unique and has its own unique way of delivering your products
and services. That’s a good thing. But it makes defining the optimal experience
for your customers harder.
In Book 2, Chapter 2, you take the first step in mapping your buyer journey by
creating personas. In this chapter, you integrate those personas into the buyer
journey. You look at the ins and outs of mapping that journey and see what content is required for each of the touchpoints along the way.
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Touchpoints, also called contact points, are the places where customers interact
with a brand while researching, learning, and entertaining themselves. These
contact points are where you need to observe what the customer does and thinks.
You can’t treat a touchpoint as an isolated moment in time. You need to understand the context and what the customer wants to achieve.
In this chapter, you find the concepts and tools you need to create a buyer journey
map. But the real effort begins when you take the time to look at every step in your
customer’s nonlinear path and analyze the content you need to provide. It won’t
happen overnight, but if you take the time to do a thorough job, the effort will be
well worth it.
Harnessing the Customer Experience
In today’s marketplace, buyers want to be able to explore information on all their
devices from any location. They explore retail stores, the web, print and broadcast
outlets, customer events, and so on, and all in a nonlinear process. What you need
to do is to anticipate the potential contact points and provide content for each one.
But even more important than a focus on touchpoints alone is an understanding
of the journey your customers take. You need to walk in their shoes to understand
their behavior and what they need. This is where your personas come into play. Of
course, mapping the journey using a host of procedures, systems, personas, and
touchpoints can be complex. But the payoff is worth it.
According to an article called “The Truth About The Customer Experience”
in the Harvard Business Review, Alex Rawson, Ewan Duncan, and Conor Jones
from ­McKinsey found that a focus on the buyer journey is “30% to 40% more
strongly correlated with customer satisfaction than performance on touchpoints”
(https://hbr.org/2013/09/the-truth-about-customer-experience). This is
a key finding. If you focus only on individual touchpoints but miss the bigger
­picture of the buyer journey, you’ll find the mistake costly.
Looking at the customer experience
from both sides
When you and your team meet to discuss the ways you’re going to interact with
your audience, you believe that you know where to engage them. Or do you?
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The survey’s goal was to show how both senior executive and customer groups
viewed service delivery to customers (http://www.economistinsights.com/sites/
default/files/Creating%20a%20seamless%20customer%20experience.pdf).
A customer group was shown a list and asked, “Thinking of the ideal customer
experience, which of the following elements are most important to you?” The top
five elements chosen were as follows:
»» Fast response to inquiries and complaints
»» A simple purchasing process
»» Ability to track orders in real time
»» Clarity and simplicity of product information across channels
»» The ability to interact with the company via multiple channels 24/7
As you can see, the customers wanted fast, simple, always-on interactions. No
friction, no delay.
Nothing listed here is an unreasonable request for a twenty-first-century
­company. If your company were rated on these criteria, how well would it do?
The same survey asked the executive group and the customer group similar
­questions. It asked executives, “Which of the following channels does your organization currently use to interact with customers (companies)?” It asked the customer group, “Which of the following channels do you use to learn about and
compare products?”
The executives focused on a few channels that were popular with customers, but
for the most part, the differences between the channels executives thought were
important and those that customers chose as important were significant.The five
channels that were the most at odds were:
»» Search engines: Twenty-five percent of executives say their company uses
search engines to interact with their customers; 69 percent of the customers
say they use this channel.
Missed content opportunity: Search engines are most often used in the early
stages of the buyer journey. If customers are searching and your contentisn’t
optimized for search engines, you won’t even be on their radar.
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The Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by Panasonic, did an interesting
worldwide survey in 2014 called “Creating a Seamless Customer Experience.”
»» Friends and family: Zero percent of executives say their company communicates with customers through their family and friends; 51 percent of customers say they consult family and friends.
Missed content opportunity: Obviously, this is a big misstep. Recommendations
from trusted friends and family are a big factor when deciding to make a
purchase. These executives have made no attempt to reach the customer’s
influencers on social networks.
»» Independent websites: Nineteen percent of executives say they use
independent websites to interact with customers; 46 percent of customers
say they use these sites.
Missed content opportunity: This mistake is a hard one to understand when
you think about all the guest posting and cross promotions available to most
marketers.
»» Email: Sixty-seven percent of executives say they use email to interact with
customers; 38 percent of customers say they use this channel.
Missed content opportunity: This one requires some understanding of what
kind of emails executives are referring to. If executives use personalized
emails to send targeted content to buyers, they have a good chance of getting
the buyers’ attention. Obviously, buyers would have given their email address
with the expectation that they would receive emails. If the executives are
sending what you would consider spam, that is, content that was neither
requested nor desired, these emails would rank very low among customers.
»» Phone: Fifty-five percent of executives say they use the phone to interact with
customers; 24 percent of customers say they use this channel.
Missed content opportunity: Obviously, this is a tactic that should most often
be used in the later stages of a buyer journey and only if the buyer has given
permission. Cold calling (that is, without permission) just doesn’t fit with
marketing tactics.
Benefitting from an omni-channel
approach
One key benefit of mapping your buyer’s journey is that it helps you understand where to put your greatest effort. So how do you go about putting your
plan together? Start with an omni-channel mindset. This means that you have to
think of all the different customer touchpoints as one integrated journey. No more
multi-channel approach; instead, all the channels are connected.
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Marketers make the common mistake of thinking about their buyer journey as a
discrete set of linear steps. For example, marketers create a content plan for their
social media channels and another for their website. They forget that consumers
are jumping from one channel to another, from different locations and on different
devices. They aren’t giving any thought as to how they fit together. That’s your job.
According to an article from the readwrite blog (https://readwrite.com/
2018/12/12/why-omnichannel-is-important-for-customer-experience )
omni-channel strategies allow users to create a personalized experience for
themselves. They can access information they need at their own pace and from
the channels they frequent.
You need to provide prospects with a frictionless journey that doesn’t require an
online road map to traverse. If buyers want to look at your Facebook page on their
mobile, or look at your website in your bricks and mortar store, you need to make
sure they’re viewing a consistent message that ties all their activity together.
This idea probably makes sense to you because that’s how you buy products,
regardless of whether you’re making a B2B purchase or buying a sofa for your
home. In fact, according to Outerbox (https://www.outerboxdesign.com/webdesign-articles/mobile-ecommerce-statistics) more than half of all Internet
shopping is conducted on a mobile device. When shoppers decide to buy, where
they are or which channel they use doesn’t matter.
Here’s an example: Imagine that your customers are looking at your website and
see something they’re considering purchasing. They want to look at it in your
store to make sure that it’s exactly what they want. When they walk into your
store, you can trigger a discount coupon on their smartphone. Then they can buy
using that coupon. When they return home, they can check your website to look
at the shipping arrangements. If you don’t have a bricks-and-mortar store, your
customer will still want to shop where and when it’s convenient for them, so you
have to create a buyer’s journey that supports that path, too.
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A multi-channel experience is not the same as an omni-channel experience. You
likely already have a presence on several channels. But if the customer experience on all these channels is not consistent and integrated, you aren’t an omnichannel marketer.
THIS IS REWARDING
Want to hear how one savvy marketer is using omni-channel marketing to the fullest?
Starbucks has a mobile rewards app that uses omni-channel marketing to its fullest potential. When a user downloads the Starbucks app, he can use it to find stores,
redeem reward points, and purchase in-store coffee from the app itself, then pick it
up in the store. The user can also view his account from his phone or the web, and it’s
updated automatically on all his channels. Starbucks understands that helping users
buy coffee and get rewards is a smart way to keep the revenue (and the coffee) flowing.
Uncovering Commercial Intent
Given all the concepts you have to deal with for the buyer journey, you probably
don’t want to hear about keywords, too. But it’s important to understand how
they fit in when you’re constructing your buyer’s journey. When you think about
your keywords, you probably choose ones that provide your users with the information they’re looking for. Before you do that, however, you should consider the
ones you need when focusing on the buyer journey.
The keywords that people use tell you their intent — that is, what they’re trying to
accomplish. When you create your keyword list, you should consider buyers’ commercial intent. That means that you want to focus on keywords people use when
they intend to buy things.
Here’s how this works. People undertake basically three types of searches:
»» Informational searches: Users perform this type of search when they’re
primarily looking for information. Their searches contain such words as “how
do I” or “where can I.” For example, the results of a Google search for “how do
I create content” is shown in Figure 3-1.
»» Navigational searches: Users conduct this kind of search when they know
exactly what they’re looking for. For example, if they want to read articles on
Ian Cleary’s blog, they type razorsocial, as shown in Figure 3-2.
»» Transactional searches: User intent here is to buy something. This is the
type of keyword that you want to focus on. You want to ensure that the
people who want to buy can find you.
Along with words such as buy, the category of product appears. For example,
you see searches such as “buy organic baby food online” or “ship organic baby
food.” The results for a search on Google for “buy organic baby food online”
are shown in Figure 3-3.
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Structuring the Buyer
Journey
FIGURE 3-1:
Google results for
“how do I create
content.”
FIGURE 3-2:
RazorSocial.
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157
FIGURE 3-3:
Google results for
“buy organic baby
food online.”
Make sure to use transactional keywords when constructing your content for your
buyer journey.
WANT TO BUY IT NOW?
In an interesting contrast, Instagram and Pinterest both rolled out their new buying
mechanisms at the same time in 2015. Adweek’s Christopher Heine reported on the
­different way they approached harnessing their customers’ buying intent (http://
www.adweek.com/news/technology/instagram-offers-big-data-pinteresthas-purchase-intent-165168). One chose to sell directly from its site; the other
chose to use ads to target customers.
Pinterest added a Buyable Pins button that allows users to search by price and buy
the items that interest them. Users can purchase directly from major retailers such as
Macy’s and Nordstrom right on Pinterest. Pinterest is capitalizing on the fact that a great
many Pinterest users go on to buy the items they pin.
In a different take on buyer’s intent, Instagram created an ad business that will allow
advertisers to target ads based on Facebook profiles. (Facebook bought Instagram in
2012.) Facebook is capitalizing on its big data asset.
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Closely following your competitor’s efforts is key to understanding what your
prospects will encounter in their research. If you know that your competitors have
provided comparison charts and data sheets, you should do so, too. You want
to make sure to do a good job of demonstrating how choosing you is the better
option. You need to cover all aspects of the buyer’s journey to win the sale.
Researching competitors
You’ve spent time learning about what your competitors are doing. But you can’t
effectively compete if you don’t know what your customers know about your
competitors. You want to know what they do well and how they fall short. Your
job is to surpass their marketing efforts and win the sale.
Your most effective way of winning the sale is to look at your competitors through
your customer’s eyes. Your customers don’t care how much your competitors
spend on advertising, syndication, and content creation. All they know is how
well their needs are met.
In the past, doing competitive analysis was a costly endeavor. Corporate
spies, focus groups, and lots of wining and dining of staff went into getting
information. Nowadays, you can do a host of things online to understand your
competitors’ strategy. The information is digital and ready to be scooped up.
Here are some things you can do:
»» Analyze your competitors’ website. Your staff probably looks at your
competition’s media properties on a regular basis. And they probably know
more than a company’s customers do when the competitor redesigns the
website or changes product features.
»» You don’t want to overdo this analysis. Keeping too close a watch on competitors can prevent you from focusing on your actual customer’s desires.
One mistake companies make is to try to clone their competitor’s site design
and approach everything in a similar way. They do this in the mistaken belief
that the customer will choose them because their product is simply better.
Unfortunately, that’s not how people think. They take into account the whole
brand experience. Someone may pick your competitor for reasons that have
nothing to do with the actual functioning of the product. Remember to tell
your customer what’s unique about your brand.
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Defending Against Competitors
To look at actual data about your competitors, you can check out tools like
these:
•
SimilarWeb (http://www.similarweb.com): See Figure 3-4. You can put in
competitor domains and see traffic statistics, referring sites, bounce rate,
and more.
•
Ahrefs (https://ahrefs.com): See Figure 3-5. This tool not only has lots of
great data but also lists the top ten competitors for the domain you enter.
Put in your competitor’s domain and see what you find.
FIGURE 3-4:
SimilarWeb.
»» See what their customers say on social media platforms. You can do this
at both a high level and a granular level. You can look directly at competitors’
social media sites to see what their customers are saying. Then you can use
data analysis tools to compare your sites.
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FIGURE 3-5:
Ahrefs.
»» Analyze their content offerings: See the next section for how to analyze
competitors’ content. (You can also use SEMrush and MozBar, again in the
next section, to get competitive data.)
»» Download their product specifications and online resources: Obviously,
you can go to a company’s website and download anything that any user can.
The key to doing a good job with competitive research is to focus on what your
customers care about. Next, you consider how to analyze competitive content so
that you can improve your own.
Analyzing your competitor’s content
To understand what your competitors are offering, you need a reliable way to
analyze their content. In his article “An Epic Guide To Creating Epic Content,”
(http://robwormley.com/how-to-create-epic-content; see Figure 3-6), Rob
Wormley recommends three effective tools that you can use to learn about your
competitor’s content.
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FIGURE 3-6:
Rob Wormley’s
blog.
The tools are
»» BuzzSumo: Go to BuzzSumo (http://buzzsumo.com) and type your competitor’s domain. You see a list of the most popular posts for the date range that
you specify. Analyze as many as you need to make a solid determination of
what content is resonating with that audience.
»» MozBar: To see the title and meta description for the post, use the MozBar for
your browser, as shown in Figure 3-7 (https://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar).
»» SEMrush: To see the top keywords that the content ranks for your competitor, go to SEMrush (http://semrush.com), shown in Figure 3-8. Put in the
competitor URL and scroll down the page to see the top organic keywords.
You can also see a lot of other key information.
Go through and evaluate the content for completeness and novelty. This evaluation should give you a good start on analyzing your competitor’s content. After
you have evaluated your top competitors, evaluate your own content to compare it.
You can use the compare function in the settings in BuzzSumo in Tools➪ domain
vs. domain.
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FIGURE 3-7:
MozBar.
FIGURE 3-8:
SEMrush.
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WOULD YOU RECOMMEND ME?
Finding exactly the right measures to determine how well you’re doing against your
competitors can be difficult. You have so many measures to consider. One quick way
to see how your company is doing is to use the Net Promoter Score (http://www.
netpromoter.com/why-net-promoter/know) to measure your customer’s overall
experience with your company.
To deploy it, you survey your customers using a 0–10 scale. You ask them, “How likely
are you to recommend our brand to a friend or colleague?” Then you score it as follows:
•
•
•
Promoters (score 9–10): People who love your brand
Passives (score 7–8): People who are neutral and could move to the competition
Detractors (score 0–6): People who are unhappy with your brand and could damage it with negative comments
Subtract the detractor score from the promoter score and you get a number from –100
to +100. Based on this score, you can evaluate what immediate actions you need to
take.
Not all marketers believe you should use the NPS. Some detractors believe that the
NPS is too simple. They say it only tells you want a customer says they will do, not what
they actually do. Jared Spool, a well-respected user experience designer, believes that
it’s not useful as a statistical measure. For more about his opinion, see https://blog.
usejournal.com/net-promoter-score-considered-harmful-and-what-uxprofessionals-can-do-about-it-fe7a132f4430.
Identifying the Stages of the Buyer Journey
To reach your prospects, you need to understand what content they need to purchase your product. Rather than send generic content and hope for the best, you
need to create content that targets the buying stages your prospects pass through.
Understanding the buying
process and journey map
The typical buying process is divided into three stages: awareness, consideration,
and decision. Because your job is never really done, you may find two more useful:
purchase satisfaction and ongoing use. If you don’t support your customers, you
will lose them.
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Here are the five stages of the buyer journey:
»» Awareness: The prospect acknowledges a problem and begins to research
a solution.
»» Consideration: The prospect looks at options and competitors and narrows
down her choices.
»» Decision: The prospect chooses your product and looks at your specific
buying details to determine customer support, shipping, and any other
follow-up.
»» Satisfaction (post purchase): Buyers want to feel that they made the right
choice, and they want information that confirms that choice. This information
can include usage tips and other ways to use the purchase that they didn’t
know about.
»» Ongoing use: Buyers want to feel supported in their continued use of the
product and may become advocates if their relationship with the seller is
nurtured correctly.
So now that you know the stages that buyers pass through, you need to figure
out where they go to get the information they need. For this purpose, you create
a journey map.
Journey maps come in all sizes and styles. You can make them highly detailed or
just cover the basics. What most journey maps lack is the marriage of your personas with your expected journey.
As the buyer journey has evolved, marketers have been realizing that creating
generic content for prospects in each stage is a waste of time and money. You
need to speak to your specific buyer. The customer is expecting something more
personalized, geared to her tastes and sensibility. You have done the hard work of
creating personas (or see Book 2, Chapter 2 if you haven’t). Now it’s time to use
them.
Perhaps when you first got started marketing your content, you created a bunch of
blog articles that you thought your audience would like. Many times, you guessed
wrong, and your traffic numbers indicated that. Then you got a bit savvier and
started to look at what content actually drove engagement, whereupon you created more of that kind of content. By creating personas, you took the next step in
giving your audience the content they really need. Now, by applying those personas to the buyer journey, you’re accelerating the buying process.
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If you’re just getting started with developing your map, it’s best to go slowly. The
main work is to identify each stage, pair it with a persona, and then lay out all the
touchpoints.
Benefitting from the journey map
If you wonder whether creating a journey map is worth the time and effort, think
about the fact that it keeps you and your organization focused on the specific needs of
your customer. That’s critical. Some other key benefits of journey maps are that they
»» Help you determine what your priorities should be. You know that you will
never meet every customer need, create every piece of desirable content, or
always make the sale. There’s just an overwhelming amount of work that needs to
be done. But you are going to try. To get a handle on your priorities, a journey map
shows you the actions that will have the most impact on the customer experience.
»» Get everyone on the same page. A visual map lets everyone know what the
goals are and why they exist. Everyone can see how everything fits together,
and team members can agree or disagree right up front so that buy-in can be
established.
»» Let you see where your customer experience is broken. An interesting
thing can happen as you map your buyer journey. You can see where your
path breaks down. If you don’t have sufficient content for each stage, that lack
will become apparent and you can remedy it.
»» Show you what each department needs to do to collaborate effectively
with one another. A visual map of the buyer journey helps staff members
move out of their silos and collaborate effectively. It’s hard to stay isolated
when you know what the rest of the team is trying to accomplish.
»» Help you determine the content needed for each stage of the journey.
Obviously, you need to match content to each point in the journey. See the
next section to find out how.
So, what are the key items you want on your journey map?
»» Buyer’s stage/goal: The possible stages that your customer may go through
are in the section “Understanding the buying process and journey map,”
earlier in this chapter. You can add those to your map if they fit your products.
Also include the specific goal statement for your product or service.
»» Persona: If you followed along in Book 1, Chapter 2, which covers creating
personas, you have them ready to go. If you haven’t created your personas
yet, doing so is important because you need to identify on the map the
persona you’re targeting.
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»» Touchpoints: See the next section to determine how to apply touchpoints to
the map.
Make sure to identify all the stakeholders who are part of the process to ensure
that you do a thorough job of mapping everything.
Focusing on content for each
part of the journey
As mentioned previously, beginning your journey map is a complex undertaking.
Table 3-1 lists possible choices.
TABLE 3-1
Content for the Buyer Journey
Buyer Stages
Personas
Potential Touchpoints
Suggested Content
Types by Stage
1. Awareness: Identifies
a problem and does a
broad search
Example:
Jane Brown
Search engines on mobile
and computer, brand
websites, blogs, landing
pages, social media
platforms, ads, influencers
WOM, ebooks, reports,
photos, infographics, blogs,
articles, recommendations,
video, influencer content,
testimonials, PR
2. Consideration:
Narrows options
and looks at specific
products and pricing
Personas
Brand websites, blogs,
landing pages, social media,
rating and review sites, ads,
influencers, email
Product tour, demos, free
trials, free samples, interviews,
testimonials, pr, webinars,
videos, white papers, case
studies, pricing, webinars,
recommendations
3. Decision: Makes
final comparisons and
chooses your product
Personas
Customer service on
social media and website
or in store, mobile,
salesperson, email
Product specifications sheets,
buyer’s guides, comparison
charts, webinars, a look at the
checkout process, shipping info,
payment options, online customer
support options
4. Satisfaction:
Felt immediately
after purchase
Personas
Customer service,
social media, website,
mobile, email
Email follow-up, tech support,
community, social media,
webinars, online training
5. Ongoing Use:
Uses product and
could become a
potential advocate
Personas
Customer service,
social media, website,
mobile, email
Free tips, online training,
conferences, webinars, video,
support, in-person meetings
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When you complete your persona research, you should be able to note what
special concerns and needs your persona has right on your map.
To create a journey map with content, follow these steps:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Choose the buyer stage.
List the specific persona you’re targeting.
List the touchpoints by thinking through the path you think this persona
would take.
List the type of content you need to create to support that path.
Another helpful way to understand how your prospect thinks about content in each
stage of his buying journey was presented by Mathew Sweezey from Salesforce.
He states that when a prospect begins his search for product information, he
thinks about the following:
»» In the first phase (the awareness stage), he considers himself and how to do
his job better. He looks at content such as blogs, articles, and industry blogs.
»» In the second phase of his research (the consideration stage), he looks for
social proof — that is, how others benefited. This includes content like case
studies, interviews, and videos.
»» In the final phase (the decision stage), he looks at content about your com-
pany to help him decide whether you’re the right choice. This includes content
such as buyers’ guides, comparisons, and sales sheets.
As you’re creating your content, think about whether customers are thinking
about how the product impacts them (what they think), social proof (what others
say), or you (what you say).
ASK THE EXPERTS
Daniel Newman of Broadsuite reported in Forbes on a study by Nielsen that was
designed to figure out which type of content had the most impact in each of the buying
stages Nielsen tested three categories of content: (1) expert third-party content (influencers and subject matter experts); (2) branded content (marketing content); and
(3) user-generated content (reviews, ratings, and so on). The study found that expert
content won in all the buying stages.
This is an important finding. It doesn’t negate the need for all the content types listed in
Table 3-1, earlier in the chapter. It does tell you that you need to pay special attention to
your earned media, as discussed in Book 5, Chapter 1. People want to reassure themselves that they are making the best decision and will look for experts to confirm it.
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Forbes Magazine has named personalization one of the top trends and said that
“Personalization is not a trend. It is a marketing tsunami.” Are you ready for the
onslaught? Can you provide the type of personalized experience that your customers expect?
Personalizing content is a tricky business. Customers want to have a personalized
experience but also want to feel that their privacy is being respected. This is a fine
line to walk. But walk it you will, because consumers no longer tolerate content
that isn’t matched to their needs.
One of the most common examples of personalization is Amazon’s ability to
recommend products and prime videos (if you’re a Prime member) that most
Amazon subscribers feel is very accurate. Target has also created algorithms
that can predict users needs even before they know them. For an interesting example of this, see (https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketingpersonalization-examples).
This statement is not an exaggeration. A study conducted by Janrain, a company
that uses proprietary technology to help companies find new users on social media
(https://www.janrain.com/), found out that when they asked respondents how
they would respond to content that wasn’t relevant to them. Seventy-five percent of the respondents said that they would leave a website if they were shown
ads or content that didn’t align with their interests. Fifty-seven percent said they
would be willing to give some personal information if it was used responsibly
for their benefit. Additional findings indicated that consumers are unwavering in
their desire to see content personalized for them and wouldn’t hesitate to leave a
site that didn’t cater to their needs.
Larry Drebes, founder of Janrain, said that “[c]onsumers have reached the tipping point when it comes to being shown content that isn’t relevant to them.
It’s a wake-up call for brands to fix this problem or risk losing customers and
prospects.” As you can see, your customers will only get more insistent about
personalized content.
If you work for a company that doesn’t use personalization technology, that’s
not surprising. According to a study done by Econsultancy and Monetate, a company that provides personalization services to organizations, more than half
(56 percent) of companies don’t use it on their websites. In fact, 72 percent of
the respondents said they know it’s important but that they “don’t know how
to do it” (http://info.monetate.com/CROnlinePersonalisationUS_Research.
html?utm_source=M-W-Blog&utm_campaign=R-Personlisation).
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Personalizing Your Content
So if you’re interested in getting started with personalization, what should you
consider?
»» Your organization’s state of readiness: Is your organization prepared to do
the work and allocate the budget necessary to do a good job of personalizing
your owned media? Does management believe it’s a good idea?
»» The strength of your personas: Do you have confidence that you can use
your personas as the framework for your personalization efforts? If you don’t
have personas or have given them short shrift, you’re not ready to put a
personalization program into practice.
»» Your data collection efforts: Do you have a customer relationship manage-
ment (CRM) system or other data collection management tools to ensure that
you have the data you need? Will you be able to assess the effectiveness of
your efforts?
»» Your email capabilities: Can you send personalized emails with your current
system and track the results?
»» Your mobile messaging efforts: Will you be able to reach consumers with
your offers via their mobile devices?
For more information about personalization, see Book 2, Chapter 3.
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Learning where your company fits on
the maturity scale
»» Considering the evolving role of
sales reps
»» Accommodating the needs of
salespeople
»» Improving the sales coaching process
Chapter
4
Embracing Sales
Enablement
S
ales Enablement (SE) focuses on the processes, tools, and techniques companies use to increase the effectiveness of their salesforce and includes
marketing automation, digital asset management, CRM systems, and social
media monitoring tools.
Of course, the idea of creating sales content to improve sales is not new. Companies have struggled with getting their products into the hands of their customers
for centuries. In the early 1900s, the Jell-O Company had its salespeople distribute
free Jell-O recipe cookbooks to customers to show how to use Jell-O with their
favorite dishes. It’s recorded that more than 15 million cookbooks were distributed
in some years and the sales of Jell-O doubled over time.
What is new is the use of the web to assist salespeople in getting the right information to the customer at the right time from anywhere in the world. This
chapterlooks at the adoption of SE and the ways in which you can deploy it to help
your sales reps hit a home run every time.
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Discovering Sales Enablement
When you look at the world of SE, you quickly discover that it means different
things to different companies. And some companies take an informal approach
whereas others set up rigorous systems that impact every part of their organization. It depends on the size and needs of each company.
The definition of SE that fits the largest possible audience is Doug Winter’s definition in the Business Journals. He writes, “. . . sales enablement is the ability,
by any sales rep, to systematically deliver a personalized, one-on-one customer
experience.” Just as in the Jell-O selling days, salespeople need to deliver targeted
sales information right into the hands of the buyers. Today, companies reach
those buyers via their mobile phones, tablets, or laptops. But the problem remains
the same: “One size fits all” never does. The key to effective selling is the ability
to present a personalized experience directly to each buyer.
So what essential elements must be present to make an SE system effective?
Although several features make up a world-class system, three components are
critical:
»» Data analytics: These analytics collect and use data to make decisions about
what the customer wants so that the sales cycle can be completed quickly.
Your SE system must give you the ability to see what customers download,
look at, and ask about so that you know what they care about.
»» A CRM system: This system provides integration with current customer
information to help speed the sales response at each point during the buyer
journey.
»» A cloud-based content database: Both sales reps and customers need to
have the latest content and product updates available to them from anywhere. Your competitors will.
Gaining a competitive advantage
Managers who are presented with the concept of SE need to be convinced that
making the effort to implement a new strategy is worth the time and money
that’s required. Will it actually improve the win rate? Can it provide a competitive
advantage? Answering these questions is key.
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So what are the reasons to implement a sales enablement strategy? Some benefits
include:
»» Making sales reps more responsive to the specific needs of the customer,
giving the company a competitive advantage
»» Increasing demand by strategically deploying the type of content that
potential customers are looking for before engaging a salesperson
»» Speeding up the time to complete a sale by answering all the questions
customers have whenever they have them
»» Keeping all the salespeople up-to-date and aware of changes to products and
services
Embracing Sales
Enablement
»» Assisting sales coaches to meet the individual needs of all sales reps by
analyzing their data
»» Helping reps gain traction early in their tenure by giving them access to the
training they require when and where they need it
These are very desirable outcomes of a sales enablement system. Any manager
would love to be able to show results like these to his company’s executives.
Unfortunately, making them happen takes a lot of strategizing and experimenting, which is covered in Book 2, Chapter 3.
Evaluating your current status
To begin considering your own SE, it’s helpful to determine where your organization stands on the SE continuum. Demand Metric, a marketing and research firm
(see Figure 4-1), uses a model it developed called the “Sales Enablement Maturity Model.” You can download it at http://www.demandmetric.com/content/
sales-enablement-maturity-model.
Look at the descriptions of the stages of maturity to determine where your company is right now. Note that the relationship of sales to marketing is an important
component. Table 4-1 describes the levels.
Do you recognize your company in one of these descriptions? You’re unlikely to
be at the world-class level. Don’t feel frustrated; so few companies are. It’s a
slow process. You can, however, move the process forward by identifying your
company’s stage of maturity to help focus your efforts and learn what is possible. You also want to consider what goes into making your organization world
class in SE.
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FIGURE 4-1:
The Sales
Enablement
Maturity Model
by Demand
Metric.
TABLE 4-1
The Stages of Maturity in Sales Enablement Strategy
Maturity Level
What’s Happening
Undefined
No sales enablement activity or perceived need. No structure or operational tools in place.
Sales and marketing departments are siloed with no collaboration. Win rate is less than
ten percent.
(When a company is organized into silos, it means that each department is independent
and does not know what the other departments are doing. There is no collaboration.)
Progressive
You’re in the early days of a loose system (fewer than two years). Requests are made for
sales enablement function. Some light response has been received. Sales and marketing
departments are aware of each other’s activities and have some coordination. Win rate is
10 to 20 percent.
Mature
A system has been in place for more than three years. A budget and staff are allocated.
There is integration of both automation and a CRM system. Sales and marketing have
mutual goals. Win rate is 20 percent.
World Class
The system has been in place for more than five years. A strategic plan is in place, and
sales and marketing work hand in hand with shared revenue responsibilities. Win rate is
more than 25 percent.
Tamara Schenk is Research Director of the MHI Research Institute. Her blog is
shown in Figure 4-2 (http://blog.tamaraschenk.com/). In her SlideShare presentation, she says that four pillars drive world-class sales enablement (http://
bit.ly/1JeWFG7).
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Embracing Sales
Enablement
FIGURE 4-2:
Tamara
Schenk’s blog.
Consider whether your company can implement these pillars. The four sales
enablement success pillars are as follows:
»» Design: Have the customer at the core of your strategy. In today’s market-
place you need the customer at the center of all your marketing efforts. This
includes the design of all your owned media like websites and blogs. If your
website is hard to navigate or find something, then you need a redesign.
Customers aren’t as forgiving about this as they were when the web was new.
Their expectations are high, and you need to meet them.
»» Scope: Integrate frontline sales managers. This means that your frontline
sales managers need to have a way to get feedback from every customerfacing employee. They need to know what’s going on in real time.
»» Foundation: Have a foundation in sales operations. All your sales content and
training need to support the sales structure as a whole. This framework will
ensure that your salesforce gets the right type of training when salespeople
need it.
»» Collaboration: Collaborate to integrate your company services. If you have
siloed departments, you know that you’re preventing people from doing their
best work. Interaction and shared responsibilities make your teams
successful.
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Understanding the new role of sales reps
The role of the sales rep continues to evolve. All the positive value that the web
provides also brings with it some obvious negatives — with the main one being
that the salesperson is no longer in control of the sales process. In contrast to
previous years, salespeople don’t control the narrative these days.
According to SiriusDecisions (https://www.siriusdecisions.com), a research
and consulting company, salespeople typically come into the conversation when
the buyer has completed more than half of the buying process. (The buyer journey
is discussed in depth in Book 2, Chapter 3.)
This means that being proactive and catching the buyer earlier in the cycle would
be an excellent way to decrease the time it takes to complete the sales cycle. That’s
what a real SE system can help you do. It helps you empower the salesperson to
find those buyers who are searching your solutions and related topics.
Today’s purchasing teams are larger and spread across departments. Salespeople
rarely get to sit across from the ultimate decision maker. By providing cloudbased content to anyone in the company who is interested, reps can help speed up
the buying cycle.
In his book The Frugalnomics Survival Guide (Alinean Press), sales expert Tom Pisello
defines the current selling environment as a place where corporate “buyers have
become more empowered, skeptical and economic-focused” and expect to know
the monetary value of a company’s solution before making a decision. Your sales
reps would agree.
Mobility is another one of the critical factors that an SE system must have to
accommodate the changing role of sales reps. First and foremost, a mobile SE
system provides the content that customers want anytime, and anywhere. But it
also is a great boon to salespeople who can’t tie themselves down to a desk in an
office. Salespeople have been known to prepare for presentations on subways, in
coffee shops, and at their kids’ soccer games, so mobility is a must. You need to
supply devices to present from the cloud.
The Tech Republic blog (https://www.techrepublic.com/article/internetof-things-in-2019-five-predictions/) predicts that more and more things
will be connected at the enterprise level. Shouldn’t all your sales content be
connected?
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Training Your Salesforce
Every manager knows that a well-trained salesforce is the key to success. Yet
many organizations fail to take the simplest actions to empower their salespeople,
such as neglecting to make sales information easy to find and forgetting to update
everyone when changes are made to sales software.
In addition, many companies still labor under the delusion that a typical “sales
personality” exists that you must hire. In its blog, HubSpot reported that
according to Dave Kurlan from Kurlan & Associates and founder of the Objective ­Management Group, several sales myths still exist among people who hire
sales reps (http://blog.hubspot.com/opinion/study-3-of-4-sales-repsineffective). They include the following:
»» Your sales rep needs to be an extrovert. Recent findings have shown that
introverts can also make great salespeople. They tend to be empathetic and
caring. You need to look among both types for your best reps.
»» Your hire should be a driven person. This one assumes that your sales rep
is driven in all areas of his or her life. In reality, you need to choose someone
who is really motivated to be a great sales rep. Being driven in other areas
doesn’t translate into sales prowess.
»» It’s preferable for your salesperson to be an athlete. Do athletes win at
everything they try? Clearly not. It’s great if your sales reps have good training
habits as long as they can translate those habits to sales performance. If not,
they’re irrelevant.
Do you still believe these myths? If so, it’s time to shake them off and look carefully at the person you’re going to hire for the skills that actually matter.
So what should your sales training include? You should consider three types of
training:
»» Structured training sessions: The classic sales training that you’re likely most
familiar with is structured training. Just as in any college course, structured
training has a syllabus, and the salesperson is expected to learn in a specific
sequence. Typically, a salesperson goes through this type of training when
first joining the company. But using this kind of training alone is outmoded. By
combining it with all the devices and technology available, companies create a
much more valuable learning environment.
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Embracing Sales
Enablement
A Dell study indicated that 52 percent of Dell’s salespeople believed that they didn’t have access to the most current compliant content.
»» Learning on the go: Cloud-based training is ideal for salespeople on the go.
They can get whatever they need no matter where they are. They can send
the right content for every step of the buyer’s journey. (See Book 2, Chapter 3
for more on the buyer journey.)
»» Interactive sales meetings: Face-to-face sales meetings or video conferencing are still indispensable. That’s because it’s still important for members of a
sales team to share their wisdom and trade success stories.
Coaching Your Reps to Become Winners
One of the key functions of an SE system is the use of sales coaches. But are all
sales coaches created equal? Your experience tells you they’re not. Some salespeople are born coaches who can spot and solve problems; others just can’t cut it.
When evaluating your company’s coaching capabilities, you want to consider
these four aspects:
»» Determine whether your coaches are up to the task. Typically, sales
coaches come from the ranks of the salesforce. They get promoted upward
based on the quality of the job they have done, not the one into which they’re
being promoted. The better the sales rep, the more likely he will be elevated
to the status of manager or coach — his skills notwithstanding. For this
reason, it’s important to assess whether your coach can impart the skills
necessary to train an effective salesperson.
»» Evaluate your coach’s overall management skills. This is a key component,
although many companies overlook it. If the coach is a bad manager, she
won’t be able to spend the time doing the most important tasks. She needs to
assess how much time she should spend with each sales rep to make a
difference. If the coach can’t manage her own time, she’s likely to be an
ineffective coach.
»» Assess whether you’re giving your coaches the materials they need to be
effective trainers. As you know, training materials must be available to sales
reps at all times. The key question becomes, do coaches have the training
materials they need? If you ask your coaches to create training on the fly,
you’re hampering their ability to be efficient.
»» Look at the metrics used to evaluate a sales rep. An SE system must have
built-in metrics to help coaches determine what and when the rep is learning.
Without these measures, coaches will have to guess what they have accomplished, or take their rep’s word for it.
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Checking Out Sales Enablement Blogs
Because sales enablement is a relatively new topic, you may not be aware of blogs
that focus specifically on this topic. If you want to regularly follow SE, here are
three major blogs that merit your attention:
»» Salesforce, the premier provider of sales software in the industry. You can
find a wealth of information about sales enablement at this link: https://
www.salesforce.com/blog/.
»» Forrester (https://www.forrester.com/B2B-Marketing), shown in
»» Association for Talent Development (https://www.td.org/Publications/
Blogs/Sales-Enablement-Blog), shown in Figure 4-4. The Association for
Talent Development is a professional organization that supports sales trainers
around the globe.
FIGURE 4-3:
The Forrester
blog.
CHAPTER 4 Embracing Sales Enablement
179
Embracing Sales
Enablement
Figure 4-3. Forrester is a well-respected research and consulting firm that
provides up-to-the minute information.
FIGURE 4-4:
The Sales
­ nablement blog
E
of the A
­ ssociation
for Talent
Development.
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BOOK 2 Uncovering the Customer Experience
3
Dipping into
Content
Creation
Contents at a Glance
CHAPTER 1:
Creating Your Content Plan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Evaluating Your Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Assessing Your Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Visualizing Your Sites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Creating Your Plan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
Focusing on Specialized Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194
CHAPTER 2:
Reviewing Content Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Dipping into Content Categories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
Working with Original Short- and Long-Form Content . . . . . . . . . . 199
Using Curation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
Making Use of User-Generated Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
Repurposing Content to Add Value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Viewing Aggregated Visual Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Dealing with Live Video Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
Extending Business News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Offering Online Courses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
Managing Content Formats. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
CHAPTER 3:
Understanding the Customer’s Intent. . . . . . . . . . . . 219
Knowing the Dynamics of Content Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
Finding Your Path to Perfect Content Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Executing Perfect Content Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
Distributing Content to Attract an Audience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
CHAPTER 4:
Creating Content That Tells a Story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
Storytelling to Engage Your Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
Structuring Your Content Using Stories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
CHAPTER 5:
Defining Your Content Framework
Using Processes and Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
Organizing the Content Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
Determining Roles and Responsibilities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Managing the Workflow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
Documenting Your Policies and Procedures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264
CHAPTER 6:
Targeting Content for Your B2B Audience. . . . . . . 269
Creating a Content Library. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
Humanizing Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
Reaching Through Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Knowing the value of your current
content
»» Understanding the needs of
stakeholders
»» Identifying gaps in content
Chapter
1
Creating Your
Content Plan
I
f you don’t have a content plan in 2019, you’re seriously jeopardizing your company’s chances for success. Everyone from “boring” companies like machinery
manufacturers to red-hot companies like BuzzFeed have one.
As you begin creating your content plan, you need to remember that your content
marketing strategy is different from your content plan. A content marketing strategy determines how your company goals will be met by marketing your c
­ ontent.
A content plan details specifically how your content will be created, managed, and
distributed to meet the goals you identified in your content marketing strategy.
In this chapter, you look at the current state of your content and what it takes to
put a content plan together.
Evaluating Your Content
Your content can be one of your company’s greatest assets if you give it careful
thought and attention. Some companies have been slow to get on the bandwagon,
but they were quickly convinced when their competitors developed engaging
­content that attracted their customers.
CHAPTER 1 Creating Your Content Plan
183
If you’re wondering whether custom content matters to your customers, ask the
Chief Marketing Officer Council World Wide (https://cmocouncil.org).
This organization’s research indicates that 78 percent of customers believe that
companies that create custom content are interested in creating relationships
with them. You engender goodwill by spending the time and money to create
quality content.
Benefitting from a content plan
If your company has a digital marketing strategy, you may wonder if you need a
content strategy as well. If you’re skeptical as to why you should create a content
plan, take a look at some ways it can benefit you. When you have a cohesive content plan, you can
»» Increase brand awareness and brand loyalty by being in the right place with
quality content
»» More effectively evaluate content performance and revise as necessary
»» Save time and money and avoid duplicating efforts
»» Meet customer needs during every part of the buyer’s journey
»» Ensure that you deliver quality content that has been through an effective
editorial process
»» Deliver a consistent message on all your distribution channels
According to the infographic by Demand Metric, shown in Figure 1-1, “80 percent
of people appreciate learning about a company through custom content and
60 percent are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it.”
You can find the infographic at http://www.demandmetric.com/content/
content-marketing-infographic.
If you now grasp the value of having a content plan, you probably want to know
how to make your content superior to that of your competitors. First off, the name
of the game is quality, not quantity.
Doug Kessler, creative director and cofounder of Velocity Partners (http://www.
velocitypartners.co.uk), outlined some interesting ways to get noticed in his
article “5 Ways to Stand Out in a Sea of Content.” The article appeared in the
CMS Wire blog, shown in Figure 1-2 and found at http://www.cmswire.com/
digital-marketing/5-ways-to-stand-out-in-a-sea-of-content/.
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FIGURE 1-1:
Creating Your
Content Plan
Demand Metric
Infographic.
FIGURE 1-2:
CMS Wire.
CHAPTER 1 Creating Your Content Plan
185
Kessler suggests the following five tactics:
»» Stay in your sweet spot. He defines your sweet spot as the overlap between
your company’s knowledge and the things your customers care about. If you
stay in that area, you’re sure to create quality content.
»» Use psychographic targeting. Know what specifically resonates with your
customers, and provide them with content that addresses their concerns.
»» Harness emotion, not just the facts. As described in more detail in the later
section called “Going viral” you’re most likely to get people to like and share
your content when it evokes strong emotions.
»» Practice insane honesty. This is an important concept. Kessler says that
when you highlight your faults, people appreciate your honesty and are more
likely to do business with you.
»» Create confident content. This is content written by great writers who know
their stuff and are convinced that what they have to share will be of value
to you.
Also be sure to check out the Velocity Partners SlideShare called “Insane Honesty
in Content Marketing” (http://www.slideshare.net/dougkessler/insanehonesty-in-content-marketing). It’s a great example of the idea behind the
saying “Total honesty is the best ruse ever invented.”
Determining content maturity
Are you just getting started creating your content or is your company an old
hand at it? Knowing where you stand is helpful when you begin creating your
­content plan. To determine your status, you can use a content maturity model.
Todd Cameron has written an article about Kapost’s “The Content Operation
Maturity Model,” shown in Figure 1-3 (http://marketeer.kapost.com/contentoperation-maturity-model/#axzz). You can use it to assess where your
company falls on the content maturity continuum between novice and practitioner.
Here are the status designations:
»» Novice: This group is just getting started. Members may have siloed departments and don’t have an established process to create content.
»» Practitioner: If you fall into this group, you’re starting to create processes and
beginning to establish some visibility.
»» Intermediate: This group is starting to establish a strategy and develop
workflows.
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BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
FIGURE 1-3:
The Kapost
­Content
­Operation
­ aturity Model.
M
»» Advanced: If you’re in this group, you’re really moving forward. You are
»» Expert: This group has mastered content creation. You’re doing everything
right. You’re optimizing your content and focusing on leads and revenue.
So where does your company fall on this continuum? Determine where you are
now and what you need to do to get to the next level. Then let all the staff know
your designation and what people can do as a team to move forward. This is a great
way to motivate teams because they can see how collaboration will be rewarded.
Assessing Your Content
It’s time to look at your content so that you can learn what needs to be added or
revised going forward. To assess your content, you need to do several things in
the following order:
»» Talk to your stakeholders
»» Conduct a content audit and determine whether you have gaps in your content
»» Create visual maps of key sites
CHAPTER 1 Creating Your Content Plan
187
Creating Your
Content Plan
revenue focused and developing sound channel plans.
The following sections consider each of these actions in turn.
Interviewing your stakeholders
Internal stakeholders play a very important role in your content plan. Their
importance is often overlooked because listening to them takes time and effort.
They are the keepers of important information and understand the history behind
the content that’s been created.
One-on-one interviews are preferable, but you can do group interviews if you
have very large groups of stakeholders.
Prepare interviewees by giving them the questions beforehand. You want them to
be ready to give their perspective on the company’s content and procedures. Making the effort to speak to them will help you
»» Find out about sites, landing pages, and other pages that were created
and forgotten
»» Understand why particular sets of content were created and how they
performed
»» Discover content needs that aren’t being met
»» Learn about systems and procedures that are working well or need
improvement
»» Understand how internal stakeholders work together and what the challenges
are in collaborating
»» Get buy-in for your content plan when you have completed it
You can see that you will miss important insights if you avoid talking to all your
stakeholders. Jump in and get it done. Your stakeholders will appreciate being
consulted.
Conducting a content audit
Are you ready to conduct your content audit? It’s the step in the process that tells
you exactly what content you have. If you work for a large enterprise, pockets of
content may or may not have been documented. If you work in a small business,
you may have a full audit or none at all.
The key to doing an effective content audit is deciding beforehand how comprehensive in scope you will get. You can determine the scope based on your specific
goals, the volume of content, and the resources you have to accomplish the task.
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BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
Ask yourself the following questions to clarify your thinking:
»» How do I define the goals of this project? Is this project being done for an
imminent campaign or does it have to encompass all your content? Make sure
that you can articulate the goals you have for each project.
»» Are there specific priorities that I can apply? Based on what you’re trying
to accomplish, can you limit your investigation to certain channels or types of
content?
»» Will it help me to know about every piece of content that exists? Decide
how much depth you need to go to. Can you take a middle ground that
collects representative content, or must it be all inclusive?
»» How deeply should I go into the specifications for each piece of content?
Do you want to take the time to document all characteristics for each piece of
content? Do you want to know everything about a piece of content or can you
be selective?
Now that you have determined the scope of your audit, look at what a content
audit worksheet might include:
»» Title: The exact title of the content piece. You may have several pieces with
similar titles.
»» Location: The URL where the content is located. It’s very important to note
Creating Your
Content Plan
this location when doing the audit. Don’t duplicate efforts by requiring a
producer to go and locate it every time it’s needed.
»» Persona: The persona name for whom you created this content.
»» Buyer’s journey step: The step in the buyer’s journey for which you created
this content, such as “Consideration.” (See Book 2, Chapter 3 for more on the
buyer journey.)
»» Format: Describe the specific format the content is in. Is it an ebook, a blog
post, something else? This information will help you determine how you can
repurpose it.
»» Topic/keywords: Put in the known keywords that were used and, if possible,
the specific topic under which this content was categorized.
»» Call to action (CTA): Identify the CTA for the content piece. Knowing the CTA
is very useful when you’re determining a content sequence, such as a link to a
landing page.
»» Metrics: List any metrics you have that let you know how well the content
performed.
CHAPTER 1 Creating Your Content Plan
189
As mentioned previously, you might not choose to include all the preceding items.
Modify your worksheet based on the type of content audit you’re doing. You also
have to determine whether you can collect some of the items in a reasonable
amount of time.
It’s important to do a content audit to help you determine the gaps in your content. You do this when you’re putting your content plan together.
Visualizing Your Sites
When planning your content, consider visually mapping it to see the big picture.
One way to do this is to create a map of your content ecosystem.
Mapping your content ecosystem
Your content ecosystem shows how your content fits together. Your map can be as
detailed as you like. You can document every site, social media account, and landing
page you have, or you can list only the most important ones. It’s up to you. The goal
is to create an easy way to see how and where your content is distributed.
To create this kind of map, you can reference the PESO model in Book 5, Chapter 1.
An example of this kind of mind map template is shown in Figure 1-4.
FIGURE 1-4:
Suggested
mind map for
­documenting
your ecosystem.
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BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
As you can see in the figure, you can document your ecosystem by category:
»» Owned media: List all your branded sites, including your website, blog, micro
sites, and user-generated content (UGC).
»» Shared media: Include your social platform accounts and any places you
guest post, embed infographics, or upload slide shows.
»» Paid media: Here you list media that you pay for, such as Facebook Ads and
traditional and native advertising.
»» Earned media: Examples of earned media are influencer reviews, traditional
PR, and media relations.
»» Syndication: Add sites in this category if you’re distributing your site via
syndication.
A map of your content ecosystem helps you see the big picture of your content distribution. If you keep this updated, it can be a valuable tool for you and your team.
Picturing website content
Creating Your
Content Plan
Another map that you should consider creating is one of your website’s and or
blog’s home page content and subpages. It serves several important contentrelated purposes.
Mapping your website in this way helps you do the following:
»» See exactly what content your company thinks is important. By seeing
what content is displayed on the main pages, you instantly see the content
that is highlighted. You can then ask stakeholders whether they believe it
reflects current business goals.
»» Compare maps of competitor websites. You can create and compare maps
of your competitors’ sites to see how your content presentation differs from
theirs and whether you need to make revisions.
»» Learn about content that is buried. You will see content that is not featured
and should be brought up to a higher level on the site.
»» Determine whether there is content you should immediately create or
repurpose. Seeing what’s featured will show you where your gaps are and
how they can be remedied.
»» Use the map to determine whether a redesign is needed. Mapping
website content almost always ignites a conversation about whether you’re
focusing on current business goals. You may choose not to do a redesign
immediately, but you may want to budget for one in the future.
CHAPTER 1 Creating Your Content Plan
191
»» Use the map to get changes made to content navigation. When you look
at navigation, you may find that your priorities have changed and a revision
would be useful.
As you can see, mapping your website and other important sites can facilitate a lot
of discussion and insights. Figure 1-5 shows an example of a map template that
you can use as a model.
FIGURE 1-5:
Model of a
­website map.
Creating Your Plan
It’s time to create your content plan. In Table 1-1, you see the components that go
into developing it.
The following list describes how each of the components in Table 1-1 helps you
determine what goes in your content plan:
»» The business case for content: If you created your content marketing
strategy), you have made a business case for your content. Use the business
case you created (or will create) for your content to inform your plan.
»» Stakeholder interviews: Your stakeholders will provide you with a wealth of
knowledge and insights about what has been done and why. Using this
knowledge will ensure that your content plan with be better defined and
executed.
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BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
TABLE 1-1
Components of Content Strategy
Component
Why It’s Needed
How to Prepare
Stakeholders
To ensure that you have information
from all those who can make or break
the project
Conduct one-on-one interviews.
Content audit
To determine existing content
Do a content audit.
Personas
To know who is the target of
your content
Use the information about personas in
Book 2, Chapter 2.
Buyer journey
To know what the customer needs to
see on his journey to buy
Use the information about the buyer
journey in Book 2, Chapter 3.
Story
To create a context for your
prospect’s choice and establish
your “why”
Use the information you develop
from the section “Crafting the story”
in Book 3, Chapter 4.
Governance, systems,
and editorial calendar
To determine how content is judged,
assigned, and moved through to
completion
See Book 3, Chapter 5 for more on
this topic.
Metrics
To be able to determine metrics that
tie to your KPIs
Choose metrics (see the bullet
about key success metrics in the list
that follows).
Hold group meetings.
»» A completed content audit: After you have completed your content audit
Creating Your
Content Plan
you will know what content you currently have and what you need to create
going forward. Obviously, this is crucial to your plan’s success.
»» Defined personas for your market niche: Your personas will tell you who
you’re targeting with your content. If you don’t have personas you won’t be
able to create content that resonates with your customers. It will be generic
content that won’t engage anyone to pay attention to you. (See Book 2,
Chapter 2 for more about personas.)
»» A map of your buyer journey: By determining your touchpoints along the
customer journey you can now see the content you need for each stage and
persona. (See Book 2, Chapter 3 for more about the buyer journey.)
»» Your business story: Obviously, your business story will determine the
themes you choose to write about. Storytelling is a key way to engage your
prospects.
»» Key success metrics: Choosing your success metrics is a very important part
of your content plan. They will tie back to the key performance indicators
(KPIs) that you determined were important when you developed your digital
marketing strategy. (See Book 1, Chapter 1 for suggested metrics.)
CHAPTER 1 Creating Your Content Plan
193
With this information, you can begin to outline your content using a content plan
worksheet. Note that you should complete a separate sheet for each persona.
Focusing on Specialized Content
Before you leave the topic of content planning, you should know about several
kinds of content that should be on your radar screen. These include pillar content, evergreen content, visual content, and viral content. Read on to see why you
should keep them in mind when developing your content plan.
Creating pillar content
Do you know what pillar content is? You’re probably using it even if you don’t
know the term. Pillar content is quality foundational content that you create to
represent your brand. This content can be ebooks, tutorials, or other substantial
content pieces that provide value.
From this content, you create a variety of other pieces of content that function as
a pillar “supporting” a topic. This means that you can take the tutorial you created
and turn it into a
»» Video
»» Podcast
»» Mind map
»» Google Hangout
»» Guest post
»» Webinar
You really have no limit to the amount of pillar content you can create.
Utilizing evergreen content
Evergreen is an important concept that you should consider when you’re creating
content. Evergreen content is content that can be enjoyed without regard to when
it was created. For example, a blog post about “how to be a productive entrepreneur” can be read any time of the year in any recent year. It’s timeless and can
keep readers interested whenever they come upon it.
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BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
Some examples of evergreen content include:
»» Tutorials
»» Support content and FAQs
»» Ebooks
»» Online tools lists
»» Favorite resources
»» Company stories
So what should you keep in mind when creating this type of content? You should
»» Make it easy to consume: Visitors appreciate content that doesn’t take a
long time to read and isn’t overly complex.
»» Create only high-quality assets: If the content is going to be around for a
while and represent your brand, you want to ensure that it can delight and
engage customers.
»» Include visuals: Visuals are key to creating great content. Make sure that all
evergreen content has graphics, photos, and so on.
»» Create a series: It’s helpful to create evergreen content that is in series form.
An interesting article by Julia McCoy, CEO of Express Writers called “Why You
Need to Start Creating Long, Evergreen Content Today” was published in the
Search Engine Journal.
In the article, she discusses why small business owners specifically benefit from
long evergreen content. She lists several reasons that could also apply to any size
business:
»» Google rewards more in-depth content, and places you higher in
search results.
»» Your visitors appreciate content that is not overly complex but is instructive
and useful.
»» You can get leads over a sustained period of time with less effort.
»» Evergreen content keeps you relevant and provides quality content whenever
visitors find it.
CHAPTER 1 Creating Your Content Plan
195
Creating Your
Content Plan
Readers look for the other articles in a series after they find one of them.
Using graphics and other visuals
Throughout this book, you see how visuals enhance your content marketing
efforts. To emphasize that point, here are just a few stats that show how using
visuals powers up your content:
»» When you include an image with a tweet, you get 18 percent more clicks than
those without images, and you get 150 percent more retweets (Buffer).
»» Eighty-six percent of buyers want interactive/visual content on demand
(Demand Gen Report).
Your customers respond to visuals, and taking advantage of this responsiveness
is imperative. A wide variety of choices are available to you, such as infographics, memes, comics, doodles, sketches, photos, wireframes, custom graphics, and
more.
Going viral
What about viral content? Everybody wants to create it, but do you really know
how? Some research done by Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman suggests
some of the components that make up viral content.
Berger and Milkman published an article in the Journal of Marketing Research
called, “What Makes Online Content Viral?” (To download the PDF, use this link:
https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=public:main.
file&fileID=3461.) They analyzed New York Times articles and determined that
emotion played a large part in creating sharing behavior.
Specifically, they found that:
»» Positive content is more likely to go viral than negative content.
»» High psychological arousal fuels viral content. Content that evoked such
strong emotions as awe, anger, anxiety, and sadness was more likely to go
viral than weaker emotions.
This research can help you when you’re creating content with an eye toward going
viral, but it can’t ensure your success. One sure-fire way to get some power from
viral content is not to write it, but to curate it.
After you know that a piece of content has gone viral you can ride its coattails by
creating an article that uses the viral content in it. You may not get a huge reaction, but at least you know that people will be interested in viewing and sharing it.
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BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Considering original content creation
»» Working with curated articles
»» Uncovering content to repurpose
Chapter
2
Reviewing Content Types
A
t the heart of your content marketing strategy is, of course, your content.
A strong collection of content is a company asset. Building this asset takes
time and effort. But with the right strategy, you can create valuable content from several different content types.
In this chapter, you find out how working with a variety of content types helps you
effectively reach your customers and win the sale. You have numerous categories
to choose from, and when you combine them, you get even greater results.
Dipping into Content Categories
Eight different content categories are available to you. Rather than write everything from scratch, you can create unique content by taking one of the eight content categories shown in Table 2-1 and turning it into a custom piece that has
value to you and your customer. By paying attention to your audience personas,
you can develop exactly what your personas need for each stage of the buyer’s
journey. (See Book 2, Chapter 3 for details about the buyer journey.)
Here’s a look at each type mentioned in Table 2-1:
»» Original content: Content that you write to inform, attract, and sell to your
customers. This is always your most valuable content. Unfortunately, it’s costly
to create all original content.
CHAPTER 2 Reviewing Content Types
197
TABLE 2-1
Content Categories
Technique
Description
Examples
Original content
Content written for your owned
media, such as a website or blog
Blog post; ebook for lead generation
Curated content
Other people’s content with your
opinions and recommendations;
articles must be credited to the
original writer
Round-up article; guest post
User-generated
content (UGC)
Content your customers create
about your company
Pictures on Instagram of customers using
your product; video sent in by users
Repurposed content
Content that is refreshed
to republish
Webinar repurposed for SlideShare; podcast
audio repurposed as an article
Aggregated
visual content
Graphics and images published on
sites like Pinterest and Instagram
Pin boards on Pinterest; photos
on Instagram
Streaming
video content
Live streaming to an audience
using an app for iOS or Android
Facebook Live, YouTube, Instastories
Press releases and
business news
Original content developed
by your company specifically
for the purpose of promoting
your business
A press release about a new product
launch submitted on a PR site and articles
written to put on your website about
charitable endeavors
Online courses
Content that is either new
or repurposed to create a
training course
Udemy, Skillshare
(A round-up article is one in which the author
interviews subjects, collects information, and
puts it into an article that contains the latest
information on the topic.)
»» Curated content: Other people’s content to which you add value. You add
your own opinions and recommendations to personalize the content for your
audience. The key is to make sure to add enough new ideas and opinions to
make it more than just a rehash of other people’s work.
There is no point in plagiarising someone else’s work. You will often be
chastised and it obviously doesn’t improve your reputation as a thought
leader. Make sure to give credit to anyone whose work you curate.
»» User-generated content (UGC): Content that your customers and others
create. This is valuable to you and your customers because it’s unique and
cannot be duplicated by your competitors. In addition, it gets your audience
members engaged and interacting with one another.
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»» Repurposed content: Content that you have already published is reworked
to become a new asset. Repurposing your content helps you make it more
cost effective. You take something that has already been seen by your
audience and update it. You can also change the format so that in your
audience’s mind, it’s new. For example, if you take a popular blog post
and turn it into a video, you have a new asset. Just make sure to refresh
the text so that it fits with your current audience’s needs.
»» Aggregated visual content: This is a category that has recently been added.
It refers to content you aggregate on visual sites like Pinterest and Instagram.
Examples include a Pinboard with your company’s products displayed and an
Instagram collection with user content. These tactics can have great value now
that Pinterest and Instagram have added “buy” mechanisms. As you know,
visual content is a key component of your content strategy.
»» Streaming video content: This type of content is relatively new. It allows you
to live-stream directly to your audience.
Platforms like YouTube Live and Facebook Live allow you to live-stream
directly to your audience. (For more about live-streaming on Facebook see
Book 7, Chapter 6.)
»» Press release and business news: This is original content developed by your
company specifically for the purpose of promoting your business.
»» Online courses: This type of content can be collected from all your training
materials to create a cohesive online course for customers that you can sell or
give away.
Working with Original Short- and
Long-Form Content
Creating original content isn’t easy, but it can deliver the greatest punch. However, the companies who have gained the most traction have figured out how to
distinguish their content from that of their competitors, regardless of length by
using visuals with both styles of content.
According to the latest Social Media Examiner’s marketing industry report,
original content using visual images is considered the most effective (https://
www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-industryreport-2018).
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Read on to see how you can benefit from including each of these categories.
See whether these comments sound familiar to you: “You should create only
short-form content because people don’t have the time to spend reading long
articles” or “Your audience wants long, thoughtful pieces and expects you to
spend the time and money to create them.” Directly contradictory, right? Well,
which statement is right?
The content community continues to debate whether long- or short-form content is preferable. Although some claim to know the answer, it really depends on
what your specific audience prefers. For example, it may like long-form how-to
blog posts but prefer short list posts. You can find the answer by looking at your
own data. In addition, some content is determined by its platform. Tweets are
short, content on Pinterest is visual, and posts on the blogging platform Medium
(https://medium.com) tend to be longer. You need original content in all these
spaces.
People generally agree that long-form content comes in at about 2,000 words and
short-form content is approximately 800 words or fewer. You won’t have trouble
recognizing which is which. The following lists highlight the benefits of each type.
Using long-form content can be a benefit because
»» Google has declared that it values this type of content, and its algorithm
supports it.
»» Your audience will reward you highly for this content. It not only informs them
but also demonstrates that you’re a credible expert who cares about the
audience.
»» It provides greater online visibility from backlinks and shares.
»» It causes readers to stay on your site longer and perhaps look at more of your
content.
»» You can turn some of the longest content into lead-generation pieces to help
you determine what your audience values.
»» You can take older content and combine it into long-form content to get more
value from pieces that have already been created.
Short-form content is valuable because
»» It’s quick and can be published on a regular basis.
»» It’s less expensive to write.
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»» It attracts readers who want to have a quick read and move on.
»» It lends itself to multipart posts that get readers coming back for the rest of
the series.
You can see that each type of content has value regardless of the current fads.
Experiment with both types to ensure that all parts of your audience are satisfied
and that you have data to analyze.
Using Curation
Content curation can seem complicated, but it is really very straightforward. What
can actually be complicated is the delivery of a curated article that adds value.
Although you can take an article you like and share it on social media, that’s sharing, not curating. Curating takes more effort than mere sharing.
You and your audience benefit when you curate content because it allows you to
»» Demonstrate your ability to analyze and add value to content topics
»» Organize the information to make it easier to understand
»» Provide a new viewpoint on an old idea to make it usable
»» Inspire trust in you as a thought leader
»» Put the information in a different format — such as an infographic — to make
it more digestible
»» Create content that can supplement your original content, thus providing
quantity and quality
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So what exactly is curated content? Here are some examples. You can
»» Round up information and package it together with your comments. This
helps your readers find information they might miss.
»» Collect media from a variety of articles in formats like slides, videos, and
podcasts and create a slide show on a topic.
»» Develop a visual timeline that shows the development of a topic based on
historical content.
»» Uncover a new trend and create a report about it using the content of others.
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Examining five curation models
Rohit Bhargava laid out a framework for content curation in his article, “The
5 Models of Content Curation.” You can use these models as prompts when you’re
considering what kind of article you want to create:
»» Aggregation: When you aggregate content to curate, you’re gathering what
you consider to be excellent material about a topic. You then add your own
opinion and give the reader a new way to think about the content you’ve
presented.
»» Distillation: The word distill means to reduce something to its essential
components. When you use distillation to curate, you boil down all the
material and keep only the most important points.
»» Elevation: When you use elevation to curate, you look for the bigger picture
or expose a trend. This is a very valuable form of curation because it offers
the reader a fuller understanding of a topic.
»» Mashups: Mashup is a term that is often used by software vendors to
describe a new functioning app that’s derived from two already existing
programs. In relation to curating, a mashup takes different types of material and brings them together with a new way to provide a new way to
think about the topic.
»» Chronology: When you use chronology to curate content, you’re using a
timeline of events to explain a topic.
Understanding how to curate
Curation is not a new concept. For example, curators have been employed by
museums to look at their holdings and pick out the most representative pieces to
tell a larger story. You do the same with web content. You use other people’s content as the foundation of a new story you want to tell.
You can use the following list as a checklist of the 11 actions you need to take to
ensure a quality curated post:
»» Give credit to the writers of the content you choose. You must give
attribution to the writers of the content you curate. There should be no
mistaking which content is theirs and which is yours.
»» Use quality content as the basis for your new content. Choosing
poor-quality content as the basis for your new content doesn’t make sense.
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You have so many quality sources to choose from that you never have a good
reason to use badly written material.
»» Develop a new headline. You are creating a new piece of content. This
means that you need a new title that reflects your point of view.
»» Use a new image. Just as you should use a new title, you also need a new
image that sets your content apart from the content you’re curating.
»» Reduce the articles you’re curating to their essence. This item is especially
important. Don’t think that you need to include a lot of content from each
article you have chosen. You will have links to the full article right in the piece.
What you want to include are the few sentences that represent the most
important part of the content.
»» Remember to do your keyword research. Using the right keywords for your
audience is just as important for curated articles as it is for original content.
Remember that keywords are used to find your content, so they need to be
present whenever you publish.
»» Don’t choose only the low-hanging fruit. You and everyone else in your
field can find the most popular content. That’s great when you want to
know what topics would make good original posts. But if you stop at the
most popular content for your curated articles, you’re not adding much
value. Make an effort to find some good content that hasn’t already been
read by your audience.
»» Include your branding to ensure brand recognition and awareness.
Any content your company creates or curates should have your branding
visible. Both types of content are of value and should let people know
they’re from you.
»» Include a call to action (CTA). As you know, whenever you publish content,
»» Decide which channel you will be publishing on ahead of time. Pick the
channels you plan to publish on before you write. Be sure to determine that it
will satisfy that specific audience.
»» Be clear about how the content will be measured before it’s published.
The only way you can judge whether your content is successful is to choose
some metrics to evaluate it. Those metrics can also help you determine
whether you should create more content just like it.
Even though curating content seems to take a lot of effort, remember that it’s still
faster than creating an original article of similar length.
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you want to tell your audience what to do next. A CTA lets your audience know
what that next action should be. For example, you may want people to go to a
landing page or subscribe to your blog.
Making Use of User-Generated Content
Next in the list of content types is user-generated content (UGC). For better or
worse, this is not content created by you but rather your audience. UGC is any
content that is published to an online site by an end user to be seen by other users.
If you’ve ever asked your customers to submit pictures of themselves using your
product or to send photos using a specific hashtag, you’ve dealt with UCG.
UGC can be positive or negative, depending on the mindset of the user. By its very
nature, it’s uncontrollable. You will get UGC whether you want it or not. It’s the
voice of the customer weighting in on you and your brand. It includes such content as user reviews, videos, photos, and ratings. UGC can be your greatest sales
driver or your worst nightmare. If you launch a specific campaign and you tap into
some major customer dissatisfaction, it can be a recipe for disaster.
A great example of positive UGC would be a tutorial on YouTube from a user
who loves your product. In many cases, users are excited by the product and feel
that they have something to contribute. This lends credibility to the product and
engages your customers.
Understanding the positives
Some online influencers believe that UGC can be a great tool for brands. An op-ed
by Aliza Freud on DIGIDAY recommends that “brands should use more UGC.”
Freud cites the following three reasons. UGC is
»» Plentiful: Social media followers of brands are a ready-and-waiting audience
who are eager to share their thoughts and opinions.
»» Compelling: Users value the opinions of other users over that of a brand.
Reviews of products are sought after and read by people who are interested
in learning about a product.
»» Scalable: Friends will tell friends. You can get your message shared by people
in groups on social networks in ways that you never could get on your own.
You can see that major benefits can accrue to any brand that generates positive
UGC. Brands establish strong relationships with their customers by constantly
monitoring what is being said on their sites and on social media. In this way, they
know where the bumps may be.
You should make sure that you have customer service reps reporting problems on
a daily basis. Things can go badly fast on social media.
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Dealing with the negatives
The pain of failed UGC campaigns has been well-documented. Sometimes companies launch a new UGC campaign and get a barrage of nasty comments and
images. Could the companies have avoided them? Maybe. It depends on how connected the brand is with its customer.
What should you do before you launch a UGC campaign? Here are some things to
consider:
»» Take your time. You can’t take back a failed campaign. Think carefully about
your goals for the project. Make sure that everyone is clear about it and that
you have buy in from management.
»» Look at other UGC campaigns. See what has already succeeded and failed.
Have competitors tried something similar? Were they successful?
»» Experiment. Try something small that can give you a feel for your user’s
sentiment.
»» Listen to your users on a daily basis. If you’re constantly listening and
engaging with your audience, you should already know about any sore spots.
If you think you aren’t sufficiently plugged in to your audience, don’t go
forward with a UGC campaign.
»» Go in with your eyes wide open: No matter how well you plan, you can
still encounter a problem. Keep a close watch on your launch and respond
immediately if things get out of hand. Be transparent and open. If you act in
a heavy-handed manner, it will make things worse.
Your collection of content is a company asset. When you consider other company
assets, such as hardware, do you ignore them and let them fall into disrepair? Not
likely. So why do you treat your valuable content this way?
When you repurpose content, you can change the format, update the material, or
both. Doing both is wise so that your content always feels up-to-date.
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Repurposing Content to Add Value
Benefitting from repurposing
Repurposing your content makes sense for many reasons. It helps you:
»» Spread ideas: It extends the reach of your ideas by giving new audiences the
chance to see it.
»» Extend content life: It demonstrates a breadth of knowledge over the
lifetime of the content.
»» Provide a variety of formats: It enhances the value of content by changing
the format to reach people who prefer that format.
»» Make content more cost effective: Obviously, when you use content several
times, you get back the cost of creating it.
To do a first-rate job with your repurposing efforts, you need to go about it systematically. First consider which content will be repurposed and then deal with
how it gets done and who does it.
Planning goals and picking content
The first step in repurposing your content is to decide what your goals are. Next,
choose the content you want to work with. You should have the following information when you start:
»» A list of the content available to repurpose organized into topic categories:
You should have this list from your content audit. (See Book 3, Chapter 1 for how
to perform this audit.) The list should include the topic, format, keywords, and
other pertinent facts. If you have not done a content audit, your choices are
limited. You can sort the content you have at hand, but you will surely overlook
some of your best material buried in your database.
»» Your editorial calendar and a list of upcoming campaigns: Make topic
choices based on what you need immediately. Look at your editorial calendar
and upcoming campaigns that require content.
»» Pick the content that suits the business goal you have for this content:
You use your repurposed content most effectively when you tie it to actual
goals you have. Sometimes you may repurpose something because it lends
itself to a format change. But the best way to do it is to match the current
asset to a real need.
»» Determine the resources you need and the implementation cost to
determine the best fit: After you get rolling, you see all kinds of things you
want to do to repurpose the content. Make sure your choices reflect your
resources and current budget.
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Make sure that the person making editorial decisions about content repurposing
use a reference chart. If you start with a ready-made list, you can develop your
own “best format” chart for your audience.
If you want to use one of the ultimate content guides, check out Robin Good’s
“The Ultimate Guide to Editorial Content Types and Formats” (http://www.
masternewmedia.org/guide-editorial-content-types-formats) shown in
Figure 2-1. What makes this guide so useful is its inclusion of almost every format
available. It’s also good to use when you’re creating original content.
FIGURE 2-1:
Viewing Aggregated Visual Content
How did you satisfy your need to share and stare at visual content before Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and others? Surprisingly, only nine years have passed
since the first of these visual aggregation sites was launched (Pinterest in 2010).
As you know, organizing photos and images on a board is not a new idea. People
kept their tools organized on peg boards and displayed photos of their collections
on their home bulletin boards. Obviously, when this activity became available in
digital form for all the world to see, the concept exploded. Now everyone can see
your collection!
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Robin Good’s
“Ultimate Guide.”
I SEE YOUR FUTURE
Millward Brown Digital and Pinterest collaborated on a study to see whether they could
determine the process people use when they plan for upcoming events. They made an
interesting finding: Forty-seven percent of people began pinning items for a major life
event in the six months before the event. During that time, those people were on the
site actively researching new ideas and brands on a regular basis.
This should encourage you as a marketer to build branded collections of images specifically labeled for major life events. You can include events such as having a baby, buying
a house, or taking a trip. You will have active pinners at all times of the year. The good
news is that many products can come under this major-life-event umbrella if you think
expansively about what might be needed
There’s a lot of value in encouraging users to share their visual content (see the
earlier section, “Making Use of User-Generated Content”). But what about creating your own branded visual content for these sites? Will it engage your users?
According to Nate Elliott, previously of Forrester, a study was done to analyze customer engagement on seven social networks. The study found that Instagram was the
clear winner: “. . . Instagram delivered these brands 58 times more engagement per
follower than Facebook, and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter.”
Dealing with Live Video Content
Now, live from anywhere — you can reach your audience using one of several
live-streaming apps like Facebook Live and YouTube. These marketing tools add
a real-time dimension to anything you promote or share. But, as with any tactic,
you need to think about how to integrate it into your larger content strategy.
Consider the emotional value of live video. As you know, when you can tap into
customer emotions, you can accelerate your ability to win new customers. With
live video, you can evoke the
»» Element of surprise: Live video definitely has the element of surprise. Your
audience doesn’t know what will happen.
»» Ability to create excitement: You can generate enthusiasm for a new
product or feature you’re launching, akin to hosting a physical event.
»» Opportunity to demonstrate that you care: Customers can ask you
questions, and you can help solve their problems.
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»» Belief that you have skills: You can provide information, training, or demos
to show your credibility as a thought leader.
»» Feeling of camaraderie: Viewers can comment and respond to one another
and you.
Although you broadcast live, the broadcasts can be replayed on tools like YouTube.
Replaying gives you the opportunity to create some great word-of-mouth exposure and possibly even wind up with a viral video.
So what kind of things can you do with these real-time tools? Here are some
suggestions:
»» Document a live event. When you launch your latest new product or feature,
get your prospect’s attention by creating a live video event and give discounts
or gifts to the audience.
»» Develop user-generated content. Others might use a replay of your video
and promote you. This is the best kind of sharing because you’re being
recommended by someone else, but you get to deliver the actual message
via your original video.
»» Take a look behind the scenes. Several TV shows have used these tools to
take viewers behind the scenes with their favorite actors. This gets a viewer’s
attention and enhances the value of the show.
»» Interview someone at a conference. Interviews can be a really fun way to
generate excitement for your prospects. You can show viewers what is
happening at the conference and interview top speakers.
»» Provide training or demos. Your prospects are hungry for valuable training
Extending Business News
Content that is created specifically to promote your business is not like other original content. Of course, all the content you create will have some value to your company. But specific content that you write for press releases, stockholders, potential
investors, and others with goals are different from all your other content.
This type of content is important because it can have additional uses and is often
overlooked. After you’ve created this content, you can feed it back to your editorial
group to repurpose it. For example, you might want to take the written content on
the charitable causes you support and add it into a video you’re creating for your
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opportunities. Provide a live demo or special training to develop trust with
your audience.
blog. The key is to document everything you create so that you can consider other
places to use it.
If you think that PR content is not suitable to be repurposed, you’re not creating
the right type of content. No audience wants to read stodgy paragraphs of corporate speak to find out what your company does. If you’re relying on that oldschool content, you’re wasting your money. Press releases now have multimedia
components that you can use in a variety of ways. Don’t forget to include this
content in your repurposing efforts.
Offering Online Courses
When Lynda.com (http://lynda.com; see Figure 2-2), a company that offers
online training, was sold in 2015 to LinkedIn for $1.5 billion, every online marketer took notice.
Online training is big business. People are willing to pay to enhance their skills
because the market is competitive and employees look for ways to set themselves
apart.
FIGURE 2-2:
Lynda.com.
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Several major learning platforms have sprung up in recent years, including
Udemy, shown in Figure 2-3. Udemy has courses for all sorts of business and personal skills. One of the interesting aspects of the company is that both individuals
and companies use the platform to provide customer training.
FIGURE 2-3:
Udemy.
So how can you as a content marketer benefit from creating online training? You
can use it for a variety of marketing efforts, including the following:
»» Revenue generation: You can sell the training as well as have affiliates sell
for you to widen your audience.
»» Development of customer relationships: You can distribute the training to
special customers as a perk.
»» Lead generation: You can use the training as gated content to grow your list.
That is content that requires an email address in exchange for viewing it.
»» Customer retention and loyalty: You can give some of your training away to
show customers that you care about them.
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One great thing about online courses is that they can be created by repurposing
content along with some original content. After you examine your content for its
ability to teach and inform, you’ll likely be amazed at what you can repurpose.
Managing Content Formats
Whereas the previous sections explore content categories, this section points out
popular formats that you should deploy. Table 2-2 shows seven of these formats
along with distribution channels that you can use to promote them.
TABLE 2-2
Content Formats
Format
Distribution Channels
Video
YouTube, Vimeo
Slide shows
SlideShare, Slideboom
Infographics
Cool Infographics, Visually
Webinars
GoToWebinar, Eventbrite
Audio/podcasts
iTunes, Blog Talk Radio
Mind Maps
Biggerplate
Presentations
Prezi
Here’s a look at the formats discussed in the table in more detail:
»» Video: As you know, video is wildly popular with customers, only second to
articles. With the addition of the live video tools, it will remain so. Some
helpful tools to create videos include Camtasia (http://camtasia.com),
shown in Figure 2-4, and Brainshark (http://brainshark.com).
»» Slide shows: This format has become much more popular with the advent of
sites like SlideShare (http://slideshare.net), shown in Figure 2-5, and
Authorstream (https://www.authorstream.com/), which allow you to post
a presentation for wider distribution.
»» Infographics: This is another very popular category for content. Audiences
find infographics easy to understand and fun to share. If done right, the
visuals can be repurposed and used in a variety of ways. Some helpful tools
you can use to create them include Canva (http://canva.com), shown in
Figure 2-6, and Piktochart (http://piktochart.com).
»» Webinars: Webinars have been popular for some time because they allow
companies to interact with their customers and provide valuable training.
Major tools to deliver webinars include GoToWebinar (http://gotowebinar.
com), shown in Figure 2-7, and Eventbrite (http://eventbrite.com).
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»» Audio: Podcasts have been regaining popularity again in 2019 after an earlier
downturn in interest. One reason for the renewed popularity is that the
technology is easier to use and the distribution is very wide on places like
iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/podcasts/id26?mt=2),
shown in Figure 2-8, and Blog Talk Radio (http://blogtalkradio.com).
»» Mind maps: Mind maps have been around a long time and have been gaining
in favor in recent years to help marketers explain their ideas to prospects.
Some helpful tools to create them include iMindMap (http://imindmap.
com), shown in Figure 2-9, and bubble.us https://bubbl.us.
To distribute your mind maps, you can upload them to an innovative company called Biggerplate (http://biggerplate.com) run by Liam Hughes,
shown in Figure 2-10. It has a large community of mind mappers who share
their own maps and promote the use of mind maps around the world. If
you’re interested in finding out about mind maps, this is one great place to go.
»» Presentations: Presentation tools such as PowerPoint have been around for
Reviewing Content
Types
a long time. Newer tools bring a new dimension to the average presentation.
These are tools such as Prezi (http://prezi.com; see Figure 2-11), which
offers zooming and movement, and Zoho Show, a cloud-based tool (https://
www.zoho.com/docs/presentation/features.html) that lets you present
from anywhere on any device.
FIGURE 2-4:
Camtasia.
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FIGURE 2-5:
SlideShare.
FIGURE 2-6:
Canva.
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FIGURE 2-7:
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GoToWebinar.
FIGURE 2-8:
iTunes podcast
directory.
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FIGURE 2-9:
iMindMap.
FIGURE 2-10:
Biggerplate.
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FIGURE 2-11:
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Prezi.
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Creating content that generates leads
and sales
»» Spreading brand awareness to cold
prospects
»» Planning content marketing
campaigns
»» Using the four major content
distribution methods
Chapter
3
Understanding the
Customer’s Intent
C
ontent is at the heart and soul of any digital marketing campaign — the
foundation on which your search, social, email, and paid traffic campaigns
are built. Without content, Google has nothing to discover on your website,
Facebook Fans have nothing to share, newsletters have no news, and paid traffic
campaigns become one-dimensional sales pitches.
Content goes beyond blogging; content includes YouTube videos, product and
pricing pages on e-commerce sites, social media updates, and much more. Each
piece of content acts as a stepping stone on the path from lead to customer, and
from customer to engaged, frequent buyer.
This book is about generating fans, followers, and customers using content. This
begins by outlining the often-misunderstood strategy behind content marketing.
You then look at the many different forms that content marketing takes and its
uses throughout a prospect’s journey toward becoming a loyal customer.
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Knowing the Dynamics of
Content Marketing
At its core, the Internet is a place where people gather to discover, interact with,
and share content. Whether that content is a funny cat video that gives you a
much-needed laugh, an inspiring podcast about a single mom surviving cancer,
or an article teaching you how to fix a leaky faucet, content is what people crave.
Engaging with valuable content is a natural, or native, experience on the Internet. People are drawn to content that teaches them something, inspires them,
or makes them laugh or cry, and people share and talk about content that has
­provided them some form of value.
With the low-cost (or no cost) of publishing platforms such as WordPress, YouTube, and iTunes, even the smallest of brands can produce content for the web.
This ease of publishing, however, is a double-edged sword because the constantly
changing nature of the Internet requires the rapid production of content. Although
your brand stands to reap the enormous rewards associated with content publishing, doing so without a plan can lead to frustration.
People have a nearly insatiable demand for content on the Internet. According to
the most conservative estimates, 300 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. This glut of content underscores the importance of proceeding
with content marketing only after you have made a plan, because you must create
quality content to cut through the noise. And quality demands a plan. Without a
plan, you won’t know whether the goals you set are being met. A plan helps to
ensure the success of your digital marketing campaign.
Marketers often confuse the term blogging with content marketing. Although blogging is a powerful and versatile content marketing channel, it’s only one part of
a well-balanced content strategy. If you’re among the many marketers who blog
with no clear direction, you should commit a few hours to designing a content
plan before writing another blog post. Well-executed content marketing includes
planning what content you will produce, for what audience, and for what purpose.
Many companies and personal brands that are frustrated with digital marketing
can trace that frustration back to the time-consuming act of creating content
with no clear audience or objective. You’ll find the entire process much easier and
much more lucrative when you have a good sense of your direction.
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Although “perfect” content marketing may sound like hype, it’s actually obtainable. When you gain an understanding of the true principles of this critical
­discipline and content marketing’s connection to all other facets of your digital
marketing mix, you can quickly see the path to content marketing perfection.
Content marketing is about anticipating the needs of your customers and ­prospects,
and building content assets that satisfy those needs. For example, the cloud-based
software company Freshbooks anticipated a prospective customer’s need for pricing information. The web page shown in Figure 3-1 represents perfect content
marketing in this scenario: The content succinctly and clearly communicates the
differences in its plans and the varying price levels, provides contact information
for those who may have more questions and want to talk to a ­representative, and
offers a free trial. The content on this page completely satisfies the need for pricing information.
FIGURE 3-1:
This content on
Freshbooks is
designed to meet
a prospective
customer’s needs
when looking for
pricing.
Source: https://www.freshbooks.com/pricing
For a prospective customer of Freshbooks to make an informed buying decision,
the pricing page is necessary. Before they commit, people want to know what
they’re buying and how much it will cost. Failure to conveniently provide that
information for the prospect will result in lost sales.
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Finding Your Path to Perfect
Content Marketing
Understanding the marketing funnel
The path from stranger to buyer is often conveyed using the metaphor of a funnel.
Ice-cold prospects enter the wide top of the funnel and some, you hope, exit through
the much narrower bottom of the funnel as customers. Content can, and should,
assist the prospect in graduating from one stage of the marketing funnel to the next.
A basic marketing funnel has three stages that take a prospect from stranger to
buyer:
»» Awareness: The prospect must first become aware that he has a problem
and that you or your organization can provide a solution.
Raising problem and solution awareness is where your blog will shine. Use
your blog to educate, inspire, or entertain prospects and existing customers.
»» Evaluation: Those who move through the awareness stage must now
evaluate the various choices available to them, including your competitor’s
solutions and, of course, taking no action to solve the problem at all. People
can, after all, decide to live with the problem and not purchase the product or
service that could solve that problem.
»» Conversion: Those who move through the evaluation stage are at the
moment of truth — purchase. The goal at this stage is to convert leads into
frequent and high-ticket buyers.
See Book 2, Chapter 3 for a more detailed look at the buyer journey.
These three stages of awareness, evaluation, and conversion form what is known
as a marketing funnel. Figure 3-2 conceptualizes the marketing funnel.
FIGURE 3-2:
The three-step
marketing funnel.
Source: http://www.digitalmarketer.com/
content-marketing/
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BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
»» Content at the top of the funnel (TOFU) that facilitates awareness.
»» Content at the middle of the funnel (MOFU) that facilitates evaluation.
»» Content at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) that facilitates conversion.
Blogs are fantastic facilitators of awareness (top of funnel) — but they do a poor
job of facilitating evaluation (middle of funnel) and conversion (bottom of f­ unnel).
Also, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, evaluation and conversion are super
critical to your business. To move prospects through the middle and bottom of
the funnel, you need other content types, as shown in Figure 3-3 and explained in
detail in the following sections.
FIGURE 3-3:
You need
­different content
types at each
stage of the
­marketing funnel.
Source: http://www.digitalmarketer.com/
content-marketing/
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Cold prospects can’t evaluate your solution until they’re first aware of the problem and of your solution. If prospects are unaware of the problem or the solution
that you offer through your product or service, they obviously won’t buy. Therefore, conversions are impossible until prospects have first evaluated the possible
courses of action they can take, which include buying your product, buying a competitor’s product rather than yours, or doing nothing and living with the problem. To move prospects through a marketing funnel, you need to provide content
designed to satisfy their needs at each of the three stages:
Top of funnel content marketing
The prospects entering the top of your funnel (TOFU) are unaware of your solution and often unaware that they even have a problem that needs to be solved. As
a result, you need content that people can freely access, as opposed to content that
requires prospects to give you their contact information or make a purchase. After
all, you have yet to prove your value to them.
At the top of the funnel, make free ungated (no password or email address required)
content available that entertains, educates, or inspires.
Choose two to three of the following content types to deliver TOFU content that
will raise awareness about the solutions you provide through your products or
services:
»» Blog posts: Arguably the most recognized form of online content, blogs are
an excellent way of raising awareness. For example, the fashion company
J. Crew raises awareness of the products it sells by creating blog posts about
fashion styles and tips for accessorizing. The J. Crew blog reader (and potential
customer) gets inspiration and solutions to the problem of what to wear and
how to look fashionable; the post also alludes to the fact that J. Crew carries
the clothing needed to pull off the look.
»» Social media updates: As with blogs, social media platforms (such as
Facebook) are fantastic at creating awareness. Whether it’s a Pinterest board
by Dreyer’s Ice Cream that lists every flavor of ice cream the company sells, or
a tweet by Airbnb about the ten perfect Paris food experiences, these social
media updates give their followers free, valuable information while also
bringing the solutions their company provides to the forefront.
»» Infographics: Infographics are an interesting and engaging way to display
content. Typically, infographics contain fun images with contrasting, eyecatching colors, and the way infographics break up text makes this form of
content easily consumable by the viewer. Infographics are highly effective at
delivering content that is both entertaining and educational, quickly. Whether
it’s an infographic by IMDb about the best of the year in movie entertainment,
or an infographic by Casper Mattress providing tips on better sleeping habits,
this type of content delivers value that a consumer wants, and it raises brand
awareness effectively as well.
Creating infographics are a great way to repurpose content. People love them
and they can help you reach more of your audience.
»» Photographs: Pictures are powerful because they can explain a lot in a single
image. Photographs also help break up blocks of text in a piece of content,
which keeps that content from becoming boring or intimidating to read. With
a photograph, a kitchen design company can show completed projects that
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»» Digital magazines and books: Digital magazines and books are popular, and
are another way to distribute content and raise brand awareness. Therefore,
you can look to your blog to inspire your content for an ebook or e-magazine.
»» Audio and video podcasts: Another form of content that you can use at the
top of the funnel is a podcast. With a podcast, you package and distribute
your content differently from textual content. A podcast delivers consumable
content on the go. Subscribers can listen to the podcast on their commute to
work or during their workout, or any other time they choose. They have a
more flexible way to consume the content, in contrast to a blog post or a
social media update that is less conducive to multitasking. Also, you can use
podcasts to effectively promote your product or service while providing value
to your prospects. If you sell outdoor equipment, for example, each episode
of your podcast can give tips and tricks about hunting, fishing, camping, and
other outdoor activities while also subtly reminding your listener of the
outdoor equipment available at your store.
»» Microsites: A microsite is essentially an auxiliary blog about a specific topic
that is put on a different site with its own links and address; a microsite is
accessed mainly from a larger site. For instance, DadsDivorce.com is a
separate domain of the men’s family law firm Cordell & Cordell. DadsDivorce.
com provides free content for divorcing fathers and is designed to raise
awareness about the services and solutions Cordell & Cordell can provide.
»» Print magazines and newsletters: This type of content can require a bigger
budget than digital content, but if going this route falls within your budget,
print magazines and newsletters are still a great way to raise awareness. For
example, the Lego Club Magazine contains plenty of entertaining comic book
style content for Lego’s target customer. Magazines and newsletters help
sales by inspiring shoppers based on what they see in print.
»» Primary research: This is research you go out and collect yourself, such as
surveys, interviews, and observations. Although this data can be difficult and
time consuming to gather, primary research is powerful because only a finite
amount of primary research exists. Specifically, when you take the time to
create research, you’re providing a service and saving people from having to
do their own primary research. For this reason, primary research can stir a
good deal of awareness among your prospects.
Do you need all these content types at the top of the funnel? Heck, no. Most businesses focus on posting content to a blog and to social media channels such as
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. After you’ve mastered blogging and
social media updates, you might want to add more top-of-funnel content to the
mix, such as a podcast or a print newsletter.
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effectively demonstrate what the company does while raising awareness of
what the company can do for another customer’s kitchen.
The big goal at the top of the funnel is to make prospects “problem aware” and
“solution aware.” In Figure 3-4, notice how Whole Foods uses its Whole Story blog
to raise awareness for the seafood the grocery store sells. In this way, Whole Foods
is reminding its audience of the products it sells, making its audience “solution
aware” while providing people with recipes they find valuable.
FIGURE 3-4:
Whole Foods
raises ­awareness
of products
it sells while
­providing value to
its blog audience.
Source: http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/blog/my-favorite-new-
recipes-tilapia-equals-easy-weeknight-dinners-0
Unfortunately, the top of the funnel is where most organizations begin and end
their content marketing efforts. Smart content marketers know that, with a bit
more effort, they can move prospects from awareness to evaluation at the middle
of the funnel.
Middle of funnel content marketing
The big goal for content you use at the middle of the funnel (MOFU) is to convert
“problem aware” and “solution aware” prospects into leads. You’re looking to
grow your email lists and gain more leads at this point of the funnel. At DigitalMarketer, they use free content to incentivize prospects to submit their contact
information (such as their email address) and opt in to receive future marketing
in exchange for valuable content. This type of content is a gated offer, which you
can find out more about in Book 1, Chapter 5.
A gated offer is a small “chunk” of value that solves a specific problem for a specific
market and is offered in exchange for prospects’ contact information.
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»» Educational resources: Educational resources for gated offers often exist in
the form of free reports, white papers, primary research, webinar training,
and sales material. These types of content resources educate the consumer
on a particular topic related to your brand while highlighting features of a
solution, product, or service you provide. An educational resource can include
a case study packed with professional tips and a detailed breakdown of some
of your strategies.
Educational resources (and all forms of MOFU content, for that matter) must
be of high quality or the consumer is likely to feel cheated. Also, if prospects
feel that the content you gave them in exchange for their contact information
is subpar, your brand awareness suffers. Keep in mind that the point of the
MOFU is to help people evaluate your company and entice them to make a
purchase. You entice with quality, not garbage.
»» Useful resources: Useful resources are tools such as
• Handouts or cheat sheets
• Resource lists
• Templates
• Software
• Surveys
• Assessments
• Discount and coupon clubs
• Quizzes and surveys
These useful tools, which serve as powerful content for MOFU, are covered
more in Book 1, Chapter 5. Instead of using a consumer’s time (such as an
ebook that may take an hour or more to read), useful resources promise that
they will not only educate your prospects but also save them time. These
resources save them time because the content is easy to consume and the
resource is complete; it doesn’t depend on another resource to deliver its
value but can stand alone. For example, a company that sells vegetable
gardening tools can create a resource called the “Seed Starting Cheat Sheet”
that allows people with an interest in gardening to quickly determine the best
time to plant popular vegetables in the garden.
Don’t pin all your lead-generation hopes to a passive gated offer on your home page
or the sidebar of your blog, because the gated offer can get lost among the many
elements of your site. A missed gated offer won’t capture leads. Be sure to also
create a dedicated landing page for every gated offer (some call this a squeeze page)
and drive traffic directly to that page using social media, email marketing, search
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Gated offers often take the form of content such as the following:
engine optimization (SEO), and paid traffic. A dedicated landing page increases
opt-ins. See Figure 3-5 for an example of a landing page.
FIGURE 3-5:
Rideshare
company Lyft
uses a landing
page to start its
driver application
process.
Source: https://www.lyft.com/drive-with-lyft?ref=ROB055729.
The goal at the middle of the funnel is to convert prospects who were unaware
of your product or service into people with whom you can now follow up. As they
say, however, you can’t deposit leads in the bank. To generate revenue, you need
content that assists your prospects in making decisions at the point of sale.
Bottom of funnel content marketing
At the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), you’re looking to convert leads into customers and customers into higher-ticket customers. What types of content will your
new lead need to make an informed purchase decision? Your leads may be reading
your blog and downloading your gated offers (all of which helps to convert them),
but to move them on through to the point of making a purchase, you also need to
offer content that helps them decide whether to buy.
Here are examples of content types that work well at the bottom of the funnel:
»» Demos: The downside of buying a product online is that customers can’t hold
the product in their hands — they have only an image (or two) and a description to base their purchasing decisions on, which can make people hesitate to
buy. Offering a demo can help with this problem. A demo shows the product
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»» Customer stories: Customer stories are customer testimonials and reviews.
Customer stories are fantastic at the bottom of the funnel because they allow
a prospect to see how someone else experienced success with your product
or service. You provide your prospects with peer reviews, which have a
powerful effect on decision making. As shown in Figure 3-6, Salesforce.com
supplies leads who are at the BOFU with plenty of customer success stories to
prove that its product can take care of their needs.
FIGURE 3-6:
Salesforce
­creates content
that converts
at the BOFU by
telling customer
success stories.
Source: http://www.salesforce.com/customers/
»» Comparison/spec sheets: When someone at the BOFU is debating over
different products, comparisons and spec sheets are handy resources that
people use to compare products side by side (whether the comparison is
between similar products that you offer or between your product and your
competitor’s product). For example, the tax preparation software company
TurboTax might show a side-by-side comparison to the features and pricing
of its competitor, TaxAct.
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or service you offer in action, so that consumers can see how it works. It’s as
close to touching the product as they can get from their screen. So find a way
to demonstrate your product or service through content such as video, screen
shots, webinars, or schematic drawings.
»» Webinars/events: You can use webinars and events at the middle of the
funnel to gather leads, but you can also use them at the bottom of the
funnel to convert those leads. At the bottom of the funnel, a webinar can
be used to gather prospective customers in one place to ask questions
about a complex, risky, or high-ticket product or service.
»» Mini-classes: A mini-class is a type of event that you set up to teach a relevant
topic to your target audience. At the end of the short class, you make your
pitch for your product or service. You need to provide quality educational
resources with the mini-class, but in the end, the purpose of the class is to
pitch a higher-dollar product related to the class you just held.
Is creating content that drives awareness at the top of the funnel important?
Absolutely. That said, particularly for existing brands, the place to start building
content is usually at the bottom of the funnel. Your prospects need information
such as pricing or how you compare to a competitor, so build content that satisfies
those basic questions before you start writing blog posts or uploading podcasts.
Exploring the prospect’s intent
The key to perfect content marketing is to understand your prospects’ existing
intent so that you can anticipate their future intent and predict which path or
paths they will take. In foreseeing this, you can create the content assets needed
to address that intent 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
For example, Freshbooks (an online accounting company) customer in the evaluation or conversion stage of the funnel might intend to compare Freshbooks to
QuickBooks. The web page shown in Figure 3-7 satisfies that intent at both the
middle and the bottom of the funnel. Freshbooks gives the prospect a comparison
sheet that allows the customer to see the differences between Freshbooks and its
competition, QuickBooks. The company knows that prospective customers want
to see how it stacks up against QuickBooks. Satisfying that intent in the evaluation
stage helps prospects move into the conversion stage.
If you’re having difficulty brainstorming ideas for content that will satisfy your
prospects’ intent, gather a group of people in your organization who have contact
with your customers and prospects. Salespeople, customer service representatives, trade-show workers, and others who hear the voice of the customer and
prospect should be present. These members of your team can help you discover
holes in your content that would satisfy a prospect’s intent.
Brainstorm lists of intent at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. Then
decide what content assets need to be built to satisfy that intent from awareness
through conversion.
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FIGURE 3-7:
Freshbooks uses
a comparison
sheet to move a
prospect closer to
conversion.
Source: https://www.freshbooks.com/compare/quickbooks-alternative
Providing a path to the next step
As a marketer, you need to provide a path from one piece of content to the next.
People are busy and don’t have the time or the patience to go digging through
your site for the proper piece of content. They need to be able to find what they’re
looking for fast.
Failing to provide an easy-to-follow path to the next step isn’t just bad marketing, it’s a bad user experience, one that will cause people to click the Back button
on thier browsers and leave your site. Smart content marketers anticipate the next
logical intent and remove as much “friction” as possible to create a clear path to
conversion.
The goal of every piece of content is to get the prospect to ascend to the next logical step in the buyer journey. In the Freshbooks pricing page example shown in
Figure 3-8, notice that Freshbooks has created a clear ascension path to a “RiskFree Trial” of the software. Creating an ascension path is good marketing and
results in a good user experience.
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FIGURE 3-8:
Freshbooks
­anticipates the
next logical
intent of a visitor
who needs to
obtain pricing
information.
Source: https://www.freshbooks.com/pricing
How well an ascension offer performs depends on the relevance of the offer. Take
time to anticipate the next logical step in the buyer journey and create offers that
are applicable to the piece of content they’re currently consuming. For example,
asking a visitor to listen to a podcast episode (a top-of-funnel content type) would
be neither logical nor relevant from the Freshbooks pricing page in Figure 3-8.
This person is visiting the pricing page because she is interested in buying, and
the smart marketer anticipates that intent and makes the next logical offer — a
free trial.
Segmenting your marketing with content
You won’t truly understand your audience and what people really want until they
have given you one of two things: their time or their money. They may answer
survey questions and make comments that they’re interested in this or that, but
until they have committed a precious resource — time or money — you don’t
know for sure what interests them. This is good news for anyone creating content
online, because when people spend time with content, they’re showing interest.
For example, imagine that you own a company that sells healthy and nutritious
meals to busy professionals, and you’ve been creating blog content about nourishing recipes. Your content falls into three main categories of recipes: vegan,
vegetarian, and gluten free. What do you know about someone who visits a
blog post about vegan recipes? Likewise for someone visiting a blog post about
vegetarian recipes. It’s pretty clear, right? These people have “raised their hands”
and told you that they are (or are interested in becoming) vegan or vegetarian.
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Retargeting is the process of advertising to people based on their prior behavior.
For example, you can configure retargeting ads so that they appear only to customers who bought a particular product or visited (showed interest) a particular
product page or blog post. This approach allows you to show a very specific piece
of content that is more likely to resonate with the segmented audience. Turn to
Book 5, Chapter 1 for more information on ad retargeting strategies.
Appearing everywhere your
customerexpects
Marketers who want to create perfect content need to publish where their customers are. That means publishing content that meets prospects’ intent in any
channel, and at every stage of the funnel where groups of prospects are searching
for and sharing content. These channels include but are certainly not limited to
the following:
»» A website or blog
»» Facebook
»» Twitter
»» LinkedIn
»» Pinterest
»» Instagram
»» YouTube
You can publish a single content asset across numerous channels to maximize
exposure. For instance, at DigitalMarketer (http://digitalmarketer.com), they
turned a presentation about how to launch a podcast into a webinar, and then into
a podcast episode, and finally into a blog post. Because their audience responded
so enthusiastically to this content, they saw the value and the need to repurpose it
and distribute it throughout their channels.
Consider what content from your company has resonated with your audience. For
example, can that video demo of your product be republished on your YouTube
channel? Can you repurpose an article from your blog into a webinar, or a podcast
episode into an article for LinkedIn Pulse? The opportunities to repurpose content
are virtually limitless.
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When people spend their valuable time consuming content, they’re segmenting
themselves. They’re telling you what interests them. And thanks to the magic of
ad retargeting, you can follow up with these prospects by using a relevant ascension offer without having to acquire their contact information.
Customizing your content
You produce content marketing materials to satisfy the intent of your customer
persona (also known as target audience). But not all personas are the same; they,
like their real-life counterparts, don’t all want or need the same solution. That’s
why customizing and then segmenting your content is essential. A particular
piece of content can satisfy the intent of multiple personas, or you can use it to
target a single persona.
See Book 2, Chapter 2 for more details about personas.
For example, Digital Marketer produced a blog article called “6 Trending Digital Marketing Skills to Put on a Resume” to raise awareness (top of the funnel)
for their marketing certification programs. This post probably wouldn’t interest
small business owners, but that was fine — they weren’t targeting them. This
article was specifically targeted to their “employee” persona whose intent is to
acquire skills that will land her a better job. Included in the post are two calls to
action, which is an instruction to your audience designed to convey urgency and
provoke an immediate response. In the case of the trending skills blog post, the
calls to action were customized to appeal to the “employee” persona.
Executing Perfect Content Marketing
As discussed earlier in this chapter, to execute perfect content marketing, you
need a plan. Each offer you make often requires the creation of different pieces
of content. As a result, the ideal is to make a content plan for each of your major
offers using a resource the DigitalMarketer calls the Content Campaign Plan. The
Content Campaign Plan aligns your content marketing with business objectives
such as generating leads and sales. You can see the Content Campaign Plan template in Figure 3-9 and can fill out your own by visiting www.digitalmarketer.
com/content-campaign.
Following are the steps to create a Content Campaign Plan:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Choose personas.
Brainstorm content assets.
Choose the vehicle and channel.
Plan for ascension.
Read on to find out more about each of these steps.
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FIGURE 3-9:
The Content
Campaign
Plan organizes
your content
­strategy for
each ­individual
­product or
­service offer.
Source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z29wImPl7PgJwQMv2TFr-RyOu_
THBu1pXlOxJgjUtEw/edit#gid=0
If you want to create content that converts prospects at all stages of the funnel,
create a Content Campaign Plan and execute it. It works.
Step 1: Choosing personas
Decide which personas this content targets. Because each persona has different
intents, motivations, and problems he responds to, each persona requires different content to move him through the awareness, evaluation, and conversion
stages. You therefore need to determine which existing content to use or what
new content to create to move the persona through the top, middle, and bottom
of the funnel.
For example, a wealth management firm attempting to sell financial planning
should approach a young professional much differently than a near retiree. Some
content will appeal to both, but the most effective content will speak directly to a
specific persona.
Step 2: Brainstorming content assets
Use what you know about your customer persona to create descriptions for content that you can create to reach that persona.
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Plan to create content at all three stages of the marketing funnel: awareness,
evaluation, and conversion. In the wealth management firm example, what content could the firm produce at the top of the funnel to increase awareness for the
young professional persona? What could it produce to move the retiree persona
through the conversion stage?
Step 3: Choosing the vehicle and channel
The vehicle of the content refers to the form the content will take. Will it be text,
an image, a video, or an audio asset? The channel refers to where the asset will be
published — such as your blog, a Facebook Page, or a YouTube channel.
The vehicle can sometimes determine the channel, and vice versa. For example, a
video asset often gets published on YouTube, Facebook, and your blog, whereas an
image asset is more likely to be on Pinterest.
Step 4: Planning for ascension
In the final step of the Content Campaign Plan, you connect your content to your
business goals. Build offers into each piece of content that allow prospects to get
more value, either by consuming more content, giving you their contact information for follow-up, or buying a product or service.
Any call to action is better than none at all, but the highest-converting ascension offers are relevant to the content the prospect is consuming. For example, a
blog post entitled “10 Ways to Grow More Nutritious Organic Tomatoes” would do
well to make an offer like “50% Off and Free Shipping on Organic Tomato Seeds”
rather than an offer for carrot seeds.
Distributing Content to
Attract an Audience
Today, content plays an important role in all major forms of traffic generation.
Convincing cold (and even warm) prospects to visit your website is difficult without first leading with valuable content.
The processes you develop to distribute content, and thus generate traffic to
it, are as important as the processes surrounding the creation of that content.
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Marketing through email
Email is still the best method for making offers and sending more content, so
growing and maintaining your email lists are critical tasks, which is why growing
your email list is built into your content strategy. After you’ve produced a content asset, such as a blog post or a podcast episode, use your email list(s) to drive
traffic to that piece.
To write the email for your new piece of content, first create the subject line of the
email message. Often the subject is the same as the title of the content, but there
are other strategies to naming your email subject line, such as scarcity headings
like “FINAL notice (Just hours left . . .)” or by piquing curiosity with subject lines
like “THIS is why I do what I do . . ..”
Next, open your email with a short, punchy introduction that pulls people into
the main body of your email, where you pique the email subscriber’s interest and
describe what he can expect from the content. Explain this email’s relevance to
the reader and what he has to gain from it (also known as the benefit). Also, be
sure to include a call to action that instructs the subscriber to click the hyperlink
to your content. Use two to three hyperlinked calls to action to make clicking them
as convenient as possible.
Capturing leads through search marketing
Search engines, such as Google and Bing, are important content distribution
channels to leverage. When prospects reach your site by querying a search engine
(they might be searching for “dslr camera reviews” or “crepe recipes” in Google
or Bing) but haven’t selected an ad, they’re using search marketing. The traffic
driven to that content wasn’t paid for but was found naturally by the users.
Today, search marketing is simple. The search engines, particularly Google, have
become adept at sending traffic to the content that is most likely to satisfy the
intent of the searcher. If you’re committed to creating content assets that satisfy
the intent of your various customer personas, you’ll get plenty of love from Google
and other search engines. You can learn more about search marketing in Book 5,
Chapter 2.
CHAPTER 3 Understanding the Customer’s Intent
237
Understanding the
Customer’s Intent
Entire chapters of this book are devoted to the nuances of traffic generation using
the methods of email marketing, search, social media, and paid traffic. However,
it’s worth mentioning how each of these major traffic generation methods interact with the content you produce.
Using social media to drive
traffic to your site
After you have created a piece of content, use the social media platform(s) that
your business participates in to drive traffic to that content. Books 7 and 8 go more
in depth about how to use social media sites, but for now, be aware that driving
traffic on social media may take several forms, such as a tweet on Twitter or an
update on Facebook or LinkedIn. This update announces the new content and
provides a hyperlink to it.
When you write text for a social media update, your brand’s personality should
determine how you announce this new content. For instance, if your brand is a
refined jewelry store, you may want to use a formal tone in your copy.
The length of the copy depends on restrictions (such as on Twitter) and the complexity of the offer. Simple offers don’t require the same amount of description
as complex offers do. Regardless of the length of the copy, be sure that the social
media update piques the viewer’s curiosity, describes the benefit of the content,
and has a clear call to action, such as the home improvement store Lowe’s Facebook post shown in Figure 3-10. This social media update meets all three of these
requirements effectively.
FIGURE 3-10:
On ­Facebook,
Lowe’s
­establishes the
benefit of the
content and
gives a clear call
to action for the
viewer to click.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/lowes/posts/10153827254486231:0
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BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
As the name suggests, paid traffic takes the form of ads that promote your content
and helps your content gain reach, or exposure. You can display ads on many different platforms, including search engines and social media. Paid traffic can be
highly effective at generating leads because it helps you to segment your visitors
and make use of retargeting.
When a prospect visits a piece of content, she places herself into a particular
segment of your potential buyers. She’s indicating an interest in the offer,
topic, problem, or solution found on that page, and you can take advantage of ad
retargeting networks such as Google and Facebook to show ads to this prospect
based on the content she has visited.
Although many marketers may be reluctant to pay to send traffic to content, such
as blog posts and podcasts, paid traffic has a major advantage: It’s predictable.
When you cut a check to Facebook, for example, to promote a piece of content, you
will get traffic. This is why, at all times but especially when buying ads for your
content, you must ensure the exceptional quality of your content. The last thing
you want to do is spend money to send traffic to poor-quality content.
Use paid traffic to promote quality content that gives value to the consumer and
aligns with your business goals. This will help you move people from one part of
the funnel to the next, progressing from ice-cold prospect to a lead to customer to
repeat customer and, ideally, to raving fan.
To learn more about paid traffic, see Book 5, Chapter 1.
CHAPTER 3 Understanding the Customer’s Intent
239
Understanding the
Customer’s Intent
Paying for traffic
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Understanding the science of
storytelling
»» Constructing product stories
»» Writing great headlines
Chapter
4
Creating Content That
Tells a Story
M
ost great content marketers know that storytelling is their secret weapon.
They know that stories engage us; they have for centuries. Stories can
be motivating and give us heroes to emulate. They can teach us how
to act and how to cope. They also perform a critical function for the content
marketer — persuasion.
In this chapter, you consider the value of storytelling, how to develop a compelling product story, and how to write headlines that capture attention.
Storytelling to Engage Your Audience
Now that the web helps everyone share stories, you need to create brand stories
that others can tell for you. A great story can capture your customer’s attention as
no other feature or benefits package can.
Seeking the science behind stories
People are hard-wired to love stories, but why is this so? A brief look at neuroscience holds the answer. More has been learned about the brain in the last ten years
CHAPTER 4 Creating Content That Tells a Story
241
than the one hundred years before that. Scientist can analyze what happens to the
chemicals in people’s brains as they respond to different stimuli.
The brain has three main “parts:” (1) the neocortex, where thinking, imagination, and
problem-solving happen; (2) the limbic brain, where people retain memories, experience emotions, and form value judgments (consciously and unconsciously), among
other things; and (3) the reptilian or “lizard” brain, which controls automatic physical
functions and signals a “fight or flight" response in an attempt to keep them safe. The
lizard brain relates to how the stories you tell influences your customers.
Consider this: The lizard brain responds when your customer perceives a threat.
Even though the threat is not a stampeding animal herd, as it may have been in
your ancestors’ day, customers may still perceive a kind of danger. In this case, it
could be a high price or an assault on their time. They need to decide whether to
stay or retreat. As a content marketer, your job is to mitigate that fear long enough
to get your customer interested in your brand. So how do stories do that?
In his article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why Your Brain Loves Good
­Storytelling” (https://hbr.org/2014/10/why-your-brain-loves-good-story
telling/; see Figure 4-1), neuroscientist Paul J. Zak talks about the effect of the
brain chemical oxytocin. He calls it the “it’s safe to approach others” brain signal
that engenders empathy and cooperation. In the lab, Zak found that characterdriven stories produce this effect.
FIGURE 4-1:
Harvard Business
Review.
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Another study by Zak is reported in Jeremy Dean’s PsyBlog, shown in Figure 4-2.
The blog quotes Zak as saying that “results show why puppies and babies are
in toilet paper commercials. This research suggests that advertisers use images
that cause our brains to release oxytocin to build trust in a product or brand, and
hence increase sales” (http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/01/the-psychologyof-storytelling-and-empathy-animated.php).
FIGURE 4-2:
PsyBlog.
The lizard brain is quieted by stories that help build trust. Such stories actually
cause a chemical reaction. Every content marketer knows that trust is the key
to building a lasting customer relationship. The screenwriter and teacher Robert
McKee says that for business communication, you need to “unite an idea with an
emotion.” So when you see long, boring articles about a product, you know they’re
missing the mark.
So what are some keys to help you recognize good business stories? They include
the following characteristics. They should:
»» Be simple and straightforward. Have you ever stopped reading a novel
because the action was hopelessly confusing? You probably decided that you
didn’t want to waste your time trying to follow the plot. People have even less
patience for a business story — they need a simple plot. That doesn’t mean
CHAPTER 4 Creating Content That Tells a Story
243
that the story can’t be complex, but if you confuse your prospect,
you’ve lost him.
»» Evoke emotions. Attention is affected by brain chemistry. If you don’t provide
some suspense, mystery, or conflict, you have no story.
»» Use visuals. Web stories should have visuals to support them. An abundance
of free, online sources of visual materials are available. Many social media
studies show that content with visuals are understood and shared at a much
higher rate than content without visuals. Imagery powerfully affects limbic
brains. Also, although some people are much more visually inclined than
others, not just in words but by imagery as well, so you need to show and tell.
»» Connect directly to the customer. Customers seek advice when they learn
about your products. They want to know whether your products are a good fit
for them. Telling stories about how great the company is doesn’t create the
emotional connection. The connection comes when you tell customers how
great they can be using your product.
The point is really very simple. Customers are moved to spend money on your
product when they believe that it will make them feel better, look better, or be
better in the eyes of those around them. Think about that fact when you write
your content.
»» Have a beginning, middle, and end. As with any good story, you need to
have the three story components. Leave something out and you’ve got some
details, but not a cohesive story.
»» Be authentic. Okay, you’ve probably heard this time and time again, but
authenticity is critical to business storytelling. Telling a phony story is anathema to everything you know about engaging customers and building relationships. You can’t win. In addition, millennials are particularly captivated by
stories about company values and giving. If you lie, you are lost.
Finding your product stories
This section begins with a basic rule. The product stories you tell should have the
customer as the hero of the story. You can make your product the hero, but then
you lose the interest of the customer. The customer’s focus is on himself, not you.
Your company has many stories to tell. Key among them are the messages that are
derived from your mission and goals. (See Book 1, Chapter 1 for help with defining
those goals.) These messages tell your customers how you will serve them. This
section focuses on the stories you post every day on blogs, in articles, and on guest
sites — the ones that keep your audience loyal and engaged. These stories are the
bread and butter of content marketers.
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“PUPPY LOVE”
Several marketers are using the valuable information about brain chemistry to enhance
their ability to capture your attention and your emotions. An article by Alyssa Hertig
called “Is Neuroscience the Future of Content Marketing Measurement?” reports that
Budweiser used knowledge of brain chemistry to enhance its hit Super Bowl commercial “Puppy Love” (http://contently.com/strategist/2014/10/08/is-neuro
science-the-future-of-content-marketing-measurement/?goal=0_855c
f0c201-2da44d4e63-315209537). Budweiser marketers determined when people
Creating Content That
Tells a Story
were likely to want to cut away from the commercial and enhanced it to prevent
that outcome. Advertisers will use any tools available to them to give themselves a
­competitive edge.
Major bloggers focus their blogs on you. How you can be better, how you can
serve your audience, and how you can make a difference. When people read Seth
Godin’s blog (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/), for example, they often come
away feeling inspired. This is how you want your readers to feel about you and
your brand.
CHAPTER 4 Creating Content That Tells a Story
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So where can you find material for these company stories? You can get them from
»» Loyal customers: Make sure that you and your team regularly interact with
your best customers. They will always give you feedback about what you’re
doing right. The stories about how they’re succeeding with your product are
crucial to capture. They can also let you know what you can do better.
»» Customer support staff: These people are on the front lines with your
customers. They solve problems and know where the fault lines are. Make
sure that they know you want to hear their stories.
»» Other employees around the company: Don’t assume that only support
people have stories to share. People throughout the company gain knowledge
about customers that will help you create your messages.
»» Vendors and colleagues: Your company is being talked about by customers
and everyone who does business with you. Capture the good stories and try
to fix the bad ones.
In short, stories are lurking everywhere. You just need to listen for them. These
stories are the raw material that you use to make your content come to life.
Another way to find stories is to look at what your data says. You can gather lots
of great insights from your analytics that can be told as a story. When you marry
data with a story, it’s easier to remember.
Jennifer Aaker of the Future of Storytelling organization (http://www.futureof
storytelling.org) talks about this concept in her YouTube video, ­“Persuasion
and the Power of Story: (Future of StoryTelling 2013)” (https://youtu.be/
AL-PAzrpqUQ; see Figure 4-3). Aaker says that because customers are overloaded
with information, stories cut through the noise and help them to decide “what to
believe in.”
According to Aaker, three major characteristics of stories are what can make them
so powerful. Stories can be (1) memorable, (2) impactful, and (3) personal. You can
convince people by using statistics. But statistics alone don’t have an emotional
impact. If you conjoin statistics with a story, the listener connects with the storyteller as well as the story, and persuasion becomes possible.
Keep these characteristics in mind when you’re putting together your next product presentation. Straight statistics and facts will not be as persuasive as a good
story to go with them.
If you’re looking for an interesting way to share a curated collection of stories, you
might want to check out Roojoom (http://roojoom.com), shown in Figure 4-4.
Roojoom provides an easy-to-use platform that lets you select and display a collection of posts around a topic to tell a story.
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Creating Content That
Tells a Story
FIGURE 4-3:
Jennifer Aaker.
FIGURE 4-4:
Roojoom.
CHAPTER 4 Creating Content That Tells a Story
247
STORYTELLING POSTS
Here’s an example of an article that successfully blends storytelling with facts. The
article, “11 Examples of Killer B2B Content Marketing Campaigns Including ROI,”
was written by popular blogger Lee Odden on his TopRank Blog (http://www.
toprankblog.com/2013/05/11-examples-killer-b2b-content-marketing/).
Odden begins with a statistic that sets the tone: “According to a CMI and MarketingProfs
study, 91% of B2B Marketers are using content marketing and that means a few things.”
He then goes on to tell about his presentation at a DemandGen conference.
Next, he discusses the awards made at the conference and shares brief stories about
the winners. At the time of this writing, his article had been shared 1,700 times. It demonstrates the power of blending storytelling with facts to make the post memorable.
Check it out! It’s well-writtten and instructional.
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Structuring Your Content Using Stories
So, how can you develop your own stories? If you’ve tried in the past but were
less than successful, you likely didn’t use a tried-and-true storytelling structure.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Storytelling has been codified since Aristotle’s time (the fourth century).
A great many story templates are available to you, and they can help you construct
your brand story. They are all a variation on the hero’s journey, articulated by
Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
If you aren’t familiar with the hero’s journey framework, you can download a PDF
from the Mythology Teacher website that gives you a good overview: http://
mythologyteacher.com/documents/TheHeroJourney.pdf.
In brief, the framework involves a hero who will be taking a journey and will come
out the other side a changed person. Here are the components and how they relate
to a product story:
»» Start with a look at the current reality. You start the story by telling the
audience about the marketplace or give them some information to set
the stage.
»» The hero has a problem. You introduce the hero, which in this case would
be one of your customer personas. You want your prospects to make the
connection to the hero as themselves and relate to his struggle. You talk
about the problems and the feelings the hero is experiencing. These are the
problems and feelings your customer has. For example, the hero could be
short on time, overwhelmed by work, or be focused on some other problem.
You’re telling this story to evoke emotions as well as recognition of the
problem.
»» A mentor is introduced. The hero meets a guide who understands his fears
and can help him with his struggle. The guide is your product or brand that
has the answer to his problem.
»» At first, the hero doesn’t want to accept the journey. This element adds
drama to the story and reflects your customer’s indecision.
»» Eventually, he takes action. The hero accepts the challenge to solve his
problem using the guide’s advice, or he fails to take his advice and proceeds
on his own. This is your call to action and the struggle itself.
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Creating Content That
Tells a Story
Crafting the story
»» He succeeds or fails. As a result of his actions, the hero succeeds or fails. This
result is determined by his execution of the guide’s advice. He can fail
miserably if he doesn’t take his advice, or succeed if he does.
You can tell an unlimited amount of brand stories using this framework. As you
work with it, you will recognize how common it is.
Incorporating copywriting
Okay, it’s time for some more definitions. Book 3, Chapter 1 discusses the difference between content marketing strategy and content strategy. Copywriting and
content marketing have the same kind of difference. They are not one and the
same; instead, they complement each other. Here’s a comparison of the two:
»» Content marketing: You’re marketing your content to achieve business
goals. The content you write is determined by what you want to accomplish
from a macro perspective.
»» Copywriting: You look at copywriting from a micro perspective. When you
focus on copywriting, you consider the words and other devices, such as
visuals, that you choose to compel your reader to do something specific.
You’re enticing her to give you her email address, buy your product, or sign up
for your newsletter. To this end, you use copywriting tactics such as great
headlines or metaphors (and stories) to persuade her.
Because the use of great headlines is one of the most important copywriting techniques for content writers to employ — and do it well — here are some detail on
headlines.
Why do headlines matter? Some people never get past them — maybe as few as
only two in ten people will go past the headline to read the article. You need all
the help you can get to create compelling headlines so that you entice people to
read further.
When you create headlines, you want to:
»» Evoke emotion. As you’ve seen, emotions trigger attention and persuasion. If
your headline is bland, the reader will pass it by on the way to something juicier.
»» Attract the right reader. Your headline should make it clear who the article
is targeted at — CEOs, small business owners, or others.
»» Assist with search engine optimization (SEO). All this means is that if you
use a keyword in your headline, you will help your customers find you.
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»» Make a meaningful promise. Readers always want to know what they will
get from reading your article. Make that clear.
»» Do the work of the entire article. As you know, some readers never get past
the headline, so create a headline that has impact.
When you’re crafting your headlines, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Several good, free tools are available to assist you:
»» CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer (http://coschedule.com/headlineanalyzer): This tool gives you an overall score and breaks down your
Creating Content That
Tells a Story
headline into several measures to help you improve it.
»» Headlinr (http://headlinr.com/): This tool is unique because it provides
you with proven headlines that match your keyword or topic. You can invoke
it right from your browser, so it’s always there.
»» Hemingway App (http://www.hemingwayapp.com): You can use this tool to
test both your headline or your entire post. It makes suggestions about
improving your content to make it clear.
»» The Readability Test Tool (http://read-able.com/): This tool helps you
determine whether your writing is appropriate for the targeted audience. It
will help you simplify and make your content more readable.
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Understanding the content workflow
»» Solidifying roles and responsibilities
»» Using an editorial calendar
»» Finding content writers
Chapter
5
Defining Your Content
Framework Using
Processes and Systems
A
chapter about systems and processes? You may be thinking that this content is reserved for people who love to talk about workflow. Well, it is. But
it’s also important for everyone else who has to participate in getting his
or her content to market. So that must include you, too.
In this chapter, you get into the nuts and bolts of your content framework. After
your digital marketing strategy is in place and you know what kind of content you
need, you’ll want to create a system that you can rely on to get the job done. This
chapter also delves into how content systems and documented procedures make
everything easier.
Organizing the Content Process
Why should you care about developing a system for your content efforts? The best
answer is that everyone benefits, even those who are not directly involved in the
process. You would probably not consider mounting any other kind of project in
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your organization without detailing how things will work. The same should be
said for your content system.
Of course, if you’re a solopreneur who doesn’t use freelancers, you can probably
get away without documenting anything. But the moment you bring on another
person, you need to let her know how things are done so that she doesn’t reinvent
the wheel.
Benefiting from a defined framework
When you implement a documented content marketing process, you provide
­everyone in the organization with clear expectations about
»» Who is in charge (and responsible) for each part of the process
»» How long your different campaigns and tasks take to complete
»» How to avoid bottlenecks and mistakes
»» What the budget will provide for and what resources are needed
»» Whether you’re meeting your content and business goals
»» Whether you’re meeting your legal requirements
»» How security is implemented and preserved
On the opposite side of the coin, here’s a brief look at what can happen if you don’t
have your content systems in place. You could have the following:
»» Violations of copyright laws: Copyrighted images or content is published
without permission.
»» Dissemination of inaccurate information: Angry customers see inaccurate
information that was not vetted by a content manager or editor.
»» Sloppy design: No approvals were obtained for design consistency, making
your brand look amateurish.
»» Poorly written articles: Without editorial guidance, your posts could have
misspellings and typos that will turn your audience off.
Obviously, people make mistakes. Even with a content system in place, you will
still incur errors. A content framework simply helps you eliminate as many nasty
errors as possible.
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Enumerating these issues is often a good way to get managers on your side. Talking about corporate exposure always gets people’s attention.
Examining the systems needed
You can begin by focusing on what’s involved in putting your content system
together. No magic is involved. As with any project you create, you need to know
what the tasks are, how to get them done, and what your budget constraints are.
It’s important to make sure that everyone on the team understands how you
deliver quality content using the highest standards.
You should have a documented process that everyone can follow. According to
the Content Marketing Institute, research shows that those companies that have
a documented framework believe that it helps them be more successful content
marketers.
You should also watch out for office politics related to your project. Big projects
usually engender big emotions. Make sure that everyone is heard. Also be aware
that not everyone will want your project to succeed, for reasons known only to
them.
So, now you’re tasked with getting the system in gear. You have buy in and you
need to get to work. What needs to happen next? The next paragraphs consider
just a few of the tasks ahead of you.
If your company has a formal Content Management System (CMS), that system
should have specific guidelines about the ways in which you have to input and
manage your content. Here, you’re dealing with the general tasks needed to put
procedures in place.
You need to
»» Assign roles and responsibilities. Everyone must know what he or she is
responsible for and in what time frame.
»» Establish governance rules to be followed. Governance rules need to be
created so that people know how to make decisions.
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Defining Your Content Framework
Using Processes and Systems
It’s also critical to give all team members the opportunity to make suggestions
and improve procedures. In fact, even those who are not actual team members can
benefit from understanding the content process. You should welcome anyone who
is interested in learning how he can assist or support your efforts.
»» Put editorial guidelines in place. Editors need rules, too. Don’t forget to
create these for everyone to follow so that your content will have quality and
consistency.
»» Develop a writer’s resource system. You need to identify where to get
writers (if they are not in-house), how to assign them to specific tasks, and
what and how to pay them. (Same goes for any other contracts; for example,
designers and other technology workers.)
»» Select and use an editorial calendar. Everyone needs to see what is being
created. A calendar is also used to assign other project tasks that complete
the content process. (See “Using an editorial calendar,” later in this chapter.)
»» Create content guidelines for authors. Writers need to know what is
expected of them in terms of style and content.
»» Ensure that you have visual guidelines for designers. Your content much
be visually appealing and conform to all guidelines that have been documented in your brand guidelines.
»» Make sure that your taxonomy is in good order. This is just a fancy way of
saying that your keywords and other data classifiers should be kept up-todate so that they can be tagged correctly and people can easily find you.
»» Develop the workflow to revise and approve content. After content is
written and has gone through the editorial process, you need to make sure
that people know who is responsible for approving the content.
»» Publish content to multiple channels. Have channel guidelines in place for
each social platform to which you publish. You don’t want to go through all
that effort to create content and then fail to publish it correctly.
»» Ensure that training is in place. If new people join the process, you want to
be sure that they can get up and running quickly.
You also need to evaluate and measure the results of your efforts, as covered in
Book 9.
How’s that for a list of tasks? Now that you understand the magnitude of the project, you can work on getting your systems in place.
When you think about content writing and publishing, you probably don’t think
about governance. In reality, though, governance is crucial to your content strategy. Governance refers to the rules of the road that guide your decision-making
throughout the content lifecycle. After you determine the scope of your project,
you have to create the rules that guide you.
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For example, if you, as the editor, intend to publish a controversial article on the
company blog, how will you go about reviewing it and getting approval? When
everything goes smoothly, the topic of governance seems unnecessary or heavyhanded. When you run into a conflict, however, either internal or external, you’ll
be glad you have them.
So what goes into preparing for governance? You need to
»» Develop roles and responsibilities
»» Establish workflow
»» Create documentation
You also need to ensure that there is adequate training for all involved. The following sections look at each of these governance roles in turn.
When it comes to the average workplace, sometimes it’s hard to know who is in
charge. People often assume the mantle of authority even when they have no real
power. But before you determine who is in charge, it’s important to know how
decisions about the project will get made. Governance models are typically one of
three types:
»» Centralized: In this model, all decisions are made by a central committee that
has the authority to consult anyone in the hierarchy to make decisions. This
committee could include the legal department, advertising, and other
departments. This model works best in small companies with a localized
editorial team.
»» Hub-and-spoke: This model allows different teams to take responsibility for
their own decisions. These teams may be spread across the globe, thereby
making a central model impractical. Obviously, the model makes having a
high standard of consistency less likely unless guidelines are strictly enforced.
»» Hybrid: As you might guess, this model is the most popular. It’s more informal
and allows teams to use the best of both models. It does require that some
matters, such as legal aspects, be controlled centrally.
After your organization has decided on the method of making decisions, several roles must be assigned in a content management system, as described in
Table 5-1.
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Defining Your Content Framework
Using Processes and Systems
Determining Roles and Responsibilities
TABLE 5-1
Roles Needed for a Content System
Role
Description
Project Leader
Corporate leader who approves the overall budget and goals and is ultimately
responsible for the overall success or failure of the project
Project Manager
Manages budget, staffing, guidelines, and so on
Content Managers
Determine what topics are written about and what formats are used
Editors
Assign and schedule writers; evaluate writing; supervise revisions; approve for
publication
Contributors
Write articles, ebooks, and other content
Designers
Create images and design page layouts
Content System
Administrators
Evaluate content to ensure that it will render correctly; create pages; check links
Web Administrators
Ensure that content is formatted for publication and meets all web standards
Managing the Workflow
Developing an efficient workflow is a vital part of the content system. When you
document your systems, you help yourself and others learn the process. You also
make it easy for others to spot mistakes.
Here are several tasks to consider in your workflow process:
»» How contributors are found and assigned
»» How contributions are scheduled
»» How the content gets reviewed and approved
»» How the content is published
The following sections explain each of these tasks.
Workflow documents should include visual elements. If you can capture screen
shots, that’s great. Flow charts are also helpful. Keeping the use of visual elements in mind will be valuable when you are trying to streamline the process.
Finding and assigning writers
Your content is only as good as the people who create it. If, like IBM (http://
IBM.com), you have subject matter experts (SME) in almost all technical and
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business fields, your problem is solved. You can have your in-house writers interview an SME and create great content.
But what if you have only a few people who can write, or worse yet, no one who
can produce content? You need to look outside of your organization to engage
writers and editors to do the job. Doing so requires a budget and an understanding
about what constitutes great content specifically for you.
To assemble a team of content creators, you have several options that vary in the
amount of time and money you have to spend. Here are some options that you can try:
»» Harness your own in-house talent and create a content writing team. If
you choose this path, you will have to take on a great deal of the management
yourself. You will have to determine how much time and effort you need and
figure out how to use your resources. One major disadvantage is that you’re
stuck with the writing talent you have. If your writers are very good, you’re
lucky. If not, you may have weak content and nowhere to go to improve it.
manage. This path gives you the potential to find good writers. You’ll still have
to manage their time, but only in the sense that you assign work and expect to
get work returned in a timely manner. The major disadvantage here is that
you may have to test and audition several writers before you find the ones
who suit you. Also, as freelancers, they can move on and you’ll have to replace
them. Some sources for freelance writers are
•
•
•
Contently (http://contently.com)
WriterAccess (http://www.writeraccess.com/); see Figure 5-1
Zerys (http://www.zerys.com/)
»» Hire a writing service. When you hire a writing service, you’re getting some-
one else to manage your writers. The service fulfills your requests by finding a
suitable writer among its stable of contributors and getting the content written.
Using such a service can save you time and effort, and you’ll typically pay a
premium for that fact. However, if you’re looking to save time, perhaps you
should consider this. Here are several writing services to get you started:
•
•
•
Internet Marketing Ninjas (http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com)
Express Writers (https://expresswriters.com)
Brafton (http://www.brafton.com/); see Figure 5-2.
»» Contact influencers who will create guest posts for you. To supplement your
content, you may want to have guest posts done by your industry’s influencers.
Book 6 has everything you need to know about working with influencers. These
people may want a byline credit, and they will be happy to have the exposure.
CHAPTER 5 Defining Your Content Framework Using Processes and Systems
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»» Hire individual contractors and create an external writing team that you
»» Pay a premium for special writers. You may know of professional writers
who would provide exactly what you need. If so, you can offer to pay them a
premium rate.
FIGURE 5-1:
WriterAccess.
Of course, you can mix up all these options and build a system that’s perfect for
you. As you experiment, you’ll find the best combination of services for your needs.
Using an editorial calendar
Would you schedule a trip without looking at a calendar? Probably not. So why not
use an editorial calendar when scheduling your content? If you wonder whether a
calendar is necessary, you’re not alone. Some content marketers don’t want to be
bothered with establishing one and keeping it current.
If you’re a solo business operator or have a very small team, you might think that
a calendar is overkill. Think again. Would you prefer to keep the schedule in your
head and have everyone ask you about it? And could you even keep everything
straight in your mind? Why take the chance of missing deadlines?
If you work in a large corporation, you probably already see the need for a robust
organizational tool and may be looking for a good editorial calendar.
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BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
FIGURE 5-2:
Take a look at the tasks that a calendar helps you perform. When you have a calendar, you can
»» See the big picture of how your content is distributed throughout the
months. A calendar gives you an at-a-glance view of the content that is in the
pipeline and that has already been published, helping you avoid
redundancies.
»» Ensure that you will have the people and resources that you need when
you need them. To avoid long gaps in the schedule, you want to get writers
lined up in advance. If someone drops out or you want to add something
special, you can prepare ahead of time. Also, Google loves consistency, and
you don’t want to disappoint Google!
»» Develop content for specific promotions and campaigns. Product
managers, marketers, and sales managers want to get their campaigns
put at the head of the line. A calendar can help to control the potential
chaos of conflicting demands.
»» Assign people to specific content tasks and then follow up with them.
A documented schedule allows you to follow up with the people to which you
assign tasks. You can see whether a deadline is fast approaching with no word
from your contributor.
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Brafton.
»» Prevent the problem of not knowing what to write about with a deadline
looming. A calendar will allow you to schedule topics in advance so that
you’re never wondering what your people should be writing about.
It is critical that you keep a steady stream of content ideas so that you can
plug them in and get them written. Keep a growing list of ideas for content in
online tools like Evernote (http://evernote.com), a content organizing tool.
Or you might use Trello (http://Trello.com), a collaboration tool. If your
group already has a collaboration tool, use that. The key is to make sure that
you capture ideas as you think of them so that you’re never at a loss for a juicy
topic to write about.
»» Make sure to vary your content formats so that you delight everyone
in your audience. Scheduling ahead of time allows you to look at content
formats. You will want to have a variety — lists, videos, and audio — to
entertain your audience.
»» Help your team be more productive because they know what to work
on when they’re ready to work. People are more productive when they
manage their own time. Not waiting for the last minute ensures that project
members turn in their assignments on time. Or at least they will know that
they’re going to miss a deadline and inform you!
Using a calendar makes it easy to show your manager what you’re doing when it’s
performance review time. It also allows you to review your strategy at given intervals. When you’re ready to revise and optimize, you’ll have all the information you
need in your calendar, along with supporting documents.
So what calendar tool should you choose? That depends on what’s available to you.
Here are some options to consider:
»» If you use a formal content management software platform (CMS), you may
already have a calendar tool built right in. An example of a CMS with a built-in
calendar is the Kudani Cloud (http://Kudani.com) content platform. It has
all the built-in features you need for finding content and publishing it to your
blog or website — all without leaving the application.
»» If you want to use a standalone calendar, you might try the one from
CoSchedule (http://coschedule.com).
»» If you use WordPress for your blog, several plug-ins are available. (https://
wordpress.org/plugins/editorial-calendar/). Figure 5-3 shows one.
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FIGURE 5-3:
CAN YOUR EDITORIAL CALENDAR
INCREASE YOUR NUMBER OF
FOLLOWERS?
You know that using an editorial calendar can help you with your scheduling, but can it
actually get you more attention and Facebook followers? According to the co-founders
Dechay Watts and Debbie Williams of SPROUT Content (https://www.sprout
content.com/), a content and inbound marketing services firm acquired by Gorilla
Group, it can. They detail how they were able to help a regional restaurant group in
Florida with several locations get into social media and create excitement for its brand.
One of the first things Watts and Williams did for this client was to create a three-month
blog editorial calendar for each restaurant.
Within a two-year time frame, the company accrued more than 23,000 Facebook fans,
a metric it could never have obtained if it didn’t use its editorial calendar to apply longterm thinking to their content creation.
Perhaps you thought that using an editorial calendar wasn’t valuable. Now you see that
it can be.
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WordPress
Calendar.
Documenting Your Policies
and Procedures
Documentation isn’t considered a very exciting topic, but it’s certainly a very
­necessary one. Documenting your content strategy can mean the difference
between the success and failure of your project. This is also true of documentation
for your systems and procedures. You need to ask several key questions about your
documentation on an ongoing basis. These questions include:
»» Does everyone know where to find documentation? It’s great to have
documentation, but if no one knows where it is, it’s useless. A central repository should exist on the company server to house all your documentation
regarding content processes.
»» Is there a method to let everyone know about changes made to docu-
mentation? Having a way to keep everyone in the loop concerning changes
is key, because tracking changes can be a bit complex. You want to figure
out the best way to let people know who care about the changes and not
annoy those who aren’t. Some companies issue alerts to specific teams
when guidelines have changed. Make sure that you know who is on each
team, for example, editorial versus technical, so that the right alerts go to
the right people.
»» Are you guarding against “walking documentation?” Walking documenta-
tion refers to the information that is known only to specific employees, who
walk out the door each night. You need to ensure that everything that should
be known by the group is written down and kept in an accessible place, rather
than existing just in the mind of a few employees.
Table 5-2 lists the kind of documentation you need for each of the content system
areas. In the upcoming sections, I explain each of these areas.
TABLE 5-2
264
Documentation Needed for a Content System
Who Uses It
Documentation
Content managers
Taxonomy
Editors
Editorial guidelines
Writers
Style guides
Designers
Visual and branding guides
Content system administrators
Social platform requirements, CMS
Web administrators
Systems and security
BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
Content managers
In larger organizations content managers are different from the editor, who
ensures that the content meets its goals and doesn’t violate any company ­policies.
A content manager has a more strategic role. She is responsible for knowing
about the personas and the data collected about customers. With that knowledge
she maintains the taxonomy and determines what topics and formats of content
should be created.
Editors
Editorial guidelines are critical for any publisher. They explain to everyone concerned what your goals are for publishing. The guidelines tell your contributors
who your audience is and what you want them to get from reading your content.
It also explains the approval process so that writers know how their work will be
evaluated.
Obviously, documenting what authors need to know about writing content for you
should be available in a style guide for authors. The type of style guide you provide
for your in-house writers will be extensive and will also include specific information about your CMS, if you have one.
HubSpot provides a free style template (see Figure 5-4) that can be helpful if you
need to create guidelines from scratch. Go to http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/
tabid/6307/bid/31247/The-Simple-Template-for-a-Thorough-ContentStyle-Guide.aspx.
Blogs that use outside contributors normally have a document available on the
blog’s website that informs contributors about what is acceptable and desirable in
a post they submit for publication.
Designers
Designers rely on the visual guidelines that have been created for the website
properties. They can also refer to brand guidelines if issues arise.
CHAPTER 5 Defining Your Content Framework Using Processes and Systems
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Writers
FIGURE 5-4:
HubSpot content
style template.
Content system administrator
The content system administrator makes sure that the CMS is functioning and
will refer to the CMS documentation when necessary. He also keeps social platform guidelines with the details about formatting content for other channels.
Web administrator
The web administrator is the keeper of the important security guidelines for
the company’s web properties. She’s also responsible for system maintenance
documentation.
Of course you know that getting all the systems in place is only half the job. People
must be trained to effectively use the systems. Some of the training occurs by
using the systems and getting comfortable with how they work.
The technology you put together for your system may include software tools for
writing, designing, and editing. This means that you expect your team members
to be well-versed in the software skills needed for their work
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YOUR CONTENT COULD BE INTELLIGENT
Recently, content marketers have been hearing about “intelligent content.” This
term doesn’t refer to content that is written for power users. Rather, it’s content that
is ­structured to make it more useful. Scott Abel, the Content Wrangler (https://
thecontentwrangler.com/#), calls it “content that can be read by people and
machines.” The value of making your content intelligent is that by providing a structure,
the content can be found and used throughout the organization. Robert Rose of the
Content Marketing Institute is quoted in Scott Abel’s SlideShare presentation as saying, “Intelligent content is an approach. A way of thinking about how we structure and
­manage content” (http://www.slideshare.net/abelsp/intelligent-contentin-the-experience-age-49565442). Intelligent content is content that is broken
out into its components (such as metadata) so that it can be structured into the output
that’s needed.
Defining Your Content Framework
Using Processes and Systems
Is intelligent content something that you need to consider for your company? It depends.
If you’re a small company with a limited amount of content, the answer is, not right now.
If you have a big organization and lots of different forms of content, developing intelligent content will help you deliver the best content to all your customers. You want to
be able to get the right content to the right customers at the right time.
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Building a resource library of content
»» Writing for the right audience
»» Creative a narrative for your brand’s
story
»» Tracking success metrics
Chapter
6
Targeting Content for
Your B2B Audience
T
he content marketing revolution transformed the B2B marketing world. The
birth of marketing automation platforms launched in the mid-2000s also
launched the digital content marketing industry. Content marketing is all
about telling the story of your company’s product or service in an unbiased way
and demonstrating thought leadership. Establishing a thought leadership position
is accomplished through creating meaningful content that leaves an impression
on your targeted accounts.
Marketing automation systems need content to fuel demand generation. Without content, there’s nothing to link to from your calls to action (CTAs) on landing pages. Demonstrating thought leadership would be impossible. Your company
needs content to demonstrate its knowledge of industry subject matter. Content
has become the lifeblood of a successful marketing program.
You have to get the content engine revved up and keep it full throughout your
marketing campaigns. A comprehensive strategy is paired with content for each
stage of the buyer journey. Content should be engaging, entertaining, and based
on the stage of the relationship. All throughout the buyer journey, you’ll use marketing technology to help deliver content at the right stage, at the right time, and
to the right contacts.
CHAPTER 6 Targeting Content for Your B2B Audience
269
In this chapter, you see how to drive a response from your various types of content, giving you a framework to start your own content marketing program. Also
outlined are the best practices for measuring the success of your content marketing programs.
Creating a Content Library
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 80 percent of business decision
makers want their company information in a series of articles, not in advertisements. The buyer journey is a comprehensive lifecycle, from the time a prospect
first connects with your company. Your potential buyers want to read and digest
information at their own pace instead of being spoon-fed by a salesperson. By
having a library full of content, your prospects can select the content they want to
read or the videos they want to watch. This content informs them about the value
of your company’s product or service without a sales pitch.
Host your company’s content library on your website, labeled “Resources,”
“Resource Library,” or “Knowledge Center.”
A content library will have gated content protected by a form. This way, you
­capture a contact’s information before they download content. Content is used
to draw inbound activity to your website to discover new contacts and nurture
existing contacts. Lots of different content is needed, as it will serve a different
purpose in the buyer journey.
When brainstorming ideas for content, think of people outside of your company
you need to interview. To remove any bias from your content, interview at least
three thought leaders outside your industry, then send them quotes to review
before including them in your content.
Your content library should showcase your company’s expertise and thought leadership position in the industry. All the different pieces of content should inform
your prospect, educate them on best practices, and guide them through the buyer
journey. These tools work in all stages of marketing:
»» Whitepapers: This long-form content is created in .pdf and should be served
up early in the buyer journey. A whitepaper is a great way to demonstrate
thought leadership in your area of subject matter expertise. Across all
industries, producing and distributing whitepapers to your prospects is
considered a best practice for moving prospects through the sales
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BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
process. Whitepapers can be as short as six pages to make the information
easy to read.
»» Ebooks: An ebook is an even longer version of a whitepaper. Ebooks are used
to incorporate even more quotes and content from other thought leaders and
industry insights. These should also be served up early in the buyer journey.
The difference between a whitepaper and an ebook is both the length
and design. An ebook is a longer work, averaging at least 20 pages or
more. Whitepapers usually are around ten pages, and they got their name
because of all the white space included in the design to make the text
easier to digest. An ebook should incorporate more color and graphic
design elements. Figure 6-1 shows a sample of an ebook.
FIGURE 6-1:
Targeting Content for
Your B2B Audience
Example of an
ebook.
Include a table of contents in your ebooks and whitepapers over ten pages.
This helps the reader to find the content they want to read. Figure 6-2 shows
a sample table of contents from an ebook.
»» Infographics: When you only have eight seconds to capture the attention of
your prospect, an infographic helps keep you top of mind. These graphics
should also be served up early in the buyer journey to help increase the
awareness of your product or service. Figure 6-3 shows a sample infographic.
CHAPTER 6 Targeting Content for Your B2B Audience
271
FIGURE 6-2:
Example of a
table of contents.
FIGURE 6-3:
Example of an
infographic.
With ebooks, infographics, and whitepapers, the goal is education of the
problem your company solves, not about your company. Don’t include
detailed information about your product or service in this early-stage content.
Save it for later in the buyer journey.
»» Case studies: Letting your customers share their success stories in case
studies is good for you (prospects will hear about authentic results from real
clients) and good for your clients (their stories promote awareness of their
businesses, too). This content should be presented by the sales team after
the qualification process, when you’re trying to progress the account into an
opportunity or Closed/Won deal. Two ways to develop case studies into
content include
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BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
•
Document: Designed in a .pdf covering the problem your customer was
experiencing and how your company provided a solution.
•
Video: Short recorded interviews with your customers, where prospects
can hear from customers in their own words about why they do business
with your company.
»» Webinars: In the early stage of the buyer journey, webinars are a great tool
to drive awareness and engagement in your target, qualified accounts. The
goal of producing webinars is to create more interest with the contacts in
your account and move them further through the sales process. With your
prospect webinars, you need a panel of presenters. When you have three
presenters, these roles are the ones you should have:
•
•
One thought leader or industry influencer from outside your team
•
One of your executive team members or a leader in your company
A customer “champion” who can be an advocate for your product or
service and can speak eloquently to your audience
Targeting Content for
Your B2B Audience
Edit your recorded webinars into shorter segments, such as a 15-minute
video. Short video recordings are easy to digest, and can be replayed at your
contact’s convenience. Figure 6-4 shows a sample webinar.
FIGURE 6-4:
Example of a
webinar replay.
Have a quarterly plan for your webinars. Hosting at least one webinar per month
is a great way to create velocity for the sales team. They should create a promotion
plan to share this new content.
CHAPTER 6 Targeting Content for Your B2B Audience
273
Because you’re going through the effort to create a content library, you need to
have a plan to share this content with your target audience. When you spend this
time, money, and effort to create content, it needs to be shared with the contacts
in your accounts.
You need to create content that doesn’t live in your “Resources” section, as
other content and communications are needed to serve other purposes to drive
awareness.
This content can be strategically used in campaigns to target accounts that are in
the early stage of the buyer journey. Here are other types of content you need to
develop:
»» Blog posts: Your company’s blog is a key component of your marketing
website. Your prospects and influencers will check out your blog for the latest
topics your company is writing about.
New content should be published to your blog at least once a week. Make it
current and topical.
»» Press releases: This is how your company will distribute major news. These
news announcements can include a strategic round of funding, a new
customer acquisition, merger, partnership, or hosting an event.
The benefit of distributing a press release on a web-based platform, such as
PR Newswire (www.prnewswire.com), MarketWired (www.marketwired.com),
or PRWeb (http://service.prweb.com/home), is that it’s an official press
release, which you can then link to from other sources.
»» Social media: The content you publish to social media platforms, (such as
Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook) should be fresh and timely. Social media
content should be created specifically for the channel you’re publishing it on.
Every time you post a link to Twitter, use a platform like Bit.ly (https://
bitly.com) or Snip.ly (https://snip.ly) to track how many times the link
is clicked. When you’re sharing the same piece of content on multiple social
media channels, such as sharing the same case study on both Twitter and
LinkedIn, create different tracking links to attribute it to different channels.
Many marketing automation systems can also generate tracked links or
integrate with tools that track social media engagement.
»» Direct mail: Content for direct mailing includes physical objects. You need
to have stationary printed with your company’s logo for your team members
to write notes to accounts thanking them for their time. Consider printing
postcards to include with “swag” or other items you will physically mail to
prospects
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BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
Create an editorial calendar for the new content you’ll publish to your library,
blog, press releases, sending direct mail, and other content. This calendar will
help your marketing team manage when and what you’re publishing across various channels.
Having an editorial calendar also provides transparency across your sales team so
everyone knows about new content and upcoming campaigns. Send an email or
communicate during your weekly sales meeting to your sales leaders about when
new content will be available and how they can use it.
Storytelling and its importance
As discussed in Book 3, Chapter 4, the whole point of developing and sharing content is to tell a story. The importance of storytelling for modern B2B marketers
can’t be overstated. Your prospects don’t want to watch a commercial or hear a
product pitch. Buyers today want to be informed and educated, so they can arrive
at a decision independently. The content your company produces should help tell
a story to your buyers, so they can be guided down a path that leads to becoming
customers.
Adapting the narrative to fit the buyer journey means everyone will discover a
slightly different version of the same story. A story always has three components:
a beginning, a middle, and an end. The same is true for the buyer journey. You
need to tell a story to the contacts in the account using your content. Here’s how
to think of your content as a story:
»» Beginning: The start of the buyer journey with your company. It’s about
awareness for the early-stage prospects. At this stage, the prospect is
becoming educated about the problem and potential solutions. The relevant
content at the early stage includes blog posts, ebooks, infographics, and
whitepapers.
CHAPTER 6 Targeting Content for Your B2B Audience
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Targeting Content for
Your B2B Audience
The content in your library should be used in campaigns throughout the buyer
journey. Throughout the sales process, there’s an underlying story. This is called
the narrative. The narrative tells a story problem you’re trying to solve and builds
to a conclusion at the end, which is how your company answers the solution.
When you think about storytelling, the story should be consistent. No matter who
you tell the story, it shouldn’t change. However, you might tell the story from a
different point of view, depending on the type of contact you want to reach. For
example, the angle from which a story is told to an IT manager is very different
from a CMO.
»» Middle: The account has been qualified and the sales team is trying to create
an opportunity. At this stage, the contacts in your account are becoming
educated about why they should buy from your company. The relevant
content at the middle stage includes case studies, video testimonials, webinars, and engaging on social media. (Sales account executives should
personally connect with accounts on LinkedIn.)
»» End: The sales team is trying to close the opportunity and win a new cus-
tomer. At this stage, the contacts in your account need to see how your
company will continue to support them after the deal is done. The relevant
content in the final stages of the buyer journey includes “how to” content
(such as checklists and implementation guides) showing them how they can
easily adopt your company’s product or service. If there’s competition here, a
competitive analysis or brief document outlining the return on investment
(ROI) can be provided.
When you have a lousy product, no good story can sell it. You must have a good
product or service, or no amount of marketing will help your company in the long
term.
To win the deal, you need a solid product offering, but it’s so much more than
that. The account will choose to do business with your company because of the
relationship built with the sales representative and the content that was ­produced
and shared throughout the buyer journey. The storytelling process helps your
sales team to tell the right story and sell the dream to close the deal. It’s part of
the psychology of sales.
Now, the content that supports the overall narrative can be different depending
on the particular problem they’re trying to solve. The story needs to tailor to that
angle and may require a change in focus on which portion of the story based on
the stage in the buyer journey.
Every quarter, your sales team should get together to determine what type of content marketing needs to produce for sales enablement. They should also meet with
customer success to discover which content will be needed for customer accounts
to support adoption and provide training.
Taking a BtoB lens to your content
Imagine you walk into a store. The shopkeeper knows your size, the colors you like,
your fashion sense, and your price range — all the information about the types
of clothes you like. They select items to present clothing options that they know
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BOOK 3 Dipping into Content Creation
you’ll be likely to purchase. B2B marketers need to think more like the storekeeper
who treats all clients like they’re VIPs with tailor-made clothing; you’re tailoring
your message to contacts in an account. These contacts should match your personas (the type of people who are the best fit for your product or service). Keeping
the accounts and contacts in mind when developing your content will make sure
it resonates.
FIVE OUTSTANDING CONTENT TIPS
FROM JOE CHERNOV
•
Think about all the content your company has published and could publish as a
“Total Address Content Market.” Everything you published includes internal content
(such as presentations and reports) and external content (such as blog posts,
resources on your website, and advertising). Next, think about everything you could
publish, such as stories and anecdotes, plugging your readers into the thoughts
and minds of your company’s leadership.
•
The value of having a content library begins with identifying what you have and
what you need. Catalog all your existing content, everything you have published
internally and externally, and then identify areas needing collateral.
•
Marketing needs to interview sales leaders for questions they’re frequently asked.
Salespeople are on the frontline between your business and future customers.
Which topics or subjects regularly come up on sales calls? Match these questions to
existing content, or brainstorm new content that needs to be developed to answer
these questions.
•
After talking to sales, marketing needs to talk to the customer success team. These
are the folks on the front line of customer service for implementation, adoption,
and usage. Use them to generate ideas for content to support customers with training and successfully using your company’s product or service. They have the pulse
on customer needs.
•
Resist the temptation to create content that speaks to you and your boss. Reduce
your own role, and replace it with your prospect or customer.
This sounds obvious, but not everyone loves the product like you do. . .at least,
not yet.
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Targeting Content for
Your B2B Audience
Joe Chernov (@jchernov) is one of the content marketing gurus in the B2B world,
­ aving run marketing teams at HubSpot, Kinvey, Eloqua, and now Robin (https://
h
robinpowered.com/). He was kind enough to share these tips for developing
content:
To think about your content from a BtoB perspective:
»» Know your audience. Remember that your audience is extremely important
as you’re taking a targeted account approach.
»» Deliver content meaningfully. Don’t just blast an email to thousands of
people every time you publish a new infographic or whitepaper. Your content
was designed with your audience in mind.
Producing content by industry vertical
Your content should be specific to the industries and segments of the market
identified in your buyer persona. When you start planning your first marketing
strategy, you’ll work with your sales team to identify a persona that includes both
company size (based on the number of employees and the amount of revenue) and
the type of industry.
Verticals refer to the market. A vertical market is the type of industry. Examples of
vertical markets include financial services, commercial real estate, fashion merchandising, retail stores, and gaming.
You must create an persona for the types of accounts you want to target before
producing content.
Writing content without basing it on an industry is like speaking a foreign
­language to someone who isn’t fluent.
Publish a case study for each industry vertical you’re targeting. When you’re
­targeting that industry, you must provide proof of how your solution works for
their peers.
Figure 6-5 shows a sample case study tailored to target accounts in a specified
industry.
Basing content on personas
For your content, consider the stage of the buyer journey and who is in the account.
Your marketing team needs to both educate one person or contact, and also all the
contacts within the account who have a stake in the purchase decision. The content should be as specific as possible for each individual decision maker, ensuring
they’re engaged in the process.
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FIGURE 6-5:
Example of a case
study for one
industry.
You must consider who your audience is for each individual piece of content, and
how they will obtain this content. Every piece of content should be created and
tailored with your personas in mind. The personas are based on job role, responsibility, and seniority in an organization.
This is why it’s essential to have your personas created before you start developing content. You can read more about building your personas in Book 2, Chapter 2.
When you’re developing persona-based content, write the content targeted toward
the persona’s role and business needs. Think about how your solution focuses on
supporting the needs of the individual role.
The personas for your contacts in your target accounts will range across all levels
of the organization. The way a C-level executive wants to consume content is
different from a marketing manager, because they’re different people who are
focused on specific business needs. Your content should provide answers for all
the personas in your ICP. Each person wants to hear why your solution will work
for him or her, in addition to the company as a whole. Here are considerations for
creating content based on seniority:
»» Individual contributor: This person is tasked with finding the right solution
for his or her own role. They’re the most engaged during the buying process,
even when they aren’t the ultimate decision makers. For content, this individual
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The story you’re telling with all your content must align to a narrative. What is the
problem, and how is your company the solution?
contributor needs to see “how to” guides. The questions your content should
answer for this persona include
•
What can your product do to deliver features, functionality, and ease
of use?
•
•
Which integrations does your platform support?
How easily can you pull reports or show metrics?
Metrics are essential. The individual contributor must show why your
product is useful.
»» Manager or Director: The department manager needs to know your
company actually can do what the individual contributor says you can. In
most sales situations, your sales account executive will begin by talking to
an individual contributor who will be the end user. Content will need to be
created for this person’s manager. A manager wants to see these types of
content:
•
•
Positive product reviews on the Internet
Case studies, customer use cases, and video testimonials
The manager is verifying that your company is solid, and that going with your
company is the right thing to do.
»» Executive: The sponsor of the project who is a stakeholder for the success.
He or she is the ultimate decision maker who is conscious of the budget and
investment required to use your company’s product or service. The types of
content this person wants to see includes
•
•
Financial proof: A brief or spreadsheet showing an estimated ROI
•
References: Connecting with your customers to confirm you truly have a
solution
•
Reporting examples or screenshots of sample dashboards
Competitive analysis: How your company is better than other vendors in the
marketplace
»» Influencers within the company: Outside of your end user and his boss,
you need to remember that there are influencers in the account who may
not directly use your product or service. These influencers can include
people in other departments; for example, when you’re selling to marketers,
an influencer could be the VP of Sales. While this VP role isn’t part of the
marketing team, because of the leadership position they influence the whole
purchasing process. The influencer wants to look at complementary solutions,
talk to their peers who have heard of your company, and show their
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colleagues on the executive team that they did a background check on your
business.
»» Beneficiaries: When the VP of another department is an influencer, then the
beneficiaries in his or her department are asking “what’s in it for me?” For
example, marketing looks at technology solutions, and salespeople benefit
from them, but marketing decides which tools to purchase. Content should
be created for the individuals who will benefit from your solution, even when
they don’t have a say in the purchase decision. They need to know whether
the solution is working, and how they will benefit.
Across the entire account, the end users want to see more tactical examples of
how your solution works, whereas the higher you go up the organization more
strategic.
The higher you go up the food chain, the more your personas care about how your
solution fits into the account’s vision and strategic objectives. The executive team
in your target account wants to know how doing business with your company will
help them reach larger business goals.
Think about how your content aligns with providing answers to all of your personas. Your personas should align with each of the contacts in the account. The
story should guide your contacts in the account by what they want to know about
your product or solution.
The goal is to get content to the right persona. You need to make sure everyone
in the account, all the contacts who can impact the purchase decision, know what
your company offers and the benefit it can provide. Here is one example using the
different personas in an IT department:
wants to know how your solution works from an integration standpoint. He or
she wants to see how it collaborates with the other tools and software that
exist in the organization’s technology stack. The question to answer here is
“Does this new technology play well with what I already have?”
»» Chief Financial Officer (CFO): He or she wants to know the return on
investment after making this purchase from your company.
VisualizeROI (www.visualize-roi.com) is one tool that helps you create an
ROI calculator plugging in different variables to demonstrate how using your
company’s product or service will save time, money, or both. Gartner’s Magic
Quadrant is another proof of investment. You can leverage the renowned
analyst team at Gartner to show your product isn’t just smoke and mirrors,
but verified by industry analysts.
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»» Chief Information Officer (CIO): The technology leader for an IT department
»» IT Director: The department head who will have firsthand knowledge of how
his or her direct reports are using your product or service. When something
isn’t working for one of the director’s team members, your customer success
manager will hear about it.
»» IT Manager or Specialist: The end user of your technology. He or she is
the persona who ultimately can turn into a “power user” or “champion” for
advocate marketing. You need to empower this person from Day 1, the time
they first connect with your company or download a piece of content.
Humanizing Content
The entire marketing industry is evolving. Instead of business-to-business (B2B)
or business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, it’s often referred to as human-tohuman (H2H). Humans want to buy from each other, and establish relationships.
It’s those relationships and personal connections that build trust. Trust makes
humans feel more confident in the purchase decision.
Demonstrating thought leadership
Thought leadership is one of the strongest influences in B2B marketing. A thought
leader is someone in your industry perceived to be a subject matter expert. Thought
leadership is presented through your content. Demonstrating thought leadership
in your content is very different than traditional marketing or advertising. Instead
of saying “Here’s why you should buy my product!,” it’s “Here’s a problem; in
your position, here is how we helped other people in your industry solve it.”
Being a thought leader means sharing the limelight with other industry leaders,
giving them the stage. People look to thought leaders when they’re bringing the
industry’s best.
SHOW YOUR PASSION
Think about showing your passion as you start to demonstrate thought leadership
in your content. Whatever topic is your subject matter expertise, own it. Assume the
position of being a knowledgeable person about this topic because you actually are!
Become a hero for supporting this cause, whether it’s chicken tenders or making a case
for content marketing. This needs to be a bigger problem you’re trying to solve across
industry, and show how people can look to you and your company for guidance.
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You can use these channels and activities to demonstrate your thought leadership
position:
»» Content: In your ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, and blog posts. Focus on
one topic that aligns with your product. If you were writing content about five
ways to use content marketing to support sales, you could highlight methods
for working with your account executives. You could also link to quotes from
other thought leaders.
»» Videos: In all your video content, from high-level product overviews to
detailed demos and customer testimonials, the language used in these videos
reinforces your thought leadership.
»» Press releases: In your communications to the media, cite industry sources
that support your go-to market claims.
»» Social media: Regularly post content about your subject matter on Twitter,
Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you were a thought leader about IT solutions, you
might post content about the latest technology, then find and follow other
thought leaders on social media who talk about the same topic to engage
them in a discussion.
»» Webinars and in-person events: When you’re putting together an event,
decide on a central theme and topic. Then find other thought leaders to join
your event as a panelist, presenter, or sponsor. Having multiple thought
leaders participate in your digital and in-person events reinforces your
position as a leading influencer in your industry.
Your content should present a solution but not in a sales-y way. The content and
messaging your company creates needs to address the wants, needs, and pain
points of your personas. Your personas have different motivations, and your content needs to speak to these driving forces. When a contact first lands on your
website or reads and email, they don’t have a vested interest in your company.
They may not even know they have a problem, which your company can provide a
solution for. What your contacts know is their own personal motivations.
Set up a meeting with your sales team to examine your personas and discuss their
wants, needs, and pain points.
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Addressing wants, needs, and pain points
Because your sales team is on the front line, interacting with prospects and
opportunities, they’re the best source to provide insight into what’s motivating
the contacts in your target accounts. Here are the questions to ask:
»» What does this persona want? Think about it from the context of their role.
When the contact is an individual contributor, like a marketing coordinator or
an IT specialist, they want their manager or director to recognize the work
they’re doing. When you’re targeting a manager or director, they want to
streamline processes and operational efficiency to achieve more results
without spending more money.
»» What does this persona need? This motivation most likely will be tied to a
strategic business objective or a company goal. When your persona is
someone in the sales department, he or she needs to hit a revenue goal each
month or quarter. Consider how your content speaks to helping with this
need.
»» Which pain or stress does this persona have? When your persona is a
marketing director, you know that the pain they’re feeling can stem from
needing to contribute to revenue growth. When you’re targeting an IT director,
their pain can come from too many systems that aren’t integrated. When it’s a
CFO at an early-stage technology company, his or her pain may come from
not having enough financial resources to grow the organization.
Before writing your content, make an outline that asks these questions. List your
persona, these three questions, and how your content will address each point to
help demonstrate your company’s solution.
Personalizing your message
There’s so much you can do differently in your content to make it personal. The
ultimate goal is to communicate on an individual level with all the contacts who
can influence the purchase decision. While this may seem impossible to do on a
massive scale, your content depends on personas, so you can address the motivations of the contacts in your target accounts.
Developing a brand identity
The content you create will reinforce an identity for your company. You want your
content to demonstrate thought leadership and answer any questions your prospects may have, as this reinforces your position as an expert. This also helps create a brand identity. But building a brand identity is a process. You can’t become
a thought leader overnight, but you need your prospects and other influencers to
recognize your brand.
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TEN CONTENT PERSONALIZATION
STATISTICS FROM TRIBLIO
•
Marketers see an average increase of 20 percent in sales when using personalized
web experiences (Monetate).
•
Personalized CTAs resulted in a 42 percent higher conversion rate than generic
CTAs (HubSpot).
•
76 percent of marketers define real-time marketing as personalizing content in
response to customer interactions (Direct Marketing News).
•
84 percent of marketing executives plan on developing a process to map content
assets to buyer journey stage (Aberdeen).
•
78 percent of CMOs think custom content is the future of marketing (Demand
Metric).
•
81 percent of marketers perceive increases in customer engagement as the main
benefit of real-time marketing (DemandGen Report).
•
60 percent say that they struggle to personalize content in real-time, yet 77 percent
believe real-time personalization is crucial (Neolane and DMA).
•
82 percent of prospects say content targeted to their industry is more valuable
(MarketingSherpa).
•
73 percent of B2B content marketers are producing more content than they did
one year ago (Content Marketing Institute).
•
46 percent of marketers cited lack of time as the biggest hurdle to content marketing personalization (The Realtime Report).
When you think about a brand, the first things that come to mind are probably
design elements: the brand’s name, logo, color, and text. While these design elements are essential, when it comes to developing a brand identity with your content, you must think about the words you select. Your brand identity is developed
through the content you publish, the events you attend, the advertising campaigns
you run that link to content, and every interaction you have with your accounts.
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Are you ready to start personalizing your customer’s experience along their buyer
­journey? The web influences every marketing program. For the first time, marketers can
target accounts with web campaigns as easily as they can with email campaigns. Jason
Jue (@jasondjue), CMO at Triblio (www.triblio.com) compiled these content personalization tips. Triblio’s platform empowers marketers to dynamically personalize messaging and CTAs to specific accounts and personas. With Triblio web campaigns, each
visitor can view customized websites, overlay cards, microsites, or content hubs that
match their interests. Here are statistics to make the case for content personalization:
Your brand is what other people say about your company. Any negative interaction
or detracting comment from a prospect can damage your brand.
There needs to be a plan for your brand’s identity. Consider the key adjectives,
phrases, and descriptions your prospects would use to describe your company.
Ask your customers questions about how they perceive your brand in surveys. This
will provide insight into the type of content and activities to build and develop
your brand. (See Book 1, Chapter 3 for more about branding.)
Reaching Through Technology
Technology, such as marketing automation platforms and CRM systems, has
allowed more precise BtoB marketing to be possible. The majority of your content
is distributed using digital channels. As you’re thinking about the type of content
you’ll develop for your BtoB campaigns, consider how the content will be delivered
to the contacts in your target accounts. The pieces of content you’re producing,
such as webinars and whitepapers, will be hosted in a central hub (your marketing automation platform) for all the gated content requiring a form to download.
Host your original content files on your marketing automation platform. It’s
synced with your CRM. It’s your marketing automation platform that monitors
who from your CRM is engaging with the content.
Employing a content strategy
According to the Content Marketing Institute, less than 44 percent of B2B marketers meet daily or weekly (in person or virtually) to discuss the progress of
their content marketing program. To succeed with targeted marketing, you need a
strategy for distributing your content. Having a strategy will help you effectively
use technology to ensure that your content is reaching the right contacts in your
account. Think about your strategy with this formula:
Strategy = Content + Context + Channel
»» Content: The marketing piece you’re sending. It’s a blog post, whitepaper,
case study, handwritten note, infographic, video, or whatever medium that
you’ve selected for your message and creative graphics.
»» Context: The time and situation when you send content. The context
depends on the stage of the buyer journey. Your content will change according to who you’re talking to, where they are in the purchase decision, and the
context around the account.
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»» Channel: All the ways you can distribute content and connect with your
accounts. The channels include digital methods (such as email, social media,
downloading content from forms, and advertisements) and more traditional
channels (such as direct mail and phone calls).
You will use a strategy to surround an account with your content, at different times,
and across various channels. Surrounding all the right contacts in an account with
your message creates a halo effect. To engage all the influencers in the purchase
decision, you run different campaigns across multiple channels. Here are a few
technology platforms that help with employing your content strategy:
»» Uberflip (www.uberflip.com): Uberflip’s software helps marketers create,
manage, and optimize content at every stage of the buyer journey. The
platform lets you aggregate all your content for specific buyer personas,
topics, events, and prospects. There are features that help you automate
curation and publishing to serve up the right content experience to
your contacts.
»» SnapApp (www.snapapp.com): SnapApp’s interactive content marketing
platform helps you create, publish, manage, and measure audience experiences. SnapApp gives you the flexibility to create on-brand custom content
experiences. Features can give you complete brand control and speed your
time-to-market.
»» Triblio (http://triblio.com): Triblio’s platform helps marketers personalize
messaging and CTAs to specific accounts and personas. With Triblio web
campaigns, each visitor can view customized websites, overlay cards, microsites, or content hubs that match their interests.
What does equal more revenue? How can you scale and do more personalization
with the same content?
The call to action (CTA) must be different. Don’t serve up a demo advertisement
when they’re in the negotiation stage. When you’re doing personalization, it
doesn’t have to be based on one technology. Within each of these strategies, you
will use different tools to help create velocity and drive awareness, interest, and
engagement with the contacts in your target accounts. Throughout the process,
your job is to make sure you’re distributing content to the right people in the
account.
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If you’re asking for budget approval to invest in technology to develop marketing
content, make sure your executive stakeholders recognize that publishing more
content will not automatically generate more revenue. It helps with nurturing
contacts throughout the buyer journey.
Content needs to be packaged and delivered to contacts in accounts based on stage.
Keep your strategy simple. You can’t control how people will find you.
When you think about the status of an account, you’re thinking about the context.
Many interesting things can happen when you think about context.
Because you have accounts that are all in different parts of the purchase decision,
there is a different context, or event(s) that impact the status, for each account.
Your contacts in the account can have different context, especially when it’s a
larger company.
There is always a context around the account. In a perfect world, your contacts
in the account would say, “We want to do business with you!” But that’s just a
dream. A specific event will trigger the progression to the next stage of the buyer
journey.
The context is important for communicating with your business prospect. Your
marketing communications, content, and activities shouldn’t just be general, or
“blanket,” messaging. It should be highly personalized, based on the context.
Here are types of situations to consider for the context.
»» Qualification: The content you send to a new account who matches your
persona for the right company size and industry.
»» Big news: When one of your targeted accounts publishes a fundraising
announcement or other press release with a major announcement.
»» Events: In-person (such as conferences and tradeshows) or online events
(such as webinars and virtual summits). Depending on the timing, there will be
different contexts, such as an attender who came to the event, pre-event
registered, or post-event (they registered, but they didn’t attend or you didn’t
have the opportunity to meet them).
»» Event sponsor: They may be sponsoring an event that’s in your ecosystem (the
industry or vertical with accounts you’re targeting). You sponsor the event for
the chance to get in front of your targeted contacts.
»» Job change: Alert from LinkedIn that a contact in your account has been
promoted.
»» Article: You saw one of your accounts in an interview or profile.
Setting up a Google Alert (www.google.com/alerts) can alert you of any news
or media pertaining to your target account. When the company publishes a press
release or is featured in a publication, it appears in your Google Alert. Whenever
there’s news, the salesperson who owns the account should reach out.
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Delivering content on the right channel
A combination of content and activities will be needed to create velocity for
accounts. By publishing content across various channels, and running multiple
campaigns, you can create energy and awareness for your targeted contacts. But
it’s important to know whether these are the right channels to use for connecting
with your contacts.
Your content is only as good as the people who read it. Find new ways to repurpose
your content or to redistribute it on new channels.
Cross-promoting your content
You invest a ton of work in creating valuable content. One way to expand the reach
of getting your content in front of the right people is to have a cross-promotion
strategy.
Think about it this way: If you’re hosting a fancy party, you’ll invite a group of
people with a formal invitation, but then you will follow up with them individually. When you see Bob at work, you’ll ask him whether he’s coming to your party,
and he’ll reply with “Oh, right, I need to RSVP.”
A cross-promotion strategy works the same way. When you’re trying to engage
a new contact in an account, and you invited them to attend an event and they
didn’t respond, you follow up with an email. Or, when you just published a blog
post, you can’t just hope people will read it. Hope isn’t a strategy. Your content
can reach a wider audience by cross promoting across multiple channels. Here are
ways you can cross promote your content.
new whitepaper or blog. When you’ve just published new content, you should
post a link to this content on social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter,
and LinkedIn, for your followers to see and read. Also, the “feeds” from Twitter
can be integrated into your company’s blog through plugins for WordPress.
»» Blog posts: When you publish a new case study, whitepaper, or ebook, write a
blog post with an excerpt of this content. Include a CTA on your blog post to
download the longer piece of content.
»» Ask customers to share: When you’ve interviewed a customer for a case
study or video testimonial, and you’ve just published it to your website, send
the link to the customer you interviewed. Ask him or her to share it on social
media, or internally with their company.
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»» Social media: You can use social media to share your latest content, such as a
»» Ask thought leaders to share: When you interview a thought leader or
industry analyst for your latest whitepaper, ebook, or blog post, send them a
link to the content and ask them to share it on social media. If they have a
blog, ask whether you can publish an excerpt on their blog as well and cross
promote that link.
»» Webinar replays: After a webinar, turn the recording into a video, and
publish the webinar’s slides on a landing page to download, or on a publicfacing site, such as SlideShare (www.slideshare.net). Send an email to your
webinar registrants and attendees to download the slides and replay the
recording. Also, post links to these assets on social media.
»» Infographic: Copy the images from your infographics into Microsoft
PowerPoint to create a slide deck. These slides can be used for a webinar, a
presentation for a sales account executive, or uploaded to SlideShare for
people to download. You can also link to the original infographic. so your
contacts can see it in different versions.
»» Monthly newsletter: Every month, send an email newsletter, featuring
multiple pieces of content. Include a recent blog post, your newest piece of
long-form content, or a link to replay a webinar. This is a great way to
aggregate all of your latest content and email it to contacts in your targeted
accounts.
Measuring your content’s effectiveness
The formula for a successful content strategy is Context + Content + Channel.
To determine whether your content is effective, you must measure the results.
You must measure the success of your content and activities across the different
stages of the buyer journey. Based on the content, here are questions to ask to
determine whether your content was effective:
»» Did the whitepaper, ebook, or case study you sent to a prospect advance the
account to the next stage (getting the account on a demo or creating an
opportunity)?
»» If you sent a direct mail campaign, did they receive your mailing and acknowledge it (replying to your follow up call or email)?
»» If you launched an advertising campaign, did you reach contacts in your
targeted accounts? If so, how many impressions did you get? How many clicks
did you receive from your contacts?
For more information about measuring your content’s effectiveness, see Book 9.
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DID YOU END UP ON A BLACKLIST?
Every quarter, check your mail server IP address to determine whether you’re on any
blacklists. You can check with a tool like MX Lookup (http://mxtoolbox.com/
blacklists.aspx) or EmailOnAcid (www.emailonacid.com/spam-testing).
You can prevent being on a blacklist by setting up a sender policy framework (SPF) and
domain-keys identified mail (DKIM). Your SPF and DKIM may be fine, but if a company
thinks your emails are unsolicited, phishy, or spammy, they may report you as spam
to a company-wide or public email service provider. Ask your IT network administrator
to make this change in your DNS record. Also, email opt-in and smart cadences in your
marketing automation system are tools to help prevent you from getting blacklisted.
Who you’re talking to matters. The whole point of cross-promoting your content
is to reach your targeted audience.
Targeting Content for
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Think about how your core content can be delivered in different ways for
­consumption. You’ll discover which platforms are most effective for distributing content, based on the number of downloads (tracked in your CRM) and the
number of clicks.
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4
Reaching Your
Millennial
Audience
Contents at a Glance
CHAPTER 1:
Figuring Out Millennials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
Discovering Why Millennials Matter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
Leveraging Millennial Influence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300
Meeting Millennials Where They Are . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302
CHAPTER 2:
Looking at the Influence of Millennials . . . . . . . . . . 307
Understanding the Marketer’s Perception of Millennials . . . . . . . . 307
The Millennial Mindset. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314
CHAPTER 3:
Pursuing a Data Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
Recognizing the Value of Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
Pinpointing Key Indicators in Your Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
Using Your Data as the Foundation of Your Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . 328
Identifying Data Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
Analyzing Your Data on a Regular Basis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
CHAPTER 4:
Finding Millennials on Traditional Media . . . . . . . . 337
Taking Advantage of Television (With or Without the Budget). . . . 338
Targeting Millennials with Print Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
Incorporating Email into Your Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
CHAPTER 5:
Experimenting with the Share Economy. . . . . . . . . 349
Positioning Your Brand Around Sharing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349
Establishing a Voice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351
Running a Niche Campaign for the Share Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
Encouraging Audience Participation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356
Measuring Results. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357
CHAPTER 6:
Developing the Brand Experience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
Creating a Brand Experience Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
Identifying Touchpoints for Your Audience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365
Checking Off Elements for Each Touchpoint. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366
Developing a Customer Relationship. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
Segmenting Your Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369
Integrating the Experience for an Omni-Channel Strategy. . . . . . . 373
Tracking the Brand Experience Across Different Media . . . . . . . . . 375
Running Brand Experience Campaigns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Understanding the Millennial market
»» Grasping the importance of
relationships
»» Reaching Millennials where they are
Chapter
1
Figuring Out Millennials
F
amiliarizing oneself with the intricacies of Millennials is one of the most
crucial steps a marketer can take. Today, personalization is the name of the
game. The tailored experience that you want to create starts with getting to
know the Millennial mind: how they operate and why they matter so much to your
business.
In this chapter, you discover the short and long-term value Millennials bring to
your organization. You see how they interact with brands across various media.
You also find out ways you can connect with them.
Millennials are consumers, just like the generations that have come before them.
However, circumstances, technology, and a changing global landscape have created a unique Millennial mindset.
Discovering Why Millennials Matter
Millennials are valuable because they now make up a major part of the global
economy. Therefore, marketers need to focus on this group to develop effective,
successful strategies that reach, engage, and convert Millennial consumers.
For your purposes, the term Millennial refers to consumers born between 1980 to
2000. The term Millennial can extend far beyond those age barriers, though, as
discussed in more detail in Book 4, Chapter 2.
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When creating a marketing plan, it can be quite effective to not define Millennials
strictly by age. However, you’ll want to make this distinction when analyzing the
physical size of the market.
There is power in numbers
In 2015, Millennials edged out Baby Boomers as the largest demographic in the
United States. Immediately, without any additional information about the demographic, they become important to your business. Volume alone makes them a
highly coveted group. They’re all independent consumers, and the vast majority
have a steady income. Very few brands wouldn’t be interested in marketing to the
largest group of consumers in the country.
The Millennial cohort provides plenty of opportunities for marketers. Millennials
currently have tremendous buying power and over time will become wealthier.
Here are several reasons why the size of the market is a particularly important
consideration:
»» Economic influence: As older generations shrink, Millennials have a growing
share of the consumer base. This results in the transfer of wealth. If you don’t
develop products that appeal to them today, then you risk your business
becoming obsolete.
»» Trend setting: Some trends are set intentionally, such as popular challenges
that pop up on social media. One example is the Ice Bucket Challenge of 2014,
which asked individuals to pour a bucket of ice over their heads to raise
awareness for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Other trends occur
because of the sheer size of this demographic. Thanks to the availability of
web data on Millennials, marketers can spot naturally occurring trends. (For
more information on the analysis and implementation of data, see Book 4,
Chapter 3.)
»» Fast sharing: The volume of data available and the rate at which it’s shared
creates a changing landscape for marketers. You can currently find more
online data about Millennials than any poll, questionnaire, survey, or census
could collect. Therefore, marketers need to be ready to adapt to the information revealed by thousands of data points.
»» Brand advocacy: The Millennial market has the power to make or break a
brand overnight. The power of the people has never been stronger than it is
now. Brands need to be transparent and respond to the demands of activist
Millennial consumers. You can’t ignore Millennials who work together to aid
or defeat a brand. One such example took place in 2016 during the original
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Millennials influence the economy
Millennials have a tremendous influence over the national and global economy.
According to estimates from Standard & Poor’s, Millennials could account for
30 percent of retail sales, which is about $1.4 trillion per year (https://www.
forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/04/30/how-the-millennial-generationcould-affect-the-economy-over-the-next-five-years/#17e2485932e1).
Millennials are poised to receive the greatest transfer of wealth in economic ­history.
Estimates from major American financial institutions, like Morgan ­Stanley, and
research firms suggest that over the next several decades, ­Millennials will receive
somewhere near $30 trillion from the generations that preceded them. That is a
startling figure, and one that undoubtedly whets the appetite of marketers in any
field.
To determine where that money is likely going to go, marketers should become
aware of the spending habits of Millennials. This knowledge will help them build
effectively targeted campaigns.
Goldman Sachs has provided key information about Millennials’ traits that you
can see at (https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/archive/millennials/
index.html)
Some of the factors that affect their behavior are as follows:
»» Money is coming in, but it isn’t necessarily going out. Mean income for
young Millennials has gone down over the last decade. Millennials are
working, but the cost of living has significantly increased. Income indicators
such as average national minimum wage have gone down. So, while
Millennials are currently a significant portion of the national population, their
disposable income isn’t significant. This may have a big impact on buying
behaviors, even after the transfer of wealth.
»» Millennials carry a huge amount of debt. The cost of education is a big one
for Millennials and has a major impact on what they’re willing to spend. In the
last decade, according to the Federal Reserve, mean student loan balance has
more than doubled for young Millennials. This counts as a form of long-term
debt. (That is, debt that is not set to be repaid over the next five years.) This
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Figuring Out Millennials
Pokémon Go craze, where a small ice cream shop in Washington state was set to
close its doors for good. Millennial players stumbled upon the shop, thanks to
the game, and then began campaigning online to save the business. These
efforts drove enough foot traffic to triple sales and keep the business alive.
has a significant impact on Millennials’ decision-making processes. Because
of this debt, buying decisions are methodical and based largely on utility.
A significant part of that utility is rooted in the extraneous benefits of a
purchase. For example, on top of the usefulness of a product or service, is
there more to be gained from the brand or ownership in the long- term?
This is one of the reasons why creating relationships with Millennials and
establishing yourself as a trusted brand are so important to both acquiring
new customers from this market and keeping them committed over the
course of their consumption lifetime.
»» Ownership is not a priority. Major, long-term financial commitments are not
as important to Millennials as they were to previous generations. In a world
where the share economy and on-demand services have exploded, ownership
is less important than access. The share economy (see Book 4, Chapter 5)
plays a major role in the Millennial consumer cycle.
The share economy, is the market for shared goods and services, giving
participants in the economy access over ownership. Millennials have gone
through the stages of consumer maturation during a recession era, which
has led to significant financial conservatism. Companies or products that fall
into the share economy, such as Uber or Airbnb, allow Millennials to access
the goods and services they need, when they need them, without requiring
them to pay the price of ownership.
»» Millennials are willing to play the waiting game. Just because ownership
is not as important to Millennials doesn’t mean that it isn’t part of their
futures. Millennials are more patient and willing to wait for the right time
to buy. This, once again, is because of the accessibility granted by both the
sharing economy and on-demand services. Almost everything is accessible
at the touch of a virtual button, so the necessity to own isn’t quite what it
used to be.
»» Brand loyalty goes deep. Previously, when making a sale, recognition and a
strong brand were all that mattered. Now, it’s the relationship between the
Millennial and the brand. Also, referrals matter more than ever. Millennials
care what their friends and family say. Customers trust referrals more than
traditional advertising.
»» Quality matters more than price. Millennials are a particularly price-
sensitive bunch primarily because they became consumers during the
Great Recession of 2008. Price sensitivity combined with a heavy education
debt load means that they’re cautious spenders. When they do decide
to make a purchase, the focus is much less on price than it is on quality.
Millennials want a product that lasts as well as a long-term relationship
with the brand in question.
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BOOK 4 Reaching Your Millennial Audience
Millennials are the most connected generation ever, and they use that connectedness as a tool in the buying process. If you don’t find a way to leverage that characteristic in your communications, your chances of long-run survival are slim.
You need to be aware of certain characteristics to take advantage of Millennials’
communications habits:
»» Millennials are over-sharers. Millennials share everything they do, want, or
think, which is great for marketers. It provides a wealth of data and information that you can use to construct highly targeted, personalized marketing
messages and campaigns.
»» You learn more by studying Millennials than you do from asking them.
Thanks to the over-sharing nature of Millennial consumers, you can find
answers to any questions you have or didn’t know you had by analyzing your
data. (For information on effectively analyzing your data, see Book 4,
Chapter 3.)
»» They trust each other more than they trust you. Every year, worldwide
public relations and consulting firm Edelman releases the Trust Barometer,
indicating consumer trust levels in different groups. For the past several years
(after the Great Recession), the highest level of trust is placed in peers, friends
and family, and industry experts. That means that brand is not on top of the
list of resources consumers look to when they need a trustworthy answer.
This statement is particularly true of Millennials. They want to hear unbiased,
honest opinions from people in their inner circles, likely on social media.
»» The buying cycle isn’t linear. The buying cycle has an endless number of
touchpoints. You have control over some of them while the audience creates
others. The key is to note where your prospects connect with your brand so
that you can plan to be there.
Touchpoints refer to the various interactions that a consumer has with a
brand throughout the buying cycle. Touchpoints can vary by medium,
creative design, and content type, such as images or video. In traditional
media, such as television or print, far fewer touchpoints are in the buyer
journey. When you consider new media, like social networks, mobile, and
other digital platforms, the number of touchpoints can skyrocket over the
course of the buyer journey. For more information about the buyer journey
and touchpoints, see Book 2, Chapter 3.
»» Mobile matters most. Mobile is where Millennials spend the majority of their
time. They connect with each other and connect with brands. If you don’t have
a mobile strategy, you’ll lose out on the tremendous potential it provides and
likely face extinction in the near future. The generation that dictates how
markets operate is telling you to think mobile first, and you need to listen.
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Figuring Out Millennials
They’re a connected generation
Leveraging Millennial Influence
Influencers play an important role in every demographic. The connectedness of
the Millennial market may require you to create more complex, interwoven communications strategies than you’re used to. It also means that you have a new
marketing tool at your disposal — the consumers themselves. Taking advantage
of influencers and using your brand advocates is a powerful strategy.
The 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that Millennials trust “a person like
yourself” and industry or academic experts over virtually any organizational
operator, such as the CEO of a company. This kind of influence is crucial in making buying decisions, and it’s something that marketers need to be both aware of
and ready to use.
Influencers are consumers who have amassed large, loyal followings on various social platforms. High star power actors are one form of influencer, but for
­Millennials, those that hold the most power are consumers who have built organic
followings by sharing great content. An example of a modern Millennial influencer would be a consumer who has built a YouTube following by sharing reviews
of a particular line of products. The influencer gains trust above the brand because
of the implicit honesty and integrity of these reviews.
Identifying key influencers
Consumers aren’t as interested in traditional advertising messages as they once
were. Of course, paid campaigns still serve a major role in the consumer buying
cycle, but identifying influencers within your existing audience is more important.
The following sections offer a few helpful tactics for finding influencers for your
Millennial audience.
Creating a loyalty program
Loyalty can’t be bought, but it can be encouraged. Establishing a loyalty program
is an excellent way to
»» Encourage repeat business
»» Increase customer lifetime value (CLV)
»» Build a relationship with your Millennial audience
Because relationships are crucial to the survival of your brand, a loyalty program
will help build those relationships. Hopefully, those relationships will lead to the
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Customer lifetime value is defined as the net profit generated by your brand based
on the entire relationship of transactions with a customer.
Implementing an employee advocacy program
Employees are consumers, too, and marketers often forget about the power of
activating their Millennial employees. They relay positive experiences with your
products and share them with their social circles. This word-of-mouth marketing
helps you take advantage of the massive social reach existing right within your
organization.
Encouraging and perhaps incentivizing employees to share content is a powerful
way to build your presence, foster brand awareness, and prompt adoption from a
new user base.
Communicating with your detractors
It’s all too easy to brush off criticism and focus on new customer acquisition. But
communicating with detractors shows that you care.
Often, when customers complain, their goal is to be heard rather than to remedy
a bad situation. Attempting to improve these transactions goes a long way toward
creating new brand advocates and defenders. In addition, addressing an issue
quickly and effectively can prevent it from spiraling out of control and becoming
a costly mistake. It also gives you the opportunity to develop a better relationship
with that customer.
Nurturing relationships
Millennials see relationships as a significant part of the buying process. The irony
of this is that this demographic is more price sensitive than its predecessors, yet
Millennial consumers are willing to pay a slightly higher price if they have a relationship with the higher-priced brand. This mindset isn’t one that marketers are
familiar with. However, marketing to Millennials doesn’t require a completely
new paradigm. It simply requires marketers to dig much deeper into the mind of
the Millennial consumer.
Brand familiarity isn’t the driving force behind a Millennial consumer’s decision to purchase; quality matters considerably more than the brand name or logo.
Reaching Millennials requires careful planning.
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Figuring Out Millennials
cultivation of brand advocates. Those advocates can then help build your brand by
introducing it to new circles of consumers.
Here are several ways to nurture a relationship with a Millennial consumer:
»» Personalization: The key to successful relationships with Millennials is
personalization. (For more on relationship building, see Book 4, Chapter 2.)
The modern product and service market seems to endlessly expand, which
means that there’s virtually no product on the market for which there isn’t an
alternative. Therefore, after you have the attention of your wider audience,
tailoring your content to the tastes and preferences of the individual will help
build loyalty.
»» Brand experience: What kind of brand do you want to be? Are you authorita-
tive or neighborly? Is your content factual or conversational? Building a brand
persona is an important step in the process because it helps you shape the
consumer’s experience with your brand. That experience is a driving force
behind establishing a relationship and works toward building loyalty with your
target Millennial audience.
»» Cause alignment: Millennial consumers connect deeply with brands that
associate themselves with causes. Just because Millennials possess this
consumer trait doesn’t mean that you should exploit causes for the purpose
of building relationships with Millennials. However, if your brand does
support a cause, it’s certainly a means of connecting more deeply with
certain segments of your Millennial audience.
»» Responsiveness: Traditionally, a curtain has been in front of the big, powerful
brand. Now that curtain has been lifted, thanks in large part to social media.
Communication with a brand is easier than ever before. A certain sense of
satisfaction comes from receiving a response from a brand. Therefore,
responding to your audience members when they reach out can go a very
long way toward nurturing budding relationships.
Meeting Millennials Where They Are
Billions of interactions and engagements take place online every single day. Joining a conversation in progress is always going to be much easier than trying to
create your own.
Millennials are engaged on various platforms with content, brands, and each other.
Your responsibility as a marketer is to find new and creative ways to become a part
of those exchanges. To reach these individuals, you need to understand
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BOOK 4 Reaching Your Millennial Audience
Figuring Out Millennials
»» How they communicate
»» How they share content
»» How they decide to make purchases
Communication
It may seem like the only way for brands to reach Millennial consumers is via
social media. But the reality is that Millennials use a broad number of communication platforms, including traditional media. Familiarizing yourself with
these media is going to play a crucial role in communicating with your audience.
(Book 4, Chapter 4 covers the use of traditional media.)
Traditional means of advertising, such as television and print, were once restricted
to brands willing to spend the big bucks. Now new methods that meld the digital
world with the offline world allow virtually any brand to connect with Millennial
consumers.
Organic initiatives and strategies are those that don’t rely on paid advertising to
reach a specific audience segment. Organic engagement is powerful and a key
component to the success of a marketing program. However, building these kinds
of audiences takes significantly longer. A well-thought-out mix of the two —
­traditional and organic — will be useful in helping you build your brand on both
traditional and new media.
While Millennials aren’t a monolithic group, many Millennials have certain traits
in common:
»» They use various media to communicate. Millennials don’t confine
themselves to one particular medium. The average Millennial is active
on multiple social accounts, messaging platforms, and devices. You don’t
necessarily need to plan to be active or even discoverable on every one
of these media. That would be too costly. But you should get to know your
audience and familiarize yourself with their preferred means of communicating. Then you can identify those media that stand to generate the greatest
return for your brand.
»» Mobile is the primary communications tool. Whatever Millennials do, they
prefer to do it on mobile. The explosive growth of mobile is unprecedented.
Marketers have had to make a dramatic shift in the way they do business.
Millennials are on the go and wherever they go, their mobile devices go with
them. Essentially, ignoring mobile means ignoring your audience, and that is
a recipe for disaster.
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303
»» Personalities differ from one platform to another. The average Millennial
may be active on four or five kinds of digital media. If they’re active on several
media, it doesn’t mean that your brand will necessarily find success marketing
to them in the same way on each platform. Millennials use different media in
unique ways. To communicate effectively, analyze your audience on each
platform.
Sharing
Sharing means a lot more than it used to, thanks in large part to media like
­Facebook and Twitter, and companies like Airbnb. You can look at the concept of
sharing from two perspectives.
First is the content and information approach. Millennials share more with
each other and with brands than any generation that came before them. Unlike
Baby Boomers, Millennials have indicated that they’re willing to share personal
­information with brands. This willingness to share has led to the explosion of
data-gathering methods, such as social sign-in. Social sign-in allows users to sign
in with a single click via Google or Facebook.
Thanks to social sign-in, your brand can collect a significant amount of data
without having to directly question your audience. The desire for simplicity and
convenience on the part of the Millennial consumers means that they’ll likely use
this option. It’s less cumbersome than creating standalone profiles for each platform and limiting the information they share with brands. Data is crucial to the
creation and improvement of your Millennial marketing strategy. The willingness
of Millennials to share via social sign-in means that those processes are made
significantly easier.
Privacy concerns cause some consumers to prefer not to use a social sign-in.
­Consider offering other forms of sign-in beyond social media accounts.
The second concept of sharing relates to the rise of the sharing economy (covered
in detail in Book 4, Chapter 5). Millennial consumers agree that access to goods
and services is more important than ownership. Brands like Airbnb (https://
airbnb.com) and Uber (https://uber.com) recognized this fact and built
­multibillion-dollar businesses to capitalize on it. The priorities and measurements
of success have changed for Millennials. The sharing economy has ­facilitated this
transformation.
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Impulsivity and ownership are no longer the names of the game when it comes
to making purchasing decisions. Millennials have access to a wealth of information that can help them make informed, educated, and trusted decisions, and they
don’t hurry the process.
The Edelman Trust Barometer showed that industry and academic experts and
peers rank above brands as trusted advisors. Review sites like Yelp, shown in
­Figure 1-1, make peer reviews readily available for virtually any type of product or
service. Millennials use these kinds of sites when making a buying decision.
FIGURE 1-1:
Yelp allows
consumers to
provide reviews.
As the availability of trustworthy, verifiable information, such as reviews, has
increased, their impact has been noticeable across all markets. A study by Forbes
found that only about 1 percent of Millennial consumers would trust a brand more
as a result of traditional advertising. Roughly, a third of Millennials review blogs
and review sites before making a purchase. Authenticity is what matters most to
these prospects, and that outweighs even the quality of content.
This trend has leveled the playing field for smaller brands. Of course, big budgets
open doors and opportunities not available to smaller companies, but now they
have the opportunity to compete for the same business as larger organizations.
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Figuring Out Millennials
Decision-making
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Defining the Millennial consumer
»» Recognizing common errors
marketers make with Millennials
»» Understanding the Millennial
mindset and its implications
Chapter
2
Looking at the Influence
of Millennials
B
uilding an effective strategy for Millennial consumers begins with a clear
understanding of their unique characteristics. Some marketers miss the
basics. Millennials, like any generation, are defined as a group of consumers that fall into a certain age bracket. But, in some cases marketing to Millennials
requires you to look beyond age. For this reason, you need to develop a deep
understanding of this market so that you don’t misunderstand its complex nature.
In this chapter, you start thinking about Millennials as prototypes for the next
generation of consumers. They’re not simply soon-to-be-wealthy 20-somethings
that are difficult to reach. They represent a seismic shift in the world of marketing.
Understanding the Marketer’s
Perception of Millennials
If you ask the average marketer to define the term Millennial, he or she would
almost certainly start by stating that Millennials are consumers born between the
years 1980 and 2000. While, demographically this is a fact, the reality is that the
term Millennial embodies so much more. That said, marketers still hold certain
prevailing notions when it comes to defining this important group.
CHAPTER 2 Looking at the Influence of Millennials
307
Examining standard definitions
that marketers use
The date ranges vary from one demographer to the next, but for the sake of simplicity, the generally accepted starting point for the Millennial generation is 1980.
While the latter point of the date range varies considerably, it’s safe to say that an
accepted cutoff point would be 2000. Some demographers are interested in only
designating those who reach the end of high school age by 2000 as Millennials.
Others define the generation as reaching consumer maturity in the mid-2010s.
Whichever range you choose to use, Millennials are the largest, most influential
group of consumers in the world (see Book 4, Chapter 1).
To gain some insight about Millennials, the Pew Research Center asked Millennials to describe themselves, as shown in Figure 2-1. It shows that Millennials have
a very particular perception of themselves that sometimes conflicts with other
people’s perceptions. Forty-nine percent of respondents indicate that they feel
Millennials are wasteful, while 40 percent believe that Millennials are environmentally conscious. You may also find it a little hard to imagine someone being
both cynical and idealistic, yet 39 percent of the Millennials who answered this
survey felt that the general demographic is idealistic, while 31 percent believe that
the generation is cynical. Clearly, you need to understand your particular niche
audience so that you target the right characteristics.
Millennials do have a few personality traits on which the majority of marketers
agree. The following sections outline the assumptions that marketers most often
make when it comes to Millennial consumers. Some of these are correct, and some
are misguided, as discussed later in the chapter. A better understanding of them
will help you develop content and advertising strategies that appeal to the true
nature of Millennials.
Tech savvy
Millennials have been born into the digital age. They have grown up not knowing a
world without extensive connectivity. Smartphones are standard equipment, and
nearly the entire Millennial population of the United States has access to the web.
Millennials have been instrumental in the expansion of such services as social
networking and helped simplify web and application development tools. If marketers can assign one characteristic to Millennials and be right, it’s that Millennials are the most technologically advanced demographic in the world.
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BOOK 4 Reaching Your Millennial Audience
Looking at the
Influence of Millennials
FIGURE 2-1:
Terms Millennials
use to describe
themselves.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/03/19/howmillennials-compare-with-their-grandparents/ft_
millennials-education_031715.
Mobile
In addition to being the most populous generation in the United States, Millennials are also the most mobile. The number of connected mobile devices associated
with Millennials almost exactly matches the size of the generation.
The way Millennials use mobile devices and their dependence on them tells a
much more important story. Millennials don’t separate from their mobile devices.
In fact, most Millennials admit to never allowing their smartphone to leave their
side.
Self-absorbed
You may or may not have heard of Millennials referred to as the Selfie Generation.
High definition, front-facing mobile phone cameras and mobile applications such
as Snapchat (https://www.snapchat.com) have normalized the self-portraits
known as selfies. Marketers associate this behavior with self-absorption.
Time author Joel Stein called Millennials the ‘The Me Me Me Generation.” But he
clarified to say that while Millennials may be self-assured, determined, and, in
some cases, even selfish, there is much more to them than that.
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309
Lazy
Marketers have watched the rise of the on-demand economy and assumed that
its success has come from the inherent laziness of the Millennial generation. The
rationalization for that assumption is that Millennials would rather use a mobile
application to order what they need than go out and run errands.
Antisocial
Millennials love using social media and sharing their thoughts with the world
from behind a screen. Traditional marketers see Millennials walking down the
street with their heads buried in a phone and assume that they’re antisocial.
Educated
Marketers know better than to try to dupe Millennials with dated, cunning advertising tactics. That is because they recognize that Millennials are smarter than
that.
Entitled
Millennials are viewed as a group that demands a lot from previous generations
without offering much in return. This perception is rooted largely in their experience that there is a vast online availability of content, resources, information, and
necessities. Since the launch of social networking sites and share-based resources
(see Book 4, Chapter 5), marketers assume that Millennials feel they deserve a lot
because they have gotten so much free.
Informed
When it comes to making buying decisions, Millennials have access to a plethora
of information that previous generations didn’t have. The buying process used to
rely largely on the word of the brand via traditional advertising channels. Now
Millennials talk to one another and receive honest reviews about a product, service, or brand before making a purchasing decision. Trust in brands, executives,
and even government has significantly decreased in recent years, which has coincided with a rise in the trust consumers put in experts and peers. This increased
reliance on others means that marketers need to recognize the importance of
relationships and the brand experience.
Lacking in loyalty
At one time, the name of a brand would guarantee a certain amount of loyalty.
Now, marketers see Millennials chasing something that can be difficult to pinpoint. Whatever it is, marketers assume that brand loyalty has gone out the window. They believe that Millennials prioritize budgets over brands.
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Price sensitive
Marketers believe that the lack of loyalty Millennials display is due to price sensitivity. There is irony in the fact that Millennials seem to insist on getting what
they want, when they want it, but are apparently willing to wait to make any purchase until a price is found that meets a certain criteria.
With hacks, data breaches, and the fear of Big Brother monitoring their every
move, Millennials want to keep their information private. Even with their high
degree of oversharing on social media, marketers assume that Millennials don’t
want to share with brands for fear of exploitation.
Reviewing what marketers get right
Some of the assumptions marketers make about Millennials are accurate, with the
data and research to back them up:
»» Educated and informed consumers: The majority of Millennial consumers
review blogs and review sites before making a purchase. According to a report
by Medalia Institute (http://go.medallia.com/rs/669-VLQ-276/images/
Medallia-Millennials-Your-Most-Powerful-Brand.pdf), Millennials say
that user-generated content has an influence on what they buy. The brand
experience is extremely important to Millennials. They believe that they can
find good information in the unbiased accounts of other consumers. Tailoring
the experience to the Millennial audience segment is crucial. This connected
consumer base has more power than even the most rich and powerful brands.
»» Price sensitive, but will spend: Millennials became consumers during the
greatest economic downfall that the United States experienced in nearly a
century. Combine that with a high amount of student debt, and you have a
generation of consumers that thinks before it buys.
The important thing to note is that Millennials will buy. Quality matters more
than price, so if they find value in a product or service, they will spend more.
Also, don’t be fooled by their cautious approach to spending; Millennials
are impulsive. This impulsiveness may be attributable to the fast-paced
nature of buying online.
»» Highly tech-savvy and living mobile-first: Millennials live online and,
more importantly, on their mobile devices. They’re constantly connecting
and communicating. Any brand that doesn’t take this particular trait into
account and recognize that mobile is the new norm won’t survive in an
increasingly competitive marketplace.
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Private
Looking at what marketers get wrong
When you make assumptions about an entire demographic, you risk getting some
things wrong. Here are some of the false assumptions marketers make:
»» Millennials are not loyal. Millennials are, in fact, very loyal. The difference
with Millennial loyalty is that it relies much more on the relationship rather
than brand recognition. Identifying the traits of audience segments, developing content that caters specifically to those traits, and building lasting relationships are what drive Millennials to be loyal.
»» Millennials protect their privacy. In reality, millennials are willing to share
more than any other generation. It may appear that they’re very private, but
less than half of Millennials set strict online privacy settings.
»» The group is lazy and entitled. Millennials are quite the opposite of lazy.
In fact, many Millennials work more than one job to pay bills and debts. What
marketers miss is that on-demand services provide access and convenience,
not laziness or self-entitlement. Millennials don’t want to interrupt their work
to run errands; they can have things like food delivered to them. This change
signals a shift in consumer norms rather than providing evidence of a
negative trait.
»» Millennials are antisocial and self-absorbed. Self-absorption is actually a
byproduct of shifting communications practices. Millennials receive a constant
stream of personalized messages. Marketers know that personalized messages are more likely to catch a Millennial’s attention, so they become the
norm. Therefore, Millennials aren’t so much self-absorbed as they’re used to
responding to messages that specifically cater to their needs.
Recognizing common flaws
in marketing campaigns
When you apply certain false assumptions to the strategy behind a campaign, the
results can be underwhelming. To avoid getting disappointing results, don’t make
these common marketing mistakes:
»» Provide generalized, umbrella content with no specific target audience.
You need to analyze your audience segments and develop tailored, personalized content to deliver to specific targeted groups. Sending generic content
without the customization that Millennials look for leads to failed campaigns.
»» Target Millennials by age and age alone. Millennials are more than an age
range; they’re the new generation of consumers. When you think about
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Millennials as a mindset as opposed to a group of consumers restricted by an
age range, you expand your potential audience and position yourself for
long-term success.
»» Duplicate content across all media. All consumers vary their use of media,
so you can’t apply the same strategy to each of them and hope to be successful. You need to understand your audience on each of the platforms you
frequent. Then you can develop effective strategies for each audience and
media type.
»» Make assumptions without analyzing data to back it up. Data needs to be
Looking at the
Influence of Millennials
at the core of everything you do. So much of it is readily available to fuel your
success, so make sure that you use it. (For more about the analysis and
applications of data, see Book 4, Chapter 3.)
Finding the roots of the most
common mistakes
The mistakes listed in the previous section are common for one reason: They generally come from the same four roots. These roots are
»» Inattention to data: Data needs to be the driving force behind your deci-
sions. If you’re developing strategies that don’t rely on data, you’ll likely be
disappointed with the results. You have no reason to rely on gut instinct. Data
insights are simply too accessible.
»» Broad generalizations applied to your audience: With so much information
about Millennials, it doesn’t make sense to run on assumptions alone. Take
some time to analyze and get to know your audience so that you can develop
content and campaigns that really resonate with them.
»» A lack of testing: Everything you do should be tested. One of the greatest
powers of new media is the ability to test, analyze, optimize, and implement
all in a matter of hours. The ability to react in real time is powerful and should
not be ignored.
The term new media describes primarily digital, social, or mobile media.
Traditional media, such as print, radio, and even television, have seen declines
in consumer use, marketing value, and adoption.
»» Refusing to adapt to changing audiences: The audience you’ve cultivated
and analyzed for today’s campaign may not be the same audience you’ll find
when you’re ready to run your next initiative. Auditing and analyzing your
audience can be a tedious process, but it’s an important one if you want to
maintain relationships and find long-term success.
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The Millennial Mindset
If you think about your Millennial audience without the constraints of age, you
begin to understand that in some ways the term Millennial is becoming synonymous with consumer. The traits exhibited by Millennials, the largest and most
influential demographic of consumers in the United States, are traits that marketers can apply to individuals across a multitude of demographics. Understanding
and adapting to a new age of consumer habits and traits will set you up for longterm success.
Defining the Millennial
If you look beyond the scope of age, how would you define Millennial consumers? Giving them a singular definition would be dangerous because it significantly
limits the audience. You need two definitions when discussing Millennials so that
you can properly analyze them:
»» Age: The first definition of Millennial consumers has to do with age range. Use
this definition when discussing data about the consumers. Demographers,
sociologists, social anthropologists, and marketers use age to conduct studies
and collect data. (Most hard data collected applies age restrictions to
this group.)
»» Interests and behaviors: The second definition for the Millennial consumer
is much more broad. Instead of focusing on age range data, you need to turn
your attention to interests and behaviors. In these audience segments, the
definition of Millennial extends far beyond age restrictions. Here, you look
at like-minded consumers that fit a series of behavioral criteria. You can
broadly define this category of Millennials as being tech-savvy, price-sensitive
consumers who place their trust in peers and experts over brands. They
digest information at a rapid rate and look for tailored, personalized brand
experiences. Brand familiarity is less important to these consumers than
relationships. When they form these relationships, they’re fiercely loyal.
Identifying preferred Millennial media
When compared to a generation ago, you can have a presence on an endless array
of media. Ideally, having such a vast presence also means you have a strategy and
a budget. To maximize your budget, you need to find and target the specific platforms your audience uses. Here are some points to keep in mind, when you begin
to identify your audience’s preferred media:
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»» Start with Facebook. The majority of online Millennials say they’re active
on Facebook. This means that you’re almost certain to find some of your
Millennial audience on Facebook. Despite what marketers and news outlets
have said, Facebook is far from being irrelevant to Millennials. In fact,
Facebook and its products have become so commonplace that Millennials
don’t even realize how inextricably linked to it they are. Facebook is a great
place to begin the process of analyzing your audience.
»» Match email lists before building strategies. Before you begin building
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Influence of Millennials
a strategy for a particular channel, you should either run an email match
audience analysis or extract data using an ad platform. This step will help
you determine whether a channel is worth investing in for the purpose of
acquiring and retaining Millennial consumers.
Running an email match audience analysis is the process of uploading an
owned email database to match emails with users on a given network and
then analyzing aggregated data to identify marketing opportunities within a
network or audience.
»» Identify top interests in your audience analysis. When conducting your
audience analysis, you should pay close attention to topics of specific interest
to Millennials. Certain content makes some media more attractive for
investment than others.
»» Evaluate content requirements and access. If your brand isn’t built for
specific channels like Instagram (https://instagram.com) or Snapchat
(https://snapchat.com), which are predominantly visual and entirely
mobile, then making the investment to use them may not be worth it.
Finding a way to be relevant on these kinds of media is ideal, but if you don’t fit,
your investment will go to waste. It makes more sense to focus on platforms that
are ideally suited for your brand and content.
Grasping the importance of relationships
One of the overarching themes of Millennial engagement is the value placed
on relationships. The importance of relationships is something that transcends
media, brand recognition, and even quality of some products or services. Millennials engage primarily in impersonal spaces, so when a real, genuine connection
is felt with an organization, it lasts a long time and can lead to loyalty and even
brand advocacy.
One long-term goal of any organization should be to cultivate brand advocates
from within their Millennial market. Brand advocates help promote your brand
and expand your horizons. Advocates decrease marketing costs and open new
doors for marketing and advertising.
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To begin cultivating brand advocates, you need to find common ground and nurture these relationships. Over time, that common ground leads to personalized
communications that ultimately lead to new customer acquisition.
The retention of these new Millennial customers, however, is where the real value
lies. Retaining and reactivating existing customers is far less expensive than
acquiring new ones. With the help of brand advocates or pseudo-sales agents,
keeping and acquiring customers becomes much less burdensome and much more
affordable.
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Sourcing and mining for valuable data
»» Identifying the hidden opportunities
in your data
»» Analyzing data on an ongoing basis
for improved campaign performance
Chapter
3
Pursuing a Data Strategy
D
ata is all around you. With the advent of social media and broadcast platforms like Facebook and Twitter, data has become more powerful than
ever, especially for Millennials. The amount of data that exists about them
is unprecedented.
In this chapter, you develop a better understanding of the many forms in which
you can extract, manipulate, and analyze data.
Recognizing the Value of Data
Data is everywhere, and as such, it’s extremely important. While the data may be
overwhelming at times, when used correctly, it’s a valuable source of information
that you can use in your marketing efforts.
Keep in mind that data can often be industry and audience agnostic. By agnostic, it’s meant that raw data can apply to any or all situations and demographics
and isn’t necessarily limited by a particular group or scenario. This means that
the lessons, tips, and processes covered in this chapter may not be limited to
Millennials.
In the following sections, you can read about several different types of data that
you can use in your marketing efforts.
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Raw data
Raw data is information in its purest form. Raw data is data extracted at the
source but not yet processed. While raw data can be daunting when you first come
across it, it’s completely malleable, which makes it one of the most valuable data
types. An example of raw data sorted in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet is shown
in Figure 3-1.
FIGURE 3-1:
An example
of raw data in
Microsoft Excel.
Cooked data
The industry reference to cooked data relates directly to raw data. Cooked data is
what marketers get when raw data has been manipulated in some way to highlight
a particular segment, finding, or aspect of the unadulterated information.
Figure 3-2 shows an example of cooked data.
FIGURE 3-2:
Cooked data
is the result
of some
­manipulation of
raw information.
Social media user data
When it comes to social media, you can leverage a treasure trove of user information to create your marketing strategy. For example, Millennials may share
answers to questions on their social feed that you never thought to ask.
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Analyzing your social audience user data can be as simple as reviewing your
Facebook Insights data, as shown in Figure 3-3. This data can lead to some
­significant breakthroughs. For more information about Facebook Insights see
Book 7, Chapter 2.
FIGURE 3-3:
Customer lifetime engagement data
When a customer engages with your brand across multiple channels, a story is
being told. At every touchpoint, or chapter of the story, data is collected, and you
can analyze it to improve your marketing efforts.
Millennials have a preference for a single sign-in, where they have the ability
to use a Facebook or Google profile to sign into all accounts, tools, websites, or
online stores. With that single sign-in, information about the customer journey is
collected at every step of the way, and that data is hugely valuable for improving
the customer experience.
Brand profile data
You can usually find the jackpot of user data in the brand profile. This user data
relates specifically to your organization. Every bit of information you extract
directly informs how you might shift your marketing efforts, your sales tactics, or
even some of your internal operations to improve efficiency.
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You can find free
social user data
using Facebook
Insights.
Figure 3-4 shows you an example of Amazon’s recommendations. Tracking user
profiles and searches and using advanced algorithms that learn about user tastes
and preferences, Amazon can make customized recommendations to its customers. Over time, this robust profile data provides a company like Amazon with the
ability to build a well-rounded view of each customer at every stage of the buying
process.
FIGURE 3-4:
Amazon
r­ ecommends a
series of tailored
products to its
customers based
on their profile.
Visualized data
Just as with cooked data, visualized information is a representation of some sort of
manipulated data in a visual framework. Plenty of tools exist to help users analyze
and manipulate data to depict it in visual form.
Tableau (www.tableau.com), shown in Figure 3-5, is one such tool.
Big data
Big data means exactly what you might think it does. It’s a large amount of data
collected from a variety of sources. You can analyze this data to make predictions,
identify trends, improve pricing, optimize customer buying paths, and optimize
products. While you can find plenty of other areas where big data may be of use,
these are some of the most popular cases. For more information on big data, see
Book 2, Chapter 1.
Showcasing only big data is a disservice to small and medium business marketing
teams. The real value for marketers rests on how you can segment and use this
data on a smaller scale.
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FIGURE 3-5:
Tableau helps
users visualize
their data.
Small data
»» Message targeting: Creating tailored messages for small groups of your
Millennial audience leads to much higher engagement and conversion. Small
data presents opportunities for improved targeting.
»» Content and creative split testing and optimization: When you dive into your
small data, you can identify minute details that allow you to optimize your campaign. This again can lead to some pretty dramatic improvements in your results.
»» Rolling ad budget optimization: Improving the performance of your budget
means making your ad dollars go further. When you analyze your small data,
you can identify new information that leads you to change small details. These
details include such things as maximum bids or placements of your ads, and
they impact the performance of your campaign as a whole.
The opportunities with small data extend even further when you consider the fact
that data is always full of surprises. Keep an open mind and analyze every possible angle of your small data subsets. Doing so can lead to major improvements in
your campaigns.
If you have a strategy, a target audience, content, and a series of objectives, the
small data you analyze may present findings that would have otherwise gone
unnoticed. This can lead to a significant expansion and improvement of your
strategies and the overall growth of your business both on and offline.
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Small data results when you conduct an in-depth analysis of smaller segments
of your complete data sets. When your data is condensed into smaller groups, it
becomes significantly easier to analyze and more opportunities can be discovered.
Diving into your small data can help improve your efforts with such things as
Competitive data
You can learn quite a bit when you analyze publicly available competitive data.
Your competitors are most likely trying to achieve the same objectives you are.
Taking cues and learning lessons from both their successes and missteps will serve
you well. What you learn from this process will help you achieve your objectives in
a shorter time frame and avoid some pitfalls that were costly for your competitors.
Several tools exist for the purposes of competitive data analysis and tracking. The
following three are easy to use:
»» Alexa (an Amazon company) (https://www.alexa.com): Figure 3-6 shows
some of the data that Alexa pulls from a competitor’s website and digital
presence when using the Pro version. The product provides users with
insights into the online performance of sites across the web.
»» BuzzSumo (https://buzzsumo.com): When it comes to tracking your competitors’ social presence, you have dozens of additional options. Figure 3-7 showcases BuzzSumo, which provides insights into the performance of content on
social media and assists with the development of effective content strategies.
»» TrackMaven (https://trackmaven.com): TrackMaven, shown in Figure 3-8,
has some great features like content optimization capabilities, integrated
social networks including paid ad optimization, and some pretty extensive
insights into the performance of your marketing efforts.
FIGURE 3-6:
Alexa.
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FIGURE 3-7:
Pursuing a Data
Strategy
BuzzSumo.
FIGURE 3-8:
TrackMaven.
Other good products are SimilarWeb (www.similarweb.com), Rival IQ (www.rivaliq.
com), and SEM Rush (www.semrush.com).
All of the preceding tools can help you
»» Identify responsive audiences: Identify audiences that have been most
responsive to your competitors’ content on both websites and social channels.
»» Create effective content strategies: Craft content strategies that have a
higher likelihood of driving engagement from your intended audience based
on content that has succeeded in your competitors’ campaigns.
»» Discover pain points: Pinpoint missteps and pitfalls that your competitors
have suffered or are currently dealing with so that you can avoid facing the
same issues.
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»» Uncover industry insights: You can use several tools to discover industry
insights. Another, more advanced example of a product that highlights industry
insights is Crimson Hexagon (www.crimsonhexagon.com), which is shown in
Figure 3-9. (In 2018, Brandwatch.com merged with Crimson Hexagon. At the
time of this writing, they’re continuing to operate as separate brands.)
FIGURE 3-9:
Crimson Hexagon
is an advanced,
enterprise-grade
industry analysis
tool.
You can also achieve the following objectives with the strategic use of industry
insights:
»» Development of a new or expanded content strategy
»» Expansion into new media and new platforms based on engagement from
your target audiences
»» Development of new short- and long-term objectives
»» Identification of trends that indicate how an additional investment may be
beneficial
Transactional data
Transactional data are the insights gleaned from your customer transactions. If
your organization has digitized its client records or if you sell products via an
e-commerce platform, then transactional data will be very useful to you. Perhaps
the most notable reason why you’ll want to leverage transactional data is for the
purpose of improving the buyer journey, thereby shortening the path to conversion and decreasing your internal costs that go into the customer experience and
marketing timeline.
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Transactional data can also be extremely useful to you when allocating your marketing budget. Within a transaction, assuming that your tracking has been properly developed and implemented, you can monitor each touchpoint reached by
your customer. Identifying the most valuable touchpoints across hundreds or even
thousands of transactions will allow you to optimize the resources to which your
budgets are allocated.
Pinpointing Key Indicators in Your Data
Although data comes in many different types, all data exhibits certain universal
indicators. By monitoring these indicators, you can get a better sense of what your
data is telling you and how to use it.
The following sections describe some of the more common indicators.
Outliers are data points that sit outside of the normal range that you may expect
to see when looking at a particular performance indicator, such as engagement.
For example, if you generally expect to see 10 clicks on a link and a specific post
receives 50 clicks, then that data point would be an outlier as it falls far outside
the range that you normally see with regards to clicks and engagement. Outliers
are perhaps the most valuable indicator of importance within your data sets. You
can see a graphical representation of this phenomenon in Figure 3-10.
FIGURE 3-10:
An example of
an outlier in a
data set.
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Outliers
When extracting raw data, running a simple linear regression and analyzing your
data for outliers, generally within a 5 to 10 percent margin of error, will give you
some great insights into what is working and what is not. A linear regression is a
statistical analysis whereby a curve, expressed in this case by the formula y=ax+b
is calculated and placed to fit over a given data set. This straight line is the closest
representation of a linear progression through the data, and the proximity of your
data point to this line — or curve — indicates how well a particular point fits the
average. The points that fall far outside this curve are your outliers.
You can find the steps for running a linear regression using a source like Statistics
Solutions (www.statisticssolutions.com). You can also use a free analytic tool
like Plotly (www.plot.ly), which is shown in Figure 3-11. The data used for these
kinds of analyses can range from engagement metrics to conversions to clicks. You
can analyze virtually any isolated data set using this extremely powerful method.
FIGURE 3-11:
Plotly is a
­ owerful free
p
tool that makes
data analysis
simple.
Peaks and valleys
As with outliers, you’re looking for anomalies (things that are unusual) in your
data when identifying peaks and valleys (highs and lows) within a given set.
Run through highs and lows with specific performance indicators, such as traffic from a particular social network, and determine what commonalities exist at
each high point and each low point. You can compare periods of analysis — for
example, a week or a month. Take what you’ve found and integrate those findings in your everyday strategy. For example, if you see on the first of every month
that an unusually high amount of traffic comes from Facebook, and upon further
analysis, you see that on the first you tend to share a particularly inspiring quote
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accompanied by a link to a landing page, use those findings to expand on this
strategy and use it more frequently. Repeat this process for all your identified
peaks and valleys, where it is applicable.
Correlations
When analyzing data of a particular type (whether it’s audience data or post-level
data), you want to pay close attention to any correlations, either positive or negative, that exist.
Your Facebook Page’s post-level data are the insights gathered and exported about
your individual posts, rather than general data about your Page and audience. The
value in analyzing post-level data is that it aggregates insights about the most
valuable kinds of engagement, such as clicks to your website or shares on Facebook. It provides you with the necessary information to build a robust content
strategy.
Industry trends
Using an industry monitoring technology has several benefits. One of the greatest is undoubtedly the ability to spot conversational trends within your industry
before the competition does.
When using an industry monitoring tool, pay close attention to upward-trending
conversation topics within your audience segments. Identifying these trends can
be extremely beneficial when developing your next campaign or creating new,
relevant content.
Here are some competitive data tools to consider:
»» https://www.similarweb.com/
»» https://www.kompyte.com/
»» https://www.brandwatch.com/
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For example, if you analyze high-performing posts shared on Facebook, ask yourself whether these posts share similarities such as the time they were posted,
an abundance of a certain color, or length. You can then use these indicators to
develop new content that will ensure a significantly higher engagement rate.
Waste
When you want to optimize your budget and improve operational efficiency, waste
is a powerful indicator. In this case, waste refers to ad spends put toward ads that
yield little to no results. You know you have waste if you find these two primary
indicators:
»» A higher than average number of touchpoints in a particular sales cycle, which
may indicate inefficiencies with the cycle flow.
»» A significantly greater cost-per-conversion or cost-per-action, which may
indicate flaws or discrepancies between the product and the Millennial
audience you’ve targeted.
Essentially, as with outliers, you want to take the time to analyze certain outstanding data points. Determine whether they’re indicative of some form of budgetary
or time waste. Then make the necessary adjustments to optimize your processes.
Using Your Data as the Foundation
of Your Strategy
Millennials, more so than any generation before them, have populated the web
with a seemingly endless amount of data. As a result, everything you choose to
do from building audiences to developing social ad campaigns will be completely
rooted in data. For more information about building audiences and ad campaigns,
see Book 1.
Following are five steps you can take — before employing any strategy or starting any campaign — to ensure that you have data to justify every one of your
decisions:
1.
Review all the data sources to which you have access.
The following section covers specific sources, but you’ll effectively review all
your owned, earned, and paid media data sources in order to pinpoint all the
data to which you have access.
2.
Segment your data to focus entirely on Millennials.
After you access all your data, filter anything that isn’t relevant to Millennials.
Begin with age ranges and then expand to include those that possess the
Millennial mindset. (See Book 4, Chapter 1 for more detail.)
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3.
Establish your objectives.
Of course, establishing objectives is a standard practice with every campaign
you run. But in this case, you justify your objectives with actual data.
4.
Refine your objectives through the use of your data.
You can now analyze the information that you have filtered to elaborate or
change some of the more universal objectives that you have outlined for a
given campaign.
5.
Set your benchmarks and key performance indicators.
What is most important about this step is the fact that any one of your
benchmarks and all your indicators should be measurable. That measurability will result from your ongoing data analysis.
Data is agnostic. That means that for every campaign you run, you can implement
these five simple steps. You support every one of your actions with numbers and
justify every decision with the statistics needed to back it up. Implement this process each time you plan on launching something new, and the entire process will
be simpler and more successful.
Identifying Data Sources
Data can come from virtually everywhere. Millennials leave small bits of information everywhere they go. To develop your Millennial marketing strategy, you use
three types of data:
»» Data from your owned media channels like your website
»» Data from social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
»» Data from public channels
Data from your owned media
Perhaps the richest center of owned data is available from the backend on your
website. The vast majority of businesses track their web data using Google Analytics, shown in Figure 3-12.
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It’s crucial that before executing a campaign, every one of your objectives has
measurement criteria. After all, how can you know whether your campaign is a
success if you haven’t defined how it will be measured? For more information
about creating measurable objective see, Book 1, Chapter 1.
FIGURE 3-12:
The Google
­Analytics
­audience
dashboard.
Within Google Analytics, you can segment data according to a variety of elements.
One is the ability to segment by age.
Creating a segmented dashboard in Google Analytics is simple and is useful when
you want to isolate a specific cluster of data for deeper analysis. Simply follow
these steps:
1.
Create a new view to avoid filtering other data.
A mistake that marketers often make is applying segments or filters to general
Google Analytics data. Google doesn’t save data that it doesn’t collect, so when
you filter data from your general dashboard, it’s gone forever. Instead, create a
new view in your admin dashboard and title it something specific, such as
Millennial Web Data.
2.
Add a segment in your audience dashboard.
Select the option to add a new segment in your audience dashboard, as shown
in Figure 3-13.
3.
Select a new segment and filter by age.
You can also filter by other criteria, but for the purposes of Millennials, you
need to add only an age filter, as shown in Figure 3-14.
After you do this step, the data pulled into this segmented view will be only the
data that fits the applied filters. Now, all the data you analyze in the backend of
your website will relate specifically to the actions taken by Millennials visiting
your website.
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FIGURE 3-13:
Pursuing a Data
Strategy
Create a new
segment from
your audience
dashboard.
FIGURE 3-14:
Select the age
range filter.
You can utilize the information you collect to develop new strategies for content
and marketing. For example, in the analysis of your website’s content, you can
identify what posts and pages Millennials are most attracted to. Using this information, you can develop Millennial-oriented content strategies. If you’re working
in an e-commerce space, you can analyze the products that are most frequently
viewed or purchased by Millennials. Then you can allocate more of your marketing
dollars to these high performers and eliminate some of the waste that might go to
ad dollars spent on less popular products.
Another area of focus in the backend of Google Analytics will be your acquisition
dashboard. Here, you can identify the channels and campaigns that have driven
the most Millennial engagement. This information allows you to optimize ad
dollar spending and marketing budget allocation for the different networks. You
don’t want to be spending money on a channel that isn’t sending viable Millennial traffic.
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Data from social media
When it comes to publicly available, accessible data on Millennial consumers’ habits and interests, you can’t find many places with such a comprehensive amount
of information as social media. Millennials share everything, and you can access
that data on several media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, to
leverage it:
Though you can extract profile and user data from many other platforms, these
three sources cover the most valuable social media platforms and provide the
most insightful information about your users.
Facebook
The backend of your Facebook Page contains a world of information about your
audience. Simply clicking the Insights tab, as shown in Figure 3-15, reveals an
abundance of data about your overall audience on the Page.
FIGURE 3-15:
Access free
Page insights on
Facebook.
While you may not be able to segment your audience specifically by age on
­Facebook, like you can on your website, your audience will largely fall into the
category of users that fit the Millennial mindset. This means that the observed
habits that you identify in the back end and the content you analyze will be largely
applicable to your Facebook content strategy.
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Within Facebook, you can also export page and post-level data for further, more
in-depth, analysis. This data is exported pseudo-raw, which means that it’s segmented but not manipulated. You can manipulate this information using a variety
of tactics or tools to discover new opportunities.
Twitter
Twitter also offers a fairly robust backend to gather insights, shown in Figure 3-16.
This dashboard is available when you create an ad account, and can be found by
visiting https://analytics.twitter.com, though you don’t need to be running
any ads to access this data.
Pursuing a Data
Strategy
Using Twitter, you can gather many valuable insights about audience interests,
engagement rates, and details about your content. By aggregating this Twitter
insight data, your content strategies can become significantly more refined, and
you can develop content that leads to action.
FIGURE 3-16:
Twitter provides
some good
insight into both
content and
audiences.
YouTube
Much like Google Analytics age and user data, YouTube links your content with
profiles of the users watching your videos. This powerful approach provides you
with a better understanding of your audience’s viewing habits so that you can
develop even more successful video content. It also helps you create channel and
content strategies that appeal to the Millennials watching your videos.
Some of the details of YouTube view data include Watch time, Average view duration, and Views, as shown in Figure 3-17.
CHAPTER 3 Pursuing a Data Strategy
333
FIGURE 3-17:
User viewing
habits data in
YouTube.
Data from public channels
You can find plenty of publicly available databases related to Millennials across
the web. To manually sift through billions of public posts and bits of information
would be impossible, so you’ll want to use tools that are designed to do that. Many
of these products peruse tens if not hundreds of millions of online sources including blogs, forums, social networks, and e-commerce websites.
These tools are designed to scour any readily available data on the web for
­keywords, phrases, and brand names to provide you with the most accurate view
of what the conversation looks like. These data are then visualized in an easy-toanalyze format, which allows you to quickly and efficiently identify opportunities
so that you can statistically justify your strategies.
The following list of tools have some of the highest user satisfaction reviews on
the market. Each has the ability to filter your user data by age range, which will
allow for the analysis of all publicly available information about Millennials across
your industry.
»» AgoraPulse (www.agorapulse.com): AgoraPulse offers a fairly broad range
of services within its platform, from insights to management to engagement.
Reporting with AgoraPulse is top quality, and it’s very affordable. (As of this
writing, prices start at $49 per month.) A free trial is available.
»» Brandwatch (www.brandwatch.com): Brandwatch falls on the more costly
side of the spectrum of data analysis tools, but the detailed data reports
make it worthwhile. You can quickly analyze your brand from all angles and
measure your performance across the web compared to your competitors.
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You can also drill down pretty deep into the data, which can be particularly
useful when it comes to identifying new campaign opportunities. A free demo
is available.
»» Mention (https://mention.com): Mention is a simple yet powerful listening
tool that offers some great insights into the conversations taking place within
your industry and around your brand. You can analyze trends at the keyword
level and use that data to exploit new opportunities. A free demo is available.
A high user satisfaction rate for a tool or technology is a good starting point, but
the key is to find the tool that’s right for you. Do your research and make sure that
the investment in technology pays off for your company. When you’re ready, use
the free trial or hands-on demo to determine whether it’s right for you.
A keyword in this case is a particular term with significance related to the subject matter of your audience’s conversations. If, for example, you’re analyzing
conversations in the technology sector, a keyword of interest may be “machine
learning,” while another term, such as “real estate,” may not be as important,
depending on what it is you’re trying to analyze.
After you look at the key indicators that you need to analyze to get the most out
of your data, you need to determine what steps to take to maximize the benefits
from the strategic use of your data.
Following is a step-by-step auditing process that you can easily implement on a
regular basis using the tools and processes discussed earlier in this chapter:
1.
Establish an auditing schedule.
At the outset of your auditing process, you need to develop a schedule to
ensure that you’re regularly keeping up-to-date with your process review.
Generally, for smaller organizations, a monthly review is all you need. If,
however, you’re a very data-driven organization, then you’ll want to review
your data, benchmarks, and objectives either every two weeks or even weekly.
2.
Pinpoint the factors that indicate an opportunity.
Outliers and correlations can be indicative of opportunities within your
Millennial audience. In addition, look at things like upward trending conversation topics or spikes in audience segment participation.
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Pursuing a Data
Strategy
Analyzing Your Data on a Regular Basis
3.
Establish benchmarks for the newly created opportunities and review
benchmarks for ongoing initiatives.
You may need to establish new benchmarks each time you conduct an audit.
Remember, Millennial habits may shift from one period to the next; they
don’t necessarily have long attention spans when it comes to content and
campaigns.
4.
Review your key indicators to identify new opportunities.
Just as you review your key indicators to establish benchmarks and make
the necessary adjustments, you need to review your data’s key indicators to
discover new opportunities.
When looking for new opportunities, keep an open mind and look for anything
out of the ordinary. These data points occur organically, so no road map can necessarily detail exactly what you should be looking for. Anything that seems new
or interesting is worth investigating, because you never know what you may find.
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Leveraging the power and reach of
television
»» Recognizing opportunities in print
media
»» Using email to connect with
Millennials
Chapter
4
Finding Millennials on
Traditional Media
T
elevision and other traditional media has had a great impact on prior generations. With the advent of new media technology comes new uses for these
traditional channels. While they no longer function in the same way that
they once did, traditional channels can still be valuable assets in your outreach
strategy. This is particularly true when you leverage the ways that Millennials use
these channels to enhance your new media strategies.
In this chapter, you get a better understanding of where traditional media fits
when it comes to reaching Millennials. At first glance, traditional media doesn’t
seem like something that is of much interest or readily accessible to a Millennial
demographic. After all, this audience lives online and engages with brands primarily through more conversational channels, like Twitter and Facebook. Even
though this is true, traditional media still has a place in your Millennial outreach
and engagement strategy.
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Taking Advantage of Television
(With or Without the Budget)
For most marketers, television is far out of reach of their budget. Advertising on
this once-prized medium and, to be fair, still prized medium, remains important
for a lot of reasons.
Television is just valued today in a different way. The barriers are significant, and
for small- and medium-sized brands, the risks of potential overspending and
undermeasurement generally outweigh the benefits.
What’s more, when you compare the metrics associated with television and social
media, television is far more limited. If your goal is to reach and convert Millennials, then your natural inclination will be to invest your money online so that you
can track it from start to finish. However, you can still track your investment if you
leverage television strategically. The following sections look at how you can do so.
Looking at Millennial TV viewing habits
It’s hardly a secret that Millennials are watching less traditional TV than any
generation that has come before it. MarketingCharts (http://marketingcharts.
com), a company that provides insights and charts related to the world of marketing, has analyzed Nielsen television viewing data, and aggregated the information shown in Figure 4-1. You see that since 2011, the amount of weekly time that
­Millennials have devoted to watching traditional TV has steadily decreased.
FIGURE 4-1:
Millennial ­viewing
habits have
decreased.
MarketingCharts.com.
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The term traditional TV takes the average of live TV viewing with recorded or timeshifted viewing. It doesn’t take into account new media, such as streaming, and
doesn’t factor in connected devices.
If you compare television viewing among other generations, Nielsen reported that
in 2017–2018
»» The number of GenY and Millennials (ages 18 to 34) TV watching has dropped
15 percent from 2014.
»» Compare this with a 2 percent drop in 2017 among Baby Boomers (people 55
and above).
You can see that Millennials are definitely not the most engaged when it comes to
television, so marketers need to take some creative measures, such as the use of
the second screen, covered in the next section, to effectively leverage TV.
Reaching viewers with the second screen
Have you ever watched your favorite team play your favorite sport, while all the
while you’re tweeting about a play or reading tweets about that last missed call
by the ref? If you have, then you’ve engaged in what’s referred to as second screen
viewing.
According to research from Accenture (www.accenture.com/us-en/insightdigital-video-connected-consumer), a global professional services company,
87 percent of consumers use a second device while watching television. For
­Millennials, that second device often means a smartphone.
Essentially, you can take advantage of second screen viewing through three
­primary methods:
Finding Millennials on
Traditional Media
»» Scheduled events, such as a national election or the Olympics:
Considering the nature of scheduled events or times of year, planning your
second-screen strategy around this kind of an event is pretty easy. You know
when the event takes place, so you can develop and prepare your content
well ahead of time. Of course, because scheduled events are often live, you
need to leave room for adjustments and modifications. However, you can
lay out your content strategy in pretty robust detail before these kinds of
events begin.
»» Spontaneous events, such as breaking news: When breaking news strikes,
members of all generations tend to be glued to the television. For Millennials,
this fascination is largely accompanied by ongoing updates on social media,
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339
particularly Twitter. With a proper strategy in place, your organic reach and
engagement can skyrocket, thanks to the second screen viewing during these
events.
»» Regular programming: While Millennials may not be watching as much
television as the generations that have come before them, they still watch
about 20 hours of television every week. By identifying the tastes and
preferences of your audience through a data analysis, you can effectively
reach these viewers while they’re engaged with specific programming.
You can significantly leverage organic reach and engagement by using two types
of second screen viewing: scheduled and spontaneous events.
Capitalizing on planned events
To see how you can capitalize on planned events, take the Olympics as an example.
The Olympics consistently draw significant online engagement from Millennials
around the world. The games provide an ideal setting in which you can leverage the second screen for both conversions and brand awareness. Users regularly
share thoughts about the events across a multitude of social platforms. The development of a comprehensive content strategy that plays into the popularity of this
conversation can lead to strong results.
When it comes to scheduled events, you can take a series of actions that will help
ensure that your campaign generates the kind of success you want to achieve:
»» Identify an event or series of events that significantly engages your
audience. In the example of the Olympics, it can be something as small as
identifying the events and sports that are talked about most.
»» Establish main conversational topics around which to base your content
strategy. Several conversations will undoubtedly be taking place during these
major events. While some of these conversations may be spontaneous, you can
certainly predict others. Do your best to figure out these probable conversations and draft a content strategy outline that hits on these main topics.
»» Determine the channels on which your target audience of Millennials
are most likely to have these discussions. Generally, when it comes to the
second screen, the most popular conversations will be on platforms like
Twitter that they can access from their mobile devices. That said, there is
always a chance that your audience is engaging on Snapchat, Instagram,
or Facebook while watching an event on television. It will be up to you to
determine the best platforms on which to execute your strategy and invest
most of your effort and resources.
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»» Determine the tone that you’ll adopt during engagement. Everyone
participating in the conversation has at least the event in common. This
means that it truly is a conversation with a common theme. That means that
you need to predetermine the level of familiarity you use and maintain it
throughout the event.
Capitalizing on unforeseen events
Unforeseen circumstances are always a factor during live events. However, you
can use some strategies to capitalize on the second screen. Here are a few tips to
keep top of mind:
»» Build a list for absolutely every scenario you can think of. That way, you
can limit surprises as much as possible.
»» Determine the kinds of stories that you want to engage with and those
that may be too sensitive. Too many marketers and brands have made the
mistake of inappropriately weighing in. One such story, for example, took
place in 2015 when, for International Women’s Day, Bic South Africa shared
an ad that stated, “Look like a girl. Act like a lady. Think like a man. Work like
a boss.” The ad drew international criticism, and Bic was forced to rethink its
strategy.
»» Develop an easily revisable content template that you can use in most
of the cases that you expect to encounter. Again, creating content for an
event that hasn’t taken place yet is fairly difficult, but in the meantime, you
can work on image files, video templates, and other basic design work so that
you can react quickly to big news.
For centuries, print media was the primary way to reach the masses. Most
people got their news from newspapers and magazines. The development of new
low-cost and readily available technologies means that print media has suffered.
Nowhere is this truer than with the Millennial audience.
Now Millennials use real-time mobile apps. In fact, Pew Research (www.
pewinternet.org) has reported that more than 80 percent of Millennials say that
they use social media as their primary source for news.
However, you can still use some tactics to leverage print media to attract Millennials.
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Finding Millennials on
Traditional Media
Targeting Millennials with Print Media
Reaching Millennials in magazines
Of the various types of print marketing and advertising that exist, leveraging
the content in magazines can be the most readily accessible type for Millennials.
­Surprisingly, the level that Millennials read magazines falls very closely in line
with those of Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, according to research from JWT (www.
jwt.com), an advertising company based in New York. This means that there is a
real opportunity to capitalize on the popularity of magazines, particularly when
you know which magazines your audience is reading.
One benefit of using Facebook Insights is that you can identify some of the print
publications that your Millennial audience is reading. You can find this information in the section of liked pages in your audience analysis, where print publications populate as distinct pages. Identifying the magazines that are of interest to
your Millennial audience will initially help you narrow the avenues to consider
leveraging on print magazines. For more about Facebook Insights, see Book 7,
Chapter 2.
After you determine the publications you want to target, you have a few options
worth considering:
»» Advertorials: Consider writing an advertorial to showcase your brand through
written content. Unlike an ad, an advertorial is a sponsored piece of written
content that highlights a product or service, but in the form of an editorial.
Of course, advertorials aren’t free, but in some cases, they can be very
cost-effective. They offer you more space to truly define your product or
service and showcase why it’s better than the competition.
In some smaller industry or trade publications, an advertorial may only cost
a nominal amount, if anything at all. Some trade publications are more
concerned with gathering as much content as they can for a given issue
and will forgo the cost to place one. If you can find a magazine that will
offer you this option, it can provide you with a pseudo-advertorial, which isn’t
an explicit sales-focused advertorial but still has a self-promotional subtext.
Inquire whether this option is available. It may not run you anything more
than the time it takes to draft the article. But don’t approach this tactic with
the assumption that it will be free; if it is, think of it more as a pleasant
surprise.
»» Inclusion in an article: Reach out to existing publication editors and staff
writers in an effort to have your product or service included in an article
about the topic. Unlike advertorials, your relationship with specific writers
and editors largely influences your success. Reaching a point where a writer
will be willing to feature your brand in her next article may take some time.
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BOOK 4 Reaching Your Millennial Audience
But the fact that this mention is entirely organic, and therefore genuine,
means that the audience reading about it will be much more receptive to
what the writer is saying.
»» Display ads: Opt for display ads in smaller publications. Large, internationally
distributed publications will simply be too expensive. Smaller publications will
be more affordable and receptive to your business. In these more local or
targeted publications, the audience you reach may be exactly the audience
that you’ve defined — rather than a very large audience that also includes
your targets.
Connecting with Millennials through
the use of newspapers
According to the Newspaper Association of America (www.newsmediaalliance.
org), 68 percent of Millennials ages 18 to 24 react to advertisements in print
newspapers. This is especially true of coupons. So, while newspaper readership
among Millennials may be down, engagement and responsiveness to sponsored
content is still strong. So how can your brand leverage sponsored content?
When working with a coupon that connects to your online store or online offer,
make sure to use a specific code that tells you the link is from a newspaper. This
will come in handy when measuring the results of your various marketing efforts
and will help you determine the return on your newspaper investment.
You need to evaluate whether you’re willing to even make an investment in newspapers. Yes, you have ways of measuring return when using the coupon offer
strategy, but there is still risk involved. Some Millennials are simply not reading
newspapers at all. With that in mind, you need to carefully consider the decision
to invest in newspapers. If you can measure all aspects of the campaign and you
can justify the investment based on the potential you identified in your research,
then go for it!
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Finding Millennials on
Traditional Media
Effectively leveraging newspapers in print form can be a little trickier, but one area
with potential is in the use of coupons in place of your ads. Advertising in local
publications can be much more affordable, and the data surrounding Millennials
highlights the fact that they do respond well to coupons in newspapers. While the
volume may not be significant, there is potential in small markets. If your coupon
also has an online tie-in as opposed to something that people can only redeem
in-store, then the potential is even greater.
The case for investing in print media
Print media still holds an important place in the world of marketing to Millennials. While online media has become a Millennial hotspot, this audience is still
active on a variety of print platforms. This means that investing in a presence in
print media is a viable option for several reasons:
»» You can increase your exposure on an ongoing basis to a Millennial audience.
»» You can tie your offline efforts to your online efforts.
»» You can reach new prospects that your brand may not have reached online.
The case for abandoning print media
While Millennials are still using a variety of print media, it’s not their preferred
set of channels. Millennials have grown up with the technology they use. They
have evolved as consumers at the same rate as their technology. With this in mind,
you need to ask yourself, “Do I want to invest in a channel that may not be viable
for Millennials in a few years’ time?”
For brands and organizations that have larger marketing and advertising budgets,
the question is an easier one to answer. When a large budget is readily available,
the decision to invest in all viable media options is clear: It has to be done. But for
smaller organizations, it may not be as simple a decision.
For small- and medium-sized operations, where budget allocations are made
sparingly, cutting print media out of the equation is often all too easy. Print media
can be cost prohibitive, difficult to measure, and hard to predict. Those problems
don’t exist nearly to the same extent when it comes to social and new media.
Essentially, you need to run an analysis on your available budgets and determine
whether you have additional budget to allocate to traditional media.
Your priority should be to choose the more cost-effective channels of new media,
where you have significantly more control over the specifics of a campaign.
Incorporating Email into Your Strategy
It may seem a little strange at first, but as far as Millennials are concerned, email
isn’t considered a new media. Email is the digital side of what is now categorized as traditional media. Millennials, therefore, use email very differently when
communicating with brands. Knowing what these idiosyncrasies are and tailoring
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BOOK 4 Reaching Your Millennial Audience
your Millennial email marketing strategy to them will help you maximize the
potential of this platform.
Creating messages specifically for email
Email messages targeted to Millennials won’t necessarily align with the content
you create for Millennials on other channels. Instead, you need to pay close attention to the responsiveness of Millennials to specific types of emails and build your
content strategy around them.
Research from email marketing company Adestra (www.adestra.com) found that
the most popular reason a Millennial wants to receive an email from a brand is
to receive a coupon or a discount. This preference mirrors what was seen regarding newspapers. Millennials are extremely price sensitive. (See more about the
­Millennial mindset in Book 4, Chapter 2.)
With this in mind, you need to ask yourself how to capture the attention of
­Millennials to both justify your investment in email and keep your Millennial
audience engaged. These two tips may help you capture their attention:
»» Leverage email as a component of your overall strategy as opposed to
thinking about email in a silo.
»» Build subject lines and headings that capture the attention of your audience
right away.
Receiving an email or an email address from an audience member is often the first
indication that he wants to take the relationship with your brand a step further.
While someone may like your Facebook Page or follow you on Twitter, nothing is
quite as intimate as signing up for your newsletter or providing you with an email
address. Personal information is seen as a form of currency by Millennials.
Email can and should tie into your Millennial marketing efforts in several ways:
»» Segment your Millennial email lists as narrowly as possible. To target
your messaging to the specific behaviors and tastes of Millennials, narrow
your segments. Millennials respond to personalization, and the best way to
drive conversion rates is to keep your lists segmented, and your messaging
highly targeted.
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Finding Millennials on
Traditional Media
Tying email into your traditional
and new media strategies
»» Leverage diverse types of email campaigns. Of course, Millennials respond
to coupons and discount offers, but email list-building tools like Constant
Contact (www.constantcontact.com) provide many variations of email
campaign types, as shown in Figure 4-2. Run a campaign that collects survey
data or asks for some sort of action that Millennials can take within the email.
You may even sell tickets or products directly from the email. These examples
are both readily available and mobile-friendly, which is most likely where
Millennials will be checking their email.
»» Cross-match email addresses on Facebook and Twitter. You can cross-
match email addresses on different platforms to better target your ads.
Improving the targeting of your ads by performing this task leads to higher
click-through rates, lower cost-per-click, and ultimately, increased conversion
rates.
FIGURE 4-2:
Different types
of campaigns
available in
­ onstant Contact.
C
Building subject lines and headings
that generate opens
When you consider how much content Millennials are bombarded with on a daily
basis, it’s easy to understand why Millennial email open and click-through rates
have been steadily declining. (Open and click-through rates are defined as the number of your total audience that opens your emails and then clicks through to the
URL they find.)
Increasing open and click-through rates starts with the subject line. That is the
first thing your audience is going to see, and it can really be a make-or-break
moment.
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To see your open rates shoot up among Millennials, here are a few tips worth
keeping top of mind when crafting your next subject line:
»» Keep your subject line as short as possible. The majority of your Millennial
audience is checking email on a mobile device, which means less screen space
for your subject. It also means that a novel-length subject line will be cut off
before you even hit the main point.
»» Personalize your subject line with personalization tokens. A common
theme across all marketing channels is the desire for a personalized experience. Personalization goes for email as well. If you have an option to personalize the subject line using a token in your email software, take advantage of it.
Personalization tokens are small bits of code found within your email software
that automatically populates a designated space either in your subject line or
the email body itself. It pulls out certain personal elements from the profile of
the user receiving the email. So, John’s subject line will read something like
“Hey, John! Collect Your Reward Now!” and Mary’s subject line will swap out
John’s name for her own.
»» Be clear about what recipients will see in their email. Don’t be vague or
mysterious about email content and don’t send emails to people with which
you have no prior relationship. This is a quick way to get your email sent to
the trash. This technique of enticing opens and clicks from your audience may
have worked when email was in its infancy, but smarter, busier, and often
passive Millennial users aren’t interested in mystery email. Everything they
need to encourage them to open the email should be in the subject line.
»» Use action or intent-oriented verbs in your subject line. Much like the
Finding Millennials on
Traditional Media
subject of clarity noted in the previous tip, use an active verb, such as buy or
register, in your subject line to highlight what your audience members will
need to do after they open the email.
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Identifying opportunities to leverage
the share economy
»» Creating a communications strategy
around sharing
»» Building campaigns with a share
economy focus
Chapter
5
Experimenting with the
Share Economy
M
illennials are patient. That statement may seem ironic to anyone who
sees the on-demand nature of the web as proof that Millennials embrace
immediacy. But, the truth is that while immediacy and short-term
gain are favored by Millennials, the share economy highlights the patience that
Millennials possess. For example, the explosive growth of services like Airbnb
and Uber demonstrate that sharing has trumped the importance of ownership.
Millennials would rather share a car than buy one they can’t afford.
This chapter highlights the importance of the share economy and presents strategies you can use to participate in the sharing of goods, services, or even content.
Leveraging the share economy is a great way to drive familiarity with your brand
and build lasting relationships with these new consumers.
Positioning Your Brand Around Sharing
Leveraging the share economy isn’t going to be a strategy that suits every brand.
For some, there simply isn’t going to be a way to organically integrate a sharing
component into a product or marketing strategy. To effectively leverage the share
CHAPTER 5 Experimenting with the Share Economy
349
economy, you can run through a checklist that will help you determine whether
your brand is capable of utilizing the strategy. See how many of the following
items you can check off:
»» You have an active community forum.
»» You have a peer-to-peer opportunity.
»» You can afford short-term opportunity costs.
»» Your product or service has an online component.
If you find that your brand, product, or service meets these criteria, then you’re
in a great position to take advantage of the share economy by capitalizing on the
Millennial’s desire for access over ownership.
The following sections look at each item in turn.
You have an active community forum
You need to have a community focus if you want to participate in the share economy. If your customer experience doesn’t include engaging with a larger community about your brand, product, or even your industry, then taking full advantage
of the share economy may be difficult.
A community forum can take different shapes. It can be owned by your brand,
where the majority of participants are either customers or hot prospects, or it can
be industry-based. If you manufacture power tools, for example, the community
forum may include a topic like home improvement with an audience made up
of general contractors or builders. The key is to have an online discussion that
engages your specific audience.
You have a peer-to-peer opportunity
The ability to share content has been a pain point for many industries that rely
on individual consumption, as opposed to community use of a limitless, digital
product, such as software accessed via a cloud service. As brands have recognized
that fighting market demand has no value, they have made adjustments. Instead
of adjusting to this demand, your aim should be to create supply for it. Your digital
content should be shareable and possess certain qualities that actually encourage
users to share your information with one another.
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Being able to afford short-term opportunity costs is likely going to be the hardest point to check off on your share economy campaign checklist. Service-based
organizations that provide a platform for sharing, such as Uber or Airbnb, don’t
have the same opportunity cost as other brands because they own their platform.
Leveraging the share economy may mean providing your product for free or for
a single fee to several users. In the past, you may have individually charged each
user. The benefit of this kind of sharing with Millennials produces short-term
brand exposure and long-term loyalty.
The question most marketers or business owners need to ask themselves is
whether these benefits outweigh the opportunity costs involved in this strategy.
Your product or service has
an online component
The online component serves two purposes. For brands that have online content
or logins, an online component makes sharing simpler and can lead to a rapid rise
in adoption. For all brands, both those with an online product or service and those
that operate offline, the online discussion serves to heighten awareness of the
campaign and mitigate the short-term opportunity cost.
Establishing a Voice
Your involvement in the share economy doesn’t mean you need to change the way
your business operates. The share economy, like any strategic tool, is something
that you apply to a particular segment of your audience. Creating a voice for these
users is an important part of your strategy.
Creating your brand’s voice specifically for the share economy means focusing on
two priorities:
»» Mapping out your target audience: Target a very specific segment of your
audience with the content you create.
»» Creating a content strategy: Focus on the sharing element of your business.
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Experimenting with the
Share Economy
You can afford short-term
opportunity costs
Mapping your target audience
The first step to launching a campaign that leverages the share economy is the
identification of a viable audience. This audience may consist of existing customers, or it may be an audience affiliated with your industry. Regardless of where the
audience comes from, you need to identify certain traits to ensure that the audience you target with your offers is a viable one.
As you put together a targeted campaign, you’ll find that the majority of the audience identification process will take place on your new media ad platforms. The
most valuable of these platforms related to narrowing the audience will undoubtedly be Facebook. The following steps help you narrow your audience:
1.
Select a general audience of Millennials that is either saved or segmented
based on a particular age range.
Start with a broad focus and then narrow it. In this particular case, you should
either begin with your general Millennial audience, or select an age range, as
shown in Figure 5-1.
2.
Start targeting a specific set of share-based interests.
Figure 5-2 shows a few examples of share-based interests, but you should
expand on these interests so that they include any share economy-associated
interests.
3.
Target interests and behaviors affiliated with your brand or industry.
After you complete the general share economy targeting, you should include
interest categories associated with your brand or industry.
4.
Select specific placements to develop segmented content strategies.
Content will vary from one medium to the next. Segment your efforts to reach
users with your share economy campaign on all current media.
Creating a content strategy
At this point in the development of your share economy campaign, you hopefully
have accomplished three crucial tasks:
»» You identified your brand as having the right characteristics and the potential
to leverage the popularity and value of the share economy.
»» You developed a target audience that is likely to engage with your brand in
this share-focused campaign.
»» You developed content specifically geared toward the traits that define the
share economy.
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Experimenting with the
Share Economy
FIGURE 5-1:
Begin by
­choosing a broad
audience of
­Millennial users
on Facebook.
FIGURE 5-2:
Initially n
­ arrow
your user
­selection by
targeting general
share economyassociated
interests.
Several standardized elements of your share economy-focused initiative includes
your objectives, target audience, and KPIs. The content is going to be particularly
important because its structure, layout, and calls to action are the driving force
behind the framing of a share-based campaign.
Consider the following to help you communicate that the focal point of your content is sharing:
»» Create standalone landing pages. Your landing pages should remain
separate from your other campaigns. One of the fastest ways to lose your
audience’s interest is to bait them with content that highlights some
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information and then sends them to a landing page that doesn’t feature
anything matching that content.
»» Highlight the share aspect. Use keywords like “share,” “participate,” or “join”
to encourage users you sent to your landing page to take part in the shareoriented environment you created for them.
»» Integrate a community conversation or activity feature. Your audience
may be reluctant to join your community if they don’t have enough information to make a decision. To avoid this issue, highlight topics that are popular
right on your landing page. Also, offer prospective participants a glimpse into
the community to allow them to see what’s being discussed.
»» Provide detailed instructions. Millennials are intuitive, but you shouldn’t
take their tech-savvy abilities for granted. If you provide a platform where
people upload information about how to do something better, walk them
through the process to display it. The upload or communication process may
be straightforward and familiar, but don’t assume that they can figure
everything out on their own.
Your share economy campaign relies on user-generated information and
content. You want your audience to participate as much and as frequently as
possible. So, if detailed instructions are one way of encouraging participation,
make them as detailed as possible, even if you consider it overkill.
»» Highlight the benefits of sharing. You need to demonstrate to your target
audience that sharing provides value. You also have to highlight the value of
your target audience’s specific participation. Audience members are going to
ask why they should spend their time sharing your brand. You have to answer
that question before they’ll take the time and effort to engage.
»» Consider an incentive-based initiative. One of the fastest ways to drive
participation in any campaign, including a share economy-focused initiative, is
to provide your Millennial audience with some sort of incentive or acknowledgment. It doesn’t have to be anything grand, but it should be something
that highlights the individual user, like a leaderboard or a Contributor of the
Month program.
»» Communicate with your audience as a peer. You want your community to
establish a real relationship with your brand. To build the community as
quickly as possible, communicate with participants on a peer level. If you hide
behind a corporate persona, you can’t encourage real relationships.
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Your share economy campaigns leverage unique segments of your Millennial
audience, which means that the objectives you create will relate to a particular
audience construct (niche) and may not necessarily focus on long-term goals.
Your goals can relate to universal objectives, such as driving brand awareness,
engagement, or conversions, but they must target a particular segment. If the
campaign has the share economy as its focus and your goals relate to the audience
that you cultivated for the share economy, then your objectives will work.
Ask yourself the following series of questions to simplify the process of developing your niche goals. They can help you construct readily achievable objectives.
»» What are you going to measure? To create your objectives, you need to
determine what you want to measure. For example, if you’re providing a
learning exchange where participants are sharing knowledge with one
another, are you going to measure the amount of data collected or the size
of your growing user base of experts? These are two separate objectives,
and while you can aim to achieve both, you need to have a different objective plan for each one.
»» Does the share economy campaign operate in a vacuum? You need to
decide just how connected your share economy initiatives will be to your
overall objectives. The share economy has some unique aspects to it that
may not fit in with the rest of your program, but this isn’t to say that it will be
different from your online brand. Branding attributes and your brand persona
will be consistent wherever you have a presence, so ask yourself this question:
How much of your brand and the brand experience (see Book 4, Chapter 6)
will you incorporate into your share economy campaign?
»» What universal elements of your marketing strategy tie into the share
economy campaign? You shouldn’t run the risk of conducting an effective
share economy campaign only to find that several members of the community aren’t familiar with your brand outside of your share economy platform.
For this reason, you need to identify those elements and ensure that they’re
present and represent your brand well.
»» Does the campaign end with the share economy, or are secondary
actions important? You’re targeting a unique segment of your Millennial
audience that is particularly attracted to the concept of sharing. However,
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Running a Niche Campaign
for the Share Economy
you should also include incentives that push your audience to take another
step beyond the share economy. It can be a download or an incentive-based
signup, such as a discount code that encourages share economy participants
to become customers.
Millennials want access over ownership, at least at first. Providing them with an
option to participate in the share economy aspect of your business can mean giving them the desired access until a fraction is eventually ready to buy.
Encouraging Audience Participation
After you establish the objectives of your share economy campaign, you’re ready
to provide your audience with incentives to participate. For example, you can create a place for your community to share access to online subscription services,
such as creative software, instead of requiring them to buy access to each individual product. This incentive can be a very powerful way of pulling users to your
brand over a competitor.
However, it’s important to create barriers to prevent this kind of service from
being abused. Some ways to prevent abuse include
»» Making sure that shared passwords work only with a certain level of
subscription
»» Putting a limit on how many documents third parties can save
These methods allow users to access the product until the desire for ownership
comes into play, and they move away from simply needing access.
The following sections look at some marketing tactics you can employ to encourage adoption of your newly launched share economy platform.
Reaching out to your existing database
Current customers are the easiest ones to get on the share bandwagon. Your existing database of Millennial customers is sure to include some users that fall into
the share economy group.
Go through the same audience development process outlined earlier in this chapter, in the section “Mapping out your target audience,” but focus on existing customers and fans. Encourage them to participate and push them to check out the
new offer.
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Mobile is where Millennials spend their time, and the success of share economy
mobile applications like Uber and Lyft show that this audience is partial to the
mobile platform.
Develop your ads and push them to your selected media on mobile devices. Highlight the benefits of the share concept for your product or industry and provide
some incentive to get Millennials to try it.
Targeting ads to the share
economy audience
After you segment the audience that fits into the share economy, create content
that focuses exclusively on the sharing aspect. Touch on the fact that your audience may have a pain point that this feature addresses — for example, not needing the full service or product or not being able to afford the full option.
The model you should use in the case of these ads and pieces of content is the
problem-solution model. This model involves presenting your target audience with
a problem they may or may not know they have and then offering them the solution to that problem all within the ad itself.
Developing incentivized adoption schemes
Incentivizing adoption is your best bet to get the ball rolling. Every one of the
models you implement should include some sort of incentive. Incentives will generate the fastest adoption by users in all categories.
The incentive can be something simple like a free sample, gift card, or offer
redemption. It can also be something more complicated, like a tiered offer based
on subscription level, subscription length, or frequency the product is used.
Measuring Results
When you set out to measure the success of your share economy campaign, what
you measure depends to a large extent on your objectives. If your goal is to drive
brand awareness, then your focus is going to be on the increase of your reach, share
of voice, and other brand-affiliated key performance indicators (KPIs). If your
goal is to get new customers then the KPIs you analyze will relate to acquisition.
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Leveraging native video ads
You’ll want to watch for some telltale signs when you determine how to measure your share economy campaign success. Those signs will be evident when you
ask yourself a few questions related to measurement:
»» Is the goal to build a new community?
»» Are there secondary goals that extend beyond the share economy?
»» Should you place a timeline on secondary goals, or should you measure those
actions in perpetuity?
For more information about analyzing campaign success, see Book 9.
Is the goal to build a new community?
A simple, one-dimensional goal may be to build a new community of share
economy–oriented Millennials. You can analyze this community for insights and
opportunities and leverage it for growth. Ultimately, however, if your primary
goal is to build a new audience, your measurement criteria will relate to the size
and engagement of your new audience.
Are there secondary goals that extend
beyond the share economy?
If your goal goes beyond simply building a new community, then you need to
identify how those goals are measured. You may want to include secondary goals,
such as conversions that result from an initial introduction to the customer by
way of the share economy. You can measure community participation through
either touchpoint attribution measurement, or you can directly link conversions
or specific actions to the share economy in their entirety. Whatever the case may
be, you need to clearly outline how the share economy will factor into these secondary conversions.
A touchpoint attribution measurement model looks at a specific touchpoint, or point
of contact between the brand and customer, in the buying journey and allocates a
specific weighted ratio to that touchpoint. For example, if, over the course of the
buying process, a customer engages with your brand five times, then a touchpoint
attribution measurement model would assign each of those five touchpoints a
specific weight regarding its contribution to the final conversion.
Attribution models can vary significantly in terms of the value given to different
touchpoints in the buying journey. In some cases, touchpoints are given equal
ratios, and in others, some touchpoints can be weighted more heavily. There are
also attribution models where attributed contribution ratios can decay over time,
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BOOK 4 Reaching Your Millennial Audience
Figure 5-3 shows an example of a touchpoint attribution model whereby each
touchpoint along the buyer journey is given equal weight, as well as one where
touchpoints are given variable weights. In these two examples of Google Analytics
models, touchpoints are given a value regarding how much they have contributed
to the conversion.
FIGURE 5-3:
Attribution
models can
weigh each
touchpoint in
Google Analytics.
To find more detailed information on the use and customization of attribution
models in Google Analytics, visit https://support.google.com/analytics/
topic/3205717.
Should you place a timeline
on secondary goals?
If you plan to measure secondary objectives that extend beyond simply building a
new community and watching it grow, placing a cap on the amount of time that
you measure these secondary conversions is worthwhile.
For example, if you measure the number of ebooks downloaded during a campaign, you want to know that the activity took place during the campaign and not
a year later. Setting a time limit, perhaps no more than about 30 to 90 days, is a
good approach.
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Share Economy
whereby a touchpoint that had a high value when it first occurred becomes less
and less relevant as time goes by and other touchpoints come into play. In the
case of the share economy conversion that might arise, you may want to consider
focusing entirely on the engagement within the share economy and then attributing any subsequent engagement to the activity that has taken place within the
share economy. This focus ensures that you’ll be able to closely monitor activity
within the share economy and with your share economy audience.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Developing an experience for your
Millennial audience
»» Linking experience to each
touchpoint
»» Creating experience-centric
campaigns
Chapter
6
Developing the Brand
Experience
M
illennials are price sensitive and willing to delay purchases. But when
they’re ready to spend, a priority for those expenditures will be on
experience-oriented purchases. Their desire for brand experiences ties
in closely with their pursuit of brand relationships. A brand experience doesn’t
necessarily need to be some grandiose gesture. It can be subtle. Millennials are
observers who appreciate subtleties and look for relationships with companies
that don’t blast them with overt corporate messages.
This chapter focuses on the creation of a brand experience for Millennials that
extends beyond the simple transaction. You concentrate on integrating the experience into every campaign and look at the tools you need to integrate the brand
experience into your larger marketing strategy. For more information about the
structure of the buyer journey, see Book 2, Chapter 3.
Creating a Brand Experience Strategy
One of the most important things to remember is that during any customer interaction, on any media type, your brand should be instantly recognizable. Instantly
recognizable means that everything from your voice to your branding to elements
as basic as your color scheme should be consistent.
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When developing your brand experience strategy, begin by outlining how you’d
like your Millennial prospect to interact with your brand at each point of engagement throughout the buyer journey.The buyer journey is the path your prospects
take when they interact with your brand across web channels. For example, a
buyer journey can begin with an initial introduction to the brand on social media.
That exposure may be followed by an educational interaction with your website,
blog, or other social network. Then it may end with a conversion in your online
store, completing the initial buyer journey. This journey continues after the conversion is made, strengthening the brand relationship and encouraging ongoing
business.
To craft the buyer journey for Millennials, start by answering a few important
questions:
»» What is the ideal medium for a first interaction?
»» Where will your efforts to educate switch to efforts to sell?
»» Will you invest in establishing multiple entry points?
»» How does the experience differ from prospects to customers?
What is the ideal medium
for a first interaction?
Millennials move from one medium to another very easily, so predicting where
their first interaction will take place is hard. But you can make an educated guess
as to where new prospects will have their first interaction based on two criteria:
»» Media platform: When you run an audience analysis you can identify the
place where your largest audience exists. Then you can put content of interest
to new prospects there.
»» Industry conversations: You can look at data analyses (see Book 4,
Chapter 3) to see where the conversation in your industry is taking place. Then
you can start there.
These two points help you determine where you meet new prospects. This location
is where you want to establish the brand experience and introduce the audience
to your voice.
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Where will your efforts to educate
switch to efforts to sell?
The first goal of any brand experience is education. To begin developing a relationship, you need to tell prospects
»» Who you are (so that you familiarize your target audience with your brand
»» What products and services you offer
»» Why you’re the best option on the market compared to your competitors
After you educate your Millennial users, the second goal is to develop a relationship to drive conversions. More often than not, this relationship-building takes
place on owned media where you have complete control of the content and the
process. This owned media can be your website, your mobile app, your blog, or any
other medium that you own.
There are three kinds of media:
»» Owned media are the channels that you control completely. An example can
be your website. You control the content, the engagement, and the brand
representation. This is different from social media that is controlled by the
company that owns it. If they change on a whim, you have no control.
»» Paid media are media where your brand’s presence is a result of an invest-
ment. For example, Google AdWords ad space is an example of paid media,
where the media representing your brand is found as a result of your paid
efforts.
»» Earned media are your most valuable types of content. Third parties that
reference your brand have created these pieces of content. While you may
not have control of wha’s being said in some cases, earned media are the
most trusted sources of material about your brand because Millennials trust
their peers more than they do brands themselves.
For a more detailed look at owned, paid, and earned media, see Book 5, Chapter 1.
Will you invest in establishing
multiple entry points?
The more robust you make the brand experience, the more likely your target Millennial audience will first encounter your brand in one of several different places.
For this reason, you need to carefully plan where these entry points will occur.
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Experience
personality)
Any potential entry point that a customer may come across should be designed
to funnel users to your most active and valuable assets, such as your website or
landing pages.
How does the experience differ
from prospects to customers?
After a Millennial prospect becomes a customer, the brand experience changes.
There are significant differences in the type of engagement a prospect will have
with your brand compared to the experiences of an existing customer. These
differences can include, for example, the media on which you most commonly
engage with a user. While social media may have been the driving force in the
brand experience with your prospects, it may change to email or a messaging
platform such as Facebook Messenger after that individual becomes a customer.
You need to establish separate strategies for each of these user types. For more
about Facebook Messenger see Book 7, Chapter 6.
An example road map
After you select a starting point for the brand experience, develop a sales strategy, and identify the differences between initial contact and nurturing existing
customers, you can get into the process of designing the brand experience. It can
be difficult to envision what your brand experience road map may look like when
you’ve never encountered one before. The following steps highlight an example of
a brand experience with a consumer product. You can use this example as a guideline when creating your own brand experience road map:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
364
You make an initial connection when a prospect sees your Facebook Ad.
The prospect visits your blog to read an article relevant to your industry.
The prospect makes contact with your company and a conversation
takes place.
The prospect buys something based on a special or promotion offered via
email.
You re-engage with the customer shortly after the initial purchase to
build loyalty.
You demonstrate your thanks by delivering private offers or gifts for the
existing customer base.
BOOK 4 Reaching Your Millennial Audience
While every buyer journey is going to be different, this example shows how the
brand experience works in action. It demonstrates a process that you can use to
establish a connection and build a relationship with prospects.
Identifying Touchpoints for Your Audience
»» You don’t need to have a robust presence on every network you choose.
»» Every network where you have a touchpoint doesn’t need to heavily factor
into your brand experience strategy.
Your branding and personality should be evident wherever you have a presence.
But with regard to the customer experience, you’re the one who should determine
which media and touchpoints should be emphasized for Millennials.
Consider using the following touchpoints for your brand experience strategy.
»» Social networks: Social networks should be the driving force in your brand
experience strategy. Social media have become the unstoppable juggernauts
they are thanks to Millennials. Therefore, most interactions that take place
with your brand occur on some social network. These networks are ideally
suited for first encounters and for relationship and loyalty development.
»» Your website/blog: When you have complete control over every aspect of a
medium, like your website or a blog, it becomes a very powerful tool. These
platforms provide an effective way to build on an initial contact. Millennials
may not stumble on your website as a first contact, but when they do click
through to your site, you know that you can provide more detailed information because you have their full attention.
»» Your mobile application: If you’ve invested in developing a mobile application, then it’s a perfect place to build a relationship and extend the brand
engagement experience after you’ve converted a prospect into a customer.
»» Mobile messaging applications: Millennials engage on mobile, which is
where they spend the majority of their time. You can further the brand
experience on a very personal level by creating an engagement strategy for
mobile messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and, of
course, text messaging.
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Before you choose touchpoints, you need to keep in mind two things:
»» Email: You may think that email is a forgotten platform by Millennials. But
after a consumer has been converted into a client, it can be a valuable asset.
You can cultivate the relationship and deepen the brand experience.
Millennials may ignore cold emails, but when information from a trusted
brand comes into their inbox, they’re receptive to what’s being offered.
Cold emails are emails that have come from a sender with which the receiver doesn’t have a previous relationship. Sending emails to rented lists, for example, where
you buy addresses for an email campaign, will be ignored by Millennials who will
consider it to be spam. Email is widely regarded as one of the last personal spaces
where a user has complete control over the content he or she sees and ignores.
An email from an unknown sender will either be automatically placed in the Junk
folder, or the recipient will ignore it and throw it in the Trash.
The CAN-SPAM act of 2003 was created to protect consumers and businesses from
unwanted electronic communications. Don’t be guilty of violating someone’s
email and possible getting blocked by your email provider. It serves no purpose to
annoy your readers.
Checking Off Elements
for Each Touchpoint
Every touchpoint where your audience encounters your brand should add value to
both the consumer and to your organization and push the customer toward conversion. To get the most from your brand experience touchpoints, you’ll want to
include certain elements at each one. These elements help move the journey along
and make it a more cohesive experience. A consistent experience encourages the
prospect to stay the course and increases your chances of successfully converting
your prospect to a customer.
In the initial stages of the brand experience when the consumer is just beginning
to become acquainted with your brand, you may want to consider incorporating
the following elements:
»» Clear branding: You need clear branding that is visible throughout your
creative design and copy. In this early stage of the experience, you’re introducing the user to your brand, so it’s crucial that it’s clearly marked — perhaps
even overstated, such as a logo or company name that takes up the majority
or entirety of an image you share.
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»» Rich media: Rich media like images and videos immediately attract the
attention of users. When used in an ad campaign on a social network like
Facebook, a video automatically begins playing in the user’s feed. Millennials
are visual consumers, so if you can use rich media to capture their attention,
take advantage of it.
prospects right in your copy. In fact, one of the most effective forms of
communicating your message to Millennials is to present your product or
service as a solution to a problem they may or may not know they have. Think
about the classic infomercial structure, where a voiceover begins by asking,
“Has this ever happened to you?” You present a problem and then offer a
brand solution. In your first interaction with your target audience, you need to
clearly spell out the problem to engage the user.
»» A call to action: In this first step, you’re trying to educate the user, not
necessarily sell your product. A call to action should simply offer the prospect
the opportunity to learn more about you. Your call to action shouldn’t be an
aggressive sales pitch, but rather an invitation to learn a little bit more about
your brand or solution.
Developing a Customer Relationship
After you make the initial introduction of your brand to your target Millennial
audience, you can begin to develop the brand relationship. In this stage of the
experience, you can use some sales-oriented content to encourage users to take
the next step.
The following sections describe some of the most useful techniques for building
a relationship.
Engaging users with conversational content
At the relationship-building stage, it’s important not to solely focus on selling
to your Millennial prospects. One of the qualities that Millennials seek is value in
the content brands share. They’re looking for content that gives them a reason to
engage. This content can be in the form of a conversation. Ask questions or conduct pools, surveys, or ongoing industry discussions. For more information about
types of content, see Book 3, Chapter 2.
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»» Solutions: It’s a good idea to include the solution to a problem faced by your
When something relevant to your industry is being discussed, it’s appropriate
for your brand to participate in the conversation. For example, suppose that you
sell a particular tech gadget, and Apple announces a shift in the way some aspect
of its devices work. This announcement gives you an opportunity to share your
opinion either on your owned channels or on a public forum where a conversation
is already taking place.
Sharing useful information that
highlights your expertise
By sharing tips and insights that demonstrate your expertise in the industry,
you’re providing value. You’re also highlighting why you’re the best of all the
options on the market.
Offering first-time customers
specials, freebies, or deals
You want to ease the potentially awkward scenario of overtly selling a product or
service on a medium like a social network, which is intended to be conversational.
One strategy you can apply in the hopes of avoiding that awkward situation is to
offer users a special discount or a deal to first-time customers.
Special deals create an incentive for the customer to convert and help you decrease
the conversion time.
Building trust by sharing third-party
content that mentions your brand
When you find that third parties, like influential bloggers, discuss your product,
you want to make sure that your audience sees it. This content further cements
your status as an industry leader and keep your brand top of mind when your
prospect is ready to make a purchase.
For more in-depth information about working with influencers, see Book 6.
After a user becomes a customer, the brand content should shift from pursuit
to relationship growth. This stage is where ongoing, personalized communication becomes your most valuable asset for long-run expansion and survival in the
market.
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To get the most from the touchpoints in this stage of the consumer cycle, you
should consider using one-on-one communication, either in real time in a messaging application or via email.
You also should consider incorporating the following elements into these
communications.
»» Personalization: It may seem like a small detail, but personalization goes a
long way with Millennials. When you can add their name to correspondence —
for example, in an email subject or body text — you increase the likelihood
that they’ll engage with the content.
Developing the Brand
Experience
»» Appreciation: Little things go a long way. That is particularly true when it
comes to showing your appreciation for your customers and your audience.
Sharing content that communicates your gratitude helps solidify the relationship you’re building with Millennials. It also enhances the brand experience
after a conversion and increases the chances of repeat business. An example
is when Cadbury, a UK-based candy maker, shared a video thanking its fans
on Facebook after it hit one million fans (see Figure 6-1).
»» Community: Making your content more about the community, the industry,
and, most importantly, the audience after they’ve converted goes a long way
toward solidifying the relationship. It also enhances the brand experience and
adds value to your content.
»» Regular communications: It’s hard to build a relationship with a brand that
has gone dark after a conversion. Keep up regular contact with your audience,
both new and old.
Segmenting Your Content
Of course, you’ll regularly share general content designed to appeal to your broad
audience. But to optimize the effectiveness of your campaigns and extract the
greatest benefit from each target audience, you need to develop content that tells
a story. (Book 3, Chapter 5 covers storytelling.)
You need to craft your brand content in such a way that it guides your target audience through the journey from prospect to customer. You want to gently move
them from one step to the next. Be careful, though; you don’t want to come across
as insistent. You want to ease your audience down a conversion path so that when
a prospect is ready, the next step is perfectly clear and easy to make.
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FIGURE 6-1:
Cadbury built a
giant chocolate
thumbs-up to
show its thanks
for one million
fans.
Creating experience-specific content
When you create experience-specific campaigns, you want to create a narrative
that helps prospects move from prospect to customer. As you develop this experience, you can do a few things to help your audience progress in the right order:
»» Maintain a structured narrative
»» Ensure the fluid connection of your channels
»» Establish a timeline that you can easily follow
»» Connect each stage of the process
»» Gradually blend the experience with standard content
Maintaining a structured narrative
When running a brand experience campaign, you need to think of each initiative
as having a complete narrative — with a beginning, middle, and end.
You may create a story with the long-term goal of building an ongoing relationship
or a short-term goal like getting your audience to participate in a new initiative.
Regardless of whether you’re focusing on the brand experience or trying to generate interest in a new product launch, a narrative needs to exist.
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Ensuring the fluid connection of your channels
You should also build a cross-channel referral component into your content. A
cross-channel referral means that you refer your audience from one channel to
another from within your content. This strategy helps you create a more robust
presence for your brand and highlights the versatility of your communication.
Establishing a timeline that you can easily follow
Consistency and timing are two keys to success when conducting a brand experience campaign. You need to create a strategic timeline that outlines when you’ll
share particular types of content and at what rate you’d like your audience to
move through the various stages of the experience.
Connecting each stage of the process
It should be clear at every touchpoint where your customer should be going next.
Remember that the campaign is structured as a narrative. At no point in this process should your audience be confused about where to go or what to do.
Leverage a call to action whenever you can to move users from one step to the
next. Also, consider presenting complete instructions when appropriate, like during the conversion stage when your audience is highly engaged and willing to
follow instructions.
Don’t give your audience outlined instructions in the early, education stage of
the process. In the case of the initial phases, a simple “Learn More” call to action
should suffice. The pushy approach may be a little bit too much for new prospects
to handle and could turn off those Millennial users who dislike aggressive sales
tactics.
Gradually blending the experience
with standard content
As you build a relationship with your customers, you should gradually blend the
brand experience narrative into your day-to-day content. This slow, calculated
transition will allow you to maintain a relationship with users and possibly transition them into brand loyalists. Initially, you want to continue sharing segmented
content that relates to the brand experience initiative. Then you can slowly work
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When you’re building your campaign, it’s crucial that you link all your media
channels. It should be entirely clear to your prospects that they’re engaging with
the same brand and the same campaign. This fluid connection requires you to pay
close attention to the consistency of your message, rhetoric, branding, and creative elements of the campaign.
your way toward integrating these users into the general audience and sharing
more generalized content with them.
As you engage your new, experience-oriented audience with campaigns, note the
level of engagement users exhibit. As this engagement rate increases, you can see
that these users are engaged in what you have to say as a brand. This advice is
particularly true as time passes after the end of a campaign.
At this point, you can begin integrating this audience with your general audience
in ad campaigns. This easy integration will help maintain engagement with your
new audience and allow you to build your general audience of engaged users.
Unifying your content across every channel
Unifying your content across all current media is an important part of the brand
experience initiative. Your audience will differ from one channel to the next,
and — perhaps more importantly — the personalities of these users won’t necessarily be the same on one medium as they are on another.
In spite of this difference, you can use the following tactics to connect your content and maintain a degree of consistency across all channels in a brand experience campaign:
»» Create a unique message
»» Deploy remarketing
»» Develop unique assets
Creating a unique message
Your audience can easily get lost across various media, even if you’ve carefully
planned each stage of the brand experience campaign. The reality is that so much
content is out there that you can easily lose sight of the next step when following
a buyer’s journey.
Try to create a standout, segmented message and maintain consistency in your
branding across all media. This consistency helps your content clearly stand out
from your other content and from other brands online.
Deploying remarketing
Remarketing displays ads to users who have arrived at a particular product or page
on your website. Essentially, it sends a reminder about a product or page the user
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has previously shown interest in by clicking it, giving them a second opportunity
to visit the page or buy the product.
Developing unique assets
A great way to connect all your brand experience assets and ensure a degree of
continuity from one asset to another is by creating standalone landing pages,
either on mobile or the web.
These landing pages allow your audience to easily identify the brand conducting
the campaign. It also makes it easier for you to track the data directly from these
pages to gauge audience interest.
Integrating the Experience for
an Omni-Channel Strategy
After you create your narrative and develop some of the content you plan to use for
your brand experience initiative, you should start thinking about how the brand
experience will fit into your overall omni-channel strategy.
One of the key features of a omni-channel strategy is the fluidity with which all
aspects of your communications operate across channels. This feature is important to focus on to capture and retain the attention of Millennials. The same holds
true for your brand experience. You run the risk of losing your audience along the
way because your messages or instructions across the channels were unclear. You
can use several methods to avoid audience attrition, including the following:
»» Creating an identifiable theme
»» Using a tracking mechanism
»» Repeating the campaign title or slogan on all media
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The strategic use of remarketing can make it easier to unify your content efforts.
Remarketing allows you to place targeted, customized, and, in some cases, even
personalized ads in front of select users on a variety of media. These ads can push
users to return to a website and complete a purchase, remind them of an item or
piece of content that they were viewing at one time or another, or present offers
and deals from the website in question. Ultimately, the goal is to use the ads to
keep the brand top of mind for prospects and offer reminders or even incentives
to the user to return to the brand’s website or store.
»» Facilitating movement in any direction
»» Ensuring that all assets are easily discoverable
Creating an identifiable theme
A theme is a powerful tool that helps your audience follow the campaign experience from one channel to the next. While your branding always needs to be consistent, a particular theme or stylistic identifier can be exactly what your audience
needs to ensure that it follows the campaign content from one channel to the next
without encountering any hurdles. An example of one such theme or identifier
may be a campaign-specific mascot or the use of unique imagery in all creative
assets associated with a campaign.
Using a tracking mechanism
Another useful option may be the creation and use of a hashtag on all active media
to track a particular campaign.
Hashtags may be more common and useful on networks like Twitter or Tumblr,
but when it comes to tracking your audience and your audience tracking your
campaign, a hashtag is a simple identifier that any Millennial will understand and
be able to follow.
Repeating the campaign title
or slogan on all media
Simple branding is all you need to display in your day-to-day content to let your
audience know that the content belongs to you. But when it comes to cultivating
an experience, reminding your audience of the existence of the campaign becomes
more important. For example, showcasing the title or highlighting a particular
initiative using a hashtag is an effective way to retain your audience along the
entire campaign path.
Facilitating movement in any direction
Your audience doesn’t move through your content in a linear fashion. While you
may have designed a narrative path that you want your audience to follow, you
need to prepare for its divergence from this route.
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You need to create links and buttons in your content that allow users to move in
any direction they choose to throughout the journey. If they opt to go back to an
original touchpoint or visit another touchpoint in the educational stage despite
having already visited it, they should be able to do so.
When it comes to reactivating dormant prospects, discoverability is key. The brand
experience campaign is one that won’t necessarily occur in one sitting or on one
medium. These kinds of campaigns take time. For this reason, you need to ensure
that the content on all channels is easily discoverable.
Sending frequent reminders about a campaign or content related to an offer to
prospects keeps even the most passive of prospects somewhat engaged. Then,
when they’re ready, it’s easy for them to pick up where they left off.
Tracking the Brand Experience
Across Different Media
Tracking your data across all your channels enables you to learn from every action
you take. It improves your efforts to optimize your budget and increase your conversion rate. Because brand experience-specific campaigns take place on multiple
media, tracking that data requires a little bit of know-how and the occasional
assistance of technology. It may also mean that you need to get a little creative
about how you track your campaigns and which conversions you measure.
You can use several strategies to track your brand experience campaigns. These
strategies may differ from one objective to the next based on the key performance
indicators (KPIs) you choose. (Book 1, Chapter 1 covers KPIs in detail.)
You can use the following common tracking methods to track the impact your
brand experience campaigns have on things like conversion and retention of new
customers and the cultivation of brand advocates:
»» A tag management system
»» Trackable links
»» Segmentation of data
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Ensuring that all assets are
easily discoverable
A tag management system
A tag management system allows marketers to place a small piece of code on the
pages of a website to track data. A tag management system lets you track data from
each of your active sources to help you effectively tie together all your campaign
efforts. If you use Google Analytics, the most logical choice of a tag management
system is Google Tag Manager. Figure 6-2 shows the dashboard for Google Tag
Manager.
FIGURE 6-2:
Google Tag
­Manager
can help you
more ­precisely
track data.
Trackable links
Whether or not you’re using a tag management system, you need to create trackable links. If you’re using Google Analytics, you can use Google’s URL
building ­
service available at https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaignurl-builder, shown in Figure 6-3, to create these links, or you can use an online
tracking service like Bitly (http://bit.ly), shown in Figure 6-4.
Link tracking allows you to both segment data in your site tracking dashboard and
monitor the effectiveness of different media and content individually.
Segmentation of data
As with any campaign, you should be segmenting your brand experience campaign data in your tracking dashboards to get a full, unadulterated picture of how
the campaign is working. Using link-shortening tools like Bitly or Google, you
can segment your data in an analytics dashboard, such as Google Analytics. Then,
from within this dashboard, you can look only at campaign data and analyze how
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Developing the Brand
Experience
it’ performing on its own. You can then compare the solo performance of a campaign with the performance of other initiatives and the benchmarks you’ve set
for your campaigns in terms of key performance indicators. Keeping your data
segmented is an important practice that will help you get an isolated picture of
the campaign you’re running.
FIGURE 6-3:
Google offers
a free service
where you can
add customized
parameters to an
existing URL to
track more data.
FIGURE 6-4:
Bitly allows users
to shorten and
track custom links
to content.
Running Brand Experience Campaigns
One of the fundamental differences between a traditional objective-oriented campaign and a brand experience campaign is the seamlessness with which a brand
experience campaign is executed. Users can move from one piece of content to
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another and from one channel to the next without becoming confused about the
path designed for the process.
While elements of your brand experience strategy may factor into your standard objective campaigns, the focus of the brand experience campaign is on the
immersion of the audience in the story you’re telling across various media. As
with any campaign, you need to start by developing either a single or a series
of objectives that you’d like to achieve by building a brand experience for your
Millennial prospects.
Objectives, such as your KPIs can be both tangible and intangible. You can collect
tangible customer data, which is concrete and measurable, by having customers
fill out a form or submit their information. Alternatively, you can try to build loyalty, which can often be an intangible objective as it’s not necessarily measured
by a concrete statistic but rather a concept that relies much more on observation.
When it comes to the brand experience, some of the most common objectives you
should consider when building your campaigns for Millennials include
»» Increasing brand engagement
»» Driving brand awareness
»» Building a new segmented audience
»» Selling more product
»» Garnering customer loyalty
»» Fostering relationships
»» Launching a well-rounded campaign
Increasing brand engagement
Continuous engagement helps build your brand awareness. A brand experience
campaign is about building that engagement across multiple media. By creating
an experience in which your prospects and target Millennial audience can participate, you’re driving increased interactions with a broad variety of users on
several digital channels. Considering that this increased engagement is going to
be an essential component of any brand experience initiative, you need to decide
whether engagement is a primary or secondary objective of your campaign.
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Your primary objective is the one that you’re most interested in achieving. All the
work you do and everything you include in your strategy is going to aim to achieve
this primary goal. A secondary objective is one that may be less of a focus or even
just a byproduct of your primary objective. While you may track this objective and
even implement a few components that work toward its success, it won’t be your
primary focus during the campaign.
Although brand awareness isn’t a tangible objective in the traditional sense. it’s
an objective that you can work toward through the strategic use of a brand experience campaign. As you drive engagement with your target audience, the conversation around your brand will increase. As that conversation increases, the
discoverability of your brand by your target prospects and by new prospects who
come across this public discussion will rise.
While there may not be a concrete way to determine brand awareness, one measurement that may be helpful is share of voice. Share of voice measures how much
industry conversation pertains to your brand as compared to your competitors. As
share of voice increases, so does your brand awareness.
Creating a brand experience that focuses on intrigue can help you garner the
attention of new audiences and users. An intrigue-focused campaign may have
something to do with a series of clues or references that participants need to follow to reach the incentive-fueled end — perhaps a discount or special offer. This
kind of campaign is a useful way to drive brand awareness.
Building a new, segmented audience
One of the benefits of brand experience campaigns is that they can entice new
fans. These viewers make it clear that they’re willing to engage with brands that
provide them with valuable content. (For more detail about content creation, see
Book 3.)
Selling more product
Of course, one of the goals that you’ll work toward is increasing sales. Just
remember that when it comes to brand experience, the sales cycle may be a bit
longer than what you’re used to because the timeline isn’t necessarily fixed and
the majority of the audience will be focused on getting the most from the experience presented.
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Driving brand awareness
You most likely will want to consider increased sales as a secondary objective
in your brand experience campaigns. Unlike some of your more sales-oriented
objectives, such as an ad campaign with a clear goal at its core, the brand experience is primarily about building relationships.
You may find that over time, these relationships lead to conversions, but the concept of building your brand experience means that you want to encourage the
organic growth of a relationship with your prospects. A conversion may take place
at any point in the process after the prospect in question feels comfortable enough
to buy. Increasing sales, however, is still a viable objective worth monitoring.
Garnering customer loyalty
One of the most valuable byproducts of an experience-oriented campaign is the
garnering of audience loyalty. Creating a noteworthy experience for your audience
shows that you care about them.
This attention goes a long way in building loyalty among your existing or newly
converted audiences.
Fostering relationships
Brand experience campaigns are reliable tools to use when you’re trying to deepen
the relationships you created with your audience. Though the growth of relationships isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to measure, it’s a worthwhile objective to
monitor.
Launching a well-rounded campaign
To get the most from your campaign, you should follow a series of steps leading
to your launch. The following steps can help ensure that your narrative is clear,
your tracking is established, and that you’re working toward achieving exactly
what you set out to do:
1.
Build a slightly generalized Millennial audience.
With a brand experience campaign, you’ll find some Millennial audience
members that you wouldn’t have necessarily thought to consider. Often,
current campaigns drive engagement from previously dormant users. To
encourage the discovery of new audiences, keep your target audience a little
bit more general than usual to expose the brand experience campaign to new
prospects.
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2.
Establish your objectives.
Determine exactly what you’re trying to achieve by creating a brand experience
initiative for your audience and selecting objectives that measure their interest.
3.
Construct a narrative.
4.
Determine tracking methods and KPIs.
Before launching, identify exactly how you plan to track your progress and pick
the key indicators you’ll use to measure your success.
5.
Set initial benchmarks.
Your benchmarks may change after your brand experience program gets
underway, but start with a few benchmarks that you’d like to improve.
6.
Develop your content.
This step connects closely to the narrative you structured for your brand
experience. Create content that helps your audience move from one stage of
the story to the next. Also, consider how the content will help you build a closer
ongoing relationship with your audience.
7.
Launch your campaign.
Measure your results to see whether your audience is following the linear path
that you created for them. You may need to make some changes to guide
them along the path you constructed. You also may need to incorporate a new
narrative that your audience is organically following.
8.
Make needed changes.
Be proactive and make necessary changes right away.
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The narrative is the driving force behind the entire brand experience, so it’s a
critical stage. Spend time outlining the ideal path you’d like users to take and
then consider all the variations that you might present. You need to integrate
your brand experience, so spend time thinking about all the ways your
narrative’s pieces are linked.
5
Implementing
Channel
Promotions
Contents at a Glance
CHAPTER 1:
Identifying Paid, Earned, Shared,
and Owned Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385
Understanding Types of Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 386
Utilizing Paid Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 388
Championing Earned Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391
Enhancing Shared Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 393
Amplifying Owned Media. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394
Creating a Framework for Achieving the Right Mix . . . . . . . . . . . . . 396
CHAPTER 2:
Using Search Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401
Knowing the Three Key Players in Search Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . 402
Targeting Search Queries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 404
Optimizing Your Assets for Specific Channels. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411
Earning Links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 422
CHAPTER 3:
Making Content Shareable. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
Embracing Shareability as a Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
Uncovering the Five Ws and One H of Online Sharing. . . . . . . . . . . 429
Adding Social Bookmarking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435
Making SEO a Priority. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 436
Deploying Hashtags to Encourage Sharing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438
CHAPTER 4:
Considering Email Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443
Understanding Marketing Emails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 444
Sending Broadcast and Triggered Emails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447
Building a Promotional Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 448
Creating Email Campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453
Writing and Designing Effective Emails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459
Getting More Clicks and Opens. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463
Ensuring Email Deliverability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 466
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Considering when to use paid media
»» Discovering the value of retargeting
»» Understanding why owned media is
important
Chapter
1
Identifying Paid, Earned,
Shared, and Owned
Media
H
ave you struggled with the concepts of paid, earned, shared, and owned
media? It’s no wonder. Within each of these categories is a rotating variety
of options that could confuse even the most seasoned online marketer.
Also, because the allocations for each type vary widely, the stakes can be high.
Getting it wrong isn’t an option.
Content marketing has added another layer to the promotion puzzle. Now marketers have to decide the budget mix as well as what to market. Should they pay
for product, service, or content promotions, or a mix of all three? In this chapter,
you look at each type of media to understand the pros and cons of each. You also
see how to put together a strategy that fits your specific needs.
CHAPTER 1 Identifying Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned Media
385
Understanding Types of Media
The notion of paid, owned, and earned media has been the accepted model for several years. In 2014, Mashable reported on a new version of the model in the article,
“Why PR is embracing the PESO Model” (http://mashable.com/2014/12/05/
public-relations-industry/) as shown in Figure 1-1.
FIGURE 1-1:
The PESO model.
The article discusses the PESO model (Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned) suggested by
Gini Dietrich, founder of the nontraditional PR firm Arment Dietrich (http://spin
sucks.com). The PESO model blog post (http://spinsucks.com/communication/
pr-pros-must-embrace-the-peso-model/) adds shared media to the traditional
mix of earned, owned, and paid. Previously, the media model didn’t specifically
segment out shared media but instead included it as part of earned media. It’s now
segmented as a separate media type because of its importance to the mix.
When you break out shared media from earned media, you can evaluate how you
will specifically deal with your shared media strategy. Shared media is not under
your control, whereas earned media can be influenced by your relationships with
traditional PR sources such as influencers and publishers.
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Reviewing each media type
To help you understand the PESO model, each of the four media types are
»» Paid media: This type of media refers to the advertising promotions that you
pay for. When choosing these options, you need a budget and a conviction
that you will get a return on the money you spend.
Examples: Facebook Ads, promoted tweets, traditional and native advertising,
print ads, paid search, mobile ads, app ads, and Amazon ads
»» Earned media: This is the media that you get when other sources recognize
and promote your content for you. Your brand or your content is deemed
valuable and is showcased in some way or reshared.
Examples: Influencer reviews, traditional PR, and media relations
»» Shared media: This refers to the shares you get from others on the various
social media platforms.
Examples: Shares on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, and others
»» Owned media: This type of media is controlled by you and is becoming more
Examples: Website, blogs, emails, micro sites, apps, collateral, user-generated
content
With shared media, you’re part of the conversation without having to specifically
buy your way in. That’s a great place to be.
Control is a big factor when choosing the media you want to use. When you have a
major campaign coming up, you want to know to what extent you can impact the
outcome. Table 1-1 shows the amount of control you have over each type of media
and the audience target. When making decisions, be aware of these factors.
TABLE 1-1
Attributes of Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned Media
Type
Control of Distribution by Brand
Audience Targeted
Paid
Medium to high
Potential customers
Earned
Low
Potential and current
customers (fans)
Shared
Low
Potential and current customers
Owned
High
Current customers
CHAPTER 1 Identifying Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned Media
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Identifying Paid, Earned,
Shared, and Owned Media
and more important as time goes on.
Determining your needs
So how do you determine how much of each media type you should use? You have
to strike a careful balance, and this is a question you should frequently revisit. You
don’t want to spend on ads when your content is effectively being shared organically. Revisions to the mix depend on
»» How well your current mix is doing. Are you satisfied with the recognition
and traffic you’re getting? If not, you need to take action. But even if you are
satisfied, you should plan to check back monthly (or weekly, if you see
significant changes) to see whether you’re still satisfied with your results.
»» How often you launch promotions. If you frequently launch new campaigns
for your products or services, you’ll want to prepare special targeted campaigns to get the word out. These could include emails or mini sites. After
you’ve launched a timed campaign, don’t let it sit online past its prime.
Make sure you’ve assigned someone the job of monitoring the promotion site.
When the promotion is over, revise the site to send visitors to something new.
You never know when someone will find the link and go there. Disappointing
a new visitor is lazy marketing and bad for your brand.
Ending up at dead campaign links annoys peopleor makes them feel forgotten. Don’t be guilty of ignoring old links. You’re wasting the effort and money
you put into getting someone to notice your brand.
»» How and where you want your customers to encounter you in their daily
online travels. If you’re targeting customers on a particular platform, you
need to buy the ads that will reach that specific audience. It can be money well
spent. It will also feed your organic traffic. If you’re unsure whether your
audience is on that platform, you’ll want to test first. Don’t guess.
Utilizing Paid Media
Of all the categories in the PESO model, paid media is the easiest to understand. It
includes traditional advertising such as paid search as well as forms of advertising
such as retargeting and native advertising.
Discovering retargeting
Over the last few years, banner advertising has had a bumpy ride. Because of
the constant barrage of these ads, online customers developed what is known as
banner blindness (also know as ad fatigue), the ability of users to ignore (subconsciously or otherwise) banner ads on websites.
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For this reason, companies had to figure out how to make their ads visible again.
Enter retargeting. You’ve probably heard the term retargeting but may not be sure
what it’s about. Retargeting refers to the ad tactic that allows a brand to anonymously place a bit of code (called a pixel) on a user’s site when she clicks items
on her website but doesn’t buy. Then when the user is browsing around the web
and hits one of the ad servers purchased by the marketer, the product is displayed
again. This gives the marketer “a second bite at the apple.” The marketer is paying to offer the customer another chance to buy its product.
This tactic has proven to be very effective. One obvious reason is that you’re
showing people things they expressed an interest in. Suddenly you’re not an
anonymous advertiser but rather someone showing them an item that got their
attention.
Identifying Paid, Earned,
Shared, and Owned Media
Retargeting also works well to retrieve abandoned carts on your websites. According to JeremySaid.com (http://www.jeremysaid.com/turn-shopping-cartabandonment-secret-weapon-creating-sales/) up to 72 percent of visitors
may return to purchase something within 12–24 hours. By sending an email
that is triggered by an abandoned cart, you can significantly increase your sales.
Figure 1-2 shows an example of a retargeted ad in a Facebook feed.
FIGURE 1-2:
A retargeted ad.
CHAPTER 1 Identifying Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned Media
389
According to AdRoll’s 2015 “State of the Industry” report, more than 90 percent
of marketers say that retargeting converts better than search, email, and display
advertising.
Dealing with native advertising
Another method marketers use to overcome banner blindness is native advertising (NA). NA refers to advertising that is made to match the editorial content on
its respective platform. A 2018 article from Ingnite Visibility, (https://ignite
visibility.com/native-advertising-why-it-is-the-next-big-thing-formarketing), found that 70% of individuals prefer learning about products through
content rather than traditional advertising. NA is often more effective because the
reader can learn something from the ad they’re reading, so it doesn’t feel like an ad.
Native advertising has raised the hackles of journalists who feel that this practice
can be deceptive. Readers, on the other hand, haven’t voiced a major concern and
these ads are performing well.
Both sides of the controversy have their defenders. Some journalists feel that
readers won’t recognize the content as an ad. Publishers say that as long as the
ad says “sponsored” or “advertisement,” no confusion should ensue. You have to
decide for yourself whether this type of media should be included in your ad buy.
Considering programmatic buying
The ability to make ad decisions in real time is another important development
for advertisers. It’s called programmatic buying (PG) and allows brands to send ads
to their potential customers via such things as emails or mobile phone numbers
based on their current website behavior.
The use of PG requires that brands put automated functions in place on their
owned channels. The customer data that’s collected triggers the buying of specific
ads that are directly responsive to users’ behaviors. This is different from realtime bidding (RTB), which is associated with inexpensive inventory. Proponents
of programmatic buying emphasize that their ads are linked to quality interactions from buyers.
This type of paid advertising has several benefits, which include the following:
»» Ads can be seen across the consumer’s devices — mobile devices as well as
laptops. They don’t have to be in one place.
»» Advertisers have greater control over what their customers see, and when.
They don’t have to wait until the customer triggers the ad online.
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»» Real-time customer interactions can be measured to provide valuable insights
and help advertisers make predictive decisions.
»» This type of advertising replaces the tediousness of making individual buying
decisions manually.
Here’s a great example: PG was used by the Amanda Foundation, a pet rescue
organization that partnered with ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi to help people
find the right pet waiting for them at the shelter (https://adage.com/article/
digital/saatchi-launches-pet-matching-effort-nonprofit-group/
301106/). By targeting its location data and browsing behavior, the campaign was
able to help people find the real-life pet that was right for them.
Programmatic buying continues to evolve, so do your homework.
Knowing your budget is not the only thing you need to concern yourself with
when you’re spending money to advertise. Because of all the decisions you have
to make, you want to make sure that you have all the facts about the platform
on which your ad will be placed. Here are some items you want to consider when
making choices:
»» Demographics: Who is the audience that receives these native ads? How do
the platform owners slice and dice their measures?
»» Geographics: What kind of geographical information does the native
advertising platform collect and how granular can it get?
»» Reporting functions: What and when are analytics available to you? Can you
get custom reports?
»» Creative materials necessary: What do you need to supply your advertising
platform, and in what time frame?
»» Special sauce: What does this platform offer that you can’t get elsewhere?
Championing Earned Media
Earned media is prized because it gives you the boost that you hoped for when
you planned your content. You and your team dreamed of hitting the front pages
of digital magazines and the local news with the content you carefully crafted.
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Finding out what you need
to know from advertisers
Unfortunately, in today’s crowded market, garnering headlines takes a lot more
effort.
Want to capture the media’s attention for your content? According to the Statistic Brain Research Institute website, the average human’s attention span in is
8.25 seconds. The average goldfish’s attention span is nine seconds. That’s why
your job is so hard.
In Book 6, you delve into the role of influencers who are crucial to making your
earned media campaign a success. In this section, you look at the role that journalists play in spreading your message. Several groups have suggested that hiring
a journalist to work on your content marketing efforts is a good idea. Journalists
know the lay of the land and are familiar with what will get you the right kind of
attention.
So how do you reach out directly if you want to make contact with journalists who
cover your subject? Several tools can make this outreach easier:
HOW MUCH DOES YOUR CEO MAKE?
One the best examples of earned media is Gravity Payments (http://gravitypay
ments.com/), a credit card payment company. Dan Price, then 30, CEO of Gravity
Payments, announced in April of 2015 that he was going to take a pay cut and raise the
lowest salary in his company to $70,000 over a three-year period. He decided to sacrifice his own million-dollar salary to improve the lives of people in his company. He read
that people who had a baseline salary of $70,000 would be able to lead fulfilling lives
without having to worry about paying their bills.
After this announcement, Dan was featured on multiple news shows, and articles about
him appeared in all the major media outlets, including the New York Times and Money
magazine. Social media was ablaze with information. He was thrust into the spotlight
and hailed as a hero. His company got more publicity in one day than it did in all ten
years of its existence.
His plan was to do something worthwhile for his employees rather than get free publicity. However, he got both, because overnight Gravity Payments became a company that
cared about its employees and, by extension, their customers.
Even if your company can’t make such a generous contribution, it’s worth the effort to
look at how you can contribute to the improvement of your community. See updates
about the effect of Price’s efforts at https://gravitypayments.com/dan-price/.
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»» Help a Reporter Out (HARO) (http://www.helpareporter.com): This service
was started as a small business by Peter Shankman and is now owned by
Cision, a leading global media intelligence company. It helps reporters find
sources for their stories and helps marketers find journalists who want to
write about them.
»» Media Kitty, now called Kiti (https://thekiti.com/): This service lets
journalists and marketers contact each other via the online platform. You can
access the journalist database or connect with reporters who have a specific
story they’re researching.
»» Muck Rack (http://muckrack.com/): This service keeps you in touch with the
stories that reporters are interested in, and much more. You can sign up as a
marketer and get in touch with journalists who are interested in your specific
topic.
You’d be hard pressed to find an online business today that doesn’t try to make
the most of its social media efforts. Whether it succeeds is another question. Businesses know that shared media is low cost and packs a powerful punch. You’ve
heard that friends and other customers make up the most powerful and credible
sales force for any product. But are you maximizing the effects of shared media?
Some marketers focus their attention solely on shared media. You could be making a big mistake if you do that, however. Why? Isn’t social media sharing the best
way to reach new customers? Yes, but not having a balanced mix puts your media
plan in jeopardy.
The problem with focusing all your attention on social media is that the platform
your content is on is “rented,” so to speak. That is, you don’t own the land on
which your content is sitting. The community you have built is not really your
own. If one of those social platforms decided to limit the amount of content you
can share about a specific topic, you’d be hard pressed to get that platform to
reverse its decision. It cares about its business model, not yours.
In addition, the attention given to content on social platforms is unpredictable.
If you want to participate in a topic that’s trending, social platforms are the best
place. If you want to develop in-depth content, be sure to balance your mix.
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Enhancing Shared Media
Amplifying Owned Media
As the creator and distributor of your content, you’re free to publish as much and
as often as you like. You don’t have to worry that Facebook or Twitter will change
their policies and wipe out your best content. Owned media is becoming ever more
important because of the control it provides the marketer.
Owned media is not free media. You have to budget for the creation and development of it. So when you’re planning your media mix, bear in mind that it may
cost as much to create it as it does to use paid media with something you can
repurpose.
Looking at the role of press releases
You most likely believe that press releases are past their prime. But think again.
Press releases have a place in your current media strategy. Just don’t consider
them strictly owned media. Press releases have evolved along with all the other
practices that marketers utilize. In addition, Google has changed its algorithm with
regard to the value of press releases for SEO, so the game has changed. Throwing
a bunch of keywords into the release doesn’t gain you any additional page rank.
The dissemination of press releases is under your control, so that is partly why
earned media is in the mix. But you also need to look at how press releases are
received by customers. In today’s marketplace, a press release should be considered more of a paid advertorial. This means that people will consider the content
of your release to be sponsored material.
You can improve the value of your press release in three ways:
»» If your press release is picked up by a major outlet like Forbes, link that on
your website to drive traffic.
»» In the press release, insert a call to action (CTA) to a landing page that has
clear value to your customers (such as a free trial).
»» In the press release, link to a piece of content on your site that has already
garnered great publicity so that even more people can find it.
The downside to press releases is that it’s difficult to determine the return on
investment (ROI).
In case you’re wondering what would be an effective topic for a press release
today, these topics still carry enough weight to make it worth your while:
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»» Significant financial news about your company
»» A major shift in business model
»» Corporate giving to charities
»» A new product announcement
»» Additions in staff and promotions
Spreading the message
Owned media refers to all the content online that you create and control. It
includes your website, landing pages, podcasts, videos, and email, for example.
For this reason, you can be as creative as you think is appropriate for your audience. It has the added benefit of letting you frame the context for your media. You
can send an email that has the right personalized message or create an out-of-the
box media piece that will get wide attention.
05/06/how-the-big-marketing-activity-coloring-book-fueled-marketosinsanely-lucrative-lead-gen-machine/). It recounts how Marketo (http://
marketo.com), a marketing software company, created a piece of content that generated more than $500,000. What was this marketing masterpiece? It’s a 30-page
coloring book called “The Big Marketing Activity Coloring Book” (http://www.
marketo.com/ebooks/the-big-marketing-activity-coloring-book), shown in
Figure 1-3. At first blush the idea sounds a bit crazy. Do professional marketers
want to spend time coloring and filling in puzzles? Perhaps. What is clear is they
wanted to download and see the inventive marketing piece.
The ebook was entertaining and educational. It was a creative break from the
norm and garnered a great deal of attention. Most important is that when they
go to the link, potential customers can see a demo, get a free trial, or contact the
company. That’s a big win!
The coloring book idea is inventive and fun. Couldn’t your company come up with
a content piece that is fun and inviting? The landing page isn’t costly or difficult
to construct. It just requires you to think about luring your visitors to a page that
entertains and sells.
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One of the truly inspired examples of owned media was detailed by Contently in a
blog post written by Aaron Taube (http://contently.com/strategist/2015/
FIGURE 1-3:
Marketo’s Big
Marketing Activity
Coloring Book.
Creating a Framework for
Achieving the Right Mix
Unfortunately, you have no sure-fire way to guarantee that your content will be
seen and shared, so it becomes even more necessary to leverage paid, earned,
shared, and owned tactics. The strategy of bringing the four types of media
together is called converged media, a term coined by the research company Prophet/
Altimeter Group (https://www.prophet.com/altimeter/about/).
Are you curious to know how other companies divide their spending? According to
the Econsultancy Marketing Budgets Report, marketers are dividing their budgets
as follows:
»» Paid media: 39 percent
»» Owned media: 35 percent
»» Earned media (includes shared): 26 percent
Are you surprised to see that paid media is leading the list? Don’t be. With all the
new tools, such as native advertising and retargeting, marketers are spending
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more on new technology to solve advertising problems. Also note that owned
media is next. Both types give more control to the marketer.
Identifying Paid, Earned,
Shared, and Owned Media
The framework shown in Figure 1-4 and described in the following sections illustrates one way to think about putting a converged strategy together. You can use
this framework as the catalyst for your own custom plan. Be aware that because
of the cyclical nature of media, you won’t be able to assess each type in a vacuum.
The ability to use the data you collect at each stage will improve the ongoing decisions you make. This section gives you one way to think about how this media can
work together.
FIGURE 1-4:
Diagram of a
framework for
finding the right
balance.
Section 1: Owned channels
Begin your plan in the upper-right section of the cycle called Owned Channels
(refer to Figure 1-4). Remember that this includes both your original and curated
content on the channels you own. Starting here to develop your strategy makes
the most sense because it is controlled by you. These are your company’s assets,
and improving the way you develop and distribute them can only make them more
valuable.
Some questions to ask:
»» Do you know what topics your audience wants to learn about?
»» Have you done an evaluation of the content you have so that you know what
you can repurpose?
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»» Do you have the people and technology in place to get your content out
quickly?
Owned content is the foundation of your strategy. Give careful consideration to
how much of your budget to dedicate to this part of your strategy, because owned
content is what gives your brand visibility. Don’t skimp on this. It’s the raw material you need to get results.
Section 2: Shared media
In Section 2 (refer to Figure 1-4), you need to look at the traction you’ve gained
from the content you published.
Some questions to ask:
»» How much content was shared on all your social platforms?
»» Did some topics resonate better than others?
»» Did some formats get people’s attention?
Shared media gives you an indication of what resonates with your current audience. Is your fan base sharing your content in large numbers? Use the information
about how your content is being shared as a barometer to determine how your
relationship with customers is faring. In this section, you see the traction you
got from news outlets, influencers, and other high-value attention for your content. You evaluate the content you created and curated and determine what has
garnered the most attention. The caveat here is that depending on how large your
audience is, you may not have received the attention you expected.
Section 3: Paid ads
Based on the response you received to your new content, you need to decide what
to promote, and which advertising methods to use. These methods can include
such things as Facebook Ads or promoted tweets. Using this method at this stage
helps you to leverage advertising to gain visibility for your content.
Some questions to ask:
»» Do you know how much you can spend on several pilot experiments to test
what works best?
»» Should you consider native advertising?
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Section 4: Earned media
After you’ve paid to get your brand story out there into the world, you can push
the story even further by connecting with influencers and others who might be
interested in your content.
Some questions to ask:
»» Have you identified several influencers to whom you can reach out when you
have content you want to promote?
Do you have media relationships that you have developed over time?
Section 5: Evaluate and revise
In Section 5, you evaluate the results of your PESO strategy and make plans to
revise your mix.
You should alter your strategy to incorporate what you’ve learned in the first
complete cycle. This is the time to consider whether you’re clear about your goals
and perhaps revise them to incorporate what you’ve learned.
As suggested in the preceding plan, many marketers are starting to see better
results when they focus more directly on getting the content out into the world
rather than just creating more and more content. If no one sees it, your efforts are
wasted. You might mistakenly believe that your content doesn’t have value, when
in reality, it just wasn’t seen by enough people to have an impact.
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Ask whether you have selected the metrics you will use to determine whether your
efforts are successful.
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Focusing on search marketing
fundamentals
»» Analyzing search queries
»» Optimizing for search traffic on
popular sites
»» Attracting robots
»» Earning links to your web pages
Chapter
2
Using Search Marketing
N
o discipline in digital marketing has evolved over the years quite as dramatically as search marketing. In the early days of the Internet, search
engines like Alta Vista, Lycos, and Yahoo! were fairly unsophisticated.
Search marketers who understood the simple factors these sites used to rank
websites could drive search engine traffic to a page regardless of its quality.
Today, search engines like Google consider hundreds of factors in deciding which
web page to display for a search. In the current search marketing landscape, the
best web pages usually win. Sure, loopholes still exist, exploited by less-thanreputable search marketers, but the scales have tipped toward those who play
by the rules. In this chapter, you discover those rules and put yourself in a great
position to receive traffic from the billions of searches that take place each day.
Search isn’t limited to big search engines like Google and Bing. Social media
sites such as Facebook and Pinterest also have search capabilities. Also, Amazon,
iTunes, TripAdvisor, and thousands of other sites provide search to their users.
Depending on your business, it can be more valuable to understand how search
operates on YouTube or Amazon than on Google or Bing.
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Knowing the Three Key Players
in Search Marketing
Three main players make up the search marketing landscape, each with a different motivation. Understanding who the players are and what they want gives you
a better understanding of how to make search marketing work for your business.
The important players in search marketing are
»» Searchers: People who type search queries into search engines
»» Search engines: Programs that searchers use to find products, services,
content, and more on the Internet
»» Marketers: The owners or managers of websites and other channels that
publish content and make offers to people on the Internet
As a marketer and business owner, you want to maximize the amount of traffic,
leads, and sales you get from search marketing. To do this, you must give searchers and search engines what they want.
Understanding searchers’ needs
The key for both marketers and search engines is understanding the mindset of
searchers. By understanding what motivates searchers, marketers and search
engines can serve them better.
People use search engines every day for everything from researching a school
project to looking for reviews for a big-ticket purchase like a car or home. What
motivates searchers is simple: They want to find the most relevant, highestquality web pages about anything and everything they’re searching for, and they
want to find those pages now.
If marketers and search engines can satisfy searchers, everyone wins. Searchers
find what they want; marketers get traffic, leads, and sales; and search engines
gain users.
Knowing what search engines want
A search engine company, such as Google, is a business, and like any other business, it must generate revenue to survive. As a result, it’s useful to understand
how search engines generate that revenue. If you understand what motivates the
search engine, you can plan your search strategy accordingly.
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Most search engines generate most of their revenue by selling advertising.
Figure 2-1 shows a typical set of advertisements in a Google search results page.
FIGURE 2-1:
Google displays
ads at the top
and in the topright corners of
search result
pages.
Source: www.google.com
As a result, it’s in a search engine’s best interest to serve the best, most popular, most relevant content to searchers. Failure to deliver what searchers want
sends those searchers elsewhere to find what they’re looking for, which means
less opportunity to show ads, which reduces its ability to ask for high advertising
rates.
If you want to build a successful search marketing campaign, you need to stay within
the borders of each search engine’s terms of service. Search marketing tactics that
­violate those terms of service are called black hat; those that play within the rules are
called white hat.
Black hat search marketing tactics are not only unethical (and sometimes illegal), but
also bad for business. Violating the terms of a search engine may create short-term
results, but those results won’t be sustainable. Search engines like Google continuously
update the algorithms they use to rank websites in an effort to squash black hat methods such as link buying and keyword stuffing.
Marketers who use white-hat search marketing strategies — those who follow the
search engine’s terms of service and build a better user experience for searchers — are
rewarded with higher rankings and more traffic, leads, and sales from search engines.
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BLACK HATS AND WHITE HATS
Other search engines generate revenue by establishing affiliate relationships with
the businesses to which they refer traffic. When a searcher visits one of these
affiliate partners and makes a purchase, the search engine makes a commission
on that sale.
Targeting Search Queries
One way that people discover your business, brands, products, and services is by
using search queries typed in search engines. A searcher navigates to a search
engine, types a keyword or phrase, and taps or clicks a search button, and the
search engine returns popular, relevant results. The searcher clicks or taps one of
those results, and he’s off to the races.
To help make your brand discoverable and available to a searcher, marketers have
two broad categories of search queries to keep in mind:
»» Branded queries: Keywords or keyword phrases that searchers type in
search engines when they’re looking for a specific business, brand, product,
or service. The search query “Southwest Airlines,” for example, is a branded
query that Southwest Airlines should target.
»» Nonbranded queries: Keywords or keyword phrases that searchers type
in to search engines when they’re not looking for a specific business, brand,
product, or service. The search query “fly to Chicago,” for example, is a
nonbranded query that Southwest Airlines should target.
By understanding the preceding two categories, marketers can target keywords or
keyword phrases to help make their brand discoverable and available to searchers.
Suppose that a searcher is looking for a bed-and-breakfast inn, and she types the
search query “historic bed and breakfast near me” in Google (see Figure 2-2).
This query is a nonbranded search query. The searcher isn’t looking for a ­particular
bed-and-breakfast; she’s simply researching and discovering historic bed-andbreakfasts nearby.
On the other hand, the searcher might be searching for a specific bed-andbreakfast, such as Austin’s Inn at Pearl Street, in which case she types a query
such as “reviews of Austin’s Inn at Pearl Street.” This query is a branded search
query (see Figure 2-3).
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FIGURE 2-2:
Using Search Marketing
A discoverable
search query for
local bed-andbreakfast inns.
FIGURE 2-3:
A branded search
query for Austin’s
Inn at Pearl
Street.
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Defining a search query
Each of the billions of search queries entered in search engines each day contain
the intent and context of an individual searcher. Intent, as it relates to search marketing, involves understanding what the searcher is looking for. The context of the
query is made up of the reason why the searcher has that intent. In other words,
intent is the “what” of a search query, and context is the “why.”
Following are examples of intent and context of three people who might be
searching the Internet:
»» Person 1: I want to start a vegetable garden because I want to add organic
food to my diet.
•
•
Intent: Want to start a vegetable garden.
Context: Add organic food to my diet.
»» Person 2: I want to start a vegetable garden because I want to spend more
time outdoors.
•
•
Intent: Want to start a vegetable garden.
Context: Spend more time outdoors.
»» Person 3: I want to start a vegetable garden because I want to save money on
grocery bills.
•
•
Intent: Want to start a vegetable garden.
Context: Save money on groceries.
Each searcher in these examples has the same intent: start a vegetable garden.
But each person has a slightly different reason for wanting to start that vegetable
garden. In other words, the context behind the intent is different in each case.
A search marketer should focus on satisfying both the intent and context of
searchers. Each intent and context represents a query worth targeting. In the preceding examples, searchers might type any of the following queries in a search
engine:
»» “start a vegetable garden” (intent only)
»» “add organic food to my diet” (context only)
»» “start an organic vegetable garden” (intent and context)
A business that sells vegetable gardening products or services would do well to
target all these keywords based on the intent and context of its ideal customer.
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Choosing the right queries to target
Each query typed in a search engine contains the searcher’s intent and context,
or both. To determine the intent and context that your ideal customer is typing
in search engines, you need to do keyword research, using tools such as Google
AdWords Keyword Planner (https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner).
Coming up with keywords the
“old-fashioned” way
Before you start using keyword tools, one of the best ways to do keyword research
is to brainstorm ideas with anyone who comes into contact with your customers.
After all, you know your customers’ wants, needs, and pain points better than
a keyword tool does. Gather the appropriate members of your team to answer
questions about your customers. This will help you come up with relevant and
specific keywords and keyword phrases to research with a keywords tool. After
you have completed the brainstorming phase, move on to your respective keyword
tool to see what keywords and phrases will work best for your search marketing
campaign.
To help with your brainstorming, answer questions like these in the subsequent
example. Following are examples of how online shoe retailer Zappos might answer
questions to sell shoes to people who plan to run a marathon:
»» Q: What is our ideal customer researching before he buys our product
or service?
A: The ideal diet for a marathon runner.
»» Q: What is our ideal customer interested in that’s related to our product or
service?
»» Q: What barriers does our ideal customer need to overcome before she buys
our product or service?
A: Finding time to train for a marathon.
»» Q: What does our ideal customer hope to accomplish with our product or
service?
A: Running a marathon.
»» Q: What information does our ideal customer need to evaluate our product or
service against our competitors’ products or services?
A: Compare the weight of Nike and Adidas running shoes to train for a
marathon.
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A: Treating sore leg muscles.
»» Q: What information does our customer need to buy our product or service?
A: The shoe-return policy.
Using keyword research tools
After brainstorming, you move on to your chosen keyword research tool. Dozens
of good keyword research tools are available for purchase, but the free Google
AdWords Keyword Planner (https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner)
meets the needs of most search marketers. Google provides this free tool to allow
advertisers to research the behavior of searchers who use its search engine. Advertisers use the information provided by this tool to choose keywords they bid on.
The Keyword Planning tool is free, but you need to sign up for an Adwords account
to use it.
Typing a keyword phrase like “run a marathon” in the Keyword Planner tool (see
Figure 2-4) returns several keywords to target:
»» “running event”
»» “marathon runner”
»» “marathon tips”
FIGURE 2-4:
Planning
keywords with
Google AdWords
Keyword Planner.
Source: https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home?_c=7275033004&_
u=6764193964&authuser=0&_o=cues#search
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The Google AdWords Keyword Planner gives you the following information about
each query:
»» Average monthly searchers: The average number of times people have
searched for this exact keyword based on the date range and targeting
settings that you selected.
»» Competition: The number of advertisers bidding on this keyword or keyword
phrase for a paid traffic campaign (turn to Book 5, Chapter 1 for information
about paid traffic). In the Competition column, you can see whether the
competition for a keyword idea is low, medium, or high.
Don’t be discouraged if you research keywords and find that the Google AdWords
Keyword Planner has no information to report. The main reason to use this tool
is to research keywords to target on Google’s advertising platform. Keywords that
may be absolutely relevant to your business, and thus good keywords to target,
may not appear in this tool, particularly for branded queries such as the names of
your products, services, or brands.
Satisfying searchers
Much like bloodhounds on a hunt, people often search the web until they satisfy
their intent, context, or both. To compete for a search query, a marketer needs to
create a web page or asset that satisfies the searcher’s query. That web page or
asset could be anything from a blog post to a product demonstration video.
Other assets you might create to satisfy the intent of a searcher include podcasts,
videos, and social media updates.
The web page or asset needs to be discoverable by the search engine that the
marketer is targeting. The Pinterest search engine, for example, discovers new
Pinterest pins added to your Pinterest boards, and the Google search engine discovers new web pages and blog posts added to your website (assuming that you
haven’t created any technical barriers for the search engine). You find more about
technical barriers in the “Optimizing for search engine robots” section, later in
this chapter.
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The web page shown in Figure 2-5 satisfies the intent of any searcher who enters
the query “mojito recipe” in the Google search engine, and the web page shown in
Figure 2-6 satisfies the intent of a searcher who enters the query “buy canon eos
70d” in the Amazon search engine.
FIGURE 2-5:
Allrecipes.
com satisfies a
­searcher’s intent
for a mojito
recipe.
Source: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/147363/the-real-mojito/
FIGURE 2-6:
A search query in
Amazon satisfies
a search for the
Canon EOS 70D.
Source: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-
keywords=buy+canon+eos+70d
If the web page or asset you create satisfies the intent, context, or both of a
searcher, it has a chance to be shown to that searcher. That said, many factors
determine which web pages and assets are shown for any given query. The following sections go into more detail about these factors and how to optimize your
assets so that they’re more likely to appear in front of your ideal searcher.
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CONVERTING PROSPECTS TO CUSTOMERS
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the goal of your search marketing is to get better
rankings in search engines. Also, don’t make the mistake of thinking that search marketing is just about getting traffic. The goal of search marketing, as with all marketing, is to
move your customer from one stage of the customer journey to the next.
For every searcher who visits your blog, YouTube channel, or Pinterest home page, you
need to provide a call to action to take the next step.
Suppose that a searcher types a query indicating that he’s looking for a demonstration
of your product. He lands on your product page and finds a product-demonstration
video. Great job! You anticipated the intent of your ideal customer and created a page
that satisfies that intent on an appropriate channel. Don’t squander this visit by failing
to make a call to action to the next logical step in the buyer journey. In this case, the
appropriate next step is to buy the product. Failing to make a clear call to action to this
logical next step isn’t just bad marketing but also a bad user experience. This person is
looking for a demonstration of your product, which means he may also be looking to
buy it. Provide a call to action that will help to move him to the next step in his customer
journey with you.
After you’ve built a web page or asset that targets a specific intent, context, or
both, you need to determine where that asset will “live.” The various places you
can house your web pages or assets are channels. Starting with a searcher’s intent
and context helps you determine the correct channel to use to deliver the web
page or asset. If you want to satisfy searchers with the intent of understanding
how your product works, for example, you might create a product-demonstration
video, so it would make sense to choose YouTube as the channel for this asset.
In this section, you find strategies to use in optimizing your assets for several
popular channels.
You may have the urge to overfill your pages with your chosen keywords (called
keyword stuffing) to make sure they’re noticed by search engines. Don’t do this.
Search engine providers have built-in algorithms to penalize you for it.
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Optimizing Your Assets
for Specific Channels
Optimizing for Google
Your website is a channel that can get traffic from search engines such as Google.
This section lays out the steps for optimizing a web page for Google.
Step 1: Write the <title> tag
The <title> tag is the most critical search ranking element on any web page. This
tag is displayed on search engine results pages and is meant to be an accurate and
concise description of a page’s content, telling search engines and searchers what
the page is about. The <title> tag appears in blue on search engine results pages
and is the link that users click to access the related content (see Figure 2-7).
FIGURE 2-7:
Examples of
<title> tags.
Keywords are essential for <title> tags, so start those tags with your most important keywords for that page. Using the keywords you’ve chosen for the page you’re
optimizing, create a title for your piece that’s no more than 70 characters long;
otherwise, the search engine may truncate it. The <title> tag should read well
because it’s displayed prominently on the search results page.
Step 2: Write a meta description
The meta description, often displayed directly below the <title> tag, further
describes the content of the page. Typically, searched keywords appear in boldface
in the meta description. Although search engines don’t use your meta descriptions
to determine your ranking for a search query, searchers read these descriptions to
determine whether they want to click your results.
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The meta description is the elevator pitch for your page, so make it compelling.
Include words that describe the content of the page in a way that entices searchers
to click your result.
Keep your meta description shorter than 150 characters; otherwise, it’s likely to be
truncated on the search result page. Consider using a call to action in your meta
description, such as “Shop now!,” “Click here for free shipping,” or “Browse the
latest trends.”
Figure 2-8 shows some examples of meta descriptions.
FIGURE 2-8:
Examples of meta
descriptions.
A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) describes a site or page to visitors and search
engines, so it’s important to keep the URL relevant and accurate so that the content ranks well. A URL (also referred to as a slug) is set up like this:
www.YourSiteNameHere.com/keywords-that-describe-this-page
Include your keywords in the URL after the forward slash (/). Search engines use
the keywords in this section of the URL to further determine what the page is
about and where it should rank. Although the keywords in your URL don’t play
as big of a role in your search rankings as your title tag does, keywords are still
important elements to optimize.
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Step 3: Optimize the URL
Step 4: Write body copy
Text on a page, also called content or copy, gives the search engine information
about what search queries your page will satisfy, so it’s important for every page
on your site to have text. Having content on a web page is also very helpful in
getting the page to rank in search. Aim for 500 words or more on each page, but
don’t fill your web pages with low-quality content just to get words on the page.
On video- or image-heavy pages, of course, you may have very few words on a
page, and that’s okay. Always err on the side of satisfying the intent of searchers
by giving them enough information to make sense of the page.
Throughout the body, use relevant keywords or keyword phrases that describe the
page. Include your keywords and variations on those keywords in the body titles
or headings. In short, use the keywords you’re targeting and variations on those
keywords anywhere it seems natural to do so.
Step 5: Optimize the <alt> tag
The <alt> tag provides alternative information for an image on your page, in the
form of text, for users who can’t view the image (because of a slow Internet connection or an image error, for example). In the <alt> tag, describe the image while
using the keyword phrase you’ve chosen for your piece.
Optimizing for YouTube
YouTube is a search engine and, therefore, is interested in keeping searchers
within its network so that it can show those searchers ads. As a result, YouTube
sends traffic to videos that are keeping YouTube visitors engaged on its site.
Here’s how to get more search traffic to your videos on YouTube.
Step 1: Create engaging thumbnails
The YouTube search engine measures how many people see your video in their
search results against the number who play your video. If your videos get played
often, YouTube rewards them with higher rankings.
The most important factor in increasing the number of plays that a video gets is the
video thumbnail, which is the image searchers see for the video (see Figure 2-9)
in the YouTube search results. A compelling thumbnail can have a big effect on
your click-through rate and, thus, your rankings in YouTube.
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FIGURE 2-9:
Each video image
is a thumbnail.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/
To engage your audience, make sure that your thumbnails are bright, vibrant, and
crisp. Include compelling text for each thumbnail to tell viewers about the content
and to entice them to click or tap it.
If you don’t have a graphic designer, you can create professional-looking thumbnails with a tool called Canva (https://www.canva.com/). This tool offers many
free and paid templates you can use. Also, you can import your own images into
Canva to create thumbnails that set your videos apart.
YouTube’s goal is to keep searchers within the confines of YouTube so that it can
show ads to those searchers. The number of shares, views, and comments your
videos receive indicates to YouTube how well your videos are keeping searchers
engaged.
In addition, a video with lots of views, more likes than dislikes, and favorable
comments proves to new viewers the quality of the content. Good quality leads
to more likes and shares. In the description and in the video itself, be sure to ask
viewers to like, comment, share, and check out more of your videos.
Step 3: Optimize content for keywords
Like your website, your YouTube videos need to be optimized for keywords. Make
sure you include the keyword(s) or keyword phrase(s) in the video’s title, the
description, the tags, the filename of the video file you upload, and the video you
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Step 2: Ask for engagement
create. This practice helps users find your video and improves your rankings and
relevancy on the YouTube platform.
To gain more insight into your score, as well as other metrics, you can use a tool
like vidIQ (http://vidiq.com/) to track and manage your channel.
Step 4: Look at retention
How long people watch your video is known as audience retention, which is an
important metric to measure. The YouTube reporting suite allows you to view
retention metrics, as shown in Figure 2-10.
FIGURE 2-10:
Examining video
retention in
YouTube.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/analytics?o=U#r=retention
It’s normal for a video to gradually lose viewers; not everyone watches a video
the whole way through. That said, pay attention to audience retention on outlier
videos that do very well or very poorly. Attempt to determine why some videos
have high retention while others have trouble holding people’s attention. Then
optimize and change your video content accordingly.
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Optimizing for Pinterest
Believe it or not, Pinterest is a search engine. In fact, it’s an important search
engine to understand if you sell physical products. Follow three steps to optimize
search for your Pinterest channel.
Step 1: Enhance your images
Pinterest is all about the pictures. You want big, beautiful, crisp pictures to grab
people’s attention. Next, include a text overlay on your image. The text overlay
serves as the pin’s headline, providing context and further describing the pin.
The size and shape of your images matter on Pinterest. The platform is vertically
oriented, so make sure that the images you use are vertical with an aspect ratio of
2:3 to 1:3.5 and a minimum width of 600 pixels. You can use horizontal images for
your pins, of course, but vertical images tend to do better.
Pins with an aspect ratio greater than 1:3.5 are truncated.
As mentioned in the YouTube section, you can use Canva (https://www.canva.
com/) to craft engaging pins with professional images and eye-catching fonts.
Step 2: Optimize board covers
Pinterest pins are categorized and housed in boards. You can find your boards on
your profile page. Like the images you use for your pins, your board covers should
be optimized with engaging, professional pictures that have clear titles to further
describe the board.
Creativity is important in Pinterest, but avoid being cute, creative, or punny. The
Pinterest search engine is less sophisticated than search engines such as Google,
so your search results will improve if you use your target keywords verbatim when
naming pins and boards and when adding descriptions.
To discover the best keywords for your pin, board, or description, use the Pinterest
platform to research your keywords, as follows:
1.
2.
Type a keyword or keyword phrase in the Pinterest search engine.
Make note of the suggested keywords Pinterest provides below the
keyword.
When you search in Pinterest, it gives prompts for keyword and keyword
phrases related to what you’re searching for. This can be used to provide
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Step 3: Target keywords
inspiration for keywords and phrases to optimize for in Pinterest. See
Figure 2-11 for an example of searching for “DIY ready projects” in the
Pinterest platform.
3.
Create new pins and boards for any relevant keywords suggested by
Pinterest, and include these keywords in the descriptions of those pins
and boards.
FIGURE 2-11:
An example
of prompts
­Pinterest gives
when searching
the platform.
Source: https://www.pinterest.com/
Optimizing for Amazon
If you’re selling on Amazon, you need to understand how its search engine operates. To get a product page to rank on Amazon, follow these four steps.
Step 1: Build sales with promotions and launches
To Amazon, lots of sales in a short amount of time indicate that a product is hot
and that it should be moved up in the search rankings. Use periodic promotions,
sales, and launches to increase sales velocity, and watch your rankings soar.
Step 2: Increase reviews
Reviews are extremely important on the Amazon platform, and lots of positive
reviews indicate to Amazon that your product should be moved up in the search
rankings. Even if people love your product, they may not take the time to review
it. Remind and encourage people who have bought your product to write a review
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with tools such as Feedback Genius (https://www.sellerlabs.com/feedbackgenius/), which helps you message customers while staying within Amazon’s
terms of use.
Step 3: Create a compelling product name
If you want people to click your product, you need to have a compelling product name. A cute or clever name may sound cool, but it can be vague, causing
people to overlook it because they don’t know what the product is. To increase the
click-through rate, make sure that your product’s name accurately describes what
the product is and does. Look to your competitors for inspiration; see how they
­present their names on Amazon.
People don’t buy products on Amazon; they buy pictures of products. Include as
many clear, crisp product images as necessary to satisfy the needs of a prospective customer. When buying on Amazon, your buyer can’t hold your product in
his hand or examine it, so you need to include quality pictures that demonstrate
exactly what the buyer will get. The more expensive or complex the product, the
more images you’re likely to need.
Step 4: Create keyword-targeted product pages
Your Amazon product page contains text, and every one of those words helps
determine your rankings. Include the keyword or phrase you’re targeting in
the title of the page and throughout the product description. Aim for a product description of 250 words or more. Don’t stuff the description with keywords,
though, and keep user experience in mind. Favor quality over quantity. As with
product images, the more expensive or complex a product is, the more detailed a
product description you need.
Podcasting is an effective and affordable way to distribute content on the Internet. If you’re podcasting, you need to understand how iTunes ranks podcasts so
that you can get more exposure to iTunes users. Take three steps to improve your
search rankings within iTunes.
Step 1: Solicit reviews
Positive reviews tell iTunes that your podcast is worthwhile and should be
rewarded with high search rankings. To generate reviews, use the podcast itself
to ask people to leave reviews. At least once per episode, have a call to action to
remind people to review your podcast.
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Optimizing for iTunes
Step 2: Create a clear title and
a clean cover design
You want a specific title and a sharp cover design not only to describe your podcast, but also to attract an audience. A cute title is likely to get lost or passed
over because people won’t know what your show is about. Therefore, be precise
in your title, and include keywords that improve your rankings and help searchers find you. In that same vein, include keywords within the episode’s title and
description.
Next, include a sleek cover design for your podcast — one that demonstrates the
theme of your podcast but isn’t too busy. Keep in mind that your podcast cover is
the size of a thumbnail. Keep the cover simple; otherwise, your message is likely
to get lost.
Step 3: Grow downloads
Like reviews, the number of downloads your podcast receives indicates the quality of that podcast. As a result, download velocity has a direct effect on your
search results in iTunes. Steady, consistent increases in downloads improve your
rankings.
To increase downloads as you launch your podcast, publish three to five episodes
at the same time, because the more times you publish in the beginning, the more
episodes people have access to and the more downloads you’re going to see as
people subscribe. As you gain subscribers after the first couple of weeks, you can
publish on a consistent date, such as one episode every Tuesday, to let your audience know when to expect your latest episode.
Optimizing for review sites
If you’re marketing a local business such as a restaurant, hotel, or retail store,
you need to focus some of your search optimization efforts on review sites such as
Yelp and TripAdvisor. Following are two steps to take to optimize for those sites.
Step 1: Gain legitimate reviews
You don’t want to “game” reviews; reviews that aren’t legitimate can result in
backlash from both your customers and the review site. Instead, you want to
encourage honest reviews by making sure that the customer experience is topnotch and deserving of a good review.
That said, you can certainly encourage your customers to submit legitimate
reviews with tools such as TripAdvisor’s Review Express. A second method is to
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ask customers for their email addresses and for product or service reviews at the
point of sale. Later, you can follow up with people and remind them to review by
sending them an email, and you can entice people to review by offering giveaways
or contests.
After someone gives you a review, respond by thanking the person for his time and
letting him know that he’s been heard. If someone gives you a negative review,
respond to that person with empathy so that she knows that she’s been heard.
Explain your side of the story, and if the review requires more attention, move it
to a private channel such as email or phone. It’s best to handle customer-service
issues outside public channels like review sites.
On most review sites, review scores outweigh the number of reviews. Focus on
getting fantastic reviews from satisfied customers. Sure, the sheer number of
reviews you receive is important, but only if those reviews indicate that your customers are happy with your business.
Step 2: Claim your profile
If you’ve been in business for a while, you’re likely listed on virtually every review
site, whether you know it or not. Visit the relevant review sites, and search for your
business. Then claim your business (or start a profile if needed) on the review site
by answering questions and performing verification checks that prove the business is yours. By claiming your business, you can manage your profile, make edits,
and add information to your profile on the review site.
Optimizing for search engine robots
Search engine robots are programs that visit web pages and “crawl” or index the
content on those pages. However, if barriers have been placed, the robot can’t
crawl the page, so that page doesn’t get indexed or served to searchers. One of
your search marketing goals should be to make it as easy as possible for search
robots to access and index your pages.
At this point, search marketing can become extremely technical. If your website is
unintentionally creating barriers and “speed bumps” for search engines, you may
need to involve a search engine optimization (SEO) professional who understands
the technical side of search marketing.
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Fix any inaccuracies in your profile, and add information that current and potential customers may find helpful, such as hours of operation, location, contact
information, and company history. Within the description, include keywords
wherever it makes sense to do so, and use categorization appropriately to improve
your search rankings within the review site platform.
To determine whether your website has robot optimization issues, install Google
Search Console (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home) on your
website. Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a free tool
that allows you to see your website as the Google search engine sees it. You can
view important technical information about search robots’ capability to index
your website, including the following:
»» Index status: The total number of URLs from your site that have been added
to Google’s index. If your website has 100 pages, for example, you should see
that number of pages in the index-status report.
»» URL errors: Pages that Google is having difficulty accessing. Investigate the
reasons why pages have errors, and repair them.
»» Security issues: If your site contains malware, it will appear in the Google
Search Console. A site with security issues is very unlikely to be served traffic
by search engines like Google. Address malware issues immediately.
Earning Links
A search marketer must create a website that earns links from external sources.
Links are the Internet equivalent of positive word of mouth about your business.
For instance, if a personal finance blog links to the personal finance site Quicken.
com, that link from the blog is saying that Quicken has quality content that the
blogger considers trustworthy and relevant; it’s the Internet equivalent of a referral in the physical world. Pages with more links pointing to them generally get
better search results than pages with fewer links.
Links that point to a web page are considered to be votes for that page. Search
engines take into account the volume and, more important, the quality of the
links to a page to determine which pages to serve in their results for a particular
keyword search query.
The following sections discuss how to earn links by using search marketing tactics
that stay within the search engine’s terms of service and avoid black hat tactics,
as stated in the “Black hats and white hats” sidebar, earlier in this chapter.
Step 1: Cross-link your own content
The method of building links that’s most under your control is cross-linking on
your own site. If a financial planning website publishes a blog post titled “Ten
Mistakes to Avoid When Planning for Retirement,” it would make sense, for both
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the reader and the search engine, to find a cross-link from this blog post to a page
explaining the company’s retirement-planning services.
Linking within your own website improves user experience and sends signals to
search engines about what pages are important on your website. Cross-link to
important pages on your website wherever and whenever it makes sense to do so,
while keeping user experience in mind.
Step 2: Study your competitors’ links
The next step is doing some competitive research. Using a tool such as Link
Explorer (https://moz.com/link-explorer), you can research your major competitors to see what sites are linking to them. Then reach out to those sites to see
whether they’re interested in linking to your site as well.
Step 3: Create generous content
You can earn links by creating so-called generous content: content that mentions
other people, especially influential people who could link back to you or share
your content on their social networks. One way to create generous content is to
write an article about a specific person or brand and then link to the appropriate
site. This article may take the form of a biography or an interview.
The bottom line is that to earn links to your website, you need to start giving out
some “link love” of your own. Be generous with your website by quoting others
and referring your visitors to pages you like. Make sure that you let people know
when you link to them.
Step 4: Create content worthy of a link
Great content provides assets that people want to share with their network. ­Create
outstanding content, particularly on your blog, that people link to because it provides tremendous value. For example, a bank that wants to attract prospective
homebuyers might build a free and easy-to-use monthly mortgage calculator. If
others find this tool useful, they will link to it and improve that bank website’s
standing in the search engines.
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Another way to build generous content is to create a crowdsourced post that
asks experts to write 100 words or so on the same topic and then links to each
expert’s site.
Step 5: Publish primary research
One powerful way to generate links is to publish primary research: new research
that you collected yourself. Because primary research can be difficult and timeconsuming to create, it’s valuable and rare. Solid primary research is in great
demand and often leads to high-quality links as people cite that research on their
web pages.
Step 6: Keep up with the news
The last step is creating newsworthy content and publishing it as the topic in
question is trending. To do this effectively, keep an eye on industry news. One
of the best ways to do that is to use social media, particularly Twitter, because
­Twitter tends to be the nervous system of the Internet.
Be ready to produce content about your industry at a moment’s notice or find
­creative ways to relate trending, newsworthy topics to your industry. This is tough
work, but being one of the first people to create content can have a big payoff:
You’ll be one of only a few sources of information about something, causing other
people to link to you as the story develops. But before you jump the gun, make
sure that you can verify the news story or risk the embarrassment and damage to
your reputation for publishing inaccurate information.
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Understanding why people share
»» Getting your message out on social
platforms
»» Examining the 5 Ws of sharing
»» Trying out social bookmarking
Chapter
3
Making Content
Shareable
W
hen the web was still a novelty, getting people to read your online posts
was easy. Well, those days are clearly over.
The likelihood that someone will read something you wrote gets more remote all
the time. Who knew that getting people to read and share what you create would
be one of the biggest problems faced by content marketers in 2019?
In this chapter, you examine how strategically sharing your content can make the
difference between a wildly popular brand and one that is ignored. You also look
at why people share content, as well as where and how they share it.
Embracing Shareability as a Strategy
One battle cry that can be heard throughout marketing departments today is
the notion that sharing content should be everyone’s job. It used to be that only
customer-facing employees were encouraged to share. Now everyone across all
departments is expected to help the company gain a wider audience.
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Understanding sharing patterns
You can make content sharing a company-wide endeavor in two immediate ways:
»» Focus some attention on your “employee channel.” The employee channel
refers to the pipeline of company content that you supply to your employees
so that they can champion the company. Your job is to help your employees
share content and promote the company regardless of which department
they’re in.
By encouraging what the Prophet /Altimeter Group (https://www.prophet.
com/altimeter/about/), a leading research and consulting company, calls
the Culture of Content (CoC), you can develop a cycle of production and
promotion that boosts the profile of all your content and makes your
company smarter.
The Altimeter report “The Culture of Content Best Practices,” by Rebecca Lieb
and Jessica Groopman with Susan Etlinger includes the following
recommendations:
•
•
•
Let an obsession with the customer guide content creation.
Align content with your brand.
Constantly evangelize your content among employees to maintain the CoC.
Book 2, Chapter 4, deals with sales enablement. You learn about the need
to give all employees who deal with customers the most up-to-date information. Having an employee channel takes that idea even further, requiring that
you help all your employees participate in sharing content regardless of
department.
»» Be channel agnostic after developing content to share. The idea of being
“channel agnostic” may seem counterintuitive. When you develop content,
you want to pay attention to the audience demographics on that specific
channel. Doing so is important, especially when you’re creating ads on that
channel, such as through Facebook. What being channel agnostic means is
that you shouldn’t be so channel focused after content is shared. For example,
Copyblogger eliminated its Facebook account in 2014, yet still gets a lot of its
content shared on that channel. Copyblogger understood that its audience
would be sharing its content across all the social media platforms and didn’t
want to expend energy directly on Facebook for what it found to be a minimal
return.
You don’t have to do the same — you know your audience best. But you
should understand how content spreads before you create a sharing strategy.
An article on Contently, a company that helps companies and freelancers
deliver content (http://contently.com/strategist/2015/04/29/
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buzzfeed-just-cracked-the-code-on-how-social-content-spreadsand-its-a-big-deal/), detailed how BuzzFeed (http://buzzfeed.com)
Making Content
Shareable
used a proprietary software technology called Pound to determine how
content spreads on the web. Contently found that content spreads in
clusters. Someone may share a post on Twitter, which in turn gets shared
on Facebook, which then kicks off a flurry of activity on Google+. The most
important takeaway from this is that you do everything you can to make
your content shareable.
Although Google+ is no longer a social media platform of choice, it still has value as
a search engine. It currently has 100 million monthly users according to ­ebizmba.
(http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites).
Sharing as a bottom-line issue
Ratings, reviews, recommendations — doesn’t it seem that nothing can be sold
without someone’s having first voiced an opinion? Actually, that is the case. If you
see a product that doesn’t have reviews or ratings, you may be reluctant to be the
first person to buy. Items such as books and movies have always been rated and
discussed, but now every grocery product and children’s toy needs to have a host
of opinions before it’s considered by a buyer.
So you need to have your products and services reviewed, but should you care
about getting that content shared? Does it really make that much of a difference
to the bottom line?
Two online companies — ShareThis and Canva — think so.
A study done by ShareThis (http://sharethis.com; see Figure 3-1), a company
that makes sharing tools, set out to determine the answer to the question, “Does
sharing matter to the bottom line?”
The study, called “The Return on a Share,” found that, indeed, a distinct business
case can be made for sharing. Findings include:
»» An excellent recommendation boosts the average value of a share by 9.5
percent over a neutral one
»» Positive shares created a 9.6 percent increase in purchases
»» Bad recommendations instigated lower purchases by 11 percent
»» Recommendations exceed price and brand when considering purchases
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FIGURE 3-1:
ShareThis.
If you need to convince your manager that sharing is key to your content marketing strategy, show her these statistics as part of your argument.
Another interesting finding from the Return on Share study: “Mobile is considered two times as social as desktop.” Don’t forget your mobile audience!
Another company that presents compelling evidence for the value of sharing content
is Canva, a design company. Andrianes Pinantoan, formerly Head of Growth Marketing for Canva, details on the Convince & Convert blog (http://www.convinceand
convert.com/content-marketing/how-to-increase-shareability/) how Canva
increased the traffic to its design school blog (https://designschool.canva.com/;
see Figure 3-2) by over 220 percent.
Canva decided to focus on shareability by testing everything it posted to its blog,
and then it developed its content strategy by doing the following:
»» Looking at the content that was being successfully shared by its competitors
»» Focusing on writing in-depth posts
»» Using storytelling to make its content more interesting
»» Developing great headlines
»» Adding more visuals
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Making Content
Shareable
FIGURE 3-2:
Canva Design
School.
In 60 days, Canva increased its traffic by 226 percent. Not bad for two months of
effort! Can you apply some of these tactics? They are best practices that should
help you make significant progress.
To encourage more sharing, you can create an inline tweet that is irresistible to
share by using Click to Tweet (http://coschedule.com/click-to-tweet). It’s a
WordPress plug-in by CoSchedule. All the user has to do is click the ready-made
box within the post, and off the tweet goes. Now that’s easy!
Uncovering the Five Ws and
One H of Online Sharing
All journalism students are taught to cover the Five Ws and one H in their
reporting — who, what, when, where, why, and how. This is a framework for
asking questions that will uncover the most important information. Using this
structure to understand online sharing works quite well.
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Knowing who shares content, and why
It’s important to know what motivates people to share content so that you can
effectively appeal to your constituency. The Consumer Insight Group at the New
York Times did a study to determine why people share online. The study’s methodology included in-person interviews, a quantitative survey, and a one-week
sharing panel.
Among the very interesting findings was the fact that they found six personas of
online sharers. Table 3-1 lists these personas and how, what, and why they share.
TABLE 3-1
Key Insights from the “Psychology of Sharing” Study
Keywords
Commonly Used
Preferred Way to Share
Content that serves the needs of
friends and family, such as health
and finance articles
Helpful, reliable
Email
Careerists
Content on business-related ideas
to improve their company
Valuable, network
LinkedIn
Hipsters
Content that defines who they are
Cutting edge, young
Less likely to email;
prefer to share on
social networks
Boomerangs
Content that gets them noticed and
provokes a reaction
Validation, empowered
Twitter and Facebook
Connectors
Deals and introductions to make
everything better for friends
and family
Creative, thoughtful
Facebook
Selectives
Careful about what they choose to
share with individuals; they want to
hit the mark
Resourceful, informative
Email
Persona
What/Why They Share
Altruists
This knowledge of personas and why and how they share content is very valuable
when you’re putting your own personas together. (See Book 2, Chapter 2 for more
about your own personas.) Look at personas through the sharing lens to help you
determine the motivations of your specific audience.
For example, if you are a health-related company, you know that you will have
one group of sharers who want to educate people (altruists). A great illustration
of this motivation, reported by the Sales Lion blog (http://www.thesaleslion.
com/content-marketing-companies-b2b/), is Health Catalyst. Health Catalyst is
a data warehousing and analytics company that was able to get its doctors and
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FIGURE 3-3:
Health ­Catalyst
Knowledge
Center.
Want a really simple yet effective way to determine the shareability of your blog
posts? Have your users take Guy Kawasaki’s “reshare test,” described in an interview on the Social Media Examiner blog at http://www.socialmediaexaminer.
com/content-sharing-with-guy-kawasaki/. The test involves asking users “Are
you sharing something that other people will share with their friends and followers?” Their answers give you information about how your readers view the value
of your content.
Considering what they share
A valuable study was undertaken by BuzzStream (http://buzzstream.com), a
company that provides link building and PR tools, and Fractl (http://frac.tl),
a content-marketing agency, to find out what types of content was shared over
a six-month period. These companies analyzed 220,000 pieces of content using
BuzzSumo (http://buzzsumo.com), a content-analysis software company.
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nurses to share information in the form of ebooks and blog posts and put them
in a Knowledge Center, shown in Figure 3-3. Health Catalyst reports that this
education effort was, in part, responsible for getting the company $50 million in
investor funding. Even though its direct customers were hospitals, the company’s
willingness to share its knowledge resulted in a high profile for a small-sized
company.
MarketingSherpa created a chart showing the types of shared content across
eleven industries, as shown in Figure 3-4 (http://www.marketingsherpa.com/
article/chart/most-and-least-shared-social-content).
FIGURE 3-4:
A MarketingSherpa chart of
the most and
least shared
social content.
Most helpful to the question about what gets shared, Andrea Lehr, former Brand
Relationship Strategist at Fractl,identified the content types:
»» How-to: The standard problem — solution post
»» Lists: A numbered or bulleted list about a specific topic
»» What-if posts: Typically, comparisons of one thing to another
»» Why posts: The author picks a topic and provides points that support the
argument
»» Video: An article with accompanying video that explains the topic
Curious about what type of content made the “most shared” lists? Steve Rayson,
formerly at BuzzSumo, looked at the data collected in the aforementioned study
and had some additional findings:
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»» List posts were the most shared content format; how-to articles were the
second most shared.
Making Content
Shareable
»» Long-form content performed best (articles over 3,000 words).
»» Individual picture-list posts have the potential to go viral. These posts have
pictures as their list items instead of text. Although text list posts did better
overall, BuzzSumo found that picture lists were more likely to go viral if they
were shared (http://buzzsumo.com/blog/buzzfeeds-most-sharedcontent-format-is-not-what-you-think/).
Discovering when they share
Several studies concerning the best time to share on social media have been done
in recent years. Anyone interested in succeeding at content marketing pays some
attention to timing. It makes sense that you’d want to at least attempt to share
your content when people are likely to see it.
In 2018, Sprout Social (https://sproutsocial.com/insights/best-times-topost-on-social-media/) reported on the best times to tweet and post on Twitter
and Facebook:
»» On Twitter: The best time to post on Twitter is Friday 9 to 10 a.m.
»» On Facebook: The best times to post on Facebook to get the most engagement are Wednesday at noon and 2 p.m. and Thursday at 1 and 2 p.m.
It’s great to be mindful of general times to get reshares, but you still want to test
and experiment. Use these findings as guidelines when you’re testing your own
social media campaigns. Audience preferences can change overnight.
Observing where they share
If you were asked in October of 2019 to list the five most popular social networking sites, you probably came up with the same list that ebizMBA (http://www.
ebizmba.com/articles/social-networking-websites) did:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Facebook
YouTube
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn
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These are the go-to sites for sharing that most companies (and users) turn to
first. When it comes to your specific audience, some sites may place higher up or
down, but these would be the likely choices.
When looking at where your communities congregate, you also want to study
niche sites that your audience frequents. For example, if you are a design company
you might want to visit Stack Overflow, (http://stackoverflow.com), a Q&A site
for developers, or SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net). If you sell electronics
and gadgets, you should check out a site like Gizmodo (http://gizmodo.com).
Looking at how people share content
The biggest surprise about sharing is how data is shared. Josh Schwartz is head
of Products, Engineering and Data at Chartbeat (https://chartbeat.com/), a
­company that measures real-time traffic (see Figure 3-5). Schwartz was asked
by Farhad Manjoo at Slate to look at the scrolling and sharing behavior of
Slate’s audience (www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/06/
how_people_read_online_why_you_won_t_finish_this_article.html ),
and his findings were very disconcerting. He found that people frequently tweet
links to articles they’ve only partially read. In Slate’s case, people scroll only
50 percent of the way before tweeting them. BuzzFeed and other online sites have
found similar results.
FIGURE 3-5:
Chartbeat.
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Unfortunately, you can’t simply shorten your content if your audience responds
to the longer format. You need to give your readers what they want and share.
However, you might want to put the most important points and your call to action
up higher in the content.
In an attempt to more effectively evaluate audience interest, companies like
Upworthy, a breaking news site, are looking at “attention minutes” (https://
blog.upworthy.com/what-uniques-and-pageviews-leave-out-and-whywere-measuring-attention-minutes-instead-d12c159d5c96). This means that
companies consider the total amount of time spent on their sites and the total
attention given to a specific piece of content. In this way, they can assess audience
interest instead of just scrolling behavior.
Adding Social Bookmarking
When you’re looking at places where content is shared, don’t overlook bookmarking sites. Users on these sites share articles they find interesting, and others read
them and vote on the ones they like. If your content shows up on one of these
sites, it can
»» Drive traffic to your site
»» Help you rise in Google search results
»» Give your content more visibility and brand recognition
»» Increase your domain authority
Being tagged on one of these sites doesn’t guarantee that the traffic that is generated will stick with you. Don’t be disappointed if the increase is a one-off. At least
you got some recognition.
The top two bookmarking sites you may want to consider are
»» Digg (http://digg.com): Unlike some of the other sites, Digg has a curated
front page. Its content is separated into articles and videos. Users vote by
clicking a digg link to signal their approval. You can sort content by time or
“most shared.”
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Think about the implications of this behavior. When you read about how people
respond to long-form content, it may mean that they like to share long-form
content, but not necessarily read it through to the end. As Manjoo stated, “We’re
in the age of the skim.”
»» Reddit (http://reddit.com): On this site, you can create a community of
your own called a subreddit. Each community has its own moderators and is
separate from the others.
Are you wondering whether you can do anything to make your content even more
shareable? Former Wall Street Internet analyst Mary Meeker says that a post gets
half of all its shares within 6.5 hours on Twitter and 9 hours on Facebook. So you
need to take some actions to keep your content from disappearing.
Making SEO a Priority
When it comes to content marketing, the concept of search engine optimization
(SEO) is often misunderstood. When SEO was fairly new, content writers were
tasked with stuffing as many keywords as possible into a blog post to attract the
search engines. This tactic is long gone along with the people who wanted to help
you game the system. Google is aware of all the “black hat” techniques that people
try to deploy and frequently changes its algorithm.
At this point, Google’s clear directive is to have you produce quality content that
employs keywords that help people find you. Your SEO strategy needs to be well
thought out to ensure that your customers can find the content you so carefully
planned to share.
Rather than create a complex list of things you need to do, focus instead on a few
SEO tasks that will have the biggest impact. You can
»» Use long-tail keywords. You still need to use keywords to be found by the
search engines. Long-tail keywords, which means keywords that are really
phrases, work best. For example, in place of the broad phrase “red shoes,”
narrow the phrase with “red sandals wedge discount womens.” In other
words, make sure to be very descriptive so that when someone is searching
for your specific shoe, she can find it.
»» Pay attention to mobile. According to predictions, your mobile audience will
soon make up approximately 50 percent of your total audience. Look at your
site on all possible devices to ensure that it’s mobile ready. The Google
Developers site has a “Mobile-Friendly Test” tool that you can use to test your
site, as shown in Figure 3-6.
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Because you’re not going to “stuff” your site full of keywords anymore, put
them in the places where they can do the most good, such as in your title tag.
Google uses a limited number of characters (55) to display what your site is
about. Make sure to use them wisely. See Book 5, Chapter 2 for more about
the best place for keywords
»» Evaluate results often. You should use analytics to measure what your users
are clicking on. Don’t guess.
»» Improve site load times. This is a boring task, but one that you should not
overlook. People don’t have the patience to wait for your site to load. Ask your
webmaster to check loading times and fix if necessary.
»» Make sure to optimize for video. This one is similar to the preceding item
about loading times. Even though users love video, they won’t wait for yours.
»» Play the long game. The most important Google SEO rules don’t really
change that much. You need quality content to drive your traffic. Optimization
doesn’t happen overnight. Prepare to do the right thing year after year and
you will be rewarded.
FIGURE 3-6:
A Google site test.
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»» Make sure that your keywords are in the right places, such as in titles.
You can always dig deeper into SEO when you have more time or want to engage
a professional to work with you.
Looking for some free SEO Tools to get started? Try these:
»» Moz (https://moz.com/): This company, offers great free tools and a paid
subscription. The free tools include Open Site Explorer, Followerwonk,
MozBar, Moz Local, and MozCast. Using these tools, you can do keyword
searches, analyze anchor text, and a lot more.
»» Ubersuggest (http://ubersuggest.org): This free tool, is so easy to use
that it’s perfect for beginners (and experienced users).
»» SEMrush (http://www.semrush.com): This is a multifaceted set of tools that
helps you develop your SEO, advertising, and link-building strategies. SEMrush
also offers paid tools.
Deploying Hashtags to Encourage Sharing
Many people use hashtags on social platforms as an afterthought (or not at all).
Don’t be one of them. Hashtags really do give your content more visibility and
increase the likelihood that you’ll be reshared on places like Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram. People set content alerts for brand names, products, and specific
keywords. By using hashtags, you immediately get on people’s radar screen and
encourage them to check you out.
Understanding hashtags
Although they may seem unfamiliar, hashtags are simply a way to categorize keywords. By adding the # symbol in front of the keyword, you’re telling the search
engine to pull out and display content designated that way every time someone
uses that term. So, if someone on Twitter or other social platform types the #
before a term, that person will be able to see all the tweets that contain it. People
can get right to the content that interests them most.
Twitter recommends no more than two hashtags per tweet. The concept of “less
is more” applies here.
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Using hashtag tools
To search and use hashtags, you should consider using some of the hashtag tools
created to make using them easier. Here are a few to consider.
Do you want to:
»» Participate in a high profile chat? If you’re hosting an online chat, it can get
confusing when you try to follow responses in the stream. Using a tool like
TweetChat (http://www.tweetchat.com), shown in Figure 3-7, you can
isolate your specific tweets posted in real time during the chat.
»» Determine which hashtag to use in real time? When you’re creating a
tweet, you want to know what tag will most likely garner the highest visibility.
A tool such as RiteTag (https://ritetag.com/), shown in Figure 3-8, can
help you make the best choice.
»» Understand how the tag is being used and who is using it? Hashtagify
(http://hashtagify.me) can show you everything you ever wanted to
know about a hashtag you may want to use as your own.
»» Register or brand a hashtag? Using a tool such as http://twubs.com,
shown in Figure 3-9, you can register a hashtag as your own.
Still want more sharing tools for your blogs, landing pages, and websites? You can
use such free tools as SumoMe (http://sumome.com/) or the WordPress Social
Sharing Optimization (WPSSO SSB) tool (https://wordpress.org/plugins/
wpsso-ssb/).
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It’s helpful to look at the usefulness of hashtags from two angles. The first is
that a hashtag helps you find something; second, it helps you to be found. Sound
simple? It really is. For example, if you want people from a specific area — for
example, New York City — to find your content, you can add a hashtag like #nyc
that makes it easy to spread your message locally. How about borrowing a hashtag
that has a devoted group of followers? If you’re a writer, you can use #amwriting
or #writing to speak to that community.
FIGURE 3-7:
TweetChat.
FIGURE 3-8:
RiteTag.
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FIGURE 3-9:
Twubs.
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Reviewing types of marketing email
»» Building a promotional calendar
»» Writing and designing marketing
email
»» Making your emails deliverable
Chapter
4
Considering Email
Marketing
I
magine that it’s seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning. You wake up to the beeping of your alarm, roll out of bed, and stumble to the kitchen, where the coffee
that you programmed to brew last night is just finishing its drip cycle. You grab
a mug, add some cream and a tiny sprinkle of sugar, and sit down at the kitchen
table. Then you check your email.
If you’re anything like most adult Americans, this routine may be familiar. Email is
not only part of daily routines, but also one of theprimary sources of information.
It probably isn’t a surprise to you that email has a higher return on investment
than any other channel by far. In fact, email returns an average 4,300 percent
return on investment for businesses in the United States.
Email plays an important role in digital marketing because it helps move customers from one stage of the buyer journey (see Book 2, Chapter 3 for more on the
buyer journey) to the next in a way that yields high return on investment. Because
email is both cost effective and time effective, not to mention one of the first
channels that most customers turn to, this channel often yields the best results.
In this chapter, you see how to create an email plan that gives your customers a reason to come to you again and again as you grow your business through
dynamic, relationship-based marketing.
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You can only send email to those people with whom you have a prior business
relationship. For more information about the specifics, check out the CANSPAM act at https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/
can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business.
Understanding Marketing Emails
To start, it’s important to understand the types of marketing emails that
­businesses send. The key to success in email marketing is employing the right
type of email at the right time.
Figure 4-1 shows the goals of three types of emails — promotional, relational, and
transactional — and how they’re used in marketing strategy.
FIGURE 4-1:
The primary goals
of each email
type.
There are a host of email service providers for you to choose from. Depending on
your needs you can choose a free supplier or a pricier one with lots of features.
Free providers include Gmail and Outlook, which have both personal and business
services.
Promotional emails
Promotional emails present the leads and customers on your email list with an
offer. The offers could be promotional content, a gated offer like a whitepaper or
webinar (see Book 3, Chapter 3 for more on gated offers), a brand announcement,
product release, event announcements, or trial offers, just to name a few.
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Promotional emails are the most common marketing emails. This isn’t surprising.
Because 66 percent of consumers have made a purchase as a direct result of an
email marketing message, promotional emails work.
Promotional emails provide value and help tee up sales. They’re great for lead generation, retention, loyalty, engagement, nurturing, sales, and upsells. They should
be part of any email marketing strategy. The problem is that many companies
use them as the only part of their email marketing strategy, so they miss out on
opportunities to relate to customers in diverse ways that are often more effective.
Relational emails deliver value to your customers by providing free content and
information such as subscriber welcomes, newsletters, blog articles, webinar
guides, surveys, social updates, contest announcements, and more.
Relational emails may not sell a product or brand directly, but they build relationships with the customer by adding value upfront. For example, when your email
subscriber receives a piece of high-quality content in an email newsletter, he or
she is interacting with your brand in a deeper, more meaningful way.
Transactional emails
Transactional emails are sent in response to an action that a customer has taken
with your brand. They include messages such as order confirmations, receipts,
coupon codes, shipping notifications, account creation and product return confirmations, support tickets, password reminders, and unsubscribe confirmations.
These emails reengage customers who have engaged with your business in some
way (see “Reengagement campaigns,” later in this chapter) and give the customer
an idea of the voice behind your brand.
Do you follow up quickly and deliver what you promised? Do you have systems in
place that give the customer true value? Do you respect your customers’ wishes?
The leads and customers on your email list are observing how you conduct business, and your transactional email is a big part of that.
Transactional emails meet all the primary goals of marketing. They offer a customer service experience, tell customers about your brand, generate leads,
increase customer retention and loyalty, engage customers, and even help with
sales. Yet most businesses rarely use transactional emails properly, mistakenly
assuming that promotional and relational emails are more effective.
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Considering Email
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Relational emails
THE CHEMISTRY OF TRANSACTIONAL
EMAILS
Think about the last time you purchased something you loved — a pair of boots you’d
wanted for years, a new snowboard, a great bottle of wine, or dinner at your favorite
restaurant. Now consider the way you felt when you made that purchase. You were
excited, right?
As you purchase a product that you’ve been wanting, your brain is flooded with feelgood endorphins. You’re happy about that product. Perhaps an hour later, you get a
shipping confirmation with information about the key features of that snowboard or an
email listing recipes for dishes that go with that wine. You’ve already made a feel-good
purchase, and when the marketer reengages you when you’re still on that high, you
move farther along on your buyer journey.
Research shows, however, that transactional emails have the highest open rates
of the three types and produce 2 percent to 5 percent more revenue than standard
bulk email does. This produces a fascinating conclusion: Transactional emails are
chemically more likely to be successful (see the nearby sidebar “The chemistry of
transactional emails”).
TURNING NEGATIVES TO POSITIVES
Many businesses tend to minimize contact when a customer takes a negative action,
such as returning a product or unsubscribing from an email list. Butthese events are
perfect times to follow up with transactional emails, for these reasons:
446
•
Product returns: Nordstrom, for example, allows customers to return any item
at any time for any reason. This return policy is highly compelling and makes
­purchases feel less risky. When Nordstrom follows up with customers who
make returns, it confirms the positive experience that those customers had with
its return policy.
•
Unsubscriptions: When a customer unsubscribes from your email list, first
respond to his negative action by unsubscribing him (give him what he wants).
Then send him an unsubscribe confirmation that lists other ways he can engage
with your brand, such as social media or bricks-and-mortar stores. Remind him
that you’re happy to communicate with him in the place that best fits his needs.
BOOK 5 Implementing Channel Promotions
Sending Broadcast and Triggered Emails
Email best practices say that you shouldn’t just send every email to every subscriber on your list, and time management best practices say you can’t spend
every day manually sending emails to customers. For these reasons, your emails
should be divided into two types: broadcast and triggered.
Broadcast emails are emails that you manually send to your entire list at a given
time. They aren’t responses to customer actions; you send them at a specific
time and for a specific purpose. Overusing broadcast emails can hurt your customer relationships and cause customers to stop proceeding on the buyer journey.
Broadcast emails should be used for only three purposes:
»» Newsletters: You should send your regular daily, weekly, or monthly email
newsletter to your entire list as promised when your subscribers subscribed.
»» Promotions: Not all promotions should be broadcasted to your entire
audience. Only major promotions that you feel deliver value to your entire
customer base should be sent to everyone. The rest should be sent to a
segmented list (see the next point).
»» Segmentation: Send a broadcast email to your entire list to determine the
specific interests of certain customers and then segment your email lists.
Triggered emails
Most of the emails that you send should be triggered emails, which are fully automated. After you get the content honed and ready, you can let your email service
provider do the work for you.
Triggered emails automatically go out after customers take a specific action. But
there’s a catch: Just because you can trigger something doesn’t mean you should.
In this day of detailed digital automation, you can probably get data to trigger an
email every time your customer logs on to a computer or pours a cup of coffee. But
that would just annoy your customers. Specific actions that trigger an automated
email for each customer action might include
»» New subscriber welcome email
»» Gated offer email (see Book 3,Chapter 3 for more on gated offers)
»» Registration confirmations
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Broadcast emails
»» Purchase receipts
»» Segmented promotion
»» Referral requests after customers leave a review
»» Abandonment of a shopping cart
»» Reengagement after a subscriber has ignored your brand emails for a specific
period
Building a Promotional Calendar
The first question many business owners ask is when to send email. This question
is a good one because a great email campaign will engage customers like never
before if it’s sent at the right time. Conversely, if an email is sent at the wrong
time, it won’t be as effective as it could be.
The first thing you should do as a business owner or marketer after you decide to
start an email marketing strategy is come up with a promotional calendar. That
way, you’ know when to send the messaging your customers need when they want
to receive it.
Using a promotional calendar gives you the opportunity to elicit action. It mobilizes your subscribers to do something that you want them to do — buy something, ask for information, call you, or come to a store, for example. The right
message delivered at the right time elicits action.
Cataloging your products and services
Before you can build an accurate, all-encompassing promotional calendar, you
have to know exactly what you’re promoting. Spend some time carefully cataloging every product and service that your business offers and taking some time
to understand how to promote it best. DigitalMarketer, uses a promotional asset
sheet (see Figure 4-2) to keep a detailed record of their assets. Every time they
release a new asset, they add an asset sheet to their list. And every time they
update their promotional calendar or run an email campaign, they spend some
time updating their asset sheets.
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Considering Email
Marketing
FIGURE 4-2:
A promotional
asset sheet.
Be sure that whatever record you keep of your promotional assets contains the
following information:
»» Name of the product or service
»» Price (both full price and sale price)
»» Where the transaction occurs
»» Whether you’ve sold this product or service via email before
»» Whether past marketing efforts worked (and why or why not)
»» When you last promoted this product or service
»» How many emails you sent about this product
»» Whether the product is currently available to promote (and if not, why not)
You may be wondering why you should spend so much time cataloging your
marketing efforts. Wouldn’t that time be better spent, perhaps, marketing those
assets? The truth is that by carefully tracking the sales of your products, as well
as the marketing campaigns that correspond with your sales, the job of marketing
those assets becomes much easier. When you know what you have available to sell
and the results of the promotions you’ve employed in the past, you can simply do
more of what’s working and less of what isn’t.
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The time you spend cataloging and analyzing these assets and the campaigns surrounding them is valuable marketing time. All marketers should gather the promotional assets from all the products and services they offered so that they know
exactly what they can sell, how they can sell it, whom to sell it to, and (perhaps
most important) when to sell it.
Creating an annual promotional plan
After you catalog your assets, create an annual promotional plan. This plan aligns
your 12-month revenue goals with your annual promotions and marketing efforts
to help you reach your goals. Figure 4-3 shows a sample worksheet.
FIGURE 4-3:
An annual
­promotional
­planning
worksheet.
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BOOK 5 Implementing Channel Promotions
You can download your own 12-Month Promotional Planning Worksheet at
http://www.digitalmarketer.com/email-planning.
Developing a marketing plan
Creating and developing an annual marketing plan takes some time, but after it’s
done, you have a solid framework for building your promotional calendar. Follow
these steps:
1.
Write your 12-month revenue goals.
2.
Considering Email
Marketing
Consider your target revenue goals, and figure out where you want to be each
month to reach those goals.
List your nonrevenue goals.
This list could include nonrevenue growth opportunities such as the launch of
a blog or podcast, the release of a book, or the opening of a new location.
3.
Slot holiday promotions into the appropriate months.
For many retail businesses, November and December are key sales times and
thus require strategic marketing. Other businesses may have peak promotion
at varying times, such as before a major conference or during a certain season.
4.
Slot annual promotions into the appropriate months.
These promotions may include major sales, product releases, or events.
5.
Denote seasonality.
Every business has slow and busy months, so note those months in your plan
so that you can build appropriate promotion during those times.
6.
Slot nonrevenue goals into the appropriate months.
Are you planning to release a new book or launch a new blog in March? You
need space on the promotional calendar for these nonrevenue initiatives.
7.
Break your revenue goals into monthly allotments.
Keep seasonality in mind (see Step 5).
8.
Add your standard revenue projections.
Include promotional efforts, major events, standard rebilling contracts, and
subscriptions.
9.
Subtract your expected revenue from the target revenue.
After doing this, consider how you can fill in the remaining revenue needed.
This step is where your marketing efforts come into play.
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10. Brainstorm additional promotional ideas that could generate the
revenue you need to reach your goals.
Will you need to add new products or services to promote to reach your target
revenue? Can you find new ways to offer the existing products and services
you already have?
11. Spot-check and adjust.
Ask yourself whether your calendar helps you meet your goals in a way that
will be both effective and practical.
12. List additional items that you need to meet your target.
You may need to launch a new product or service, or to create a sales presentation, for example.
Creating a 30-day calendar
The next step is to get down into the nitty-gritty of what you’re going to do for
the next 30 days.
A promotional campaign should have three goals:
»» Monetization: Making money or making a sale
»» Activation: Moving your customer forward on the buyer journey
»» Segmentation: Becoming more aware of customers’ needs and desires so
you can segment your list and deliver value
For your first 30 days, you set one of these promotional goals for each week and
reserve the fourth week for a wildcard campaign. A wildcard campaign gives you
the chance to try something new, get creative, test new ideas, or try to replicate
your most successful campaigns.
You can use a monthly planning worksheet (see Figure 4-4) so that you can easily
track which promotions you’re running and how they do. You might also plan a
backup promotion for each campaign in case the primary campaign falls, so that
you still reach revenue goals regardless of how the campaigns perform.
You can download your own monthly email planning worksheet at http://www.
digitalmarketer.com/email-planning.
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FIGURE 4-4:
Considering Email
Marketing
A 30-day
­promotional
­planning
worksheet.
Creating a 90-day rolling calendar
When your 30-day promotional plan is up and rolling, you can plan a bit farther
in advance with a 90-day rolling calendar. This calendar is called a rolling calendar because by repeating similar promotions every 90 days or so, you keep your
customers informed and engaged without making the same offers with the same
campaign goals over and over again.
Use a calendar application like Google Calendar or hang a dry-erase board with
a 90-day calendar template on it in your office so that you and your team can
routinely map a schedule that meets your revenue targets without repeating the
same promotions too often. When viewing your 90-day calendar, you might find
that you have three monetization campaigns in April, but none in May. Moving a
monetization campaign or two to May will make it more likely that you hit your
revenue targets in May and reduce the number of monetization offers you send to
your email list in April.
Creating Email Campaigns
How do you create email campaigns that move your customers along the buyer
journey in a way that creates long-term brand engagement? And how do you do so
without spamming or annoying your customers the way so many brands can do?
This section walks you through five types of email campaigns so that you know
how to build email campaigns that will work for your business.
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A campaign structure page (like the one in Figure 4-5) will help you keep track of
each campaign and the purpose of each email in the campaign.
FIGURE 4-5:
A sample
c­ ampaign
storyboard.
Indoctrination campaigns
An indoctrination campaign is a triggered campaign sent immediately following
an initial subscription. This campaign is designed to teach new subscribers about
your brand and convince them that they’ve made a good decision by joining your
email list and, by extension, becoming a part of your community. See Figure 4-6
for an example of an indoctrination email.
Customers don’t sign up for your email lists on a whim. Instead, they probably
were introduced to your brand and then considered the value of your email list.
Perhaps they were given the opportunity to get value in advance with a gated
offer. (Learn more about gated offers in Book 3, Chapter 3.) Or perhaps they were
signed up as they made a purchase or engaged with your website. In all cases, an
indoctrination campaign reaffirms positive action and shows your customers that
they made the right choice.
The fact that customers made a positive choice to join your email list, however, doesn’t mean that they’re fully engaged with your brand. They don’t know
you well enough to be anticipating your every word. They may not recognize your
name in their inbox and are still unsure about the value they can expect from you.
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Considering Email
Marketing
FIGURE 4-6:
An example
­indoctrination
email that
welcomes a new
subscriber.
A carefully crafted indoctrination campaign can help move customers down the
path of their buyer journeys. (See Book 2, Chapter 3 for more on the buyer journey.) In the aggregate, when you add an indoctrination campaign, you see a positive effect on the open and click-through rates of the email you send to these
subscribers in the future because they know, like, and trust you better.
Indoctrination campaigns generally run one to three emails and introduce customers to the brand on a deeper level. These campaigns help you put your best
foot forward with new subscribers, introducing them to who you are and what
you stand for.
Your indoctrination campaign should do the following things:
»» Welcome and introduce new subscribers to your brand.
»» Restate the benefits of being a subscriber.
»» Tell subscribers what to expect.
»» Tell subscribers what to do next.
»» Introduce subscribers to your brand voice or personality.
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Engagement campaigns
An engagement campaign is an interest-based, triggered campaign sent immediately following a subscriber action. It’s designed to make a relevant offer and
potentially a sale to subscribers. The role of an engagement campaign is to turn
subscribers into converts by prescribing the next logical step based on what you
know those people are interested in.
Before you craft an engagement campaign, ask yourself two questions:
»» What next step do you want your customer to take? You may want her to
make a purchase, opt in to a gated offer, or engage with your brand on
your website.
»» Do you believe that the customer is ready to take that next step? If the
customer isn’t ready, you only annoy and alienate her if you push her to take
that step.
Sometimes it does hurt to ask — especially when you’re asking too much too
soon from a valuable customer.
Your engagement campaign should do the following things:
»» Turn subscribers into converts. A conversion might be buying a product or
service, scheduling an appointment, or registering for a webinar.
»» Consider what the customer is interested in now and what will interest him
next. Refer to your buyer journey and design your engagement campaigns to
move the email subscriber to the next stage in that journey.
»» Reference the previous positive action.
»» Overcome or inoculate against known objections to converting.
»» Prescribe the next logical step.
»» Ask for an order or a next step.
Ascension campaigns
An ascension campaign is a triggered campaign sent immediately following a purchase to start the value loop designed to turn ordinary buyers into buyers who
purchase from your brand again and again.
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If a customer just bought a tent and four sleeping bags, for example, you could
assume that she’s looking to head out to the campground, and you could send her
a coupon code for a camp stove. If a customer just bought a subscription to a social
media training event, you could offer him follow-up training on email marketing.
An ascension campaign is a great way to move customers along the buyer journey
and build a long-term relationship with them. In an ascension campaign, you give
customers what they want and then a bit more.
»» Overcome or inoculate against known objections.
»» Prescribe the next logical step.
»» Increase the average value of customers by selling more to them, more often.
»» Increase customer trust.
»» Make customers ascend to fans.
Segmentation campaigns
A segmentation campaign is a manual campaign sent to your entire database as a
promotion designed to segment your subscribers by interest.
Consider a small publishing company that sells high-interest nonfiction books
to teachers and librarians. That company is releasing a series of science books
on gardening and plant growth. The books have similar content, but some target
early learners, others middle-school students, and still others high-school students. The marketing department, being wise and astute in the best practices of
email marketing, decides to send a segmentation campaign. The department staff
craft an email listing the books that are available, with clear guidance on what age
level each book is appropriate for. Then the staff sends the email as a broadcast
campaign to the company’s entire mailing list. This campaign makes the company’s entire list aware of the new product, and possibly more important, the
resulting click data allows the company to segment the list by which subscribers
are interested in early-learning content, which are interested in middle-school
content, and which are interested in high-school content. Segmentation assures
that each customer profile can be effectively targeted.
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An ascension campaign should do the following things:
The marketing department can create audience segments and send additional
emails that meet tcustomers’ exact interests. Figure 4-7 shows a segmentation
email from Home Depot. The email lists six categories in which subscribers can
get savings. When a subscriber selects one of these categories, the marketing team
knows that this person responded to this email and clicked a particular product
category. That person would then be segmented, and Home Depot would likely
send follow-up emails on the product the subscriber selected.
FIGURE 4-7:
Example of a
segmentation
campaign email.
Reengagement campaigns
A reengagement campaign is a triggered campaign sent to any subscriber who has
not opened or clicked an email in the past 30 to 60 days. This campaign is designed
to reengage those subscribers with the brand. Perhaps subscribers got extremely
busy and didn’t check their email diligently. They may have gone through life
changes and now have different interests. Or maybe they got frustrated with you
and chose to disengage. A reengagement campaign can help those customers get
back on the buyer journey.
Figure 4-8 shows an effective reengagement email.
Email deliverability is greatly affected by disengaged users. Best practices in
email list management require that customers who aren’t engaged be reengaged
or removed from the list. If you run a reengagement campaign and still don’t get
a response from some customers, you can unsubscribe those customers and protect your email list from deliverability issues. See the section “Ensuring Email
Deliverability” to find more must-do’s and tips on keeping your emails landing
in customers inboxes.
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Considering Email
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FIGURE 4-8:
An example
reengagement
campaign.
Writing and Designing Effective Emails
If you want people to read your emails, you have to write and design emails that
they want to read. But with thousands of companies writing and sending emails
every day, you have to make your emails stand out.
Although email writing and design are art and not formula, this section lists a
few tips to hone your copywriting and email design skills so that your messages
stand out.
Harvesting proven email copy
Go into your own email account and check the last ten messages that you opened.
Look at the copy and the design. Then ask yourself the following questions:
»» Did the headline grab your attention?
»» What hooks and leads did the copywriter use?
»» What benefits of the product or service are mentioned?
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»» What proof or stories grabbed your attention?
»» What was the call to action?
When you’ve read the emails that grabbed your attention, see whether you can use
them as templates for emails that meet your own business goals. There’s no need
to reinvent the wheel if it’s already been invented for you.
Answering four questions
To write great email copy, you have to figure out why a customer would engage
with the promotion. Answer these four questions:
»» Why now? Consider whether the promotion you have should offer new or
on-sale items. Also consider whether it’s seasonal or timely; that is, whether
it’s something that customers want or need now more than at another time.
»» Who cares? Decide who in your target audience is most affected by having (or
not having) what you’re selling.
»» Why should they care? You need to let customers know how their lives will
be different if they have your product or service.
»» Can you prove it? Provide case studies, testimonials, or news stories to prove
that your customers’ lives will be changed if they engage with your product or
service.
Great email copy answers these questions in the body of the email in a way that
clearly demonstrates to the customer the value of your promotion.
Knowing why people buy
People always buy things for a reason. By considering the reasons why people
make purchases as you write email copy, you can hone in on what makes a customer click Buy. People generally buy things for four reasons:
»» Personal gain: A product or service will help them reach personal goals
or desires.
»» Logic and research: Customers have done their research, and this product
seems like a logical fit to meet a particular need.
»» Social proof or third-party influence: Customers’ friends have told them
that the product or service is great, and they want to be part of it, or they see
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a large number of people doing something and want to do it, too. Nothing
attracts a crowd like a crowd.
»» Fear of missing out: People have a genuine fear of missing an opportunity or
of being the only person not to have something important.
Consider which of these motivations you think will drive your customers and then
address that reason in your email copy.
Because most people spend only three to four seconds deciding whether to open
an email, the subject line is the most important piece of email copy you can write.
A good subject line piques interest and entices a customer to open the email. Then
your email body copy can do the rest to drive engagement.
Subject lines can be tough nuts to crack. One company has its marketing team
write 25 subject lines for each email and then choose a favorite to use in the email
campaign. This operation may be time consuming, but the company continually receives higher-than-average open rates for its industry and higher-thanaverage email engagement. You may not have the resources to write 25 full subject
lines for each email, but it’s a good idea to consider several options for each send,
especially triggered sends that you’ll use over time.
You can use three types of subject lines to give people different reasons to open
an email.
Curiosity subject lines
Curiosity subject lines pique the interest of subscribers and encourage them to click
to find out more. For example, Kate Spade, a clothing retailer, sent an email to
its subscriber list with the subject line, Ready for your close up? That email contained an offer for Kate Spade’s jewelry products and used a curious subject line
to increase the number of people opening the email.
Benefit subject lines
Benefit subject lines clearly state the reason why subscribers should open the email
and the benefits they receive for doing so. For example, OfficeVibe, a Software as
a Service (Saas) company that helps managers measure the engagement and satisfaction of their employees, sent an email to their subscribers with the subject
line, 38 Employee Engagement Ideas, which clearly states the benefit the subscriber
will get by opening the email. The opposite of a benefit subject line is a warning
subject line. For example, OfficeVibe also sent an email to its subscribers with the
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Writing effective email subject lines
subject line, 11 Statistics That Will Scare Every Manager. This subject line type should
be used sparingly, but, when appropriate, it can be very effective.
Scarcity subject lines
Scarcity subject lines cause subscribers to feel that they may miss out on something
important if they don’t open the email and engage with it. For example, Home
Depot sent an email to its subscribers with the subject line, Hurry! Labor Day Savings End Tonight to encourage subscribers to take advantage of its Labor Day sale
before it was over.
Writing body copy
Copywriting isn’t a formula, but an art. It’s also true that through some formulaic
chunking, you can create email copy quickly and effectively.
This chunking method is based on the answers to the questions in the “Answering four questions” section earlier in this chapter. By breaking your copy into four
major chunks and allowing each chunk to answer one of the questions, you can
ensure that your copy addresses the major points you’re trying to cover.
Each chunk of copy should have one link. That way, by the time customers read
the entire email, they’ve had all their questions answered and have been given
multiple opportunities to find out more by clicking a link.
Here’s how you chunk your email:
»» Introduction: In this section, answer the question “Who cares?” by showing
customers that they should care about this promotion and why.
»» Body: Next, help your reader to answer the question “Why should they care?”
by explaining the proven benefits or results of the product or service.
»» Close: The close of your email is a great time to answer the question “Why
now?” Tell customers, if it applies, that they have a limited time to engage with
the promotion.
»» P.S.: A postscript is a fantastic place to answer the question “Can you prove
it?” by sharing social proof such as a testimonial, positive review, or story of a
customer whose life has been changed by the product or service.
Include a link to a relevant place on your website in each chunk of the email. It’s
okay if multiple links go to the same location. Just make sure that customers are
given ample opportunity to engage further.
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Cuing the click
You’ve written a killer subject line. You’ve chunked up your copy beautifully, and
each chunk contains a relevant link. You have a product or service that you believe
in. You’re 99.4 percent of the way to your goal. But you still have one more thing
to do: You have to cue the click by asking people very clearly to perform the action
of clicking.
Here are a few methods that may be effective for you:
»» Pose a benefit-driven question. Example: “Would you like to learn to grow
»» Connect proof with product. Example: “Our customers are able to grow
20% more winter tomatoes using our Indoor Tomato Trellis! See how it works
here: <link>”
»» Show the “After.” Example: “When you have the Indoor Tomato Trellis, you’ll
enjoy ripe tomatoes picked from the vine even in the coldest winter months.
Get the Indoor Tomato Trellis here: <link>”
»» Present a takeaway. Example: “This is your last chance to get the Indoor
Tomato Trellis at 35% off: <link>”
Getting More Clicks and Opens
When you go through your inbox, you probably pay close attention to only a few
emails — maybe 10 percent.
What went wrong with the 90 percent of emails that you didn’t engage with?
Maybe they didn’t have great copy or design, or you didn’t like the sender’s products or services. Maybe you don’t have a trusted relationship with the senders,
and those emails just got lost in the sea of emails in your inbox.
You have about three to four seconds to grab your reader’s attention, so a great
subject line, perfect copy and design, and an awesome promotion aren’t always
enough. That may seem a bit unfair.
To get you over this final hump, here are some tips to give your emails an extra
boost:
»» Get the timing right. Send your emails at times when others aren’t sending
email. Then your emails will stand out in people’s inboxes and get a higher
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tomatoes indoors? Click <link> to find out.”
open rate. DigitalMarketer found that the best times to send emails are from
8:30 to 10 a.m., 2:30 to 3:30 p.m., and 8 p.m. to midnight.
»» Call people by name. Research shows that emails with a first name in the
subject line garner a 23 percent higher open rate. That’s an amazing boost,
but don’t use this trick too often. It loses its effectiveness if overused.
»» Be positive in the morning and negative at night. We all wake up bright-
eyed and excited to face the new day (okay, after coffee). Take advantage of
that fact by sending positive email messages during the morning hours. In the
evenings, negative messages are better accepted.
If you’re going to send a negative message — perhaps about a declining
market or an urgent need — make sure that you offer a solution to the
problem as part of your email. No one likes to be made to feel hopeless.
»» Be controversial or relevant. Stand out in the inbox by bringing up controversial topics (even if you worry that some of your subscribers won’t agree
with you) or relevant content.
»» Use odd or specific numbers. Everyone has ten tips for doing just about
everything. Try using different numbers: “6 ways to change your business
tonight,” “14 simple ideas to teach your child math,” or “The $234,423 idea
that changed everything,” for example.
Never round up your numbers. Doing that makes you sound like a liar. If you
have only nine amazing ideas for holiday décor, say you have nine amazing
ideas. Saying that you have ten and then delivering only nine makes you look
dishonest.
»» Keep your subject line short. The best subject lines have six to ten words, or
25 characters. Short subject lines are easy to read and view on a smartphone
while still piquing customer interest.
»» Use a second subject line. Most email providers have a second area of
displayed content on every email. In many email systems, this area is referred
to as the description, but if it’s left blank, it defaults to the first line of copy.
Instead of accepting the default, write a second, short, strong subject line and
place it in the description section to tell your customers more about your
email’s content.
»» Press Play. Instead of including a link, embed a still image of a video with a
Play button superimposed on top. This technique can dramatically increase
click-through rates in email campaigns.
»» Ask customers for their thoughts. This strategy results in the highest
click-through rate of all campaign types. This strategy involves asking a
question and listing four to five answers, each with a link (see Figure 4-9).
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All the links go to the same place, where customers can find answers to the
questions.
»» Combine video and questions. Video consistently yields high click-through
rates and high customer engagement. Include a video and a “your thoughts”
question in an email, and have subscribers watch the video to get the answer.
Many marketers worry that they don’t have the charisma or budget to make
highly professional video. Don’t be afraid! Because email is about relationships, a simple conversational video can show your personality and voice to
your subscribers, and allow you to connect with them in a new way.
“You’ll never get this deal again!” increase the urgency of the promotion. You
can increase the urgency even more by adding a countdown clock or timer to
show customers exactly how much time they have.
»» Use animated GIFs. Pretty or funny moving images in an inbox catch people’s
attention. If you have access to a designer who can make custom animated
GIFs, have that person create some for you. If not, sites like Giphy (http://
giphy.com) offer free GIFs that you can use to give your emails an extra edge.
FIGURE 4-9:
An example of a
“Your Thoughts?”
email that
engages the
audience.
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»» Add a countdown. Phrases like “Four days until this sale is over forever!” and
Ensuring Email Deliverability
Everything discussed so far is moot if your emails aren’t reaching your subscribers’ inboxes. Did you know that 21 percent of emails worldwide never reach the
desired recipients? A whole lot of work, effort, and brilliance are being wasted on
emails that end up floating around in cyberspace.
How do you make sure that all your work isn’t wasted? It comes down to one
simple thing: You have to prove that you aren’t a spammer and that you have no
intention of being one.
Sadly, the Internet service providers responsible for determining whether you’re
sending spam consider bulk mailers to be guilty until proven innocent. They
assume that emails are spam from the outset, and until you can show them that
you don’t act like a spammer, your email deliverability will be affected.
The following sections provide some methods for improving deliverability. Most
of these methods are very technical. If you’re a tech wizard, go forth and set up
your infrastructure to ensure deliverability. If you need help with technical stuff,
find a local tech person or call your email service provider, and get some systems
in place to ensure that your emails reach the people you want to reach.
Monitoring your reputation
To ensure deliverability, you have to keep track of how you’re interacting with
your list. Do the following things:
»» Monitor the complaint rates and the volume of complaints you’re receiving.
Your email service provider should provide reporting capabilities on the
number and rate of complaints your emails are receiving.
»» Respond to complaints in a timely manner.
»» Make sure that you unsubscribe and stop sending email to anyone who
unsubscribes. Your email service provider should provide a path to unsubscribe from every email and automatically remove those that unsubscribe
from your email list.
»» Keep your message volume steady. Don’t send a million emails one month
and then none for six months.
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»» Check your blacklist status on the major blacklist sites including Spamhaus
(https://www.spamhaus.org/) and Spamcop (https://www.spamcop.
net/). These major blacklist sites are referenced by mailbox providers
like Google’s Gmail to help them determine whether your email should
be delivered to the inbox. Each blacklist has its own process for removal
from its blacklist; you can find this information on its website.
The best way to assure the Internet service providers that you’re not a spammer
is to prove that you engage your subscribers with every single email you send. If
people are opening your emails, reading what you have to say, and then clicking
relevant links, you aren’t a spammer.
Subscriber engagement rates are based on the following factors:
»» Your open rate: This rate isn’t the number of emails that are opened, but the
percentage.
»» Your lateral scroll rate: This rate is how far recipients scroll down on your
emails.
»» Your hard and soft bounce rate: A bad email address is considered to be a
hard bounce. A soft bounce can happen for many reasons, including a full
inbox or accidental flagging as spam.
If you continue to send emails to addresses that reject your mail, you look like
a spammer.
TOOLS THAT ENSURE EMAIL
DELIVERABILITY
Several applications can help you ensure a high percentage of email deliverability. Two
of them to try are
•
Mail Monitor (http://mailmonitor.com): Mail Monitor breaks down delivery
per IP address, message, and email service.
•
Return Path (https://senderscore.org): If you have your own IP address,
Return Path allows you to monitor your reputation and set up alerts. You get a
baseline email deliverability score.
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Proving subscriber engagement
Export your entire list and send it to a company called BriteVerify (www.
briteverify.com/). This company runs an analysis of your list and tells
you which addresses are definitively good, which ones are questionable,
and which are bad. If you expunge the questionable and bad emails from
your list, you’re practicing good list hygiene and increasing deliverability.
»» Unsubscription and complaint rates: If you receive high numbers of
unsubscriptions or complaints, examine your campaigns to see whether
you’re doing something to upset subscribers.
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Connecting with
Influencers
Contents at a Glance
CHAPTER 1:
Communicating with Influencers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 471
Defining Influencer Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 472
Identifying the Primary Influencer Platforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 473
Engaging Stellar Influencers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477
Making Influencer Marketing Work for You . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482
CHAPTER 2:
Collaborating to Win. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489
Discovering the Evolving Role of Influencers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489
Recognizing Influencer Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 494
Finding the Right Influencers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 496
Uncovering New Influencers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 501
Influencing with Customer Advocacy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 501
Enhancing Word of Mouth (WOM) with Advertising. . . . . . . . . . . . . 504
Paid Influencer Programs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505
CHAPTER 3:
Engaging Influencers Using the “Three Cs” . . . . . . 509
Communicating Like a Pro. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 510
Upping Your Game: Creating an Influencer Contract . . . . . . . . . . . 514
Compensating Influencers Fairly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517
CHAPTER 4:
Succeeding with Influencer Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . 523
Secret #1: Set Realistic Campaign Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523
Secret #2: Know Your Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527
Secret #3: Stay on Message. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 528
Secret #4: Be Agile. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529
Secret #5: Recognize the Power of Emotional Stories. . . . . . . . . . . 530
Secret #6: You Get What You Measure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 531
CHAPTER 5:
Getting Creative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533
Getting Creative and Letting Go . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533
What If It All Goes Wrong? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 538
CHAPTER 6:
Working with an Agency. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 543
So, You Want to Hire an Influencer Marketing Agency . . . . . . . . . . 543
Deciding Which Type of Agency Is Right for You. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 547
One-Off Events versus Continuity Campaigns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 547
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Getting the lay of the land
»» Approaching social media platforms
like a pro
»» Redefining “influence”
»» Knowing what your business needs to
launch successful programs
Chapter
1
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C
ongratulations! You’ve arrived at the era of influencer marketing: an
­exciting, interesting, fresh, ever-changing, and seriously fun time to be a
marketer! You’re gonna love it here.
What makes influencer marketing so compelling? For one thing, it simply ­couldn’t
have existed before now. Influencer marketing brings together age-old concepts
but gives them a modern, social media twist, and then distributes them across
platforms that change almost daily. And the results are stunning.
Influencer marketing is unprecedented and truly differentiates itself from the old
marketing practices. In fact, it challenges most of them. This new medium pushes
traditional boundaries — and that’s a good thing! Consumers (the folks you’re
marketing to) are savvier than ever. It’s your job to keep up.
In this chapter, you get an overview of what influencer marketing is and why it
should matter to you — whether you know it or not!
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Defining Influencer Marketing
So, what is influencer marketing exactly, and why are marketers so darn excited
about it? Influencer marketing is the art and science of engaging people who are
influential online to share brand messaging with their audiences in the form of
sponsored content.
Advertisers have always used celebrity endorsements as a way to increase awareness and improve perception of a brand, because people tend to trust celebrities
they admire, and sometimes aspire to be like them. Influencer marketing is similar in concept, but it has ushered in a new way to define celebrity. In addition to TV
and movie stars, pro athletes, and musicians, celebrities of the social media world
exist now, too. People can build big, engaged audiences on social media, such as
through blogs or Instagram. And those social media influencers wield influence over
their audiences, akin to celebrity influence. Brands then work with these social
media influencers to create a new kind of celebrity endorsement.
For example, maybe a new energy drink has just come out, and they want to
market themselves as a “perfect boost for busy women.” They decide that — in
addition to email blasts, online display ads, and in-person events — they’re going
to reach out to influential female bloggers who write about their busy lives (and
include information about the new energy drink). To engage these influencers, the
energy drink’s marketing team will
»» Find bloggers who meet their target demographic.
»» Reach out to the bloggers in an effective and professional way so that both
parties are happy with and clear about their upcoming partnership.
»» Send the bloggers samples of the drink.
»» Enjoy the results of a fantastic social media campaign! The bloggers’ readers
are thrilled to have learned about their favorite online friend’s good experiences with this energy drink, and they comment that they’re going to try it
themselves.
Of course, influencer marketing is not quite that simple, and these are actually
quite time-consuming and involved, but the idea is sound.
So why influencer marketing? What makes it so impossible to have done before
and so hot right now?
»» Social media today gives access to anyone to become an influencer; anyone
who builds an audience can influence that audience. This means there’s a
huge pool of influencers available for brands to work with.
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»» More tools than ever before exist to help brands find and engage with
influencers. There are resources for turnkey influencer programs now that
simply didn’t exist.
»» Influencers exist on any channel or platform; they aren’t limited to one format
or another.
»» Consumers have little trust in advertising. No one clicks banner ads anymore!
But consumers do trust their friends and family when it comes to product
recommendations and purchasing decisions — and consumers consider
social media acquaintances to be friends.
»» When executed well, influencer marketing programs have proven to be one of
the most cost-effective and powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal.
A slew of social media platforms are out there, but this part of the book, focuses
on the six big ones:
»» The most established: Programs on these platforms are replicable and
scalable based on years of data and case studies.
»» The most marketing-friendly: Marketers know they can expect good results
from programs on these platforms. The Snapchats of the world are fun, but
they haven’t yet proven to yield demonstrable results for most businesses.
Regardless of how many new tools emerge, when you’ve mastered the basics of
these six platforms, you can manage influencers anywhere.
Blogs
Blogs were arguably the first form of user-generated content that attracted
advertisers. When the web evolved from top-down editorial content (content that
was published on websites, much like magazines and newspapers were published,
without any way for audiences to interact or respond to that content), bloggers
were the first people to attract true, measurable, engaged audiences. Blogs allowed
for commenters, which meant bloggers (publishers) were interacting with their
audiences. This two-way communication was revolutionary, and entire communities formed around blogs. Advertisers followed.
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Identifying the Primary
Influencer Platforms
Since 2000, blogs have evolved from being primarily text-heavy outlets for
sharing opinion and personal stories, to a dizzying world of highly visual, readily
shared content.
Blogs are still a mainstay of influencer programs. Here’s why:
»» There are popular blogs for every topic under the sun.
»» Traffic and activity from blogs (page views, visits, time on site, and so on) are
easy to measure.
»» Influential bloggers can create gorgeous content and tell beautiful, true stories
in a way that brands simply can’t.
»» The evergreen nature of blog content means sponsored posts will be discovered long after programs have been completed.
For more about evergreen and other types of content, see Book 3, Chapter 2.
Instagram
No other social media tool has enjoyed Instagram’s meteoric rise to prominence.
People of all ages (especially under the age of 34) love perusing and sharing snapshots and short videos called Instastories of people’s lives, whether they know
them IRL (in real life) or not. Instagram is fun and easy to use, and though marketers were once hesitant to believe that fleeting photos on Instagram could do
much for brands, nearly 95 percent of retailers are now on Instagram!
Working with influencers on Instagram is fabulous because
»» Users want visual content that’s easy to digest, which is why Instagram is so
popular. Engaging Instagram influencers to ensure that brand content is
prominent on Instagram is a no-brainer!
»» Simple photos and videos are a great way to bring your product to life, for
others to see it in action. A picture really is worth a thousand words.
»» Many tools are available to track Instagram programs simply by using a
unique hashtag, so measuring program success is easy (and some of these
tools are even free!).
»» Instagram’s audience is broad, and often different from the audiences who
are reading story-based blogs. Instagram offers a fantastic additional channel
to get sponsored content in front of as many people as possible.
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For more about digital marketing on Instagram, see Book 7, Chapter 5.
Twitter
Twitter has changed the news cycle, and the way social media-savvy users consume news. Any event will be discussed and shared as it unfolds in real time on
Twitter. Twitter is the platform for the world’s social commentary, whether it’s
serving as a political megaphone for citizens reporting live from the trenches, or a
humorous collection of ongoing reactions to this season’s Bachelor finale.
Facebook is where social media users check in and check up on family and friends
(mostly people they know in real life). Twitter is where users go to find out — or
share — what’s happening in the world at large with thousands of users they
(mostly) don’t know. Therefore, Twitter is great for
»» Hosting chats or “parties” with a wide cross-section of people who have a
common interest.
»» Disseminating information about a new product launch or anything
newsworthy.
»» Brands that are interested in actively engaging with users. Facebook is more
Communicating with
Influencers
passive — comments may go unanswered for long periods of time, for
example. Twitter users expect responses quickly. As a brand, if you can’t
engage in near real-time conversations with followers, working with influencers who can do it on your behalf is a fantastic option.
For more about digital marketing on Twitter, see Book 8, Chapter 1.
Facebook
Although Facebook isn’t quite as popular as it once was among the under-25
crowd, millions of Americans check Facebook daily. Marketers have to be there!
But being there can be tricky. Facebook changes its algorithms, policies, and ad
serving regularly — what worked today may not work tomorrow. It’s tough — but
critical — to keep up.
For that reason, when it comes to Facebook, working with influencers is fantastic.
Here’s why:
»» People who are popular on Facebook know how to navigate the tool to ensure
that their posts are seen as widely as possible. Working with influencers
means working with experts.
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»» If you’ve already created branded content and you just want to disseminate it,
engaging Facebook influencers is your perfect solution. Facebook is incredibly
powerful for sharing brief, to-the-point messages, such as coupons, in-store
sale info, or branded images or videos.
Running a company Facebook Page is completely different from engaging influencers to post sponsored content to Facebook.
For more details about digital marketing on Facebook, see Book 7.
Pinterest
After soaring onto the scene, fueled by users who couldn’t get enough of the
beautiful, educational, and aspirational tool, Pinterest has established itself as an
absolute must for any product-based brand. Pinterest drives more traffic to online
retailers than any other site.
Here’s why Pinterest is great for influencer marketing:
»» Influencers love to create beautiful content and post it to Pinterest. The more
beautiful the content, the more extensive the pin’s reach will be.
»» Working Pinterest into an influencer marketing program means thinking
about the brand in a visual way, which ultimately makes the program more
successful. For example, how do you make a child’s plastic bucket visually
beautiful and pinworthy? By adjusting the program content to work for
Pinterest — for example, images of sand castles that influencers made with
the plastic bucket or by posting a list of 13 outdoor activities for kids under
5 (and all you need is a bucket!).
»» Unlike other platforms, pins tend to live on and on and on, because they’re
pinned and repinned in perpetuity.
For more about digital marketing on Pinterest see Book 8, Chapter 4.
Video
Video influencers are, in some ways, the holy grail of social media influencers.
In some cases, their videos reach millions of adoring viewers who can’t wait for
the next installment — and to be told what products to try. A popular beauty
expert who makes a video about the perfect bronzer will directly affect sales of
that bronzer.
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In the influencer marketing world, video is its own special entity. The most
popular video influencers are often quickly scooped up by agents or agencies,
which makes it difficult for brands to work directly with them. Popular video
influencers can also command much higher compensation than other types of
influencers, especially if they have six- and seven-figure followings.
The good news is, as video production tools continue to become more ubiquitous, more affordable, and easier to use, there are more up-and-coming video
influencers than ever before. Now that you can film nearly theater-quality movies
with your camera, more and more people are entering the video influencer world
and amassing thousands of viewers who aren’t necessarily reading blogs, checking Pinterest, or using Twitter or Facebook. And when done well, a sponsored
video can be as beautiful as a TV ad, while being more authentic and compelling
to viewers.
To make the most of video influencer programs,
»» Don’t focus too narrowly on YouTube stars. There is video talent everywhere! For example, there are thousands of Snapchat users, who have
tremendous followings even though their videos are only seconds long.
the masses, she’s less likely to work one-on-one with brands or marketers.
»» Allow influencers great creative freedom. Building a video audience isn’t
easy to do, and the influencer knows her audience best. If you want her to
incorporate brand product or messaging into her work, you have to be willing
to allow her the flexibility to do it her way.
If you’re working with highly inexperienced and less popular video influencers,
be willing to offer help — from editing resources to script ideas — and expect
more back-and-forth communication throughout the process.
For more about digital marketing on YouTube, see Book 8, Chapter 3.
Engaging Stellar Influencers
You may have the most creative, most stupendous ideas for an influencer program. Hooray! But your fabulous ideas won’t make a lick of difference if you don’t
know which influencers to engage or how to engage them. This section gives you
six keys to engaging stellar influencers.
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»» Keep your eyes open for new talent. When a video talent is discovered by
Starting with women
Women influence up to 90 percent of purchasing decisions in U.S. households.
So, it almost doesn’t matter what you’re selling — appealing to women simply
makes sense.
This doesn’t mean you should ignore male influencers in favor of working with
female ones. It just means that it makes sense to start by identifying female influencers. The good news here is that women use every social media platform as much
as (if not more than) men, share more product information online than men, and
make a greater number of purchases as a direct result of social sharing than men do.
Finding people who create great content
Search for influencers who create great content that is (at least somewhat) related
to your brand and who demonstrate engagement with their audiences — as
evidenced by comments; followers on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or Twitter;
and social shares per post.
Beyond engagement, relevancy is critical. It seems perfectly reasonable and logical for a marketer to want to go after the “biggest” influencers they can find, but
big doesn’t mean relevant. For instance, say you have a client who is launching a
new gluten-free protein bar, ideal for people who are fit and athletically inclined.
At the outset, it might seem like a great idea to try to work with a prominent
gluten-free food blogger on this program. But what if that blogger never writes
about fitness and never recommends packaged products? She may have 300,000
monthly blog visitors, but it’s not likely that any of them care about prepackaged
fitness foods, even if they’re gluten-free.
Compare that to a blogger who may only have 25,000 monthly visitors, but whose
stories focuse on her new gluten-free lifestyle as she trains for a marathon. In
this case, you’d be better off working with the smaller blog. Even if the numbers
won’t look as great in some reports, the program can gain more traction with the
smaller blog’s audience.
If you’re tempted to find the biggest influencers, keep this in mind:
»» Relevancy of a blog or influencer content is more important than size.
»» Prominent influencers often command much higher compensation.
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»» Popular influencers are routinely inundated with brand offers. Your offer
needs to be compelling. Even then, you must be willing to be treated as
though you’re doing the influencer a favor. (This isn’t always true, but it
happens often!)
»» The audience of prominent influencers who do a lot of sponsored work get
fatigued by sponsored messages and start tuning them out.
If you’re a marketer and you need to show impressive numbers in your program
report, keep in mind that there’s a lot of ways to make a dollar. If your program
goal is to meet a million social impressions, you can get there with one prominent influencer whose blog garners a million monthly visitors. But you could also
get there with four bloggers, each of whom gets 250,000 visitors a month — or,
better yet, with 100 bloggers, each of whom has 25,000 visitors per month. At the
end of the program, the 1 million number would look the same, but you’d have
100 different pieces of content from 100 different perspectives and 100 different
audiences.
Influencers are human beings. You want to approach working with influencers professionally, but not so professionally that you come across as a robot (or
worse, a spambot).
As Chapter 3 explains, reaching out to influencers to ask them to work with
you isn’t as simple as sending a mass PR mailing. Outreach should be personal,
thoughtful, and tell the influencer what’s in it for them. Putting in the time to
craft customized outreach is time-consuming, but it always yields better results
than a spray-and-pray approach.
Signing a contract
This may sound like a small, tactical concern, but it’s not. Bringing a contract into
your influencer relationship makes sense for myriad reasons:
»» You’re emphasizing that this is a professional relationship between the
influencer and your brand.
»» You want the influencer to create authentic content that will resonate
with her audience, but you don’t have to lose complete control of the
entire creative process. Use a contract to provide some rulesfor the influencer
about what she can and can’t say, do, or post with respect to your brand.
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Perfecting your pickup
»» You’re not leaving deliverables up to chance. The “old” influencer model —
where, say, a company would send product to influencers with no note at all, in
the hopes that the influencer would write, well, anything about the product — is
dead. As a brand you have every right to spell out exactly what coverage you
expect (a blog post, a Facebook post, three Instagram images, and so on) and
by a set deadline.
»» A contract ensures there is no ambiguity about compensation. Include
what the compensation is, how it will be delivered, and by what date.
One of the most important functions of a contract is to spell out how a relationship is terminated if one of the parties doesn’t live up to the deal.
Paying influencers for their time and effort
When influencer marketing was still a new phenomenon in the social media
sphere, brands that compensated influencers for their work were considered
shady. By the old public relations standards, that’s not how things were supposed to work., Brands would simply send publications information or products
in the hopes that the publications would feature them. PR folks applied the same
approach with bloggers.
The industry has moved past this. Influencers expect to receive compensation in
return for their work. Plus, compensation should reflect that the influencers are
doing work on behalf of brands regardless of how the content “performs.” If an
influencer goes to the store, buys a new salad dressing, creates a beautiful dinner
featuring that salad and salad dressing, blogs her salad recipe, and features gorgeous photos of the salad, all her work deserves compensation regardless of how
many comments her blog post receives.
For more information about creating compelling offers, see Book 1, Chapter 5.
When it comes to compensation, cash is almost always preferred by influencers. It
may be acceptable for a brand to offer products or services instead of cash, as long
as those products or services have a monetary value equal to or greater than the
cash equivalent; even then, some influencers may take offense at being offered
“payment” that won’t actually pay the bills. “Paying” influencers in “blog traffic” by featuring them on a brand site is not acceptable.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires that anyone who is being paid
for their opinion must disclose this fact to readers. Make sure you abide by this
requirement.
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Measuring the right stuff
Measuring the right stuff doesn’t just help your influencer marketing programs;
it helps you recruit the right kind of influencers.
Never, ever begin an influencer program before you can answer the question,
“What will success look like?” If you don’t know how you’ll measure success,
how will you know if you got there? And if you don’t know what your goals are,
how will you know what to measure? For more information about how to measure
campaign effectiveness, see Book 9.
Here are some guidelines to consider:
»» You can only truly measure return on investment (ROI) if you take the cost
of your entire marketing program and its effect on sales into consideration.
What percentage of budget that was allocated for influencer marketing?
How does that budget compare to sales results?
series of blog posts is incredibly difficult. How can you track someone who
saw a tweet about a new mascara, went to the blog post about it, took down
the name of the mascara in her phone, and then purchased it the next time
she was in her corner drugstore weeks later? The ability to use technology to
track these purchase paths is improving, but it’s not there yet. (This is why you
have to estimate ROI as a percentage of sales compared to percentage of
budget.)
»» “Success” can be measured in ways other than sales results, including the
amount of content created, increases in a brand’s social followings (Facebook,
Instagram, and so on), site traffic, coupon downloads, engagement (comments, shares, and so on), overall share of voice before and after a program,
overall social mentions, and brand sentiment.
An effective approach to measuring a program’s efficacy matters to influencers
because it guides what they need to do. If you’re clear on what you’re trying to
achieve, you can be clear about which influencers you need, and what you ask
them to produce. (Influencers don’t want to create useless content any more than
you want it created!)
Being upfront with influencers about what you’re trying to achieve makes your
offer more compelling, and helps the influencers feel that they’re in a true partnership with you.
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»» “Success” can be measured in sales results, but linking purchases back to a
Making Influencer Marketing Work for You
No matter what size business you have or what kind of marketing or PR
background you come from, you can make influencer marketing work for your
business — as long as you keep in mind what influencer marketing can and ­cannot
do! The various approaches outlined in this section can serve as the foundation for
the influencer programs you’ll build.
If you’re an established consumer brand
If you represent a large, established brand and you’re looking to launch or enhance
your influencer marketing programs, you likely have the experience, resources,
and budget to regularly run large-scale programs.
Leveraging your advantages
If you’re an established brand, you’ve obviously been successful with your marketing and PR programs. Way to go! You have systems and processes in place for
your marketing efforts, you know what works, and you have a budget in place for
ensuring your campaigns are successful. You should be able to implement all the
tips and tricks in your influencer marketing efforts. Use your scale and experience
to your advantage!
You probably already have access to more data and metrics for influencer marketing than you realize. Many social media metrics tools — the ones you’re already
using to monitor your social media programs — have add-ons for measuring
influencer activity. Research what your current tools can already do to help save
budget while ensuring you’re measuring your programs’ successes.
Speaking of measuring success, according to a 2015 study performed by influencer
marketing agency Tomason, businesses are, on average, making $6.50 for each
$1 spent on influencer marketing (https://www.adweek.com/digital/studyinfluencer-marketing-pays-6-50-for-every-dollar-spent/). That’s quite
a statistic! Data like these support influencer marketing ROI figures and should
make an easy case for diverting more marketing budget to influencer marketing.
Given the demonstrable ROI, hiring a dedicated person to oversee influencer marketing makes sense. Just as businesses were once reluctant to hire full-time social
media resources and now have entire social media teams and agencies, influencer
marketing is deserving of full-time strategizing and implementation.
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Think of influencer marketing as an addition to your current programs, not a
standalone effort. Start with your overall marketing plan: What are your goals?
Your key messages? Your key milestones? Your social media efforts will be coordinated with your more traditional tactics (digital, print, TV, radio, and so on).
There’s no reason for influencer marketing to be any different. Influencers should
amplify your efforts, not compete with them!
As an established brand, the best reason to use influencer marketing is to help give
your brand a fresh perspective. Allowing influencers to tell your story lets other
consumers see your brand through their eyes. Handing over the “­storytelling
keys” to influencers breathes new life and personality into brands that may
otherwise feel too staid to consumers.
Avoiding common mistakes
Larger brands with bigger budgets and teams can run into trouble with influencer
marketing by taking too much of a “hands-off” approach. There are, of course,
ways to scale influencer marketing programs, but avoid rushing to automation!
Don’t fall into one of these traps:
programs to an influencer agency, don’t underestimate the amount of
work that goes into making influencer campaigns successful. The very
reason influencer marketing works is because influencers are real, live human
beings — not display ads. There are ways to scale your programs, but influencer
marketing is not programmatic. Don’t approach it as though it were.
»» Don’t under-budget! You’re working with individuals (not machines or ad
exchanges). No matter how sophisticated your process or tools may be, every
influencer campaign will be different, and each will require a larger investment of time and resources than a campaign that only involves “flipping a
switch.”
»» Don’t try to control everything. More established brands frequently
have a more rigid way of doing things, and are often used to owning — and
controlling — their own media. Yes, an influencer campaign would be more
automated and controlled if a company simply provided the influencers the
exact copy they were supposed to publish — except that’s not influencer
marketing. Don’t try to control the messages in the name of efficiency or
fear of losing control. Otherwise, you’re just forcing a different kind of
display advertising into a medium where it will fall flat. (Bloggers’ audiences don’t want to read a prewritten press release!)
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»» Even if you build your own internal pool of influencers, or outsource your
»» Don’t treat your influencers impersonally. The more impersonally you
treat your influencers (something that’s easy to do when you’re a large
organization), the less personal and less effective their work will be. Treat your
influencers like individuals.
Finding an approach that works for you
As a large and sophisticated company, you have greater flexibility to really
leverage influencer marketing and make it work for you. Here’s how:
»» Your overall marketing initiatives can lay the foundation for hugely
successful influencer marketing campaigns. You can use influencer
marketing to supplement, enhance, and amplify your existing efforts. For
example, say you’ve created a two-minute ad spot but only 30 seconds of it
will air on TV. Use influencers to showcase the full video across social channels, while everyone uses the same hashtag.
»» Don’t limit your perception of influencer marketing to “something
someone else creates over there.” Use and repurpose the amazing content
you worked so hard with your influencers to create! Spend the time, energy,
and budget to create large, high-quality influencer programs. For example,
the kind of programs where the writing and photos and captions and posts
are striking, where influencers clearly can and do produce outstanding content
for you. And then repurpose that content all day long! Use it in display ads, via
social media channels, on your website, even on TV. Be sure to build content
usage terms into your influencer contracts.
Influencer marketing works in two directions: It’s easy to mostly focus on how
influencers do a great job of introducing their readers to a new brand or product —
to grow brand awareness, purchase intent, and (ultimately) purchase. But don’t
forget that influencer marketing also works well for consumers who are already
in the purchasing intent phase. For instance, a guy who’s looking to buy a new
vacuum cleaner is going to start by searching online for something like “best
family vacuum cleaners.” Imagine how compelling it would be for him to stumble
upon a series of blog posts written about a specific vacuum cleaner, especially if
those posts were balanced and visually attractive. He’s never heard of these bloggers before, but this demonstrates the long-term impact of influencer marketing
programs.
What’s more, this man may then further investigate the vacuum he’s read about
by going to an online retailer and looking up the model to read reviews. It’s
extra powerful to have influencers write reviews directly on retail sites (with full
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disclosures that they’re being paid for their reviews) to help move the customer
from intent to purchase.
If you’re a small to midsize consumer brand
You don’t have all the experience and budget of the major brands, but that doesn’t
mean you can’t rock influencer marketing! In some ways, you’re actually more
likely to be able to enjoy success with this new marketing medium because you’re
more nimble and better able to try new things. You can absolutely use your size
and lesser-known brand name to your advantage!
Leveraging your advantages
Instead of breadth of programs, focus on depth of relationships. In other words,
do more with less. Spend time upfront identifying influencers who really embody
your brand, and develop true, one-on-one working relationships with them. If
you can’t pay them in cash, “pay” them with valuable products, insider information, and attention. Treat them as extensions of your workforce. Consider developing brand ambassador programs that span several months.
If you have a lesser-known brand, you have more creative freedom. The social
media influencer sphere is attracted to innovation and self-expression. The less
forced influencer marketing is (that is, the less a brand insists on stringent brand
and editorial guidelines when working with influencers), the more likely the program will be to garner users’ attention. Take chances and let your influencers get
creative with their assignments!
As you’re working to create more awareness of your brand, you’re building your
social media presence. Influencer marketing is especially useful at helping companies build their social media followings on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and so on.
Focusing your influencer marketing goals on shorter-term wins, such as building your social media following, means you can better track successes. “Brand
awareness” is a good goal, but it’s tricky to measure and expensive to achieve on
a broad, national scale. Influencer marketing goals need to be realistic and achievable, especially when your resources are constrained.
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What you may lack in resources (budget and human capital) will impact the size
and length of your influencer programs — you simply won’t have the ability to
run giant programs again and again.
Avoiding common mistakes
Some approaches to influencer marketing simply won’t work, regardless of the
size of the company trying to implement them. But there’s a disappointing pattern among small to midsize organizations trying to implement influencer marketing for the first time. Don’t fall into these traps:
»» Don’t underestimate the cost of running influencer marketing programs.
Too many companies turn to influencer marketing because they mistakenly
think it’s a cheap, easy alternative to other marketing tactics. It’s not! Producing
amazing and demonstrably valuable campaigns takes dedicated time and
resources. That doesn’t mean you can’t get great bang for your buck, but don’t
approach influencer marketing as though it’s a quick fix for marketing ails.
»» Don’t let your influencer marketing take over your marketing budget.
Allocate no more than 20 percent of your total marketing budget to your
influence marketing programs. Remember: Influencer marketing amplifies
traditional marketing efforts, but it doesn’t replace them.
»» Don’t forget about how to measure success. Think about what your
success metrics are going to be and how you’ll get there. Are you tracking
sentiment, brand lift, coupon distribution, social media followers? With what
tools and benchmarks? Whatever your goals, start with a small, in-house
program with a handful of influencers and let them serve as your benchmark.
Too many organizations throw together influencer programs with unrealistic
expectations (“Our hashtag will go viral!”) and no way to measure success.
Finding an approach that works for you
You want to get the most out of your investment, especially because your marketing dollars are likely to be spread thin. Keep these tips in mind as you approach
influencer marketing:
»» Given your more limited resources, focus on influencer marketing
programs that truly amplify your other marketing efforts rather than
programs that operate completely independently from them. If you
have a product promo code or sale, use influencers to get that code spread
far and wide. If you’re launching a product in stores, coordinate your influencer efforts to launch at the same time. Do you have TV, YouTube, radio, or
podcast content you’re proud of? Work with influencers to share that content
with their audience.
»» Use influencer marketing to increase awareness of and followers to
your social media channels or to increase your email marketing list.
This is easier to do if your influencers have one simple, clear, and consistent
message.
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»» Keep your goals realistic, measurable, and short term.
»» Nurture the relationships you develop with your influencers. You want
them to become vocal advocates for your brand — both online and off —
even when they aren’t being paid to do so.
»» Reuse the content that your influencers create! Their content can
populate your other social channels and resonate with your audience because
the content came from users and not just the brand. This is especially true for
Facebook, where you’re constantly searching for new content that will engage
your readers; posting images and blog links is fast, easy, and very relatable.
If you’re a startup brand
Being a startup is tough in every way. You’re struggling to build something great
internally, while ensuring that potential customers know you exist. Often startups
turn to influencer marketing because they think it’s a fast, cheap (read: free) way
to get a lot of traction with brand awareness. And although that’s not exactly true,
there are ways to make influencer marketing work for startups.
The very best advantage you have as a startup is that you’re new and fresh. Maybe
you want to be first to market with a cool new concept. Maybe you can do something no one has seen before!
Find influencers who care about being trendy and who want to know, see, or do
things before their peers, and appeal to this desire — you’ve got something no
one else has. If you can’t pay them, offer them first looks, tours of your workspace, beta versions of products before they’re on the market, or stock/equity in
your company.
Be creative! As you’re trying to get your brand name out there, you have tons of
freedom to try new things. PR “stunts” are safer to try. Consider collaborating
with potential influencers to do something radical!
You don’t have to limit your influencer activity to writing reviews of your product.
Consider reaching out to influencers and using them as beta testers. Bloggers can
make amazing virtual focus groups. Sometimes, early feedback makes all the difference between a startup succeeding or failing. If you don’t have the resources
to pay an influencer to write a public-facing review, the influencer may still be
willing to work with you to give you private feedback.
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Communicating with
Influencers
Leveraging your advantages
Avoiding common mistakes
Startups tend to make the following mistakes when it comes to influencer
marketing. Avoid doing the following:
»» Assume influencer marketing is quick or cheap. Influencer marketing
takes a lot of time and resources, two things most startups don’t often have.
Unless there is a clear strategic marketing goal that influencers can help you
achieve (such as beta testing), don’t waste your startup energy.
»» Try influencer marketing if your product is an app. If you’re promoting an
app, you may want to reconsider influencer marketing. Yes, it can be a fabulous
tool for long-term boosts in searches — if you engage a handful of bloggers to
include your app as part of a blog series on “perfect apps for kindergarteners,”
you can be sure that parents who search for “kindergarten apps” will discover
those posts. But you won’t see a surge of downloads directly from blog posts.
Don’t max out your marketing budget hiring 50 bloggers to write about your app
thinking you’ll see thousands and thousands of downloads as a result. Influencer
marketing is not direct response — it will never convert at the rate a startup app
needs.
Finding an approach that works for you
If you’re limited in resources and budget, be very deliberate in how to leverage
influencers and know exactly what you’re going to get out of a program before
you start one.
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Examining the changing role of
influencers
»» Measuring the value of influencers
»» Looking at influencer types
Chapter
2
Collaborating to Win
I
n today’s marketplace, many types of people make up the constellation of
customer influencers. Sometimes a family friend can supersede any referral
made by your hand-picked celebrity. It’s important to know your audience and
understand what really matters to them. The key to using influence is putting the
customer at the center of your content-marketing efforts.
In this chapter, you look at how digital marketers can harness the role of influencers to satisfy a customer’s greatest needs and make their brand indispensable.
You examine both the accepted industry expert and the influencer whose word of
mouth (WOM) recommendations drive conversions.
Discovering the Evolving
Role of Influencers
First, what is social influence? Pam Hughes (nee Dyer), Marketing Chief at Agile
Alliance and one of Forbes Top 25 influencers the defines social influence as the
following:
Social influence occurs when a person’s thoughts, feelings, or actions are
affected by others. Essentially, influence is the art of persuasion — the ability
to cause a change in mindset or actions so someone thinks or behaves in a
certain way. In the world of social media marketing, influence is currency.
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This quote clearly spells out the three principles that must be present to influence
others. To have influence, something or someone must do the following:
»» Impact the person’s feelings. Although most people believe otherwise, logic
is not the way to influence someone. You must touch people to get their
attention and allow them to focus on primitive emotions. Most information
goes right by you unless it taps into your lizard brain (the part of the brain that
controls such things as addiction, happiness, and the fear response.)
»» Cause a change in mindset. Influence must cause movement that impacts
your mindset. You may start as neutral or even negative. Persuasion causes
you to move in the direction of the influencer.
»» Rest on a trust relationship. Influencers have “emotional capital” with their
audience. They are trusted, which keeps the lizard brain from invoking the
“fight or flight” response and instead focuses on positive emotions.
Persuasion is not trickery or deceit. The best types of persuasion help educate
buyers to understand that your solution is the best. After you’ve done that, price
is not an impediment to selling. You’ve allowed the buyer to persuade herself.
Understanding the six principles of
persuasion
In his seminal book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini identifies six principles at the heart of persuasion. (You might want to check out his
blog, shown in Figure 2-1, at http://www.influenceatwork.com/. Also see the
upcoming sidebar “Social proof and reciprocity: Better together?”)
Cialdini’s principles are closely followed by marketers, and they can help you
identify why your customers respond to some tactics more than others. Here’s a
quick overview of these six principles:
»» Reciprocity: This principle is about keeping a relationship in balance. You
want to reciprocate to someone who gives you something. There is no stated
contract, but people instinctively want to make sure that they don’t take more
than they give.
»» Social proof: This is another principle that remains unspoken but is
­ nderstood by most. People like to eliminate the amount of risk they take
u
in everyday life. One way to do this is to make sure that others have made
the same decision you are about to make and have been pleased with the
consequences. No one wants to be the first person to try something. Content
marketers know that they need to show customers that others have used and
raved about their products.
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»» Liking: It’s well known that people want to do business with people they like.
Dealing with likable people and brands is easy and certainly preferable to
dealing with someone who is difficult. It is that simple. If your customers like
you or your brand, they’re predisposed to do business with you.
»» Authority: People believe in experts. If you have a title after your name or
are an acknowledged authority in some field, people believe what you say.
If an authority recommends you, you’re more likely to be chosen.
»» Scarcity: This principle has been abused by marketers since the beginning
of advertising. People hate the idea that they can’t have something because
its quantity is limited. When something is scarce, people want it all the more.
Content marketers have recently extended this principle and called it fear of
missing out (FOMO), which includes the value of physical goods as well as the
fear of losing out on an experience that can’t be repeated. The idea of FOMO
is discussed further in Book 2, Chapter 2. The buyer journey is detailed in
Book 2, Chapter 3.
»» Commitment and consistency: People’s image of themselves dictates their
Collaborating to Win
behavior. For example, if they consider themselves to be generous, they
would not like to find themselves acting in a miserly way. They want their
behavior to be consistent with who they are. If they make a commitment, they
want to believe that they will keep it.
FIGURE 2-1:
Influence
at Work.
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SOCIAL PROOF AND RECIPROCITY:
BETTER TOGETHER?
Robert Cialdini’s well-known “Towel Reuse Study” has garnered much attention. He
looked at the impact of changes he made to small signs left for patrons in their hotel
rooms. In randomly assigned rooms, he left a sign that asked patrons to reuse towels
because it was good for the environment. In the other rooms, he asked them to reuse
towels and noted that other guests had recycled their towels at least once during their
stay. Here you see social proof in action. Twenty-six percent more of the guests who
received the second sign recycled their towels. The simple fact that other guests had
recycled made it more likely that these guests would do so, too.
Another study cited by the American Psychological Association (http://www.apa.org/
monitor/2011/02/persuasion.aspx) returned to the topic of towel recycling. This
time, the topic related to the reciprocity principle. The sign referencing the environment
was used, and another, randomly distributed sign said, “We already donated to an environmental cause in the name of our guests. Would you join us in this effort to cover our
costs?” This sign testing the reciprocity principle achieved a 21 percent greater response
than the first.
Understanding why influencers
­matter more now
A trusted friend or family member has always been a social influencer. But online,
influencers matter even more than they used to because of the glut of information
coming at your customer from all sides. No one can read and understand everything on the web that he wants to know. People need help in the form of customer
reviews, recommendations, and communities united around common topics.
According to Forbes, shoppers have completed 70–90 percent of their research
before they ever speak to a salesperson.
It’s both a blessing and a curse that users can investigate products or services
they want to buy before ever talking to a salesperson. Rather than turning to a
salesperson, they find trusted sources who can explain the benefits of a product
without displaying a vested interest in making a sale. That’s where influencers
come in.
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Influence marketing provides several benefits, including:
»» Lending credibility: Customers give a sales page on a company’s website
very little credence. It’s great to find out about specific product features, but
most customers are too cynical to believe the hype. When an influencer
recommends the product, it’s given much more weight. You can capture
brand awareness through recommendations in a way that you can’t with
your own ads.
In a study by Dimensional Research, respondents found that 90 percent said
that positive reviews impacted their buying decisions. Eighty-six percent said
their buying decisions were influenced by negative online reviews (https://
marketingland.com/survey-customers-more-frustrated-by-howlong-it-takes-to-resolve-a-customer-service-issue-than-theresolution-38756).
»» Cost-effective targeting: It’s easier to tap into a community of people
interested in your topic than it is to create one from scratch. Influencers have
already done the hard work.
»» Positioning and copy: Many content marketers overlook the opportunity to
learn from their audience’s influencers. How do they talk about the product?
Are they tapping into specific emotions or using special language? They show
you what content resonates with your audience. Paying attention to their
appeal and what their audience wants to hear is an important takeaway
for you.
»» Finding out what channels are their favorites: Influencer audiences point
the way to the channels your potential customers spend time on, thereby
saving you a huge amount of time and pointing the way to the best advertising venues.
»» Developing brand awareness: Having an influencer discuss your products
»» Helping build your online community: Building an audience from scratch is
difficult and time consuming. Anything that you can do to encourage selfselected members of the influencer’s group to join you as well is a great boost.
»» Fronting a specific campaign: You know that some campaigns are more
important than others. If you are a start-up and customers are seeing your
product for the first time, collaborating with an industry insider can make all
the difference.
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can develop enhanced brand awareness. Not only is the influencer discussing
your product, she is implicitly endorsing your brand.
Understanding how to measure
expert influencers
How can influence be measured? A lot of controversy exists among content marketers about how to measure influencer clout. Marketers dislike the way some
clout-ranking companies give a high rating to an influencer based solely on the
number of Twitter followers he has or the amount of attention he garners on
Facebook. The key to measuring influence is by looking at a range of factors.
An ebook called Identifying and Measuring Influencers in Social Marketing published
by Klout (closed its doors) identified three attributes of influences:
»» Reach: Does the influencer have your target audience as a subset of hers?
Does she have the social followers and real-world influence to impact your
potential customers? Is her audience large and responsive?
»» Relevance: Do the influencer’s content topics align with yours? Does his
content have the quality your audience expects?
»» Resonance: Do the influencer’s authority and authenticity attract the
audience you’re trying to reach? This is important to determine. You want to
be sure that you don’t have more of a niche audience that doesn’t resonate
with your influencer.
Recognizing Influencer Types
You may be surprised by the wide range of influencer types. When you say influencer, what usually comes to mind is a celebrity or family member. But influencers
come in five types:
»» Friends, family, and work colleagues: This category of influencer you’re
most familiar with. These influencers make up the person’s social graph on
social media platforms. They are known as positional influencers because
they constitute the person’s inner circle.
»» Subject experts: This group has demonstrated expertise in a particular topic
or area of interest. They are thought leaders and others who work to gain
recognition by virtue of their knowledge. When they recommend something,
their audience listens. These people generally have titles such as trendsetter,
thought leader, authority, or even analyst.
A subset of this group is the gadfly. The gadfly is known for saying controversial things and disrupting the status quo.
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»» Professionals in high positions: You recognize these influencers because
they have jobs that confer expertise on them. They are the captains of
industry, the politicians, and the local business leaders. Their credibility is
measured by the size of the position they hold and the people over which
they have power. Titles for these people include decision maker or industry
leader.
»» Celebrities: This group is easy to identify. Its members have high profiles
and are written about in magazines and newspapers. Celebrity influence is
very high and usually unpredictable. Fashion designers and others often give
celebrities their merchandise free in the hopes that the celebrity will be
photographed wearing it. That kind of publicity can’t be bought. The downside
to using celebrity influencers is that you may be subject to criticism if their
behavior doesn’t comport with your brand.
A subset of this group is the professional brand. These people are stars in
their specific industry. For example, they could be a YouTube star or Internet
marketing star.
What kind of influence do you think you could wield if you’re Taylor Swift.
She told Apple in 2015 that she wasn’t going to allow her album 1989 to
stream on Apple’s service because of its decision not to pay artists during
Apple’s three-month trial period. Apple quickly relented and agreed to
accommodate the artists in some way. Swift accomplished this concession
by placing an open letter to Apple on her Tumblog (http://taylorswift.
tumblr.com), demonstrating that influencers can impact even the world’s
most valuable brand.
Are you targeting millennials? If so, be careful who you choose as your
celebrity. MediaPost, an online publishing resource for advertising professionals, reports that “Authenticity is most important among the very desirable
youth market (ages 12–29)” (http://www.mediapost.com/publications/
connection to your brand to satisfy this group. For more about marketing to
Millennials, see Book 4.
»» Your raving fans: This group is the one you love to nourish. This group’s
members are the people who chat up your brand and do the work of a citizen
sales force. Their buzz is organic and never dies down. These people influence
by being your best brand ambassadors. You can find out more about how to
use your fans in the “Enhancing Word of Mouth (WOM) with Advertising”
section, later in this chapter.
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article/251664/rethinking-celebrity-endorsements-authenticityan.html?edition=83523). Even the most popular celebrity must have a true
Finding the Right Influencers
If you’ve read the previous sections of this chapter, by now you’re probably convinced that influencers matter. But how do you find the influencers who are right
for your audience? Assuming that you’re starting from scratch, the following sections look at how to find the right influencers and approach them.
Discovering the influencers you
need to target
Say that you’ve considered the influencer types described in the preceding section, “Recognizing Influencer Types,” and have decided to focus on self-selected
experts for now. These top thought leaders and bloggers are whom your target
audience reads and follows. (At some point, you will also want to consider the
other types, of course, such as raving fans.)
Following are several immediate actions you can take to find influencers using
three free online tools — BuzzSumo, Followerwonk, and Alltop:
BuzzSumo
To find influencers through the BuzzSumo tool, follow these steps:
1.
Go to https://app.buzzsumo.com/influencers to use the influencer
search.
Look at the left side and select the filters you want to use, such as bloggers and
influencers, as shown in Figure 2-2.
2.
Type the topic of your niche.
After typing your topic, you receive a list of results, as shown in Figure 2-3 that
shows the results for pet food. (For a longer list, you need to sign up for the
Pro version and pay a fee.)
From this list, you can start to research influencers.
3.
496
Select the ones you want to research further and put them on a list in an
Excel spreadsheet or Google Doc.
BOOK 6 Connecting with Influencers
FIGURE 2-2:
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Filters on
BuzzSumo for
influencer types.
FIGURE 2-3:
Results of pet
food search on
BuzzSumo.
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Followerwonk
Follow these steps to work with the tool on Followerwonk:
1.
Go to http://followerwonk.com.
On the page that opens, you see a tab called Search Bios on the upper left
hand side.
2.
Click the Search Bios tab and type in the topic of your choice, for example
pet food.
Followerwonk returns a list of all your Twitter followers who cite pet food in
their profiles, as shown in Figure 2-4. Add the names you want to look at
further to the list you created.
FIGURE 2-4:
The
­FollowerWonk
homepage.
Alltop
Alltop provides a collection of the best blogs on various topics. To find those blogs,
follow these steps:
1.
Go to http://alltop.com/.
You get the alltop homepage, as shown in Figure 2-5.
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2.
On the list of blogs, look for duplicates and see which ones show up
most often.
Don’t forget to consider bloggers that aren’t at the top of the list. They may be
more open to collaborating because they’re not bombarded daily with offers.
FIGURE 2-5:
Topics to
search at the
top of the Alltop
home page.
Don’t forget that you can also search Google using your terms as hashtags and
keywords.
Developing a system
After you pick the influencer(s) you want to work with, you should establish a
working system to define your roles. This step is important because you want to
make sure that everything goes smoothly. You may feel a bit intimidated working
with your influencer for the first time, but you want to ensure success. The last
thing you want to do is alienate someone who is important to your audience.
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You can always do a simple search on Google for your topic, such as pet food influencers, and see which blogs are returned. You can also search related terms, such
as “pet resources,” to see what you find.
For this reason your system should have a documented plan.
Working with your influencer includes documenting the following:
»» The overall goal of the campaign or collaboration: Each of you will have
different goals for participating. You should make sure that it’s clear what
each of your goals are.
»» Deliverables: Document what the campaign deliverables will be. Are you
going to put on a webinar for the influencer’s audience? Who will take care of
the promotion and the technical aspects?
»» Roles: Some influencers may want to front the campaign, whereas others
may want you to take the lead. If the influencer has to spend time preparing a
presentation, you want her to know that up front.
»» Decisions about editorial content: Will you have to get approval for all the
content in your campaign? Does the influencer want to run through everything beforehand or is he leaving the details to you?
»» Success measures: How will you know whether the collaboration was a
success? Decide beforehand what measures will be used.
Make this process as informal or formal as you think it warrants. The key is that
you do it. It’s not uncommon for people to be disappointed by those with whom
they’ve collaborated because they didn’t have clear parameters before they began.
You also need to establish some predefined metrics that will let you know whether
your association with an influencer is valuable. You may not have revenue returns
immediately (unless you’re specifically selling a product or service). However, you
do want to make sure that you have tangible results. Although the ROI is difficult
to measure, here are some to consider:
»» Increase in followers tied to that influencer
»» Increase in requests for sales demos or leads or materials
»» Increase in your mailing list tied to a specific landing page that you established
for the campaign
»» Increase in sales of the product or service if applicable
»» Increased traffic of new visitors to your website right after the campaign
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Uncovering New Influencers
Influencer marketing continues to change with the influx of new channels and
technology. A relatively new phenomenon is the social media platform celebrity.
That’s an influencer who becomes popular on a specific platform based on the
content that influencer creates just for that platform. Musicians, beauty bloggers,
and others have posted tutorials that have catapulted them to fame. Social media
creates its own media stars. Two innovative ways that influencers are being discovered are
»» On social platforms that have their own celebrities: Because social media
platforms have no barrier to entry, anyone with a good story to tell and a
pleasing personality has a shot at becoming famous. This fame can then be
parlayed into a line of physical goods, such as makeup, or a gig with a brand
that wants to appropriate your celebrity for its media campaign.
»» By creating algorithms on social platforms to find more catalysts:
Another way in which social platforms are using influencers is to uncover and
target them for their own publicity purposes. Uncovering new influencers and
using their clout is serious business.
A case in point is Facebook’s being granted of an ad patent that would
reportedly identify new influencers. The way it works is that Facebook can
identify the people who share content and then get the most reshares. Every
advertiser would be interested in knowing who they are and paying to
advertise directly to them.
Influencing with Customer Advocacy
As most content marketers agree, getting WOM from happy customers is the best
advertising of all. If you can encourage your own fans to be your de facto sales
force, you can expect great results. By organizing your most ardent fans, you can
multiply your brand’s profile. One type of advocacy is typically known as brand
ambassadorship, which is a program that has a company’s most loyal customers
provide testimonials and other positive information to prospects. The program
can be as large or small as makes sense for your audience. When people join your
ambassador program, you can offer them free stuff, discounts, or special group
meetings.
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If you know the influencer’s website but not his specific email address, you may
want to check out Email Hunter at (https://emailhunter.co/). This tool isn’t a
license to spam someone, however. Be respectful.
One key benefit of an ambassador program is that you will be privy to feedback
that you probably wouldn’t get from other sources. Remember, these are your
fans, so their criticisms are heartfelt. They want to make the program better. Consider them to be your most intense focus group.
One example of brand ambassadorship is the Champions Program created by Brainshark, a sales enablement company that helps customers create high-end video
sales presentations. Its case study was reported by Truman Tang on the Influitive
blog (http://influitive.com/blog/brainshark-social-media-case-study/).
Tang reported that Brainshark knew it had an avid group of fans who loved its
products. The key was to figure out how to get those fans to increase their advocacy
on social media. To this end, the company created an online community staffed
by Brainshark’s star employees and called that community Brainshark Champions. The community invited customers who had given testimonials and case
studies on the company’s website. Customers were categorized into four groups:
(1) active users; (2) social content sharers; (3) customers nominated for their loyalty by employees; and (4) community leaders and influencers. To demonstrate its
commitment, the company provided the community with exclusive training and
networking about Brainshark products. Obviously, this offering served as a real
incentive to raving fans.
The program was very successful and won Brainshark the Forrester Groundswell
Award for 2014. One success measure showed a 106 percent boost in Twitter activity. Clearly, a program like this would be worth considering for your fan base.
Another example of a very active brand ambassador community is the one run by
Evernote (https://evernote.com/community), the online content catcher. With
more than one hundred million users, Evernote must be doing something right.
It started its ambassador program in 2011 with an eye toward highlighting different use cases. Evernote picked users who were both passionate about Evernote
and expert in their own field, and the company wanted to offer something valuable to these users. For example, a user who wantsto solve a particular problem
with Evernote might find an ambassador who can offer tips and hints. Figure 2-6
shows a listing for Paperless Living Ambassador Jamie Todd Rubin.
You can also see a link to Rubin’s website (http://Jamietoddrubin.com), shown
in Figure 2-7, on which he mentions his ambassadorship in his blog heading
along with his own considerable skills. Clearly, this is a win-win for both the
ambassador and the company.
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FIGURE 2-6:
Collaborating to Win
Example of
Evernote
listing for an
ambassador.
FIGURE 2-7:
Jamie Todd
Rubin’s website.
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Enhancing Word of Mouth (WOM)
with Advertising
As powerful as a collaboration with an industry influencer can be, word-of-mouth
(WOM) recommendations are equally important. When you adopt WOM as a content marketing strategy, you can get results that are even more effective. The best
way to deploy WOM as a strategy is to understand its power as an advertising tactic that is called Word of Mouth Advertising (WOMA).
WOMA refers to actively using tactics to encourage WOM. Rather than use hope as
a strategy to accelerate WOM, you proactively seed your campaigns with WOMA.
A study at the University of Auckland Business School found that three major
benefits accrue to companies when WOM is used. They are (1) greater enthusiasm
for a company and its products; (2) increased brand awareness; and (3) greater
customer loyalty.
Connecting with your audience
An article in Forbes reports that 64 percent of marketing executives believe that
word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing. Only six percent say that
they have mastered it. That’s an astounding number! So why is using word of mouth
marketing (WOMM) so difficult? Suzanne Fanning, former President of the Word of
Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), thinks she knows why. She believes that
marketers have a hard time with WOMM because they use it to “collect rather than
connect.” By this she means that marketers are focused on counting followers,
tweets, and likes rather than actually connecting with the very audience who loves
their
products
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/kimberlywhitler/2014/07/
17/why-word-of-mouth-marketing-is-the-most-important-social-media/).
(In 2018, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) acquired WOMMA.)
You can easily see how this lack of connection results in a failed strategy. Most
marketers show off their social media numbers as though they directly translate
into revenue. What’s missing is the knowledge of the level of advocacy behind
those numbers. Many of your followers can have only a very casual interest in
your brand and not be very effective ambassadors.
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Identifying factors for WOM
It’s important to understand what factors must be present to trigger WOM. The
conditions have to be right so that people feel comfortable sharing content with
their trusted network. According to a study by consulting service McKinsey &
Company (http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/a_new_way_
to_measure_word-of-mouth_marketing), three factors are critical to triggering
WOM, as explained in Table 2-1.
TABLE 2-1
Three Critical Factors that Trigger WOM
Factor
Must Be Present to Trigger
What’s said
Important product or service features
Identity of the messenger
Trusted advisor
Environment
Trusted channel where the message seen
Paid Influencer Programs
If you want to go further and develop an ongoing influencer program for your
company, you may want to consider paid influencer programs. A report called
“2017 Influencer Marketing Benchmarks,” by RhythmOne (http://www.
rhythmone.com/advertisers/influencer-marketing), found that “advertisers
who implemented an Influencer Marketing campaign in 2017 received $12.21 in
earned media value for every $1.00 of paid media.”
Here are a few influencer programs you may want to investigate:
»» GroupHigh (http://www.grouphigh.com): Shown in Figure 2-8, GroupHigh
Collaborating to Win
is a PR and marketing software provider that helps companies find influential bloggers.
»» RhythmOne (http://www.rhythmone.com): RhythmOne is a company that
provides influencer marketing and unites advertising across all devices. (See
Figure 2-9.)
»» Tapinfluence (http://www.tapinfluence.com/): Shown in Figure 2-10,
Tapinfluence has a Software as Service (SAS) platform that helps brands find
influencers and create co-branded content.
CHAPTER 2 Collaborating to Win
505
FIGURE 2-8
GroupHigh.
FIGURE 2-9
RhythmOne.
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FIGURE 2-10
Collaborating to Win
Tapinfluence.
CHAPTER 2 Collaborating to Win
507
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Approaching influencers with
irresistible offers
»» Entering into mutually agreeable
relationships
»» Ensuring great results and happy
influencers
»» Compensating influencers the
right way
Chapter
3
Engaging Influencers
Using the “Three Cs”
T
he overwhelming majority of influencers, especially the ones brands should
be targeting, are not celebrities. They don’t have agents. They aren’t corporate entities. They may not have any corporate (let alone marketing
or advertising) experience to speak of. They’re real, genuine people who have
amassed an online following simply by being themselves.
Reaching out to influencers, getting them to respond, and ultimately getting them
to do what you want is possible . . . but it’s not as easy as automated transactions.
You can’t “order” engaging, personal, and authentic sponsored content the way
you can buy ad space or hire a celebrity endorser who will ultimately read from a
script. And you can’t reach out to influencers as though they’re press or as though
they understand (or care about) your corporate-ese.
Mastering influencer outreach, relationship building, and program execution isn’t
hard as long as you keep the three Cs in mind: communicating, contracting, and
compensating. This chapter has you covered.
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Communicating Like a Pro
When you’ve decided that you’re ready to work with social media influencers, you
may spend quite a bit of time finding the right influencers for you. Don’t let it all
fall apart by screwing up your communication. In this section, you find out how to
reach out to influencers in a way that will reflect well on your brand, whether the
influencers decide to work with you or not.
Making your communication personal
The number-one mistake marketers make is sending the same generic email to
every influencer.
How personal social media is can’t be stressed enough in this chapter. People connect through dozens of different channels every day to stay in touch with friends,
family, their communities, and the world. Social media outreach needs to be personal, too.
Each influencer is special in her own way. Each influencer has cultivated a unique
audience and deserves to be recognized accordingly.
If you want a successful influencer outreach program, start by contacting individuals (not mass email lists). Find an influencer you believe will do good work for
you and tell her why — read her blog, understand what she blogs about and who
her audience is, and tell her why you think she’d be the ideal influencer for your
company. Approach influencers as you would potential partners — not as potential hires who didn’t even know you had a “help wanted” sign on your window!
This means doing your research and putting in a lot of upfront work. But the time
spent is worth it!
To make your outreach personal, follow these tips:
»» Remember that most influencers take their work personally. They
consider their relationships with their readers personal as well. If you
want to interrupt their regular flow of content to have them showcase your
sponsored messaging, the very least you can do is recognize that’s what
you’re asking of them.
»» Don’t address your email to “blogger” or “writer of such-and-such blog.”
Find the name of the person behind the account, or at least how he refers to
himself.
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»» Avoid marketing-speak. You’re reaching out to a person, not a corporation.
Approach your target with respect and professionalism, but also as a human
being.
»» Don’t forget that you’re asking them to do something for you, not
the other way around. Even if your product is the best, even if you’re only
contacting the very top of the top-tier influencers, even if you’re planning
to pay them well, never lose sight of the fact that you’re the one asking for
their help.
Making your offer compelling
You want to leverage each influencer’s voice and brand and the influence she’s
established among her community to further your brand message. Why would an
influencer want to do that for you? Unless you can answer that question, you’re
not likely to get very far, no matter how personal your message.
As influencer marketing expands as a viable marketing approach, influencers are
in higher and higher demand. As a brand, your offer needs to be compelling. Simply having a great product may not be enough. Never approach an influencer if
you haven’t thought through a good response to the question, “What’s in it for
the influencer?”
In the following sections, you walk through several key ingredients you may be
able to offer to sweeten the deal: stuff, status, and creative freedom.
Offering free stuff
The simplest and most obvious offer brands make to influencers is a quid pro quo:
We’ll send you our product for free in exchange for your writing a review of the
product on your blog.
Makes sense, right? In many cases, this approach works well. For example, many
beauty bloggers, Instagrammers, and YouTubers receive makeup samples in
exchange for including those samples in their makeup photos and tutorials.
If your product doesn’t have much retail value, or you don’t have enough product
samples to send to every potential influencer, this approach isn’t the right one
for you.
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Offering status
Offering “insider” information about your company and products is a great way to
engage fans on social media. Liking a brand page on Facebook may give someone
access to behind-the-scenes information, advance notice of cool announcements,
and even special discounts or coupons.
A similar tactic can work well with influencers. If an influencer is someone who
would likely use your product or like your company, you could offer her special
“insider” status in return for writing about your brand. In fact, you could even
offer her an ambassador role.
A brand ambassador is an influencer who partners with a brand and works almost
as an extension of the company. Her role is to promote a brand online over an
agreed-upon amount of time (although it’s possible that she’ll be so enamored of
your company that she’ll continue to promote it after her ambassadorship is over).
Many influencers enjoy being brand ambassadors as long as the brands follow through on their end of the bargain — that is, they ensure the role of
brand ambassador is actually compelling. Here are some tips for how to make a
brand ambassador or “insider” offer compelling:
»» Offer your ambassadors sneak peeks at upcoming products or announcements as you would with employees.
»» Engage in regular communication with your ambassadors to share
behind-the-scenes information, such as photos of the company or
product that isn’t otherwise available to the public.
»» Send your ambassadors product(s) to sample before the product is available
in stores.
»» Offer your ambassadors special coupons or discounts or (even better!) give
your ambassadors codes that they can give away or pass on to their readers
at their discretion.
»» Cross-promote the content that your ambassadors create on your own social
channels — you can repost her photos on Instagram, retweet her tweets, even
feature her blog or images on your brand’s Facebook Page.
Offering creative freedom
You’re selecting your influencers because you like the content they produce.
Unfortunately, too many companies make the mistake of engaging with an influencer only to tell her exactly what she is supposed to do — from the photos
she should post, to the language she should tweet, to the features and benefits she
should highlight.
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You’re working with influencers so that they tell your brand’s story in their own
unique way. The more you try to control their message, the more like an ignorable
“ad” the message becomes. You also risk damaging the influencer’s reputation
with her audience if you force her to use your marketing language while framing
it as though it’s her own.
In addition, consider brainstorming with the influencers about the kind of content
they want to create! Don’t be afraid to invite your influencers to your company’s
creative table and be part of the campaign planning from the beginning. After all,
who knows what will resonate on your influencers’ social media channels better
than the social media influencers themselves?
Keeping it real: Do’s and don’ts
When it comes to influencer outreach, put yourself in the mindset of the influencer. Social media is founded on authenticity, so as much as you’re able to, leave
your jargon and marketing hype out of the equation.
Online influencers are popular because their audience relates to them. They aren’t
corporate entities — if you want these influencers to respond to you, you need
to speak to them like the people they are. This may seem obvious, but it’s harder
than it seems!
Here are the do’s and don’ts of keeping it real in influencer outreach:
»» Don’t make false claims about your brand or company. For example, don’t
call a product “life-changing” if it isn’t (and let’s be honest, few products are).
»» Do explain why your company, brand, or product is worthy of being
promoted.
»» Don’t make the message or request confusing. The influencer shouldn’t
have to guess at what you’re asking them to do! Don’t send an email saying,
“I thought you’d want to know about this product” with no call to action if what
you really want them to do is write a blog post reviewing the product.
»» Do keep your message clear and simple. Ask for what you’d like the
influencer to do.
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Not giving an influencer her space to create an authentic-sounding, craftedby-her message dilutes the whole reason you want to use influencers in the first
place. Brands that give the influencers gentle guidance but then let them “do their
thing” are much happier with the results.
»» Don’t expect your product, message, or social media campaign to go
viral. Yes, influencers have caused virality but there’s no way to predict what,
when, or how something — especially a sponsored piece — will hit it big.
»» Do be realistic in what results you can expect from your influencer.
There are many different ways to set goals for influencer marketing programs.
Unfortunately, “We want it to go viral” is not a realistic or useful one.
»» Don’t expect the influencer to create an ad. Influencer-generated content
is not a glossy print ad, it’s not a press release, it’s not a graphically designed
display ad. You’re asking the influencer to create a sponsored message in her
own authentic way. If you want to control every aspect of what the influencer
produces (her language, her post design, editing her photos), you’re no
longer engaging in influencer marketing, you’re defaulting to a purely paid
media model.
»» Do provide clear editorial guidelines and standards (things the influencers should or should not do) and let them tell your story their way.
»» Don’t ask your influencers to jump through hoops. The harder you make
the program, the more room there is for errors and incomplete assignments.
For instance, don’t require that your influencers download a coupon, print it,
take it to a specific store miles and miles away from them, purchase the item,
bring it home, demo it, write an extensive review, take tons of photos, and
post everything to their blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram with only a
few days’ notice.
»» Do be considerate of your influencers. The easier your request, the better
the odds that you’ll have a successful program.
Upping Your Game: Creating
an Influencer Contract
One of the most important things you can do to ensure a successful influencer
marketing program is to establish a contract with your influencers. This should
be a simple but legally binding contract between the hiring entity (that’s you, or
your marketing agency if you hired one) and each and every influencer that entity
is engaging.
Use an online service such as EchoSign (www.echosign.adobe.com) to send and
sign contracts electronically with no need to print, fax, or mail anything.
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Nothing is preventing you from entering into a professional relationship with your
influencers. You are, essentially, hiring them to function as an extension of your
marketing team. You’d never hire someone (even a freelancer) without a written
agreement, so contracting with influencers just makes good business sense.
Setting expectations
Don’t leave your influencer marketing program to chance. When you’ve reached
out to your influencers and established mutual interest, it’s in all parties’ best
interests to put in writing exactly what is expected, when, and for how much.
Forget the idea of writing an influencer to say, “I thought you’d want to know
about . . .” without actually asking them to do anything specific. Be as clear as
possible, and don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.
Controlling what you need to control
Many brands harbor some fear of bloggers and influencers in general. For as far
as social media has come, some companies still hate the loss of control that comes
with engaging with the masses on platforms they don’t own and can’t completely
steer.
With one-way communication (where companies controlled everything about
their brand image and messaging, before social media allowed consumers to “talk
back”), companies didn’t have to worry about anything being “off-brand.”
When you hire influencers to produce sponsored content, you’re walking a fine
line. You want the message the influencers create to be on-point, but you can’t
have the message seem too corporate or it’ll sound inauthentic (because it is!). But
if you allow someone to produce brand content for you, you risk that influencer
going “off-brand.”
The entire point of influencer marketing is to let the influencers do what they do
best: Craft your story in a way that’s best for their readers. Fortunately, this doesn’t mean giving the influencers carte blanche. With a contract, you can give your
influencers express guidelines that should help them stay within the bounds you
feel comfortable with.
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Setting up a simple contract can mean the difference between the “spray and
pray” approach — where you reach out to dozens of influencers and hope they
produce something of quality — and knowing exactly what results you can expect.
Protecting yourself and your brand
A contract doesn’t just help the influencers understand what’s expected of them,
it helps protect you, your company, and your brand.
From a simple legal standpoint, if the influencer you contract doesn’t fulfill her
end of the deal, you’re under no obligation to compensate her. If the work she
produces isn’t up to your standards, or is in violation of the guidelines you provided, you have recourse to ask her to change her work and bring it up to snuff.
You may be wondering what happens if you hire a blogger and she hates your
product. What if she writes terrible things about your company? Can you make her
sign something that says she won’t say anything bad? The short answer is “no,”
but the longer answer is “nor should you want to.”
You can draft a contract that clearly states that the influencer may not post content
that is false. However, it’s unethical to require a positive review. What’s more, if
an influencer posts an unbalanced review of a product or company, it’ll come
across as inauthentic. Her readers will know she’s not being genuine — especially
because influencers are required to disclose that they’ve been sponsored to create
brand content. This is mandated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) so don’t
make the mistake of overlooking this.
Avoiding problem influencers
Not only is it unethical to require positivity in a contract, it’s largely unnecessary.
Consider why an influencer may write something damaging to a brand so you can
avoid putting yourself in harm’s way:
»» The influencer genuinely doesn’t like or understand the product. Make
sure you’re targeting the right influencers and that they’re a good match for
your product before you enter into a contract, and you’ll likely avoid
this problem.
»» The influencer receives a shoddy product that doesn’t work, doesn’t
meet claims, or doesn’t live up to its hype. If you don’t make claims about a
product that it can’t live up to, you’ll prevent this problem. And if the product
just isn’t very good (which sometimes happens), use another form of marketing instead of asking for honest feedback from influencers.
»» The influencer feels frustrated, undervalued, or angry with how the
program has been managed. Make sure your expectations have been
communicated clearly and are outlined in a contract that both parties have
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Knowing what to include in a contract
Have a lawyer create your contract with all the standard elements needed to
ensure your contract is legally binding. your influencer contract should include
these contract elements:
»» The influencer’s legal name.
»» The influencer’s social media addresses where you expect her to post
(for example, her blog URL, Instagram handle, Twitter handle, and
so on).
»» Specific deliverables with deadlines. For example, “Write one blog post
between July 6 and July 17, 2019, including what you enjoyed about the
product, why other families might enjoy the product, three to five high-quality
photos that complement your post, and top and bottom disclosures (provided
separately) in compliance with FTC guidelines.”
»» Language about who will own the sponsored content that the influencer
creates for you. We recommend that you allow the influencer to always own
her content, but that she grants you and your brand rights to use or repurpose her content.
»» Professional standards. Here’s your opportunity to make sure the influencer
doesn’t post anything illegal, false, or defamatory; doesn’t use profanities;
doesn’t plagiarize; provides error-free work; and attributes photos properly.
»» How you prefer to communicate and how you’ll confirm that the
influencers’ work has been completed.
»» What the influencer will be paid, dependent on what, by which means,
and by when.
Compensating Influencers Fairly
Paying influencers is something of a controversial topic, but there are no two ways
about it: You must compensate your influencers.
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signed. The more respect and professionalism you show the influencers, the
better the quality of the work they’ll produce. Having a contract in place helps
solidify your partnership and prevents influencers from retaliating — because
they have nothing to retaliate against.
Some PR and marketing professionals believe that the old, spray-and-pray
method is the best way to approach influencers. They still believe that the best
way to get “organic” (or “earned”) media placements is to send product samples
or press releases to as many influencers and possible and just hope to get something good in return.
But influencer marketing isn’t only about earned media, it’s about earned, owned,
and paid-for media. There is no reason to limit how you approach influencers, and
there should be no controversy about paying them. This section helps you know
how to pay your influencers fairly.
For more information on earned, owned, and paid media see Book 5, Chapter 1.
Understanding why you need
to pay influencers
If you’re still not convinced that you need to pay your influencers, here’s why:
»» Not compensating your influencers sends a clear message: “We don’t
value your work.” You want influencers to produce good content in a timely
manner that supports your brand goals. In other words, you’re asking them to
work for you . . . for free.
»» Some influencers may promote you out of the goodness of their hearts,
but most will not. Influencers who do agree to promote a brand “for free” do
so with the expectation that they’ll be compensated down the road.
»» Brands that don’t compensate influencers fairly risk getting a bad rap
among influencers. One of the most prominent bloggers in the country, Jenny
Lawson (a.k.a., The Bloggess), has an entire section of her blog dedicated to PR
people who pitch her poorly. For a great laugh, see www.thebloggess.com/
heres-a-picture-of-wil-wheaton-collating-papers.
»» You get what you pay for. The less you’re willing to invest in your influencer
marketing program, the less successful it will be. The best talent doesn’t work
for free, so what level of talent are you engaging?
»» Air and traffic don’t pay the bills. Brands sometimes promise that they’ll
pay influencers by featuring them on their website or Facebook Page,
explaining to the influencers that this will benefit them — it will boost their
visibility and increase their traffic. Unfortunately, that is a rare outcome for
the influencer, and almost never worth the amount of work the influencer
put in.
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Several brands and agencies just entering the world of influencer marketing start
off with this question: “How do I calculate what to pay influencers?” It’s a tough
question. And it’s also the wrong one.
Bloggers and marketers have been struggling to come up with a formula for calculating how much a blog post is worth for over a decade. The trouble is, formulas
are necessarily dependent on numbers alone, such as how much traffic a post
is likely to receive, how many comments it generates, or how much revenue it
drives. But what you’re really asking influencers for is to create quality content —
almost (but not completely) irrespective of numbers.
How can you create and apply a single formula based on subjective, qualitative
requirements? You can’t. The best way to figure out what to pay influencers is to
understand what the going rates are in the influencer marketplace. That way, you
avoid the two likely-to-fail approaches in the following sections.
Calculating influencer payments with traffic
and engagement metrics
Some marketers try to quantify the success of a program (and associated influencer
payments) using formulas based on an influencer’s reach and engagement, where
engagement includes likes, comments, and shares of that influencer’s sponsored
content. They do this by placing a dollar value on these things — deciding, for
example, that a Facebook “like” is worth $100 and a comment left on a blog post
is worth $250.
At best, these numbers are arbitrary. At worst, they’re absurd. For one thing, these
numbers suggest that all content and engagement is created equal. But some
influencers have better content and more genuinely engaged fans. Someone who
likes a brand’s Facebook Page to enter a contest is not as valuable as someone who
likes a brand’s Facebook Page because they’re genuine fans of that brand.
More important, if these numbers are used to calculate the value of an influencer
program without taking into account the actual, measurable success of the program on the whole, the numbers are useless! How much money was invested in
the program? What were the program’s main objectives? To what extent were the
objectives met? Did an increase in sales revenue occur? Only when taking those
factors into account can you truly know the value of your influencer marketing.
Otherwise, your calculations are being done in a vacuum and the numbers aren’t
tied to anything.
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Avoiding compensation pitfalls
Tying influencer payments to click
performance or revenue
Some brands prefer to pay influencers on a performance basis, such as how many
clicks their posts generate, how many coupons someone downloads, how many
sales are generated directly as a results of an influencer’s post. This is an unfair
and impractical approach for several reasons:
»» It devalues the work the influencer is doing. Sometimes a product, brand,
or service is simply not very compelling to readers and doesn’t get traction
through social media. But the influencer who has spent time, energy, and
talent building good content for your brand should still be compensated for it.
It’s up to you to make sure that you’re not working with an influencer who is
willing to damage her brand by agreeing to promote something that her fans
won’t respond to.
»» Performance metrics don’t tell the whole story. Influencer marketing is
primarily about building brand awareness, not delivering immediate conversions to sales. Paying influencers based solely on the sales they generate is
affiliate marketing, not influencer marketing.
Affiliate marketing is when a publisher (like someone who writes a blog or
produces a website, not necessarily an “influencer”) gets a portion of a sale
that is generated from her site. For example, if a blogger has a link to Amazon.
com on her sidebar, and you click it and then make a purchase, the blogger
will be paid a portion of that sale (essentially a commission). The upside for
affiliate advertisers like Amazon is that they only have to pay their publishers
if and when a sale is made, so there’s no risk for them. The upside for
publishers or influencers is that they can make a fee simply for passively
posting something on their site — they don’t have to create sponsored
content. The downside for affiliate advertisers is that very few people click the
links and purchase something. The downside for publishers/affiliates is that
the fees they make are a tiny, tiny fraction of sales they generate, which are
usually small to begin with.
»» Performance metrics set up influencers for bad behavior. Over the years,
too many brands offered influencers payment based on the number of clicks
they drive (pay per click, pay per performance, and so on). This sets up
influencers to try to “stuff the ballots” and find unscrupulous ways to inflate
their numbers. The best influencers know better and shy away from these
arrangements.
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You’ll only be able to engage and contract with the best influencers out there if
you’re willing to compensate them fairly based on market rates.
You don’t have to pay your influencers in cash. You may offer to compensate
influencers with product in addition to or in lieu of cash payments. However,
the value of the product should be equivalent to what an influencer would command in cash. Of course, “value” may be calculated by retail value or by other
intrinsic qualities of the offer: opportunities to meet celebrities, receive an indemand product before it’s available to the public, and so on.
In addition to cash, the “Izea 2018 State of the Creator Economy” study indicates
other incentives for influencers include:
»» Free products
»» Free services
»» Discounts or coupons
»» Gift cards
»» Trips or travel
Just be reasonable. Don’t offer an influencer a coupon for $30 worth of shoes if
she can command $300 for her work. And remember, nothing says, “I love your
work” more than cash.
The Izea study (https://izea.com/2018/11/01/announcing-the-2018-stateof-the-creator-economy/) also presented some very interesting information
about the difference between how marketers value content and the compensation
creators expect to receive. Here are some examples:
Type
Creator (Influencer)
Marketer
Sponsored Facebook update
$77
$1429
Sponsored blog post
$329
$1129
Sponsored pin
$75
$1061
Sponsored tweet
$59
$910
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Looking at the going rates for influencers
Obviously creators are undervaluing their worth to marketers. However, it’s hard
to determine how much more marketers would be willing to pay influencers when
they have a host of other costs to run a campaign.
Obviously, these market prices continues to evolve. But remember that according
to this study, the most important criteria for a marketer when choosing a creator
is quality of content.
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Setting realistic campaign goals
»» Knowing your audience
»» Staying on message
»» Being agile
»» Recognizing the power of emotional
stories
»» Measuring your progress
Chapter
4
Succeeding with
Influencer Marketing
I
n this chapter, you find six secrets to help you set up your influencer marketing
programs for success.
Secret #1: Set Realistic Campaign Goals
Campaign goal setting is important. Why? Because influencer marketing without
goals is a waste of time. And influencer marketing without being tied to business
goals is an even bigger waste of time. Just as you wouldn’t make a capital expenditure without assessing your business need, you wouldn’t spend money on an
influencer marketing campaign unless your end goal was to move your business
forward. This section walks you through a series of questions to ask yourself to set
realist goals for your campaign.
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“GOING VIRAL” IS NOT A GOAL
“We need a viral video!”
“Make it go viral!”
Companies, influenced by the constant barrage of viral videos shared via social media,
want all their social media programs to “go viral” and think that virality is the key to
brand marketing success.
Wanting a campaign to “go viral” is not a viable campaign goal. Going viral isn’t realistic —
and, besides, it often doesn’t map to business goals like engagements or sales. What
you want to do is set practical, measurable campaign goals that will (maybe) set you up
for virality, but more important, help you achieve your sales and/or marketing goals,
whether you go viral or not.
What are you trying to achieve?
When preparing for an influencer marketing campaign, think about what the
overall purpose is. For example, is your campaign:
»» Launching your new company, product, or brand
»» Sharing a charitable initiative
»» Amplifying a special offer, like a coupon
»» Promoting a contest or sweepstakes
»» Advertising an event
Your purpose might be one of these, a combination, or all of them. Whatever the
case may be, start by thinking about what your marketing need is and how influencers will fit into that plan.
How will you assess your achievements?
After the purpose of your campaign is set, you need to decide how you’ll assess
your achievements by selecting a few measurable targets. These targets can be
anything you want — from the number of people who download a coupon to how
many times a tweet is shared (tracking via your unique hashtag) — as long as
they’re tied to sales or marketing goals.
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If you’ve never done an influencer campaign before, set some metrics so that you
can gather baseline data about your campaign, and then use that baseline data to
gauge future campaign success.
Here are some suggested targets to get you started:
»» The number of visits to your website
»» The number of increased Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and/or Facebook
followers
Succeeding with
Influencer Marketing
»» The number of likes, comments, and/or shares a Facebook post gets
»» The percentage of increase in sales due to a coupon or promo code
»» The number of tickets sold to an event based on a trackable URL
»» Increase in foot traffic to your retail store
»» Brand awareness (more people talking about you online)
»» Better data on your customers
One of the main reasons why it’s important to have business goals is so that you
can track your return on investment (ROI). Influencer marketing isn’t free, and
as with any marketing program you run, you want to make sure that the data you
gather supports your spend.
How will you achieve your goals?
When you’ve decided on the purpose of your campaign and how you’ll measure
your achievements, you need to think about how you’re going to git ’er done! Here
are the main questions you need to answer:
»» Do you have the time, expertise, and resources within your organization to
not only create your influencer marketing campaign, but also find, vet, and
hire the right influencers for the job?
»» Are you familiar enough with social media analytics to gather and measure
the data you’ll be collecting?
»» Would you rather hire expert consultants and/or agencies to do the creative
work, manage the influencers, and/or collect the data?
How you answer these questions probably depends on the timing of your influencer marketing campaign, your marketing needs, and your budget. If you’re in a
hurry, you may want to hire outside help — but keep in mind that most agencies
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require several weeks of lead time and may charge a quick turnaround fee if you
need a campaign to run sooner.
If you aren’t on a timeline, you may want to budget to hire a creative team, which
includes a staffer who is knowledgeable about influencer or content marketing or
an analytics expert. Think about what’s best for your company and your needs,
and go from there.
When will the campaign run?
The timing of your influencer campaign is very important. Think about when
you’d like your campaign to run. Is it seasonal? Does it correspond to a holiday? Is
it tied to an event you’re promoting?
Let’s take a month-long holiday campaign as an example. You have a product
that would make a fabulous holiday gift. Ideally, you want to start promoting that
product in November, having your influencers marketing your product all month
long in advance of the holiday shopping rush. If you’re in the United States, you
may want to launch your campaign around Thanksgiving and capitalize on the
Black Friday or Cyber Monday shopper mindset.
Working backward from there, this means your influencers should be familiar
with your product and know what their scope of work is (exactly what’s expected
of them and what they’ll be sharing) and have all assets and materials needed
(product photos, videos, and/or descriptions) by the date of your program launch.
This means that the creative for your campaign — including goals, assets, and
influencer scope of work — needs to be completed at least three to four weeks in
advance of influencer selection, vetting, and hiring (including getting all employment contracts signed). Depending on the number of influencers you’re hiring,
that process alone can take two additional weeks even with experienced professionals doing the selection and vetting.
Six weeks in advance of your November campaign launch puts you in midSeptember, which means you should already be thinking about plans to lock down
your influencer marketing holiday promotion in the summer.
Even if your influencer marketing campaign isn’t tied to a holiday, you should
give yourself at least two months to come up with a plan, set goals, figure out how
you’re going to achieve them, and begin gathering your data. When you’ve done
all that, you’re ready to launch your influencer marketing campaign.
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Secret #2: Know Your Audience
The second secret to setting your influencer marketing campaign up for success is
knowing who is talking about you and where your potential customers are.
If your company has a social media presence, you need to know where your
­audience — fans and potential customers — is talking about you. Do you have a
product or service that people tweet about or share about on blogs? Or are lively
conversations happening on your Facebook Page? Before starting any influencer
program, take the time to investigate and listen in on conversations already happening about your company, product, industry, and/or competitors on social
media and focus on who’s doing the talking.
HOW TO INTRODUCE YOURSELF
TO AN INFLUENCER WITHOUT
SEEMING LIKE A SPAMMER
It’s easier than ever to reach out to the influencers you want to work with, but doing it
without coming off as a spammer . . . now that’s another story. Here are some suggestions for contacting influencers without turning them off:
•
Research the influencer’s blog or social media account to see if she does sponsored posts. If she doesn’t, that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s not interested in
starting, but it might be a sign she’s not interested.
•
Use the influencer’s real name (not her social media handle). Don’t start emails
with “Dear Fashion Blogger.”
•
Show that you’re deeply familiar with the influencer’s content, interests, and
values. The more specific you can make your message — and the less generic —
the better.
•
Show that a real person is reaching out. Infuse your outreach with humor and
personality. Don’t send a generic tweet or email that makes it seem as if you send
100 notes per day.
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Who’s talking about you?
Grassroots conversations may already be happening about your brand. Get to
know those influencers. Introduce yourself to them, whether via a hello tweet
or by leaving a comment on a blog post, as a way to begin a relationship (see the
nearby sidebar). People who are already talking about your brand on social media
are your organic influencers. They have the power to affect your brand in positive
or negative ways. Establishing an authentic relationship with them — where you
engage their opinions and ideas — is a way to keep their view of your company or
brand positive. And when you’re ready to start your influencer marketing campaign, you can contact these influencers first to see if they’d like to participate.
Where are they talking about you?
It’s not just who is talking about you, but where. When you see where the most
engaged social media interactions are happening, you can target your influencer
marketing campaign to those particular channels.
For example, if you’re a fashion or beauty brand, you may want to focus your influencer marketing on Instagram, like Jimmy Choo (www.instagram.com/jimmychoo),
Motives Cosmetics (www.instagram.com/motivescosmetics), Flash Tattoos (www.
instagram.com/flashtattoos), or Christian Siriano (www.instagram.com/csi
riano). All those brands leverage Instagrammers to share their content.
It makes no sense, for example, to focus on Pinterest for an influencer campaign
if you sell cloud services. Pinterest is a visual channel, so it lends itself to sharing
visual content like recipes, workout ideas, decorating tips, and fashion inspiration.
Know where your audience lives. If no one is talking about fundraising on Instagram, you’re wasting your time doing your campaign there.
Secret #3: Stay on Message
Sometimes the first question seems to be when starting any influencer marketing campaign is, “What’s the hashtag?” The key message is just as important as
the goal, and making sure that everything you do drives activity back to your key
message matters. If your marketing plan is a rocket ship, your messaging is the
flight plan and social media is the rocket fuel.
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Marketing plan = Rocket ship
The rocket ship analogy is useful when talking about influencer marketing. Just
as you wouldn’t attempt to explore space without a rocket ship, you shouldn’t
engage in influencer marketing without a plan.
With your rocket ship in place, you need a flight plan to get to space, and that’s
exactly the purpose of your message. What will you be asking your influencers to
do? Share a coupon code? Tweet a link for a charitable donation? Post a photo?
Whatever it is, your influencer marketing flight plan needs to have one clear, consistent message. Pick one call to action so you don’t confuse your influencers and/
or your potential customers.
Social media = Rocket fuel
You’ve built your rocket ship and your flight plan is solid. Now it’s time to take
off! The social media channels where your influencer marketing campaign will
live are the rocket fuel you need to send your campaign into outer space. By tracking where your influencer conversations are already happening, and by leveraging those channels, you can give your influencer marketing campaign the fuel it
needs to take off. Influencers will be sharing your content in the channels where
it makes the most sense, and you can leverage the influencers’ audiences or communities within those channels to spread your message far and wide.
A marketing plan is your rocket ship, and social media is the rocket fuel that sends
it to outer space or somewhere amazing. Without a plan, without a ship, you just
have a bunch of liquid that can catch fire and burn down your launcher.
Secret #4: Be Agile
It’s important to have an influencer marketing plan in place, but be sure to build
in contingencies just in case Plan A doesn’t work as planned.
Say you have two dozen influencers contracted to write blog posts, but what happens if three of them get sick, one person’s laptop dies, and another has a family
emergency and can’t complete her work by your deadline? Hopefully, you’ve also
identified five backup influencers who can step in and take their places to get your
job done. Even with the best laid plans, anything that can go wrong often will go
wrong, but it doesn’t have to be a disaster if you’re prepared.
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Messaging = Flight plan
DON’T FEED THE TROLLS: HOW TO
HANDLE DAMAGE CONTROL
Companies sometimes fear that, once their messaging is in the hands of influencers,
they won’t be able to control it anymore. The message is sent into the social mediasphere where it has the potential to engage people who aren’t fans of the brand or
message. You can help protect your product, initiative, or service from trolls (Internet
bad guys — or just really loud critics) in several ways:
•
Make sure your company hasn’t had any bad press recently. Has your product
been the subject of a recall? Are you in the middle of a sticky lawsuit? Did your
product have a glitch or virus that left lots of people unhappy? Maybe you should
postpone your influencer marketing campaign until your brand isn’t so exposed.
•
Hire exactly the right influencers for your campaign. Influencers who are
fans or potential fans of your brand are professional and will often be your best
cheerleaders, evangelists, and/or explainers if their posts encounter negative
­attention from trolls. Make sure they’re armed with correct information, and let
them do their job.
•
Don’t feed the trolls with emotional responses. Engage carefully and respectfully with trolls — even and especially if they aren’t being respectful. Your audience
is watching, and they’re paying attention to how your brand conducts itself on
social media. If a troll is spreading untrue information, state the correct information
(or a link to the correct information) across social media. You don’t have to have the
last word; you just have to have the correct word.
Secret #5: Recognize the Power
of Emotional Stories
Emotions — from awe and anger to sadness and joy — make content go viral. You
want to set up your influencer marketing campaign to go viral, but Psy is busy
making another video (plus you can’t afford to pay him) and your cat is camera
shy. How to create a compelling story that people will want to share? Start with a
story people will care about!
If you want your influencer marketing campaign to be set up for virality, you
must create an emotional angle for your story. What emotion will your brand
story elicit? Will it play on humor? Or will you aim to inspire? Brands have spent
­millions of dollars on creative concepts and marketing plans to ensure virality.
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If you don’t have millions of dollars to spend, you have to come up with a compelling story, formulate a solid plan, and identify the right influencers to help spread
your message. Then hope for the best.
Beyond the emotions of virality, two other factors are at play:
»» Good viral content tugs at the heartstrings or makes people feel something,
and that’s not necessarily tied to any of the emotions we mention earlier.
feel a part of the story and then share it not only because they relate, but
because something about the sharing is a reflection on them as well.
Secret #6: You Get What You Measure
Marketing — especially in new spaces and platforms — is iterative, which means
you make changes and adjust as you go. What worked? How do you do it more?
How do you scale? You can answer all these questions by setting goals for your
campaigns and tracking those goals. In that sense, you get data from what you
measure (see “How will you assess your achievements?” earlier in this chapter).
Let’s say the goal for your month-long holiday influencer marketing campaign
was to track the number of visits to your website and to sell more of your product
by sharing a coupon code across social media. Your influencer marketing plan
should focus on having influencers share a link to your website where people can
then find a coupon code to use toward a purchase. Before you start your monthlong influencer marketing campaign, gather some baseline information about
your website traffic and know your typical sales numbers for your product. At the
end of the your month-long promotion,check your site traffic and look at your
sales numbers.
You get what you measure — and hopefully the results are what you were
expecting!
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»» Good viral content is relatable. Content is contagious when people want to
IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Exercising your creativity
»» Making magic with your personal
insights
»» Avoiding the controversial
»» Managing “crazy”
Chapter
5
Getting Creative
N
ow you’re ready to tackle your influencer marketing programs with gusto!
Time to have some fun!
Of course, no one will care if your marketing efforts are “fun” if they don’t produce real results. But the best part about social media marketing is that fun tends
to equal effective.
Think you’re ready to have some fun? Of course, you are!
Getting Creative and Letting Go
Social media is a loud, crowded space full of millions of people talking over each
other. Standing out isn’t easy! Engaging influencers to create content that resonates with their audience is a great first step — you know their audiences are
receptive. But even the most loyal influencer fan will click or tap to something else
if the content they’re seeing is something they’ve seen a million times before. No
one wants content that is stale, boring, corporate, or lame.
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As with all social media advertising, creating great content is tricky because users
are savvy. They don’t want to be sold to. They don’t want advertising that feels
like advertising. At the same time, they don’t want to feel “tricked” into reading
or engaging with content that is sponsored but tries too hard to pass itself off as
non-sponsored.
FTC guidelines require disclosure of sponsored content! Be sure to visit www.
ftc.gov for the most recent guidelines on how to properly disclose influencer
endorsements on social media.
The happy medium with influencer marketing is in developing a great campaign
outline and then letting influencers take over, doing what they do best.
Walking the walk
To be successful at influencer marketing — or social media marketing of any
kind — you must stay on top of Internet trends. (Many marketers outsource influencer marketing for this very reason!) You wouldn’t hire someone to produce a
TV commercial if that person had never seen a TV commercial before, would you?
Similarly, you can’t run an influencer marketing campaign if you’ve never seen
one, and you can’t just guess at what kind of influencers and content will work on
social media platforms if you aren’t paying attention to them.
Start by expanding your own social networks. How many people follow you is far
less important than how many people you follow. Listen, post, and interact on
Twitter and Facebook. Use Instagram every day. Find some Tumblr accounts you
enjoy and follow them. Join Reddit. Spend time researching trending topics. If you
don’t understand a hashtag, click it and find out what the story is. Start using the
language yourself.
While you’re poking around social media, you’ll run into countless “gurus” and
experts and people whose only job online is to offer advice. You may benefit from
following them, but you’ll likely benefit more simply by becoming a savvy social
media participant yourself. It’s about a million times easier to answer the question “What would make this blog post interesting for readers?” if you’re a blog
reader yourself!
You don’t have to be an expert, but you should at least try to understand what’s
happening in social media by downloading popular apps (for example, Snapchat,
Whatsapp, and Tinder) and/or talking to people who use them regularly to become
versed in what’s cool.
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Yes, you have to know what’s cool. Cool is critical to social media and influencer
marketing success. If you’re not trendy, you’re not relevant.
Are you having fun yet?
For some reason, marketers seem to completely forget how they behave online,
and end up creating content they’d never pay attention to themselves.
Social media is, above all, social. It’s about connecting, reaching out to people you
know in real life and online, and sharing human experiences through stories and
photos. The only way to interject brand stories among all the nonbranded ones is
to make them as real and unbrandlike as possible. This doesn’t mean you should
create programs that are so far from your brand or brand message that no one will
notice (or remember!) what your brand even is. But there are definitely ways to
get out of “corporate box” thinking.
»» What content do you click each day?
»» Which headlines spark your interest most often?
»» What content do you actually share?
»» What content do you ignore?
»» What’s the last piece of sponsored content you read?
When you can answer those questions, you’re on your way to building influencer
marketing programs that will pass the cool test!
The following sectionswalk you through an example of taking an everyday ­product
and transforming an influencer marketing campaign from “boring” (irrelevant)
to “fun” (relevant and engaging).
Dental floss is boring
Say you’ve been tasked with engaging influencers as part of a new product launch
for dental floss. Assuming that the program goals and success metrics have
already been mapped, your job is to guide influencers into creating content. About
dental floss.
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When you’re immersed in social media culture, pay attention to your personal
trends and preferences:
You’re probably hard-pressed to think of a more boring blog post than one that
outlines the features and benefits of dental floss. A product review of dental floss?
Not only would you, as a reader, never click that post, but what kind of influencer
would be happy to write it?
If you secretly think dental floss is boring, everyone else will think it’s boring,
too. So, how do you create an influencer marketing program around dental floss
that’s fun?
Making dental floss fun
Start by considering what you find fun about social media, and what type of content you share. You can then transfer those ideas to a dental floss program. Now,
your ideas won’t be all good, but they’re a jumping off point to get creative and
fun with even the most mundane of topics. Here are some ideas on how to make
dental floss fun:
»» Share DIY content/ Ask influencers to showcase other uses for floss, encouraging them to take a creative, DIY spin on a product usually relegated to the
bathroom: weaving, making jewelry, dipping floss in paints and decorating
jars, dangling cat toys, and so on.
»» Recipes are always popular. Why make a special trip to the store for cook-
ing twine when dental floss works just as well for trussing roasted chicken
or turkey? There are many ways dental floss can be used in cooking techniques that influencers could illustrate, encouraging new ways for consumers
to keep dental floss top-of-mind.
»» Getting kids to floss regularly can be really tough. Ask influencers to share
their best tips and tricks to getting their kids to floss regularly, sharing their
secret bathroom charts or incentives, plus lots of pictures of really cute kids!
»» Create completely unscientific “flosser profiles” and then develop a “What
Kind of Flosser Are You?” type of quiz that people love to fill out.
»» Maybe the goal is to make dental floss a more prominent aspect of everyday
grooming among consumers. Ask influencers to showcase new ways in which
they’re willing to display their floss. Why do soaps and toothbrushes get all the
fancy bathroom display tools? Why can’t floss be proudly displayed on the
bathroom sink as well?
»» Best songs to floss to? Ask influencers to name, or even come up with
alternate lyrics to, their favorite songs — songs that they sing to themselves
in their heads while flossing so they know they’re spending enough time on
the job. You could even host a contest for the best song/lyrics for flossing
your teeth to!
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Go for it!
Not to get too philosophical, but when it comes down to it, the real reason brands
don’t do a better job of embracing influencer marketing is because they’re scared.
They’re afraid of losing control of their brand’s message. What the brands don’t
realize, however, is that people are using social media to talk about them —
whether the brands are participating or not.
Still, this fear of loss of control compromises influencer campaigns that could
otherwise be great. To those brands and marketers: Let it go!
Don’t be afraid to be real
In the earlier dental floss example, influencers needed to think of and post creative uses for dental floss. This isn’t a traditional approach to promoting dental
floss, and probably the brand’s manager expects the entire marketing campaign
to focus on bathroom-only messaging. But that’s so corporate! And everyone
knows what dental floss is for. No one will pay attention to a boring bathroomonly program. Not on social media, anyway. But using dental floss for crafts?
That’s unexpected. That’s something people would be interested in. That’s a reallife hack and something people on social media are likely to find useful.
So what’s “real”? Think of it this way: Would you tell your friend about it? You
probably won’t tell anyone about a new dental floss just because there’s a new
dental floss on the market. (In truth, that would be weird! “Hey, buddy! Did you
hear about this new dental floss?”) But you might share a fun craft you did with
your kid that turned out great and that you photographed and that, oh, hey, happened to use dental floss.
Let the influencers influence
If you’re all tapped out of “real” or “cool” ideas but you really want a fantastically successful influencer marketing program, ask the influencers what kind of posts
they’d like to create!
No one knows an influencer’s audience better than the influencer does. Influencers are successful because they create great content. Don’t be afraid to let them
take the lead! Tell them what your program goals are and ask them how they think
they could best achieve your objective.
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Getting Creative
If you’re paying attention, you’re immersing yourself in social media. You’re following and interacting with influencers you want to engage professionally. You
see what they’re posting.
The influencers care just as much about their posts as you do. They have a reputation to uphold, and they can’t come across as inauthentic to their readers. They
are (presumably) being paid for the work that they’re doing for you. They want
to please you because they want to work with you — and other brands — again.
Giving minimal guidance to the influencers and letting them do their thing often
results in diverse, interesting, compelling programs that truly engage audiences.
What If It All Goes Wrong?
Brands still worry about handing their precious brand messaging keys over to
influencers. What happens if the bloggers go crazy on us? Horror stories abound of
brands failing to use social media correctly, and having the Internet come after
them like an angry mob. It does happen from time to time.
The good news is that avoiding Internet disasters isn’t difficult! Brands that find
themselves in hot water usually do so because they aren’t paying attention, or
because they forget that social media is a live medium, which means if you put
something out there you need to be prepared to respond. Social media and social
media marketing isn’t a one-way street — you need to be prepared to engage with
your consumers as soon as they offer you feedback, even if it’s not positive.
Preventing a crisis
No form of social media marketing, including influencer marketing, can be
100 percent brand-safe. Even the most carefully selected influencers following
guidelines to a completely innocuous program may have a commenter who says
something unkind about the brand. That’s okay! This is what makes the medium
so real. And truly, a few negative comments here and there aren’t a big issue.
Internet backlash from influencer marketing programs occurs for a finite number
of reasons. Here’s how to prevent this kind of backlash:
»» Don’t try to hide the fact that you’re working with influencers, or that
the influencers are being compensated. Always be transparent! Besides,
the FTC requires that you be honest about this stuff — whether you get
backlash or not from consumers, you don’t want to be fined by the FTC.
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»» Don’t underestimate the intelligence of your influencers’ audiences. If
your brand or service is controversial, even just among a small group of
people, the influencers’ audiences may bring this controversy to light. Don’t
use influencers to try to “spin” something negative into a positive if the
positive spin is disingenuous.
If you do have a product or service that is known to draw Internet ire, do your
best to warn the influencers ahead of time.
»» Don’t hop on social media memes — like using trending hashtags on
Twitter — without doing research! Too many brands use hashtags without
researching their origins. Don’t ask your influencers to participate in trendy
memes or use hashtags if they’re appropriating or “hijacking” them from
meaningful conversations.
»» Be careful, courteous, honest, and professional in all your communica-
tions with influencers. Not all influencers will show you the same respect,
but it’s always worth it to err on the side of caution. Ask yourself, “What if this
blogger decided to post the content of my email to her site?”
»» Don’t engage influencers in programs that encourage “bad” behavior
Getting Creative
on the influencers’ part or their audiences’ part. For instance, programs
where the influencer who get the most votes wins can get downright ugly.
In an attempt to get votes, some influencers may start spamming their
networks, or find creative ways to get people to vote for them. Meanwhile,
influencers who don’t get enough votes may feel jealous and/or make
accusations of their fellow influencers, and the whole program can end
poorly, overshadowed by the angst and anger of the participants.
»» If you’re asking influencers to review your product and you’re afraid of
what they’ll write if they don’t like it, know your options. If the product
isn’t great, influencer marketing is probably not the best way to go. If you
don’t really want influencers to share their honest opinions, don’t engage
them. You’d basically be asking them to lie for you, and that damages
everyone’s reputation. This is where a contract becomes important. Spell
out what your expectations are and be sure your influencer is on board.
If the product is good but you worry about influencer feedback, be upfront
about how you would like them to handle it. Don’t say, “You may only post
your opinion about our product if you like it.” Remember: You aren’t compensating people to write good things. Instead, say, “If you were unhappy with
this product for any reason, we’d love to hear your feedback directly. We
want to know how we can improve it! You’re welcome to share your balanced
feedback in your post, or you may choose not to post at all.” Give them the
option of not posting. Consider compensating them regardless.
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»» Cease all influencer marketing activity across social channels when
there is a national or international crisis. From a brand management
standpoint, you don’t want influencers touting a product amid sensitive posts
about a national tragedy. You don’t want your “Fun, flirty looks for spring”
mascara tweets next to a tweet from someone who’s openly mourning.
It’s important to make sure you do your due diligence and research the reputation
of any influencer you’re planning to engage.
Managing a crisis (if it happens anyway)
If you follow the guidelines, you’ll deftly avoid any real controversies online.
However, on the slim chance that something does go off-kilter with your influencers, here’s what you can do:
»» Respond immediately. The longer you remain silent, the worse the situation
can get. Don’t launch an influencer marketing campaign (or any social media
campaign) if you don’t have the resources to monitor it in real time. If someone or something goes off the rails, you need to have someone on hand to
respond right away. If the crisis is big and requires more executive-level
response than you can give immediately, at least acknowledge that there is
a problem and you’re looking into it.
»» Respond with honesty. Don’t lie about how long the issue will take to
resolve, or say that the issue was unforeseen if it wasn’t. That will only make
matters worse.
»» Apologize. The Internet has a terrible memory! The faster you apologize
for whatever started the negativity in the first place, the faster the audience
will move on to something else. Negative situations usually get worse when
a brand argues with its customers, and the same holds true for influencers
and their audiences.
Make sure your apologies are sincere and actual apologies. Don’t use words
like if and but. For instance, saying “We’re sorry if we offended anyone” is
troublesome for two reasons:
•
If you’re making an apology because people were offended, there is no
need to say “if.”
•
Phrases like this suggest that the blame lies with the people who are
offended as opposed to the offender.
This may seem like splitting hairs, but bad apologies can add fuel to Internet
firestorms.
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Try to make your apologies personal. If a program somehow offended many
people, do your best to apologize to those people directly, not just in a single
blanket statement they may not see. If your influencers are the ones fending
off negativity, support them publicly and privately. Publicly, defend your
influencers on their posts (by acknowledging the negative comments and
apologizing on behalf of the influencer). Privately, email the influencers and
offer them support.
Getting Creative
None of these steps should be necessary if you’ve taken the proper care to avoid
risky programs in the first place. Remember: The influencers want their programs
to be as successful as you do. You’re in this together!
CHAPTER 5 Getting Creative
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IN THIS CHAPTER
»» Hiring a social influencer agency
»» Deciding which kind of agency to hire
»» Doing one big campaign versus
multiple activations
Chapter
6
Working with an Agency
A
day comes in every marketer’s career when you realize you need help.
When the program is bigger than your internal resources or expertise
can handle, you’re smart enough to bring in the cavalry. Especially when
you’re working on something as specialized and dynamic as influencer marketing,
it helps to have an experienced guide on the inside to help you navigate. In this
chapter, you walk through the process of finding and hiring the right agency for
your needs.
So, You Want to Hire an Influencer
Marketing Agency
The fact that influencer marketing is a rapidly evolving practice can make it hard
to evaluate and pick one agency over another. Like any other kind of outsourcing,
it helps to start by understanding your budget, and what you want to accomplish,
including the following:
»» Who you want to reach.
»» Where and how they already interact on social media channels, so you know
which type of specialist to hire. You don’t go to a Twitter agency if your target
is active on YouTube.
CHAPTER 6 Working with an Agency
543
»» What type of message you want to share and have the influencers share
in turn.
Having a clear picture of what you want your program to be will help you set
­specific and actionable goals for your agency partner, and make it easier to measure the success of your program. You want to be sure that any and all activity
supports your business goals. Because if it doesn’t, you’re wasting your time and
money!
May I borrow your relationships?
Managing relationships with influencers is hard work. Coming up with a ­concept,
theme, and hashtag is just the beginning! Someone also has to manage the communication and administrative tasks, including identifying and recruiting the
right people, setting up a contractual agreement, administering payment, and
even dealing with typos. Setting up this infrastructure with each individual influencer at any kind of scale is costly and time-consuming, and around every corner
is another opportunity to get it wrong and offend the very people you’re trying to
convince.
Perhaps most important, very few brands (Disney is the exception that proves the
rule) have enough content or interesting reasons to interact with any one influencer more than two or three times a year. Influencers don’t want to write about
a brand more than that, and their audiences certainly don’t want to read that
much content about any one brand! Unless you can come up with diverse, creative
angles from which to approach your brand’s messaging (for example, a recipe one
month, a post about a vacation the next, favorite pets the next, and so on), while
still somehow staying relevant, content will get repetitive and boring.
This is where outsourcing to an agency, especially one with a network of influencers, is so valuable. A capable agency will have a comprehensive database with
information that helps identify and vet the best candidates to work on your project.
They’ll have processes in place for quality control, systems to pay the influencers,
and measurement and reporting methodologies. A great agency will even offer
first-hand qualitative data about its influencers as well — that is, who is reliable, whose posts produce consistent engagement, who creates the most original/
creative content, and which influencers can’t be counted on to meet a deadline!
This knowledge can’t be found in a database or by simply looking at statistics.
An agency that works on behalf of multiple brands has multiple reasons to contact
influencers, building credibility and a relationship over time. In practical terms,
this means they have already weeded out the crazies and earned the respect of the
good ones.
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Consider the value of the influencers’ desire to stay in the good graces of an
agency that provides them with multiple opportunities to work on prestigious
programs — they have more at stake than a single gig paying $150, which means
they’re motivated to behave professionally.
A strong relationship with an influencer is extra valuable when consumers say
they hate your product. The influencer will be more likely to reach out privately
with negative feedback, and less likely to take cheap — and brand damaging —
shots on a public forum if she sees a long-term value to the relationship.
How it works: Self-service
versus full-service
Approaches to managing influencer marketing programs range from fully automated and self-service, to highly personalized, high-touch, custom solutions.
Most agencies skew more one way than the other. Each approach has value, and
it’s smart to let your needs, rather than a philosophical preference, dictate your
selection.
Think of it as a choice between an all-you-can-eat buffet in a casino in Las Vegas,
or having a personal chef come to your home and make a perfectly designed
three-course meal for an intimate dinner date. They both can be delicious, but
when you’re in the mood for one, the other choice definitely won’t satisfy you!
I <3 control: When self-service platforms rock
Many systems let you go in and sort their influencer database according to a set
of desired characteristics. This can include demographic factors like household
income, education, gender, and number of children, as well as information about
their social channel presence like number of followers or monthly blog page views.
Automated solutions are usually a cost-effective way to get a general message to
a broad audience at scale. Some platforms allow you to review posts before they’re
published, which is appealing to brands that are in highly regulated industries
like financial services or have a desire to tightly control the messaging. However,
the quality of the content tends to be fairly generic, and the engagement of the
influencers audiences is often low. Also, there are usually few vetting or validating processes to join these automated platforms, so anyone with an email address
can sign up.
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Working with an
Agency
Often considered the “technology solution,” self-service, automated platforms
put the bulk of the control — and responsibility — in your hands. You log in to the
vendor’s system and have access to a variety of program components.
This approach is fine if you can reach your goals with the lowest common denominator. For example, if you’re trying to sell gift-wrapping supplies during the
December holiday season, you can afford to be very general in your targeting and
selection of influencers. It’s a safe bet that pretty much every influencer out there
has someone in their community of followers who needs a gift bag.
Automated solutions also make control freaks happy. Do you want, or even have a
pressing business need, to check your results daily or even hourly? Great! Log on
and watch the impressions roll in.
Just remember that most platform solutions don’t provide very much customer
service, so you need to have internal staffing resources, who are trained and
available to do most or even all of the program setup, project management, and
reporting.
Just make it happen: Getting someone
else to do the heavy lifting
At the other end of the continuum is the full-service influencer agency that manually (or mostly manually — everyone uses some kind of contact management
system, even if they don’t give clients access to it!) sets up the program. This gives
you great flexibility, starting by allowing you to be very specific in your influencer
selection.
Need military moms in Florida, with three kids and a family history of diabetes? They can be found and recruited! But it’ll be expensive, it’ll take time, and
your program size will be limited by the actual number of people who match your
requirements and are also willing to participate in the program.
Speaking of participants, the members of this type of network usually meet minimum membership requirements and consequently are of a higher caliber, with
better content and higher audience numbers, as well as being more reliable.
These more expensive services come with a full suite of benefits for you the marketer, including an expert project manager, who runs the programs, manages
influencer communications, and provides you with reporting that can be highly
customized.
This type of service is great when you really just want to outsource it all. If you
want to hand over your list of requirements and goals, and go take care of something else, you’ll be happier with a full-service agency.
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Deciding Which Type of Agency
Is Right for You
Realistically, your program probably needs a little bit of both. And few agencies
are purely one or the other, although their pricing and standard service models
will start at one point or the other. See Table 6-1 for a helpful chart on when to
use a self-service agency versus a full-service agency.
TABLE 6-1
When to Use a Self-Service Agency versus a FullService Agency
Self-Service
You have a small budget.
Full-Service
X
You have a bigger budget.
X
You have few demographic requirements.
X
You have very specific demographic requirements.
X
You have a highly engaged, skilled, and/or dedicated internal staff.
X
You have limited internal resources to manage the project.
X
You need real-time, frequent reporting.
X
You have a broad topic that is applicable to most of the population.
X
You have a very specific or sensitive topic.
X
As part of a broad marketing plan, influencer marketing activations can be a powerful tactic to get a spike in awareness or generate buzz around a specific event
or launch.
On the other hand, influencer marketing can be a powerful ongoing tool to engage
with your customers over the lifecycle of a product, supporting market research
and customer service, as well as contributing to overall branding efforts.
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Working with an
Agency
One-Off Events versus Continuity
Campaigns
Matching your program goals to the bigger business goals helps you decide which
kind of program to design.
Making a big splash for maximum effect
Sometimes marketing goals are time sensitive. You need to get everyone’s attention at the same time, for a product launch, a fundraising deadline, or a special
event, like the Grammys.
In these situations, you want to use tactics and channels that are effective in real
time and in the moment, such as Twitter. Using attention-getting techniques, like
bringing in a celebrity or high-profile influencer, can help you generate a spike in
attention and awareness.
Although they aren’t sustainable over a longer timeframe, these high-intensity
activations can be a spark that gets a fire burning for your brand.
Putting in the hours for a
long-term relationship
Every marketers wants to have those big awareness spikes on a daily basis, but
that’s simply not feasible. And it’s not even desirable — people get sick of seeing
the same thing every day, and that’s a good way to generate a backlash.
Taking the approach of multiple activations, over time, with modest but increasing goals, allows you to test and learn as you go. You can modify program elements
to add more of what works, and eliminate problematic elements. This approach is
great if you’re in beta with a product, are doing regional rollout, or have any kind
of phased program to support.
In these cases, activations with more evergreen content, such as blog posts or
Pinterest boards, can be very effective. By creating content that is discoverable
over time, you can gradually build your library in a more organic and authenticfeeling manner.
Long-term programs may have the same overall budget, but because they happen
over an extended period, they may also be more cost-effective if you’re budget
sensitive.
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7
Facebook
Marketing
Contents at a Glance
CHAPTER 1:
Delving into Facebook Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 551
What Is Facebook, and Why Is It So Popular? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 552
Understanding the Marketing Potential of Facebook . . . . . . . . . . . 553
Understanding Why Your Business Needs a Facebook Page. . . . . 557
CHAPTER 2:
Creating a Facebook Marketing Plan. . . . . . . . . . . . . 561
Understanding the Power of Word of Mouth on Facebook . . . . . . 562
Understanding Your Facebook Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 563
Defining Your Marketing Goals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 565
Developing Your Content Strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 570
Encouraging Audience Engagement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 572
Monitoring and Reporting Page Activity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575
Integrating Your Online and Offline Campaigns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 579
CHAPTER 3:
Selling Products and Services
Using Facebook Offers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 583
Understanding Facebook Offers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 584
Creating an Offer for Your Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 585
Getting the Most from Your Offer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 587
Promoting Your Offer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 588
CHAPTER 4:
Uniting Facebook with Other Social Media. . . . . . 591
Making Facebook Part of Your Marketing Mix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 592
Promoting Your Facebook Presence Offline. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 597
Optimizing Your Page for Search Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 598
Integrating Instagram into Your Other Marketing Channels . . . . . 601
Getting Inside Your Customers’ Heads. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 604
CHAPTER 5:
Getting into Instagram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 607
Promoting Your Brand on Instagram. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 608
Using Your Instagram Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609
Determining What Is Photo-Worthy for Your Brand . . . . . . . . . . . . 612
Using Hashtags in Your Instagram Posts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 613
Finding Friends and Fans on Instagram. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 614
Using Instastories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61