Amber Ricchetti, a content strategist with OutstandingStar, shared an interesting item on the top takeaways from a recent content marketing conference, ContentWorld.
She reports that the conference offered 5 tips regarding content marketing. We think these are great tips for content marketing and have added some additional thoughts.
1. Earn Trust
You will earn your readers’ trust if you provide valuable information. Provide information (including free info) that offers real value to your audience. We’ve had some clients say, “we do not want to give-away the store”.
While you may need to protect proprietary information, don’t over think this. With so much info available for free, prospects might as well get if from you. If you deliver great information, prospects think more highly of you. You should give valuable info as freely as possible, the fewer strings attached the better.
MarketingSherpa has shown that freely given whitepapers, which do not require an email in exchange for the download, have a higher take rate. If you brand the content, you can dramatically expand your content’s reach, even when you give it away.
2. Develop a Real-Time Mindset
A real-time mindset refers to providing very current information. This is information happening now, not last month.
A pioneer in this concept is David Meerman Scott (a presenter at ContentWorld), who talks about real-time content marketing.
We advise customers to create a content-idea-portal, which dynamically captures information from across their domain of interest. With a content-idea portal, you can have regular feeds from Google news, top industry blogs, industry publications, etc. You would use these feeds as the basis of content marketing activities such as tweets, blog posts, forum answers, etc.
To build your credibility, you can add your analysis of the news and information rather than just re-tweeting or posting a hyperlink in a blog post.
With information moving as fast as it is, you should try to be among the first with valuable insight for your audience. To set up your content-idea-portal, think about what is relevant to your customers and prospects. If you need help, contact us for more information.
3. Integrate Your Story
Certainly, as you distribute your content, you want to integrate your own story.
First, you need to find your story. In her post, Amber points out that many businesses think they do not have a story or they think their story is boring. She mentions that Ann Handly, of MarketingProfs, defines the company’s story is the behind-the-curtain type information. The back-story of who you are as a person, brand, or company.
A company’s story often serves as the root of it all. To build your story, make sure you are authentic and truthful. If you develop a good story, you can build a good content marketing strategy.
4. Conduct a Content Inventory
A common dilemma many businesses face is how to find good content. You probably have much more information than you realize.
We work with a renewable energy company that gives several trade conference presentations each year. The company’s CEO also participates in panels and responds to detailed questions from prospects via email. All of these elements can be part of the company’s content inventory.
First, you need to take stock. Interview the subject matter experts in your company to see what great content is lurking in their digital lives. For our renewable energy client, the CEO’s industry presentations and interactions offer a great basis for white papers, how-to-sheets, slideshare presentations, etc.
Once you have a complete inventory, you can then figure out how to use it. You can also pinpoint any content holes you need to fill.
5. Intrigue
For this final point, Amber cites conference keynote speaker, Sally Hogshead, as saying that you don’t have to have the best product or biggest budget to succeed.
Sally suggests companies strive to fascinate their audience. You can do this by wrapping the more mundane parts of your content with your own story (see #3 above). Think about what makes your company interesting and include those messages along with the technical info.
The best way to intrigue is to offer captivating, one-of-a-kind information. You can use many of today’s channels, to test messages to see what gets the best results.
You can read more about Amber Ricchetti’s daily tasks at the following link.