Content That Works

"My name is Lucille Meachum, but I’m Lucy to everyone, only Lucille on my business cards. I’m 41, and happily married now for seventeen years — wow. I have two great kids that can really get my blood pressure going one minute, but can be sweet and caring the next, even to each other."

No, that's not an exercise in creative writing you're reading, it's an example of a persona you should be creating for your content marketing strategy, according to Keith Weigold, a contributor to Junta42's new Content Marketing Institute blog.

To know who you're targeting with your content, Weigold says, you have to understand more than just their demographics. "A key to engaging content is put the customer first, to solve her problems and answer his questions. This requires understanding their beliefs, feelings, wants and needs," he says.

Weigold walks us through the process of creating a persona--starting with the information we're most likely to have about our customers (demographics) and filling in the blanks until you can write your target customer's narrative.

"This ultimate step truly places you within her shoes and provides the customer-centric viewpoint so crucial to effective content marketing," Weigold concludes.

Though good-quality and engaging video production can be a daunting task, it pays off for some businesses. The popularity of YouTube can be turned to commercial purposes, and ROI can be gauged using the site's analytics functions.

Creating your own channel is a particularly effective strategy to attract visitors and monitor viewings, comments and feedback. Once you've created a channel, you must maintain it much as you would a blog or text-oriented social media presence, according to Mashable.com's "Top 10 YouTube Tips for Small Business."

The advice on using YouTube's social capabilities – favoriting appropriate videos and making "friends"; using tags; and promoting your videos elsewhere - are particularly important in getting noticed.

We'd add an 11th tip: Determine your audience before you go on air. That will help shape the content and production of your videos, as well as whether YouTube is a good fit in the first place.

In most cases, a client's website plays a big role in their overall content strategy. But how many companies take the time to think about the goals of their website and how they fit within their overall content marketing strategy? Not many, based on our experience. The good news is that it’s never too late to stop and rethink the purpose of your website.

Patsi Krakoff, content marketing specialist and co-founder of The Blog Squad, shares recommendations for five content marketing goals for websites:

Lots of businesses are setting up accounts on various social media sites lately, but not all of them really "get it." While there aren't steadfast rules on how to use the sites, there are best practices and certain etiquette guidelines that most seasoned users try to follow. OnlineMarketingBlog hits many of them in this recent article, and while they specify the tips are for e-commerce sites, they really can apply to any business' social media strategy. Tips include:

• Collect data: It's important to understand where your customers are coming from and how they're interacting with your website and its content. Utilizing services like AddToAny and Google Analytics can provide valuable information about the habits of your audience.


• Set up Twitter and Facebook profiles: This should be pretty obvious by now, but Twitter and Facebook are emerging as the top social media sites and can greatly enhance your digital presence beyond your website.


• Engage your audience: It's not enough to just set up a website, Facebook page or Twitter account. You've got to have a back-and-forth with the people coming to those sites. Respond to comments on your website and follow, retweet and respond to others on Twitter. If all you do is sell, sell, sell on social media sites you'll lose authenticity quick—as well as the patience of your followers.

For more tips on social media best practices, visit the social media section of hammock.com.

How-to articles for using Twitter abound, but we liked the way this article from Connected Marketer zeroed in on helpful tips for tweeting responsibly and building a B2B community on Twitter. Blogger Jeremy Victor outlines the how Twitter can help "start conversations and build real life relationships" that will ultimately benefit your business.

Our favorite tips:
Don’t: Flood your audience with self- or company-promotional tweets. A balance is critical.
Don’t: Post negatively about a competitor. Don’t post negatively about anything for that matter.
Do: Provide value and be selective in your tweeting. Only tweet about things that the community of people whom you are working to attract will find interesting or valuable. A great place to start is to share links to industry news or new product announcements.

Measuring ROI seems to be a hot topic this week, as Bill previously pointed to an article about why it's important to measure ROI on social media marketing efforts.

A new study by Omniture doesn't go into why measuring ROI is so important, but it does show that marketers simply aren't doing it, regardless of online marketing method: "80% believe ROI from online marketing activities is important to measure, but only 31% of marketers can effectively measure it," according to the 2010 Omniture Online Analytics Benchmark Survey. Further, "86% of respondents think conversion rate from online marketing activities is important to measure, but 25% cannot effectively measure it."

At Hammock, we do a lot of content marketing for clients, and for each of those clients, we report back on a monthly basis about how our content marketing efforts are working for them. And by "report back" I don't mean vague statements about how awesome our work is; I mean specific metrics that clearly show how our work is helping our clients achieve their business goals.

Custom publishing has changed significantly since Rex created Hammock Inc. 19 years ago. While the “custom” part remains, “custom content” rather than “custom publishing” is a more accurate way to describe what we do and the work we create for our clients. Custom content is published in print, online, on websites or via social media. The platforms and the methods of distribution and syndication are varied based on the goals of our clients.

Forrest Gump famously compared life to a box of chocolates, in that "you never know what you're going to get." Social media can be a little like that, but fortunately you can measure its effectiveness and fine-tune your approach to, ahem, sweeten the results.

At a recent Social Media Breakfast in Seattle Katie Paine, from KD Paine & Partners, outlined to a packed house a 7-step program to determine the ROI on social media.

As reported on the University of Washington "Web Tools for the Digital World" site, measuring social media effectiveness isn't all that different from measuring other media.

As with other media, you need to define your goals, your audiences, your benchmarks and your metrics. Make your messages credible and closely track responses. Encourage word of mouth. Learn from mistakes and adapt - social media will tell you much more quickly than other forms whether you're on track.

Above all, remember that social media is not a magical cure for deeper problems with a brand or business. If you choose to use it, you must see it as part of a suite of tactics to help fulfill your long-term strategy.

The first step in successful content marketing is to ensure your website is set up properly. Good Plum has a list of several common mistakes businesses make with their websites, including:

• A bad domain name: Will you choose one that incorporates important keywords? Or will you go with one that's catchy? Or both? Spend time researching and testing your domain name, Good Plum says.
• Neglecting traffic generation strategies: Websites that ignore tie-ins to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, fail to research keywords and other Internet marketing tactics, and ignore their rank in organic and paid search will not be as easily discovered as those who utilize those services.
• An ugly website: It might sound harsh, but if your website is difficult to look at (blinking banner ads everywhere, 10 different fonts, 50 different colors, etc.), people won't stay long. Be kind to your visitors' eyes and invest time in developing a good design—both visual and navigational—for your website.

Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 reminds us about the challenge facing companies that embrace social media face—the social media policy.

He points to a couple of different organizations (different, as in, one university, one corporation and one nonprofit) to show how a policy can help or hinder a company's efforts to use social media for marketing. The policy is important, no doubt, but it shouldn't scare off employees from tweeting or mention the company on Facebook.

Joe has some great insight on what an effective social media policy should look like.

While social media can be credited with numerous positive contributions to society, sometimes that sphere can feel impolite and harsh to folks diving in. Applying a little more politeness and a lot more dependability to your content marketing efforts can go a long way toward building trust and ensuring your success. Take a lesson from Grandma.

This week the Custom Content Council (CCC) along with its magazine ContentWise released their 10th annual “Characteristics Study: A Look at the Volume and Type of Content Marketing in America for 2010.” In addition to covering print media usage and spending, this year the study included questions about marketers’ use of digital media as part of their content marketing efforts. Here are some of the highlights from the report:

This post appeared recently on the eminently snarky and cynical website Overheard in the Newsroom: "Social media editor: “I’m too busy. I can’t use my brain.”

If your organization has leapt into social media, the people responsible for that may well feel that way. But it's something they have to do every day, because a day online is like a month (or more) in more traditional marketing.

It's also important to take the time to analyze your social media's effectiveness - if for no other reason than to justify your efforts. Just make sure you use meaningful metrics, and understand what those metrics can and cannot say about their success.

For example, if you or others at your group blog, notes Galen De Young at ProteusB2B, business bloggers need to look beyond metrics such as numbers of visitors or RSS subscribers.

"In my opinion, one of the best ways to gauge the success of a B2B blog is to analyze how much traffic it’s generating, and to analyze how hard those blog pages are working for you," De Young writes.

Those measurements include how people found your site, where people land on your site and how much time they spend there, he notes.

At Hammock, we call that a Content Marketing Intelligence Report or CMIR, and it's what we do for every client at the start of a relationship and at regular intervals thereafter. That's how we measure up.