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Secrets To Great Content Marketing: Value, Place, And Being The Best

Oracle

By Chris Moody

Later this month, Oracle will bring together a diverse group of modern marketing leaders—representing dozens of industries—to discuss the art and science of creating and distributing great content.

What’s the secret to doing effective content marketing? You might pinpoint a number of essentials—how frequently you write and publish, the precision of your targeting and segmentation, the breadth of your social communities.

However, as Jay Baer, president of Convince & Convert—a content marketing and social media strategy consultancy that works with major brands—reminds us, marketers should focus on something even more basic: the real-life usefulness and value of their content.

Jay recently shared with me his ideas on best practices in content marketing. Here they are, in Jay’s own words:

Content marketing isn’t new.

For a century or more, companies have been trying to educate customers and prospective customers on how to remain top of mind. However, the ease of information creation today and the proliferation of dissemination options make content marketing a noisy and complex landscape.

If you’re a CMO or marketing leader, here are three key questions that you should ask yourself before executing any content marketing campaign:

1. Is your content marketing useful?

Every consumer is being faced with an invitation avalanche, where countless companies are asking them to click, watch, like, follow, share, and more. It’s overwhelming. The way to succeed in this hyper-competitive messaging environment isn’t to shout louder and send out even more messages. Rather, the secret to effective content marketing is to make your messages truly and inherently useful.

This is the theme I explore in my new book, Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help Not Hype. What if your marketing was so useful, people would pay for it if you asked them to do so? What if your marketing had intrinsic value? What if you created marketing that people cherish, not just marketing that people tolerate?

Companies of all types, including LEGO, General Motors, and many, many more are investing resources in creating Youtility marketing.

It works because it’s not frivolous and disposable like so much of modern meme-filled messaging. It works because we crave useful things. (A great case study in Jonah Berger’s book, Contagious, found that useful articles in the New York Times were forwarded 30 percent more than average.)

2. Are you a digital dandelion?

For approximately 17 years, marketers have put considerable resources into building and burnishing their online corporate homes. The cycle of creating and sustaining an advanced website, getting visitors to it, and then trying to convince increasing percentages of those visitors to do what we want them to do has been the central premise of digital brand building for a long time now.

Today, however, the attention of our customers and prospects doesn’t “clump” the way it once did. The rise of mobile internet access as well as myriad social networks and attention aggregators is turning digital into a push-based marketing program, rather than the pull-based one it has historically been.

USC’s Center for the Digital Future announced recently that 80 percent of Americans’ online time is spent at 15 or fewer online destinations. What is the chance that your corporate website is one of those 15? Essentially, no chance. Thus, the key to effective content marketing is to create informational outposts that represent your brand in as many of those “magic 15” as possible.

Of course, your key content marketing assets should live on your website or in your branded mobile app. But they also need to be repackaged, deconstructed, and atomized to live successfully in the places where your customers and prospects already spend time: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, LinkedIn , Slideshare, and the like.

3. Are you the best solution?

In my research for Youtility, I discovered that the companies that are succeeding best with content marketing are not those that are covering the most informational bases. Instead, the most successful companies are those that create content that fully satiates the needs of the intended audience. Don’t create a lot of content that is somewhat useful; create a little content that is extraordinarily useful. Your content marketing should constitute the best solution for a particular customer inquiry, problem, or circumstance.

For example, Clorox has a mobile app called MyStain. It tells you what to do if you spill on yourself (which, you know, happens). It’s an incredibly useful app. Unless you are particularly clumsy, it’s not an app you are likely to use with great frequency, but that doesn’t matter. When I spill something—or am in the vicinity of a spill—I can access that app in seconds, and use Clorox’s expert advice immediately.

At that moment, Clorox and its content marketing are the BEST solution. And as such, they are inserting their brand into my life in a circumstance where ordinarily they would be wholly absent.

Remember: It’s not about making content. It’s about making content that matters.

Source: iStockphoto