Tag Archives: content strategy
Happy New Year! Our teams are back from holiday time with their families and ready for an exciting year ahead. But before we welcome 2012, we thought it might be fun to look back on some of our favorite stories of 2011. It seemed fitting to pick 11.
Here you have a list of eleven posts from across our offices, spanning topics from customer experience and branding to measurement and mobile. It’s a great overview of trends and technologies that shaped the past year of digital marketing.
We thank you for continuing to read Experience Matters and are looking forward to bringing you another year of timely and compelling points of view.
It’s conference season (when isn’t it?) and as the leaves turn to brown and travel budgets get squeezed we all have to carefully consider where we’re going and what we hope to get out of the experience. It’s not all trays of banana bread and drink tickets, so what makes for a good conference experience? For me it’s a focus on emerging trends and creative problem solving shared with your peers.
I was lucky enough to sit on a panel titled Managing, Measuring and Evaluating Distributed Content: Video, Webinars, White Papers and More, where we discussed the challenges and opportunities that distributed content models offer. Joining me was my partner on the client side, Kelly Turner, who is the content strategy lead at AT&T and provided perspective on what a large organization faces when it comes to distributed content and maintaining a strategic vision.
Kelly and I recently discussed what we brought home from the Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver.
Derek Phillips: So, what did you think of the IMC? Was it what you expected?
Kelly Turner: Let’s see, I expected a big conference room, people with name tags, aroma of coffee and cologne, weird haircuts, hipster glasses…and on that front I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Other than that I had absolutely no idea what to expect. But I will say that overall it was definitely one of the cooler things I’ve gotten to do in my professional career. And remember, in my life as a journalist I saw open heart surgeries and interviewed criminals, many of whom were not elected officials, so I know what I’m talking about.
Derek: Were there any “ah-ha!” moments? Did you learn anything?
We’ve talked a lot recently about marketers starting thinking like publishers. We’ve outlined three key phases of the publishing cycle: planning, sourcing, and governing.
To dive deeper, let’s take a look at sourcing content. After your team of go-getter content strategists have planned for the type of content that is required to meet business, brand and consumer needs — the type of content that’s going to inspire, resonate and promote engagement through relationship building — you are now tasked with the question: Where’s all this awesome content going to come from?
Creating content from scratch is expensive and time consuming. Chances are you already have plenty of usable content at your disposal. If you’re a major corporation, chances are you have too much.
This is where the emerging concept of content curation can help. Content curation is “defined as a highly proactive and selective approach to finding, collecting, presenting and displaying digital content around predefined sets of criteria and subject matter,” according to Rebecca Lieb, Vice President, North America at Econsultancy.
Content curation is more than just a Google search of your company name, though. Curating good content takes time and good editorial judgment. Here are 4 things to think about when curating content.
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In our webinar, “A Marketer’s Guide to Thinking and Acting Like a Publisher” earlier this week, we talked a lot about the importance of developing and managing content that meets customer needs as well as your brand and specific business objectives. One tool publishers use to maintain timely, relevant and useful content is an editorial calendar. To continue the conversation started in the webinar, here are four inputs businesses should consider in developing their editorial calendars: Customer, Marketing, Merchandising, and Seasonality.
Customer inputs:
What are your customers talking about? What are they interested in? You can find out by simply reviewing your internal search logs for keywords your customers are using, or you can dig deeper (and wider) by employing digital listening tools like Radian6 and SM2 that scour social media channels and compile data on the conversations going on. These tools allow you to not only get a better sense of what people are talking about, but the sentiment around those topics. All of which can help you develop content that will resonate with your target audience.
Derek Phillips and I presented a webinar today entitled “A Marketer’s Guide to Thinking and Acting like a Publisher.” In it, we outline the six key elements of great content plus the three phases your company needs to include in their publishing plan.
You might notice that we won’t talk a lot about social. It isn’t because we don’t value social media; we have three experts working with clients in our Chicago office alone. So in this web 2.0 world, why didn’t we focus as much on social?
It reminds me of a recent Joe Pulizzi interview with Jay Baer. During the interview, Jay reminds us that strategy must come first.
“You have to focus on how to ‘be’ social first, and worry about how to ‘do’ social second…If you and your company are worrying specifically about your ‘Facebook strategy’ then you really don’t have a strategy at all…”
I don’t think Jay is saying that you shouldn’t have a Facebook strategy, period, but that you should come up with your overall strategy and then determine how you want to use to distribute your message.
Our webinar focused on a publishing strategy; social can and should be baked into that strategy. But social is more complex than you’d think. As we discussed editorial calendars and governance processes, many organizations have these things in place solely for their social strategies. While I love the commitment around these channels, I think it’s always best integrated.
Content strategy isn’t just about audits or aligning with information architecture. Directly supporting copywriters is a primary goal of content strategy as well. It falls to content analysts to distill insights and create an appropriate plan (based on business objectives, user needs, etc) – a plan that gives your copywriter enough to succeed.
Without content strategy, you create an unjustified delay; your copywriter is forced to research, analyze and strategize before they even start crafting the language that will entice your customers to convert. It’s unfair to your copywriter and is poor stewardship of your client’s resources.
After all, content strategy at the start of a project makes the creative process run faster and more efficiently, thus saving money for your client. Like information architecture and planning, content strategy work done up front will ensure that the best possible creative is produced…and that the entire project aligns with the given business objectives.
