7. #CMWorld
•Share your project document – INCLUDING projected deadlines
•Alert stakeholders about new content, and include messaging docs
•Leverage content newsletters
9. #CMWorld
•What kind of content do you want made?
•Who are we targeting with this content?
•What do we know about our audience?
•What is the story this content should tell?
•Who in our company is an expert in this subject?
•Who will need to approve this content before we publish it?
•How involved are you going to be?
10. #CMWorld
No.
“Not right now”
“Let’s answer those questions first”
“Is this the right asset?”
HI everybody, welcome to “I think we’re alone now, creating world-class content on a team of one or none.”
I’m feeling not very alone right now, which is unusual and pretty wonderful, so thank you all for coming and keeping me company here. I’m going to dive right into my presentation,
But what not everybody in the marketing world is sold on is that somebody in your organization has to OWN that content. And that’s why I called this content marketing on a team of one or NONE. I realize that while some of us (like myself) who are on a one-person team think we’ve really got it tough, others of us are the SOLE people creating content AND they’re also doing other jobs too. So who here is creating content on a really small team, like only one or two people? Show of hands? And who here is creating content while ALSO doing other jobs? Wow You are my hero. You are amazing. I don’t want you to be sleeping under your desk.
So, why is it hard to create content by yourself? Now, speaking from personal experience, these are the top challenges with creating content on a team of one or all of you total badasses who are doing this on your own.
Challenge #1: Everybody’s asking me for something. Content is a service, and everybody in your company wants you to serve them.
Challenge #2: It’s too hard to find your ROI, which means it’s too hard to figure out what’s working
Challenge #3: It’s too expensive to get things made, or you just don’t have enough time to get everything made
Challenge #4: Nobody can know everything about anything. You’re only one person, but you’re expected to be an expert on everything.
So, let’s start with how you can handle what I think might be the biggest challenge for those of us on small teams. This is a huge problem, especially if you’re dealing with multiple teams who all need content made for them.
So, the first way to deal with getting too many asks is to show everyone on your team what you’re up to. Now I know some of us are a little shy about sharing our accomplishments, but this isn’t about showing off – it’s about making your work visible.
My second strategy for people are getting too many asks is to get answers. If people on your team want to ask you for things, you should be allowed to ask them a few questions of your own.
I frame in a kind of “help me help you” way – basically, the more you can help me get this content made, the faster I can do it. And you want to establish DURING THE REQUEST PHASE. So when someone on your team comes to you, and they say they need something, make it a policy that they need to do a little homework first.
So here are some of the questions anyone asking you for content should be able to answer. And this isn’t a one-way street – if I think of some awesome content on my own, I’m not going to dive in without answering these questions first either.
And finally, sometimes you just have to say no. I never say “no” for no reason, and when I do, I try to say “not right now” instead of “absolutely not.” Sometimes the reason I say no has to do with that step we just talked about – sometimes when I ask who the audience is for a piece, it turns out that we don’t really have a perfect audience for it, or when we look at what that audiences wants to hear from us, the content someone is asking for just doesn’t fit. As hard as it is to say no to the people you work with every day, often you’re the gatekeeper. And if you say yes to everything, you’ll waste your time with content that isn’t necessary, and you’ll let people down when you can’t meet their expectations.
So recap: get organized, which is going to help you manage all of these things people are asking you for
Make everything visible – this is going to help everybody in your organization see how hard you’re working, and the status on where you’re at
And finally learn to say no.
So the #2 challenge of creating content on your own is in finding the ROI of your content. Going back to my last challenges – dealing with too many asks – knowing how well certain types of content do for your business makes it MUCH easier to prioritize which content you should and shouldn’t do.
So how do you find your ROI? At Marketo, we look at 3 types of metrics, which are early-stage or vanity metrics, content performance, and program performance.
But these metrics are useful when it comes to measuring early-stage content.
The real purpose of your early-stage content is to engage your buyers, and that’s exactly what vanity metrics measure. Share, downloads, and views tell you whether your content is attracting attention, and whether people like what they see. The important thing is to not rely entirely on vanity metrics – treat them like a piece of a larger puzzle.
We also take a look at how content affects actual revenue. If you’re facing skepticism about content marketing’s effectiveness, or you’re having doubts yourself, there’s nothing like tying content directly to closed-won deals.
Below, you can see a report we ran in our Revenue Cycle Explorer, which tells us how the same assets have contributed to revenue so far. The “FT Revenue Won” column refers to revenue generated from customers who originally entered our database by downloading that particular asset. The “MT Revenue Won” column refers to revenue generated from customers who downloaded that asset at some point during the buying cycle.
Of course, with this type of reporting, keep in mind that it will take time before your content generates opportunities or revenue, depending on the typical length of your sales cycle. Rather than comparing an asset you created a year ago to asset created six months ago, check in on both assets six months after they’re published – and compare those numbers for an accurate view.
File name: “Revenue won”
Finally, you’ll also want to see how programs using your content (such as email programs that used your content as an offer) performed. There are a lot of factors involved in an asset’s performance in programs – the relevance of the content to the audience who received an email, the email’s subject line and copy, etc. But if you content is consistently tanking in certain types of programs, it’s probably time to sit down with your team to figure out what’s going wrong; if your content is performing beautifully, you’ll want to keep up the good work.
In this illustration, you can see how five different content assets performed, all sent within the same paid email program:
From this report, we can see that for “Awesome Email Program” (not its real name!), our Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation brought in a high number new names, and the highest FT Pipeline Ratio. Our Content Marketing Cheat Sheet, on the other hand, brought us the most new names. This tells us that if we continue to run paid programs with this vendor, offers that deal with content marketing and metrics would be good bets.
So just to review
So challenge #3: you’ve figured out what you team really needs from you, you’re able to measure what works…but the fact remains that creating content can be a pretty big investment, especially if you’re making something very elaborate or time-consuming. I know that at this conference, I’ve seen a lot of amazing examples of what companies with huge budgets or huge teams are doing, and I’m totally inspired by that, but I always also have to think: what can I do with my budget, and the amount of time I have to work with?
So the first way to deal with this problem is to make a huge investment in one piece of content, and then divide it into a bunch of smaller pieces.
example, you might turn a page of an ebook in to a cheat sheet, take data from a whitepaper to create an infographic, or expand on a particularly good blog post to create an ebook.
If you do choose to present the same information in a new way, make sure that you aren’t just repurposing for the sake of looking productive. Repurposing works because people consume content so differently – some people prefer slide presentations, some people like to quickly scan infographics and blog posts, some people won’t bother downloading anything under five pages. Repurpose your content to reach a bigger slice of your audience.
So before you update something, get the numbers. As we covered in our section of “vanity” metrics and FT/MT-attribution, you should be running reports on how your content is affecting engagement and your company’s bottom line. Whenever an asset shows continually high-performance, you should earmark it for a future update. Eventually, those numbers will start to drop – a good sign that it’s time to update.
Change the dates. This isn’t just about timestamps. If you used words like “recently,” “lately,” or “in the next few years” make sure those still apply.
Check your stats. If you cited a study or a report cited in an ebook, find out if there’s a more current version.
Add some fresh thinking. Is there a relevant thought leader who’d be worth getting a new quote from?
Finally, reach out to whomever in your organization knows most about a topic – remember those Subject Matter Experts from the “Content Creation” section? Set up a meeting to gather input from your resident expert, and ask her to give your asset a thorough review. Often, this person will identify out-of-date or inaccurate information that you never would have seen.
And this is actually a nice segue way into the 4th challenge of creating content on your own, which is that, simply put there’s only one of you. No one person can be an expert on everything, and no one person can do everything.
This last one really speaks to people out there who are doing all of their team’s content marketing, and their biggest issue isn’t budget, but time. It probably sounds to insane that you aren’t thinking about budget. Now, if you’re considering getting some freelance writing done, but you ARE super stressed about your budget, one way to look at it is that NO freelance writer is going to cost you more than a full-time hire. So even though spending on outside help can be painful, you aren’t making a huge financial commitment, and you’ll be freeing up other members of the team to do OTHER money-making activities. At Marketo, we use freelance writers quite a bit. There are a lot of freelancers here at CMW this year, so if you’re struggling, get out there and take some business cards.
find your writers. There may be people in your organization who are strong writers but don’t necessarily write all day, and there also might be people who have amazing IDEAS for content, and a lot of knowledge to share, but they aren’t great writers or they just don’t like writing. You need to find and cultivate those people do.
Reach out to partners,
So recap: hire freelancers, find the writers in your organization
So recap: hire freelancers, find the writers in your organization
So recap: hire freelancers, find the writers in your organization
So that’s it for my blogging tips, let’s open it up for questions!