This quote by Jay Acunzo of NextView ventures in his post Should Startups Blog? stopped me cold and made me re-think content marketing forever.

Why did it have such an effect on me? Because it stated an obvious point I had directly experienced for the last eight years with content marketing: the most successful content marketers treated content like a product offering, not like a marketing tactic.

Let me tell you the story of how I became acquainted with modern content marketing.

I was laid off from a software sales job during the first week of January 2009. It was just after all hell broke loose in the stock market – the beginning of the ‘Great Recession.’

So there I was in January 2009, out of a job and with no prospects. What to do? I already had enough of the corporate world, so I decided to launch my own consulting career. But with no money for marketing, I concluded the only thing I could do was a blog.

But I didn’t know the first thing about how to blog to generate business for myself. I did what anybody in my situation would do: I went to Google.

I stumbled upon Copyblogger. It was only a few years old at that time. I couldn’t believe my luck, because what I found was a treasure trove of free content – content so valuable that I felt guilty consuming it.

The first series of blog posts that grabbed me was their initial “Copywriting 101” series written by Sonia Simone and Brian Clark.

This was truly valuable content. It was chock full of valuable advice, the kind that normally costs hundreds of dollars to get from an online course – yet here were Simone and Clark giving it away for free.

In fact, that’s how Copyblogger built its business: by giving away tons of really valuable content.

Of course, now they are one of the most successful Software-as-a-Service companies with their Rainmaker Platform.

But to me, and to thousands of writers and freelancers out there, their main product is their content. That software stuff is just how they make money.

Treat Your Leads Not Like Leads But Like Customers

Copyblogger treated me like a customer. I never felt like they were trying to butter me up to sell me something. However, they did sell me stuff: teaching sales, premium WordPress templates from StudioPress, and membership in their Authority membership site. I estimate that I have spent over $1,000 on various “paid for” products they have.

But I became a customer the minute I consumed their free content and subscribed to their newsletter.

Brian Massey, “The Conversion Scientist,” explains it this way in his book The Customer Creation Equation:

“The term ‘customer’ works because we should treat our leads with the same respect that we treat customers who have paid with cash.”

Massey doesn’t like the term “lead,” nor do I. He calls it “sales speak” because it seems to dehumanize the very people we are striving to help.

But why asks Massey, should we call them customers when they haven’t bought anything? Because on the Internet, no one is going to give you their contact information unless you offer them something in return.

“They’ll fill out a ‘lead’ form if you promise a great report, webinar, or some consulting time on the phone,” continues Massey in his book.

They have bought something with their attention, and with their email address – two very important resources we hold dear in this day and age.

And how do you treat your customers? You strive to make their experience with your product or service as wonderful as possible. You want them to become loyal customers, you want to eventually upsell them to your higher value products and services. And in the case of “content as a product,” you want to upsell them to a paid product.

But first, treat them as a welcome member of your customer family, that exclusive club of preferred customers who have given you their valuable time and attention, and deserve your best.

Develop a Product Development Mindset

In his revolutionary book Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing, Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute said you should treat your content not as a campaign, but with a product development mindset.

I wanted to include the following excerpt in its entirety because I think it’s so important:

In a traditional marketing or advertising campaign, we want to understand the campaign goals and tracking, the target audience, the key campaign messages, the offers, the media strategies, and the schedule and campaign integration. Many of these are similar to the construction of a content marketing approach. But there is one critical— and often overlooked— difference. This experience really has no end. It’s not a campaign. It’s a content product. In this regard, the mapping, building, and ultimate management of the content-driven experience looks much more like product development than it does a traditional marketing campaign.

Rose says it’s like planning and building a permanent space station, not a mission to orbit the earth and come home.

The best product development model to follow for the ongoing ideation, creation, production, and publication of content is the media company model – for who the content is THE product.

But obviously, this looks a little different when you’re a product or service company and living on the 24/7 always-on Internet.

Contently produced a very interesting graphic that represents the prerogative of content marketing departments today:

SOURCE: CONTENTLY, “STATE OF CONTENT MARKETING 2016: THE TIPPING POINT”

At the center of this chaotic spaghetti of content that is produced for many channels is the Brand Newsroom – a permanent, well-defined department that serves as the machine that produces, like clockwork, the ongoing content needs of the organization.

If the content is one of your products, then you need to approach it with a product development mindset and put into place procedures for ongoing product ideation, creation, production, and publication.

Put Your Customer-Oriented Mission Before Your Profit Motive

And talking about Contently, Shane Snow, Contently’s founder, wrote SmartCuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success, a fascinating book that interestingly has nothing to do with content marketing. But Snow inadvertently provided one of the most valuable lessons for content-driven organizations: Your mission, especially if it’s a mission to start a movement or change the world, is highly important.

In the book, Snow describes research conducted in the 2000s by executive Jim Stengel, formerly global marketing head of Procter & Gamble and research firm Millward Brown to collect a decade’s worth of data on the market performance of major brands that orient themselves around a noble purpose or ideal.

Snow said the findings were more dramatic than he expected.

“Brands with lofty purposes beyond making profits wildly outperformed the S& P 500. From 2001 to 2011, an investment in the 50 most idealistic brands— the ones opting for the high-hanging purpose and not just low-hanging profits— would have been 400 percent more profitable than shares of an S& P index fund.”

Snow cites content marketing poster child Red Bull, and Whole Foods, as iconoclastic examples of brands who have put their mission apparently above their profit motive – although, of course, these brands are very very profitable.

In order for your content to be successful, your mission should be to change people’s lives, to lead a movement, to champion a cause – whether your “customers” pay you for the privilege or not.

Copyblogger honestly doesn’t care whether most of their subscribers buy any of their stuff – their mission is to improve the writing skills and marketing savvy of freelancers and creatives everywhere – while making an insane profit in the process.

And that’s the ironic thing about your content as a product: you’re giving away deep value in the form of free and paid products to fulfill your mission to improve lives – and you get paid handsomely for it.

Conclusion

Success in content marketing starts with your mindset for approaching content. If you treat content as a campaign or as a marketing tactic (and I know this is going to sound weird and woo-woo), karmically it comes through. People can smell a marketing pitch a mile away, even though you’re taking a content marketing approach.

As Jay Baer says in Youtility, be useful, be valuable, but not in a “…Trojan-horse, ‘infomercial that pretends to be useful but is actually a sales pitch’ way.”

Approach your content with the mindset that it is a product that represents and fulfills your customer-driven mission. Treat your leads as customers to whom you’re delivering value, and turn them into loyal customers who eventually buy your “paid for” products. Implement a product development process to your content, because content must be an ongoing process, not a campaign. Approach it the way media companies do.

And finally, make it your mission to change your customers’ lives and lead a movement they’d love to belong to. Your mission is expressed by your free products (your content), and your “paid for” products. Your mission transcends your profit motive, but of course, you’ll make a mint.

As a result of this change in perspective, I’m changing the way I approach my content marketing. I’m approaching it as my initial product offering to my clients, sincerely and without reservation. Not in a cynical quest to implement the power of reciprocity, but because it’s the right thing to do – and it works!

The post Why Content Should Be Your Product, Not a Marketing Tactic appeared first on Relevance.

I know we’re supposed to tell our clients, bosses, and stakeholders that content marketing takes patience—that we shouldn’t treat it like a campaign. But there are many companies who may never have the patience, the resources or the stomach to stick with a content marketing strategy long enough for it to bear fruit.

Does that mean you can never do content marketing? Or if you do, that you’ll be perpetually stuck with the other 62 percent of content marketers who aren’t seeing results?

No. I believe there’s a middle way.

I believe that you can borrow tactics and strategies that others (such as direct marketers like Jeff Walker and Rich Schefren) have used before to shortcut your time to content marketing ROI without investing in building a full-fledged, in-house media department.

How can this be possible?

Introducing the Modified Content Marketing Approach

To explain what the modified content marketing approach is, I think it’s best to compare and contrast it to classic content marketing as we know it.

With classic, full-blown content marketing, your goal is to build a content destination. You create a blog, a resource center or a honey pot that you hope will become a major content resource for your niche. Think American Express’s OPEN Forum for small business, or Blackbaud’s npENGAGE for online nonprofit fundraising.

These efforts are characterized by:

• A regular schedule of frequently published short form and long form content
• Building a visible content brand for your industry
• Use of content that spans the sales cycle—from attraction content to conversion, sales and loyalty content
• Driving traffic via keyword optimization, social media promotion, native advertising, PR and guest posting

In other words, large, coordinated efforts that look more like a publication than a marketing department. In fact, “becoming the media” has been the rallying cry for content marketers for a while now.

The modified content marketing approach, on the other hand, is a lot less ambitious. Its goal is not to create a content destination, drive tons of SEO traffic and social media shares, or follow a strict editorial calendar.

The goal of a modified content strategy is to drive a niche target market of subscribers into your database through the use of a content cannonball and then execute a focused spurt of blog and email content to nurture your prospects into customers.

It looks something like this:

The initial focus is an epic long-form content piece (e.g., an ebook, guide to your industry niche or major research report). This is called the content cannonball because its purpose is to make a big splash in the market. It is designed to be the focus of PR efforts, attract buzz in the market, and drive subscriptions.

Following that, another focused effort is spent on creating between 10 and 20 blog posts and associated content that will be used in an auto-responder campaign designed to build demand for your product.

The dripped articles, sent over a period of weeks or even months, serve the same purpose as the classic online product launch. Each communication is designed to progressively take the prospect from know and like, to trust and finally buy.

Let me delve into the individual pieces of the modified content strategy, with specific examples to illustrate these points.

The Content Cannonball

As I mentioned above, the content cannonball is your magnum opus. Wikipedia defines the magnum opus as “…the largest, and perhaps the best, greatest, most popular, or most renowned achievement of an artist.” You’re really trying to make an impact with this content piece.

The content cannonball can be an ultimate guide to your industry, a new concept, original research or even a full-length book.

A perfect example is Relevance’s eBook, “The Content Promotion Manifesto,” written by Chad Pollitt. The Manifesto put Relevance on the map as the content promotion agency. It was originally designed to be sold on Amazon and is subsequently longer and more in-depth than the standard lead generation eBook. It was even mentioned by OneSpot as one of their 10 must-read content marketing books.

It is definitely Pollitt and Relevance’s “magnum opus.”

Promote the Content Cannonball

The next part is promotion, the focus of “The Content Promotion Manifesto”. With modified content marketing, the promotion of the content cannonball is planned from the very beginning and takes on many of the characteristics of a book launch. But instead of driving sales, the purpose is to drive subscriptions.

When big data provider Infochimps was pivoting from its earlier business model as a seller of data into a big data infrastructure provider, their challenge was to attract a completely new client base.

To quickly attract a large number of new leads, Amanda McGuckin Hager, Infochimp’s Director of Marketing at the time, commissioned a joint study with the SQL Server Worldwide User Group (SSWUG.org) about big data. They published the results in a major research report entitled “CIOs and Big Data: What Your IT Team Wants You To Know”.

This was one of the first reports of this kind ever published and became Infochimp’s magnum opus. And because the study was conducted jointly with SSWUG, promotion to all association members was a fait accompli, garnering a large number of downloads and subscriptions in a very short period.

But McGuckin Hager went further. In her presentation to the Austin Inbound Meetup, McGuckin Hager described how she used traditional PR to promote the study to industry press, generating industry buzz for the report.

So did the Infochimps content cannonball make a splash? It sure did. They increased their house database by 94 percent and grew demand 358 percent to produce a multimillion-dollar pipeline.

Drive Email Marketing Through Automation Sequences

After you make a splash with your content cannonball and have driven as many subscribers into your marketing database as possible, then you must nurture them to the point where they’re ready to buy (or at least ready to talk to a sales person).

Use an auto-responder to slowly send nurturing content to them over time using a sequence of emails designed to generate awareness and trust, and ultimately get your prospects excited about your offering. The concept is similar to a product launch sequence.

A recent example of a marketer successfully using this method is Neville Medhora and his Kopywriting Kourse blog.

Medhora is a brilliant copywriter, but his blogging is fairly sporadic. His last three blog posts were published July 30^th, August 14^th and Sept. 3^rd, or more or less every two weeks.

But I receive emails from him every one to three days. Just look at my inbox:

It feels like Medhora is producing content all the time (and the content is really valuable). But they’re all blog posts he’s written in the past scheduled into his auto-responder sequence.

I read almost everything he sends, and I even bought a couple of courses as a result of the emails he’s sent, all thanks to his auto-responder marketing.

Content marketing has become one of the most effective forms of marketing in the era of almost-infinite competition for attention. But it requires a long, sustained effort to really pay off. A content marketing consultant and friend of mine from Germany recently told me he advises his customers not to expect ROI until one year, or in some cases even two years, after they get started.

For those who don’t have the resources, in-house talent or patience, the solution could be the modified content marketing approach. By focusing on a large, up-front effort to create a content cannonball that drives subscriptions, and executing a product launch type of email marketing sequence, you can leverage the concepts of content marketing (i.e., giving away value) without the long-term sustained effort typical of the media company approach.

The post Shortcut to ROI With the ‘Modified Content Marketing’ Approach appeared first on Relevance.

Unfortunately, the waters on the way to the U.S. can be rough. Many bright-eyed sellers from Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America, with high hopes and dreams of abundant riches, have had their hopes dashed on the rocky shores of the largest market on the planet.

But there’s another way – an easier way. Content marketing has emerged as a key method for entering international markets – especially the U.S. market – saving you time, expenses and headaches.

It’s important to it approach it the right way, especially since content marketing has become so pervasive in the U.S. that the blogosphere has sounded the warning about content shock and the content saturation index.

If you’re smart about how to use content, you could be selling your products and services in the U.S. in no time at all. Here’s a simple plan for you to follow:

1. Pick an Initial Niche

Conducting market research in any market, let alone a foreign one, is a tough task if you’re introducing a new product – especially if you have no previous customers to interview. But if you’ve been successful in your home market, you can extrapolate the niche you’ve successfully sold to and target the same niche in the U.S.

A word of warning: if you’re coming from a fairly small country, what seems like a niche to you may actually be a pretty broad market in the U.S. For example, at Content Propulsion we worked with a small, South American software company who wanted to target online marketers. But in the United States, the online marketing niche is huge. So we had to narrow it down to “small boutique advertising agencies who do online marketing” to select an effective segment to target.

If you approach your initial content marketing efforts using the lean content approach, you can refine your target niche and the personas associated with that niche from initial market feedback on your blog posts, eBooks, and infographics.

You have to start somewhere, so start with an educated guess about who your target market niche is.

2. Choose Your Unique Point of View

Don’t be afraid to take a stand, make a statement, and have a unique point of view. Or as sales guru John Costigan likes to say: Be different.

I work with a lot of outsourcers from Latin America who want to crack the U.S. market with their “high quality, Microsoft-certified software development services.” They all sound the same. But they don’t want to rock the boat – they want to make sure they sound “official” to appeal to the demanding U.S. corporate buyer. Consequently, they labor in perpetual obscurity.

The only way you’re going to stand out in the U.S. market is if you’re different. How do you develop that unique point of view?

You can start by creating a content marketing mission statement as described by Joe Pulizzi from the Content Marketing Institute.

Boiling it down to its essence, the content marketing mission statement gets everybody at your company who is involved with creating content on the same page. It helps you define your unique voice.

The components of a content marketing mission statement are:

• Who is your audience?
• What kind of information will you deliver to them?
• What outcome should your audience take away from your content?

The content marketing mission statement is very powerful. It can help you decide what to put on your content calendar, help you filter out content ideas that don’t fit, and enable you to develop a body of content that’s consistent with your unique point of view – and help you stand out from the crowd.

3. Create Your Shiny Object

The term “shiny object” has taken on a bit of a negative connotation in the United States, but if you want to enter the U.S. market, you need the kind of shiny object that marketer Amanda McGuckin-Hager refers to as the key to your lead generation activities.

What is a content marketing shiny object? It’s premium content, such as an eBook, research report or white paper that is newsworthy, all-encompassing and extremely valuable. It’s that shot across the bow to the market that declares, “We’re here, and we’re making an impact!”

Another name for a content marketing shiny object is the content marketing home run, a term coined by Doug Kessler of Velocity Partners U.K. in his presentation Content Marketing in the Age of Crap.

Your shiny object, or content home run, is a result of the intersection between your unique point of view, your expertise on your topic, and your target market’s particular needs, concerns, and goals. It’s your pièce de résistance, your raison d’être, your calling card. Make sure it’s awesome.

4. Use PR to Promote Your Shiny Object

Next, how do you get your shiny object noticed and consumed by your target market? This is where you might have to invest a little bit of money. If your report or eBook is truly newsworthy, then make an effort to promote it to press outlets that target your niche.

McGuckin-Hager used a PR firm to promote a research report on big data produced while she was Director of Marketing at Infochimps. The effort led to a 94 percent increase for their in-house database.

If you can’t afford a PR firm in the early stages of your U.S. market entry, approach media outlets or blogs that target your niche market and offer to write a guest article.

5. Outsource Content (if necessary)

Outsourcing your content is easier said than done – but if you do it right, it can pay off.

If English isn’t your native language, there are a few options for outsourcing your content creation. Elance or Odesk are great solutions because of the variety of writers available who know your industry. However, you should choose writers carefully and not hire the writer who offers the lowest price.

To ensure high-quality content, it’s best to seek recommendations from community managers or directors of freelance and writers’ associations. For example, I have received great recommendations from the leadership team of one of our local organizations, Austin Freelance.

Next Steps

If you’re trying to introduce your company, product or a new service to the U.S. market, the best way to do it is with content.

Entering the U.S. market, or any foreign market for that matter, is like creating a startup. Even if you’re already established in your home market – and your products might even be the leading brand in its category – when you enter an international market you’re starting from zero.

Content marketing is a great, low-cost way to test the waters in the U.S. market while gaining valuable feedback that can help you refine your message and your understanding of your target market.

But first, you must define your target market, establish a unique point-of-view, create a shiny object, promote that shiny object and – if English is not your forte – hire a stateside freelance writer.

The post How to Enter the U.S. Market Using Content appeared first on Relevance.

These disturbing statistics were from Paul Roetzer’s presentation at this year’s Content Marketing World, 7 Steps to Becoming a Performance Driven Content Marketer. Roetzer said content performance has become a critical issue for corporations.

CMOs can begin to improve these figures by making every content piece accountable to the bottom line, just like VPs of sales hold each one of their sales people accountable to meeting and exceeding sales quota.

But how do you do that? Here are two simple steps:

1. Measure Content Conversion Rates

“Traffic x Conversion Rates = Success!”

So said one of the first slides In Andy Crestodina’s standing-room-only presentation at Content Marketing World, Content Marketing 201. This formula may seem obvious to you and me, but it’s amazing how many companies either don’t know this or don’t take it seriously.

Here’s how to calculate the conversion rates for each content piece so you can find your content champions:

Step 1: Measure your conversion goals.

For B2B firms, especially those with long sales cycles and high price tags, your first conversion goal is to drive subscriptions to your newsletter so you can nurture your prospects through the sales funnel.

When a prospect subscribes to your newsletter you should redirect them to a “thank you” page on your website. Don’t use the default “thank you” page provided by your email marketing program, since it lives on their domain, not yours.

Then go to Google Analytics to set up your “Conversion Goals.”

• Go to Conversions > Goals, and add the URL of your subscription “thank you” page as your goal destination URL.
• After about a month or two, go back to Google Analytics and navigate to Conversions > Goals > Reverse Goal Path. You’ll see the best-performing blog posts that convert visitors into subscribers.

Step 2: Identify your blog post pageviews.

In Google Analytics, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, to see your most popular content.

Then export the most popular content into Excel (delete pages you’re not interested in tracking, such as “home” or “/blog”). For each blog post, add the “views” column from the “Pageviews” screen, then add the “conversions” column from the “Reverse Goal Path.”

In a fourth column add a formula to divide the conversions column by the views column. Voilá: conversion rates for each blog post!

Once you find your content champions (and your content goose eggs), you’ll know what topics to write more about, and which topics to avoid.

2. Make Sure you’re Converting the Right Leads

But what if your content marketing machine is chugging away nicely and you’re attracting a lot of subscribers, but the leads you’re getting are not the right leads? What if they just come for the free information without buying anything?

There are two ways to make sure you attract more buyers and fewer moochers: track the types of content they consume and ask better questions on your conversion forms. Use this information to create a custom lead score in your automation system so you can segment your leads into a high-quality bucket and a low-quality bucket.

Step 1: Track what content they’re consuming.

Are your subscribers reading lots of how-to content, or have they started clicking on product related content?

Find out from your sales people what kind of questions your prospects ask when they’re reaching for their wallets, and then track whether your subscribers are reading or downloading content that answers those exact questions.

Step 2: Set up progressive profiling in your conversion forms.

If you have an automation system that allows you to set up progressive profiling, start using it now.

Progressive profiling works like this: instead of asking your prospects every single qualifying question on one form (which can kill your conversions), you can progressively ask a few more qualifying questions each time they return to download another piece of premium content, such as an eBook or an Infographic.

You can ask them: What’s your role in the purchasing process? What are your biggest challenges related to xxx problem? What’s your time-frame for solving your problem?

Note: also take into consideration prospects who have filled out a “Contact Us” form or a “Request a Demo” form. They’re the highest quality “ready to buy now” prospects.

Step 3: Segment your subscribers.

Put the most qualified leads (the ones who answered the form questions the right way, consumed “buying” content and/or requested a contact) into a separate marketing funnel.

Achieving Company-Wide Content Accountability

The content marketing novelty appeal is over – now it’s time to prove ROI. Treat your content like sales people: they either close deals, or they’re fired.

Track your content conversion rates, and make sure your content attracts the right leads.

Knowing a few simple tricks in Google Analytics and in your automation system can go a long way towards helping you make your content accountable to the bottom line.

But this is just hors d’ouvres for the larger meal: turning your whole company into a performance-driven organization, where marketing gets to call the shots.

Consider this: Only nine percent of CEOS and six percent of CFOs use marketing data to help set corporate direction, says Paul Roetzer in his new book, The Marketing Performance Blueprint. It’s time marketers reverse these sad facts by tracking content performance and making those beautifully written pieces pull their own weight.

The post Content Accountability: Make Every Asset Pull Its Weight appeared first on Relevance.