Many businesses who are betting on acquiring and retaining customers with content act as if the whole world has been waiting for it—as if it were inherently bound to get attention once it’s made available for public consumption. Eventually (and inevitably) this mindset leads to frustration.

When businesses decide to put content at the core of their strategy, the vast majority of their resources are put into planning and creating said content. Then they hit “Publish” and hope it goes viral. “Of course it will! We are so interesting,” they think to themselves.

But readers of this publication will know that it takes a lot more than that.

Over the past few months, I’ve experienced this mentality time and time again during workshops and conversations with managers. Apparently, I’ve been in the content marketing silo for too long, thinking that by now everybody gets it: The consumer is at the core of marketing communication — not the brand, not the product, not the company. But the truth is that most managers still think modern marketing communication goes like this:

When it should actually be like this:

Customers Don’t Care About Your Brand

A few weeks ago I was conducting a workshop and we were developing the brand story that we thought should be told. But we kept hitting a wall.

“We need to say how reliable we are. We need to communicate our unique selling point and position our brand,” the workshop attendees kept insisting.

Sorry, but this is a crime against content.

Having a strong brand is still important in our fast-paced world; there is no denying that. However, some things have changed. A strong brand (especially in B2B) is shaped by usefulness. Or, as Jay Baer puts it, youtility. When you communicate, getting attention isn’t enough (sorry clickbait fans). You have to think beyond the click.

At the very moment you grab a visitor’s attention with content, you are taking their time away from them, so you better make it count. Be useful to them and it will be a positive experience. Multiply this by many potential clients and your brand starts getting into shape.

Brands are shaped by usefulness and the customer experience—not by you shouting as loud as you can about how awesome you are with your multi-million dollar image campaign. If you help someone, you’ve got their sympathy and they feel inclined to reciprocate. If you waste their time, you are annoying to them.

Traditional marketing is telling the world you’re a rockstar. Content marketing is showing you are one. – Robert Rose

If you embrace “Show, don’t tell” as a fundamental principle, it will help you create better content. Distribution begins with the content itself.

Don’t Rely on SEO Alone

For a lot of people, the thinking goes like this:

“We produce a lot of amazing content and make it available to Google for crawling and indexing. They know about online content better than anyone and they’ll figure out that we are just the best at this, and after a while, we’ll rank at the very top. That will bring us a lot of traffic and customers. Let’s do this!”

This is plainly and simply negligent. And yet there are so many still doing it. Think about the differences between search and social media. People don’t “discover” content by looking for it; it finds them through the attention it’s getting from conversations others are having about and around it. On social media, serendipity is king.

For blog posts, I recommend writing separate meta data for search and for social so that you can optimize for both channels. The best content not only creates conversations, it’s also shared—on both “visible” channels and dark social channels.

Let’s sum this up:

• Stop wasting people’s time with your brand drivel and put youtility at the center of your content.
• Don’t take attention for granted. Optimize your content and distribution tactics so that you exceed readers’ expectations.
• Always take into account the context in which content will appear to your audience. Don’t just post a link; make it relevant to your audience for the setting in which they will stumble upon it. Empathy is more than a buzzword.

As a project manager, I like to advise clients and contacts to remember that every new content piece is a project in itself. You have to plan distribution before hitting “Publish” and you can never take attention for granted. Once you have really gotten into this new mindset, you’ll find distribution a whole lot easier.

The post The New Marketing Mindset: Nobody Is Waiting for Your Content appeared first on Relevance.

Techopedia summarized the concept concisely:

Dark Social is a term […] to refer to the social sharing of content that occurs outside of what can be measured by Web analytics programs. This mostly occurs when a link is sent via online chat or email, rather than shared over a social media platform, from which referrals can be measured.

The trend towards one-to-one sharing instead of one-to-many clearly favors direct messaging services over social media. WhatsApp was acquired for a staggering $19 billion, which indicates the value Facebook saw in direct messaging apps. Look around and you’ll see people frequently chatting on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Snapchat. These networks are organized around one-to-one sharing (or very specific groups of friends or contacts). Email (also a form of Dark Social) is still one of the strongest distribution channels around.

However, almost two years later, reports are still claiming that the number of social shares are a must-have KPI. It’s supposed to tell you how many people have enjoyed your content and approximately how many users saw it. For many niche-topics, it’s very hard to get more than a handful of shares, though.

The number of shares is certainly an important metric to track, but when a content piece only gets a handful of shares, it seems to indicate the content itself is bad, doesn’t it? What if your content is actually good, but its low share counts are due to you not enabling the sharer to make it easily relevant? For that to happen, users need to be both motivated to share and have the ability to easily pass content on to the right network of contacts.

Motivation To Share

As the study “The Psychology of Sharing” from the New York Times pointed out, 94 percent of social media users share content primarily to provide value to others. The other two major reasons for sharing are self-representation (68 percent) i.e. content which is shared because it shapes the image of the sharer and his/her identity, and to nourish relationships (73 percent).

Content which is truly helpful and/or entertaining WILL be shared, given that “the very act of learning and discovering information is inseparable from sharing it, as three in four (76 percent) say that sharing is half the fun of finding information.”

Even though this study was conducted in 2011, it’s still relevant. The results implicate something I’ve observed on many occasions: A company that focuses on producing great content should focus even more on how it is going to be recommended (note avoidance of the term “goes viral”). Allow me to explain.

Let’s say you publish a helpful glossary for engineers and I am an engineer who values it. I’ve downloaded your app on my tablet and my smartphone and I gave it an excellent review. I have a big network of peers and I teach classes at a college. You’d want me to share this with all of those potential customers, wouldn’t you?

Everybody knows that making content “shareable” is a must-have nowadays. So you embed Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin sharing buttons. Easy, right? Think again, because all of that actually doesn’t help me.

At best, it reminds me that I could share it, but does it really enable me to share it with people I would want to share it with? The vast majority of my Facebook contacts are family and friends. I’m not going to share it on my timeline because it’s just not relevant for all of those people.

Moreover, it wouldn’t gain much traction because the newsfeed algorithm amplifies widely popular content that engages with the masses (not a specific, highly targeted niche). I can share it on Twitter, but only three percent of my followers would see it on a good day. LinkedIn? I did share it, but many people missed it.

Ability To Share

If you want me to make it easy for me to share with like-minded people, you need to enable me to be relevant.

If the engineering glossary is truly a youtility, why make it so hard to recommend it to others? I’d have to remember it before my next class with students and at the next meeting with my peers. Or I’d have to copy the link, open my email software or webpage, paste it in an email, choose the appropriate contacts I want to send it to and compose a message to provide context.

I (the marketer) think dark social is massively undervalued. The more specialized the content and the more it addresses a niche audience, the more you should think about implementing “dark social” sharing buttons.

Facebook – a company that obviously understands the usage of social media like few others – purchased WhatsApp for $19 billion. Whether this acquisition was intelligent is not the point; the fact that Facebook understands the growing importance of direct communication as a digital social interaction is. Have you noticed that when you open a link, it does so within the Facebook app? It’s also no coincidence that Facebook makes it increasingly easy to share via the messenger.

What does it mean for your next initiative?

Sharing is an impulsive act. If you make it too hard to share content in a relevant way, most of the people you want to reach will simply not find your content. The more specialized your content is, the more you should think about implementing “dark social” sharing buttons. Enable them to send it directly to their peers and friends (via email, WhatsApp, etc.) who are much more likely to be interested.

Two key learnings emerge from this:

1. The deeper your business addresses niche needs, the more “dark social” will be relevant as an amplification tactic.
2. Start thinking about how your target audience really communicates with each other; Twitter and Facebook might not be the best networks for your content to be shared on by evangelists.

Just because it’s easy to track and calculate Facebook and Twitter shares doesn’t mean it’s the best way to distribute your content. Remember, the goal is to meet your intended audience with remarkable content and, in the event that they consume and enjoy it, make sharing it with a relevant audience an intuitive, seamless process. Consult your audience personas, determine how they communicate with peers and give them a way to amplify your great content for you.

The post Shining Light on “Dark Social” Sharing appeared first on Relevance.

As the amount of Content pushed out there is increasing minute by minute, a shift is happening as I write these lines. One could say that we’re moving from content marketing to marketing content.

I think everyone can agree on the fact that hitting the “publish” button isn’t enough anymore. I started blogging back in 2010 (on a blog which doesn’t exist anymore) and I can remember that I didn’t have to work much on my distribution. Sure, back then blogging wasn’t an isolated phenomenon, but still, you didn’t have to allocate much time to executing your distribution tactics. I didn’t publish articles to generate leads at that time, but getting people to read your stuff still is your goal.

At the time I put 4, 5 hours of my time into researching and writing an article and only 30 minutes to one hour in distribution. Nowadays, I’d say I allocate at least twice that time into distribution to get similar results.

When talking to people interested in adopting an online content strategy, I systematically notice that a lot of thought is put into content creation (how to make this content valuable and relevant for potential customers) but much less into distribution and promotion (via respectively owned and paid media). “We’ll just publish it on Facebook.”

So what does this growing importance of smart and effective distribution mean for businesses?

You need to allocate additional resources to Content Distribution

Yeah, you need to allocate even more ressources to this content marketing thing. A few years back you could just publish it once on  Facebook and a couple of times on twitter and that was it. This isn’t enough anymore. Not only are there so much more channels available, the attention span of your leads is also smaller and smaller and the amount of content calling for their attention much bigger.

An excellent resource you can subscribe to, in order to learn about efficient distribution is relevance.com

You need an evergreen Content Strategy

The second implication of this reality is that you really need to think about an evergreen content strategy. If you’ve been publishing for some time, you have (hopefully) already noticed that some of your content continually attracts visitors. That’s your evergreen content.

“Evergreen content is that which is still interesting and relevant weeks, months or even years after its initial publish date. It doesn’t date like news, and the value is that it can deliver traffic, leads, social shares and can occupy valuable search positions for a prolonged period of time.” (econsultancy)

The article on Econsultancy pretty much says it all about evergreen content, so I recommend you read it as soon as you can.

Once you’ve identified your evergreen content, I recommend you also break down the channels which work best for each piece of content. Why is that? What does it mean for future distribution tactics? Maybe it even impacts the content creation itself?

Content Marketing comes before marketing your Content!

Even though the title may be kind of provocative, I will never be the one to say that Marketing Content is more important than the content itself. I actually published a long blogpost in German about this.

The best distribution in the world will fall flat if your content just isn’t good… Let me finish by quoting Rebecca Lieb (Altimeter):

“Smart marketers know that, and they know that the best content begins with a strategy. Not with a channel.” – Rebecca Lieb

– See more at: http://maelroth.com/2014/09/content-marketing-marketing-content/#sthash.FyBZBlzX.dpuf

The amount of content published is increasing minute by minute, and a shift is happening as I write these lines. One could say that we’re moving from content marketing to marketing content.

I think everyone can agree on the fact that hitting the “publish” button isn’t enough anymore. I started blogging in 2010 (on a blog which doesn’t exist anymore) and I can remember that I didn’t have to work much at distribution. Sure, back then blogging wasn’t an isolated phenomenon, but still- I didn’t have to allocate much time to executing my distribution tactics. I didn’t publish articles to generate leads at that time, but getting people to read my writing was still my goal.

At the time I put four or five hours of my time into researching and writing an article and only 30 minutes or an hour into distribution. Nowadays, I’d say I allocate at least twice that time into distribution to get similar results.

When talking to people interested in adopting an online content strategy, I systematically notice that a lot of thought is put into content creation (how to make this content valuable and relevant for potential customers) but much less into distribution and promotion (via respectively owned and paid media). “We’ll just publish it on Facebook,” they say.

So what does this growing importance of smart and effective distribution mean for businesses?

Allocate Additional Resources to Content Distribution

You need to allocate even more resources to content marketing . A few years ago, you could just publish it once on  Facebook and a couple of times on Twitter and that was it. This isn’t enough anymore. Not only are there many more channels available, but the attention span of your leads is also increasingly shrinking while the amount of content calling for their attention is increasingly growing.

Develop an Evergreen Content Strategy

The second implication of this reality is that you really need to think about an evergreen content strategy. If you’ve been publishing for some time, you have (hopefully) already noticed that some of your content continually attracts visitors. That’s your evergreen content. According to econsultancy,

“Evergreen content is that which is still interesting and relevant weeks, months or even years after its initial publish date. It doesn’t date like news, and the value is that it can deliver traffic, leads, social shares and can occupy valuable search positions for a prolonged period of time.”

Once you’ve identified the evergreen content you want to create, I recommend you also break down the channels which work best for each content piece and bake them into your content production recipe. The channels you ultimately want to promote on will affect both future distribution tactics and even the content creation itself.

Content Marketing Comes Before Marketing Content

Even though the title may be kind of provocative, I will never be the one to say that marketing content is more important than the content itself. (If you’re fluent, read my post in German about this topic.) The best distribution in the world will fall flat if your content just isn’t good.

Let me finish by quoting Rebecca Lieb (of Altimeter):

“Smart marketers know that [there simply is no marketing without content], and they know that the best content begins with a strategy. Not with a channel.”

By allocating more resources to an evergreen content marketing plan, you’re propelling the shift from content marketing to marketing content. Baking your distribution strategy into your content creation plan ensures you’ve given adequate thought to your audience and how you’ll reach them. This early focus on both content creation and distribution is what it takes to get seen in today’s content marketplace.

This article originally appeared on MaelRoth.com.

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