She found a void and filled it.

As any B2B content marketer will tell you, conveying complicated concepts in a digestible way is truly an art. In this sense, Joan is an artist – and one who understands the worth of her work. In speaking with her, you’re guaranteed to hear the word “value.” Her clients recognize the value of content that’s compelling and useful in that it helps transition a reader from visitor to lead to customer. On her end, her writing has value in that it’s what she gets paid to do. These two elements are closely tied, for Joan succeeds when her clients succeed.

I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Joan, who shared her expertise on how content marketing editors and publishers can increase the value of the writing they produce, both for their clients and for themselves. Here are 5 key highlights from our conversation:

Own it.

Joan says, “I think we need to examine the organization of marketing in companies.” It used to be that all public messaging could go through marcom. But now, customer service has a Twitter account, marketing has a Twitter account and a Facebook page, and leadership is spouting off on LinkedIn. This siloing needs to stop, she says, and someone must own all the content from blogs to YouTube. She is calling for the creation of a Media Center of Excellence in organizations. Basically, many cooks can add their unique touches, but only one chef should choose the cuisine.

Use the “So What” Test.

Whatever your idea for a piece of writing, she recommends you ask yourself, “So what?” “Sure, your product does X, Y and Z, and it does it in 5 seconds. Well, so what?” When you can answer that question, you actually have something to say in your writing, and readers will find it relevant.

Don’t lose touch.

Content marketers are voracious readers. With such an overload of dialoguing at the speed of light, we can sometimes cut corners and get hooked on current trends, entirely losing sight of our marketing purposes. Joan recently edited a piece of writing that was full of buzzwords and content marketing cliches. These pitfalls exist in every industry. She reminds writers to identify the difference between a buzzword and something that adds value to the topic.

Streamline the messy.

The creative element of writing is messy. “Let it get messy,” says Joan, but don’t let a disorganized process get in the way of efficiency. Streamlining the communication, approval, and distribution of content will save you a lot of headaches and, more importantly, it will save you money. Full disclosure, I met Joan when she shared her thoughts about Kapost on Business 2 Community. A client of hers began using the software to streamline the content marketing process from ideation to social media promotions. By tidying up the workflow and organizing the process, she was able to make more money per piece of writing because she wasn’t wasting time with tedious (and costly) tasks.

Serve sales.

To stay on top of her field, Joan reads a lot of sales blogs. While she is not directly in sales, she sees her role as supporting sales and helping them close more customers. Recently, she was asked by a salesperson, “Is one more white paper going to help me meet my $2 million quota?” It’s a great question, and one that identifies a common division between marketing and sales. To bridge the gap, content marketing folks should ask themselves some questions: When is a good time to hand off this contact to sales as a lead? What keywords can I use to increase visibility of this piece to drive sales? How is sales framing our product and how can I align what I do to support that effort?

In her thirteen years freelancing, Joan has worked with a myriad of clients. Across all industries, the need for valuable content – content that marries the technical and compelling, converts visitors to customers, and supports sales – is consistent.

Joan Damico is a B2B copywriter and marcom consultant with more than 15 years’ experience in B2B marcom for high tech and industrial companies. She helps them leverage social media and traditional media to build brands, boost leads and drive sales. Joan is the author of Integrated Marcom Minute blog andnewsletter. She has presented copywriting and integrated marcom seminars for clients and industry associations including the American Writers and Artists Institute (AWAI), Business Marketing Association (BMA), Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and has taught marcom and copywriting courses at colleges and universities including New York University (NYU). A social media enthusiast, Joan is a former community manager of the LinkedIn Group, B2B Social Media, where she took the group from 2,000 members to more than 10,000 in 18 months.

As you know, many of the companies that are growing at a fast clip are using content marketing. They’re communicating with their customers. They’re giving away information for free.

But even more than that, the really successful online marketers are companies with powerful, consistent brand personalities.

They know who they are and what they stand for. And it comes across in every blog post, newsletter, webpage, and communication.

It’s not enough to send a monthly email newsletter or keep a blog. It’s not enough to give away information. Even if you have the best product on the market, you still need a little something more.

Is your business the strong, beautiful type? (Photo credit: Frank Kovalchek)

For example…

Just look at Marie Forleo—a life coach whose stated mission is to make ladies rich, happy, and hot. Her primary content marketing channel is video and every single one of those videos is designed to let her personality (which is, in her case, also the personality of the business) shine through.

Her online following, her program sales, and her media coverage, understandably, seem to be exploding.

Similarly, though in a different industry and with a different cause, there’s Sevenly—a clothing retailer with a charitable twist. Their brand personality is confident, compassionate, and passionate…and it shines through every communication.

They are also spectacularly popular (and making a difference to boot).

These companies probably have great products, but it isn’t product that really makes them shine. They’re storytellers with consistent and beautiful personalities. They’re companies you want to know personally. They stand for things that we all want to stand for (do I want to be rich, happy, and hot? You betcha. And do I believe that Marie Forleo, whose every video oozes with laughter, beauty, and confidence, can get me there? You better believe it.)

And another (somewhat embarrassing) example…

Finally, I’ll add my own experience to the mix: when I first started my business, I wanted to seem bigger and more experienced. So I hid behind a bit of a corporate mask. I wrote my website a little more formally than I actually wanted to. I didn’t put together a voice and tone guide. I didn’t even think about my brand’s personality.

In other words, I held back.

Luckily, though, with time came confidence. (Not to mention the embarrassing realization that I wasn’t following the very advice I was giving my clients. Oops.)

So I overhauled my website, my content strategy, and my voice. I put a picture of myself laughing on the homepage. I stopped writing in a formal voice and started saying things like “heck yeah” and “oopsie-daisy” – because, hey, that’s more me and as an independent contractor I am my brand personality.

Within two weeks of launch, I had closed one new client and filled my inbox with queries from people who wanted to do something bold, new, and different.

In other words, identifying and owning my business personality was an immediate game changer in terms of both leads and sales.

Is your business the smart, quiet guy who could totally fix your computer? (Photo credit: Daniel Zedda)

What this doesn’t mean

Okay. So you get it. When it comes to doing business online—and especially with content marketing—personality wins business. But I should probably also offer a little clarification:

Having a personality doesn’t mean being the boldest, biggest, funniest, or most colorful character on the block. It doesn’t mean you should make light of serious topics. It doesn’t mean copying the Marie Forleos of the world.

What it does mean is identifying what you stand for and emulating that in all your brand decisions—from word choice to logo colors to which magazines you appear in. It means knowing who your business is, how it speaks, and who it is talking to.

If your business is selling medical equipment and targeting hospital decision-makers, its personality should feel very different from Sevenly’s or Marie Forleo’s or mine.

So, how do we get there?

As usual, this is where content strategy, advance planning, and putting together a useful, consistent style guide come in. In my next article, I think I’ll talk about just that.

Thoughts? Questions? Comments? Drop us a note in the comments below. 

Photo credit: Marco Bellucci

This week, big names are posing big questions. The below articles will make you think…about your strategy, about scaling your content operation, and about technology. Give these content marketing questions a read, because at the end of the day, the right questions will make us better content marketers. Enjoy!

There’s a debate going on in the world of content marketing. Is it better to produce a lot of content, or is it better to produce quality content? In a fantastic post by Mitch Joel, he proposes…why not do both? To show how it can work, Joel references how Gary Vaynerchuck has built his online empire with both repetition and quality. Not only does this article validate the investment in content marketing, but it poses an interesting final question: “Is this hard to scale? Absolutely. Will every brand get this right? Absolutely not.” The implication here: don’t you want your business to be the one that figures it out? Via Harvard Business Review

If you’re just starting out with content marketing, you should read this post. If you’re knee-deep in content marketing, you should read this post. In it, Michael Brenner breaks down the 8 questions you need to ask yourself when defining (or, evolving) your strategy. Need more convincing to take a closer look? In his own words, here’s why this is such an important topic: ”We need to create more of the kind of content our customers are looking for and less of the stuff no one reads, or acts upon.” Check it out. Via B2B Marketing Insider

This week, just today actually, the Content Marketing Institute’s Robert Rose released a new report on content marketing technologies, explaining how 13 tools organize and map to the steps in the content marketing process. In his blog post, Rose does an incredible job examining why and how software solutions can support this process. If you’re looking into content marketing software, the post is definitely worth reading. Of course, it’s not as thorough as the full report, but it will help you define which of these “pieces” of the process is most valuable to your content operation. Via Content Marketing Institute

And in case you missed anything this week on the Content Marketeer:

• 4 Strategies for More Efficient Content Marketing
• 8 Content Marketing Stats to Knock Your Socks Off
• Stop Working So Hard: Leveraging Internal Resources for Content Marketing Ideas

Hopefully, this week’s articles have made you think through some of the most important pieces of your content marketing operation. If you want to see how companies are managing (and answering) these questions in their organizations, check out Cengage Learning’s Succes Story. And don’t forget to enjoy your weekend, Content Marketers!

Text added. Original photo credit: Rollan Budi

You’ve been staring at that blank screen for 30 minutes. You try one sentence here, one sentence there. To get the creative juices flowing, you attempt free association. 5 minutes later, you end up with “What Kind of Dog is YOUR Software Solution?” Everyone loves dogs, right? You think of the hours you’re about to spend researching different dog breeds and mapping them to your target personas. You take step back.

Why is it so hard to come up with content marketing ideas your buyers will actually enjoy…and find useful?

The truth? You’re working too hard. As Joe Chernov said in an interview, “People overthink it. There are so many opportunities to generate ideas for content.” He’s right, and these opportunities are close by. In fact, their inside your organization.

We call them the Three S’s: Sales, Service, and Support.

The sales, service, and support departments are three of the best resources for topics that are important to your brand and also interest your buyers. Not only do they understand the buyer’s concerns and needs — they are, after all, communicating with potential and current customers all the time — but they’re also experts on the company’s products and the unique value propositions of those products.

Sales

Sales is constantly communicating with prospects about their wants and needs. They know why deals are won, or lost (and to whom), and the challenges facing specific prospects. They also know what features or services get people excited—and the problems those features and services solve. Also, with social selling as an increasingly effective strategy, salespeople need more buyer-appropriate content to share with buyers — and they usually have good ideas about what that content looks like.

For example, if a deal is lost, ask the sales rep why. Maybe the buyer didn’t know what questions to ask, or how to make a case internally for the purchase. Maybe the company was concerned with online security or software integration, and didn’t see any documentation addressing those concerns. Those lost deals highlight important information gaps, and provide an opportunity to fill them with useful content.

Service/Account Management

The service and account management department handles the needs of existing clients. On a daily basis, account managers field customer questions, respond to feedback (positive and negative), and hear about creative use cases. All of these daily experiences make the service team a goldmine for ideas. Also, by encouraging account management to share their ideas, marketers have the opportunity to create stories about happy customers that they can share with prospects in relevant industries, as well as content on topics buyers want to learn more about, and content that can be repurposed for retention and up-sell campaigns.

For example, say an organization wants to attract more financial services customers. Marketing can tap account managers for information on the most common questions and concerns they hear from current clients in that industry. They can also request testimonials and case studies from customers using products and features successfully and in interesting ways. Right there, the marketing team has an arsenal of content ideas that will attract and help financial services companies while supporting the goals of their own organization.

Support

The support department hears everything from immediate issues with a product or service to unrealistic feature requests. They’re also experts at troubleshooting, and know how to think fast about a customer problem. Support hears from customers at their most frantic moments, and understands better than anyone why a feature is so important to an organization, how it’s used, and how to solve everything from common to bizarre challenges. Dealing with this wide array of topics and concerns makes them experts on customers and the product, as well as fantastic sources for content ideas on the current and emerging challenges facing buyers.

For example, say customers are constantly requesting a feature that will help them organize their day-to-day projects and tasks. Of course, the product team needs to know this information, but it’s also wonderful insight into missing content. Perhaps the marketing team begins a blog series around organization tips, creates downloadable templates to help keep track of projects, or films video tutorials on task management.

Idea Submission & Follow Up

To successfully gather and profit from the content marketing ideas of these three (and other) departments, the marketing team needs to let people across the organization know exactly how to submit ideas and how ideas are evaluated. A single point person might be designated to collect submissions via email, but that inbox can quickly become chaos. Another method is to circulate electronic forms that have required fields to collect all the information needed to understand and evaluate the concept. Then, ideas can be evaluated at a weekly or biweekly meeting. Incentives to contribute—cash or in-kind prizes, recognition, competitive bragging rights—also help. And be sure to respond to every submission, regardless of whether the idea is good or bad.

So ditch the dog idea brainstorm for now, and start communicating internally. You have nothing to lose (except ideas that are, well, a bit of a reach).

For more on generating ideas for content, download the e(comic)Book, Content: The Force that Moves the Buyer Down the Funnel. It’s full of great tips for organizing a content marketing strategy as well as coming up with ideas for content your buyers will love.

Content marketing is more than a fad: it’s a radical shift in the way brands think of and create marketing strategies. Take a look at the graph of Google searches for “content marketing” since 2007 below. Sometime between 2011 and 2012, the search volume started going nuts. It’s easy to dismiss this kind of surging popularity as a trend, but for those of us paying attention, it’s obvious that content marketing is here to stay.

“Content Marketing” Google Search Volume

Content marketing has finally been around long enough that we’re starting to see some real data on its effectiveness. And the results may be even better than you’re expecting. On the whole, the data suggest that content marketing is cheaper, more effective, and better received by customers than traditional marketing efforts. And as marketing technology improves and content marketing techniques are refined, modern marketing strategies will only become more effective.

No wonder so many brands are shifting towards content as a way to find leads, build relationships, and close deals. Don’t believe me? Check out some of these content marketing stats and discover for yourself how content is changing the face of marketing:

Content marketing’s popularity isn’t just growing, it’s exploding. 5 years ago, hardly anyone had even heard about it, and now it’s all anyone can talk about. Content marketing has changed the way buyers and brands interact and the change is here to stay.

78% of CMOs think custom content is the future of marketing.

Tweet This Stat (Source: Demand Metric)

C-suite support of content marketing has been a mixed bag. Many executives are still stuck in the old ways of thinking about marketing as focused on interruption-based campaigns for generating leads. Digital marketing has a very different rhythm and requires that buyers feel they can engage with and get to know your brand before committing to a sale. This statistic suggests that when it comes to CMO’s at least, more and more corporate executives are realizing the power of content.

Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads.

Tweet This Stat (Source: Demand Metric)

It won’t come as a surprise to most marketers to find that content marketing is cheaper than traditional advertising sources. After all, it costs a lot less to make a short video for your website than to create a commercial for television. What might be more surprising is the fact that content marketing is better for generating leads than traditional channels. But this is exactly why content marketing is so popular. Think about it: people who choose to seek out and engage with your content are far more likely to be interested in your brand’s solution than a random person who happens to see an advertisement.

Brands relying on inbound marketing save over $14 dollars for every new customer acquired.

Tweet This Stat (Source: Hubspot)

On average, organizations who spent at least $25K on content marketing strategies last year saved over $14 dollars for every new customer. They also saw a 13% decrease in overall cost per lead. That’s some pretty impressive savings! It’s numbers like these that demonstrate why content marketing is way more than a fad.

39% of marketing, advertising and communications budgets were dedicated to content marketing in 2012.

Tweet This Stat (Source: Custom Content Council)

Up from 26% in 2011, it’s clear that organizations are getting serious about content marketing. Marketing budgets are expected to continue increasing in 2013 and there’s no doubt that a lot of those resources will be dedicated to content. As more brands turn their attention to content marketing, expect to see a lot more support from within your organization for modern marketing initiatives.

Buyers go through about 57% of the purchasing process before ever talking to sales.

Tweet This Stat (Source: Corporate Executive Board)

This is exactly what modern marketers are talking about: no one wants to talk to sales anymore. The internet allows buyers to do research on their own terms and from the sources they trust. That means you can no longer rely on prospects reaching out to your organization when they want to learn more about the solution you offer. If you want your buyers to receive your message before they’ve made a decision, you’re going to have to reach them in the places they prefer to do research.

70% of consumers say content marketing makes them feel closer to the sponsoring company.

Tweet This Stat (Source: Content Marketing Institute)

Interruption advertising is dying and here’s why: people buy from brands they like and people don’t like being interrupted. That sounds simple enough, but it’s taken a long time to convince marketers to focus on inbound, permission based content. Now we’re starting to see data to support this idea. Your customers want to do business with someone they know and whose opinion they trust. Creating custom, targeted content helps you build a relationship with them and allows them to feel comfortable making the purchase.

Adopting inbound marketing doubles average website conversion rates, from 6% to 12%.

Tweet This Stat (Source: Hubspot)

Isn’t it nice to know that all those interesting articles and featured resources you’ve been creating are working? When your buyers reach your site, they’re looking for ways to get to know you. Marketers using inbound tactics have filled their company website with loads of interesting, relevant content. That gives your buyers the confidence they need to do business with you.

But Wait, There’s More…

Still not convinced? There’s a lot more where that came from. Big data is the future of marketing and as more evidence is collected, the stronger the case for content marketing appears.

To keep track of new research as it emerges, the Kapost team has just released a new resource: Cold, Hard Content Marketing Facts. This new page will track the hottest marketing trends and statistics. Check it out to see how other organizations are building an audience, engaging their prospects and closing deals with the power of content.

“You want the execution of your content marketing strategy to be as efficient as a pit stop at the Indy 500.” Photo credit: Bo Nash

When it comes to content production at enterprise organizations, there’s a serious problem with supply and demand. In fact, SiriusDecisions reports that 60-70% of content produced by B2B marketing teams goes unused, stuck forever in digital purgatory, where no one will ever access it.

Why? Because communication between business units and departments is down, organizations continue to produce content that doesn’t interest their buyers, and streamlined processes have not been established for the ideation, creation, and distribution of content.

This situation is, unfortunately, all too common. However, organizations are catching on. Marketers are taking the mantra “brands must become publishers” to heart, and have started to implement efficient content marketing tactics to cut down on waste and streamline the often clunky processes behind content.

You want the execution of your content marketing strategy to be as efficient as a pit stop at the Indy 500. But how? Here are 4 strategies for maximizing efficiency and successfully planning for content marketing:

Establish Internal Communication Channels

One reason there’s so much unused content is because of redundancies. For example, if your sales department needs a specific piece of content, what do they do? Often, instead of relaying this need to marketing, the Content Center of Excellence, or whoever owns content production, they create that piece of content independently and use it without ever telling anyone else in the organization. Unfortunately, this can potentially result in lower quality content (it may not go through the same review or design process as other pieces) and it also may be similar to content that already exists.

To avoid this time- and resources-suck, you need an established process for communication and internal distribution. In this case, a master editorial calendar is critical. It shows the status, publication dates, and location of content pieces, and everyone can access it. This allows people across business units to check on what content already exists before creating something new, and if an important topic hasn’t been covered, those ideas and requests can then be shared with those responsible for planning the calendar. With this type of transparency, organizations can significantly cut down on content waste.

Create an Editorial Board

A fantastic way to keep internal conversation around content active is by establishing an editorial board. This is a tactic employed by many of our customers with incredible results. An editorial board is made up of key stakeholders from different departments or business units. At least once a quarter, the board meets and brings their content needs and ideas to the table. By establishing the board, different departments gain insight into the content coming down the pipeline, know when it will be available, can strategize how to use it, and won’t create their own redundant pieces. Again, in this situation, a master editorial calendar is the key to keeping everyone updated and informed.

There are huge benefits to this strategy, even beyond cutting down on content waste and increasing efficiency. By involving other teams in the process, you’ll also see more interest and investment in the content being created. Being involved in content creation helps members of the editorial board understand how their teams benefit from content, and allows them to feel like a part of the process. Also, our customers who have established boards have seen more active participation in content creation. Once the board gets excited about an idea, they often offer to create some of the content themselves, or supply the right experts from their teams to weigh in on these topics.

Align Content to Personas and Buying Stages

In order for content to drive more visitors and move leads down the funnel, it has to be valuable to the person receiving it. With tools like Google Analytics and marketing automation software, marketers have more insight than ever before into who is consuming content, how they behave, and what they care about. This is powerful knowledge that, when aligned with the stages of the buyer’s journey, allows marketers to deliver targeted content to buyers.

A huge part of this process is tracking and segmenting your buyers by their information and digital body language so you can successfully deliver content to them at the right time. But first, marketers need to create content – including emails, eBooks, infographics, videos, and you name it – that’s relevant to specific people at these specific points in their discovery or evaluation process. This, too, needs to be a part of the planning of your content marketing process. By evaluating what content you already have and how it can be used to move buyers down the funnel, you’ll also see what content you still need. For example, maybe you have lots of top of funnel content geared toward one persona, but very little late-stage content to help your sales team close that deal. Understanding what you have and what you need will ensure you’re efficient with planning upcoming content creation and distribution.

Reuse and Repurpose Content

Publication is not the last step in content production and distribution. Now that you’re creating all this fantastic, relevant content to be used across departments, get the most out of it by strategically repurposing and breaking large pieces of content into smaller derivative pieces. This is all about using your team and resources efficiently, filling up your editorial calendar, and tracking how different topics and types of content land with your buyers. And it’s easy to organize.

Start with a large and thorough piece of content (such as an eBook, how-to guide, or event footage). This goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: make it good. Conduct video interviews with thought leaders, design nice-looking infographics or schematics to be included in this larger piece, and take your time with the text. Then, take that piece and break it into smaller, bite-size pieces of content for your buyers. Share the infographic separately on social media or pitch it for syndication. Write a blog post about it. Create videos on specific topics from the eBook, or from the thought leaders you interviewed. Introduce each of those videos in a helpful blog post. Take the text you created and break that into emails to send out via marketing automation, or pitch those topics as guest blog posts on relevant, high-traffic sites. This will ensure you get the most out of your content and is a great way to increase efficiency in your content factory.

These are just 4 of the ways you can strategically plan for successful, efficient content creation, production, and distribution within your organization. To learn more, register for Eloqua’s Road to Revenue Virtual Event. It’s going to be an incredible event without the stress of traveling – because it’s entirely online. The 3-hour virtual event is jam-packed with information for modern marketers, including examples of how the above strategies have been successfully put into practice. Check out the full lineup and register here.

Photo credit: rlonpine

Oh, Boston. You brilliant city. 

Yesterday, Kapost and Oracle | Eloqua hosted Content Marketing Bootcamp in this fair city. After spending a wonderful day absorbed in conversations with world-class marketers and listening to presentations by pioneers in content, we wanted to dedicate today’s post to the impressive Content Marketers of Boston. If you weren’t able to attend the event, don’t worry. We won’t exclude you from our content love. Below, you’ll find most of the presentation slides for your viewing and learning pleasure.

So without further ado, enjoy this round up of Content Marketing Bootcamp presentations on SlideShare (videos of the sessions coming soon):

1. Toby Murdock, CEO of Kapost – Welcome, and Why Content Marketing?

In the opening session of Content Marketing Bootcamp, Toby Murdock explains why content marketing is increasingly important–especially for B2B marketers. Buyer’s once relied on sales reps to provide them with the information necessary to make a purchase decision, but now the buyer lives in a Google world, a world of information abundance. In fact, buyer’s have access to more information than ever before, and they conduct most of their research independently of sales. Now, marketing owns the top half of the funnel and is responsible for delivering qualified leads to sales. But how can marketers grab the attention of their target buyers, and generate more leads for their organizations? The answer, of course, is with content. 

3. Carlos Hidalgo - The Use of Content in the Middle of the Funnel

ANNUITAS is in the business of transforming demand generation, and for companies to successfully engage with their target buyers mid-funnel, CEO Carlos Hidalgo recommends moving away from the tactical and toward the strategic. Peruse the slides below to discover how to align content to your buyer’s needs and interests, and optimize your demand generation strategy for success. 

4. Katherine Scott - Overcoming Organizational Barriers

Think you have a lot of products to market? Thermo Fisher Scientific has over one million. At a company with over 39,000 employees in 40 countries that creates or distributes “pretty much anything you can find in a lab,” and also creates and distributes quite a bit of content, Marketing Specialist Katherine Scott has taken on the incredible challenge of streamlining their content marketing strategy. Find out how she’s doing it as she shares her tips and lessons learned.

This presentation is the perfect example of B2B storytelling. You’ll enjoy it because it shows you how to succeed with content marketing, but you’ll love it because it’s surprising, clever, and just plain fun. So click through the slides below (study the style as well as the content), and let Bill Strawderman, Senior Director of Digital and Social Marketing, tell you the story of “Nettie” and content at AT&T.  

Thank you for a great conference, Boston, and a special shout-out to the sponsors of Content Marketing Bootcamp: Influitive, NetProspex, and ANNUITAS. Have a great weekend, content marketers. I’m off for a Duck Tour!

This post was originally published by Nancy Bhagat on Intel’s Musings of a Marketeer.

A few months ago I wrote about the evolution of marketing, recounting the strategic shifts I’ve seen over my career.  The one I left off was how brands are becoming publishers.   The “miss” is due to the fact that we’re very much in the middle of this shift.  In some cases, Intel has been at the forefront, as have other leading brands.  While some are debating the pros and cons of being a publisher, others are leading by example.

This is top of mind as I was asked to speak at the internal marketing summit of a large consumer brand.  Their goal was to drive change in both how they market, as well as their culture, with the desire to move from a follower to a leader.  It’s a great goal and I give them credit for taking the initiative and bringing their marketing teams together from around the world.

I was on a panel called: ”Branded Content Creation” and wanted to share some of the points I raised on behalf of my experience at Intel.

We’ve learned a lot over the past few years, with our share of wins and losses.  The important thing is to never stand still and push the boundaries, learning and optimizing as you go.  So here are a few “tenants” we live by:

1. Start with a strategy

This may seem obvious but it’s critical to reinforce why you are creating content and your target.  At times we encouraged speed and creativity and found that strategy, and ultimately effectiveness, was an afterthought.

2. Know your brand platform

I can’t emphasize this enough.  Be clear on your brand, who you are, how do you want others to perceive you and who do you want to connect to? Optimism and Unexpected are an important part of the Intel brand.  We want consumers to see more than the technical, manufacturing side but also the passion our employees bring to work daily.  We want to share the wonder of technology with a broad audience and we strive to make the complex simple.

3. Put content at the center

Content has moved to a primary part of our strategy, across our various audiences including B2B and consumer.  From our marketing strategy we develop a content strategy to reach our marketing goals.

4. Be timely and relevant

People will engage with you when it’s something they are interested in.  For example, our Social team loves Newsjacking.  This is when you enter a conversation real time.  It can be about entertainment, news, etc.  We did a series of posts around key television show premieres such as Mad Men, Game of Thrones, etc.  We used the hash tags around these “events” and entered the conversation with a related, yet Intel spin.  People engage and share and we become part of the larger conversation, at the moment the conversation is happening.

5. Integrate

Integrated Marketing used to be a buzz word several years ago and it’s even truer today.  As we see mulit-tasking, multi-channel viewing and usage, the integration of our messages, content and touch points are critical.

6. Keep your ears and minds open

Gone are the days of single dialog or even 2-way.  You need to develop a sense for when you create, share, respond, listen and learn.

7. Own your distribution strategy and plan

You need to be clear on how you will distribute any content you produce.  The idea of something just “going viral” is an exception, not the rule.  At Intel, we also wanted to own a distribution channel and thus created iQ.  This is a Digital Magazine that has the added benefit of being a Media Destination as well.  We can create and even co-create content with our OEM partners and editorial partners like Buzzfeed, MTV and strategic partners to drive impact. Learn more about the strategy behind iQ.

8. Organize and staff for success

We are changing how we market and that will require different resources, staff and perhaps a different structure.  Seeing the synergy between paid and earned media, we created one Integrated Media group to drive all things media.  As the need for timely and relevant content increases, we need to look at new models for production.  Whether you partner with an agency or develop an in-house studio, you need to develop a real-time system.

But the most successful marketers begin by optimizing the bottom of the funnel first, not the other way around. These marketers focus first on turning leads into sales, then working up the funnel by creating content to convert visitors into leads, then finally generating more visitors at the top of the funnel. 

In this article, I’m going to make the case for why, especially in certain businesses, optimization should begin after the sale, in the post-sales funnel. In further articles, I’ll discuss what content should be selected, and how specifically pre-sales funnel content can be re-used in the post sales funnel.

First, let me illustrate the post-sales funnel with two graphs.

All Customers Are Not Created Equally. Duh.

Everyone knows that all leads are not created equal. Well, folks, customers are the same way. Some customers are much more profitable than others. Just as content is used to turn unprofitable leads into profitable ones, content can also be used to turn less profitable customers into more profitable ones. However, content by itself will not work, the content needs to be presented within a structured process. You need to have an onboarding process in place.

To get an understanding of the difference between more and less profitable customers, let’s compare the “bad customer onboarding” with “good customer onboarding” graphs. The first thing we need to understand is what exactly these graphs are displaying. The straight line in the middle is shows when a sale, or the first transfer of money, happens. The funnel before the sale is the traditional sales funnel that all marketers know.

Along the Y axis is time, and as you move from left to right more time has passed.

The X axis is money. Before the sale, this money is marketing costs. At the sale itself, it’s either revenue or profit. After the sale it represents customer profitability, which is a combination of revenue, customer service/support hours, referrals, and customer lifetime value. All else equal, two points that are closer to each other on the X axis equal less money (lower costs before the sale and lower profits after the sale) or more money if they are farther.

One thing to understand about this graph, and something that I’m going to discuss in-depth shortly, is that this sales process is only for specific types of businesses where the majority of the profits from the customer come after the first cash transaction. If you’re selling hula hoops, the sales process doesn’t look like this. It actually ends at the sale. There is no “post-sales funnel” in the hula hoop industry. However, if you’re selling a $10,000 per month subscription service, the post-sales process will look like the above. While you may have two customers paying $10,000 per month, one might use $500 of customer support time while the other uses $3,000.

So, what is customer onboarding? 

Now that you understand the graph, let’s get to the good stuff.

Customer onboarding is a structured, standardized way of teaching all new customers about your product or service. Customer onboarding uses specific pieces of content, tools, and strategies to increase customer profitably. The purpose of customer onboarding is to simultaneously decrease customer support time while increasing customer profitability in a measurable way.

When should customer onboarding be used?

One thing I noted when describing how to interpret the two customer profitability graphs is that only certain types of businesses will have pre- and post-sales funnels. You may be wondering, where does my business fit in here?

The main criteria to determine if customer onboarding will matter to your business is if the majority of the value of a customer happens after the first transfer of money. This will largely depend on your business model and pricing plan. Onboarding might not matter as much with low-value single purchases. 

For this application, let’s define a low-value purchase as a purchase price less than $10,000 and only happens once with more then 75% of your customers.

When does onboarding matter a lot? Account and subscription-based businesses, and when an extremely high-value single purchase occurs. If your customers will only buy from you once, but that purchase is $500,000, then onboarding is most likely critical. In that situation, it’s likely that the implementation of the product or service that was purchased will be key to using it correctly.

One example of an subscription-based business is a solar equipment distributor. These distributors sell equipment to contractors. Typically, a contractor’s first purchase will be around $30,000 of equipment. After that, the contractor will spend between $30,000 and $600,000 of equipment per year, at least for the next 5 years. A high-value purchase might be a software service sold at $10,000 per month.

Why Content Matters for Customer Onboarding

So you know why onboarding is important and to what types of business model. But just like any communications that occur between your organization and customers or leads, you need content that delivers information and value. You’re probably already creating content in a help or resources center. Use that content, as well as the expertise and experiences of your support and account management teams, to create effective onboarding materials.

Some of the most useful things I’ve seen include step-by-step videos (great for product features and set up) and presentations walking through best practices for using a product or service and how to implement them. These materials can be recycled again and again. However, listening to the specific needs of customers and tracking their most commonly asked questions will provide fodder for excellent material that can also be re-used by marketing to speak to potential customer needs. For example, if a prospect is concerned with password security, yet you’ve already created a presentation for current customers on exactly how password authentication works in your software, then you have material contributing to future sales as well as content helping current customers succeed with your product. Win, win, win.

Now, this is definitely an undertaking. So if you’re considering starting or improving onboarding in your organization, consider the following points.

A Few Customer Onboarding Best Practices

1 – Determine the most important characterstics of current clients who are the most profitable. Determine what you need to do replicate those characteristics with other companies.

2 – Make it Mandatory. In order to reap the benefits of decreasing customer service hours while increasing the quality of customer service, you need to make your customer onboarding process mandatory. If you already have customers, make it mandatory for all new customers.

3 – Give it a name to get the certification, for example if Kapost created a mandatory customer onboarding training, everyone who finished could be “Certified Kapost Publisher.” Another great idea is having levels of certifications. While all new customers must go through basic training, you can also have more advanced layers that will give better trained customers perks.

4 – Make sure the customer onboarding process teaches the customer a specific skill AND how to use the product or service you’re selling them. For example, in the “Kapost Certification” training some of the materials will be around how to actually use the software. However, my guess is that teaching customers how to be better content marketers and editors (while using Kapost) will more likely lead to more profitable customers.

5 – You must make you that you can VERIFY that new customers are learning the material correctly. One reason that webinar and videos, and article cannot be reused as is, is that there is no way of verifying that a new customer is learning and implementing the information.

Next Steps: Do you Need a Customer Onboarding Process? Ask yourself These Questions.

How do you know if you need a customer onboarding process? I’d start by asking yourself three questions.

1. What type of product are you selling? Does the majority of your profits from each customer come after the first transfer of money?

If you’re selling a product where a majority of the sales come after the first transaction of money, you might want to have a customer onboarding process. 

2. Is there a huge swing between the profitability of your customers? If 50% of your customers were as profitable as the top 5%, how would that impact your business?

If you have a large swing between the profitability of customers, you may want to create an onboarding process. 

3. How do you currently teach new customers? Is it reactive or proactive? Do you have a standardized process or is it an issue-by-issue basis?

If you teach customer on a reactive and issue-by-issue basis, you’re likely answering the same questions over and over again. This eats up a lot of customer service time. By standardizing the process and being proactive about education, you’ll increase quality and decrease costs.

What have your experiences been with customer onboarding? When have you found it successful, and when has it fallen short? Share your thoughts in the comment section below. You can also take a look at some customer-focused content by checking out the Kapost Customer Success Log on the Content Maketeer.

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite features in Kapost is our Crowdsourcing feature. At Kapost we feel strongly about aligning those that are on the front lines with your customers, with your marketing team. As our CEO, Toby Murdock often shares, “The Three S’s: Sales, Services and Support,” hear from your customers everyday. Engaging and tying them into your content process is a powerful mechanism that allows you to continually answer the needs and issues of your customers.

Before Crowdsourcing Feature (Photo credit: Joe Goldberg)

The Crowdsource feature in Kapost, allows you to send a simple web page to anyone who might want to submit content ideas or requests, into Kapost, thus queuing it up in your ideas area. It basically turns the disorganized jumble of idea sharing into a streamlined, manageable process.

Below, I’ve outlined four key ways to have ideas filter into your marketing queue (or into Kapost) by engaging organizations or groups, outside of your marketing/content team.

1. Sales Enablement

A common best practice is to use the Kapost Crowdsourcing feature to send to your Sales team so they can request content that will enable their sales process. This allow sales and marketing to work together and to truly allow content to be the powerful tool it is, aligning to buying stages and personas.

We suggest creating a cadence on your crowdsourcing form where you can say when you will respond by, you may not create every idea they ask for, they will be prioritized by number of requests, etc. Common requests we see from sales into marketing are questions they’re getting from prospects with high frequency, content that address all of your specific personas and buying stages and questions that truly answer the needs and issues, of their prospects. This goes well beyond sales collateral and allows your sales team to also serve as thought leaders in their respective industry and space, through the content that marketing can equip them with.

After Crowdsourcing Feature (Photo credit: DieselDemon)

When we interviewed Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at Kinvey, and a leader in the content marketing space about generating ideas for content, he expanded upon this idea in a clip that isn’t in the video, but that we certainly couldn’t forget:“Stay in lock-step with your sales team. If you won a deal, find out why you won that deal. That will inform future content creation. Or better still, if you lost a deal, see if there was a piece of content that the sales rep says, ‘If we only had this we would have closed that.’ There’s another source for new ideas for content.”

2. Readers/Customers:

Another option is to link the Crowdsourcing feature somewhere publicly – on your blog or website for instance – and subsequently prompt readers or customers to request content ideas into your marketing queue or Kapost. These questions usually are geared toward information that your readers or customers may want to read about your product, service or offering. This also may provide you with a feedback loop from customers to marketing, so you can understand what their needs, issues, and questions might be.

3. Freelancers/Contractors:

A neat component of the Crowdsourcing feature is that you can have as many people as you want, submit in ideas through the form that filters in Kapost, without it going against your user count. We call them “sources” and they may not be writers or people in Kapost day-to-day, but you do want fodder for new ideas. We see a people have their freelancers pitch ideas through this form so all the questions can filled out and right into Kapost. There is also an option to have freelancers pitch you through the form, filling out all the custom questions you’ve built into the form, and then you could make them a regular writer, as well.

From Kapost’s How to Build a Content Marketing Machine eBook, AT&T’s Gina Welker shares their robust writer network for their Networking Exchange Blog where they manage over 150 AT&T employees and content creators in their content marketing machine.

As Gina shared around recruiting, “we dove head first into recruiting bloggers directly from the ranks of our own IT savants…But we didn’t stop there; we provide bloggers with continuing social media education opportunities, contests and incentives, and ongoing support. The company also developed editorial processes to manage content, making it as easy and “hands off” for the bloggers as possible so they can focus on the important stuff: creating great posts!”

The program’s impact was immediate. In the three months following the launch of the Networking Leaders Academy, average monthly visits to AT&T’s Networking Exchange Blog increased 55 percent, page views increased 45 percent, and social referrers increased 93 percent. Today, the Networking Leaders Academy continues to grow as word of mouth within the company spreads about the benefits of blogging.

4. Opening Up the Organization:

The last general option we see as a best practice is to send the Crowdsourcing feature to anyone in your organization. Having a team or organization be “all in” in content marketing, not only enables marketing and sales, but makes the company more successful.

As mentioned above, services and support are two great divisions who talk to customers all the time and allows you to send those pressing questions into marketing, who may not be talking to customers as much. It’s a good idea to send this link to everyone in the organization so the process is that nothing goes through a messy inbox, it’s all queued into Kapost for marketing to queue and process.

Jennifer Lashua, Global Social Media Strategist at Intel, explained how it works for them during her session at Content Marketing Bootcamp: ”[Ideas] used to get dumped into one person’s inbox which was chaos. Now we have a great form. There are certain fields [contributors] are forced to fill out and not only does it streamline things for us, but it makes people think…So not only is it helping us [in social media], but it’s helping the company because, in a way, we’re also teaching people about social by use of this tool.”

What are some ways you encourage those outside of marketing to contribute to your content planning and ideation? Do you follow any of the above processes for gaining new ideas for content?