Content as Competitive Advantage

If I could only give one piece of strategic advice to any business owner, I would say this:

Own and distribute proprietary content.

A subset to that advice would be this:

If your company doesn’t have the resources or skills to develop proprietary content, pay someone to do it for you.

There are a number of companies that serve the association/non-profit market with “custom” e-newsletters and online buyers’ guide directories. They contract with associations to produce and distribute branded e-newsletters and guides. In exchange, they sell advertising into those products and split the revenue with the association. The revenue split is usually something like 80/20 or 90/10.

The pitch is simple: Associations get a new product that generates revenue without additional overhead. It’s a pretty good pitch for associations that don’t already have publications and want to diversify their revenue streams. Unfortunately, it’s all about the short-term dollar. The elephant in the room that nobody asks is whether anyone will read the e-newsletter or use the buyers’ guide.

There’s good reason to think these publications aren’t reaching readers. Why? Because these companies are sales organizations, not publishers. They create products that appeal to advertisers, not readers. They do not (will not?) produce original and proprietary content for your organization. In other words, you could be sending an e-newsletter with the same links to the same aggregated content that your competitors send.

The problem is that any business can set up Google alerts, find stories on particular topics and link to them through their website, blog or e-newsletter. Any organization with enough cash can replicate the technology and scale necessary to reach many eyeballs with aggregated content.

So think about what kind of information you offer your customers. Is it information they can find somewhere else? Is it information they’ve already found somewhere else? If so, you are playing in a crowded field. When that happens, you can expect that advertising revenue is going to go down eventually. What distinguishes a company and allows you to hold advertising pricing steady is when your publication has information and content that no one else does.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Content Strategy

One Tip for Improving Your Blog

Most of the “Top Ten” type articles I see about improving your blog are filled with platitudes, like “Post regularly” and “Post relevant content.” Some drill down a little and offer ideas for the types of content you could post.

I want to go a step further and offer something specific. Here’s one tip to improve your blog. This will be most useful for people who are using a blog to promote and/or report on a conference, convention or meeting.

Step 1: Get a list of education session presenters, including their email and phone numbers.

Step 2: Send an email to presenters explaining that you want to interview them for your blog. Here’s some boilerplate:

Dear XX:

My publication is blogging about NAME OF EVENT before, during and after the show. I’d like to interview you about the session you’re presenting so we can promote it ahead of time on the blog. Are you available for a quick interview sometime this week or next?

Step 3: Follow your email with phone calls. Get presenters on the phone. Conduct the interviews or set appointments to do the interviews within a given timeframe.

Step 4: Here are some questions to ask presenters:

1.    Who should attend this session? Who is the ideal audience for this session? Who would get the most out of it?
2.    What do you hope the audience will learn? What do you want to them to walk away with?
3.    Describe the scope of your presentation? What are the key highlights?
4.    What are some frequently asked questions you get about this topic?
5.    Why is this topic important?  Why should people attend this session/webinar?

Step 5: Ask for a head shot, company logo and any other artwork you can use.

Step 6: Write story based on interview or format as a Q&A.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Content Marketing, On Blogging

Content Marketing Consultants: Be Patient

I believe that a content marketing strategy can help any organization grow and prosper, but it takes more than a list of tips and platitudes to make it work. It requires a shift in perspective. If you’re a stakeholder or a consultant, it often requires persuasion and—worst of all—patience.

Most of us who have started or want to start our own businesses lack patience. We see how things could be improved and feel frustrated by how slowly things change.  When we finally strike out on our own, we want clients to hire us because of our expertise and then get out of the way. “Just let me take care of it,” we say, and when a client like that comes along, you never want them to leave.

Most of the time, it doesn’t happen that way. They’re the customer, remember? They’re spending a lot of money. (We hope.) They usually want to be involved in the process. Oh my god, they might even have ideas! What I’ve come to realize is that content marketing in theory is easy. Most people don’t need a consultant to tell them that offering great content is a better marketing strategy than offering lousy content. They hire a consultant to help them move forward, make progress and realize results. So what distinguishes content marketing consultants isn’t whether they have tips for making your blog better. What makes consultants different is whether they can work with clients who have different ideas about what content marketing means to them, especially in the context of their particular work environment.

To build on yesterday’s post, I’m not impressed by a lot of the content produced by content marketers. It’s written to attract a general audience. It perpetuates the idea that content marketing is more about delivery tools (Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn) than the content itself. I hope that’s something that will change.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Client Relationships, Content Strategy

Yet Another Blog About Content Marketing

A lot of content marketing bloggers write for a broad audience, so they end up with posts like “Tips for Improving Your Blog” or “Top Blogging Myths” and “10 Minutes a Day to a Better Blog.” I find them useful, but I consume them the way I consume other content designed for mass appeal, which means scanning them quickly for one thing that will spark my imagination or at least reinforce what I already know.

That’s not what this blog is about. This blog is for an audience that already knows the difference between good and great content. It’s for people who already know how they would improve their blog—if they had the time, resources and support from their managers. It’s for people who know they need to make fundamental changes to their business processes and culture.

The challenge that a lot of my peers face is how to convince their bosses that spending the time and money on a content strategy will pay dividends in the future. Once that hurdle is accomplished, they face the practical challenge of implementing a content strategy. Anyone can set up a blog. Everyone should know that you need to post to your blog regularly. But it’s quite another thing to determine why projects languish and how to give them momentum.

At my day-job, there’s a lot of pressure on staff to constantly initiate new and highly visible projects, whether or not we ever complete them. The act of starting something new every quarter is meant to signal vitality, energy and momentum. It’s true that we’re constantly busy, but sadly, not much ever gets done. Our magazine stories too often rely on the first interviews we conduct instead of the best ones. This is not because individuals in my department don’t know what to do or want to do it that way. It’s because the overall business model and culture is based on a different set of priorities and values.

Who determines the culture? How do you change it? Can your department operate a sub-culture that operates effectively within a larger, contradictory culture? There are no single answers to these questions, but I plan to explore them all in this blog.

The stakes are high, by the way. In our organization, the tension between needing to do many things fast and wanting to do a few things right has become a staffing issue and a revenue issue. We’ve had nearly 100 percent turnover in two years as professionals who want to be proud of the work they do leave for better jobs. Only two people have been with this association more than three years, and some positions have turned over two or three times in the last three years. It’s difficult to measure, but our revenue has most certainly been affected by the loss of institutional knowledge on one hand and the inability to sustain high-quality, core products in favor of starting new products with minimal resources.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Content Strategy

Creating a “Content Culture” Isn’t Easy

Sway Engine is a fledgling business, so I still hold down a day job running the communications department at at trade association. When I started just over a year ago, the department operated like a traditional magazine publisher. The staff were responsible for generating revenue through a monthly ad-supported magazine. The association also had a website and an e-newsletter, but they had limited audiences by any metric.

The biggest challenge I faced a year ago was changing a culture that valued modes of distribution more than the information they distributed.  So long as we have a magazine, e-newsletter, website, blog, Twitter feed,and Facebook and LinkedIn pages, what we put in those vehicles was secondary. The most active members of our association are the most passionate about the organization, so they favored sanitized “news” and promotional copy about the association’s activities.

I’d like to say those days are over, that I’m some kind of genius who can turn around decades of ingrained notions about marketing and publishing in one year, but that wouldn’t be true. We have made significant progress, though. As I look back, here are some of the things we did that I think made the most impact:

Create a Honeymoon Period
If you’re new to the job, you automatically get a grace period. If you’ve been in the job for a long time, you’ll need to create a grace period for yourself. This means approaching  the people who supervise you with a plan and extracting from them a promise to give you time to implement it.

I like the 100 days approach to planning big changes in an organization. The goal isn’t to accomplish everything in that short period of time. The goal is to get enough momentum going that there’s no turning back. In our case, I explained in broad terms that we were transforming the department from a magazine-focused operation to a content-producing operation. The proof would be more quantity and better quality content at the end of the grace period.

Train Your Content Producers
Once you’ve got the time to put a plan into action, make sure you have the people to do it. I started with two junior staff, neither of whom had significant writing or publications experience. No problem. They were eager to learn, and I consider that the most important asset. I explained to them how this transformation was going to take place. We met regularly to talk about and exercise fundamental content-producing skills: source cultivation, interviewing, research, writing, editing, revising, fact-checking and so on. A year has passed and my management challenge is no longer bringing them up to speed. Instead, it’s  finding ways to retain them and their valuable skills!

Improve Legacy Products While Creating New Ones
We took a two-pronged approach to generating and maintaining momentum. The first effort was to improve our legacy products, namely the monthly magazine. We started by improving the quality of content that went into the magazine. At nearly the same time, we began the process of redesigning the magazine. Some of this was cosmetic–a new logo, new departments, more contemporary and consistent style guide. But the more important part was how we organized the magazine’s content. For instance, the magazine used to focus on one big topic per month, usually a market segment where our industry’s products are used. Not everyone in our industry works in every market segment, however, so when an issue on the aerospace market was published, for example, there was no reason for large swaths of readers to pick up the magazine. We had plenty of good content about every market segment every month, so we lessened our focus on single-topic issues and started writing a little bit about every segment every month. To do this required a minor change to our internal process, but the impact was large enough to create momentum that our leadership could see.

We also created new products. Our staff is small, so we have to be choosy about what new work we’re going to create for ourselves. We decided the first project would be to implement a blog for our association’s annual conference. We couldn’t commit to a year-round blog, so we conceived of it as a special publication that would only exist seasonally. During the conference, we posted on-site and daily. We were the only publication to cover our conference this way, and it was hugely successful with the members of our industry who have migrated online. Just as importantly, we’d brought something into existence that hadn’t existed before, and that contributed–literally and symbolically–to our changing culture.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Content Strategy

Why Is Content Marketing So Hard to Grasp?

I love the term ‘content marketing.’ I use it to describe what I do because I think it’s important to make the distinction between Sway Engine’s expertise and what other marketing communications firms do. I don’t get frustrated or upset when a prospect or client doesn’t “get it.” As the only one responsible for business development at Sway Engine, I love the time it takes to explain something new to customers and prospects.

Most salespeople aren’t interested in educating their customers. Time is money, so once they’ve got a marketing product to sell and the customer is interested in buying it, it pays to keep that customer buying the same thing over and over. For example, if the customer wants a newsletter, most salespeople will promise a newsletter, whether or not it’s what the customer needs. Down the road, most salespeople want to keep the customer buying that same newsletter service, whether or not it’s working. These sales almost always take place without any discussion about the content.

As one of those rare creatures who spent time on the editorial and business side of publishing, I have a different attitude. Customers I can talk to and educate about different ways of doing things almost always become good clients. The ones who don’t want to be educated almost always end up being the least loyal and least lucrative accounts.

I’d love to meet more prospects who already understand the value of content and simply hire Sway Engine to execute the nuts-and-bolts of their strategy. More often, though, I call on people who think they need a blog, e-newsletter, Twitter account or some other delivery vehicle, but they don’t know why they need it or how they would use it effectively. It takes more time to flip the process, show them how and why they should start with content, but when that happens, it always pays off.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Content Marketing