Content Marketing

There is to much content chasing too little attention as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted at the 2003 Techonomy conference.

According to Schmidt, every two days, we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. That's something like five exabytes of data every two days, he says. Let me repeat: we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003." The real issue is user-generated content," Schmidt said.

Worth noting that Schmidt's made his prescient comments almost twenty years ago. Content marketing and web design must go hand-in-hand. Today, let's focus on how to write, beg, borrow, or steal online content. Let's think in two dimensions - actions and psychology.

Actions - Arrest

In an environment as noisy as NOW, your content marketing’s first job is to stop your potential audience long enough to share. While each content in a box value wraps around every Action and Psychological element, arresting attention comes from headlines and images. So, when your content underperforms expectations for clicks or readership, test new headlines and then new images. Creating a testing culture is a Critical Success Factor (CSF) to online marketing success; we share notes about how to test in How to Create a Testing Culture. 

Actions - Beauty

By beauty, we don't necessarily mean what is beautiful. Beauty, in this context, describes images consistent with your branding and capable of arresting attention, like Rachelle's great WTE BLog image above. If that sounds like your images must leave the comfort of stock photography, you win a prize. Let's be clear, stock photos are a must for online marketing, but find astonishing stock images or ask your graphic designer to tweak stock images to achieve a distinct look. 

Actions - Psychology

Psychology describes the feelings your content marketing must create to win customer hearts and minds. Do your readers feel happy, sad, or indifferent? Authentic stories that poke gentle fun at your company, brands, and journey are likely to win hearts and minds. 

Tactics - Create A Unique Voice

Whether you realize it or not, your company, brand, product and website have a unique voice. WTE’s voice is technical with enough marketing and business acumen to translate complex tech in ways our customers can understand. After twenty-five years of creating creative technical solutions, putting out inevitable fires, and helping customers fight lions, tigers, and bears (oh my) we also have a sense of experience humor. How did we create our unique voice? We have more editors than writers because writing by committee is harder and less effective than editing with a group. We don’t have defined “voice guidelines” though writing down “rules” is never a bad idea.

Tactics - Share Stories

Tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever. 
- Native American Proverb

Most marketing teams believe in feature benefit selling, especially online. Of course, sharing a product or service's features and benefits has a place, but stories win customers' hearts and minds. As we shared in Start with Why people don't buy what you do, they grant attention, loyalty, and fellowship to why you do what you do. So, telling authentic stories sharing liabilities and vulnerabilities wins.

Tactics - Be Authentic

People are intelligent, and thanks again to Godfather Google, our ability to recognize false, inauthentic content is sharp and becomes sharper daily. Of course, nothing is perfect and flawless all the time, so writing content making such easy to see as false claims is stupid and dishonest. Instead, we recommend sharing failure and success, lessons learned the hard way, knowledge learned the first time quickly, and asking for help. Nothing feels more authentic than admitting to needing help, fully appreciating support when offered, and publicly rewarding helpers with genuine appreciation.   

Tactics - Carefully Use Controversy

Using controversy in content marketing is tricky. Shying away from all controversy will be inauthentic for your unique voice. Most online debate is healthy and inevitable. Just as no one is perfect, people disagree, and disagreement can become a richer understanding. Acknowledge when something is controversial. Take an authentic stand consistent with your beliefs, ethics, and knowledge and share legitimate disputes. If or when you're thinking evolves share why and who helped create your new understanding. Be specific, generous, confident, humble, and always listen more than you talk.

Great content marketing examples are harder to find that you may imagine. Content capable of creating community, excitement, tapping friends of your company's, brands's, or product's friends is rare, but here are a few examples:

• Tony Hawk Excitement
  While it may be possible to make skateboarding boring Tony Hawk's content is exciting, fresh, and heroic. Tony's images, videos, and copy arrest, are beautiful, create online community, and prompt social shares.

• Hubspot's Spread
  Hubspot is the exception to our, "your marketing team can't create as much content as you need" rule. Actually, Hubspot is a hybrid where contributors are glad to add content because of the power of Hubspot's reach. With almost 4M pages indexed Hubspot's team and contributors created a trusted content marketing source - trusted by Google, visitors, and customers.

• Vienna Beef
  Vienna Beef has millions fewer pages than Hubspot, but creating more than 300,000 pages about sausage is a singular content marketing achievement. Their "Hot Dog University" demonstrates a favorite tactic - create a school, college, or university to share your secrets and encourage contributors. Schools are mutually beneficial environments, so use the model to share, teach, and learn.

Tell me facts and I learn. Tell me truth and I believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.
Native American Proverb

Legal Eagle's Video Storytelling

If you aren't one of the millions of LegalEagle subscribers, we recommend following Devin's masterclass in video storytelling. Devin Stone's YouTube channel proves a crucial point - video tells engaging stories when done right. Would I watch a YouTube channel about the law and legal matters? Not so much would have been my answer before watching "Dapper Devin" discuss everything from The Most Ridiculous Lawsuits Ever to why Criminals and Smartphones Don't Mix.

Devin and his talented editors tell amazing video stories. Amy, one of the two LegalEagle video editors, recently left to start Awkward Awkward Anthems on YouTube (linked in Resources). Amy is off to a blistering start, with more than sixty thousand followers in her first few months. 

And, as the video below illustrates, it isn't hard to see why Amy's subscriber counts are exploding - she tells great video stories crafted with video editing skills honed by LegalEagle's aggressive deadlines and using video tools Adobe Aftereffects Templates. It is interesting to hear an editor discuss what she learned.

• Branding
  LegalEagle's branding components such as Devin's dapper dress, easy narrative manner, and using a law office-like backdrop create contrast with Awkward Anthems funky dress including her Awkward Anthems tee, less polished backgrounds, and easy narrative manner. Branding can be any consistent thing.

• Calls-to-Action
  We've discussed the importance of asking your customers to take actions because if you don't know what you want your visitors to do confusion is the result. LegalEagle's ability to build and blend their CTAs provide great lessons in effective conversion your videos and websites should steal.

• Pattern Interrupts
  Breaking up videos with jokes, graphics, and fly ins that keep or shock attention back to your video story. We agree with Amy pattern interrupts are an art. We would pay to attend Amy's Masterclass in the art of pattern interrupts and how to use Easter Eggs to keep your viewers guessing.

• Sponsor Seques
  Smoothly blending sponsorship ads into your video storytelling, even if you are the sponsor of those "ads", is another art LegalEagle masters.

• Production Mindset
  Amy discusses the most challenging thing in a production video storytelling environment - staying on deadline with passion and commitment. Amy's discussion of optimizing her video editing environment while rolling with the inevitable punches any production environment brings or "stumbling a lot until you find your rhythm."

Other Good Video Storytellers on Youtube

Here are other great YouTube video storytellers we follow:

• Jacque Slade - engaging stories about sneakers.

• Drew Gooden - Intelligent, funny, and well crafted pop culture stories.

• Clownfish TV - Rants about "dismal Disney" and other pop culture stories.

• Company Man - Business topics that could be boring come to life on the Company Man YouTube channel.

• Future Proof - Quirky business stories told with narrative flair and multimedia without breaking the six second rule.

Online, everything is data. Everything from where your visitors came from to what they clicked on can be tracked, reported, and used to refine your online marketing. So let 's discuss two aspects of creating a testing culture - how to use data to optimize your online marketing and how to test.

How to Use Data

We hold Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) meetings once a week. Using Google Analytics to prepare for this week's meeting we noticed Selling Services Online achieved the most pageviews in September, so we decided to make the article one of our three "featured posts" or posts that appear first on the page below the hero (largest image on a page is called a "hero" image).

We replaced Windows 11 When Should You Upgrade because Windows was strong for several months after publication in May, but wasn't receiving as many pageviews now. 20% or less of your pages receive 80% or more of your site's visits, reads, and engagement. This 80/20 Rule should guide your online marketing - make it easy to find, read, and engage with your most popular content. 

Create A Testing Culture

In the Selling Services example above, we saw the data and decided to replace popular content from May with more popular content now. Instead of making a call, we could have designed an A/B or multivariate test. A/B testing starts with a hypothesis, such as adding Selling Services Online to the Featured Posts list will earn more pageviews than the control (the current list of Tech Tuesday, Windows 11, and Cloud-to-Cloud).

We'd use a tool such as Optimizely or Adobe Target (linked in Resources) to set up the test. The tool and our development team would split traffic to our A condition - the featured list with Selling Services and the "control" or "B" condition - the existing featured content. The winner is the option with the most clicks.

Since there are a lot of variables, including location within the list, the images, and copy, we'd conduct a multivariate test if we were betting millions on the results. Multivariate tests isolate variables so they provide the best results. Multivariate tests, and the way we do 100 A/B to every multivariate test, are a pain to establish, take a long time to achieve statistically significant results, and need a quant (math genius) to understand fully.

A/B tests are easier to set up, faster to run, and much faster to use in a production online marketing setting. We've learned to test from conversion backward instead of design elements forward. We use Google Analytics to understand pages and offers viewed before conversion, such as filling out a contact form, and we begin to test elements immediately before conversion. We'll A/B test form elements such as email and name, calls-to-action, and images.

It's rare we walk back more than a page because there are always new things to test and only so many hours in a day. We've learned to view an optimized form, landing page, or preceding page as Lego blocks we can trade into other areas. Strictly speaking, we should perform new tests each time we make significant changes, but online marketing is a ready-shot aim environment - fast, chaotic, and complex. Creating a testing culture is how million dollar websites become multi-million dollar sites and how multi-million dollar websites become worth more money than anyone can spend in a lifetime.

As outlined in Blue Audio Oceans, no web marketing team can write all the content needed to win online. Better to crowdsource your content by encouraging contributions. Building trust online isn't easy, takes time, and requires a delicate shift from content creators to curators, but User Generated Content (UGC) comes with advantages.

• Adds Another Network
  No matter how extensive your network of fans and followers is, tapping into a new network is almost guaranteed to add new customers, particularly when your contributors share their content on your website with their friends and followers. When contributors share their content on your websites or social media, the intimate connections such shares create the reach into your contributors' friends-of-friends and add new customers.

• Friends-of-Friends
  There's a splash and ripples when you throw a rock into a calm pond. Think of your contributors' contacts and friends as that first biggest ripple. Your contributors' friends have friends, and so on, through generations of waves. The second, third, and tenth ripples represent real gains to your visitation, customers, purchases, conversion, and sales. While your marketing may strike it lucky and reach your customers' friends-of-friends, creating community and asking for help is the most efficient and best way we know to make a big splash.

• Lower Costs & More Tests
  As we shared in creating a testing culture, the number of tests you could do is always infinite, but time nor resources are unlimited. Asking for help, developing an online community, and valuing UGC lower your content creation costs since most contributors will work for non-monetary benefits such as links and kudos. Every piece of content creates an implied test - watch analytics and create more like it when the scope blows up.

Online Community Isn't Easy

The 1-9=90 Rule says 1% of your website visitors will contribute content when asked, 9% will share your content, particularly with UGC, and 90% of your visitors read. Put another way, 10% of your visitors will help, share, and advise, but there's a rub. The rub is creating an online community isn't easy because trust is hard to build and easy to lose. Building an online community takes time, patience, and good software. 

That's why WTE is creating our "Community-in-a-Box" application to include key online community components such as:

• Gamification
  Badges and recognition are powerful things, as the Boy Scouts, Audible, and every social media platform recognized.

• Value
  Badges are one way to value contributions publicly; social shares, appreciative public comments, and private email thanks are other ways to thank your contributors.

• Ambassadors
  Creating a "job description" that explains how "Ambassadors" can help build your online community, and their rewards helps move content curation from your marketing team to contributors.<

Rideology.io is where we're testing our Community-in-a-Box application. Please visit and share your online community ideas.

Since we opened with Eric Schmidt's quote about the content flood it makes sense to end with Mark Schaefer. In 2014 Schaefer controversial prediciton that content wouldn't be a sustainable strategy feels prescient eight years later. Here is a recent riff from Mark's blog. 

In 2014 I forecast that content marketing would not be a sustainable strategy for many businesses when the content density in a niche or industry reaches over-saturation. It’s basic economics. When the competition increases, it will cost more to win and earn meaningful attention in a noisy world. 

While this idea was regarded as controversial at the time, I don’t think any rational person would disagree that my assessment was correct. It is excruciatingly difficult to stand out today, especially if we are trying to win an SEO game.

We agree with Schaefer's note about the difficulty of standing out in a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) game, but content marketing or the ability to share stories to win customers' hearts and minds is and will always be necessary, important, and needed.

We noticed Schaefer's shift not long after reading his book. Winning traffic with great content and better organic search was over. Today, content marketing must be married to other tools such as social media marketing, information architecture, and cause marketing.

We couldn't play golf with a single SEO club, so WTE worked on content marketing and SEO as essential but not the only clubs in our online marketing bag. Marketing Automation, telling great video stories, and developing online community are other important clubs for your digital marketing. Finding uncontested space - blue oceans -  is crucial these days since the "SEO game," while still important, is different and much less valuable.

When the fantastic cause marketing you created about the uncontested space you discovered millions will visit to your website, read and watch your stories, and grant the loyalty and assistance every website needs, so don't let anyone say your content doesn't matter. 

Marketing automation automates repetitive tasks while providing the data analytics needed to know who to call, email, text, and follow and why. Customers who fill out forms on your website need timely and relevant replies. Think of online marketing as conversations. When customers share their information a two-way converstaion and a reltionship begins. As with any converstaion and nascent relationship, customers expect to get to know you, your company, brands, and products better as your knowledge of them increases. 

The Internet's good and bad news is rapid adoption. Most online campaigns follow a drip, drip, flood model. As marketers we create campaigns, watch analytics, adjust, and watch analytics to adjust, and so on until adoption speeds, unsuccessful campaigns are abandoned, and successful marketing tuned so a flood begins. 

Floods put stress on even the most advanced marketing automation and may lead to backlash. Backlash happens when customer expectations aren't met, when your response is slow, not relevant, or robotic. Not all customers are equal, so using marketing automation algorithms and software to feed the right response sot the right potential customer at the right time is art and science.  

Think of marketing automation as having two components:

• FrontEnd Automation
  Frontend automation creates timely relevant responses to triggering events such as filling out a form, requesting more information, sharing your content, or following your social media.

• BackEnd Automation
  Backend automation uses artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms to invest in more robust engagement to prevent backlash and promote sales, engagement, and a deepening relationship.

Marketing Automation's Frontend

Let's expand our digital marketing is like a conversation idea with another analogy - your website is like a cocktail party. You've gathered friends, colleagues, and contacts together. You've hired a great catering company that ensures your guests' drinks are cold and customized and they are well fed. 

You walk around welcoming friends you know, introducing yourself to people you don't know, answering questions about bathroom locations and where to put coats, and catch snippets of conversations you introduce friends who don't know each other. You're a convivial host. But, by the end of a long night, everything that just happened is a blur as exhausted you fall into bed.

Now imagine your catering company is noting, in real-time, how your guests arrived, what they eat and drink, wear, and discuss. The next day your catering company provides a report with everyone's name, the car they arrived and left in, who ate and drank what, and how much. They've recorded and organized every conversation by keywords and assigned a listening priority. What sounds intrusive and dystopian in a cocktail party happens as routine on every website."

Customers want your website to be personal and efficient, to know who they are and what they wish to do, because leading retailers such as Amazon, Apple, and Target create high expectations. Once high expectations happen, they aren't limited to the business-to-consumer space where personalization algorithms such as Amazon's "people who bought x also bought y" reviews or bestseller lists started. Instead, business-to-business customers carry their e-commerce expectations to your site's content, whitepapers, and webinars.

Let's not leave our cocktail party just yet. Remember the division of labor where you were the convivial hostess as your catering company gathered and reported information? Each job is demanding, but on the day after the party, with your hostess job over, you analyze what worked and how to tweak your next party, so everyone has more fun, feels rewarded, and engaged, and is sure to tell their friends why you have the best parties. Your backend analysis begins.

Marketing Automation's Backend

We design responsive websites with marketing automation in mind. As information begins to flood into a website, we've tagged and coded conversions to inform and trigger. We know 20% or less of web pages will earn 80% or more of clicks, reads, and downloads. So we don't spend time trying to raise the average response. 

Instead, we focus on winners looking to tweak and optimize the most popular pages and calls to action because small increases in big numbers often return more than significant increases in smaller numbers. If 100 visitors requested a "Tell me more about marketing automation" whitepaper tweaking the offering landing page to create a 20% improvement produces 20 more requests. Spending the same time to improve a page and call to action with only two requests is a waste of time. 

We can't make more time, so best to use analytics and algorithms to find your 80/20 Rules and focus time, energy, and optimization on the left side of the Pareto Principle - the 20% (or less) of causes contributing 80% (or more) of consequences. Trying to understand your 80/20 rule as digital marketing floods your website with responses is a non-starter. 

Better to use Applications Program Interfaces (APIs) to incorporate popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software such as SalesForce, HubSpot, and Zendesk while automating "drip campaigns" with algorithms supplied by Pardot, Hubspot and Mailchimp." "Drip campaigns" share information over time intending to develop an increasingly personal relationship with potential and existing customers."

Drip campaigns aren't static but set up with additional triggers, communication, and personalization. For example, your CRM and marketing automation may include a business rule that states, "when a customer downloads two or more whitepapers, give them a call.". Each day will produce a list of contacts who've downloaded more two or more whitepapers so your sales team can give them a call.

Before calling a prospect, your sales team will first check your CRM to learn who they're calling. Good CRMs are like patient health records - interactions are captured, categorized, and easily reviewed. In addition, your CRM may trigger research into potential customers who've downloaded two or more whitepapers.

Social media such as LinkedIn or Facebook can help you learn about "hot prospects." Once your business rules define a prospect as "hot," learning as much as possible in a proactive CRM while using algorithms to analyze and tweak what works turns more prospects into customers.

Today, some automation is a requirement because the Internet can swamp even the smallest businesses. Every website carries an implied promise. Look at our pages, share your reactions, ideas, and comments, and we'll respond in increasingly personal ways. Every website, from your favorite plumber to Amazon, has this implied promise. Trying to manually manage floods of prospective customers is like trying to stop the tide. Designing websites with automation in mind is a must.

You may think email marketing in social media times is superfluous. However, email marketing in support of marketing automation is more important than ever. Personal, relevant, and timely emails controlled by algorithms in drip campaigns create and grow crucial relationships turning prospects into buyers and visitors into customers. 

What is an Email Drip Campaign?

Email drip campaigns, sometimes called automated email marketing, send or "drips" written or curated content in a series designed to move visitors to prospects and prospects to customers. There are several ways we create drip campaigns:

• Pre-written Personal Emails
  Email drip campaigns "drip" share helpful and relevant information over time. It's possible to plan and automate every communication.

• Curated Email Content 
  Some drip campaigns leave an opening to curate highly relevant content happening now into the series.

• Hybrid Email Schedules
  Mixed or hybrid drip campaigns may replace a pre-written and scheduled emails with curated, relevant content about something that is happening NOW. We stick to the schedule and use triggers and pre-written content if there's no relevant newsy content to curate into the series. Changing a schedule can make analysis complicated, so we only disrupt a schedule when news is so hot and relevant not incorporating it would lower engagement and conversion.

Stefano Mazzalai, Instapage Head of Marketing Operations explains email drip campaigns:

Email drips are all about relevance and timing. By using a combination of intent signals (i.e., is the user interested in this specific content?), fit (is this the right user for our product?) and behavioral metrics (how engaged/disengaged is the user?), it is possible to create highly segmented drip campaigns with 70%+ open rates and 30%+ click rates.* It is all about how much you know the pain points of each target audience and what you can offer to solve their issues.

Instapage article by Stephanie Mialk linked at the bottom of the page.

Drip Campaign Example

Let's start our drip campaign example with an emailed offer for a whitepaper about five must know e-commerce trends for next year from an ecom influencer. Thanks to our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software our email list is segmented meaning we know who contacts who care about e-commerce. Halloween is the latest to send this kind of content to your ecommerce segment. After halloween your ecommerce segment will be busy with Black Friday and Christmas

We create an email tease with a call-to-action linking to the whitepaper landing page then we create a "Yes" and a "No" track. When a customer downloads or opens the whitepaper they are on the "Yes" track, so we'll follow with an free e-commerce eBook by the same influencer. Customers who download and read the free eBook will be called to set up a meeting. 

Customers on the "No" track receive a short video by the e-com influencer. Customers who watch the video receive the free eBook because they've moved to the "Yes" track. Customers who don't watch the video are considered "disengaged" and should go into a "last chance" bucket. 

Everything from offers to drip timing is being analyzed, reported, tweaked, and tested. Read drip campaign testing to learn why we like hybrid drip campaigns the most.

Drippy Websites

Drippy websites include "drippy content" or content that is organized to support drip campaigns. Here are a few of our favorite examples of "drippy content":

Now imagine your catering company is noting, in real-time, how your guests arrived, what they eat and drink, wear, and discuss. The next day your catering company provides a report with everyone's name, the car they arrived and left in, who ate and drank what, and how much. They've recorded and organized every conversation by keywords and assigned a listening priority. What sounds intrusive and dystopian in a cocktail party happens as routine on every website."

Customers want your website to be personal and efficient, to know who they are and what they wish to do, because leading retailers such as Amazon, Apple, and Target create high expectations. Once high expectations happen, they aren't limited to the business-to-consumer space where personalization algorithms such as Amazon's "people who bought x also bought y" reviews or bestseller lists started. Instead, business-to-business customers carry their e-commerce expectations to your site's content, whitepapers, and webinars.

Let's not leave our cocktail party just yet. Remember the division of labor where you were the convivial hostess as your catering company gathered and reported information? Each job is demanding, but on the day after the party, with your hostess job over, you analyze what worked and how to tweak your next party, so everyone has more fun, feels rewarded, and engaged, and is sure to tell their friends why you have the best parties. Your backend analysis begins.

• Blogs
  Blog is a powerful word that has come to mean current content. Curating a recent blog post into a hybrid drip series may increase the "what's happening now" value—the closer to NOW your shares, the more weight they carry.

• Curated News Feeds
  Tech Tuesday is our curated news feed. Watching for and curating relevant news into your website and drip campaigns is a good idea because the closer to NOW your shares, the more value they carry. Eventually, we'll use Flipboard or Feedly to improve our curated newsfeed, but Tech Tuesday works for now.

• Blog-Like Services Pages
  We've changed our services pages to be more blog-like and won't let them sit and get stale. We'll update content with curated news or relevant content because each update creates a great reason to share the content in a drip series.

• Portfolio Pages
  Portfolios can be good additions to a drip series when the content is relevant. In our ecommerce example, we could include a set of ecommerce portfolio examples. We use the same guidelines as our services pages - when something is new and relevant, curate it into a drip series. We A/B test curating content into our drip series. If the series generated a 3% response rate before curating content and a 5% response after, we'd find ways to incorporate the curated test content into the regular drip series. When curated content doesn't beat our control, it's back to the testing drawing board.

• Social Feeds
  If something blows up on your social feed, consider curating it into your drip campaigns. Perform an A/B test, and if hot content from social helps, find ways to include your social embeds into your drip campaigns.

• Galleries
  Never underestimate the power of images, mainly when photos come from users. Asking for customers to share action shots of a favorite coat or apparel, curating those candid photos into a gallery, and then including the gallery in a drip campaign create a sense the party has started, and your customer should join. The same "closer to now" rule holds. Summer pictures of summer content work better than summer pictures in winter.

Our community-in-a-box applicaiton beta: Rideology.io

Eric Schmidt on TechCrunch. 

Thanks to the Digital Marketing Institute for writing 5 Companies Dominating Content Marketing in 2018. Their lists aged well, so we used it for our great content marketing examples.

Engaging Content

Tony Hawk Excitement.

Hubspot Spread.

Vienna Beef University.

Video Storytelling

Jacques Slade Sneakerhead.

Future Proof Engaging business and branding stories.

Clownfish TV Dismal Disney and other pop culture rants.

Company Man well crafted business and branding stories.

Drew Gooden interesting and intelligent cultural criticism.

Testing Culture

Creating a testing culture A/B testing tools Optimizely, Adobe Target

Content Matters

Mark Schaefer's Business Grow blog.

Marketing Automation

Shailesh Pandey What is Marketing Automation on Medium.

Email Marketing

Only Drip Campaign Guide You Need from by Stephanie Mialki on Instapage.