This week, I attended the inaugural Content Marketing Conference, an event hosted by Writer Access and Rising Media in Las Vegas at the Rio All Suite Hotel and Casino. The list of sessions was diverse, with speakers from startups, enterprises, and publishers all coming together to reflect on the future of marketing.
If there was one big takeaway from the conference, it’s that marketing is becoming media. This was a theme that was first touched upon by Bruce Rogers, Chief Insights Officer of Forbes, and expanded upon in nearly every session.
To develop a great content strategy, marketers need to ensure the brand is as much a publisher as a company. And that means marketers are acting more like journalists than ever before.
Newsbreaking Marketers
Larry Kim, the founder of WordStream, showed a great example of how marketing and journalism is merging: he broke an exclusive story about Google and it was picked up by official tech and business publications.
His investigation started when he noticed that new Gmail users were no longer asked to register for Google+. Then he contacted a friend at Google to ask more about it.
His original story, “Mandatory Google+ Gmail Integrtion Quietly Shelved,” was published on Thursday. Two hours later, Marketing Land picked it up. By the end of the weekend, outlets such as CNET, Fast Company, VentureBeat and many others had all written about it and linked to the WordStream blog:
This kind of snowball effect shows the power of original content. And not just original content, but ground-breaking investigative work… the kind of stuff a reporter would do. By writing a piece that was cited by so many other outlets, Kim increased the traffic to his site and the visibility of WordStream, too.
And it all happened by using Kim’s formula for creating great content: spending 80% of his time doing research and 20% of his time writing.
The Psychology of Keywords
Bob Cavilla, Managing Partner of UpWord Search Marketing, dove into SEO tactics and covered a variety of different ways for companies to think about keyword strategy. As Cavilla put it, “Behind every keyword is a real person.”
SEO is as much about analytics and strategy as it is about content and psychology. Marketers need to think about what kind of content their audience is looking for on search engines and write to those needs. How can you relate it back to your business? What is your brand’s voice when you’re writing about those topics?
Again, this comes down to organizing your blog like you’re a publisher. You want to create content that enhances the reader’s experience and encourages them to explore the website further once they come in from search.
For SEO, you are writing to answer the questions they’re already asking Google. You’re just using keywords to do it.
Your Primary Sources = Your Customers
In “Content Planning for Industry Dominance,” Jon Wuebben, the CEO of Content Launch, explained that marketers needed to interview both customers and sales teams to build the best possible content and buyer personas.
And it’s true – if marketing is media and marketers are journalists, then your customers and reps are your primary sources. By creating content that specifically helps solve the challenges of your customers and prospects, you can guarantee they’ll engage with it.
Cynthia Johnson, Director of Marketing and Social Media at RankLab, presented “Case Studies in Social Optimization.” She talked about how marketers could also look into forums about the topics that concern your customers. Specifically, she used Reddit and Quora as a resource to track the current conversations around the issues her audience faced.
Predictive Journalism
So marketing is becoming media. That means blogs are transforming from blogs as we know them today to fully-fledged digital publications and digital experiences.
But how do you spread the word about all the great content you’re creating? How do you know someone will share all those blog posts and white papers and reports?
In almost every session, the speakers reiterated another central point: know your influencers before you even started making the content.
Beyond buyer personas, you should pinpoint who you hope will share the story. Larry Kim, for example, uses Twitter Ads to create custom audiences and promotes his content that way. In fact, since running Twitter campaigns to promote his content, he’s entirely stopped emailing people for publicity.
Just like journalists, content marketers have to keep track of the latest developments in their industry and also have a long list of contacts – not just primary sources like their customers, but sources for influencers as well. If influencers share your content, you can guarantee your audience will grow.
The most interesting part about the Content Marketing Conference, I thought, was that very few people seemed skeptical of content anymore. There’s a definite interest and faith that content helps brands achieve their goals. At Movable Ink, we already know this – we’ve seen brands like Nickelodeon use contextual content to boost engagement and really provide a unique digital experience.
Now, the question is how brands can provide that kind of experience every time.