There were so many “golden nuggets” in Ian Truscott and Adeola Sole’s discussion “How to Create ART with Content Marketing”, that we’ve pulled a second batch out for you to enjoy!
Start with your “why”…
“Why are you uniquely positioned to help this person with this content? Or to write this content? Or be in this position? What is it about your expertise that you have, or maybe you’ve got access to research? Like, for example, we do a yearly study about an email marketing benchmark reports every year.”– Ian Truscott
If you’re in a rush to build out a content strategy, you might be tempted to copy what a competitor is doing. Resist the urge! You wouldn’t be in business if you didn’t have something unique to add to the mix. Between internal expertise and your pool of customers, there will definitely be an angle that you can make your own.
…Then relate it to the audience’s “why”
“You may have an idea of what your business wants to talk about or the content that you want to produce. But whether or not it’s actually useful or relevant to your audience is another thing.” – Adeola Sole
One area where our both experts agree with Mark Ritson is the need to throw out your preconceptions and listen to your audience. When you’re surrounded by your brand for the whole working week, you have a very different viewpoint to the rest of the world. When you’re thinking about people who aren’t yet your customers, that’s even more true.
To gate or not to gate
“you’ve put in a lot of work to produce this content. So you want to make sure that the right people are seeing it” – Adeola
As with many marketing questions, the answer is “it depends”.
If your main goal is visibility and awareness for your brand, ungating is the way to go. Maximum visibility, easy access to what you do and how you do it for anyone that’s interested.
If you’re aiming to generate leads, then you are better off with a gate. That way only people who you can actually help are likely to make their way into your database.
Content as a long-term play
“I find that if you can build a good brand if you can build a good content marketing strategy, it will act as a multiplier for all of your other marketing that you do.” – Adeola
The key to Mark Ritson’s point of view is content marketing “as a separate discipline”. As long as you treat your content strategy as a feeder into your strategies for email, social, etc., you’ll avoid the pitfall. After all, without the right content, your emails would just be “Buy Now!”
How to measure the intent behind the actions
“Instead of building generic campaigns, that reach the masses, but talk to technically nobody, we want to focus in on people who have the intent. So we can have customized, really personalised copy and messaging that gets them over the line to converting.” – Adeola
The very worst thing you can do is produce content for content’s sake. By looking not just at which pieces of content earn that final conversion, but the journey that a person took to get there, you’ll start to see what shape your content strategy should be.
For lead generation, content that solves an immediate problem is likely to be a winner. “How do I add a mailto link?” or “What are UTMs?” set you up as a useful source of knowledge that your target person will return to again.
When it comes to brand building, you’ll want to address bigger strategic questions. Things that your intended audience will be thinking about, but not at the top of their to-do list. How about a comprehensive overview of the state of marketing automation?
