91% of B2B companies are diving into content marketing according to eMarketer. It seems that the fat part of the curve is upon us as the corporate world realizes that savvy consumers of all stripes just don’t buy the old advertising game. The new bargain is, if you give me valuable content of some sort, I’ll maybe think better of your company. Seems a bit tenuous, but I’ll vouch that it works, or used to.

We started our first thought-leadership led strategy with IBM back in 2002. We didn’t call it content marketing back then, but IBM had realized that they were not in the blue box business anymore, they were instead in the business consulting business; that’s why they sold their PC operation to the Chinese and bought PwC Consulting.

The problem is that with everyone and their brother buying into marketing automation systems, which need to be fed with content, I’m afraid the marketplace is rapidly going into content overload mode. Enterprise marketers cite producing engaging content as their number one challenge, according to the Content Marketing Institute. That’s code for: “Whoops! We’re making content, but nobody’s looking at it”.

So what’s a marketer to do? Advertising doesn’t work like it used to and the hoi polloi are ruining content marketing for the good guys (that’s us!).

Table stakes today are having a constant flow of content designed to appeal to each of your key personas at every step in the Consumer Decision Journey. This requires doing serious work mapping your consumer’s path to purchase, discovering their key touch points and understanding their psychology at every step. It sounds complex and it is. But if you don’t do this foundational work, you will not have the right content in front of the right consumer at the right time. That, however, just gets you in the game.

The challenge then is to create content that is sufficiently valuable and distinctive that your prospect not only engages with it, but also shares it, and most importantly is intrigued by the company that has produced it.  This is a very high bar and not for the weak of spirit.

Unfortunately, in content marketing today there is no substitute for a living content strategy effort informed by data and analytics and activated by best-in-class content created around valuable consumer insights. Makes you pine for the days of a clever print ad and a scotch and soda.

—

What do you think? Tell us below!

Like us? Stay connected:

In the pre-digital days there really wasn’t a need for brands to produce more than the ads that went on traditional media. Now they need to produce an almost constant stream of fresh content to keep up with digital channels and social media. For most companies it’s a pretty tall order because making content is a completely different business from what they know. And it gets even harder when so much of the content that they now need is video.

Since cheap bandwidth has made high-quality video so easy to get, people want more and more of it. Projections have video representing over 85% of all Internet traffic in a couple of years. So brands need to make lots of videos. The problem, of course, is not just the quantity, but how does a brand make videos that are good enough to stand out? While cameras and equipment are cheap and easy to get, creativity and know-how are still in short supply. Of course, what makes a video good is in the eye of the beholder, but most of us know bad video when we see it, and the last thing any brand needs is to be spreading bad videos.

So the challenge is for companies to put in place the capability to produce lots of “good” videos, consistently over time. The problem is that because the budgets are much smaller, it’s not like producing TV commercials, which brands have a lot of experience with. According to the 4A’s, the average cost to make a TV spot is over $300,000 — but for video content, that may be your entire budget for the year.

The big question is — do you try and do it in-house or hire pros? While you may need a lot of videos, you may not need enough to justify the large expense of hiring a full-time team. So another approach is to hire an in-house video producer whose job it is to put together freelance teams for each production. This is not a creative person, but a video project manager, and you still need to be doing enough work to justify a full-time person.

For most brands the answer is to hire pros. The advantage, of course, is the wide range of talent and capabilities you can access. The problem is how to keep the costs down. Most agencies focus on developing the creative, and then hire a production company for the execution. As a result, the costs mount quickly. Some TV production companies do creative, but their focus is really on the production and they are rarely able to develop the creative or the strategy for the video, which is critical. So that leaves companies and agencies that specialize in video content for digital channels.

The ideal is to have digital content strategy, plus creative, plus production under one roof. A company that can do all of that — and that is set up to produce a lot of video content over time, cost-effectively — has found the perfect solution. Of course, the videos still have to be good in the eye of the beholder, which to start with would be you.

We don’t just love our clients, we live and breathe their products. Here, for example, is “Pennington Grass Seed” from our client Central Garden & Pet,  in full bloom. This stuff grows so fast account director Kevin Smith can barely keep up with it!!

Don’t Waste Your Website

Back in 2010 I wrote an article called “Back to the Future. The dotcom in 2010” for the SoDA report  (the Society of Digital Agencies). Since then the digital marketing world has kept marching on and our heads have been turned by many new things, most of them in social media. But even after all this time the old brand website still wears its crown as the center of digital brand ecosystem.

As Pete Blackshaw, Exec VP of Incite, a joint venture between Nielsen & McKinsey, writes in a superb article on the role of websites “Importantly, if we’re truly entering a POEM (paid, owned, earned) media mix model, brand websites are key. They anchor the owned, reinforce the paid and incubate the earned.

Think about it. Where can a brand make as powerful and complete a pitch as it can on its website? Where else does a brand have as much control over the experience? Other brand touchpoints have bits of the puzzle and can certainly have influence, but only the brand site can be designed to take a prospect from curiosity all the way to SOLD and beyond. Of course brand sites may not be as sexy as a Pinterest page or a mobile app on the fad scale, but think about what they can accomplish.

Whenever we create interest with an ad or a piece of content we need to do something with that awareness. We always need a next step that can move the prospect closer to the sale, and nothing can do that better than the brand site. So don’t waste your brand site. Make it the next step for all your marketing and equip it to be a conversion machine.

A brand site should therefore be designed with three primary missions in mind:

Continue Reading

Attention all you content marketers out there: judgment day is at hand. That’s the day that many brands will wake up soon to discover their content doesn’t attract an audience like they were told it would.

Don’t Be Drowned Out

It seems that everybody and their brother is talking about content these days, and how the only way to connect with the consumer is by giving them lots of it. They are right, of course, because about the only way brands can still influence advertising averse, digitally savvy, consumers is with content. The problem is that we have already come to the point where there is a veritable tsunami of content drowning consumers. It’s a problem when both Nike and the local auto shop are doing content marketing.

I’ve seen this happen before. I remember the first time I was handed a loyalty card and told that I’d earn a free smoothie after 10 shakes. Delighted I dutifully put it in my wallet. The second time I got a card I also put it in my wallet. But soon I had no more room for loyalty cards and I bagged the whole idea. It looks like content is also becoming an out of control bandwagon. Continue Reading

Back by popular demand, here is the Christmas Story I wrote a few years ago. Believe it or not……it’s all true.

Our house is Christmased up to the eyeballs thanks to years of post holiday stuff accumulation by my wife. There is nothing she likes more than to buy giant nutcrackers on sale at 90% off. Sometimes I think she is singlehandedly responsible for the rise of China. But with the columns on our old house dressed up like candy canes, wreaths on all the windows and various and sundry seasonal oddities like Victorian carolers about the size of Mini-me, it does look rather marvelous; all except for one fairly important element — our Christmas tree. It is undoubtedly the most troubled tree we have ever brought home. My wife bought it without my expert eye and was clearly hoodwinked by unscrupulous street retailers.

From the first moment I saw it I knew we had a problem. To start with it was too small and although I’m not sure what kind it is, it’s not the Noble Fir with the crisp, wing like branches and wonderfully symmetrical onion shape, which I love. Instead ours was an explosion of branches going every which way; a misshapen gnome that resisted all my attempts to find a vaguely acceptable viewing angle, despite some judicious clipping.

I should explain my motivation was not only to contribute to the perfect holiday ambiance, but also to prepare for the impending office Holiday party we were having. The Holiday party at my house has been a storied tradition unbroken for 15 years, except in 2009 when an extremely large tree attacked my house in a storm and destroyed my living room. Little did I know this runt of a Christmas tree might be a relative.

Continue Reading

A new type of video content creation.

This post is about a brand new digital technology for video called Popcorn. It’s one of a number of technology led efforts to broaden what video is capable of, and in a world where soon 90% of data on the internet will be video, that’s good news for marketers, but first a little context.

My career and IQ, my digital agency started out in the video business. Over the years I’ve seen big changes as we moved from film to HD video, and from expensive post-production to a million dollar edit bay on a laptop. But despite these changes the basics of video creation haven’t changed that much. It’s still a linear experience made out of the combination of visuals and sound. It still a demanding art that takes quality writing, acting, lighting, sound design, animation, and post production, to say nothing of great ideas, to make quality videos.

Now, with the Content Age in full swing and a general mad scramble for video content creation, companies are finding that while they might be able to produce a talking head video of the chairman or an interview with a customer, it still takes experts to make the quality of video that captures the imagination or moves us emotionally. Today companies can go out and spend a couple of thousand dollars on a camera that would’ve cost a fortune a few years ago, they can buy microphones, lights and editing software and be fully equipped for chump change. But in the end it’s still the experience and expertise of the people using the equipment that’s the difference between wonderful and OMG.

Many forces are driving this demand for video, not the least of which is that it’s become incredibly easy and cheap to put high quality video in digital channels. So much so that video has replaced many of the interactive experiences we used to make. This is good and bad. The bad, at least for brands, is that we have moved away from interactive experiences which required the participation of the viewer. Instead of two way experiences we’ve gone back to a one way traditional video experience. Until now……

With the introduction of a new technologies like Popcorn that may have changed. Popcorn is open source technology that allows us to put links, images and even dynamic content into a video stream. That can be as simple as a link to where to buy that sweater you’re looking at, or a photo and email address for an insurance agent in your area. Popcorn essentially turns videos into mini-websites so that when your video travels around the web from person to person and site to site, it has the same capabilities you could have on your home page.  The possibilities are as many and varied as the technology is flexible. It can adopt the dynamics of “choose-your-own-adventure” and allow brands to follow viewer preferences and interests, or it can enable the functionality of shopper video without the big platform cost. On first blush it looks like Popcorn is moving video into the digital age with functionality capabilities that could reshape what we think of as video. It’s early days for Popcorn, but it appears we’ve been given a new paint box for video and I can’t wait to see what’s possible.

For years I have been preaching the strategy of Click/Reward. The idea is simple, every time someone clicks within a digital experience something pleasant should happen. This idea, while perhaps intuitive, flows from a number of observations. First we live in an instant gratification society, and, of course, we are all pleasure hounds. But more importantly it comes from mapping buyer psychology to the sales process.

Understanding the Buyer

How the unique dynamics of digital media connect with the psychology of a buyer, on the path to purchase, is the key to creating successful digital experiences.  This path today is often presented as a wonderfully busy chart with a myriad of touch points and influences. But in the end we all go through the same simple process: first we are unaware of a specific need, then we recognize it as a potential need, then we explore its value. Then, if we continue, we evaluate our options, finally make a choice and buy.

Yes, there are many factors and forces that influence this along the way, but block out all that noise for a minute and focus on the buyer’s basic motivations. Through this process our motivation shifts from passive in the early stages, and unwilling to invest much effort, to active in the later stages once our intention starts to crystallize. Continue Reading

Great design does make a difference. We’ve seen it for years from Apple, and as marketers working in the trenches of digital design, we see its impact every day. But rarely does a design execution come along that so perfectly illustrates the power of design on the web. Myspace, that echo from the past, is back with a brand spanking new incarnation. Continue Reading