Why Content Marketing Should Be “Choose Your Own Adventure”

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Why Content Marketing Should Be “Choose Your Own Adventure”

In content marketing, it can be tempting to expect customers to follow our preferred and most convenient path of content breadcrumbs to the sale. But while each individual will experience a linear path from their perspective, the question of “which” follows “what” will differ for just about everyone.

Anyone else remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books, hugely popular with kids in the  late ’70s/early ’80s? Between the ages of 10 and 13, I was a fan.

Every page or two, the book invited me to choose what came next. Did I want to steal the flaming sword of Eternal Thingywhatsit (Turn to page 36)? Or should I continue on to find the captured Princess Cliche (Turn to page 23)?

Inevitably, some of those decisions would result in my hero being flambeed by a dragon, shot by cowboys, abducted by aliens or some other equally ignoble end. Back to page one to try again until I got the right ending.

You’re the Star of the Story

Choose Your Own Adventure bookInstead of reading about some other hero, these books put me in that position. I got to choose how the hero should behave, made the decisions and copped the consequences.

But many businesses make the mistake of assuming their brand is the hero of this story. Far from it. No one wants to read your blog or download your white papers or subscribe to your newsletter to hear what your business is up to unless it is relevant to their own story.

We are all the heroes of our own stories, not passive participants in a self-serving corporate fairy tale. [Tweet this]

Your brand, product or content may be no more than a single chapter in someone else’s much wider quest.

The goal is never web hosting or car insurance or cheese slices. It’s a successful online business, or a new car or delicious food. Even these goals may be just steps in another, broader quest; a steady income, travelling around Australia, or impressing a new date.

So by the time a person starts searching for content on web hosting, car insurance or cheese, they’ve already made a number of choices, turned many pages and may even have been burned by many dragons. Your content should recognise the whole quest.

Otherwise, how do you know enough people will make the choices you hope for instead of any number of alternative routes to their goal?

Therefore, Australian web hosting provider Netregistry published NETT magazine, full of small business advice with very few pages concerning web hosting or related services. (Disclosure: I worked for Netregistry and wrote for NETT between 2007-2010.)

Shannons Car Insurance has Shannons Club, a community for car enthusiasts and collectors to share their passions, swap advice and even list cars for sale.

Recognising that cheese is not the only route to delicious food, Kraft publishes Food and Family magazine, full of recipes and broader lifestyle tips.

Instead of just promoting their products or brand, each of these companies introduces the relevant concepts into the preceding pages of the customer’s own story.

For me to choose to steal the flaming sword (turn to page 36), it has to be introduced earlier in the narrative.

Choose From Many Possible Endings

Choose Your Own Adventure bookSimilarly, the reader or customer is in control of the journey through your content.

Each new reader will dive in at a different point. One first touches the brand via a tweet. Another reads a magazine article, a third may watch the YouTube video. They choose where to start and where to go after each piece, jumping backwards and forwards through your entire archive at their own pace.

Not everyone who joins the Facebook page will sign up to the email newsletter and thence to your white paper, and so on.

So, just like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, each piece of content should appear to follow logically from the one before – whichever it may be. Whatever path they take through your content, it should seem like a consistent story with one narrator (or one editor or brand voice).

And this includes offline touches with the brand too. Don’t let your sales and support teams become the plot holes or continuity errors that knocks the reader out of the story and has them questioning what they’ve read.

This need for a consistent story that works from every angle is what content marketing is all about. Not individual pages of content thrown at a reader like confetti but pages that can be bound together in any order to form the perfect next chapter in their own story.

The only stats that matter are your own

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The only stats that matter are your own

We love stats. With so much data available to us on every aspect of marketing, we have come to trust stats with a level of awe and power that can sometimes lead us astray.

When someone releases a new research report or infographic, we eagerly cherry-pick the information to shore up our own opinions or challenge others. We’re so eager to trust cold numbers and make business decisions based on current trends that stats like these make their way into all manner of management pitches and marketing proposals.

But imagine if we behaved the same way in the doctor’s surgery? None of us would want to be prescribed medication based on the most common ailments suffered by the majority of other patients, no matter how many pie charts the doctor shows us. We want to be diagnosed based on our own blood tests and pathology results.

We’re told that numbers never lie. In fact they lie, obfuscate and mislead all the time, by omission at least.

What Numbers Don’t Tell You

Take this stat from last week as a “for instance”. (Hat tip to @globalcopywrite for alerting me to this one.)

@wildfireapp: March 20, 2013

Exciting stat. Plenty of retweets. The inference is we will see an improvement in our social media activity if we use more fill-in-the-blank posts. How easy! “Intern – be off with you to Twitter and get us some more of this valuable ‘engagement’ I keep hearing about!”

Doesn’t say whether that’s positive or negative engagement though, does it? Rather important when evaluating the stat as a business insight. Context is everything! Sometimes questions work really well. Nowt wrong with that. But it would be foolish to think the numbers aren’t skewed by those times when such posts have prompted a huge flurry of piss-take responses.

Anyone familiar with any of the major brand social media #fails over the last couple of years – and I mean big ones like Qantas, Coles and Woolworths – would know that a fill-in-the-blank post is an invitation to be trolled.

Of course it gets more engagement! You’ve just made it so temptingly easy for anyone to add a touch of irony or sarcasm to your words and use your brand as a piñata for the amusement of their followers! What japes!

Most social media marketers now shy away from the technique as way too risky. Sure, the engagement numbers would look amazing on the next monthly report, but the brand reputation risks taking a hit in ways the numbers probably won’t show. (Data and sentiment measures have trouble identifying sarcasm as well as context it seems.)

Don’t believe the hype!

Here’s another fact, this time from the recent Edison Research report – The Social Habit 2012.

brandfollows1

According to the report, one in three social media users now actively follow brands. 79 percent of those do so on Facebook. 47 percent also identified Facebook as the network with the most influence on their purchasing decisions, far ahead of any other network.

Wow again. Reading that report, any business not actively pursuing a Facebook strategy must be completely out of touch. How many proposals to management in the next few months are going to include those stats to justify the push for a Facebook page?

But Facebook is not right for every business. It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing. It doesn’t matter how many people identify Facebook as having influenced their purchasing decisions cause you don’t know what those decisions were. Did they buy a soft drink or a new car?

I bet the numbers would be radically different if the questions were confined to how social media influenced the choice of corporate data centre or brand of toilet paper. Some decisions we just don’t make after visiting Facebook.

These stats are completely meaningless as business insights. All that matters is how your target audience behaves, no one else’s.

Conformity Sucks

What broad stats like these do is imply a normalcy or a trend too persuasive to ignore. If you know no better, it’s easy to assume the same stats should apply to you and your business. The stats imply that businesses taking this approach are succeeding and that going a different way risks failure. Or at least a harder road with a lot of unnecessary effort. You would do better to conform!

I was reminded of the irrelevance of supposedly convincing stats and ‘received wisdom’ when interviewing Phoebe Gazal of Papier d’Amour about their email marketing strategy for a recent article.

We were once told that Tuesday mornings were best for email. But our results told us that Friday afternoon was more successful.

Phoebe Gazal: Papier d’Amour

There are plenty of stats out there that claim to have the answer to what time and day of the week is best to send out your email newsletter. Or how many characters should be in your email subject line. But there is no single answer! It will always be unique to you and your particular scenario.

Stats like these may be a starting point to experiment, but nothing more. Determine your own metrics. Analyse your own data. The results you get are real, relevant and far more important in guiding future insights and activities.

Content Marketing: Too Much of a Good Thing?

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Content Marketing: Too Much of a Good Thing?

Everything points to content marketing exploding in 2013. 95% of businesses claim plans to increase content marketing activities this year. Great, huh? Should keep me very busy (and reasonably well paid) with all the new and eager clients beating on my door, right?

But anyone who knows me at all also knows cynicism runs through me like the word Blackpool through a stick of rock.

Don’t misunderstand me. Yes, content marketing is hitting the tipping point. Some would argue it already has in the U.S. and U.K., powering forward to sweep aside previous marketing hypes du jour such as SEO and social media. Forget those collections of diminishing tricks and tools standing in for strategy. Content marketing is the real deal!

Except, of course, when it isn’t.

2013: The Year Content Marketing Explodes

Towards the end of last year, the Content Marketing Institute invited me to submit my prediction for 2013. The resulting e-book includes forecasts and comments from many of the best minds in the industry – people like Joe Pulizzi, Jay Baer, Robert Rose and Brian Clark – with a plethora of positive, insightful ideas on how 2013 will be an exciting year indeed.

Reading it back now, I can tell I was grumpy the day I wrote mine.

This is the year everyone starts calling themselves content marketers; SEO agencies becoming content agencies while delivering the same keyword-stuffed landing page copy; social media gurus rebranding as content marketers to grab some of the buzz while not actually doing anything different. Just as the term “cloud” became confused and distorted under the weight of opportunistic IT marketing, it’ll become tougher to keep content marketing a clearly defined and understood discipline.

“A grumpy person”

Never mind glass half full or half empty; while everyone else celebrates the glass filling to the brim, I’m complaining that it’s going to overflow and stain my tablecloth!

Crap: The Single Biggest Threat to B2B Content Marketing

But I honestly do believe content marketing is actually under threat. And, I’m not alone.

This absolutely wonderful Slideshare from UK agency Velocity Partners explains far more eloquently than I why the huge explosion in content marketing could quickly become a poisoned chalice if we’re not careful.

Maybe the fault is ours. Maybe Content Marketing is just too broad a term. Maybe it’s too easily co-opted by anyone with an infographic tool and a Twitter account. Or maybe, just maybe, 2013 is the year we work hard to clearly differentiate to clients why our words, pictures and videos over here are infinitely more worthwhile than those words, pictures and videos over there.

Creativity, not content, is king

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Creativity, not content, is king

If you’ve attended any marketing conference over the last few years, you would likely have seen plenty of talk about tools and process and less about genuine creativity.

Sure, some extremely creative and ground breaking case studies would be shown. But too often they are presented to illustrate a series of mechanical tasks. “Brand X drove a 20% increase in sales with this innovative Facebook campaign from the best creative minds in the business. So here’s how you build a Facebook brand page…”

No, no and thrice no. And it’s not just conferences. So many blogs, books and more attempt to simplify complex and sometimes unique content marketing scenarios into “Ten Top Tips to Tripling Twitter Traffic”.

These have their place, but I think the discussion has been dominated with attempts to simplify marketing to a series of hints, tricks and tips “we can all do at home, folks”.

Science or art

When presenting these case studies there’s very little, if any, talk about the creative process that comes up with the ideas and a ton of info about the mechanics, the channels used and metrics gained.

It’s not surprising so many people think sending something viral is a simple and mechanical process. The discussion reduced it to one by forgetting everything that makes the content special in the first place. And it’s that special sauce that causes something to go viral, not some switch inside YouTube.

‘Content is King’ may be one of the most over used phrases in marketing history. But it is too regularly co-opted into arguing for quantity and scale than it is about quality. It is used to justify the reduction of content to a production line of generic blog posts and landing pages driven by keyword research, automated or mass produced for chump change in the hope sheer volume and persistence will outweigh the blandness of it all.

Creativity reduced to a science, not art. Content reduced to tasks, not ideas.

Not that the tools aren’t important. Of course they are. But it’s like presenting a case study on the novels of George Orwell to a conference of budding writers by discussing whether he used notepads or a typewriter to write Animal Farm. And then pointing to his book sales as evidence that typewriters are the way to go, before launching into a pitch for the Acme Typewriter company, “Come see our stand in the main exhibition hall”.

OK, maybe it’s not quite that bad. But the last few years have definitely seen far too much focus on the technology; the code, the meta tags, keyword density, widgets, bots, black hat, white hat and more in between. Everything presented as accessible to all, a box of tricks guaranteed to rain fortune down on your business.

Clicks are people too!

It is as if the arrival of internet marketing brought with it a contagious amnesia, causing many to forget that clicks are people too, that success or failure lives in the nuances between the numbers. Just as picking up the phone doesn’t make someone a communications genius, the tools are nothing without creative thought and genuine insight.

It’s not hard to see how this amnesia came about. The pioneers of online marketing were developers, not marketers. They built the tools and showed the rest of us how to use them. Therefore, the concepts underpinning online marketing were reduced to a language of zeroes and ones. I’m not blaming them; that’s what they do and do it well.

Customers were no longer people but numbers on a spread sheet, captured by a tracking code and stripped of all individuality except for whatever demographic information was deemed relevant in a shopping cart form.

In the last few years, marketers began to reclaim the customer. Now there’s more talk of ‘content marketing’, recognising the importance of message over channel. There’s less talk of clicks and more talk of people; with individual motivations, goals and behaviours. Less talk of hits on a page and more talk of what’s on that page.

Many businesses have a long way to go. Some are already there and have been for a while. Others may never ditch their obsessions with production line neuromancy, looking for push-button solutions. These last will continue to add to the graveyard of sub par corporate blogs, abandoned forums, ignored Twitter streams and unliked Facebook pages. Some of those businesses will die, wondering why the mechanics of online marketing failed them while writing it all off as an over-hyped fad.

The last decade belonged to the tactics of technology: the tools, the channels, the code. The next decade belongs to creative approaches to content strategy; what we actually say, why and how we say it.

And technology better get used to holding the door open.

Declaring war on ‘solutions’

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Declaring war on ‘solutions’

If there is one word I would expunge from the English language tomorrow, it would be ‘solution’. Give me dictatorial power and by sundown all dictionaries would have the single page ripped out. All electronic documents would be subject to enforced ‘find/replace’. Google would automatically de-index any offending webpage.

But that wouldn’t be enough. Anyone in danger of ever putting words on paper or screen likely to be exposed to innocent people would be required to undergo a surgical removal of that part of the brain where the word sits in the linguistic memory, like a cancer in the lexicon.

Sure, we may lose some other words as unfortunate casualties in this war against vocab barbarism. The dictionary purge would delete ‘sombre’, for example. But as the English language has more synonyms than any other in the world, it is easily compensated with ‘gloomy’, ‘mournful’, ‘dismal’ and a slew of others with overlapping shades of meaning.

‘Sombrero’ would also be a casualty. But hey, every cloud…

We would also lose the alternative definitions for ‘solution’ itself. Understand, I have no beef with dissolving solids or gases into a liquid. Chemists may carry on their experiments unimpeded. We just need to pick another word for it. There are a couple of other more obscure definitions which I’m sure won’t radically undermine our language too much. There’s a greater cause at stake.

It’s the richness of the language and the sheer number of synonyms available that is partly why the word drives me to such puritanical measures. Why? Because it is so often used to obfuscate or blur over accurate meaning rather than clarify and convey detail.

It has become a dull (in both senses of the word) landmine of letters, turning so much marketing copy into minefields of banality. At any moment, a reader interpreting a sentence to glean necessary information or insight may innocently come across the eight letters of linguistic doom. Once the reader’s eyes alight upon the word, the entire sentence implodes into vaguery, leaving in its stead a crater of bland, meaningless twaddle.

It is a lazy word. It has become synonymous with almost any phrase where the writer wants to sound professional, while simultaneously positioning the subject of the sentence as a positive benefit. What the word really displays is either a) a disinterest in thinking up a more appropriate word more accurately describing the subject, which ironically would be more professional, or b) even the writer doesn’t know what this thing does.

A few years back, Private Eye ran a wonderful column of submissions from readers of the most ridiculous uses of ‘solutions’ in marketing spin. For example, cardboard boxes described as “Christmas Ornament Storage Solutions”. It ran for many years and received hundreds of increasingly mind-boggling variations. But constant ridicule hasn’t deterred repeat offenders from sticking it into company slogans, website headings, product descriptions and sales copy.

Yet the majority aren’t even that imaginative. Why say ‘Electrical Solutions’ on the side of your work van when you just mean ‘Electrician’? We all know what an electrician does, so you would save some money on the decal letters at least. Or maybe that van wasn’t an electrician but a supplier of household electrical appliances? How would we know? Adding those extra letters doesn’t add greater meaning. It actually subtracts it, removing all context and make it less clear what it is you’re selling.

And then there are those instances when it is added to an equally ambiguous word. What exactly are ‘business solutions’? That’s a pretty broad concept you’ve tried to commoditise there. Or consider ‘technical solutions’? OK, we’ve narrowed it down to anything involving a device of some kind… or something. How about ‘Strategic Consulting Solutions‘ for a triple whammy of WTF?! Do they even know what it is they do?

Why oh why oh why has the art of marketing and copywriting become obsessed with selling solutions? You don’t sell solutions, you sell a product or service! I’ll be the judge of whether it solves my problem or not if you would simply tell me what it is you’re actually selling! In plain English! If you can’t tell me what it is yourself, why the hell would I give you my cash?

Yes, it’s probably a good thing I don’t have dictatorial power to enforce laws based on my own grammatical preferences and linguistic pet hates. Bad copywriters don’t need to fear a knock on the door late at night and dictionaries can continue unmolested.

But I’m watching you… I can bide my time.

Please don’t call me a thought leader

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Please don’t call me a thought leader

There are certain words and phrases I find myself using every day that I wish I didn’t have to. ‘Thought leadership’ is one. ‘Community’ is another. Even ‘social media’ sticks in my throat it has become so overladen with misinterpretation, expectation and confusion.

But use them I do as they are still the established, recognised terms of today’s digital marketer. Clients and businesses talk about thought leadership so I have to talk about thought leadership. Clients and businesses are looking for social media consultants, so unless I use the words social media, they are not going to find me.

And so there is a feedback loop where these weasel words have become necessary. They are like a form of universally understood shorthand that, on rereading, doesn’t always make as much sense as it should.

Standing my ground by using more appropriate words or phrases hurts me more than anyone else, especially when you consider keyword SEO. More people search for ‘social media’ than they do ‘digital communications’ or whatever equivalent phrase one might adopt. (I’ll explain my irritation with the phrase in a later post.) And so the loop continues, encouraging more people to use the same words and phrases while simultaneously diluting them of any real insight or power.

I started thinking more about this when I was asked the other day how else I would describe ‘thought leadership’.

It is almost an impossible task. The phrase has adopted meanings, inferences and interpretations far beyond what those two words would have held the first time some bright spark in marketing (or more likely PR) put them together in order to wow a client.

What is thought leadership? Is it providing opinionated and informed editorial? Is it offering free advice in your content? Is it somehow developing the perception of being a leader in your field by the sheer force of will behind hundreds of tweets, blog posts and conference lectures — regardless of quality?

And so I open the challenge up to you. What could we replace the words ‘thought leadership’ with? And should we? Go on. Be a thought leader. What’s your best comment?