Crystal Clear Communications Blog

Content marketing is a hungry beast

Why are marketers always on the lookout for sources of content marketing ideas? Because our audiences are always hungry for content on relevant topics with fresh story angles.

The most valuable sources of content marketing ideas:

• Resonate with your audience.
• Unlock expertise inside your company and customers.
• Fit the moment.

To measure sources of content marketing, track which ideas gain the most views and clicks through your website, social media and email analytics. Use a heat map such as hotjar.com to study where users’ eyes travel across your web pages.

Specific pieces of content will also lead people to the behaviors you seek, such as to:

• Consume more content, e.g., you’ve read the blog, now watch the video.
• Subscribe to a blog or e-mail.
• Convert by making a purchase.

How can you create content that drives those specific buyer behaviors? When you need sources of content marketing topics, consider these approaches.

Content that resonates

The best-performing content builds on insights you derived in buyer persona research. The more audience-centric your content, and the better you understand buyer needs, the more your content will resonate with buyers.

Real buyer persona research goes beyond demographics or segmentation. It provides insights that enable you to:

• Learn buyers’ preferred information sources.
• Understand which topics they’re researching.
• See the obstacles that impede the buyer’s decision.
• Offer content that gets buyers past obstacles to advance towards a purchase.

No wonder so many marketers are using buyer persona research to get their content marketing on target.

Buyers search the Internet for answers to their questions. To create content that resonates, become the best in your industry at answering specific customer questions.

Lee Odden advises, “Be the best answer.”

Here’s a blog on how to gather, analyze and answer your customers’ Top 100 questions to create great content.

Unlock internal expertise

Your company holds a treasure trove of expertise about customers and products. It may be locked away inside emails, customer chat, customer service calls or underutilized data.

To mine the value from that hidden expertise, recruit subject-matter experts and customer-facing employees as partners in content creation. Invite people to:

• Share customer stories they’ve heard in the field.
• Suggest customers to interview.
• Be interviewed for a story.
• Write a bylined article, blog or column.

Look for opportunities to make customers the heroes of your content. Invite prospects and customers to write for your website or to be interviewed for a video or story.

If it’s hard to get customers to become sources of content marketing, play to their egos. For example, a company that struggled to get customer testimonials found it easier to identify customers who wanted to be on the front cover of its magazine.

Those magazine stories became the driver of customer testimonial content.

“Ask: who’s looking forward to your next piece of content?” Andy Crestodina asks. The more names your put into your content, the more people will be looking forward to its publication.

Fit the precise moment

As a former newspaper editor, I used a bag of tricks that enabled our 4 weekly papers to compete against a big daily paper.

How did we go up against the Goliath in our market, with our handicap of 1/7 the frequency?

• Names, names, names.The more people you name in your content, the more people will read and share it.
• Visuals. We devoted more editorial space to photos of local people than our competitor.
• Currency. Monitor timely news on relevant topics and customers with Google news alerts. Generate news: for example, conduct a survey at a trade show and turn the survey results into a news story.
• Curate content. Share relevant headlines through email and social media. Point customers to content that will be useful to them, whether or not it comes from you.
• Newsjack industry stories. Quote industry and competitor news to freshen up your evergreen content. Comment on what customers and others are doing.
• Localize world, national and industry news. One of my best tricks as a newspaper editor: we found trend stories in The Wall Street Journal and New York Times, then interviewed local sources to localize big trend stories.

Make sure your content fits the exact moment of publication by designing an editorial calendar that’s audience-centric.

Start by creating content to fit major calendar events, such as the seasons, holidays and industry events.

For example, B2B buyers are driven by their companies’ calendars:

• Many decisions are driven by selling seasons, industry trade shows and events.
• Budgets and set strategies are planned for next year during the fourth quarter.
• Companies with leftover budget in December may need to spend or lose it.
• Companies usually initiate new programs in the first half of the year.

Help buyers out by anticipating what they need to do next on the calendar.

“Show buyers what’s next,” advises Ardath Albee. “They’re not going to figure it out themselves.

“Focus your content distribution strategy on engagement. It’s all about pages per person, versus persons per page.”

Bundle related content together, to make it easier for buyers to find. That’s what people prefer.

Content Calendar Example

One marketer that squeezes the most content out of a calendar is See’s Candies. They celebrate the holidays you’d expect and the holidays you’ve never heard of.

In the summer, See’s serves up content to customers such as:

• Gifts for Father’s Day.
• See’s makes sure your candies arrive in good condition despite the summer heat by shipping in insulated containers – a seasonal message.
• Honor new high school and college grads.
• Limited-time sweets such as Summer Berries and Summertime chocolates.
• Mark Independence Day, July 4.
• How to make S’mores around the campfire with See’s candies.
• Come in for National Lollypop Day (July 20) and get a free lollypop.
• For back-to-school shoppers, get a free piece of candy in stores.

That makes a full calendar of sweet content to attract and retain readers!

Valuable Sources of Content Marketing Ideas

The most valuable sources of content marketing ideas:

• Resonate with your audience.
• Unlock expertise inside your company and customers.
• Fit the precise moment of publication.

Measure the performance of various content sources by analyzing which topics gain the most views and clicks on your website, in social media and email.

“How to measure sources of content marketing?” is one of marketers’ Top 100 Questions about content marketing. Here are the answers.