In workshops, marketers have asked me over 1,500 questions about content marketing. Their questions provide great insights into the content marketing journey.
What were the best questions and answers from Content Marketing World? Content marketing thought leaders from around the world converged at Content Marketing World 2018 to share their wisdom with 4,000 marketers. The best 15 questions from Content Marketing World 2018 are answered here.
Without further ado, here are answers to some of the Top 100 content marketing questions.
ORGANIZATION
To create content marketing converts:– Contrast content marketing and advertising.
– Address 3 key questions about buyer needs in your market.
– Share data on eroding ad performance and content marketing growth.
– A/B test advertising and content marketing.
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To develop a successful content marketing program:– Avoid over-reliance on an agency “black box.”
– Pinpoint the exact problems buyers are trying to solve.
– Collaborate with stakeholders to co-create a mission, strategy and message.
– Build a big tent to co-create strategy.– Educate about why the company needs content marketing.
– Advocate for customer-centric content.
– Run pilot programs to produce proven successes.
Content is about creating information pages that lead to selling pages. Help SMEs understand content marketing, so they see that brands need both kinds of pages to sell effectively.
The Marketing Department is where content marketing begins to take root, typically. As it grows, content adds natural allies step by step on its way up the organization. It’s best to view content as an evolutionary process.
When the advertising vs. content marketing debate surfaces, help senior managers become self-aware about their own behaviors as consumers of marketing. Great content marketing is all about putting teaching before selling.
Build relationshipsTurn people into subscribers, who give you permission to deliver content regularly
Convert subscribers into buyers
Improve the user’s experience to win repeat buyers.
Know your customers’ tribe.Learn everything about your tribe’s passion.
Make content that feeds your tribe’s passion.
Your tribe will love you for it.
A free taste of great content makes audiences hunger for more. That’s why marketers need to create short-form content.
To maximize content: Create a dedicated content team. Find the right mix of skills. Get the whole company on the same page. Organize content like a newspaper. Choose marketing tools wisely.
The best length of content is the length your buyer wants right now. Make content marketing that scales gracefully from 7 seconds to 20 minutes with a Message Map.
Educate execs about changing buyer behaviors. People avoid ads, yet seek content that answers their questions. That’s why 7 out of 8 marketers use content marketing to reach buyers.
Write down every question customers ask your company. Here’s how to capture customer questions and convert them into compelling content.
To help you create time for content marketing, here are 5 ideas to help you create the most content marketing in the least time.
STRATEGY
Marketing automation supports content marketing by getting 4 jobs done for you:
– Track users’ interests to recommend relevant content streams.
– Assign scores to users to decide which are ready to contact and qualify.
– Offer content that helps buyers qualify themselves.
– Enable reverse engineering of successful content-to-customer conversions.
To prioritize content:
– Put your audience needs first.
– Build your content base.
– Create a content calendar, starting with mega-content.
– Ride the currents of trends and news.
To leverage existing content, reuse, recycle or reduce what you made already. This infographic shows 7 smart ways to leverage existing content.
Start by diagnosing the problem. Why doesn’t your audience consider your brand a source of content? Does your brand offer content on the topics the audience cares about most?
To get better at content marketing, you’ll need to learn from others. To do so, look for the right boss, the right blogs, the right books and the right tribe.
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People’s attention spans are short. If you can’t hook your audience in 7 seconds, people may not get your message.
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Marketers constantly face the need to quickly adapt content across communications channels, audiences and media to get the word out fast. First create an overarching message and strategy quickly. Then, adapt the message and strategy to the needs of each audience, channel and medium.
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Marketers who write a content marketing strategy are 4 times more successful, says Joe Pulizzi. Yet only about 1 out of 3 of marketers have written a strategy.
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Make sure everyone is pursuing the same mission. Here’s how to write your content marketing mission statement in 5 steps, using our free template.
Find out what are all the questions customers ask your company. Then focus on creating content with the best answers to each question.
If you’re afraid that your evergreen content is getting stale, here’s how to re-purpose content, squeeze out more value, and expand your audience.
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Learn your buyers through buyer personas or question analysis. Use content analytics. Serve relevant messages to each buyer.
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RELEVANCE
Target content marketing effectively by identifying the right audience of buyers – the tribe that craves your content. Find out which information they need to become smarter buyers in your market.
Then, provide the best information buyers can find on key topics, in the places they hang out.
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To sustain momentum in content marketing:
– Understand what buyers need and want.
– Build an audience-centric content calendar.
– Add other people’s voices.
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The 2018 studies by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and Marketing Profs show what the most popular types of content are.
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Andrew Davis answers a crucial content marketing question and he’s one of the most exciting speakers you’ll ever hear.
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The best way to better engage readers is gradually.
Let readers set the pace. Don’t dump too much information (TMI) on them all at once.
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To retain readers, help them form a content habit. How? Keep content fresh and engaging, on mission, and on a regular cadence.
The smaller your audience, the more content marketing must become a love letter.
Show how much you know, how much you care and how you can help.
To keep content relevant:
- Listen to understand buyers’ needs thoroughly.
- Guide buyers on a clear path through content to conversion.
- Keep content fresh and engaging.
Think carefully through how to use strong opinions, by using research and insights to create thought-provoking content.
To continuously engage your audience: evoke an emotional response, keep content newsy and fresh, make content interactive, and encourage user-generated content.
To keep content relevant: Listen to understand buyers’ needs thoroughly. Guide buyers on a clear path through content to conversion. Keep content fresh and engaging.
To make content great, teach before you sell.
To find out which topics to include in your content marketing, capture customer questions and analyze them. Then create highly relevant, useful, educational content marketing assets.
To understand buyers’ needs takes buyer persona research. That is, talk with 10 or 12 buyers who’ve reached a decision in the past 6 months – whether to buy from you, buy from a competitor, or stick with the status quo.
If an audience doesn’t recognize it needs your content, identify the root cause. It may be that buyers don’t recognize an existing problem or need.
Here’s how to magnify buyers’ unrecognized pain point, problem, need or opportunity.
How do you make the content relevant to the audience so that they continue to come on board?
Listen to understand buyers’ needs thoroughly. Guide buyers on a clear path through content to conversion. Keep content fresh and engaging.
Here are 5 ideas to keep content fresh and 3 ideas to keep content engaging.
To keep content fresh, perform original research. For example, host a quiz to hook people’s curiosity.
DISTRIBUTION
Here are 3 ideas to help you discover the ideal email frequency for your brand:
– Let subscribers choose the ideal email frequency.
– Test to find out the ideal email frequency for your list.
– AI (artificial intelligence) can identify which weeks to avoid sending mega-content emails.
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Up to 1/3 of webpages offer duplicate content:
Some search engine optimization (SEO) experts believe that your search engine rank can be hurt by duplicate content. Others say that’s a myth.
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To promote content effectively, take 3 approaches:
1. Owned media
Why? Because no one can take away these assets or arbitrarily raise your rent.
2. Earned media
Expand your influence by borrowing other people’s audiences.
3. Rented (aka Paid) media
To expand your reach and amplify your message, use paid advertising.
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To gain blog subscribers, you can:
Maximize content value.
Minimize user effort.
Increase currency and urgency.
Create anticipation.
Learn how.
We couldn’t outspend them, so we had to outsmart them. That takes a David vs. Goliath approach to content marketing.
1. Create content that celebrates customers as heroes.
2. Invite users to create content they want to share.
3. Include user-generated content (UGC) along the path to purchase.
Just as animals go to their usual watering holes, so do buyers searching for information.
Don’t build a new watering hole, because the job of luring buyers to a new place is expensive, uncertain and fraught with risks.
Use these 4 keys to engagement:
1. Evoke an emotional response.
2. Keep content newsy and fresh.
3. Make content interactive.
4. Encourage user-generated content.
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1. Do buyer persona research to learn buyers’ information habits.
2. Gather and analyze buyers’ questions.
3. Build your content first in owned media, then earned and paid media.
CONVERSION – Top 100 Content Marketing Questions Answered
Marketers use content marketing all through the sales funnel. Consumer marketers create content to build the top of the funnel first, says the 2019 CMI research:
– 4 out of 5 marketers use content to build awareness.
– 2 out of 3 use content to build credibility and trust.
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To clearly connect content marketing to revenue, take these 4 steps:
– Prove the effectiveness of content marketing by ring-fencing one specific market where the only marketing is content marketing.
– Before you create any content, find out which content buyers need the most through buyer persona research.
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Content marketing analytics must go beyond separate functions grading their own report cards. Follow these guidelines:
MEASUREMENT
To measure success of user-generated content (UGC), be:
– Clear about its purpose
– Ready to relinquish some control
– Set up to measure the right results.
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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.
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Content marketing plays multiple roles to grow your business
To measure content marketing in your business, take these steps:
– Measure the value of content as a long-life asset.
– Be crystal-clear about the jobs you want content to do.
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To start out, assess content marketing effectiveness 4 ways. Discover:
– Is your content on target, on mission, on strategy and on message?
– Is your content being found by buyers?
– Are buyers consuming your content?
– Are buyers moving forward toward a purchase?
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Content marketing can achieve many different marketing goals. To measure the value of content marketing, spell out your goals in writing, in advance.
In other words, write down your content marketing mission and content marketing strategy.
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Three reasons why tracking content marketing analytics is vital to success:
– What’s working and what’s not.
– Track buyers from content to conversion.
– Demonstrate content marketing results to higher-ups.
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Here are 10 budget rules of thumb I developed as a manager, director and vice president.
Budget rules of thumb make it easier to secure you the budget you need. I hope one or more of these budget rules of thumb help you get the resources you need to succeed.
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How does content make your reader’s job easy? When you measure good content, that’s the first question to ask.
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Out of all the questions marketers ask about content marketing, the most frequently asked question is: How to measure success?
It’s a big-picture question that applies to content and all marketing activities – digital, event, email, and others.
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Executives invest in marketing to produce growth in sales and revenue, new customers and new deals. How do they measure marketing success?
And what should you avoid telling them?
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Look for measures that matter, track them faithfully over time, and adjust your content mix to become more successful.
Don’t worry about what you can’t measure. There’s plenty you can measure and learn from.
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To write effective copy, use these 5 tips and tricks. Start with listening.
Listen to your audience, Perform buyer persona research to gain insights, monitor social media to mine topics, and use analytics to see which content your audience consumes and shares most.
Here’s how to measure the entire marketing system to see how it’s working. Marketing measures work best as they reveal patterns that emerge over time.
Most of what goes into a company’s ROI lies well outside the Marketing Department. A more sensible measure for Marketing is the marketing return on investment (ROMI). Here’s how you can calculate it.
“How to measure success?” is the #1 question out of of 1200 questions that marketers asked about content marketing. Here are 10 ideas to consider before you start or change marketing measurements.
Begin with the why: What’s your purpose in measuring marketing? Knowing your purpose helps you measure the right things.
Measures that gauge the quality of content are too often overlooked. Yet they’re important because quality beats quantity in content marketing.
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Measure with a clear purpose – to learn how to do content even better.
Measure marketing as it’s seen through the eyes of executives, to grow the business.
Measure everything that’s feasible and practical to measure. Start out by rounding up as many as 30 or 40 measures. Over time, figure out which ones matter most.
Calculate your return on marketing investment (ROMI) using this formula:
(profit from sales growth – marketing expense)
Marketing expense
Use marketing metrics as internal diagnostics, in order to maximize results.
Measure the long-term value of content to the business. Don’t consider output alone to be a valid marketing measure.
Top 100 Content Marketing Questions Answered
George Stenitzer
As a marketing change agent, I consult with clients, lead content marketing workshops for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and write the weekly Simplify Marketing blog.
With experience from Fortune 500 companies such as AT&T, RR Donnelley and Tellabs, I've been named:
- Content Marketer of the Year by the Content Marketing Institute.
- Best Marketer by BtoB magazine.
- A B-to-B CMO to watch by Fierce CMO.
