Top 100 Content Marketing Questions Answered
In workshops, marketers have asked me over 2,100 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
Here are 10 proven ways that content marketing can help generate sales and revenues. Each will help you gain Sales’ buy-in.
Anything that puts more money in their wallets, Sales will embrace – including content marketing.
Look at size and scale constraints as an advantage in content marketing, because they force you to focus. To make your small team into an advantage, do David and Goliath content marketing.
To succeed with a small team, focus on your advantages. Be bold. Be controversial. Be quick.
When you need effective ways to Tweet, consider these 4 approaches to Twitter:
– Make it brief and timely.
– Evoke strong emotion.
– Add visuals.
– Spark dialogue.
Some companies find it nearly impossible to break the campaign habit. So they resist any move towards content marketing.
But almost 9 out of 10 marketers apply content marketing today. Others are striving to catch up.
To succeed, first marketers have to prove that content marketing can be successful in their company.
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.
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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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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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
Here’s how you can create a corporate story that everyone in your company, including every business unit, can tell.
Start at the company level.
While it may seem daunting to try to create one message that covers the entire company, it’s the best place to begin.
To get you started, bring out your company’s mission, vision, and purpose.
Aligning your company around a content marketing strategy can be a struggle. Why?
We see clients suffering from:
A lack of internal understanding about what content marketing is, sometimes even inside Marketing.
The absence of a clear mission and role for content marketing on a brand.
A false expectation that you need a 3-inch-thick binder to create a solid strategy.
Due to COVID, the marketing strategies for 2020 went out the window a while ago. Robert Rose suggests that marketers “stop posting for a moment, sit back and architect the right strategy for your business. Then lean in heavily and execute it brilliantly.”
As you start planning marketing for 2021, you need to adapt to customers’ new media habits – and make sure brand messages remain relevant in changing times.
The short answer: yes, customer-first content is a winning strategy. Here’s why:
Putting customers first, understanding what they need, and building trust with empathetic, differentiated content is a roadmap to long-term marketing success.
Increasingly, CEOs and companies must speak out. That raises the question: what should business leaders say right now?
Speak Out
Use a Clear Moral Compass
Lead with Empathy and Humanity
A Message Map helps you say it, share it, tweet it, blog it, post it, publish it, or debate it well. By using Message Maps consistently, you can make your marketing, employee, and investor communications even more harmonious and successful.
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To build a content marketing strategy from scratch, get internal buy-in.
Inside the company, build buy-in by collaborating with colleagues to co-create your content marketing mission, strategy, and message.
Here’s a step by step process for how to build a content marketing strategy from scratch:
Content marketing and advertising are similar, yet different. What do marketers need to know about their similarities and differences?
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
I’m often asked how best to apply content marketing to a highly educated audience with specialized buyers. What all marketers need, regardless of buyers’ education and specialty, is a mix of content targeted at specific buyers during each stage of the buyer journey.
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To address different demographics with relevant content, marketers need to:
Know your audience.
Consider 7 key factors.
Understand what people want and don’t want from content.
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Tune into your customers and your brand personality. The better you know your brand and your cutomers, the more in-tune your voice will sound.
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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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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.
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 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
The answer: it depends on your audience’s information habits. That said, the tips below will help you maximize audience engagement with content, whatever its frequency.
Put audience needs first
Know your buyers and especially their information habits.
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Four key trends will drive the future of social media and content marketing:
1. Usage is up: Americans are using social media more during the COVID-19 crisis. About half are consuming even more content.
2. Trust is down: But trust in social media is strained, due to fake news and fake accounts.
3. Dependency brings dangers: Marketers absolutely depend on social media today as their #1 content marketing channel, both organic and paid.
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The 4 keys to aligning content with channels are:
– Know your audience.
– Deliver content that’s on mission, on strategy and on message.
– Deliver content at the right time.
– Use the right media mix.
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Balance audience size and engagement. The audience size only tells part of the story. Marketers who build a smaller, highly engaged audience can outperform those who focus on a bigger but less engaged audience.
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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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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.
To continuously engage your audience: evoke an emotional response, keep content newsy and fresh, make content interactive, and encourage user-generated content.
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
Whether or not to gate content is a common dilemma, because an estimated 80% of B2B content assets are hidden behind a gate. So approach the question of gated content from a buyer’s viewpoint.
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Marketers jealously guard their results – including conversion rates of content marketing. That’s why it’s so hard to find information about typical conversion rates of content marketing.
Why don’t people share conversion rates? Because their competitors would love to know.
Conversion rates of content marketing vary dramatically, driven by these variables: Industry, Company, Product or service, Customer list (subscribers), Timing, and Offer.
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Generally, content marketing takes 1 to 2 years, plus or minus, to show its full effects. The speed of your content marketing results depends on your product’s sales cycle:
If it usually takes a year to close a sale of your product, expect visible results in 18 to 24 months.
If it’s a quicker-moving product that sells in 30 to 60 days, you start to see results in the first 3 to 6 months.
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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 gain blog subscribers, you can:
Maximize content value.
Minimize user effort.
Increase currency and urgency.
Create anticipation.
Learn how.
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
Here are 5 ways to prove content marketing is working.Any one is sufficient, but two or more will make your case for content even more convincing.
1. Trace customers from content discovery to profitable sales.
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When you consider how to measure your content marketing – individual pieces of content vs. the overall success of content marketing:– Be clear about your purpose in measuring.
– Strike the right balance in measuring programs, campaigns and pieces.
– Use tricks that improve measurability of individual pieces.
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Marketing attribution is the key to measurement, and it’s the #1 challenge consumer marketers face. My study of more than 1,600 questions from marketers confirmed this is a major pain point for marketers.
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Marketers jealously guard their results – including conversion rates of content marketing. That’s why it’s so hard to find information about typical conversion rates of content marketing.
Why don’t people share conversion rates? Because their competitors would love to know.
Conversion rates of content marketing vary dramatically, driven by these variables: Industry, Company, Product or service, Customer list (subscribers), Timing, and Offer.
Read More
Generally, content marketing takes 1 to 2 years, plus or minus, to show its full effects. The speed of your content marketing results depends on your product’s sales cycle:
If it usually takes a year to close a sale of your product, expect visible results in 18 to 24 months.
If it’s a quicker-moving product that sells in 30 to 60 days, you start to see results in the first 3 to 6 months.
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Carefully choose which marketing metrics to share with executives, with internal clients, and inside the marketing department.
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To create a test and learn environment, focus first on creating an innovation culture in the Marketing Department.
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More than half of B2C marketers use content marketing not only to build awareness, but also to successfully meet additional needs:
– Build credibility and trust.
– Educate audiences.
– Build loyalty with existing customers.
– Generate demand, leads, sales and revenue.
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Get the whole team aboard
To demonstrate the impact of content marketing, start by getting your executives and internal clients aboard the content marketing bandwagon. Take these steps:
Convene decision-makers in a workshop
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To measure content marketing effectively, measure to improve performance, enable testing and share the most relevant results.
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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.