How To Create Content People Want

Editor's Notes

1. This is me at age 3. It’s 1974 and the ways that marketers used to reach their buyers was relatively simple. TV, radio, print, billboards. With the right Madison avenue agency and a decent size budget, any brand could reach their audience. But in 1974 something really important happened. The first barcode was scanned at a Marsh supermarket in Troy Ohio. It was a pak of Wrigley Juicy Fruit gum. In many ways, this started the beginning of the information age when brands could begin to understand the 4Ps: which place their products sold at what price and on what level of promotion. For me, this was also a big event. Both Marsh supermarkets and Wrigley gum would become clients of mine when I went to work at Nielsen selling and marketing scanner data.
2. This is me 20 pounds, I mean 20 years ago, at College Graduation. I went to school to study business but then changed my major to English Lit because I was fascinated by the art of storytelling. I still wanted to follow my career ambitions by working in the business field but felt even then that communications was the key to business success. It’s 1994 and a company named Mosaic changed it’s name to Netscape and released the first web browser. At this time, there were 1,000 connected computers in the early world wide web. In just a few short years, that number went from millions to the billions of connected devices we have today.
3. Fast forward to today. And it’s content and accessibility that is driving the world, not the Internet. Marketers, publishers and agencies are no longer in control. The consumer is…we have each become our own network hubs.
4. These are my children. The oldest there in the middle is Linkedin, to the left is my other daughter Facebook. To the right is my son Twitter and my youngest is G+. Aren’t they cute. I’m so proud of them. They have literally and drastically changed my world in just a few short years.
5. We’ve all asked the question, why content marketing? To set the stage, there’s been a fundamental shift in the way we as consumers consume and share content. Momentous amount of content being created, consumed and shared. An amazing amount of content, the real question is how does a brand stand apart?
6. Ant that can be your brand
7. Ant that can be your brand
8. For you, it’s a customer behind every one of those content interactions. We need to keep in mind there’s a person, not an undefined entity of customers.
9. The secret to content marketing is that its not that hard. There are obstacles, but what we’re going to do is give you our secrets and let you know what’s worked for other brands to drive a content marketing strategy.
10. The secret, content marketing is relatively simple. The buyer journey is just a series of question to be answered and we as brands have a role to play. Its simply to answer the customer questions.
11. As a brand, our natural instinct is to talk about ourselves. Customers are asking questions, they want to be informed and entertained, but we can’t just do that because that’s just charity. So the way we balance is make your customers the hero of the story. Take your brand out. How do you do that? You solve their problems at every stage of the journey.
12. The formal definition of content marketing. NOT advertising or PR – important About helping your customers answer those questions in the journey they’re taking Owned media – its specifically content that lives on a brand owned media.
13. Core components the way we need to think. We need to think different.
14. So we started with research. We looked at the differences in search engine traffic between thought leadership search terms like “Big Data” versus SAP product terms like “HANA.” Not surpirisingly, we found that there were many magnitudes more search queries across nearly every one of our categories. The only exception being in ERP and Business Intelligence, wehere SAP and Business Objects have strong brand affinity for those solutions. ----- Meeting Notes (10/13/14 15:01) ----- This would be a really useful exercise for Content Loop.
15. Then we looked at how much traffic SAP.com received from these non-branded searches. What we found was shocking! 99.9% of our traffic came from branded search terms. Or those prospects who are alreasy very late in the buying process. These are visitors who already know who we are and what we sell. But our portfolio had changed drastically. We needed to reach early-stage buyers in our newer solution categories.
16. Organizationally, content is a complex problem to solve. So we teamed up with the SAP.com team, the SAP Newsroom (Global Communications) and the advertising and branding team who had been spending money every year or so building advertising landing pages that had no organic or social sharing and were discarded as each campaign ended. We built Business Innovation. Our mission was to deliver on the promise of Pull Marketing, to become a destination of business insights for early-stage buyers. We wanted to earn traffic instead of buying it. And for those visitors who came from paid advertising, we wanted to provide a learning experience that was consistent with our brand image. The hope was that they would like and share the content with their connections, thus achieving the benefits of an integrated paid, owned and earned media strategy.
17. Help your customers with something. Do their jobs better, become heroes. You need to fill in the blanks.
18. Help your customers with something. Do their jobs better, become heroes. You need to fill in the blanks.
19. Make sure your social accounts demonstrate interaction. You want to interact with who you’re trying to reach. How many of your own posts you’re going to share? Or sharing other people’s content and influencers. You’ll see your social channels will grow. You want to help your authors and contributors as much as you can. You want to think of this as a mix of what you’re doing.