https://soundcloud.com/newfangled-agency-marketing-matters/episode-4-dont-forget-that-content-marketing-is-marketing
Chris:
Hello. This is the Newfangled Marketing podcast. This is Chris Butler speaking. I’m the COO of Newfangled.
Mark:
I’m Mark O’Brien, the CEO of Newfangled.
Lauren:
I’m Lauren Siler, the Director of Marketing at Newfangled.
Chris:
We’ve been trying to gracefully steer these conversations through matters that are really structured in our minds around how digital marketing works today from positioning on. We’ve talked about position and content strategy and all sorts of other topics. Today we want to talk a little bit more about content strategy because something that gets missed a lot is how to connect content to the services you actually offer.
I actually wrote a blog post about this a few months ago where I led off with an anecdote where I had been talking to an agency principle about their content strategy and she mentioned to me that, “Yeah, we got so deep into this stuff that we forgot to actually talk about what we do.” We see that over and over and over again where this content is of interest to the person making it and they’re trucking along, but they don’t have a coherent direction that connects it back to the business, and they don’t have a set of tools that holds them accountable to where this is meant to go and how to measure its effectiveness.
Lauren, you spend all day talking to clients about just that. You’ve created systems. You’ve created tools. What are your thoughts on that? Why is it hard for an agency to go from writing content, from being inspired, to actually making it an effective agent of business?
Lauren:
Right. It sounds like it would be obvious, right, that if you are going to invest your time and energy and resources into sustaining a content plan, then of course you would map it back to the types of services that you’d want people who you are marketing to to be calling you about.
Chris:
Right.
Lauren:
That’s surprisingly difficult. It is. I think one of the things that we see often is that agencies who are sustaining their own content plans or taking their first stab at this, it’s just an ad hoc process. There is no process. They write about what inspires them in the moment or they write when they’ve got a spare hour that they didn’t realize that they were going to have. There’s no real work flow internally to understand how long they should be investing in developing content ongoing, so they may find they have the seed thought, the seed of an idea, and then perhaps eight to ten hours later they’ve developed it and gone through various rounds or drafts over a series of three to five business days. They’ve invested a ton of time and then they lose interest, they lose momentum, and things start to fizzle.
Chris:
What’s that saying about something being inspiration versus perspiration? In this regard, the inspiration does not carry you far enough. It can be a great catalyst. It gets people into it, but it’s not the system that holds you to doing it over and over and over again and doing it right.
Lauren:
Yeah. What we really see is writing is seen as this creative act, but there’s definitely a science to sustaining a content marketing plan. That science is the system, right? It’s less about just being a good writer or finding a single topic that you’re excited about. If successful content marketing was just about being a decent writer, a lot of agencies would be a lot better at it, but without the science of the system, without the structure in place to understand, and really be intentional about the type of content that you’re writing and the topic that makes sense as it relates very specifically to the expertise that your firm holds in the marketplace, without that system in place, you leave yourself no roadmap. There’s nowhere to really understand what’s been effective, what’s going to resonate with your audiences, why you should continue to invest your time ongoing. Those things aren’t in play and so you’re just writing in a vacuum and of course you’re going to lose momentum and interest after awhile without those things in place.
Mark:
Yeah, this is Mark speaking. We’ve seen this again and again and again. Lauren, you mentioned this in the white paper we just did where content marketing used to be just about creating content. If you’re doing it, great. You check that box. All the issues you’re describing are pervasive. It seems like almost any agency who gets into content marketing falls prey to these pitfalls, right? How do they get out of it? What are the tools specifically that can lift them out of these trenches?
Lauren:
To begin, it’s about being well-positioned, having a firm perspective and a voice that’s being a true expert in your field. That’s job one because without that, you don’t really have a perspective that’s going to be relevant to your target audience. You’re going to be a journalist and the quality of the content will suffer. Positioning is job one.
It’s about understanding who your target person really is, who you really want to be bringing in through your marketing and understanding from their perspective what the buy cycle is. What’s the journey that they take to ultimately purchasing your services? What kinds of things are keeping them up at night? What are their pain points? Being really specific about articulating those things. Not just anecdotally throwing some ideas around a table, but getting that down on paper and thinking about, “How does my ideal prospect come to purchase my services? What does that buy cycle journey really look like?” Because you need to be mapping the content that you’re writing directly to those pain points.
When you’re well-positioned, when you understand your target audience, when you understand their buy-cycle stages, you can begin to create a bridge with your content between your expertise and the services that you offer directly to those pain points. That’s when we start to see your content marketing actually begin to work.
Chris:
Right. It’s interesting, too, because in the last episode, we talked a lot about math. How can math play a role in content strategy? It always comes back down to math because if there’s a formula for what works in content strategy, what’s interesting is that formula starts to trickle down. What Lauren hasn’t described yet, but what I’ve seen and what our clients see, she takes them through a really complicated structure. It’s like this matrix. Matrix is about math, but it holds any agency or anyone participating in the content work accountable to very specific numbers, targets, goals, across a variety of different concepts. You’ve got these big rocks like persona rocks and buy-cycle rocks and things like that.
Lauren:
Yeah, and what we see, too, having that structure in place gives you an actual process by which you can measure the effectiveness of your content marketing using empirical data rather than just a gut check, which is what most of our agencies are doing when they initially come to us. They think about what felt good or what they anecdotally got good feedback on and so let’s write more things like that. With the right system in place, when you’re evaluating the effectiveness of content within the parameters of target personas, buy-cycle stages, message categories that map directly back to your services that speak directly to pain points, when you have all those things in play, you can begin to evaluate very specifically what you should be writing and you’ve got real data, tangible data, to back that up and drive your strategy ongoing.
Chris:
Right, so if you want the romantic laptop in the coffee shop text editor with music playing in the background, you can have that if you do the math stuff first. You’ve got to do the matrix. You’ve got to do the math. You’ve got to pay your dues. Another thing I was thinking of, Mark, is I remember recently you were talking about a Blair Enns concept that is exciting on this notion of what is the proper ratio and balance, mathematical ratio of promotional content and educational content. I think this is one of those issues that keeps people from success here because people have this idea of, “Oh, well, content marketing, that’s not supposed to be promotion, right? That’s this other thing. That’s sort of this happy, warm fuzzy kind of way of marketing, but it’s not promotional. It’s not advertising.” That’s not quite right, is it?
Mark:
Right, yeah. We talk about, just in the last episode, we spoke about the idea of the content being focused on the overlap between your expertise and the prospect’s pain points. Lauren, you just reiterated that. That’s true, but Blair has this ratio that really inspired and that we adopted as we have so many of Blair’s perspectives, which is the idea of three-quarters of your content strategy being about pure education, as we’ve just described, and one-quarter being about promotion. I think that’s entirely fair and legitimate.
That gets back to the point you made on the previous podcast, Lauren, about not looking at your efforts as spam and not looking at your services as spam. These agencies, they’re in business because they’re providing real value in the marketplace. That’s why people give them money. They’re doing something helpful and productive for these people.
Back to the core idea of content, Lauren, one of the things that I love about the way you operate inside of Newfangled is that you’re a creator. You are speaking with agencies all day long about their kind of strategy and how effective it is, what’s working, what’s not, and you see patterns. Then you develop systems that you can then train agencies on to play to those patterns and one of the things you just created recently that’s a beautiful new system is the idea of content themes, which is a little bit of a 303-level concept, but since we’ve covered so much of the groundwork, could you just draw that out loosely?
Lauren:
Oh, you’re talking about the message manager tool. Yeah, the idea behind the message manager is really to give a system by which you can better measure the effectiveness of your content from a messaging standpoint. What we were seeing is that agencies would come in and they’d be throwing very, very specific topics at the wall just based on maybe something they’d read that day. It could come from a variety of points of inspiration. What is helpful is to align the content that you’re developing within message areas of focus that you know resonate with your target personas.
Oftentimes, that does map directly back to the areas of expertise that you offer to those personas, the services that you offer. Understanding what those message categories would be and then using that as a bit of a constraint when you are ideating on the topics that you’re going to develop for a particular month. Thinking about, “What is the overall message category? What are the topics that fit within that specific category that are both relevant to my personas, as well as relevant to the service and the expertise that I offer?”
What that gives you a tool to do later on is when you are looking at the engagement metrics around each particular topic that you publish to your site, you can map that directly back to those message areas of focus. Understanding over time you’re gathering data as to which articles, and by extension which areas of focus, from a messaging standpoint really did happen to resonate best with those personas, which gives you, empowers you to be more strategic and intentional with the content that you choose to write ongoing.
Chris:
That’s interesting. As I listen to you guys talk about this, I realize that there are three elephants in the room that could be their own episodes of this podcast, but one is this idea of, well yeah, you were writing on interest for so long that you have to learn the discipline of maybe that interest isn’t relevant from a message standpoint. When you get in a room with a group that’s responsible for creating the content for marketing purposes, you have to be in alignment and agree on what’s important right now.
That leads to the second element, which is there has to be alignment between sales and marketing. If someone in sales is on the phone and hearing from prospects and closing deals, and they have a much understanding of what’s important and what’s relevant to the buyer, that information has to get to the marketing team. Because if it doesn’t, then the marketing team might have a completely different idea of what’s important. That feedback loop has to get closed and that’s an elephant.
The third connects all the way back to this first principle of connecting services and content, which is if you don’t have services, if you don’t articulate them, if you don’t actually make your business known, then your content is not going to do it for you. You actually have to have that and the woman that I was speaking to, where that blog post came from, they hadn’t done that. They hadn’t actually put out there, “These are the things we do. This is what you can pay us for.” That’s critical. If you don’t do that, why wouldn’t somebody be confused about what you do?
We actually experienced this for ourselves. Mark and I were at a conference and someone that we thought knew us pretty well, over dinner, I forget how it ended up there, but he said, “Oh, I thought you guys were a publisher. I thought you guys were a content house or something.” He thought we got paid for content and that couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Mark:
That was a turning point.
Chris:
It was. It was a major mirror being held up in front of us where we realized this exact point. We need to talk about what we do and we need to connect it to the content that we’re putting out there. Otherwise, no point.
Lauren:
Right.
Mark:
This has been great. We can talk about this for hours and hours. Again, as always, if you’d like to continue with the conversation with anyone of us individually, we’re happy to make that happen. Next up, we’re going to be talking about the website specifically and what needs to be on the website in order to facilitate business development using these tools we’ve already discussed of positioning and contacts and content. That will be a lot of fun. We’ve got – speaking of creation – a whole new methodology that Chris has put together to help guide agencies through the process of making really good decisions, good strategic decisions about the website as a business development tool. We’ll talk through that next time.
Chris:
Yeah, looking forward to that.
Lauren:
Thanks so much for listening.
Mark:
Bye.