When upgrading to Content Marketing 2.0 always keep the issues of your target audience uppermost your mind
Top 10 Biggest Mistakes when upgrading to Insights-based Marketing
When you are taking your marketing content up a level by infusing it with strong opinion and insights, as well as rock solid evidence of technical or market expertise, there’s a lot that can go wrong. So here are my ‘Top 10 Biggest Mistakes’ to avoid when upgrading to what I call ‘Content Marketing 2.0’.
1. Not involving your most senior executives
This level of content demands the input of your most senior people ideally all the way from your product owners up to the CEO. Ultimately, the nature of many campaigns aimed at building your thought leadership positioning needs to go all the way to the top.
Your leadership team will understand instinctively what type of content is likely to cut through and engage those key decision-makers inside your key accounts and most valued prospects. They know when the perception of the business needs to be kicked up a gear. Get them involved in shaping your company’s story!
2. Failing to communicate beyond product or service features
My most valued business mentor has one key mantra ‘Get to the Why!’. All too often technology providers get stuck in elegant descriptions of the features of a product, what it does and perhaps how it achieves what it does. That’s not enough to get your content to stand out in today’s content intensive digital age in which you need to grab their hearts as well as their minds.
Your comms needs to rapidly help answer the inevitable question: ‘why should I buy this product from this company, what are their credentials?’ You need to communicate the benefits of working with you. That should ideally include conveying the culture and expertise of your organisation — your approach to doing business, painting a picture of positive, enriching engagement if that is what you want to convey.
3. Only producing written content
We now live in a world where communicating something valuable just once or twice in written format, perhaps via email or an enewsletter just doesn’t cut it anymore. It hasn’t got the reach. You need to create multiple opportunities to see. You’ll need to present content in different forms designed to capture the attention of the three different types of learners out there. You know them all I’m sure: they are kinaesthetic, visual, and auditory learners.
Auditory learners might gravitate towards your monthly podcast on the topics that showcase your knowledge and expertise.
Kinaesthetic learners are natural doers. They learn best while doing something physically active or physically engaging. It’s tougher to organise those workshops or user group meetings in lockdown but virtual workshops may be the closest you can get for these learners.
And then there are visual learners. They like to see diagrams and videos to understand ideas and concepts. Think about using charts, offering vlogs (video blogs) to supplement the blog posts and eBooks you are creating as part of your campaigns. Interestingly, a 3 minute vlog can cover the content of a 1,000 word article, even including some highly visual illustrations and branding. It’s highly efficient in a time poor world.
4. Operating in internal isolation
When drawing up a Content Marketing plan, failing to think about all your internal clients is a common mistake, whether they be in marketing, sales, business development, research, HR, or investor relations. Consult as many of these constituent groups as possible. Ideally, your plan should be working directly from the organisation’s central business plan. Never lose sight of what you need to communicate to help the business as a whole move forward.
5. Creating single pieces of content rather than full campaigns
A great many of the sorts of comms campaigns I run for clients today have six to eight month time lines. Start with a theme around which your campaign will rally. You need a theme which explores a business problem which your product or service is addressing.
Campaigns often start with some in-depth external market research designed to deliver a rich seam of new insights; either around a specific consumer group’s buying behaviour or some market-specific findings linked perhaps to pending regulation, technology adoption or other market challenge.
Whatever insights you decide to ‘mine’, you need to be able to uncover findings which reveal something new to your prospects’ decision-makers. These insights offer levers to deeper engagement. At the very least, they must add to your authority to speak about a specific market development which you’ve hopefully understood better than any of your competitors. Your campaigns must offer routes to thought leadership.
6. Failing to address your target audiences’ real concerns
Even if your marketing budget does not allow big budgets for external market research, it’s always possible to ask them in closed forums what they are preparing for right now. People are often only too pleased to unburden themselves if you can create the mechanism for them doing just that.
This is more difficult when you are breaking into new markets so, like a good salesman, you will have to build up your repertoire of knowledge and insights by stages if that blockbuster market research cannot be signed off or you don’t think you’ve got the knowledge to ask the right questions right off the bat.
If in doubt, start with lots of reading around the market and then call up someone you know working in that industry to give you more first-hand insight. And then, when you have a little more knowledge, you can start to ask the more penetrating questions which deliver valued insight.
7. Ignoring your audience’s medium of choice
The most recent webinar I hosted revealed that one of the biggest concerns of leaders of businesses and senior sales and marketing managers, was making sure their content is reaching and being read by their key audiences.
Think about going to where your audience congregates and ask to speak or sponsor these industry events. Make sure you are present in the publications your target audiences are reading. Reach out to them via LinkedIn, ideally through personally connecting with them from a relevant individual in your organisation.
Make sure your content is being fed out via your key LinkedIn personal profiles (as well as your LI Company profile). Stimulate them to join your mailing list and run a regular (at least monthly) eNewsletter which has a mixture of content in it — perhaps your latest thought piece, latest news story as well as product launches, software updates, patches etc.
Consider adding a ‘Business Challenge of the Month’ slot into your eNewsletter to get those top level directors engaged as well. Some of this is about making sure you are offering different types of content to suit different levels of the organisation.
8. Failing to measure engagement levels
Marketers need to be ready to be challenged in terms of engagement metrics. You cannot just say — ‘we know that we’re getting more traction with this new campaign’. You need to prove it. Thankfully, the digital marketers have numerous Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which can be pressed into service.
For engagement with content published on your website you can track visitors’ Time on Site, numbers of unique and return visits, which pages were most visited, dwell times on key content and ‘hero content’ download numbers.
If you want to go fully digital you are going to need to set up dedicated landing pages specific to each campaign so you can see how many people clicked through from which locations to your landing pages and from there ideally onto a sign up page of some sort.
This might be for downloading a new report, white paper, extended case study, research report, corporate video, or some other premium content which I like to call ‘Hero Content’. It might be for signing up to your latest webinar.
9. Giving up on trying to secure media coverage
Many people I meet who run their own business, tend to think it’s too tough to secure media coverage. But be in no doubt that if you present your latest breakthrough or launch in a well written news release and target it at a well-researched, finely-targeted media list, you can nearly always secure media coverage.
And if you marry your story with evidence of some market research which reveals that you are responding to an emerging consumer trend or business need, then you add a dimension to the story which suddenly makes it interesting to a wider audience.
Always try to package your stories as something more than you simply blowing your own trumpet. Add context to the story. Make it clear your offering meets a market requirement which you’ve spotted, analysed and verified.
Never underestimate the power of media coverage. It extends the reach of your content and adds additional authority, quite apart from the SEO benefits it can bring.
10. Thinking you must create everything on your own
The art of fast growth these days is building strong partnerships and milking them to look bigger — broadening your offering, creating new channels to market and building credibility faster.
Never underestimate the power of collaboration with others on campaigns, especially if you are tackling big industry themes where both parties can benefit from building up more knowledge and sharing the resulting knowledge. So why not work with one of your key customers or partners to share the cost of a big piece of consumer market research and work together on the outreach to the media?
Or alternatively, work with a partner to create a conversational podcast series with the two of you sitting together and discussing themes of wider interest? Very often these sorts of collaborations achieve far more than 1+1 = 2.
You can find out more about how to design and execute market research-led campaigns as the most reliably powerful way of upgrading to ‘Content Marketing 2.0’, by joining my half day ‘Insights Engine’ Workshop on Thursday 27th August 2020. For more details, here’s the link to buy a ticket and book it into your diary.
In summary, the 10 biggest mistakes when upgrading to Content Marketing 2.0, creating content that is rich with informed opinions, insights and evidence of expertise is:
1. Not involving the leaders of of the business — they are closest to the business plan, corporate focus and hot buttons in the market.
2. Failing to communicate beyond product or service features — remember to ‘get to the why’ (they need your product/service)
3. Only producing written content — you are going to need visual content like vlogs, graphs and charts. Ideally you also need online workshops to support your communication so that you reach all 3 types of learners.
4. Getting trapped in internal isolation: make sure you speak to all parts of the organisation that can shape your campaigns and be assisted by the content you are creating. Siloing has become a bigger problem in lockdown as collaboration has become harder with so many employees still working from home but it’s crucial to get all internal stakeholders invested to enable the upgrade to Content Marketing 2.0.
5. Thinking in terms of single pieces of content rather than campaigns: consider how you are going to generate new insights which will help you get closer to the market you are serving.
6. Failing to address your target audiences’ real concerns: build up knowledge of their concerns in good old fashioned ways of picking up the phone and asking them as well as surveying them and their end-user customers.
7. Ignoring your audiences’ medium of choice: Find out what they read, where they network, which social channels they are regularly in. Make sure you and your content and brand are present in those places.
8. Failing to measure engagement level: Use the array of new digital KPIs to help measure levels of engagement with your campaigns
9. Giving up on securing relevant media coverage: frankly there’s no excuse for giving up on getting coverage — it’s just about working out what type of information they want and in what format and then delivering to the requirement while building relationships with them whenever possible.
10. Thinking you must create everything on your own: the power of collaboration with a partner or with the media itself can never be underestimated.
You can find out more about how to design and execute market research-led campaigns as the most reliable and powerful way of upgrading to ‘Content Marketing 2.0’, by joining my half day ‘Insights Engine’ Workshop on Thursday 27th August 2020. For more details, here’s the link to buy a ticket and book it into your diary.
I’ve got 25+ years experience in designing and running impactful, insights-led Campaigns for over 150 Tech Firms. I’m also the coach and trainer on my Agility Insights Method.
