Content

Marketing
Identify and understand
your audience

Learn the three forms of

content marketing

Optimize your content

GETTING STARTED SERIES

DUMMIES CUSTOM SOLUTIONS
 IN THIS CHAPTER

»» Understanding content marketing

»» Discovering your audience

»» Learning how to think like a

publisher

»» Establishing content marketing

goals

»» Researching your competition

Getting Started in
Content Marketing

C
ontent marketing encompasses all forms of content that add value to con-
sumers, thereby directly or indirectly promoting a business, brand, prod-
ucts, or services. Content marketing occurs both online and offline, but the
free and simple tools of the social Web have opened up the ability for companies
of all sizes to compete alongside one another, not for market share but for voice
and influence.

Marketing a business using content isn’t a new concept; however, it has evolved
in recent years to mean far more than creating a company brochure filled with
overtly promotional messages and images. Today, content marketing focuses on
creating content that is meaningful and useful to consumers with promotion tak-
ing a backseat to adding value, particularly adding value to the online conversation
happening across the social Web.

To achieve success, companies need to engage consumers rather than interrupt

them. Consider a pop-up ad appearing on a website today. It wasn’t so long ago
that pop-up ads were all the rage among marketers. Today, they’re a sure-fire
way to annoy customers and cause them to turn away from your brand. Rather
than taking control of consumers’ online experiences, businesses need to enhance
those experiences, and they can do it with content that adds value and engages
consumers.
Defining the Three Forms of
Content Marketing
Content marketing comes in three basic forms — long-form, short-form, and
conversations. It’s important to understand that content marketing is still a rela-
tively new form of marketing, and no one knows the recipe for success. Only a
few rules and some loose guidelines are available for businesses and marketers to
follow. In fact, you’re really limited only by your creativity and dedication. Truth
be told, any content that you make publicly available online and offline could be
considered a type of content marketing because all content is a reflection of your
brand and business. Furthermore, all content opens up a potential talking point for
consumers to consider, dissect, analyze, and debate.

The three forms of content marketing that you can create, publish, and share as
part of your content marketing plan follow:

»» Long-form content marketing: Includes all published content that’s longer

than a few sentences and that offers deep value, such as blog posts, articles,
ebooks, press releases, white papers, presentations, videos, podcasts, webi-
nars, and so on.

»» Short-form content marketing: Includes all published content with no more

than a few sentences and that communicates useful information, such as
social updates, graphics, images, and so on.

»» Conversations and sharing content marketing: Can happen through

conversations about published content and through the sharing of published
content, such as blog comments, social updates, link sharing via social book-
marking, comments on videos and images, and so on.

The important thing to remember is that you’re likely to see overlap between the
three forms as well as overlap with social media and traditional online marketing
efforts. That’s a good thing! The best marketing plan is a fully integrated strategy
where one piece connects to the next.

Identifying Your Audience

Finding your audience is a fundamental step in building a business. Once you deter-
mine the customers you want to target, you need to then define ways to find those
customers in order to provide them with meaningful advertising, promotions, and

Getting Started in Content Marketing 3

so on — or in the case of content marketing, more useful and shareworthy content.
The traditional way of taking this step is to segment your customers by focusing
on similar demographic characteristics, such as age, income level, gender, and so
on, and then to find similar people based on those demographics.

However, this approach is not necessarily the most effective way to segment and
target customers in the world of the social Web. It’s true that you need to know
the primary demographic profiles of your best customer audiences and whether
those profiles match sites where your audience might spend time; however, those
factors aren’t the only ones that matter — because the social Web can be ana-
lyzed using behaviors in addition to demographics. In fact, behavioral targeting is
often more powerful than demographic targeting because, while using the Inter-
net for researching, communicating, shopping, building relationships, and more,
people don’t necessarily reveal personal demographic information. Furthermore,
the social Web is filled with people who participate in conversations and publish
content anonymously or by using pseudonyms, so it can be very difficult to actu-
ally compile demographic information about these people.

Clearly, relying on demographic segmentation when building a content market-

ing strategy may lead your business down a path to failure. Instead, Internet users
need to be segmented and targeted based on their online behaviors. What sites do
they visit? What conversations do they join, and what do they say in those con-
versations? What content do they share with their own audiences? Those are just
a few of the relevant questions marketers need to ask to understand their current
and potential online audiences.

By continually evaluating customer behaviors and adjusting the marketing strat-

egy to address those behaviors, marketers can help ensure they find the right cus-
tomer and introduce the best content for that customer, in the right places, and at
the right time.

The best content marketing strategies involve finding your audience and publish-
ing the right kind of content to interest these people and add value to their lives.
A combination of demographic and behavioral targeting is essential to creating a
solid content marketing strategy.

A good way to start identifying your customer and their needs is by building a
persona or buyer’s profile. This type of exercise helps you narrow down your cus-
tomer, identify their pain points, and decide what content you can create to best
meet their needs. For instructions and a template to start building a persona, click
here.

Getting Started in Content Marketing 4

 Discovering what your audience
wants and needs
If you’re not delivering the type of content your target audience wants and needs,
they won’t read or view your content nor will they share it. In fact, they might ignore
you or publish negative responses to your content. You don’t want that to happen.

Just as you need to determine what your audience wants and needs from your
products and services to develop effective advertising, you need to determine what
your audience wants and needs from content.

To find out what your audience wants and needs from your content, you can start
by listening. In fact, listening is one of the most important parts of any success-
ful content marketing strategy. You need to constantly be listening to the online
conversation so that you can modify your content marketing strategy as necessary.
Consumers move quickly and change their minds even more quickly. If they find
your content to be stale or outdated, they’ll move on in search of another business
or destination that offers the type of value-added information they want and need.

Ask your customers both in person and online what kind of information they want
and need. Publish a poll on your blog using a tool like Polldaddy or SurveyMonkey,
or pose the question on a forum or group you belong to where your target audience
spends time. Additionally, pay attention to your own website and blog analytics to
see what content is driving a lot of traffic, comments, and incoming links.

Your focus should be on long-term growth and trends. There will always be a few
audience members who are louder than others, and certain pieces of content might
attract a lot of attention. It’s up to you to find fluctuations that spell opportuni-
ties and weed out anomalies that won’t drive business in the long run. Pursue the
opportunities aggressively, and put the anomalous traffic spikes on the backburner.

Shifting from a Marketer to

a Publisher Mindset
One of the first things you must do in order to be successful with content mar-
keting is to forget everything you know about marketing. That’s a scary concept
for many people. For years, businesses have been following marketing strategies
based on interrupting consumers. For your content marketing efforts to work, you
need to put the aggressive marketing mindset on the backburner and focus on
writing and publishing shareworthy content.

Getting Started in Content Marketing 5

Therefore, as you’re creating content, do so with your audience in mind, not your
business goals. Deliver the content your audience wants and needs and then pro-
mote that content separately through your social media interactions. Inevitably,
your content and social media marketing activities will overlap, but your content
should be able to stand on its own, separate from your social media marketing
tactics.

Applying the 80-20 rule

In marketing theory, the 80-20 rule states that 80 percent of business comes from
20 percent of the customers. I like to use a similar concept when it comes to con-
tent marketing and social media marketing. Remember, you have to think like a
publisher to be successful with content marketing. If you apply the 80-20 rule to
your content marketing efforts, 80 percent or more of the content you develop
should not be self-promotional and 20 percent or less should be self-promotional.
That means the vast majority of the time you spend on content marketing activi-
ties won’t be directly related to marketing at all.

But hold on! Just because 80 percent of your efforts aren’t directly self-promo-
tional doesn’t mean they’re not indirectly marketing your business. In fact, it’s
indirect marketing that makes content marketing so powerful. Every piece of
content you publish or share can add value to the online experience and further
strengthen your relationship with your online audience of brand advocates who
will talk about your content and share it with their own audiences. Don’t think
content that doesn’t directly promote your business isn’t helping drive revenues.
It just takes time to see the results. These interactions are happening indirectly
and often the effects are not immediately apparent.

UNDERSTANDING CONTENT MARKETING

ETIQUETTE AND AVOIDING TURN-OFFS
As a content marketer, you have to adhere to both written laws and the unwritten rules
of etiquette and acceptable behavior. If you break those unwritten rules, you could
destroy all of your chances at achieving content marketing or social media marketing
success. To help you get started on the right foot, here are some of the most common
content marketing turn-offs and etiquette violations:

Getting Started in Content Marketing 6

Too much self-promotion: Stick to the 80-20 rule. If you spend too much time talking
about yourself and self-promoting rather than engaging with other people, sharing their
content, and adding value to the online conversation, people will start to ignore you or
remove you from their radar screens entirely.

Intentionally or accidentally spamming: Don’t participate in activities that can be labeled

as spam. For example, don’t leave comments on blog posts that include nothing but links
back to your own site, and don’t publish blog posts that are nothing more than an ad or
marketing piece selling your products. Always try to add value and engage people, and
you should be safe.

Not attributing sources: Don’t publish content without giving a virtual hat tip to the
source that gave you the story idea. For example, if you publish a blog post about a hot
topic related to your business that you heard about from another blog or online source,
link back to that source within your content. Doing so helps to build relationships and
adds to your credibility.

Not sounding human: Content marketing should avoid corporate rhetoric and should
never read like a corporate brochure. Instead, content marketing should sound more
personable and closer in tone and style to social media marketing than formal commu-
nications. No one will want to connect with you and engage with you if you sound like
you’re reading from a corporate document.

Not acknowledging people: Part of content marketing includes engaging with the people
who read or view your content and respond to it. Don’t publish content and forget it. You
need to be available to respond to comments, answer questions, and so on, or your con-
tent marketing efforts will die before they have a chance to drive any indirect or direct
results to your business.

Sending automated messages: People are busy, and automated messages clutter
inboxes and annoy recipients. For example, don’t send an automated self-promotional
message to everyone who follows you on Twitter telling them to check out your website,
blog, Facebook Page, and so on. That’s an easy way to make people regret following you.

The more time you spend publishing content and engaging with other people, the more
you’ll discover about your target audience. Always listen to what they have to say so that
you can adjust your content marketing efforts to meet their wants and needs. They’re
your best source of information for current turn-offs and etiquette expectations. Pay
attention and apply what you find out! What is acceptable today may not be tomorrow.

Getting Started in Content Marketing 7

Adding value, staying relevant,
and being shareworthy
If you’re following the 80-20 rule, you know that 80 percent of your content
should add value to the online experience, particularly for your target audience.
This is how you build relationships and set expectations for your target audience
and among online influencers who can help to spread your messages even farther
across the global Web community. You need to take the time to research what type
of information, messages, and content your target audience wants from a business
like yours, and then deliver that content in a professional manner.

In addition, you need to offer content that your audience will share with oth-
ers. Traditional publishers use this strategy to create content that not only sells
newspapers or magazines but also offers a pass-along value that may convert sec-
ondary readers into subscribers. The same concept holds true for content market-
ing today. The difference is that today anyone, including you, can be a content
publisher and use that content to lead to bigger and better things, such as brand
awareness, business growth, and sales.

Never has there been such an exciting opportunity for small and mid-size busi-
nesses to stake their claims and position themselves for success — because now
it’s not necessarily the depth of your wallet that leads to success through content
marketing but rather the depth of your words. Content marketing enables busi-
nesses to continually meet customer expectations and to add something extra to
the consumer experience that helps develop trust, security, and loyalty.

Content marketing offers the perfect way for businesses to leverage the three S’s
of Customer Loyalty:

»» Stability: Customers become loyal to a product, brand, or business when it

sends a consistent message they can trust and rely on.

»» Sustainability: Customers become loyal to a product, brand, or business

when they believe it will be with them for a long time or at least for a specific
amount of time with a predetermined end.

»» Security: Customers become loyal to a product, brand, or business when it

gives them a feeling of comfort or peace of mind.

As you can see, consumers actively look for products, brands, and businesses that
they feel they can trust and that won’t abandon them. They become emotionally
involved in the products, brands, and businesses that help them feel a sense of
comfort. A well-executed content marketing strategy can offer the stability, sus-
tainability, and security that consumers seek, and it can help them develop an
emotional connection and relationship with a product, brand, or business.

Getting Started in Content Marketing 8

Establishing Goals and Choosing the
Best Forms of Content Marketing
As you develop your content marketing strategy, you need to do so with goals in
mind. Since content marketing is very much a long-term marketing strategy,
you must define where you want your business to be in the future. This strat-
egy includes determining how much time you can devote to content marketing,
the resources available to help you with your content marketing efforts, and the
results you want to attain from those efforts.

However, you do need to approach content marketing realistically, or you won’t

be satisfied with your results. Remember, content marketing success comes in the
form of long-term sustainable growth through brand building and relationship
development, which lead to loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing. You can sup-
plement your long-term strategy with short-term tactics such as discount pro-
motions, contests, and so on, but the power of content marketing comes from the
organic growth it creates.

With that in mind, you need to move forward with a highly focused content mar-
keting plan. You can’t be all things to all people. In fact, trying to spread your-
self too thin will reduce your own content quality and confuse consumers. If you
can’t meet their expectations through your content, they’ll leave you behind and
find someone who can. The most powerful brands are highly focused brands with
accessible content, so it makes sense that with all the clutter and competition for
a share of voice online that optimized, niche-focused content can help you stake
your claim in the online space. Your brand, online reputation, and business will
benefit immensely if you take the time to choose a specific area of focus and opti-
mize your content to ensure it can be found easily.

You also need to think about the types of content marketing you can realistically
pursue given the amount of time and technical savvy they require. You’ll want to
consider the types of content your audience will best respond to as well, to ensure
you make smart content choices that are an efficient and effective use of the time
and resources available.

The best part about content marketing is that the tools of the social Web that
enable you to publish content are fairly easy to use. If you can use word-processing
software and an Internet browser, then you can use social Web tools.

Take some time to create accounts on the most popular sites that enable you to
publish content such as WordPress.org for a blog, Facebook.com for social net-
working, and Twitter.com for microblogging. To choose which accounts are right
for your business, first identify which tools you have the bandwidth to manage

Getting Started in Content Marketing 9

DON’T FORGET THE KEYWORDS
Before you begin creating and publishing content, take some time to identify what key-
words and keyword phrases you need to focus on to optimize your content for your
target audience. Drill down and find the specific keyword phrases that will drive traffic
to your content — and that will help you avoid competing with larger organizations that
have bigger budgets to spend on search engine optimization.

Following are several free and paid tools that can help you determine which keyword
phrases to target in your content:

Google AdWords Keyword Planner: The free tool enables you to find out the popularity
of keywords and see how certain ones might perform.

Wordtracker: To use Wordtracker, you have to pay a fee, but a free trial is available. If
you’re serious about keyword research, then Wordtracker is a good tool with a fairly rea-
sonable price tag.

Keyword Discovery: Keyword Discovery is another tool for keyword research, but it also
has a fee associated with it. A free trial is available, so you can give it a test drive before
you pay anything. The results you’ll get from Keyword Discovery are extensive and best
for someone who really wants to drill down deep into keyword research.

BrightEdge: Although this is a pricey option, it provides a lot of great tools to help you
achieve your content goals in addition to keyword optimization. One additional benefit is
that it has enterprise options.

Search engine optimization is important, but don’t let it take center stage. Your content
is always the top priority. Make sure what you say is the cornerstone of your content
marketing efforts. For the best chance of getting people to engage with and share your
content, you need to be genuine and make sure the content you create is always mean-
ingful, relevant, and useful to your customers.

effectively, where your target audience is most engaged, and what sites will be
valuable for the long-term, and begin to define your marketing strategies using
those tools as your top branded online destinations. Before you announce that
you’re joining the social Web or start reaching out to other people online, play
around with the features and start publishing content to build up an archive of
amazing content.

Getting Started in Content Marketing 10

 Next, it’s time to develop goals. Your content marketing goals need to be realis-
tic and measurable. For example, you might create a goal to develop three viable
branded online destinations within the next three months, or you might create
a goal to attract 1,000 quality Twitter followers over the next six months. These
are both good goals, but make sure that you also identify what you will measure
to prove if these strategies are effective, for instance what determines a viable
destination or a quality follower. This could include traffic metrics that show the
viability of a site or interactions details that prove the quality of a follower.

Make sure your content marketing goals are always based on quality, not quantity
because if you publish quality content and focus on developing quality audiences,
quantity will come organically in time. In other words, your content marketing
strategy is successful when the compounding effect begins to truly work for you
and you see your numbers growing simply because your content and conversations
are meeting customer expectations.

Quality content and relationships help you increase your sphere of influence in the
online space, which is a valuable intangible business asset.

Knowing Your Competition

You’ll find it very difficult to achieve higher levels of business success if you don’t
know what your competitors are doing. In order to develop your content market-
ing strategy, you need to know your competition as well as you know yourself.
Researching your competition allows you to react appropriately to their content
marketing tactics and even to anticipate some of those potential tactics. In other
words, by knowing your competition, you can more effectively position your busi-
ness in the minds of consumers and meet their needs and expectations. More spe-
cifically, competitive research enables you to find and exploit your competitors’
weaknesses, position your brand as a brand of choice, establish your unique niche,
and differentiate your business from other businesses.

Don’t be tempted to assume that you already know everything about your competi-
tors from years of experience. The social Web is a completely different space, and
what worked offline through traditional marketing strategies and tactics is unlikely
to work as effectively online. Consumers are actively looking for information. Give
it to them, and know what your competition is doing so you can give consumers the
information they’re actively seeking better than your competition does.

Getting Started in Content Marketing 11

Finding your competition online and
monitoring their activities
The first step to researching your competitors is finding them across the social
Web. However, you need to analyze more than your competitors’ websites. For-
tunately, a variety of tools are available to help you find your competition online.
When you find your competitors, you need to analyze what they’re doing on their
branded online destinations as well as on sites they don’t own but simply maintain
a presence on.

Following are a number of methods and tools you can use to conduct your
competitive online research:

»» Google Alerts: Set up Google Alerts to send you alerts for your competitors’
names.

»» Social Media: Follow your competitor’s social media accounts, where you can
receive their tweets and updates.

»» LinkedIn: Follow your competitors’ profiles on LinkedIn and read their

updates. If you know the names of your competitors’ executives or employ-
ees, you can search for them on LinkedIn using the search tool. Note that you
can’t view a private profile unless you’re connected with that person.

»» On-site searches: Visit your competitors’ websites and blogs and look
for links to other online profiles or branded destinations such as YouTube
channels, Flickr profiles, and so on. Companies that are implementing a social
media marketing or content marketing plan should have links to their various
branded online destinations prominently displayed on their websites and
blogs.

As you find your competitors’ online destinations and conversations, analyze

them to discover what kind of content your competitors are publishing. Can you
find any gaps or any opportunities to “borrow” a share of voice or to offer content
that your target audience isn’t already getting from your competitors? Is there a
way to repackage the type of information they’re publishing to make it more use-
ful and interesting to consumers? What content are your competitors publishing
that sparks conversations or sharing? Your findings can help you determine what
kind of content to create and where to publish it.

Getting Started in Content Marketing 12

Finding gaps and opportunities
As you monitor ongoing conversations within your target audience, as well as your
competitors’ involvement in those conversations and related content, look for
opportunities to fill gaps and offer something different or offer similar informa-
tion in a better way. In other words, don’t market scared. Just because your com-
petitors are publishing a specific type of content in a specific way doesn’t mean
those strategies or tactics are right for you and your audience. However, knowing
what those strategies and tactics are can help you differentiate your business or
better position your brand as the brand of choice.

Just as each piece of content that you publish becomes part of the larger com-
pounding effect that can deliver long-term sustainable growth to your business,
so do your research and analysis efforts. Altogether, your activities will enable you
to drive organic buzz about your business that can be far more powerful than a
simple banner ad.

Try to think out-of-the-box and come up with new ways to offer content that
your audience wants and needs. For example, if you sell customized gift baskets
online, allow consumers to view those baskets through online video so that they
can see exactly what their money will buy and make changes on demand. This
visual approach provides a creative way to add a tangible element to an online buy-
ing process. A business that once could thrive only offline can now thrive online,
thanks to creative content marketing and communications via the user-generated
content of the social Web.

If you own a business that can help customers by offering step-by-step tutorials,
don’t just provide in-person training classes or instruction manuals. Instead, add
a content marketing aspect by offering webinars or screencast tutorials. You can
even turn tutorials into videos that can be shared across the social Web to broaden
the reach of your content and indirectly market your business.

By offering useful information to consumers, you build a relationship with them

based on appreciation and trust. In this way, you can deliver positive word-of-
mouth marketing as well as tangible results to your business for years to come.

To get more tips on how you can expand your marketing efforts, visit dummies.
com/custom-solutions and check out our Getting Started marketing series. This
series includes ebooks highlighting the basics behind several popular marketing
methods and a guide to help you bring these tactics together into an integrated
marketing campaign.

Getting Started in Content Marketing 13

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