Content Marketing Strategy, Part 3: The In-Depth Analysis—Listening

After you’ve compiled the thorough inventory of your organizations content marketing efforts during the audit stage, the next step is to really listen to the feedback on those efforts. I call this the Listening phase because we need to not only listen to what our data and analytics tools have told us — the part of this phase that usually gets the most attention—but we also need to listen to what the market is telling us, what our customers are telling us, and what our partners within our organization are telling us. This stage can get really complicated very quickly, so I’m going to give an overview of some key areas to investigate and questions to ask. If you work for a large organization, you’ll likely have resources and teammates who can help you answer these questions and provide perspective, but for smaller organizations, where you’ll need to do the investigating yourself, you’ll probably need to take a less in-depth approach and choose where to focus your efforts.

Let’s start with market insight, or market intelligence. Whether you work for an organization with a dedicated market intelligence department or you are doing your own research, there are key areas where you’ll want to understand the landscape so you know how your content compares (and competes). Questions you should be asking at this stage include:

What is the competition doing and how is that manifesting through their content?
What are the big trends in our industry? How are megatrends, like new technologies, impacting our industry?
What are the market opportunities for our organization (and which ones have we been pursuing or will we pursue in the future)?
What are our strengths as an organization?

We all know quantitative data is critical, but don’t ignore the qualitative data you can gather from your stakeholders and what they’ve seen first hand and in talking to customers.

Three lessons from NaNoWriMo

I tried NaNoWriMo this year. (For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, when you marathon write for the month of November in an attempt to get to a 50,000 word first draft.) I felt a little hokey doing it, but I was hoping to get back in the habit of writing regularly at home. I’ve been so busy writing at work the last few years that I’m usually pretty burnt out when I get home, but as my role has shifted to focus on planning and strategy instead of actual writing, I’m finding that I need a bit more an outlet for creative energy.

So, did I get a solid first draft of a novel? No! Not by a long shot. I didn’t even make it to 50,000 words. Most of what I wrote is utter crap that will be completely deleted or rewritten during the revision process. So why am I even telling you about this? A few reasons.

Butt in chair is how drafts get written.
I’ve been out of the habit of writing at home for a long time (example: When was this blog last updated?), and this was a great way to submerse myself in a creative project I’d been mulling over for a long time. It gave me a specific goal and deadline and it got me to sit in the chair morning and night after morning and night and actually write. And that felt good. It’s kind of like running again after years of not running. You’re uncomfortable at first and then muscle memory kicks in and you think “This feels great! Why haven’t I been doing this?!”Like I said, I didn’t meet the goal. I’m fine with that. My story is not a 50,000 word novel and that was pretty clear by the end of Chapter 4. I knew I might reach 50,000 words but I would not have a completed draft. I am happy with where I am, at the end of Part 1 because I have something to revisit and think over and grow.
Trying to write in a new way is a useful creative stretch.
NaNoWriMo forced me to write at a sprint and not self edit — this is very far from my normal approach, where I mull over each sentence, edit as I go, revisit the previous day’s writing before starting a new page, etc. It forced me to keep going, even I knew something was off or wasn’t going to work. But it also forced me to find out what was going to happen. I had a very thorough outline before I started and I was surprised at how things evolved as I wrote. Two characters that didn’t actually have a solid place in my outline suddenly emerged as a driving force of action. A character that I thought was a villain of sorts was a potential hero. And my protagonist started to have a distinct voice.Breaking creative habits can be really healthy and productive, and I’m glad I tried this approach. I found myself willing to try some experiments as I went, because I knew at the speed I was going, quality wasn’t so much the goal as quantity. Write a scene with just dialog? Check. Write a scene with no dialog? Check. Try different narrators. Try different tenses. Run as many experiments as you can as you go and see what’s working and what isn’t.
A sprint is a great way to find out if a project has potential.
One of the things that emerged as I approached the end of the month is that I’m not writing the genre I thought I was writing. There were certain conventions I expected to follow and that’s just not how the story is unwinding. So now, at the end of this first part, I need to figure out where to go. Do I want to explore making the story more genre-specific? If I don’t, how does the style need to evolve to make the story work for a different audience?While I want to stick with this story, at the same time, I’m grateful that I spent a specific, dedicated amount of time playing with it. I didn’t spend months and months on a story that might not work. I spent a very defined, relatively short period on it, and I have enough material that with a little thought, I should be able to tell if it’s worth continuing or if my time would be better spent on a different project.

Even if NaNoWriMo isn’t your thing, I’d encourage you to try a writing sprint. Set a goal for time and words, be it 1,000 words a night for a week or 50,000 words in a month, sit down and draft like crazy. Break from your normal habits and see if you can find a style, an idea, a habit, or a voice that’s going to help you with your writing in the future.

Content Marketing Strategy, Part 2: The In-Depth Content Analysis — Audit

For an organization that has some content marketing efforts underway — whether it’s a scattered approach or a fully planned program — a detailed analysis of where you are is a great place to start the strategy process (and measure success after you’ve been running for a while).

I divide my analysis into three stages: Audit, Listen and Evaluate. Today, let’s talk about the Audit.

An audit is basically just an accounting of what you’ve done or currently have out there in terms of content marketing. I like to take the near look and the long look back (or What have we done this year? and What have we done this quarter?). It can be as simple as a laundry list:

What topics did we have content for this year?
What formats did we publish in? (Don’t just think of “permanent” content like papers, blogs or videos — include webcasts and presentations too.)
Who were our target audiences?
How did we distribute the content?
Which “owners” and subject matter experts within our organization participated and produced content?
What were our key messages?
What were our desired outcomes?
Where are the materials now? (Both the external facing homes and the location of any design or production files)
What were the key publication dates or events?
How much did we spend on production and distribution?

One thing to notice here, is that there isn’t a lot of measurement —yet! Right now we’re looking at the full scope of what’s out there and how things were developed and distributed. It’s important to be thorough, and try to look at all efforts with unbiased eyes. You might already know that such and such piece of content was a huge success and another was a failure, but if you don’t know the full range of what you’ve done, you can’t really do a great comparison to find out why, or look at how you can make changes to get better results.

Next, we’ll take a look at the feedback and measurement to get a better grasp on strengths and weaknesses of the content and the content marketing efforts as a whole.

Content Marketing Strategy, Part 1: Conducting a Preliminary Content Marketing Audit

The first step for any content marketing program is getting a clear idea of what your organization is already doing and how successful these efforts are. This is known as the content marketing audit. Next week, I’ll come back with a post about what goes into a content marketing audit for an established or robust program, but today I want to talk about doing a preliminary audit when you’re looking across your organization and you aren’t sure who has been doing content marketing, which audiences they are targeting, how or even if they are measuring results, etc.

I tried to hike at this lake, Echo Lake in Colorado, with a friend on Memorial Day weekend. But it was still too snowy so we had to move down to a lower elevation for the hike. Consider this the lower elevation version of the content audit, for when it’s too early for a deep audit.

This is what I ask when I’m starting from scratch and don’t know what efforts have been going on throughout the organization.

First, I try to make it clear what I want us to be talking about when I talk about content marketing. You can find my outline of what it means and what it does here and a basic list of definitions I use here. Shared understanding about what we’re talking about when we discuss content marketing is a key first step. (For example, I went into a meeting a few weeks ago where a colleague said “Well, we’ve been doing a lot of content marketing. I mean, it’s all content for marketing.” She then went on to discuss a direct mail campaign that highlighted product features and website copy, neither of which is content marketing as I, and our program, define it.)

After you’ve established that you are all talking about the same thing, the next step is to get a basic idea of who has been producing content marketing materials and what they’ve been doing. I recommend a multiple choice format:

What types of content marketing materials did your team produce in FY2014?

We did not do any content marketing in FY14
White papers (produced and distributed by COMPANY)
White papers (partnered)
Articles through owned channels
Articles through external channels
Blogs through owned channels
Blogs through external channels
Research reports
Videos
Ebooks
Infographics
Webinar or webcast
Live event

I created my list based on what I know we do and what’s considered content marketing at my company — your list will vary based on what your organization prefers. I also ask which formats they feel were most successful.

Next, I ask them who their key targets were and include a list of our customer types (again, something that will vary by organization).

I go on to look at what their primary topics were by quarter, if the topics were tied to other marketing efforts (such as an ad campaign or sales initiative), and which topics got the most attention both internally and externally.

It’s only after all of this that we get to the question of measurement. I ask if they’ve been formally measuring and, if so, which methods they’ve been using. This is another good opportunity for a multiple choice question. It’s also good to know if there are additional measures they’d like to use next year.

Lastly, I ask the open ended question: Is there anything else you’d like us to know about your Content Marketing efforts for the year?

Now, I use a questionnaire for a first pass at this because I need to gather information from multiple regions globally and different marketing roles and departments within those regions (Communications, Marketing, PR, etc.). There’s well over 20 people who might be doing content marketing. After I do the survey I either have a global call to talk about results or conduct a bunch of smaller meetings with individual groups, depending on what the situation warrants. If you have a smaller organization, an actual conversation is probably a better/easier way to go. I find that having the follow up conversation is vital because you get to move into the listening phase of the audit, which is where the intel that helps you garner internal support and understand past successes and failures surfaces. I’ll talk about that phase in more detail soon!

Intro to Content Marketing

I’ve been working on revising the content marketing strategy for my company, and as part of that, I’ve been on a quest to educate some of my colleagues about what content marketing is and how it benefits our company. Since programs vary from organization to organization, I thought it might be useful to share our approach here.

What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the creation and distribution of materials that provide value to the customer, with the purpose of building brand credibility, showcasing leadership or expertise and influencing customer behavior. It is a “soft sell” approach, focused on thought leadership rather than product pitches. At its best, content marketing is an integrated part of an overall marketing plan, strengthening customer relationships and sales efforts while promoting industry leadership and insight by delivering the information the audience wants. Content marketing materials can include articles, blogs, videos, papers, social media content and more.

The benefits of content marketing
The sales cycle is evolving, and customers are more likely than ever to do preliminary research before reaching out directly to a company or sales representative. With a thorough understanding of customer desires and questions, our company can use content marketing to build trust and credibility with potential and current customers by providing meaningful, insightful and informative content that enhances our reputation as an industry leader and innovator.

A well-executed content marketing program is not just a reputation- or awareness-building effort. It can create a foundation of understanding that helps both customers and employees discuss our company and our products, technologies and services and make more intelligent and informed decisions. When properly integrated with strategy and communication efforts, content marketing can help provide a framework for discussing the ideas and offers that underlie our tactics and messaging.

For my fellow content marketers out there, I’d love to hear your thoughts on our approach. Is your definition different? Is there a benefit that I missed?

What are we talking about when we talk about content?

Even though I still consider myself primarily a writer and editor, over the last few years my role in various projects has also been described as “content strategist,” “content manager,” or “content marketing manager.” What always surprises me is how differently people interpret those titles—even when they’ve bestowed them upon me.

I’ve been working across the organization at my current job to learn more about how we’re using content and forming content strategies in our different divisions and among different teams. What was really surprising to me was that there was no consistent vocabulary to discuss our various projects. People, even people in marketing or communications roles, often mean different things when they say “content” or “content strategy.”

So I scoured the internet and came up with this list of definitions to help us all speak the same language when we talk about content. (I tweaked all the wording of the definitions a little to suit my own needs, so consider then paraphrases. I cite my primary sources for the definitions in italics after each one. This was one exercise where I thought it was valuable to have the backing of industry expertise, rather than just my opinion about what words mean.)

Content strategy
The plan for the creation, delivery and governance of useful, usable content.
Kristina Halvorsen
Content management
The processes and tools/technologies used to collect, create, manage and deliver content.
Halvorsen, Wikipedia, Slice of Pie
Content marketing
A marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
Content Marketing Institute
Thought leadership
The ideas, research and content that showcase and validate an individual or organization’s expertise, foresight and unique perspective.
Thought Leadership Strategy
Sales enablement
The messages, information and tools that help customer-facing personnel advance the sales process.
American Marketing Association
Product literature
Content that assists with the selection, purchase and use of specific products.
AMA, Marketing Wiki
Media
The format of production (PDF, video, blog, etc.)
Northwestern University Content Strategy MOOC
Platform
The destination/method of delivery (paper, browser, mobile, etc.)
Northwestern University Content Strategy MOOC
Content
Specific, purposeful pieces (a paper, a microsite, a video, etc.)
Northwestern University Content Strategy MOOC
Copy
The actual words/text on the page or website
Northwestern University Content Strategy MOOC

Have you encountered words or terms that are being used differently in your organization? How do you get people speaking the same language? Do any of these definitions seem debatable to you?

Balancing Passion and Practice

A few nights ago I went to a jazz club. I love watching musicians play, especially jazz—there’s something about the way they move. Not just their fingers, but entire bodies seem to create the rhythm or melody of the music.

I’m inept as a musician. Mostly because I never really practiced. I also lacked the drive to practice. When I was very young, my cousin and I both started playing instruments around the same age (me=violin, him=flute). I’ll admit I did the bare minimum to be competent. I learned how to play decently, but not well. My cousin, however, had a real drive to practice and improve. Every time I saw him, he had that flute with him. He was passionate about it, and it drove him to play and practice. I never felt that way about music. Writing, on the other hand…

I think that with any artistic type of endeavor, there needs to be a balance between the passion that drives you to practice and improve and the precision you achieve. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell theorizes that it takes 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to be great at anything. And I’ve heard (I’m sorry, I can’t remember where) that the true successes, those masters that really excel at what they do, love the practice as much as they love the performance. The trying and striving is as important to them as the final achievement.

When we focus too hard on the end result, on perfection, I think the soul goes out of what we’re doing. A musician might hit all the notes, but if there’s no feeling behind the playing, the audience feels the emptiness. Likewise, a writer just churning out technically perfect prose often lacks the emotion that draws readers in. I know when I was halfway through my MFA program, on the 10 or 12th round of edits for the same chapter, I felt like the chapter had died and I was just trying to figure out what to do with the remains. In workshop, I’d get few comments, but there just wasn’t much to say about it. The writing was fine, but the feeling had been chased out.

Everybody gets there sometimes, that point where practice makes something so automatic, so natural you don’t need to think or feel it—you just do it. But, there’s a fine line. You can’t just play the notes. The practice makes it so that your fingers will automatically hit the right keys, but the passion is what makes it a living creation. Same with writing. There are technical aspects that must become automatic—not just the mechanics like grammar and spelling, but the style and rhythm of your writing. Only when you have these basics firmly in your grasp are you able to consistently move beyond them. To improvise.

So write and revise, write and revise, write and revise.

The Danger of Giving Your Characters Everything They Want

Can we talk about the end of How I Met Your Mother? If you haven’t watched it, I’m going to spoil it, so don’t say I didn’t warn you (and maybe go watch it and come back in 100 hours or so?). I’m also going to spoil the end of Twilight.

Ready?

Ok.

There’s nothing wrong with a happy ending where the character gets everything they wanted and lives happily ever after. But there’s a really big problem when you sacrifice the story you were telling to give them this ending. If the story was about them struggling with choices and those choices end up not making any difference at all? Well, unless that’s the point of the story, your audience is going to feel cheated in the end. Because you copped out and put giving your characters what they wanted before the integrity of your story.

Now, let’s talk about HIMYM. One thing I always loved about the show was that it had a running theme that tried to present us with a Truth About Life. The type that requires capital letters. The type that’s usually present in books that we consider literature, vs those we don’t. For HIMYM, that Truth was that your decisions are leading you somewhere, but you don’t know where that is until you get there. You’ll only get there when the time is right, and then you’ll look back and see that you were headed there all along. I loved that. I enjoyed watching Ted’s cumulative love story as each relationship or bad decision led him on the next step in his journey. And I loved that the format, with him looking back and telling the story from 2030, allowed him to have that perspective on his story.

(Did I ever mention that I wrote my graduate thesis on narrative distance, or the difference between when the story took place and when the narrator told the story? Obviously a television show centered around a narrative distance device was going to be up my alley.)

There’s a poem by Dorianne Laux, “Music in the Morning,” that ends with the lines

…But I know it’s only luck
that delivered him here. Luck and a love
that had nothing to do with me. Except
that this is what we sometimes get
if we live long enough. If we are patient
with our lives.

Life has all these forks in the road, and you might head this way or that, but hopefully we all get those points where we realize “Oh, good. I’m here. Thank God I made the choices that brought me here.”

The twist on this idea at the end of How I Met Your Mother went another rotation further: You might think you are heading toward point A or point B, only to have that “I’m here” moment at point Z. And you might even convince yourself that point Z is the entire point of the story. But then, you might end up back at point A after all. Life is exciting that way.

The fact that Ted went all the way to point Z, the mother, Tracy, and then was surprised to find himself back at his point A, Robin, fits very well into that big Truth that HIMYM was telling us the whole time. I can get behind it. Ted danced his way around Robin on his way to Tracy, and they both loomed large in his life. There’s nothing wrong with having more than one great love in a story. The point I think the writers were trying to make was that you can want something desperately and it still might not happen. And you can find something else that you fully embrace and love that fate for all it has to offer. And life can still surprise you even after that, and you’ll look back and realize “Hey, I actually was heading here all along.” That’s actually a beautiful ending.

My problem isn’t with where HIMYM ended, it’s with how it was executed. Because the writers were the ones who created the dilemma that forced Ted to give up on Robin and move down that path toward Tracy. They wanted different things, and ultimately neither could give the other what they wanted without giving up what they wanted. The show spent years on this impasse. The characters have to live with the consequences of those decisions. But then, in literally the last five minutes, the writers remove all the barriers and everyone gets everything they want. Yay?

Doing this so quickly actually has the effect of turning Tracy, who had just finally been realized as a character and given a name in that episode, into vehicle to give the writers the ending they wanted—one where Ted gets the family he wants, Robin gets the career she wants, and they get each other too. Tracy is reduced to a surrogate, an easily removed barrier—which weakens her as a part of the series*. Instead of it feeling like part of the Truth, it just feels like writers decided it should end that way, so it did, regardless of the rest of the story we’ve been watching.

Now, let’s talk about the Twilight series, because I think Breaking Dawn, while not a bastion of great literature, is a fantastic example of an author undoing the story she was telling.

The Twilight series is centered on the premise that in order to be with the “man” she loves, Bella has to give up her humanity—her parents, her friends, her ability to have children, her self-control, her mortality, her ability to grow and change. It’s presented as such a huge thing to give up that no one actually wants this for her, including Edward, the vampire she’s in love with. But she decides that being with him is worth it and makes that sacrifice.

Then, way too conveniently, all those things she was giving up? She doesn’t have to give them up after all! Her dad can still come around, her best friend stays her best friend (and miraculously has his broken heart healed by magical instalove). Instead of being overcome by bloodlust, she has unheard of levels of self-control. And, best of all, vampires can have babies now! No one grows old or suffers or dies or has to live with the consequences of their actions. All those heart-wrenching decisions that consumed hundreds of pages in the first three books? Completely pointless in the end.

In both How I Met Your Mother and Twilight, the “happy” ending is disappointing because it feels undeserved. It feels like the writer is in control, not the story. Instead of living with the decisions and sacrifices made, the characters live in a universe where the consequences and barriers have been removed. It doesn’t feel like fate, it feels like the writer interfered in the story being told. Like they meddled. It doesn’t feel like the Truth.

Many writers have heard that phrase “Kill your darlings.” And it usually means to kill the phrases and words that feel oh-so-clever to you, because they probably aren’t, and sometimes they just don’t work. But it applies to your characters too—don’t sacrifice your story to make your characters happy.

When I was in grad school, one of my professors, Pete Fromm, told us a story about finishing the novel he’d been working on. He finished writing and went into the kitchen and sadly told one of his kids that he’d just killed off one of his main characters and it was a bit of a surprise, even to him. And his kid was upset (much like us students, he’d probably heard bits of this novel read over the years as his dad wrote it), and said “Well, go back and fix it.” And Pete told him “I can’t. She dies. That’s the story.”

Even stories that are filled with sadness and sacrifice can have happy endings. Things that seemed impossible can end up being possible. But, as writers, I think we have a responsibility to make sure we’re staying true to the story. We can’t rush past or remove barriers to get our characters there more quickly. We have to stick to that Truth we were aiming at all along. Even if it turns out to be a surprise.

*Also, this casts an odd and uncomfortable light on some of the running Marshall/Lily jokes, such as Marshall’s inability to fantasize about other women unless Lily dies in his fantasy first, or the “last letter” joke with a fake out on Lily’s death.

Well, hello there.

Halfway up this flight of stairs, I encountered a pair of fellow travelers, taking a break to rest. We’d already climbed so far, and they didn’t know if they’d make it. But we did. And the view was breathtaking. All of Paris spread out before us.

I’ll admit, I’m not the most reliable when it comes to personal blogs. I have two and sometimes they get put on the back burner. Since 2011:

I changed jobs within my company, then moved on to new job with a new company. Both were good moves and expanded my professional opportunities and experience.
I moved to a new apartment, which needed some major work and spent about 7 months painting, repainting and fixing broken fixtures.
I took on a leadership role with a very active foodie social group here in Milwaukee.
I ran two half marathons and my first full marathon.
I ended a relationship, started a relationship, ended a relationship.
I worked hard on a proposal for a second book on jewelry making, only to discover that I didn’t actually want to write a second beading book. At least, not the same way I wrote the first one (following the traditional proposal – draft- edit- publish model). I’m planning to take a more segmented approach that I think works better with today’s publishing opportunities, and requires a bit less of a “drop everything and do nothing but work on a book for 6 months” approach.
I read well over 100 books.
I learned to garden.
I started biking.
I resumed working on my grad school novel (still in progress! There is so much research to be done when you write about a different era).
I started traveling again, something I didn’t have the time or means to do during the grad school years or when I was a contract employee with an uncertain future. I did a solo trip to Paris this past fall, and it was life changing.

It’s been a rich and full two years with a lot of creative fulfillment. But I want to resume and pursue the conversation I started here a few years ago. It’s true, I could just delete the old entries and start from scratch (I doubt my entire 15 former readers would notice). But it’s nice to have this record of how I thought about writing and reading and storytelling back in 2011. And the nice thing about being the author of your own story is that you get to decide where to start. So let’s begin again, in February of 2014.

Quick Grammar Lesson Two: Less vs. Fewer

Strictly speaking, this isn’t a grammar lesson; it’s a vocabulary lesson. But I’m including it anyway because it was requested.

Less and fewer are commonly confused, and there are plenty of instances where the error has been institutionalized to the point that it’s believed to be correct (For example: “15 items or less” at the grocery store). Keeping these two adjectives straight is really pretty easy, if you just remember two simple rules:

1. Less is for mass or abstract objects (time, money, food), while fewer refers to specific, countable objects (hours, dollars, apples).

2. Less is used with singular words or plurals that don’t end with “s,” while fewer is used with plurals that end with “s.”

What does this mean? Here are some examples:

I plan to watch less TV by saving fewer shows to my DVR.

There are fewer products being manufactured in the Rust Belt, so there is less employment available.

I want to eat less, so I need to bake fewer cakes.

Got it? The “s” is really the easiest way to remember: Words that end in “s” are described with “fewer.” Of course, like any grammatical (or vocabulary) rule, there are always exceptions. And there are also cases where common usage trumps “correct” usage—”10 items or less” might be incorrect, but don’t be surprised if you’re told to get a life when you inform your local grocery store.

Lesley M. Weiss

Writer, editor, book lover