We’re inordinately proud to announce the launch of a new microsite by Salesforce UK that Velocity helped with. The site is called Social Success and it’s all about helping businesses harness the power of social media. Our job was to find the considerable pockets of expertise within Salesforce (the place is crawling with very, very smart people) then help package up their ideas and best-practice advice into content assets for the site.

The core piece of content on the site is a chunky eBook called The Social-Powered Enterprise: how social media is transforming your three most important disciplines. The three disciplines are sales, marketing and customer service and the book presents plenty of action points and cases in each area. There’s a form to fill in to get the eBook — but it’s worth it!

If you’re putting social to work in your business, the rest of the Social Success site is full of best-practice content and expert advice for you, including:

Social Media Expert Interviews
With people like Jacob Morgan on Social Collaboration and Brad Cleveland on Social Customer Service.  These guys really know their stuff and the interviews capture their thinking really succinctly.

Social Media Resource Roundups
These are short curated pieces that summarise some of the best resources out there across the web on subjects such as Mobile Social Media and Social Business Metrics and Social Selling (among others).

Dreamforce Takeaways
Dreamforce is the hottest tech event in the world, attracting amazing speakers. Dreamforce Takeaways are our attempt to summarise the most social-media-relevant sessions in a quick, easy-to-digest way. And you can listen to the original sessions and see the slides here too.  Our favourite is the Social Roadmap session with Gary Vaynerchuk, Charlene Li of Altimeter Group and Adam Brown of Dell.  But there are five more excellent ones to browse through.

Social Media Mini-Guides
These are more extensive articles on specific social disciplines including Social Selling and Social Customer Service.

Social Media Articles
Including this crowdsourced piece on Social Media Business Etiquette that had dozens of top-notch contributors or this one on Social Innovation.

A killer Social Media Infographic
On the Six Principles of Social Media Success from the eBook. It’s the social ethos captured in one rather tall graphic.

The site is a major initiative by Salesforce UK and it’s all about helping growing businesses (and businesses that are already massive) to get social media into their DNA – as Salesforce itself has done.  It’s not about selling software, it’s about evangelising something the company really believes in (working with them, we’ve seen how they walk the talk).

The project was the brainchild of Kieran Flanagan, the Search Manager for Salesforce EMEA and it’s an impressively ambitious play — the content will be rolled out to France and Germany this year. We’re not kissing arse when we say this (maybe a little) but Kieran has been hugely impressive through the entire process. He mined the considerable expertise and experience inside Salesforce to make sure we were capturing best practice strategy and real-world tactics. And did it with intelligence, focus and charm.

We loved working on the project and learned a hell of a lot on the way.

There’s a lot more to come on the Social Success site. Drop in, find the content most relevant to you – and do share it with your Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends and Google+ circles. They’ll thank you for it…

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, Social Media, Thought Leadership

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But content marketing is different. The best content marketing tends to be narrowly targeted, focusing on a very specific audience. That’s how we maximise relevance, earn downloads and reward engagement.

Of course, there’s no need to be too narrow. and if a single piece of content can cover more than one target audience, why not go for it? It saves time and money and raises your Return on Content. Unfortunately, it’s not always a good idea to try to kill two birds with one content stone. In fact it’s rarely a good idea. Here’s why:

Different people ALWAYS have different perspectives, agendas and issues

• A board member has a different view of the world than a junior manager (where seniority is the dimension of differentiation)
• A test engineer has a different set of challenges than a sales director (the target’s discipline is the dimension)
• A hospital administrator cares about different things than a high school administrator (market sector)
• An existing customer has a different view of you than a cold prospect (degree of familiarity with your company)
• A Chinese manufacturer has different concerns than a French one (region)

Pick almost any meaningful dimension and you’ll find your prospect base starts to divide itself up along that spectrum.

The key questions are:

– How important are these differences in the context of the story you want to tell?

-- What are the penalties for addressing more than one target audience in the same piece?

Let’s go to the whiteboard please, Janice.

Here are two targets – Persona A and Persona B.
They have some things in common but lots that are not shared:

You’ve got a few options for targeting A and B with content:

• Aim for the common ground– keeping your story in the lavender zone; this is good if that zone is still compelling enough to both A and B. The downside: you’re often forced to leave out really good parts of your A story or your B story.

Tip: Signal the scope of the piece in the title and the introduction, then tell people up front who it’s for and why: “This piece is for A and B — we know you’ve got a lot of differences but here’s what you have in common and why this piece is great for you.”

• Try to tell the whole A + B story– signalling to the reader that ‘this bit applies to A’ and ‘this bit applies to B’. The downside: B people get bored during the A bits and vice gets bored during the versa.

Tip: Sidebars that clearly signal “Hey Mr A! Read this bit!” can help you balance your agenda without boring the pants of of one target or the other.

• Do a piece of content for A and another for B– This lets you tell your best story to each audience. The downside: it costs more and takes more time.

Tip: Use broader, more generic content to buy time while you develop your targeted, persona-specific stuff.

Of course, it’s great if your target audiences have a lot more in common, so the middle ground contains most of your goodies:

But sometimes, you cant fake it. Your two targets have so little in common that almost every paragraph contains a fork in the road and every sentence needs a conditional:

B2B Content Relevance & Alienation
There are two tests to help determine if the piece you’re developing really ought to be two pieces:

The Relevance Test – lumping two audiences together means each will have to wade through things that are not relevant – that’s a negative experience and can lose readers.

How much of your content is actually irrelevant to A or B? Can you make it relevant by explicitly building bridges? If a third of your content has no relevance or resonance for one target or the other, it’s probably time to split the piece.

The Alienation Test – Even if there’s lots of common ground, a single message that’s gold dust for A can be a major turn-off for B. One example: when marketing some kind of media (trade show, magazine…) one audience (the exhibitor or advertiser) is selling to the other (the visitor or reader). In this case, talking all about how the former will enjoy a ‘captive audience for your sales team’ will be perfume to A and skunk juice to B.

Is there any important message to one audience that will actually alienate the other? These need to be managed carefully — and lumping both targets together is rarely the answer.

Of course, sometimes — like on the home page – you have to address the issue and find the most compelling common ground. But if there are significant relevance or alienation issues, you want to stream people off of that common ground home page as quickly as possible so you can look them in the eyes and sell to them without fear.

Why this matters
As a reader, you know when you’re reading a great piece of content: it seems to almost have your name on it. It’s aimed at a spot right in the middle of your forehead. It uses the language you use to describe the challenges you face in terms you recognise.

You also know when a piece is not quite aimed at you. It uses unfamiliar language; is pitched at the wrong level (too techie, not techie enough); talks about problems you haven’t experienced and skips over ones you have.

The penalties of badly targeted B2B content marketing
Making a piece to target two different audiences forces some bad things to happen:

– You’re forced to use generic language – instead of language that’s specific to one of the audiences.

To a hospital administrator, “increase asset utilisation” is a bore, but “double your operating room throughput” resonates. But you can’t say that if you’re also targeting high school administrators with the same piece.

– You talk about abstract ideas – instead of concrete realities.

To a marketing director, ‘improve process efficiencies’ is ho-hum jargon while ‘get more campaigns to market faster’ is lean-forward stuff.

– You’re forced to ‘couch’ your killer messages – instead of letting them fly.

‘For people like A, this widget halves costs and for people like B it’s doubles revenue.’
‘Finance guys love it because it saves money; engineers love it because it improves performance.’

Yuk.

The Bottom Line
(because all lines have bottoms have and all bottoms, alas, have their lines):

Non-specific, abstract, couchy talk sucks. While specific, concrete and direct talk moves mountains and blows away molehills.

‘All things to all people’ results in boring work. While relevant points told in familiar language feels ‘just for me’.

Great content hits people between the eyes. And mediocre content falls at their feet with a pffffttt.

The time to discover which of the two piles your next piece of content marketing  falls into is at the outline stage – where the problem will leap off the page and kiss you full on the lips (but in a bad way).  That’s reason enough to always do an outline stage.

The Reco: do occasional broad-brush content marketing but, as a rule, do more pieces and make each one highly targeted, with a persona so clear you can talk to it.

How about your own experiences? Any pieces you wish you had split into two or three? Any that spanned different audiences but worked just fine?
We’d love to hear about it.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, Copywriting, persuasion, Thought Leadership

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Content marketing has hit the tipping point for B2B marketers. At Velocity, we used to have to evangelise the concept of content marketing , then spend lots of time telling clients and prospects why it’s such a powerful thing. Today, those conversations are a lot shorter. B2B marketers have discovered content marketing as the engine room of their marketing strategy and there’s no going back.

But as more and more B2B marketing departments ramp up their content marketing efforts, a new bottleneck is developing: the content development bottleneck.

Content development is the process that drives the conception, development and production for your content marketing machine. And since it’s a fairly new discipline in many B2B marketing departments, there aren’t a lot of best-practice processes in place for it.

A good content development process turns a bunch of random activities into some kind of a system, covering everything from idea generation to copywriting, design, production and the all-important approvals process.

The goal is simple: quality at scale — being able to produce the right amount of excellent content with the team you’ve got. (Notice I said ‘the right amount’ not ‘the most content you can generate’. Sometimes fewer, better pieces is the way to go.)

Here are nine content development tips to help:

1) Start with a Content Marketing Strategy

Not having one is the number one cause of content development inefficiency, because everything is ad hoc. A good content marketing strategy starts with your goals; then summarises a quick audit of existing content; captures the core messages you need your team to deliver; outlines your target audience personas; creates a topic list. It also outlines the team roles and responsibilities and captures any core content principles you want everyone to follow. This is your content marketing playbook.

2) Create an Editorial Calendar

This is essential for maximising your content development resources and keeping everything on track. Some editorial calendars identify a different theme every month or quarter; others map the content to the different stages of the buying cycle; others cover one product line at a time. Whatever editorial strategy you choose, get it down in a calendar so you can see what’s due when and who’s doing it.

3) Use timelines for every piece of content

Sounds too obvious to mention but every piece must have its own production schedule detailing the major milestones and their corresponding dates. When you’re overwhelmed, it’s easy to skip this and mark everything ASAP. But it’s amazing how often people will hit deadlines if there really are deadlines to hit.

4) Avoid ‘stop & start’ content development

A lot of content marketing teams we’ve seen tend to focus on the big pieces and let everything else stall. Tips 2 and 3 should help avoid that, keeping early stage projects progressing even as the big pieces get the attention they need. Otherwise you get peaks and troughs in your content marketing efforts instead of a nice, steady flow.

5) Make the most of each piece of content

A big part of the art of content marketing is the art of ‘atomising’ your content to get the most out of your budget – without seeming to be repeating yourself everywhere. So a big, fat eBook gets re-purposed into a slideshare, series of blog posts, guest posts, articles, worksheets, videos, etc.

Each gets a re-spin but they’re all based on the core ideas, so exploit the original research and development.

6) Make your blog the foundation of your content marketing

A content marketing strategy without a blog is like a speedboat without an outboard motor. When there’s no time for a major piece of content, there’s still time for a blog post. Use the blog to promote content, test new ideas, atomise existing content, build relationships with influencers and encourage engagement.

7) Use content curation

You don’t have to produce 100% of the content you offer to your target audiences. A lot of great content is essentially curated content – stuff that you’ve found out there in the world or on the web, added a bit of value and linked to. The key here is to add that value. If you’re writing about ‘Ten Marketing Strategy Posts We Love’ summarise why you love each post and give a glimpse into the content. Done well, content curation stretches your budget without diluting your content brand.

8 ) Use outside resources effectively

It’s a rare content marketing team that can produce everything in-house. But if you throw everything out to agencies and writers, you may lose the authenticity that makes for great content. The trick is to find great resources (writing being the absolutely critical one) and use them intelligently, playing to their strengths and yours.

9) Let the data be your guide

Analytics is an essential part of any content marketing strategy. Measure the things that matter most and test the things you need to learn about. The data will tell you where to put your content development resources. Without it, you’re in ‘spray & pray’ mode.

Follow these nine principles and your’e on your way to that lean, mean content marketing machine that’s the envy of your B2B marketing peers.

A few content development resources:

Our Content Marketing Workbook – a primer on the art & science of content marketing

The Content Marketing Tutorial – a short, sharp Prezi that outlines the process of developing a great piece of content (view it in full screen mode).

The Content Marketing Institute

The Content Marketing Institute – tireless evangelists and best-practice advisors

Managing Content Marketing

Managing Content Marketing – the book by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose

The Econsultancy Content Marketing Best Practice Guide – free if you’re a member of Econsultancy (you are, aren’t you?)

Creating Content That Sells

Creating Content That Sells – a guide to content marketing for demand generation

The Velocity Content Marketing Blog

The Velocity Content Marketing Blog – all about it for B2B marketers

Got any other tips for content development?

We’d love to share your thoughts with fellow B2B marketers, so do comment away…

[BTW – This post was written using Inbound Writer, the content development tool. It scores a 70 on their Document Score. I reviewed Inbound Writer here but was maybe a bit sarcastic so this is my attempt at using it for real. I'll add my thoughts to the review post itself.]

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Photo: Creative Commons by zigazou 76

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, Content Development, marketing strategy, Thought Leadership

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If you haven’t yet, check out the first Hackgate post to see why this content marketing skill matters, and who uses it.

The Hackgate Technique takes a page from the best content marketers of all: leading digital publishing houses. These outfits elegantly bundle their own, and others’, topic-based content in an easy-to-navigate (and easy-to-index) way. The result pleases readers interested in the topic, and search engines.

This is all well and fine, you say, but how do I do it?
Initially, and at the core of any content marketing effort, there is the need for some content. The beautiful side of this technique: You can do Hackgate for beginners with little more than an eBook or deck, three blog posts and a handful of interesting links about a topic near and dear to your business.

I’ve used Mockingbird – a very slick little wireframing tool – to draw this simple and straightforward Hackgate-style content marketing page:

To anyone with even a passing familiarity with digital publishing or blogs (and particularly blogs built on WordPress) this basic layout is no stranger. You have a few core elements, easily and elegantly presented:

A. The topic at hand in big letters at the top (obvious? Maybe. But important.)

B. A marquee piece of your content, such as an eBook or deck, on the topic. In time, you may have more than one. Here you’ll put the most recent. And you can link to a separate page with all of your reference items on the topic.

C. A clear categorization of blog posts on the topic. Visitors will immediately see one attractive blog post on the topic. Then click-through to a list of them. Or perhaps we give a few sentences on the most recent post here, then just a few titles of older posts on the same topic.

D. A final bucket for excellent third-party content on the topic. You may not want to share the eBooks or posts of your direct competitor, but – it’s a big world – surely someone else has said something remarkable on the topic too?

At this point, it’s important to make a distinction about content marketing. It’s about creating a destination about a topic. If you focus this page well and update it, people may click away, but they will come back. And it’s that return traffic that builds trust, builds brand and builds business.

Even the most elementary web designer can create this simple page. The three content buckets are effectively just RSS feeds (streams of content), and new items are added to these streams based on tagging or categorization.

Obviously, the more care you pour into updating and qualifying your content, the better the results will be long-term. But, as a content marketing initiative, you should start to see search engine traffic pick up considerably in a matter of months.

Want to see one site that’s gone whole hog for this kind of digital publishing approach: Check out MobiThinking’s global mobile statistics page [DISCLAIMER: We developed this site]. What’s lost in ease of navigation is gained in depth.

An advanced Hackgate technique for content marketers
For the more advanced content marketers, an interactive tool is another excellent route. This can take a number of forms, but essentially you ask the site visitor to enter something about themselves and you provide custom feedback. People love that sh*t.

Here’s a très simple wireframe demonstrating how that can work:

You ask a few questions, and then you can tell them something about the respondent. You can put the visitor in to a relevant taxonomy, give customized advice, whatever. The sky’s the limit. And you team it up with your topic-based content.

Web 2.0’s full of these kinds of sites. Consider either SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer or Pingdom’s site optimization tool. Enter your URL and we’ll assess you. The same kind of thinking can be applied to content marketing, but based on taxonomies as opposed to real-time monitoring.

The last piece of Hackgate-inspired digital publishing advice we’ll give you simply relates to proportions: What’s the right amount of stuff for such a page?

There are around five essential buckets for this kind of digital publishing, which include the interactive element (mentioned above), marquee items (eBooks, decks, etc.), blog posts, curated content (3^rd-party) and social content (twitter or facebook feeds).

Four is probably a maximum to put on one page, before it starts looking cluttered. At least one should always be some content with some gravitas (a lasting demonstration of topic expertise), and at least one should be easily updatable like blogs or social feeds (to keep the page fresh).

In terms of screen space, the field is open:

Use the Hackgate Technique to slice and dice your content marketing pie however you like it. Just, please, be sure to monitor site visits so you know what’s happening (and call us if you’re wanting more content marketing ideas).

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, Content Marketing, curated content, digital publishing, online reputation management, Thought Leadership

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So what is the omen that sparks the orchestra into life? It’s a request for a specific type of content before the idea has even been discussed.

It happens every time somebody asks for “an infographic”, before they have any information; “thought leadership”, before they’ve done any thinking; or “a viral”, before they’ve done anything infectious.

The Ave Santini Moment
It’s all a bit predictable: content vehicles emerge, explode but ultimately decline when marketers start planning trendy outputs before they’ve plotted any meaningful inputs.

When Marshall McLuhan famously said that the media is the message he may have had a point; but not anymore: people want great, creative ideas presented and delivered in the best way (whatever that maybe).

The end result looks like a classic product curve: what was young and energetic, starts to look mature and tired, and begins a rapid decline accompanied with a backlash against “infocrapics” and “viral diseases” as the market gets swamped with corporate propaganda that wouldn’t look out of place in an edition of Pravda.

The graphic below illustrates the point of panic for this humble B2B marketing account director:

As you can see there’s a paradox at work here: the Ave Santini moment takes place as the putative number of experts starts exponential growth. Why? Because the experts, following the demand and the money, tend to be technical (focused on outputs) rather than creative (ideas focused).

Why it matters
And all this worries me because it makes providing the best possible service more difficult in three ways:

• Genuine creativity is overlooked. If it’s not your primary consideration then your campaign will be still born.

• Great content vehicles get commoditised too quickly. It’s annoying when tools become cheapened and discarded when there’s no obvious upgrade: we know iPhone 5 is coming with new features, but there’s no roadmap for infographic 2?

• Content marketing gets demonized. It’s harder to do great marketing when you alienate your audience with empty shells rather than useful, beautiful and actionable content.

So let’s exorcise the growing belief that vehicles are the source, rather than the vehicle, of creativity. Put the idea first then we’ll protect our profession, our campaigns, our options and, of course, my mind.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Thought Leadership

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As content marketing gains momentum, we find that we’re not having to work quite as hard explaining the principles to prospective clients. But one objection does keep popping up that we thought would have died off by now: “Why should we give content away that tells people exactly how to do what we do? Won’t people just do it for themselves and cut us out of the picture?”

Here’s how we address this understandable but misplaced concern:

• You know far more than you think– If your success really rests on a body of knowledge that can be captured in a white paper, your business is already built on sand. it can’t and it isn’t. Information is only source of the value you deliver. Experience,expertise, intellectual property and methodology all play a role.

Take some time to map the richness of the expertise that lives inside your company. Then think about which areas will be of most value to your prospective customers. That’s your sweet spot.

• Knowing something isn’t the same as doing it – We can tell someone everything we know about how to write a fantastic eBook. But we’ve been doing this a long time and we can still do it better than anyone we teach. If we didn’t have confidence in that, we’d stop letting people download The Content Marketing Workbook.

Realise that your company has a depth of expertise that can’t be replicated with a bit of book-learning. Knowing how to apply that learning is a much harder thing to replicate.

• People don’t WANT to do what you do, they want to find someone who’s great at doing it – Your prospects have a day job. They don’t actually have a secret desire to become experts at video distribution or application management or cockroach prevention. They just want to find someone who is an expert. That’s the power of content marketing: it doesn’t just claim expertise, it demonstrates it.

Understand that your area of expertise is only a small part of your customer’s world. It means everything to you but is only one pain-in-the-arse of many to them. It may be critically important but it’s still not their universe.

• Sharing your expertise doesn’t mean sharing ALL of your expertise– Deciding to engage in content marketing does not forfeit your right to decide exactly what to share and what to hold back.  If you believe you’ve got some proprietary knowledge that gives you a competitive advantage, don’t spill it all over the web. But you can still allude to it and discuss the insights that inform your special sauce.

Decide exactly what knowledge in your company represents precious intellectual property. The list will be shorter than you think. But protect it with your life. Often it’s in the specifics of methodology and delivery rather than the principles that inform them (and the principles are the stuff people really want to understand).

• Your weakest competitors will copy you anyway– That’s why they’re so weak. People can tell the difference between an authentic expert and a wannabe. And by the time the also-rans have ripped off your latest insight, you’ll have moved on to the next one. This isn’t to say you should let the competition see everything that makes you special – just don’t worry so much about it. They’re not that good.

Keep an eye on the competition but don’t obsess about them. Leaders lead.

• You have no choice– If you decide to clutch all of your expertise close to your chest like a greedy gambler with a full house, your competitors will share theirs and market circles around you. They’ll get the interest, the leads and the new business. Because people will see them as the expert and see you as just another company.

Bite the bullet and capture your company’s crown jewels, then put them to work, helping your prospects do their jobs better.

That last point is really the bottom line. Content marketing is the portion of your marketing plan that actually works. The rest is window dressing. You can be shy about sharing your company’s brilliance with the world and wonder why nobody cares about you; or you can be generous with your goodies and watch the world beat a path to your door.

What’s your experience? Do you come across this concern a lot? Are you effective in overcoming it? Let us know, below.

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photo: creative commons: kwhitten

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, Content, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Corporate Positioning, Lead Generation, Thought Leadership

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In case you missed last week’s Content Marketing & Marketing Automatation webinar put on by DemandGen’s John Sweeney, here’s a link to the archived talk with slides.

In it, Bob Apollo of Inflexion Point and Hubspot takes you through his principles of content marketing and Doug Kessler from Velocity shares Twelve Lessons learned from our B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign.

Bob also gave people links to two very valuable downloads that we wanted to tell you about. They’re two templates to help you focus your own content marketing efforts:

The Stakeholder Profile / Buyer Persona Template – this helps you map out exactly who you’re targeting in your next piece of content, including job titles, roles and the key influencers, motivations, concerns, constraints, success measures and trigger events that shape each persona’s world.

This template captures a best practice content marketing in a pdf.

The Ideal Prospect Profile – a short template that helps you and your sales people define the perfect prospect – not just by demographics but by the things that really drive interest: structural, environmental and behavioural dimensions that tell you you’re on to a great prospect.

Thinking about personas in this way adds a ton of value. Because it’s often someone’s attitudes,beliefs and culture that determine their likelihood of loving what you do.

Bob knows his stuff and these templates capture a good chunk of his formidable experience.

The webinar is a great introduction to the ‘why’ and the templates show you how.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, digital marketing, personas, Thought Leadership

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There’s some yadda-yadda to go with it but you’ll probably get the idea…

More Project Open Kimono, in which Velocity exposes itself to the elements:

Project Open Kimono Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)

Project Open Kimono Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)

Project Open Kimono Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)

Project Open Kimono Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)

Project Open Kimono Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)

Project Open Kimono Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)

Project Open Kimono Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)

Project Open Kimono Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)

Project Open Kimono Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)

Project Open Kimono Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)

Project Open Kimono Part 11 – the one about autoDMs in Twitter

Project Open Kimono Part 12 – Re-purposing and atomising your content

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, digital marketing, Lead Generation, SEO, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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This is typical: you put a lot of effort into a chunky piece of marketing content — then retire it, move on and start working on the next piece. When you do that, you’re leaving a lot of content value behind and wasting a real opportunity to get more goodies for just a little more work.

Here’s an example. Our B2B Marketing Manifesto has had a great run (Neil will summarise just how great in an upcoming post) but traffic and downloads have started to settle down. Similarly, our Content Marketing Workbook went gangbusters for a while and is now a steady earner rather than start performer.

So here’s where the re-purposing comes in.

The Manifesto ends with the Six Staples of B2B Marketing (seven actually, there’s a bonus staple thrown in). So now the plan is to turn each of these into a short piece where we can drill down a bit more than we could in the Manifesto itself.

The first effort is The B2B Content Marketing Tutorial, a highly visual, interactive guide to a best-practice content marketing workflow. We did it as a Prezi to vary the media a bit (it would be great to do all seven in seven different media — if we can come up with seven). Take a look — but make sure you view it in fullscreen mode and use the play button to advance.

We hope The B2B Content Marketing Tutorial is more than an excerpt or simply a reshaping of existing content (you’d all get bored with that pretty quickly). Instead, it’s a new spin on a smaller topic within a larger piece: in this case, a guide to the HOW part of content marketing instead of the WHAT and WHY covered elsewhere.

Here are some principles of content re-purposing:

Zoom in – take a single chapter or topic from your big eBook and make it the whole subject of the next, shorter piece.

Complement – the Manifesto was strategic, so the Tutorial is tactical and practical.

Morph – change formats to keep things interesting. We’ve turned eBooks into checklists into videos into webinars into slideshows…

Connect – make an explicit connection between the pieces. Make them feel like a family. The Tutorial is in the Manifesto ‘spray paint stencil’ style. (It’s also connected to the Content Marketing Workbook, but we changed styles since doing that one).

Atomise – the Tutorial is on our site and the Prezi site, too. If it was, say, a deck, we’d put it on Slideshare, Scribd and Docstoc, too. If a video on YouTube, Vimeo and beyond.

Cross-promote – the Tutorial promotes the Manifesto and CM Workbook. And we’ll update those pieces to promote the Tutorial. Makes sense. Of course, we’ll also blog about it (like, um, now) and tweet about it and post it in LinkedIn groups and bookmark it and send it out to our e-newsletter subscribers (sign up using the form on the right)…

Open the gate – the Manifesto had a short form for data capture. The Tutorial doesn’t. We discuss that here.

Measure – this is essential on of any list of B2B principles. All links in the Tutorial are tagged for analytics and for Marketo, so we can watch our honoured audience as they poke and prod around our soft bits. (Ooh. That tickles.)

It’s early days — we only just posted the thing – but we’re getting lots of hits, some really good comments – and downloads of the Content Marketing Workbook and B2B Marketing Manifesto are spiking again. It’s like B2B Viagra.

Don’t just relegate your latest content piece to the dusty digital shelf. Give it a new spin, a quick squeeze and a zotz of energy.

More Project Open Kimono, in which Velocity exposes itself to the elements:

Project Open Kimono Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)

Project Open Kimono Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)

Project Open Kimono Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)

Project Open Kimono Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)

Project Open Kimono Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)

Project Open Kimono Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)

Project Open Kimono Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)

Project Open Kimono Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)

Project Open Kimono Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)

Project Open Kimono Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)

Project Open Kimono Part 11 – the one about autoDMs in Twitter

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Thought Leadership

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© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 14 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, Content Marketing, Thought Leadership

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh