Managing Content Marketing: The Real-World Guide for Creating Passionate Subscribers to Your Brand

187 Pages·2011·1.47 MB·English

by  Robert Rose

Copyright© 2011 by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi. All rights reserved.

Published by CMI Books division of Z Squared Media, LLC, Cleveland Ohio.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
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under section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of
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Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in
preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or
completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of
merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales
representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for
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damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential or other damages.
ISBN 978-0-9833307-1-4
eISBN: 9780983330707

Printed in the United States of America.

Table of Contents

Forword
Introduction
Part 1: Content Marketing Strategy
1 Build the Business Case
2 Who’s on First and Why
3 Create the Journey: Developing Your Pillars of Content
4 Digging Your Channels
5 Putting It All Together
Part 2: The Process of Content Marketing
6 The Four Stages of a Content Marketing Process
7 Welcome to Workflow
8 The Tools of Content Marketing
9 Getting the Choir to Sing
10 Talk the Talk and Listen In
11 Measurement: Developing Your Pyramids
12 Beyond Content and Marketing
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Foreword

The chief advertising officer is dead. Long live the chief content officer.
The marketing landscape is evolving in new and exciting ways. We no longer
talk about ad campaigns. We talk about our value proposition, a meaningful
relationship, and crafting an experience for our customers. As marketers, we
have new opportunities to reach our customers everywhere we look. Video and
mobile and social media are exploding at unpredictable rates, causing businesses
to shift their focus and restructure their budgets.
As we identify new audiences, channels, and communities, we also discover
brand new opportunities to interact, listen, get feedback, and respond. This is our
new marketing landscape.
We must, in turn, transform our marketing strategy to match that landscape.
That’s easy to say, but much harder for businesses — and their marketers — to
do. We need a roadmap to get us there.
We need goals, a plan, and a strategy. We need to re-evaluate and constantly
answer the hard questions. We must make sure we fog the mirror and our
business breathes. After all, just because you kill the cow doesn’t mean you’ll
have steak for dinner.
Managing Content Marketing: The Real-World Guide for Creating Passionate
Subscribers to Your Brand provides the vital steps required to navigate this new
path called content marketing.
“Conditions of satisfaction” is business-speak for the criteria used to measure
the outcome of a plan or project. Once well-defined, they help you gauge and
monitor progress and ultimately measure your outcomes and success. For me,
personally, three basic conditions of satisfaction underlie everything I do:
Grow professionally
Grow wealth
Have fun
If I can’t accomplish these things, I don’t do it. Your own conditions of
satisfaction may be very different, but they will still be fundamental to building a
business case for content marketing. That is, once you “understand who YOU
are” (what is your story?), this book outlines the process for the next step, which
is “understand who THEY are” (why your customers should care about your
story and how to make it stick).
Understanding “who THEY are” is critical to creating relevant and meaningful
content. You need to know your customers better than your spouse or your best
friend. What do they like? What do they do? What are their activities and
hobbies? What products do they use? What do they read? What are they saying
and when are they saying it?
All this creates the need for content — specifically content as part of a
marketing strategy. Robert and Joe nail it when they say marketers are looking at
all these new channels and building their business cases — if they even get that
far — then filling the gap with content. How you build content and the message
is as important, if not more important, than any step in the process.
It’s all about the “step and repeat process.” When creating marketing
programs of any scale, every piece of content you create, every strategy, every
element of everything you do should be thought of as “make ready” —
something that can be used over and over, and in new ways to truly make an
impact on customers. Step and repeat; one step, repeated over and over. This
process gives you the best opportunity to leverage what you have by ensuring
your efforts are always multiplied. You don’t need zeroes for all the processes;
you just need to keep doing more with what you have. This book does that. It
lays out the road map and creates a fail-safe process for content marketing.
What gets me fired up about this book is that these guys have it so right —
there’s nothing new about content marketing; it’s the evolution of opportunities
around it that will propel us forward. No one ever died (that I know of) as the
result of a marketing campaign. Take a risk! Step out on the edge! Be the chief
content officer. Read on to find out how to implement, maintain, and measure
your content marketing strategy.
Saddle up, marketers! Get ready for a transformational journey into your
content marketing strategy.
Happy reading,
Jeffrey Hayzlett
Jeffrey Hayzlett is the bestselling author of The Mirror Test: Is Your Business
Really Breathing? He is a global business celebrity as well as a content
marketing cowboy. You can find him online at www.Hayzlett.com.
Introduction

Okay, you’ve opened the book. Thank you. Now it’s our job to keep you
engaged.
Marketing has changed. Past tense. By opening this book, you already know
that. Now it’s time to actually do something about it.
The sea change that has been talked about in the hundreds of marketing books
that precede this one is well under way. We’re all in agreement that the
influences of the explosive growth of the mobile and social Web are creating
seismic shifts in all areas of business. We watch, as the Web threatens the
existence of entire content-oriented sectors such as periodicals, newspapers,
book stores, record companies, and broadcast television. Others, such as
software companies, financial services, healthcare, and advertising services are
undergoing fundamental changes as the social and mobile Web matures, and “the
cloud” offers more value. Entire job categories — such as HR benefits manager,
travel agent, librarian, journalist, photographer, videographer, and Web designer
— are going the way of the linotypist, stenographer, and elevator operator.
And this pace of change is quickening. In 2004, former U.S. Education
Secretary Richard Riley was quoted as saying that “none of the top 10 jobs that
will exist in 2010 exist today.” This may possibly be the first time in history
when college graduates are taking jobs in categories that didn’t even exist when
they first entered school. And today we know we are preparing our kids for
occupations that haven’t even been created yet.
But perhaps no function in the business organization has been as
fundamentally revolutionized as marketing. The social and mobile Web has
completely changed the speed, efficiency, and ease with which consumers can
engage with each other and has had a tremendous impact on brands. This new
engagement of the consumer — with keen awareness of their relationships and
emerging social networks — now correlates to every single aspect of our
business. Marketing now influences how our accountants account, researchers
research, developers develop, service people service, and even how leaders lead.
Jeremiah Owyang, a former Forrester analyst now with the Altimeter Group,
talked with CRM Magazine in April 2009 about the growth of the social Web
and its effect. He said:
“The community will take charge. Social networking will only continue to
facilitate the power shift toward the consumer.”
So, yes, marketing has changed. The question is what are we going to do about
it?