Concept Cheat Sheet
Content Marketing What’s a CheatSheet? Gleanster Research produces two types of CheatSheats: • Concept CheatSheats: Explaining the nuances of a key concept. • Technology CheatSheats: A comprehensive guide to a technology. CheatSheats offer a quick and consumable overview of a key concept or technology. Our analysts develop these with one goal in mind; explain the concept or technology as if you were talking to your grandmother. It’s the quickest way to get acclimated to emerging business terms and impress your colleagues and your boss with your practical insights at your next meeting.
Inside a Concept CheatSheet The Concept, Defined Related Definitions Related Business Outcomes Relevant Technologies
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The Concept, Defined Content marketing is any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content in order to acquire customers. Content Marketing is often used synonymously with Inbound Marketing, but it’s not the same thing. Content Marketing is a tactic within Inbound Marketing – which represents the broader strategy around driving call-to-action engagement. It’s the creation of content that derives value for a target audience. In other words, it’s what turns visitors, or potential customers, into actual customers. Information can be presented in a variety of formats, including news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, etc. Content marketing is focused not on selling, but on simply communicating with customers and prospects.
Related Definitions Outbound Marketing: Defines a wide variety of tactics that push intrusive communications to a target audience. Analogy: It’s like tossing a stick of dynamite into a lake and seeing what fish float to the surface. Inbound Marketing: Defines a wide variety of tactics which engage your target audience and pull them into the sales cycle. This can be accomplished by aligning value-added content with their interests or needs to attract them to your brand. • Webinars • Thought Leadership Document Downloads • Infographics
• Videos • Blogging • Newsletters • Content Publication • Content Creation • Content Aggregation Content Curation: Content curation is the process of collecting, organizing and displaying information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. Content Creation: Content creation is the creation of content, especially digital content, for self-expression, distribution, marketing and/or publication. Typical forms of content creation include maintaining and updating web sites, blogging, photography, videography, online commentary, the maintenance of social media accounts, and editing and distribution of digital media. Content Syndication: Publishing your own or someone else’s content on another media property. This is usually accompanied by a “this article was originally published on…” at the bottom of the article. There are lots of websites that syndicate content. Contrary to common conceptions, Google doesn’t penalize you for syndicating content. Search engines will actually display search optimized content based on the context of the content. So if you aggregate best practices that your audience finds valuable by syndicating content (and providing attribution for the original author) it could actually help your search results. Syndication is more of a shortcut for creating content. There is no substitute for original content. Call-to-Action: A call to action, or CTA, is a banner, button, or some type of graphic or text on a website meant to prompt a user to engage and continue down a conversion funnel. It is an
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Concept CheatSheet: Content Marketing
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essential part of inbound marketing because it encourages prospects to take action. The trick with call-toaction marketing is to offer CTAs that will resonate with the prospect. Some marketing automation platforms can be configured to dynamically adjust online call-to-actions based on a lead score – a highly effective way of maximizing the chance of engagement. Buyer Personas: Profiles that exemplify or represent the real buyers who influence or make purchase decisions about your products and services. Top Performers use these “personas� internally to develop content that maps to specific high-value target audiences. Customer Journey: The customer journey describes the collective series of interactions a particular segment or target audience might engage in at different stages of the customer lifecycle; an email, an encounter with a salesperson, subscribing to a loyalty program, etc. Customer journeys are typically contextualized around a buyer persona, segment, or target audience to define how to engage, when to engage, and across what channels to engage in. Naturally, content marketing efforts should be developed to address buyers challenges at different stages in the customer journey.
Related Business Outcomes Why invest in content marketing? • Attract new leads • Increase volume of sales ready leads • Brand awareness & credibility • Target new strategically important audiences • Scale marketing efforts • Reduce sales cycle time • Increase revenue from cross-
selling and up-selling Content Marketing Considerations • The basis of successful content marketing is the development of valueadded materials that are targeted, relevant, and timely. • In today’s “greenâ€? culture, everybody’s recycling. That applies to your content as well. Re-use content and cut it up wherever possible. People desire consumable amounts of information. Segment that ebook into a handful of blog posts, or turn your content into a webinar, or post it on You Tube, or create a presentation for SlideShare. • It’s easier to share bit-sized information. If you have a lot to say, then go ahead and say it, but do it a little bit at a time. Share sound-bites and other shortform content that fits with your brand voice.
Top Performing organizations, analyst commentary, and vendor rankings (based on end-user feedback) on all the relevant Solution Providers in a given Topic Area.
Marketing Automation Revenue Performance Management Content Curation Platforms Blog Platforms Search Engine Optimization
• Keep to a consistent, and fairly frequent, schedule. Buyers like to check their favorite sites for updates, so make sure that they have something new to see when they do. Some sites add new content throughout the week, conditioning their customers to expect these new posts. This is a great way to build relationships and customer loyalty. • Generating content of real value drives traffic to your site and demonstrates leadership within your specialty. Don’t be too salesy with your messaging. Buyers can sniff out a marketing communication a mile away and they will move on unless they are already engaged.
Relevant Technologies What technologies support this concept? Check out the links below to view the landscape of vendors (and related Gleanster Research content). Remember that Gleansights benchmark reports contain best practices from
Entire content Š 2014 Gleanster, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use or reproduction prohibited. Note: This document is intended for individual use. Electronic distribution via email or by posting on a personal website is in violation of the terms of use.