Storytelling: why most content marketing plans fail

This is a webinar BrightTalk asked me to present last week on how to tackle the main obstacle of modern marketers: developing content.

Some say content is the fuel of marketing but as it became so pervasive in all marketing activities, it also became the bottleneck. At Scoop.it, we developed a framework alongside top content marketing influencers to reach ROI with content and that we called lean content marketing. In this webinar, I presented some of the key lean content marketing strategies.

Interesting to see others look at marketing the same way we do: the lean methodology spearheaded by Steve Blank and Eric Ries for startups clearly is expanding beyond entrepreneurship. It's particularly well suited to areas which are not hard sciences and where the cost of failure can be high. 

Content Marketing is a particular area of marketing which needs to be made lean by necessity for many companies. Limited resources, limited time and increasing objectives means you have to find ways to make things efficient and get ROI.

Is your marketing lean?

Here's our guide to do so for content. 

Repurposing is a key strategy of the lean content marketing methodology. 

Are you leveraging it to its full extent? 

Here's a chart I put together to compile some ideas from various sources including 15 top marketing experts who contributed to the Lean Content Marketing Handbook for SMBs.

We've all been where Bryan Harris was when he wrote the above introduction to this post. As bloggers or content marketers, we always hear that voice in the back of our heads. 

When are you going to just sit down and write that post? What are you even going to write about? How are you going to actually make an impact with the finished product?

This post validates one of the core values of Lean Content Marketing: leveraging existing information and communities that you already have access to to enhance your content marketing efforts.

Bryan goes on to describe his newfound writing process. He checks the analytics of his most recent tweets, finds the ones with the most clicks, then turns the central idea behind each one into a question that he can answer in the form of a blogpost.

Another method that Bryan mentions is checking Quora for someone already having asked the question you want to ask to get more insight into what knowledge you can provide. After all, one of the goals of content marketing is to teach your current and future clients the things that they want to know that you already do know.

One way to inspire content creation that I would add is to experiment with content curation. Curator @Martin (Marty) Smith has been utilizing this method from day one. He created a process to inform his content creation that involves curating a post on a similar topic to his website's content hub, checking the analytics of that post, and then deciding whether or not his audience has a high enough interest in that topic to write his own post about it.

With the new analytics on Scoop.it, you can generate reports involving metrics such as audience engagement, views, shares, time of day at which the most views were generated, and more. When a piece of curated content has a high success rate, perhaps it's time to expand on that for your audience and provide the value that only you can provide by creating an original post of your own.

This report by the Aberdeen Group highlights the need to measure results as a key success factor in content marketing.

Beyond this key findings - companies which measure tend to do better - there are interesting numbers as those in the above chart. The companies surveyed in this report had a customer acquisition cost of $20-$30,000. 

Does this feel a lot to you?

Well, if you're a leading Enterprise software company with an average deal value in hundreds of thousands or millions, it makes perfect sense. But for the vast majority of small and mid-sized companies, this is a lot because what they sell is the hundreds or at best thousands of dollars. 

So what I'm getting from this data is that SMBs need to work in a leaner way:

- first by measuring (I agree with the data on that)

- second by optimizing their conversions all through the funnel (237-350 marketing responses to close a deal is not lean at all): focus on the topics and the questions your potential customers are interested in.

- but perhaps more importantly by reducing your content costs through lean content tools and techniques: introducing content curation in the mix is a great way to do that with a cost per piece of content published 7x to 10x lower.

The keyword to scaling when you're resource-constrained is: leverage. 

When we started discussing lean content marketing techniques, it was clear that leveraging other resources and other audiences (influencers) was key.

Since then, we've also found that leveraging other people's content, which is what content curation is - in a win-win and good way - is all about. 

The other part of the ROI equation for small teams is around amplification: reducing your own investment in content or doing more with less is good but amplifying results is also important.

To build on that, check out the top lean content marketing practices we've compiled from top content marketing influencers.  

There are a lot of bad reasons to do guest blogging - including bad and outdated SEO tactics that no longer work - but there are also very good reasons to do so which is why it's one of the lean content marketing best practices.

While measuring the impact of guest blogging remains ambitious in my opinion, this post frames what to expect when doing proper guest blogging: more visibility, more distribution. I find however that #5 - lead generation - is a stretch and I wouldn't recommend to guest blog to generate leads. Yes, a good guest post will send some traffic to your site (but maybe not as much as you expect) and some of it might convert if your site is optimized for that. But it's a long shot.

Another reason which is more valid in my experience to justify guest blogging is to expect thought leadership development by contributing to well established blogs in your industry. The association of your brand with an established one acts as endorsement and will add credibility to your next pieces and your blog.

Or I would say: fortunately. 

Because if you believe some of the gurus of content marketing, it might look much harder than you think.

Vertical Measure's Arnie Kuenn makes a great job at debunking 8 common mistakes or myths which are often believed about content marketing. 

A great post showing how content marketing can - and for many SMBs should - be lean. 

A great case study by Tracey Parsons from Social Media Explorer who's also has a startup going and describes how content curation was essential to developing its brand and its voice. 

Beyond building the brand, she found content curation is not only very helpful to avoid being self promotional but also brings tangible business and perception benefits. 

To build on her case, you can check our own study on the ROI of content curation for SMBs which results correlate nicely what she writes about: http://business.scoop.it/content-curation-roi/ 

Great article by @JuliaEMcCoy with a ton of helpful tips on content curating using a tool like Scoop.it followed by content auditing. I like how Julia covers what next after content curation.

Here is a snippet of the what's next.

So, You Have Your Awesome Content Ready To Go: Now What?

"Thanks to your tools of the trade for content curation, now you have a good bit of content to share and ideas building in the back of your head. Once you have all of your content in front of you, the next logical step is to create an editorial calendar to keep yourself on track.

Content editorial calendars are useful to organize your content, blog topics, and social sharing schedules. Instead of randomly selecting days and times to post your new content, using a content calendar will help give your strategy structure. Editorial calendars keep you focused, and they offer a platform where you can monitor and measure your results.

If you are serious about making your content marketing quest a success, it is a smart move to develop a template for your needs and stick to it. You will find your content marketing and development will run a lot smoother, and hopefully it will help keep fresh ideas flowing for your audience.

As those ideas to continue to flow, you will build up quite a content base overtime. Your collection of content will continue to grow, and eventually there will come a time where this content will need reviewed for performance purposes; this is known as a content audit."

This is a post I wrote for LeWeb's blog as their major event is coming to Paris which will be the opportunity for a lot of entrepreneurs to reflect on how to make it big. 

For startups in particular but also SMBs in general, opportunities now exist to step up and be heard that didn't exist before unless you had deep pockets. 

Lean Content practices can help you become your own media on a budget and here's my take on the 3 things any startup or SMBs should consider for their content / inbound strategy.

This article by Olsy Sorokina @HootSuite shares many great tips to help you with your lean content strategy and save you time with social media.

Using the combination of content curation power of Scoop.it and the social networking power of Hootsuite you can move from sharing to engagement and lead generation with a few easy steps. 

Already have HootSuite account you can integrate Scoop.it within the HootSuite App Directory

Don't know what to share here is a tip from the article.

On Facebook, choose storytelling, visually rich messaging. Limit your posts to 1-2 a day.
On Twitter, if you schedule Tweets, make sure to space them out, to avoid being perceived as “spamming” your audience. Include Tweets with different formats—photo, video, different placement of the links—to test which ones perform best. If you are sharing content from an external source, include the appropriate hashtags and @mentions.
On LinkedIn, share content with a more serious tone, oriented to a professional audience, through LinkedIn’s publishing platform.
On Google+, share any news from your business, as well as external content relevant to your business, your field, or may otherwise be interesting to people in your Circles.
On Instagram, plan photo content to complement social media messaging on your other, less visual channels. If you have a campaign or a product release coming up, schedule a photo to spread awareness among a bigger audience. Instagram also presents a great opportunity to give your customers an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at your business and the people who run it.

As a kid my favorite game was to play Lego and build, deconstruct and rebuild stuff (spaceships mostly: I'm a geek...). As a father, I've been fascinated to see that construction game becoming my kids' favorite too and see what they came out with in terms of new ideas to build. 

Are you thinking of your content as modular with lego-type building blocks?

Leed Odden says you should because you'll then be able to turn mico-content into eBooks and then blog posts, newsletters, etc... And vice versa. 

Rebecca Lieb of the Altimeter group came out with the turkey leftover analogy to explain how you could turn epic content such as an ebook or a white paper into many other pieces of content with only marginal additional work. It's interesting to complement that with the opposite approach and plan your micro-content so that it can fit into something bigger. 

As Lee Odden points out, content curation plays an important role if you want to pursue this strategy: "Curation of micro-content is easy, provides useful information to your target audience".

And because of the many benefits he describes with social and SEO, by assembling your Lego content blocks into an awesome content spaceship, you might realize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. 

Use existing resources & apps to make the most out of video marketing to meet the number one goal of video marketers: brand awareness.

Great read on the evolution of journalists from those in the 60s who were concerned mostly with the opinions of their colleagues to those today who sit in front of monitors and watch real time analytics.

The results of the study mentioned here are also pretty interesting for marketing as brands are increasingly adopting the "publisher" mindset.

Staying on top of analytics on a consistent basis is one of the most important parts of becoming a brand publisher and ensuring you're doing the right thing to meet your objectives.