By definition, content marketing means working with owned media. Media you own (or largely control) can include properties such as a company website, microsites, blogs, and social media platforms. The idea is you build it and hope that they will come.

Often, they (i.e., a target audience) will come, enticed by compelling, well-crafted, search-optimized, useful, funny, clever, delightful content. And sometimes, all best efforts to the contrary, more reach and more subject matter authority are required to meaningfully connect the message to the desired audience.

This is where an influencer strategy often comes in for many content marketers. Influencers are domain knowledge experts in a field. That field could be enterprise software, beekeeping, baking, or national defense. No matter the topic, the influences are the go-to subject matter experts. Their writings, videos, tweets, and/or blog posts enjoy broad followings with what’s likely your target audience: the people who follow that given topic.

Influencers can be leveraged in a wide variety of ways. They can be interviewed for your own owned media (e.g., an e-book or a blog post). They can be briefed on company news in the hope that they will share it with their networks, which is good old-fashioned PR, updated for a world in which journalists no longer have a corner on the media influence market.

Influencers can also be commissioned to create and share content on a relevant topic with their followers, providing ethical guidelines and disclosure protocols are followed. A large technology company recently commissioned a dozen technology influencers to create a total of 120 pieces of content (mostly blog posts) which enjoyed, in aggregate, over a million views. In B2B, that’s paid media reach for an earned media investment — not too shabby.

The basic steps for connecting with and working with influencers are fairly simple, yet frequently overlooked by harried, deadline-driven marketers.

This checklist should help.

Identify the influencers
Media, analysts, researchers, and academics are all obvious choices. So are the people active on social media with the biggest and most passionate followings on the topic in question. They post frequently and reliably on the topic, and their messages are amplified by readers and followers. Find influencers via search, hashtag research, or through social listening software. Influencers can also be located the old-fashioned way: who’s quoted in articles, cited in research? Those are the names to get.

Weave an introduction into the initial contact
Genuine influencers are frequently courted and receive a great many “asks.” Don’t assume influencers you reach out to know your company/product/strategy. Provide background information, with an offer of more. They’ll want to know who they’re dealing with. Communication is a two-way street.

Craft narrow, highly specific requests
Influencers are often asked for quotes, or to respond to interview questions via an initial contact email. Nothing wrong with that, but a response is more likely if that ask is laser targeted. Instead of requesting a quote about “content marketing,” go straight to the specifics. “What are three best practices for using curation in content marketing?” or “What’s the difference between content marketing and content strategy?” Providing direction is more likely to elicit not only a response, but a good response.

Deadlines matter
Always, always, always provide a deadline for response. If there isn’t one, make it up. There’s a world of difference — and responsiveness — between asking someone to do something whenever, and requesting that they do it by close of business on Thursday.

Ask for everything upfront
Need the influencer’s headshot? Bio? These aren’t afterthoughts — they’re part of the content plan. Request all deliverables upfront. It’s polite, considerate, and saves everyone a lot of time and email traffic.

Be easy to work with
Really, this is the cardinal rule of everything stated above. Are you requesting a call with the influencer? Providing three or four available timeslots in the initial request makes their life much easier than throwing the ball into their court with a “When are you available?” So does providing options, e.g., offering to conduct an interview either by phone or by email — their choice.

Follow-up is essential
It’s not just what an influencer contributes, content-wise. Distribution and amplification are huge components of an influencer strategy. Ensure the influencer has access to all published artifacts (e.g., the interview, the e-book, the webinar link). Mentioning their contribution or participation on social media makes them more likely to reciprocate and broaden the reach of that tweet or post. Using their Twitter handle or favored hashtags also helps get the message to their following.

Working with influencers needn’t be difficult or complicated. It’s easier than it ever was not just to find the important voices in the field, but to easily connect with them, too. The rest is basic Golden Rule territory: do unto influencers as you would have them do unto you.

This post originally published on iMedia

It’s impossible to spend any time in academia without encountering the ominous and omnipresent phrase “publish or perish.” It’s long been a reality in academia, and it’s become an equally real state of affairs in business, too.

Wikipedia describes it thusly:

Frequent publication is one of the few methods at scholars’ disposal to demonstrate academic talent. Successful publications bring attention to scholars and their sponsoring institutions, which can facilitate continued funding and an individual’s progress through a chosen field. In popular academic perception, scholars who publish infrequently, or who focus on activities that do not result in publications, such as instructing undergraduates, may lose ground in competition for available tenure-track positions. The pressure to publish has been cited as a cause of poor work being submitted to academic journals.

The need to publish, and to publish early and often, means living life in a pressure cooker. There’s the pressure to come up with the ideas, to translate those ideas into artifacts (blog posts, articles, speeches, PowerPoint decks, social media communications, and other formats too numerous to mention). Then there are the vetting and publishing processes.

Small wonder the publish or perish model has been under scrutiny in academia for decades — for demanding too much content, too fast. For leading to subpar content that’s not up to academic or research standards. For leading to cheating, plagiarism, and other unethical shortcuts. For leading, in short to too much low quality content.

Sound familiar?

The too much noise/too little signal problem is as innate to content marketing as it is to academia. Large brands now publish more content on a weekly basis than did “Time” magazine during its heyday. The pressure to feed the beast is real, whether you’re building a corporate or a personal brand. This isn’t just an observation, but a fact my research confirms. The majority of spending on content marketing technology this year will be on content creation tools, even though when I surveyed marketers and asked what they need (as opposed to what they plan to buy), they cite better tools for audience targeting and measurement.

The only means at a marketer’s disposal to address “publish or perish” is with a content strategy, something my research — as well as others’ — indicates 70 percent of organizations don’t formally have, though at this point virtually every business is regularly publishing (or trying to publish) content. Businesses are trying like crazy to plug the gaps. They’re investing in software solutions and trying to recruit talent to run their content operations. Executive content marketing roles barely existed two or three years ago. This week alone, three recruiters have rung me up, fishing for candidates.

Publish or perish isn’t just for academia anymore. Consistent, frequent, high-quality content in a multiplicity of channels is a business and marketing imperative. It won’t happen by itself, and tactics without strategy are a quick route to a downward spiral.

So, what’s your content strategy?
This post originally published on iMedia 

Image: http://www.theragblog.com/

I don’t often share my media citations, but I’m very pleased with this piece that published in Fast Company, so wanted to share it.

THE BIG PROBLEM WITH YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY

Increasingly, brands are making room for executive content roles within their organizational structure. I’ve been studying content roles in the enterprise for some time now, and realize there’s an issue that’s not yet been addressed.

What’s the difference between content and content marketing?

There’s a much-vaunted, but rarely-seen-in-the-wild title of chief content officer. That role has executive purview and cross-functional authority.

A chief content officer has reach into R&D, product, HR, customer care, internal communications — all areas that don’t ladder up to marketing. And of course, the larger the organization, the greater the remove (or the silos) can be between departments and divisions.

A content marketing executive, in contrast, focuses on content exclusively within the confines of the marketing organization. While the content marketing chief (or vice president, director, etc.) can and almost certainly should work with divisions external to marketing to develop ideas, campaigns, input and inspiration for their initiatives, his or her strategic goal will always align with marketing’s mandate.

Content marketing will be designed and developed for marketing purposes, not for wider company initiatives, be they internal or external. This content will address various segments and/or personas at different stages in the purchase funnel. The content calendar will align with sales, customers, products, partners, trade shows and other externally focused initiatives.

Both types of content must align, of course. Voice, tone, look, feel, consistency, brand guidelines — all these and more are components on the governance that forms the guardrails of content strategy, no matter how broadly or narrowly focused.

The Blurring Line Between Content And Content Marketing

Having recently taken up the mantle of VP of content marketing at a large, global organization, the blurry area between “content” and “content marketing” became immediately apparent.

Are product demo videos content — or content marketing? What about product brochures? Web pages that document regular software updates and upgrades? The customer support and help sections of that same website? Product specification sheets? All these are (and require) content.

The questions come in when a content strategy is being mapped. A content strategy outlines governance, resources and processes. Part of my new challenge is determining how, where and if all these non-marketing pieces of content will fit into content marketing.

Do we create that content? Check it for look and feel, voice and tone, adherence to brand guidelines? Into which division and under whose purview fall the creators and administrators of non-marketing content?

There’s practically no business area that content doesn’t somehow bleed into. Many gray areas are emerging around the differences between content-content and content marketing.

What’s Ahead?

What will most likely emerge in the next year or so will be a career path for content professionals. Organizations are hiring content executives across the hierarchical spectrum. Editors and managing editors are almost commonplace now at companies ranging from Dell to Adidas.

Content marketing leads are also slowly, but surely, being created within the marketing department.

The growth path? The career apogee is, of course, a place in the C-suite. Will content take its place alongside the CEO, CMO, CTO, CIO, CRO, and other senior leadership roles?

It won’t happen soon, and it won’t happen everywhere. That’s simply not realistic. Corporate boards are hardly tripping over themselves to create new leadership roles (and the salaries that accompany them).

But increasingly forward-thinking organizations will realize that content isn’t just the atomic particle of marketing — it’s the currency with which we relate, interact, communicate and signal who we are and what we stand for.

Chief Content Officers will likely never be ubiquitous. But your chances of meeting one will likely become greater in the next couple of years.

This post originally published on MarketingLand

Is content a DIY project, or is it a job better left to professionals?

Major brands want to create content marketing in-house. A couple of years ago I conducted research and asked major organizations such as Nestlé, GE, Adobe, IBM, and Coca-Cola what their preference was. Do it yourself, or farm it out to an agency? Everyone — 100 percent — of the executives I spoke with said their preference is in-house.

Their own staff know the company, the products, the culture, the brand, and the voice better than any outside handler ever could. But there’s another cold reality: resources. Few brands have the staff, time, and tools to meet all their content marketing demands internally.

There’s no shortage of agencies of all stripes that are eager to land your content business — ad agencies, PR agencies, “storytelling” agencies, PR agencies, content marketing shops, publishers’ in-house “content studios.” Service providers who are more than happy to create content for you are popping up like mushrooms after a strong rainfall.

The trend really picked up momentum a couple of years ago when, in the PR sector alone (just to pick one of these verticals at random) Weber Shandwick launched Mediaco  and Porter Novelli birthed PNConnect  In early 2014, Waggener Edstrom created Content360. The momentum is still going. FleishmanHillard unveiled FH ContentWorks, a global initiative. And at Cannes last week, the unlikely bedfellows of WPP’s Group SJR teamed with Snapchat, the Daily Mail to launch the latest and most questionably-named shop, Truffle Pig.

What should you look for when engaging a content marketing agency? There are many criteria to consider. Here are the primary ones.

Why do you want an outside agency?
Content creation? Technical expertise you lack in-house (e.g., video production or mobile app development)? Strategy development? There are myriad reasons — nailing yours down will help to limit and focus the range of candidates.

Industry/vertical expertise
Don’t expect them to be peers in the knowledge sector, but they should possess a fundamental understanding of your vertical and/or industry, audience, region, or other individual criteria that are essential to your strategy. At the very least, they should be great listeners who are genuinely interested in you, not just the job.

Strategy before tactics
If a documented content strategy doesn’t already exist, you need one in hand (or to commission one) before diving into tactics with an outside provider. If you need to create one, make sure you choose an agency with a proven capability for developing strategic frameworks.
Reminder: “You need a Facebook page” is not a strategy. It’s a tactic.

Are the cobbler’s children wearing shoes?
Does the company practice what it preaches? Look at its own content marketing: the quality, quantity, channels, and responses to it. Its dedication to both strategy and practice will be demonstrated if it is as dedicated to content marketing as it likely claims to be.

Relevant case studies
Request them and evaluate them. Discuss them with the firm. Even if they don’t reflect your industry or vertical, the shop should help you to understand how they relate to your issues.

Talk with current and former clients
References matter. A reluctance to put you in touch with former (or current) clients also speaks volumes.

What are the success criteria?
Any plan or proposal should be accompanied by success criteria and key performance indicators (KPIs). How will the plan be measured? What indicates success? Look for metrics that impact business results (e.g., increased leads, revenue, shorter sales cycle), not mere volume metrics (30,000 likes!).

This post originally published on iMedia

Content marketing: It’s certainly nothing new — it’s been with us since the dawn of marketing — but in digital channels, it’s rapidly changing and evolving. As content changes, so too do the policies, processes, priorities, and governance organizations require to effectively market with content. This applies not only to owned media channels — content has a strong gravitational pull that cannot be decoupled from earned and paid media.

Conversations these past few weeks about content with some preeminent brands and marketers have yielded insights worth sharing and pondering.

Content is the product

Susan Ridge, vice president of marketing and communications at Save the Children said in a recent meeting, “content is our product.” For most marketers, and for a significant number of brands, truer words were never spoken. As a non-profit charitable organization — and, for full disclosure, one of my clients — Save the Children doesn’t sell widgets or services. They craft stories and evoke emotions that ignite action, involvement, support and evangelism. What organization — even the ones that do have actual products — wouldn’t want the same of their customers, prospects, partners, and stakeholders?

Content achieves functionality

Twitter, Facebook, and Google now offer ‘Buy’ buttons on specific types of content, another indicator of the blurring of paid, owned, and earned media. This means content will increasingly be measured by its ability to convert, whether conversation (which is a desired action) is to bring customers in-store with inventory information, serve in an e-commerce capacity, or some other transaction of money and/or information.  Still, it’s important to bear in mind that selling widgets is not the only KPI for content. Far from it. As I’ve previously mentioned, marketers are far too uncreative when it comes to establishing business-oriented KPIs for content. Please combine transactional functionality with other business metrics that matter, and that have dollar value.

Vertical matters

As visual and audio-visual content continue to rise in prominence thanks to the pervasiveness of mobile, designers, content creators, and UX experts will rethink orientation. Most print and banner images are oriented — and intended to be “read” — horizontally. Phones and handheld devices flip, of course, but the most intuitive interface, particularly for content snacking, is vertical. Plan accordingly.

Concept above product

This is not a new notion, but as more brands pile on to content marketing, it is a strategy worth repeating. The brands most successful in content marketing don’t talk about themselves very much. Everything General Electric does, for example, ladders up to “Ecomagination.” IBM’s concept is “Smarter Planet.” What’s yours? It should inspire and command interest, as well as involvement. It’s what the intended audience cares about.

Plan everything, and prepare for the unforeseen

Competent content marketers don’t just maintain highly detailed editorial calendars, but those calendars incorporate workflow, governance, and process. They also know that even the most tightly-orchestrated plans require leeway. Save the Children has designated staff on-call evenings, weekends, and holidays. Ebola, the Nepal earthquakes — all are calls-to-action to the content teams. Julie Ryan, executive director of worldwide digital marketing at 20th Century Fox, has a great addition to this piece of advice: “Don’t delegate everything to your agency. Things will come up.”

Organize for content

Content is too big, too important, and too ongoing a need to leave to happenstance. Putting organizational structure around content initiatives across paid, owned, and earned media is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity. And it needs to be connected with the entirety of the enterprise. This week, Chris Murphy, managing editor of adidas’ newsroom, shared that he has no fewer than eight counterparts worldwide, and that the company moved media buyers to Portland (where he is based) so there can be closer collaboration between the media and content teams — in real-time.

On a personal note, I’m putting my money where my mouth is on that last point. This week I joined Teradata Marketing Applications as vice president of content marketing. I look forward to continuing to share insights and experience on content marketing and content strategy as a practitioner instead of as an analyst.

This post originally published on iMedia

Over recent years, I’ve dedicated most of my effort and inquiry into content marketing and content strategy.  I’ve written a book on the topic, as well as published more research in the field than any other individual.

Content is the distillation of all my professional passions. I’ve worked as a marketer, editor, journalist and analyst – all media, all the time. Since the beginning of digital I’ve been at the forefront of search, email, social media, digital advertising and digital publishing. All these (and more) couldn’t exist without content. All media, in fact, are containers for content.

I’ve also been studying how content works; how organizations plan, strategize and resource for it, and how content flows between paid, owned and earned media.

Today I put my brand-side hat on again and will begin to practice what I’ve been preaching. I’m proud to join Teradata Applications’ smart marketing team to oversee content for their global marketing operations.

Some friends and colleagues have asked what precipitated the move. Here are my reasons for making the change.

1. The opportunity to practice – and to put into action – the principles I’ve been studying and the analysis I’ve conducted.
2. Getting my hands dirty. As a strategic advisor I’ve been helping organizations from agencies to publishers to big-box retailers, financial institutions, healthcare and non-profits with their content strategies. Now I can be there for execution, too.
3. Going global – as a marketers, I was always involved with bringing brands across borders. While I speak internationally, the lion’s share of my work has been US-based since I crossed over from the brand side. Having lived and worked abroad extensively, I’m looking forward to taking up global initiatives again.
4. The position – organizations are only just beginning to organize for content. Few are a forward-looking as to put an executive in charge of content initiatives. I’ve researched this trend, and am excited to be one of the very first (of many to come) senior content marketing executives out in the wild.
5. The organization – I believe in Teradata’s product, and in its people. The company is consistently called out as one of the best in its field, most ethical, and most sustainable companies in the world.

So wish me luck, keep in touch, and I’ll keep you posted on insights from the inside.

Oh, and don’t think for a moment this move with move me out of the traffic. I fully intend (and am fully supported by my new employer) to keep speaking, writing, and staying thought-leader involved in all things digital marketing and media.

Nothing matters more in search engine optimization than content. Nothing.

And, while search visibility is a high priority for most brands (and as SEO providers rebrand themselves as “content marketing” companies), in a survey I conducted of more than 75 very senior marketing executives, most at Fortune 500 brands, SEO ranked dead last on their list of content marketing priorities.

Yet when it comes to having a well-optimized Web presence that’s visible to search engines, content is the alpha and omega of those efforts — more specifically, written content. Search engines can only crawl, index and understand text — not images, videos, podcasts, photos or any other type of graphic or multimedia content.

That’s not to say you can’t optimize non-text content marketing elements.

Keywords Are Key

Strong, optimized written copy is the most critical part of any SEO initiative.

But before the first sentence, tagline or headline are written, first venture into the heart of search optimization by identifying those keywords and key phrases your target audience is likely to use when searching for your website, articles, blog entries or other content initiatives, as well as for individual pages or specific pieces of content within a website or blog.

These are the words and phrases searchers use, not necessarily the ones you use back at the office when you’re talking with colleagues. Perhaps you’re a medical professional who bandies about terms such as “myocardial infraction.” The average Web searcher is more likely to seek information on “heart attack.”

The first step in the keyword research process is simply to brainstorm a list of the words and phrases a searcher might use to find your site or business.

The trick here is to be specific. Forget broad terms like “shoes.” Focus instead on “running shoes” or “wedding shoes” or “nike running shoes” or “black patent leather high-heeled pumps.” It can be helpful to ask outsiders such as friends, family, clients or colleagues what terms come to mind.

Once the initial list is in hand, the next step is to determine how useful these terms really are. That’s where keyword research tools come in handy. (Both Google and Bing offer free keyword research tools. They require you to first sign up for an advertiser account, but no worries — they don’t compel you to run ads to use the free tools.)

By running the list of proposed keywords through a keyword research tool, you’ll learn how many searchers are actually conducting searches for a given word or term every day, how many of those searches actually converted, and other analytical information. These tools can also make you aware of words not on the list, or synonyms.

This information should narrow down the selections to a final list of keywords. Plug these into a spreadsheet that helps you to visualize at a glance each word or phrase’s conversion rate, search volume, and competition. This list helps narrow your focus and concentrate on the most important terms for your content.

Don’t completely eliminate very broad terms such as “shoes” — this helps searchers get a general feel for the content. But it’s the very specific, targeted terms (“pink suede ballerina flats”) that attract the targeted traffic at the bottom of the purchase or conversion funnel.

The best keywords have:

• Strong relevance: terms for which you have content to support.
• Relatively high search volume: terms people actually search for.
• Relatively low competition: terms with a small number of search results.

Once you’ve determined which keywords to target, both for an overall content marketing initiative as well as for specific, smaller campaigns, it’s time to build content around those terms.

Bear in mind that search engines reward high-quality, original content more than virtually anything else out there. This is why content aggregation is fine (and relevant), but also why aggregation should almost always be regularly supplemented with well-written and researched original content.

A major way that search engine algorithms determine quality content is by examining how many links there are to specific pieces of content. Links can almost be considered “votes” vouching for quality content.

As far as search engines are concerned, this isn’t the most democratic process in the world: A link from a major metropolitan daily such as The New York Times is a higher-ranking vote than one from, say, a random tweet on Twitter. And links from sites that are semantically similar obviously make more sense — and therefore count more — than a link from something willy-nilly, say a site about politics linking to a page about Christmas cookie recipes.

One of the best strategies for getting people to link to you is, of course, to link to them.

Another approach is to follow relevant sites, blogs, online video channels and social-networking presences in your particular vertical and to comment on them, with appropriate and relevant links back to your own content.

Authoring articles and other types of content for third-party sites is also a valuable link strategy; most of these will have an “about the author” blurb that creates a link back to your own site or blog.

Internal links are also highly valuable, as links are what search engine spiders follow to find content in the first place. This is where site maps, tags, category pages, and well-considered taxonomies come in handy. They not only help visitors find relevant content, but help search engines find it, too.

Making content as sharable as possible is another valuable link-building strategy. It’s why so many sites contain those small icons encouraging visitors to “share on Facebook or LinkedIn or Digg or delicio.us,” or “tweet this.” Individually, social media links might not be as valuable as that New York Times citation, but many sites are seeing highly significant portions of their traffic originating from social media sites thanks to such efforts.

To this end, content authors should also be regarded as important link-building sources, particularly guest or third-party content contributors who can leverage links through their own websites or social networks to build links that benefit both parties.

Optimize Images And Multimedia Content

As stated above, search engines can’t “read” anything other than plain old text. They can’t “watch” a video, “listen” to an audio file, or assign a thousand words to a picture. So in order to optimize images and multimedia content for search, you have to create the words for the search engines.

What all these files types have in common is a need for clear, descriptive names or titles. These are not by all means the default name spit out by audio, video or image software — e.g., img230769.jpg. File names should be as descriptive as possible and match what the file represents.

If you’ve got a shot of an apple, for example, call it a “New York State Macintosh Apple” or “Ripe Harvest Orchard’s Macoun Apple,” not just plain old “apple.” For all a search engine knows, that “apple” could be a computer, or even a mobile phone.

Such descriptive names are not only found by search engine spiders, but often have the added advantage of appearing above, below or by the image itself, enhancing the user experience as well. Beyond any other optimization tactics, file names are accorded the most weight by search engines when it comes to ranking.

It should therefore come as no surprise that websites that regularly use multiple media files require a naming strategy or protocol to ensure consistency in the names used for graphics, audio or video.

After giving media files clear, descriptive names, don’t forget to add more descriptive text (or meta data) to the “alt” attribute in the file’s tag. Make it short and to the point, like the file name.

This is an opportunity to go a little bit broader. That New York State apple, for example, might be from Olsen’s Orchards, or have been a product of the 2011 harvest. Or perhaps this is the place to indicate it’s a sweet, crisp, delicious and nutritious apple.

Online merchants might want to use this field to add information such as a manufacturer, product category, or UPC code. Let’s say you sell DVDs online. The name of the media file, in this case a photo of the cover art, would obviously be the title of the film. The “alt” attribute might include the names of the actors, director, studio, genre, release year, and any miscellaneous information such as “Academy Award Nominee.”

Perhaps the media file in question is named “Lady Gaga on American Idol.” The meta data might refer to the specific contestant in the competition, the names of other judges, or list some of the singer’s credits so the video shows up on more general searches by her fans.

Keyword strategy, combined with content marketing goals, will inform what type of additional data are added in this section.

A caption adjacent to an image or media file helps search engines to “understand” what the file is about, because adjacent text helps search engines contextualize what they’ve found and determine relevancy. The goal here is to function much like a newspaper or a magazine by adding keyword-rich captions to files.

This way, even if someone’s been careless and named an image file “Bass.jpg,” the adjacent text and caption can help a search engine understand if the image depicts a fish, a musical instrument, or a particular brand of shoe. This approach can be broadened to optimize the entire page the media file resides on to further increase the depth of context and relevancy.

In the case of images, file type matters. Photos should be rendered in jpg format, logos should be gif files. The reason is simply that these are standard formats that search engines “expect” to find. Search engines assume a gif file has 256 colors, standard for rendering graphics such as logos, while photos are rendered in millions of colors.

And when using logo files it’s all-important that the file be named with whatever is in that logo. No search engine is smart enough to deduce a simple gif file represents the logo for Bank of America, Ikea or Acme Exterminating.

While it can be labor-intensive, posting an HTML transcript of the dialogue in an audio or video file goes extraordinarily far in terms of optimizing the actual content of these media files.

Given the nature of the medium, it’s best to keep these files short, optimally five minutes or less (particularly in the case of video). Cutting longer media files into shorter segments not only eases viewing, but also affords additional opportunities to optimize the content and to provide extra, spider-able links between episodes or installments. This is particularly helpful in the case of episodic videos or podcasts.

Quality Matters. So Does Specificity

It’s not just content that reigns supreme in SEO — it’s quality content. Google’s own published guidelines on the topic say in essence that anyone hoping to rank well in search should write for their own visitors and users, not for the search engines themselves. The company is putting its algorithms solidly behind this recommendation.

In recent years we’ve seen “content farms,” websites that churn out mountains of garbage content to game the search engines and rise to the top of organic search results, plummet, and in many cases even disappear from search rankings.

Creating a lot of garbage is, of course, cheap and easy. Creating — and sustaining the creation of — high-quality content requires thought and investment (particularly when everyone else is trying to do it, too).

There are plenty of good reasons to keep content interesting, informative, entertaining, engaging, witty, useful, well-written and well-presented. There are dozens of reasons to have a strong taxonomy, descriptive and compelling headlines, tags and other organizational attributes. Now you can add search engine optimization to that list, too.

You may be creating and publishing the best content on the Web — but what does that matter if no one can find it?

This post originally published on MarketingLand.

If you’ve been around digital marketing since the Pleistocene Epoch, which correlates roughly with the mid-1990s, you’ve doubtless noticed a trend. Whenever a new channel or medium appears — and appears to have staying power — marketers’ first instinct seems always to be: throw a teenager at it.

During the Web 1.0 era, businesses were literally hiring the senior vice president’s 15-year-old nephew to build the company website. After all, he knew HTML. When email was ascendant, the first email program managers were a mere notch above summer interns. Search, social media — the operative fallacy is that these channels are for the young, and therefore only the dewiest of candidates are qualified to tackle them. The kernel of truth inside that fallacy is that newer channels are poorly understood, marketers (and the C-suite) are reluctant to allocate budget, so they take baby steps — with babies – and staff that may have tactical proficiency but are lacking in business experience, a strategic approach, an understanding of business goals, and overall maturity.

Now that web development, email, search, and social have developed into fully-fledged disciplines, they often have their own departments, staff, and oversight.

Content marketing? Not yet. Although without content there can be no paid, owned, or earned media, content doesn’t have a formal home in most organizations. Heck, 70 percent of organizations that practice content marketing don’t have a documented content strategy (according to my research, and corroborated by numerous other surveys). Without a formal strategy, there is rarely a budget, an org chart, or an infrastructure for content.

And this gives rise to another wave of amateurism. Too many organizations still subscribe to the “hire an unemployed journalist” school of content marketing. The reasoning is that this low-rent ink-stained scribe can churn out blog posts at a regular cadence, perhaps even thought-leadership pieces and some marketing copy.

I’ve got nothing against journalists — having been one myself for many years — but literacy and a flair for writing isn’t enough. This “content associate” (as these positions are often called) hasn’t been trained in marketing and too often doesn’t understand the core business they’re working for. Ideas such as personas and brand voice are alien to them. Recently, I was regaled with the story of a meal-delivery start-up whose in-house blogger not only wasn’t producing copy, but flat out confessed to having little interest in food, dining, or nutrition as a topic.

Even those organizations lucky enough to land talented, interested writers aren’t going the distance. Content isn’t text alone. Increasingly, it’s visual, and audio-visual. It requires the talents of editors, videographers, and graphic designers. If content is embedded in or reliant on apps, it can also require developers. The content price tag has just shot up considerably from that out of work journalist, hasn’t it?

Business will soon leave the era of content managed by barely-past-their-teens practitioners. Content will be formalized and institutionalized. Organizations are on the verge of realizing no content equals no email, no search, no website, no social media, no PR, and no advertising. All these are channels and containers for content.

Content is growing up. Budgets and organizational structure must and will rise accordingly.

This post originally published on iMedia

Organizations are finally getting the memo: They need a clear, cogent, documented and well-communicated content strategy to govern their content marketing efforts.

My research (at Altimeter Group), corroborated by that of several other studies, indicates that currently 70 percent of companies practicing content marketing lack a documented strategy. But thankfully, this is slowly changing as the need to align content with actual goals, processes and procedures comes into focus.

What are the steps to outlining that documented strategy? The following is a list of my asks the moment I’m brought into an organization to help them develop a content strategy road map.

The first, and most critical part, is goals. What is content trying to achieve? What are the business reasons for creating and publishing content, and how are these goals aligned to broader company priorities?

This critical first step is determining the big “Why” of content. Without the why, there can be no strategy.

Part 2 may be secondary, but it’s of equal importance. It answers the question “How?” People, process, governance, tools, technologies, assets — all of these and more must be present and accounted for, aligned and communicated to numerous stakeholders. How is ongoing, but adheres to a broad procedural schema.

In order to determine Why and get to the How, these are my “Day One” requests when beginning a content strategy engagement.

List Of Tools & Technologies

What tools do you use to create content? To publish it? To store, archive, share and retrieve it? To optimize and measure it? What other tools do these tools have to play nice with?

This list might include Web or social analytics tools, SEO or SEM software, CRM solutions, marketing automation, even intranets and telephony software.

No tool or technology is an island anymore, so a holistic, 360-degree consideration of technology — what’s used today and what’s planned for deployment in the future — is essential.

Content Audit

A content audit is a painstaking, exacting exercise that many would be only too happy to skip. But you can’t.

If you don’t know where you are, you can’t chart the journey forward. A content audit is both a quantitative and, more importantly, a qualitative analysis of all the content for which your organization is responsible.

In order to conduct an audit, you’ll need a list of all your public-facing online properties, from websites to social media. When I conduct an audit I want to see your email marketing, your ad campaigns. I even (this surprises many of my clients) want to examine offline collateral, perhaps that big annual report or research study undertaken annually or semiannually.

It’s not enough to just have at the content itself. I’ll also request access to analytics software (Web, social, email, and so on). The purpose of an audit isn’t just to evaluate whether or not I like your content. I want to see if it’s being seen, found, used, shared and amplified — or not.

A good audit (they vary by purpose and type of engagement) is a 50-point diagnostic. They’re very deep and reveal often-surprising insights, not just about the content itself, but also requirements for the processes and technologies to create and sustain the flow of content. The goal is to define gaps and problems, as well as to identify strengths, and develop specific recommendations for improvement.

Stakeholder Interviews

The stakeholder interview is the most interesting part of developing a content strategy.

I’ll ask for a list of 10 to 15 stakeholders for in-depth interviews on content needs. What are their goals? Their wants and needs? Their vision of process? It’s usually up to my client to identify the stakeholders I’ll interview, but I don’t want all of them to be senior executives. I also want to speak with the techies, the creatives and tacticians to get a pragmatic, from-the-trenches perspective.

I don’t want to interview groups larger than two to three people (otherwise some will clam up), and I don’t want a senior executive present at all my conversations (self-censorship can be an issue).

While stakeholder interviews aren’t a democratic process, really asking people what they want and need around content can be incredibly revealing, and unveil very interesting levels of consensus.

There are, of course, other asks dependent on the size, scope and purpose of a content engagement strategy. But for anyone approaching their organization as a client in need of a content strategy, these three starting points are mandatory.

This post originally published on MarketingLand