Great content marketing can and should incorporate personality! Who sells more Sports Illustrated issues: Payton Manning or Kate Upton?

No contest it’s Kate. Not to be chauvinistic ladies, just trying to make a point. Peyton has the gravitas but Kate “delivers” a level of brand cachet at least in her fifteen minutes of fame. #justsaying

Visual is  driving poor old text down the road.

That’s  not always a good thing for how quality content is created, viewed and shared - images are moving front and center as content drivers.

  Content Nirvana for brands in need of  Inspiration and Buzz

• Attractive content, visual or otherwise differentiates your brand, understand how to create and share compelling content: text, images, videos, infographics, blog posts, web site copy that grabs your targeted demographic.
• Think brand selfies. Your content messaging has to be amplified to be read and “heard” in today’s smartphone driven world. Google: “com bubble” the noise level is back.
• Your challenge brands is getting heard above the “selfie twerking din” that rules much of social media marketing, especially for businesses marketing to consumers.
• Effective content marketing requires a rinse and repeat strategy.
• Content best practices is morphing into two silos (you need both): smartphone snackable, image driven (think souffle), short form content and longer form content (1-5K Words); see the Huff Po for the former and the NY Times (somewhat) for the latter.
• Major social media platforms that were once textual are shifting to image based: see LinkedIn’s almost “instagramish” feeds and Twitter’s new image focus in the stream and via  their redesigned home page for accounts.
• Hashtags are ubiquitous and represent new a new “short form” way to drive your brand. Look at the success AMC has had using hashtags to fuel social chatter both for shows and episodes: #breakingbad #littlekid #walkingdead
• Personality defines your business brand. “You brought a Beatle home to meet your “Mum” but “you” wanted to spend the night with a member of the Stones.
• Be brand melodic with a “Yesterday” muse or “Let’s Spend the Night Together” - #standforsomething
• SEO is somewhat Dead in the Road (other than wonky on page work) and content shared across the social web is going to do a lot more for your brand vs. hiring someone offshore to do a lot of backlinking. Create an Editorial Calendar and blog away.

Seven Key Metrics for Smart Content Marketing

1. Stellar curated content still drives engagement: an editorial calendar is just a horizontal tool.
2. Mobile usage is driving 30-50% of content “consumption” (be mobile savvy) but “brand stories” may drive significantly more engagement: mix and match the size of your content (long or short form).
3. Content syndication is increasingly more important in today’s “technology drenched’ world: use rinse and repeat cycles to reach today’s distracted consumer and professional.
4. Personalty still drives content engagement for B2B and B2C brands and it’s becoming increasingly more important to use imagery that gets attention in the marketplace. Note: LinkedIn’s move to an image centric feed.
5. Content Measurement is Critical: have a finite grasp of these ROI drivers: Unique Visitors, Page Views, Return Visits, Time on Site, Bounce Rate, Engagement/Virality (ReTweets, Shares, Likes, Comments), Revenue or Lead Generation.
6. Mix and match “snackable” short form content (images, video, infographics) with “evergreen” high value content to drive brand engagement, incremental traffic and revenue.
7. Build in cross platform marketing on all top tier platforms: Tumblr, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook using plugin to automatically “push” content to other platforms or pure play content syndication cloud based services.
8. Less is more in some cases: remember 30-50% of traffic is via Smartphones and these prosumers have short attention spans.

Content ROI Variables

• Clickthrough traffic
• Social Engagement
• Brand development (softer measurement)
• Lead generation via Sales Funnel
• Shared and Repurposed elsewhere (viral, mentioned, commented, followed liked, retweeted)
• Clickthrough revenue generation

Content is No Longer Static

• Content is anything and anywhere: Text, Images, Video, Audio, Comments, Reviews
• Social conversations about your Brand have to be monitored.
• Platforms Choices are many and evolving quickly: Web Site, Blogs, Wikis, discussion groups, SllideShare, Tumblr, Snapchat, Instagram, Vine, YouTube
• Social Platforms have unique technical challenges and the features and functions change quickly.
• Celebrities and others are constantly pushing the “limits” of content being shared - that’s not a good thing from a pure content perspective.
• Your competing with billions of pages of content and the volume is increasing.
• Businesses are aggressively deploying a product marketing strategy that encompasses no frills brands along side their traditional branded products: getting real world and “mental” shelf space is challenging.
• All brands are by necessity of changes in the digital landscape forced to become publishers on some scale.

Key Takeways for Content Marketers

• Recognize your customer is untethered from your brand; one in five shoppers never left their couches in the most recent holiday shopping seasn. Your goods and service may be somewhat anonymous to them or the purchases decision was made even prior to visiting your web site.
• Understand who your customer is in start-up language that’s known as a brand persona. In the ancient days it was referred to as a customer demographic, although some geeks will disagree with our labeling
• Niche in when/where you can to make your brand or business stand out
• Use an editorial calendar to impart some discipline and focus across all you marketing efforts. Get a sample editorial calendar here (no reg just download).
• Read more and steal knowledge when/where you can find it.
• Be a confident brand but not arrogant. We all want answers from smart people.
• Push boundaries when/where you can. We can’t tell you what these are: ask your customer.
• Recognize we are moving into an autonomous and automatic buying cycle for most consumers: that’s not all bad, it levels the playing field for many smaller brands. You can move faster than many bigger competitors, which is a distinct advantage in a market that has commerce market moving faster than any on record.
• Getting discovered in this new digital age is core anchor for your marketing processes: “live” and “be” where your customers are with a targeted social strategy, content marketing efforts, paid media, newsletter marketing, lead gen on any/all targeted social platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.
• We live in a tech drenched world and technical expertise is a must for savvy content marketers encompassing: platforms, syndication, measurement, lead gen integration, landing page functionality and connectivity.
• Lines are blurring between organic content created in house and “native advertising content - noise levels are unprecedented for content marketers.

Our Executive Summary:  attractive/sexy content differentiates your brand,  you gotta amplify your content to be heard, create snackable (short form) and long form content, use hashtags across all content, incorporate some personality with your content marketing strategy. Remember: #sexsells - you heard it here first right? #tonugueincheek