Keeping it Real with Content Marketing: Why Integrity, Storytelling & Creativity Reign Supreme

Marketing is often seen as a game. A game in which the marketers are the strategists and the customers are the pawns. Unfortunately, that is a game in which nobody wins. Marketers may feel a quick rush due to their success but customers that feel duped or mislead will surely, and quickly spread news of foul marketing practices.

There is no shortcut to providing value to customers through your marketing. In fact, now more than ever self-directed buyers are relying on the content they read online to lead their purchasing decisions and if something “feels fishy” they’ll quickly move on to a more reputable source.
Because of the amount of content being created today, that also means that not only integrity, but creativity and storytelling are an incredibly important part of creating content that connects your customers to your brand.

At the end of the day, customers want to trust you and feel that the service or solution that you’re offering will help them stand out. Below are some examples of how you can keep it real with your content marketing to create a better user experience.

Help Your Customers See Themselves in the Content

The content that you create shouldn’t just be about your brand and what you offer. Instead, your customers should be able to see themselves in the story that you are telling through content. How can this be accomplished?

Two of the best ways are through customer stories and case studies.

Customer stories can be incredibly impactful if done well. This type of content works two-fold. First, your current customers often get excited at the prospect of sharing their personal story and therefore creating an even deeper bond with your brand. Second, studies have shown that 92% of people trust recommendations from individuals over brands which means that your prospective customers are likely to connect with these stories.

Tesla for example, has an entire section of their website dedicated to Customer Stories. These stories are written by their customers and include photos as well as insights into their own journey with their Tesla car.

Their YouTube channel also contains videos of their customer’s sometimes moving and sometimes humorous stories.

Case Studies can also be a great way to create content that incorporates storytelling and builds trust. A good case study will not focus only on tactics,, but more so how your brand helped a company or individual solve a problem.

The problems and needs of your current customers will be the most telling sign of what your prospective customers are looking for. So, to help attract new customers you need to showcase how you’ve been able to help other companies/individuals solve similar problems.
Take for instance this case study from our team that focuses on a strategy that helped a B2C company increase conversion rates by 129%.

Other forms of content beyond customer stories and case studies can also help support the goal of helping your customers see themselves in your content. Website copy, blog posts, content assets, social messaging and advertisements should all be focused on customer need first, and what you’re trying to sell after.

Write Like a Human Speaking to Humans

There is no denying that good SEO is still a very important part of creating great content. However, stuffing your content with keywords you want to rank for may get people to your site initially, it won’t keep them there or create a good experience.

Instead, time is better spent conducting research to see what questions customers are asking and how they are being phrased. That information can then be used to inform how you go about incorporating key search phrases in a way that is natural and pleasant to read.

B2B marketers have traditionally struggled to humanize their content. Much of the B2B content in existence today focuses purely on the business case for why the VP, CEO, etc. needs the product or solution that they are selling. Many have been able to understand and communicate the business problem and business need, but not the need of the individual actually consuming the content.
This is a big opportunity for B2B (and yes, even B2C) marketers to think a little bit deeper about the actual people behind the personas and begin developing content that will inspire and move them as a person, not a job title.

Open Up & Share

It doesn’t matter if you’re asking people to spend $50 or $50,000, you are asking them to trust that investing their money with your brand will be of a benefit to them. There are often three stories that people tell about their company.

1. The one that they tell to prospective customers online, in-person or on the phone.
2. The one that they tell at cocktail parties with their friends.
3. The real story.

In an effort to build credibility, many companies will tell the very dry and highly edited version of how they came to be, what they offer and what they can do to help customers like the ones they’re trying to reach. Unfortunately, when all of the bad or less than ideal is edited out of the story, it can make it harder for prospects to connect with the teams that work there.

Not every company started with millions of dollars of funding and many had to hustle and work their asses off to get where they are today. Your ability to tell that story in a way that inspires confidence (ie: here is what you learned from those experiences), can actually build more credibility with prospects and connect them tighter to your brand.

Help Customers Visualize the Message

An essential part of learning starting as a young child all the way through college is with the help of visual aids. When you’re younger, the images are a much larger focal point than the words because they are a way to help you discover what those words mean. As you get older, visual queues are still used to help explain more complex ideas and processes.

I’m sorry to be the one to tell you but those visual aids don’t stop being useful when you graduate. In fact, with the monstrous amount of content that is being created today, compelling visuals need to be a staple of your content marketing efforts to stand out in the crowd.

Visual elements should be included in everything from your blog posts, to larger content assets and social messages.

When is scrolling through their Twitter feed trying to uncover some tidbits to read on-the-go, what do you think will stand out to them? Will it be the precisely 140 character tweet or the message that has the great picture attached? I urge you to go through your own Twitter feed (as I just did) and make note of what stands out to you most.

This sort of experiment just goes to show that while what you say is incredibly important, what you show people will often be what catches their eye and draws them in.

Be Real, Be Entertaining, Be Useful & Be Creative

There are ways to create compelling content that doesn’t play a game with your customers or deceive them in any way. If you can follow the principles above, you are on the path to creating a better experience and stronger bond between your brand and your customers.
Since we are all consumers in some way or another, what are some examples of brands following these principles that have stood out to you?

Header image via Shutterstock

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How to Decide If You Should Go Wide or Deep with Your Content

Creating effective content is hard. I don’t want to deter you from crafting content for your business, but you need to set goals for everything you create.

Whether you produce content that is timely or evergreen, audio or text, knowing your goals will ensure you maximize the return on your time and resources invested in content marketing.

Each piece of content needs to be placed into one of two categories: wide or deep.

And each category has one specific goal:

• Wide content attracts new audience members.
• Deep content strengthens relationships with your existing audience members.

An effective content marketing strategy uses both wide and deep content, but an individual piece of content shouldn’t try to meet both goals.

Let’s explore each type of content goal.

Going wide with your content

When you create a piece of wide content, you attempt to reach the most readers, listeners, and customers as possible. In short, going wide is how to use content to find customers.

Wide content is not about immediate results. Instead, it positions your net to continually find new people who fill the top of your funnel.

You will notice a pattern with wide content: it’s perfect for repurposing. With a little planning and forethought, you will be able to repurpose wide content into different formats to reach a broader audience.

SEO helps you go wide

The foundation of all wide content is built upon SEO, and Google is a top source of new traffic and visitors to websites.

Because of this, we need to consistently create useful and relevant content for our website visitors. It’s an excellent first step for all wide content pieces.

Our net spreads even further when people link to and share remarkable wide content.

Wide content and podcasting

With the recent rise in popularity of podcasting, content creators should utilize the reach of audio. Think of iTunes the same way you think of Google: it’s a massive search engine that helps your audience find you.

Starting a podcast does not have to be a daunting task. You just need the right platform.

In fact, podcasting is an excellent way to repurpose popular content from your website. If an article has been popular as a written piece, with minor alterations to the text, you may be sitting on a great podcast episode or two.

Cast your proven content far and wide, and craft audio content as you would any other content you publish on your website:

• Write engaging headlines for titles.
• Provide keyword-rich show notes.
• Keep a consistent publishing schedule. 

Infographics: a wide content powerhouse

Due to their visual nature, infographics tend to receive more social sharing than audio or text content. More sharing means a wider reach.

Infographics allow you to share useful and insightful information. The medium is easy to consume and has the ability to make your content stand out in a sea of competition for attention. 

Creating infographics doesn't have to be difficult. The key to a successful infographic is excellent content, coupled with beautiful and clear design.

You want to create infographics based on topics and information that have already proven to be popular in a written or audio context.

Take what has worked and extend its reach even wider with a well-made infographic.

Going deep with your content

When creating wide content, your goal is to reach as many potential readers, listeners, and customers as possible — but you shouldn’t try to reach everyone.

Always keep your focus on your perfect customer.

Going deep with your content nourishes and strengthens your relationships with those people you attracted with your wide content.

Deep content moves people from cold audience members to warm audience members, and then to customers. It’s like the second date and beyond with your audience.

How to use email to go deep

For years, people have been touting the death of email. Yet, to this day, email is the most powerful tool we have in our arsenal as content marketers.

There is no better way to deepen our relationships with our audience members than through access to their inboxes. 

Email content, when done right, is powerful value exchange. You’re able to provide multiple points of value to your audience in exchange for their attention.

You could:

• Write a newsletter
• Curate content your audience will love 
• Craft a useful email autoresponder sequence. 

All deep content marketing strategies need to include email marketing.

Can social media be deep?

Social media is often viewed as a wide content vehicle, but when you think about it this way, you overlook its deepest value. 

For example, think about why you follow someone on Twitter. Are you there to see an endless stream of promotion, or are you looking for a behind-the-scenes view?

Of course, social media can and should be used to promote your content, but without interesting personal insights mixed into it, your social media presence will flounder rather than flourish.

Deep diving with Periscope

Periscope, which is owned by Twitter, is the new media darling of the day. It’s also an excellent tool for going deep with your audience.

Periscope is a live streaming platform and app that easily enables you to stream unedited video to your audience.

Due to the platform’s live environment, your audience gets to learn from you in an unfiltered way. For some content creators, the idea of live video that can’t be polished is off-putting.

But this is the very reason why the platform is fast becoming a personal branding game-changer. It’s an example of deep relationship building at its finest.

Deep content using Blab.IM

Blab is another great tool for going deep with your audience. The platform is similar to a webinar, but it’s a public and open setting.

Blab does allow you to pause recordings, so you can create a slightly more polished piece of content than with Periscope. But your live stream never stops, so your live audience gets to look deeper into how you work and act.

You can hold Q&A sessions with your audience in a casual and useful setting without the formality of a traditional webinar setup.

Plus, as a host, your barriers to entry are low. It’s simple to set up and share with your audience.

Clarify your content goals by going wide or deep

As with everything in your business, crafting content without specific goals will diminish both the short-term and long-term benefits of the work you are putting in today.

As a bonus, there is often an overlap between content created to go wide and content created to go deep.

For example, your goal may be to go deep, but the same content may also help you find new audience members. Remember that this is a side benefit and shouldn’t be confused with your original goal.

Always focus on one type of goal for each piece of content you create.

Your goal is to either find new audience members or form deeper connections with existing audience members.

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How to Choose the Right Content Marketing Software

It’s not easy choosing the right software for your content marketing efforts. Luckily for you, I’m here to help.

The reason it’s so hard is that there are so many requirements for an effective content marketing strategy. While there have been plenty of attempts to make sense of all the different software choices that are available to you, they tend to confuse and daunt more than help.

Take, for example, marketing software “landscape” diagrams like this that showcase endless logos in random buckets of functionality—great for gaining a sense of the vast number of options, but oversimplified for the purpose of making choices. These diagrams only tell you that there are many, many… many software solutions out there, all vying for their place in this incredibly fast-growing movement called “content marketing.”

Given their desire to categorize everything on a level playing field, these diagrams tend to force each logo into a single bucket of functionality which results in pigeonholing every vendor as a “point solution” that does only one thing well. Not every software vendor is a point solution. Many touch on a variety of functions and processes across marketing as a whole, while others truly do focus on one small piece of the puzzle.

Other attempts, like this one, only hit one note of what makes software “content marketing” software: how many integrations it provides to other software vendors. Otherwise, it uses signals like how many social media followers that vendor has. That may help you determine if a vendor is established, but that’s about it. It’s a one-dimensional assessment much like the landscape diagram.

In order to uncover the right solution, we must first break this mold and give content marketing the more accurate, thoughtful, three-dimensional perspective it deserves.

After all, in the world of marketing:

“Content isn’t King, it’s the Kingdom.” – Lee Odden

It’s also important to realize what’s been happening in digital marketing as a whole. It has evolved. Although we’ve been using social media managementsoftware for a decade and marketing automation platforms for years, we continue to use those solutions—just more so for marketing content than ever before. As a result, those solutions are now part of an effective content marketing strategy.

When content marketing gets described, it somehow gets placed beside these other marketing functions as if it’s the new kid on the block, when in reality, it is the new umbrella under which those solutions sit.

Redefine Your Content Marketing Process

To choose software for content marketing, we have to be able to articulate what it’s going to do for us. I’ve found the continuous process of marketing content to be defined most frequently as a three-pillar system:

“Creation” is the process of, well, creating content. “Distribution” is how you get eyeballs to your content, and “Insights” means the measurement and reporting on those eyeballs.

But this is a rather flawed perception. Where in this flow have we figured out how this content will actually be presented or managed? Where is lead generation taking place? What is actually getting distributed on social media?

At Uberflip, we’ve been touting a resolution to this misperception for some time. Behold: the fourth pillar!

“Experience” is the way in which content is consumed, the destination of what is being distributed, and where lead generation takes place.

Your content experience is the very essence of how your incredible content is packaged for your audience to devour. Without a great experience, you’re serving piña coladas in a garbage dump instead of on a sandy beach, you’reriding a tricycle instead of a four wheeler, you’re playing a 3D movie on a small screen without providing 3D glasses, you’re… well, you get the point.

The reason content marketing “experience” has been ignored for so long may lie directly in how our content distribution methods have evolved. One example of this is email. For over 15 years, we’ve primarily been sending our prospects content via email. In the early days, this content included newsletters right in the body of the email, PDFs, and sometimes even video files as an attachment.

Solutions like YouTube (a better video “experience”) allowed us to link out to that video content and use the email only as a call-to-action. Video is the most obvious example, but if you attach a PowerPoint file today instead of using a solution like SlideShare, or a PDF instead of using a Flipbook provider like Uberflip, you’re not only serving up a poor user experience—you’re missing out on user metrics and an opportunity to continue the content journey.

I’m not knocking email. Email has been around a long time, and it’s not going anywhere.

But today, email is most effectively used as a call-to-action that drives people to content experiences on the web. It’s one of several distribution channels for effective content marketing.

All that said, content experiences are by no means a new idea. We’ve been building out WordPress sites for over a decade! But while CMS’s like WordPress are great for your website and blogs, all those other forms of content (e.g., videos) can either be shoehorned into blog posts or consumed on non-owned experiences like YouTube.

And then of course there’s the rise of mobile. If you’re sending visitors to non-optimized experiences for their screen size, you may as well have a big “goodbye” as your headline, as that’s all they’re going to read.

Content Marketing is Not Flat

The reality is that by forcing content marketing into four linear pillars, we’re only scratching the surface, and we’re really no better off than with those diagrams I scorned earlier. Each of these pillars is more complicated—more three-dimensional. They look more like this:

What I’ve done here is further break down each pillar of content marketing into its parts. These are simply more refined pillars, or “buckets”—most of which can be further refined if we felt compelled.

For example, you could chop “experience > management” into smaller buckets like traditional “CMS’s” (think WordPress), “landing pages” (think Unbounce), “content hubs” (think Uberflip) and even “video players” (think Wistia or Vidyard).

You could also mix in content recommendation engines like BrightInfo and personalization software like Optimizely that enhance or improve those experiences, or data enrichment software like DemandBase or ReachForce to fill in the information gaps on your leads. There are numerous platforms and point solutions that touch or “own” a portion of content experience management, much like there are ones that touch or own other buckets within the other pillars.

Using this model allows us to paint different solutions—whether point or platform—with more than one tone. What I mean by that is that many software vendors will easily fit in more than one bucket. Imagine those “landscape” diagrams where each logo got recognized for all the buckets of functionality it satisfied. Wouldn’t that be a better way to understand how software vendors participate in content marketing? Wouldn’t that make it easier to choose the right vendor?

Doing so would allow us to break out of the mental box we’ve created and recognize that even social media management, SEO software, and marketing automation platforms are all a part of content marketing.

Marketing Automation’s Role in Content Marketing

Marketing automation platforms, which predominantly serve as sophisticated email marketing solutions, can be thought of as a point solution (albeit a mature one) within the distribution pillar.

Even though these platforms have been around long before the recent rise of content marketing, it’s because of the aforementioned evolution of email marketing that they’ve squarely in the mix of effective content marketing.

Marketing automation is rather limited without a healthy supply of contacts, or more bluntly, email addresses. And it goes without saying that the most effective way to build your distribution list these days is through effective content marketing.

Social Media Management’s Role in Content Marketing

Social media sites like Twitter and YouTube, in combination with the vast number of software vendors that help manage those channels (think Hootsuite, Sprinklr, or Buffer), are ultimately helping us distribute content. They’re distribution channels and channel management software.

Whether you’re marketing a new whitepaper or just trying to grow your following, if you’re into content marketing, then you’re doing both of those things squarely with the intent of leveraging those channels for your content marketing efforts.

Social media is a distribution channel for marketing content.

SEO’s Role in Content Marketing

Gone are the days of keyword stuffing, but SEO is still incredibly important to your content marketing efforts.

Why? Because landing on the first page of Google results will send more eyeballs to your content. SEO is your gateway to a very important distribution channel: organic search.

That said, be careful not to overvalue SEO. SEO serves only one of many distribution channels, where distribution is one of many pillars you need to satisfy.

Why Content Marketing Platforms Matter

This is one of those tricky situations where you have to call a spade a spade. There are a number of established software vendors (think Newscred or Kapost) that are considered to be “content marketing platforms.” The similarity among all these vendors is their strength in the first pillar: creation.

These platforms all have one or more elements in common: They’re either a place to purchase content (marketplaces), they help with ideation (what should I write about), they help with curation (where can I collect existing content from), or they help with workflow (how do I get my authors/creators working efficiently).

While they all tackle a portion of the first pillar, they certainly don’t handle all of content marketing. They certainly don’t also include marketing automation functionality, social media management, SEO software, experience management, deep analytics and insights, and so on and so on… it’s simply impossible for one solution or platform to do it all.

There’s nothing new about the process of content marketing. It’s a 100-year-old practice that recently got fitted with a shiny new title and place to be practiced: enterprise.

Build an Integration Content Marketing Software Solution

When it comes to software vendors, there are no true content marketing software providers—for the same reason there’s no “internet software.” There are only solutions that satisfy a small or large part of the methodology and techniques of content marketing.

You could argue that Oracle, Salesforce, and the like will continue to acquire software to build their respective “marketing suite” with the hopes of satisfying all those pillars and their buckets. But those won’t fare well in the long run. Modern marketers like you will want to choose vendors and solutions that are best-in-class for their respective function, rather than buying into false hopes of all-in-one suites. (highlight to tweet)

With integration solutions like Zapier and Cloud Elements, the connectivity of marketing software vendors just keeps getting tighter, and in a sense commoditizing the notion of “a suite.” At Uberflip, for example, we’ve been hyper-focused on building out our new API in order to enable not only our customers but also other vendors to build integrations in and out of our platform.

Tightly integrating solutions is the only way marketers will meet the demands and best practices of an effective content marketing strategy.

As the marketing software landscape continues to explode with new offerings, you will have even more choice when building your technology stack. As you evaluate vendors, it’s important to ask how each satisfies specific requirements, and how well it integrates with the rest of your stack.

At the end of the day, it won’t be a single suite that dominates content marketing, but rather infinite permutations of marketing technology stacks that organizations like yours build to meet your unique needs.

It’s up to you to build your content marketing software stack. Which pieces will you choose?

Editor’s Note: A version of this article originally appeared on Uberflip’s Hub.

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6 Scientific Strategies to Improve Your Content With Visuals

“Why isn’t anyone reading or sharing my stuff?” If you’ve ever produced content for the web, you’ve probably asked yourself this question at one point or another. Your content’s “findability” is often a big part of this equation, but that’s not what I’m going to focus on today.

Another likely contributor to this problem is a lack of understanding (on the part of content producers) about how our brains process information.

I’ve always been fascinated with neuroscience, and decades of research have led to a stronger understanding of how our brains have evolved to do things efficiently. When we encounter new information, the primitive parts (the reptilian or “crocodile” brain and the limbic brain) kick in first to answer questions like, “Can I eat this?” and, “Is this a threat to my survival?” If the answer isn’t that simple, the primitive brain will decide whether to kick the new information up to the neocortex, which handles such processes as human language and abstract thought.

That’s where visuals in your content come into play. You can’t go right for the neocortex and expect good results; you have to catch the attention of the primitive brain first.

Seeing Is Believing

Imagine you’re searching the web, and you come across a page with giant blocks of text and no images. Within nanoseconds, your crocodile brain says, “Whoa, this is going to be a painful read.” It then shuts down the desire to read the page because there’s nothing there that commands your immediate attention.

Now, if that same page has a picture of a delicious chocolate cake or a group of attractive people, your primitive brain perks up to see what’s going on. Images like these speak to primal desires. To grab the most attention for your content, start by stimulating the primitive parts of the brain.

One of my favorite books on this subject, Neuro Web Design by Susan Weinschenk, details the story of a kitchen remodeling company trying to make a good ad. The company had no shortage of great photos to showcase the amazing work it had done in the past, but the ads still weren’t succeeding like company leaders wanted.

With the help of Weinschenk’s research, the company decided to stage one of its kitchen photos in an environment that included a young, attractive couple in bathrobes cooking up a post-sex snack together. The ad became an instant success. The attractive couple grabbed the attention of the primitive brain, and the entire visual moved viewers to desire that kitchen experience.

Think of your target audience’s neocortices as a club and their primitive brains as the bouncers. Visuals are your VIP pass4. (highlight to tweet) Without good visuals, you’ll usually find yourself on the outside looking in.

Incorporating Visuals Into Content

Of course, you can’t just slap any visual into your content and expect results. You want visual content to support the text and vice versa. Try these strategies to make sure you’re using visual aids to their fullest potential.

Stay Relevant

Don’t just put a picture of a juicy hamburger on the page if you want to promote a new concrete mixer. Spend some time thinking about how to express your main points with an engaging graphic. Research the successful posts on both your topic and your intended site for posting, and take your cues from what you see presented there.

Keep It Simple

Once you think about what kind of images you want for your piece, consider ways to make them appeal to the primitive brain. Could you show a group of attractive people in this setting? Think about how to make your audience associate with your visuals in a visceral yet positive way1.

Get a Professional

Once you have your idea in place, hire someone who has the skills necessary to provide a quality product. Get a graphic designer or other professional who is well-versed in the concepts of neuromarketing and visual storytelling.

Coordinate and Collaborate

To get all of your content working together, you need your people working together. Encourage your writers and visual artists to collaborate throughout the process instead of letting them work separately until the end.

Fit the Medium

A blog may not need more than a couple of pictures, while a professional presentation requires clean-looking charts and graphics. Choose visuals appropriate to the setting in which you want to present them. Those crisp, mathematical charts may win over investors, but on most general-interest blogs, they’ll just look like more noise for your audience’s crocodile brains to ignore.

Don’t Overload

A few visuals bring attention to your content, but too many visuals make it hard to digest. Even worse, if you go overboard on images, people might have trouble loading the page and close the tab before they ever read what you have to say.

Remember: Your visuals should simultaneously grab your readers’ attention and further the story you want to tell. Appeal to the crocodile brain with catchy images, then hold the attention of the neocortex by providing quality content. If you can do that, your content will finally get the attention it deserves.

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