The Content Marketers Playbook Brand Awareness Dubin actually did it. He created a single piece of content, and suddenly, millions of people knew about his business. Better yet, that awareness led to revenue. Within two days, Dollar Shave Club had more than 12,000 orders. (The response was so overwhelming that it crashed the company website) The companys annual revenue rose millions year after year. And in 2017, Unilever bought it for $1 billion. Thats quite the fairy tale, right? Well, Dollar Shave Clubs origin story is a little more complex than it seems at first glance. The brands success was about more than just going viral or getting lucky. Like other companies that have mastered content marketing, Dollar Shave Club had a clear mission, audience research, a unique voice, and high-quality storytelling. Content marketers in all industries can learn from this example. You dont need an unlimited budget or a team of 80 to drive business results (although more resources is always nice.) But what you do need is an understanding of the different components thatll set your company up for content marketing success.Brand Awareness & Thought Leadership 5 A BRAND IS JUST THE SUM OF ALL INTERACTIONS someone has with a company. Every purchase, TV commercial, customer service call, and tweet contributes to the relationship, whether good or bad. Over the past decade, content marketing has become one of the primary ways brands build those relationships. If you want to drive awareness, trust, and loyalty, great storytelling is much more effective than intrusive ads or overt promotion. Engaging the right audience starts with a basic question: How are you going to help someone? II. A Model for SuccessBrand Awareness & Thought Leadership 6 As Joe Lazauskas, our director of content strategy, wrote on our main publication The Content Strategist: “The easiest way to build those relationships is to genuinely help people. If youre B2B, help people get better at their job and move up in their careers. If youre B2C, help them enjoy personal passions (travel, fitness, wellness, food, sports, etc.) more. If you help someone master their little corner of the universe a little bit better, theyll trust you.” Marketers think they have to be perfect at this from the very beginning, but building a brand takes time. If you do things right, youll start to see progress. Just ask Michael Dubin. Dollar Shave Club didnt happen overnight. “The beginning of the story is about solving a problem for guys,” he told Fortune magazine in 2015. With that simple sentence, Dubin clearly articulated the blueprint for meaningful content marketing. First, he started with a problemrazors are too expensive and inaccessible. He locked in on a specific audienceguys, specifically people old enough to shave who wanted simplicity over luxury. Then, he found a way to reach “ Engaging the right audience starts with a basic question: How are you going to help someone?” II. A Model for SuccessBrand Awareness & Thought Leadership 7 them and solve that problema subscription service that brought them razors for one dollar per month. That foundation established why the brand existed, which would serve every video, blog post, and marketing asset to follow. You see, the billion-dollar deal had little to do with Dollar Shave Clubs products. Dubin actually bought razors pre-made from a wholesaler named Dorco. What Unilever really wanted was access to the relationships Dollar Shave Club had fostered through content. The brand invested heavily after the success of the YouTube video. It started sending customers a monthly print magazine called The Bathroom Minutes with their razors. There was a popular Fathers Day video series. Then came Mel Magazine, a digital publication that specializes in ambitious, longform stories on topics off the beaten path. Its the only place you can read about people who refuse to drink water or watch documentaries about former Harvard graduates who become medieval fighters. At the time of the sale in 2017, Dubin had more than 3 million subscribers coming back for more every month. II. A Model for Success Marketers think they have to be perfect at this from the very beginning, but building a brand takes time.” “Brand Awareness & Thought Leadership 8 Building this type of content program is so difficult because it requires the perfect combination of strategy, talent, process, and tools. Contently developed our own Content Maturity Model to show what the different phases of success look like: II. A Model for Success Phase 0 Majority of businesses Strategy: Undocumented Technology: Siloed Process: Ad-hoc Strategy: Persona and journey- driven Technology: Marketing org interloc Process: Data-driven decision making and optimization Strategy: Corporate KPIs Technology: Cross-enterprise interlock Process: Org-wide visibility on prioritization and delivery Phase 1 Proving model Phase 2 Roll out to other LOBs & other use-cases Phase 3 Enterprise adoption CONTENT CHAOS CENTRALIZED CONTENT TEAM CENTRALIZED CONTENT OPERATIONS ENTERPRISE CONTENT OPERATIONS9 II. A Model for Success A Contently study found that of senior marketers believe that having and following a content strategy is crucial 98% But only 55% actually have a documented strategy. Based on all the market research weve compiled over the last decade, too many brands are still stuck in content chaos. They may publish a blog sporadically or create marketing assets they hope will drive business results. We know this approach doesnt work long term. A Contently study found that 98 percent of senior marketers believe that having and following a content strategy is crucial, but only 55 percent actually have a documented strategy. Whats causing this disconnect? Why is 65 percent of content either unusable or unfindable, according to SiriusDecisions? And why are 75 percent of B2B organizations without a formalized content process? Brand Awareness & Thought LeadershipBrand Awareness & Thought Leadership 10 To help marketers right the ship, were releasing a series of five playbooks over the next few months. Theyll cover: II. A Model for Success Playbook 4 Sales Enablement Playbook 1 Brand Awareness & Thought Leadership Playbook 5 Retention Playbook 2 Lead Generation Playbook 3 Scale & AlignmentBrand Awareness & Thought Leadership 11 II. A Model for Success For each e-book, we spoke with some of the most insightful content marketers out there to uncover their biggest tips and pain points. By the end of the series, well tell you everything you need to know about building your brand, setting up effective internal processes, and proving the value of content marketing throughout your organization. Whether you work in B2B or B2C, the goal of these playbooks is to get you out of content chaos and on the path to content mastery. Lets get started.12 COMPANIES HAVE ALWAYS ASPIRED TO BE INDUSTRY LEADERS. Whats changed is how they get there. The days of interruptive advertising and low click-through rates have largely been replaced by storytelling designed to educate and entertain. Beyond that, the goal of good brand awareness content is to catch the attention of relevant people in a way that connects to your business and separates your brand from competitors. III. The Connection Between Brand Awareness & Thought Leadership13 Brand Awareness & Thought Leadership Somewhere along the way, though, marketers lost sight of that. The concept of thought leadership has actually been around for centuries. In 1876, Ralph Waldo Emerson was described as having “the wizard power of a thought- leader.” Over time, though, the term has been corrupted. Why? Well for starters, some people just dont have anything interesting to say. They want to be thought leaders but dont want to put in the work developing compelling ideas. Thats how we end up with thousands of gurus peddling trite advice on LinkedIn. The other big reason is that brands tend to play it safe. They want to offer meaningful advice but dont know how to commit. Thats how we end up with generic listicles that include superficial tips and tricks. III. The Connection Between Brand Awareness & Thought LeadershipBrand Awareness & Thought Leadership 14 “I audited the content from the top ten banks in the world and very quickly realized that every single bank was indistinguishable from every other bank as far as thought leadership content was concerned,” said Rebecca Lieb, a research analyst and strategic advisor who co-founded Kaleido Insights. “Brands risk getting lost in the cacophony of noise and messaging that is out there.” In its purest form, though, thought leadership is incredibly important to brand awareness. Its a way for an individual to convey intelligence and authority. It can also change the way people think about your company. Per a 2018 Conductor report, 78 percent of respondents found a brand “helpful” and 64 percent found it “trustworthy” immediately after reading content from that brand. Those numbers increased by 8 percent one week later. Thought leadership is about being bold. Put a stake in the ground and make an argument that you believe in. Well cover the key points of content strategy in the next section, but for now, keep in mind that you have to combine strategic planning and creativity to find the arguments worth making. Regardless of your industry, theres room for you to do this in your own way. III. The Connection Between Brand Awareness & Thought LeadershipBrand Awareness & Thought Leadership 15 III. The Connection Between Brand Awareness & Thought Leadership At Monster, for instance, the content team makes a concerted effort on reporting and interviewing to pull out the best ideas for thought leadership content. “Its not easy to get an executive to tell you a story thats worth telling,” said Margaret Magnarelli, Monsters VP of marketing. “You need to spend half an hour with them gabbing about the future of the industry before you find that one little thread. Then you can dig deeper on a topic that will pay off.” Weve seen the benefits of this strategic mindset firsthand at Contently as well. A few years ago, The Content Strategist took off when we stopped caring what the rest of the martech industry thought. We stopped using bad marketing buzzwords. Our executives unequivocally embraced storytelling and editorial integrity before our competitors. Perhaps most importantly, we took on our biggest marketing challenges with honesty, transparency, and a penchant for obscure metaphors. The response was clear: Average traffic jumped from 14,000 readers a month to over 400,000 at its peak.16 ANY BRAND CAN INCREASE AWARENESS HERE OR THERE, but the ones that stand out over time have a plan in place to guide smarter decision- making. Content strategy boils down to figuring out what content will help your target audience and inspire them to take actions that boost your business. Doing that successfully requires melding together some moving parts. To name just a few, you need to set goals, research your audience, and map out how buyers will interact with your content. IV. How to Create Your Content StrategyBrand Awareness & Thought Leadership How you craft a content strategy will ultimately be unique to your situation. There is no grand solution that every brand can copy to triple their revenue. However, there are a few core tactics that will put you on the right path. Here are the seven tasks to focus on before you start creating content. A few years ago, athenahealth debuted athenaInsight, its data-driven news publication, to make a serious investment in content marketing. According to executive director of content and communications John Fox, the marketing team made a choice to adjust the brands point of view as they prepped for the launch. “At various points in our history, weve talked a lot about whats wrong with healthcare, whats broken. Weve gotten a lot of mileage out of that in terms of thought leadership,” Fox said. But weve made a conscious move to point the way toward a solution, being that voice of hope and optimism to help doctors and others.” IV. How to Create Your Content Strategy 1 Set a mission, goals, and KPIsBrand Awareness & Thought Leadership 18 IV. How to Create Your Content Strategy Your mission should align your team and make it easier to eventually talk about your brands products organically. The goals and metrics will follow. Since athenahealths initial goal was building an audience, the team was “obsessed over growth metrics like unique visitors.” But they also operated with a long-term view of business metrics, so their plan also accounted for pageviews per visit and visits per readerdata points tied to loyalty. Well go over key awareness KPIs in more detail in the next section of this e-book. But let athenahealths early steps serve as a framework for getting your content program off to a clear start. “You cant stand for ten things,” Fox said. “You need to stand for one thing and have a clear message for what youre putting out in marketing. Align everything behind that as much as possible.”Brand Awareness & Thought Leadership 19 IV. How to Create Your Content Strategy In content chaos, the first mistake marketers make is leaning too heavily on intuition. They either try to reach everyone, or they trim their focus too narrowly on the person who has the most purchasing power. Gut instinct has a place in content marketing, but not if it goes unchecked. “When I work with large technology companies, all they want to do is reach the CMO. And all theyll ever tell me is their audience is the CMO,” Lieb said. “I push back. Its not just the CMO. Its the VP of marketing, its the SVP of marketing, its the assistant to those people, and the interns. They can be so laser-focused on the final decision-maker that they ignore everyone else in the decision- making process.” The fix here is simple: Do research to find out more about your primary and secondary audiences. And dont be afraid to weave together qualitative and quantitative data. 2 Study your audience