Baseball Cards and the Evolution of Content Marketing

Boston-based Chuck Leddy has been crafting engaging content since 1995, as a journalist and B2B brand storyteller. He's written for B2B brands such as General Electric, ADP, Office Depot, Cintas, the National Center for the Middle Market, and many more. He's also been published in print publications such as the Boston Globe, Forbes, the Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle. His website and blog are at www.ChuckLeddy.com.

When I was a kid growing up in Dorchester in the 1970s, I was an avid collector of baseball cards. In fact, I probably spent all of my discretionary income buying those 25 cent packs of Topps cards with the hard-as-a-rock stick of dusty chewing gum inside. I'd open each pack, tossing aside the worthless gum in breathless expectation of finding my favorite Red Sox players -- maybe a Carl Yastrzemski (Yaz), Jim Rice or Freddy Lynn card.

Baseball cards began as content marketing around the turn of the 20th century. Kids from Boston in 1910 were probably the same as I was in the 1970s, saving their pennies, buying packs of cards hoping to find a Ty Cobb or Honus Wagner card, which today are worth tens of thousands of dollars. Baseball cards were brilliant marketing vehicles to sell chewing gum and (for adults) cigarettes too. The cigarette and gum companies were looking for creative, non-traditional ways to engage customers and stimulate sales (today we’d call it content marketing), and thus the baseball card was invented, to the delight of generations of kids like me.

The radio and television soap opera is another pioneering example of content marketing -- aimed at engaging the emotions of at-home mothers, who presumably would tune in for dramatic stories about the complicated lives of rich, attractive folk for the price of being bombarded with soap powder commercials. The soap powder companies actually sponsored these daytime dramas, giving them the name they still bear. Hey, we all want our colors to be bright and clean, and we also want good stories about amnesia, serial betrayal, and revenge among the upper crust (though I'm not exactly in the daytime soap opera demographic).

The basic idea behind content marketing, which stands in stark comparison to "interruption" marketing (such as TV commercials) is that you can use content -- basically entertaining, emotionally-engaging stories and helpful advice -- to engage target audiences. By providing strong and usable content that keeps target audiences coming back, you can deepen the relationship between the content consumer and the brand that sponsors that content. This, at its most basic level, is content marketing. It drives awareness and gains customer engagement/sales by offering value in the form of stories that connect with human emotion.

Why is content marketing the present and future of customer engagement? Because people won't tolerate the "hard sell," which places the focus on the product and the brand instead of the needs of the consumer. People don't care that a company or its pushy salespeople need to sell products to meet their monthly/quarterly/annual sales targets. Today's customer wants a more personalized relationship with a brand. Brands need to become like friends we welcome into our lives; friends who care about us and have something to offer. The pushy, demanding, talkative friend who knocks on our door at the end of the month because they need our “help” meeting their sales quotas isn't really a friend for long. And it’s never been easier to shut the door in a brand’s face (thank goodness).

Content marketing works because it gives value in exchange for engagement. People will actually pay hard-earned money to avoid commercials, whether online or on TV. That tells you all you need to know about the "effectiveness" of interruption marketing. What do today's consumers want from brands? Understanding, a willingness to listen and sympathize; someone there to help them when needed -- in other words, a friend.

Engaging potential consumers through great content has the benefit of engaging hearts and minds. People don't want data or sales-y pitches (however creative they are); they want stories that connect with their needs, their emotions, their problems, their aspirations and their everyday lives. Content marketing, if done well, is always people-centric. I write B2B content, but I’m always addressing the concerns and emotions of a human being (who may happen to be a buyer).

The challenge of doing content marketing is in creating the content itself. Content marketers like me, who often call ourselves "brand storytellers," "digital content providers" or "digital storytellers" try to engage our target audiences through the heart first, then the head. It's more about engaging and connecting, and less about selling product. Do my business clients, the brands I write for, expect to use great content to convert prospects into customers? The answer is yes, but knowing this doesn't help me engage audiences around the stories I craft.

Providing great content is about understanding your target audience at a deeply human level, knowing what drives them (their hopes), what concerns them (their worries), and what, in short, offers meaning and purpose to their lives. Good content marketers know that it's a service job, which requires empathy and a deep willingness to help the audience. There’s one rule above all to gain influence: Show them you care about them first, and then the audience might care about you and your brand. Be human, and be a friend.

Offering a solution to a complicated problem helps, because it makes life easier for others. Making people think or laugh also helps, but you always need to give something to get something (attention, brand loyalty, and so on).

I'm still learning exactly what content marketing is. I had no idea at age 12 that baseball cards were my first encounter with content marketing, but I do know that great content, like baseball cards for a young Red Sox fan in 1978, engages my passions and keeps me coming back for more. And I’m not alone in this -- almost every brand knows that great content is the present and future of marketing. We’re all storytellers and “story-sellers” now, because nothing else will work.

9 Ways to Get Your Creativity Groove Back

Kathleen Ohlson is a writer and editor with over 10 years of experience. Previously, she was a high tech reporter covering various topics, including 9/11 and virus attacks. You can follow Kathleen on Twitter, @kaohlson.

You’ve got another deadline. You’ve worked on this topic before, but you’re wondering how you are going to make it sound new and exciting. You start to think, think some more… and before you know it, you resemble Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.

But, wait, don’t panic. Seriously, don’t. Really? Really. You certainly can go back to the content calendar, revisit buyer personas or go through the list of topics you’ve been keeping. But the following tips might help you come up with a different angle to create content.

1. Dig into the past

Yup, you’ve written about this topic before and you can do it again. Add to the conversation. Take one point and expand upon it. There’s almost always more you can say than you can pack into a blog post or a video. By elaborating on a previous topic, you’ll add additional value to your audience and help get you back on a creative track.

2. Take a Q&A approach

If you’re stuck getting started or organized, go back to the basics and answer those questions you first learned in English class: who, what, when, why and how. Think of this project as a list of questions you need to answer. What do your customers need to know? What are their concerns? How would your new product or service help them out? Think about the questions they may have. This approach is another way to brainstorm and may help you come up with angles you hadn’t thought of before.

3. Bond with your customers

Remember them? Ask your customers directly what they want to read and learn more about. Use short surveys to prompt them for feedback about your company, products and services. Encourage conversation in blog comments or on social media, and respond promptly to your audience. Analyze their responses and come up with content ideas to address their comments. By talking to them and using their feedback for your content, you’ll boost your credibility with them.

4. Storyboarding time

Stock up on some sticky notes. Meet with your team to discuss a project, as well as your thoughts and research. Don’t worry about having anything finished; jot down ideas, hang up pictures, and use any other relevant information. Once the notes are hung up, start arranging them in order of the story you want to tell and nix the ones that don’t work. By putting them in order, you’ll likely see a project from a fresh perspective.

5. Find inspiration

Looking for ideas? Follow major brands and authors through daily alerts. Use keyword indicators (e.g., Google Trends and Keyword Planner) to see what trends are showing up in search engines. Find out what your audience is reading, such as blogs or news sites. Check out what the competition has done. The catch with this last idea: Don’t compare yourself to the competition. It’s worthwhile to look at them for inspiration and how audiences generally respond. Keep in mind your competitors are not you and what may work for them, won’t necessarily work for you.

6. Just keep writing

Are you stuck? Keep writing; don’t worry about that first version.

In Everybody Writes, Ann Handley says to keep writing and create a first draft, “The Ugly First Draft (TFUD).”

Handley describes TFUD as “where you can show up and throw up. Write badly. Write as if no one will ever read it.” In this version, don’t worry about writing complete sentences, grammar, spelling and usage. Focus on writing down key ideas and thoughts. She says using TFUD is a necessary step to create above standard work, but doesn’t give a pass to produce substandard work.

Once TFUD is complete, you can go back and clean up your draft.

7. Stick with writing

If you’re a writer, do you work on a few sentences, stop, reread and start editing? If you do, STOP! If you’re focusing on editing while you’re writing, you’ll likely get distracted from writing.

Learn to get uncomfortable when you’re writing and resist the urge to reword sentences and rearrange paragraphs until you’re finished. If you can pull this off, you’ll find yourself in a rhythm.

8. It’s picture time

So you’re really stuck? Maybe let the images tell the story. (Sorry, designers!).

More studies are showing videos and pictures increase audience engagement and drive conversions. According to Business Insider, 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook daily, while more than 100 hours of Facebook video ads are watched every day.

9. Run away

If all else fails, run. Hide. Seriously, step away from the scary blank screen with that annoying cursor. Take some time and clear your head. Find another place to work or go for a walk. Put on some tunes. Anything to make you more comfortable to start creating again.

Creating good content is made up of data crunching, lots of research, conversations with people and putting the pieces together. While you may be stuck now, remember you’ve created content before and other people have gone through what you’re experiencing right now. And your customers want you to be real, so focus on that and what your instincts tell you to create.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Unsplash.

Why Your Infographic Needs Data-Driven Writing to Deliver Results

Katie Burkhart is the founder of KBurkhart & Co. and serves as the lead brand strategist and designer. You can follow Katie on Twitter @KBurkhartCo and read her posts on the KBurkhart & Co blog.

Content comes in many shapes and sizes these days. One of the forms that continues to grow in popularity is the infographic, due in part to its bite-sized, eye-catching nature. But it’s still content and should be treated like any other form of content: strategically, and with purpose.

While the end product is predominantly visual, you must start with some amount of written content. That content is often produced separately and then sent to a designer who is responsible for creating the infographic.

How do you write that content to get the best results?

To start, know what you mean when you say “infographic” to your designer. In our world of marketing buzzwords, it’s easy to have two separate conversations even though you’re using the same words and standing in the same room (or looking at the same email, however you prefer).

An infographic is literally an information graphic. It’s a visual, be it a chart, graph or counter that gets accompanied by minimal text. Its goals include: simplifying the presentation of large amounts of data, showing patterns and relationships, and monitoring changes over time. This is why the term “data visualization” is often used in the same conversation.

Without that clarity, it’s hard to move forward productively because the expectations of the outcome are often different.  Secondly, the definition states outright the best thing you could do when writing the content: Give your designer data.

For an infographic to turn out in its iconic, counting ticker, colored bar graph style, you should be going to your designer with data, preferably quantitative data, or data that deals with numbers. Doing so gives your designer the nuts and bolts they need to create what we all know as an infographic. Some examples of quantitative data include:

1. Stats (preferably related to your brand, such as how many scholarships you gave out)

2. Percentages

3. Number of Items

4. Averages (in numbers, such as an average weight or height)

Without the numbers, the infographic loses what makes it distinct. No, there’s nothing wrong with qualitative data, such as interviews, articles or reports. They’re all great content, but they’re other forms of content and would be best represented in a different format. Trying to squeeze them into a brightly colored graphic suit isn’t doing justice to your content or your audience.

The next step you can take is to make sure you put your data in context. 60% of people opened your email. 65% of scholarship needs were met. 7 kids graduated. These are entirely random stats because there is no context. Context, in terms of data, comes by comparing one figure to another to establish a relationship, which ultimately allows you to justify why all the figures are relevant in the first place.

Of the 300 people on our email list, 60% opened our monthly emails, which was up by 52% from last year: Now that means something.

The last thing you can do to produce a better infographic is to have a story in mind. Yes, even numbers need to weave together with a beginning, middle and end. Perhaps it’s an overcoming challenges story, where the data from last year leads off, and then the data from this year goes from least impressive to most impressive. Or, maybe it’s an annual report and it follows along a timeline because the data and points build upon each other as the months go by.

Writing your infographic content with an underlying story will help your designer to prioritize specific pieces visually. It will also give key guidance on how to arrange the entire infographic so your audience can more easily connect the dots, and thus be more engaged with the content from start to finish. Whatever story you choose, it should help to support the data you have selected and feel authentic to your brand.

It’s more likely that your infographic will look like an infographic if you approach it as an information graphic. By strategically driving your writing with data, and giving purpose to that data with context and story, you will get a better, bite-sized piece of content primed to deliver results.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Unsplash.

What You Need for an Efficient Content Creation Process

Rebecca Bakken is a freelance writer and content strategist for MarketMuse. She has 10 years of experience as a journalist and marketer, doing everything from managing large teams to going it alone as a solopreneur.

Writers and editors know that the road to great content isn’t always a direct path. But if you’re running a content marketing department, you have objective business goals to hit and deadlines to meet, leaving not a lot of time for writer hijinks or other process inefficiencies.

Whether you’re just starting to build a team or your current department could use an overhaul, there are four things you need to execute the most efficient content creation process possible:

• Specific Goals
• Evolving Plan
• Right People, Right Spots
• Tested Tools

This post will guide you on how to develop your internal strategy, as well as recruit and manage your writers and designers. First, let’s think about what you want to achieve:

The Goals

It’s hard to have an efficient process if you don’t have a target. Talk to your managers and sales team about your company’s quarterly and annual goals, and then determine how you can assist in achieving those. For example, if you’ve got a new product and your team has sales benchmarks for it, you might set a goal for the quarter to bring in X amount of leads with an email campaign that builds awareness for the new product.

Whatever your goals are, make sure they’re:

• Business focused. This means no vanity metrics like boosting traffic or gaining followers on social. Your efforts must support business goals in some way, so instead of gaining followers, your goal might be to gain leads from social channels.

• Specific and actionable. Vague goals lead to vague results, so get laser focused on what you want to achieve. You’ll find that the more specific your targets are, the easier it is to take action on them because a clearly defined goal can be broken down into steps.

• Attainable. Setting yourself up for success means being realistic about what you can achieve with your time and resources. Stay ambitious, but be honest about what it would require to reach your goals, and whether success relies too much on factors outside of your control.

• Attributable. You want to be able to connect your actions to achieve goals, both to show ROI and so you know what’s working and what isn’t. Consider how you’ll track and measure the results of your content marketing efforts, whether you use UTM codes or features within your CMS or email platform.

When you set your quarterly and annual content marketing goals, don’t neglect areas where you’re already performing well. There’s always room for improvement, and you don’t want to let your progress slip. It’s perfectly fine for some of your goals to be to maintain a certain metric or make modest improvements if it’s an area where you’re already killing it.

Once you have your goals identified, you can start to work on strategy.  

The Plan

Having a plan is integral to an efficient process. A thoughtfully developed plan removes the guesswork when it’s time for action, and makes it clear who is responsible for what.

If you have a content team, this can be a great opportunity to work together and brainstorm. Get the pertinent parties in a room, display your goal on a whiteboard, and start tossing out ideas for content types, distribution channels, ways to track performance, and innovative ways to hit your targets. If you don’t have a team, the process will be less boisterous, but you can still brainstorm on your own. The point is to think strategically and creatively about how to reach your goals.

Here’s what your plan should define:

1. What content is needed. Be specific here, identifying all copy and articles that needs to be created. Include outlines that specify target audiences, word counts, focus topics, and related topics to cover in each piece of content.

2. How you will measure performance. Each goal may have different metrics for success, so decide which attribution model is appropriate for your objectives, and set your tracking system before you start distributing.

3. How you will distribute the content. Email is a great way to engage your contacts, while third-party platforms like Medium or even LinkedIn can attract new leads. And don’t neglect the power of ads. Decide the appropriate channels for distribution, and conduct tests to see if new platforms are worth the effort.

4. When and where to optimize. Once you post your first blog or send your first email, you’ll immediately have some metrics to work with. For longer campaigns, you may want to wait a few weeks before you take those metrics seriously and start to make tweaks, while a dismal open rate on your first email may warrant immediate action.

If your plan doesn’t seem to be working toward your goal, find ways to tweak it. Flexibility is a main attribute of a good plan, because content, as with life, isn’t always predictable. This is another reason why brainstorming is a smart way to start, because you can derive your Plan B (as well as C and D) at the outset.

Your plan should also identify who will be taking on each task, making for an efficient workflow. But since the human element is also the most unpredictable, it gets its own section.

The People

Your writers, editors, and designers are essential components of a well-oiled content marketing machine, but only if everyone is doing their part and working collaboratively. Whether you have an in-house staff or a roster of freelancers, your team members are the engine behind an efficient content creation process.  

Schedule regular one-to-one meetings with each person on your staff so that you get consistent updates on what they’re doing, any problems they may be having, and how you can help them. This also leads to better working relationships between you and your direct reports, and lets you learn their career goals, preferred learning style, and any weaknesses that can be strengthened. It also gives them a good opportunity to broach any issues they may be uncomfortable bringing up on their own.

As a manager, something you should ask yourself regularly is, “Do I have the right people in the right spots?” Be open to letting someone shift their responsibilities onto something at which they’re more naturally adept, and be proactive in suggesting changes.

If you have a writer or designer who is consistently underperforming, either in terms of quality or efficiency, consider the following actions:

• Have a frank discussion about the problem. In a one-to-one meeting, discuss specific examples of sub-par performance, and ask about the reasons why the work suffered. Avoid making assumptions or blanket statements, and stick to the facts. Hear them out, and give sympathetic responses without excusing poor work.

• Devise an improvement plan. Be clear about the areas in need of improvement, and offer help and resources that can assist them. Then, set a timeline to meet again to review performance. This lets them know that you’re willing to work with them, but sets clear expectations.

• Consider a change in roles. If someone can’t keep up in your environment, think about whether there are any less intense roles for which they would be better suited, or if a part-time or contract position makes sense.

There may come a time when you decide that a member of your team isn’t working out. It’s not a fun situation for anyone involved, but it’s a necessary part of running a team. If this happens, remember to keep all justifications purely performance-based and specific, and be sensitive to their feelings.

If you’re building a team and want to vet writers and designers before bringing them on full time, you can hire them as freelancers first to get a good idea of how they operate and whether they can consistently (and efficiently) produce solid work. You may even find that working with freelancers instead of hiring a staff is your best move, as it’s a lower cost option that gives you tons of flexibility.

So, you’ve got your goals set, your plan devised, and your team assembled. Now you just need the right tools to get the job done.

The Tools

The content marketing tools and software you use can save you loads of time, as they perform tasks that would take hours, if not days, to complete manually. But learning how to use tools and software takes time, so decide which ones are most useful to you and your staff, and provide the training and resources to use them to their fullest extent.

Here’s a keyword research guide that breaks down all of MarketMuse’s favorite tools and platforms. Depending on your strategy, you’ll want to have tools and software that perform the following:

• Rank tracking
• Keyword research
• Traffic and backlink analysis
• Content optimization

Be aware that you usually get what you pay for with these solutions, and that there’s a vast difference between a tool and a software platform. Keyword research tools can give you a quick estimation of related keywords based on words that appear together in posts ranking for a given term. However, they can’t quantify co-occurrences or other on-page factors to rank those that are the most important related keywords (i.e. the lowest hanging fruit) like a software platform like MarketMuse can.

If you want to maximize efficiency and have the budget, software like MarketMuse, HubSpot, and SEMrush are worth the money because they’re all multi-use platforms that give you most, if not all, the information you need.

You can also help your team use the tools and software you choose effectively by having a shared folder that contains:

1. A spreadsheet with the usernames and passwords of everything you use

2. Training documents and links to resources on how to use each one

3. Examples and templates of any reports they’ll need to produce

Of course, a folder can’t replace in-person training. When you adopt a new tool or platform (or have someone new starting), have a training session so they know all the functions and capabilities. Ask your team about what they find helpful and what’s confusing so that you can evaluate and change your arsenal if necessary.

Once you’ve established your department’s goals, plan, roles, and tools, you’re going to need to update and improve upon them to keep up with trends and evolving company objectives. Here’s a blog post that can help you organize, optimize, automate, and collaborate for a streamlined content creation process. A content marketer’s work is never done, it’s a whole lot easier with an efficient process.

 Thumbnail image courtesy of Unsplash.