Nashville American Marketing Association

Strategy is Key to Successful Content Marketing

Nicole Provonchee

Nicole Provonchee, VP, Parthenon Publishing

Content marketing consumes about a quarter of all marketing budgets today and 60 percent of marketers expect to maintain or increase their content marketing budgets in the coming year, according to the Content Marketing Institute. That has led many to proclaim, “content is king”. It is true that engaging content based on a strategy tied to business goals is the king of marketing tools. However, content with no strategy is, at best, a distant royal relative.

Whether they call it “content marketing” or not, almost every company practices some form of content marketing. To engage with current and potential customers, companies may create a print newsletter, send an email update, share items on Facebook or write a blog. It is all content marketing.

With audiences splintering across more and more media platforms, marketers need to create more content than ever before. And, in content marketing, one size does not fit all. Content should be tailored to each unique platform. How do you create content marketing that’s strategic and hits your audiences?

A plan is just the first step. Whether the plan will succeed depends not only on the volume of content a company creates, but on the quality.

While content strategies are specific to individual companies, there are three simple questions marketers should ask when developing or evaluating content:

1. Does it engage our target audience? To succeed, content needs to be noticed, inviting and relevant.
2. Does it deliver value? Successful content must deliver value through inspiration, entertainment or information. If you can achieve all three – all the better.
3. Does it make sense coming from our company? Content marketing efforts need to be consistent with an organization’s overall brand position and offer.

These questions create a strong base for a company’s content marketing strategy.

Parthenon Publishing helps clients grow their business through engaging communications through a variety of print and web-based platforms. Parthenon has been working with clients on content marketing needs for almost a decade.

Importance of B2B Social Media

Like it or not, social media is playing an ever more important role in the B2B decision making and sales process. As a B2B marketer, having command of  social media tools is critical to the success of your future.

A Nationally Organized B2B Social Media Conference Right Here in Nashville

The American Marketing Association is bringing one of its signature conferences right here to Nashville. If you’re a marketer in a business-to-business marketing position who is seeking to get a social media marketing program in place, or is looking to take their social media success to the next level, you’ll want to check out the event on May 15th and 16th.

What You’ll Learn in B2B Social Media

B2B Social Media will teach you how to drive leads, revenue and repeat business through B2B social media by engaging advocates, influencers and purchasers who are not just engaging online, but energizing your bottom line. You’ll learn advanced strategies and tactics for reaching business buyers and building a long-lasting online community around your organization using the best practices in B2B social media. You will also learn how to take social media beyond marketing and acquire the tools you need to deputize your sales team and front-line employees for enterprise-wide social media engagement.

Finally, you’ll build a multi-channel social media campaign, social media metrics dashboard and engage in case-based problem solving with a high-energy group of marketing peers that are keen to take their social media programs up a notch or two.

When: May 15 & 16 8am-5pm

Where: Courtyard Nashville Downtown
170 Fourth Ave North
Nashville, TN 37219

The Soft Sell of Branded Content

Nowadays, most companies are looking to get new fans and customers thats an unobtrusive, soft-sell. Branded content. It’s the idea of creating content that tells a story to an audience and as a second priority includes a brand. Branded content

Branded content is a relatively new form of advertising medium that blurs conventional distinctions between what constitutes advertising and what constitutes entertainment. Branded content is essentially a fusion of the two into one product intended to be distributed as entertainment content, albeit with a highly branded quality. Unlike conventional forms of entertainment content, branded content is generally funded entirely by a brand or corporation rather than, for example, a movie studio or a group of producers–Wikipedia.

Many companies–such as American Express, Gatorade, Red Bull and smaller ones too–are now using branded content as a way to connect with their audience.  It’s a shift in thinking from advertising in the way the brand wants to communicate to the way the consumer wants to hear the message. It makes more sense as many people tune out the sales-only messages. Leading with the soft sell instead of the sales pitch may be the right play if this is your goal.

Looking for a Bigger Bandwagon

With so many channels and video outlets, and with how much video helps SEO and how easy it is to track video, it seems like more companies should be jumping on the brand content bandwagon with video. However, we’re hearing from marketing folks that branded content often gets lost in the overall discussion of marketing strategy with a client unless a few people have a passion for it.

Why we wonder? We know marketing professionals are making the best decisions for their clients and brands with the information that they have. But we do run into a couple of misconceptions about video and branded content:

The brand’s message will be lost.

In fact, many people are investing in branded content because it creates a stronger emotional connection for the brand. In a recent FastCoCreate article, Linda Boff, Executive Director of Global Marketing for GE said that for GE, branded content had a much greater impact on consumer perceptions than standard display ads.

They’re worried about the cost.

But since branded video is often unscripted storytelling, it is usually less expensive than a traditional commercial, or scripted corporate video … and for gosh sakes, branded content is more fun.

Since, we’re doing a lot more video branded entertainment at Gamma Blast lately– specifically for some of our national clients, we’re here to give a few tips. We hope this helps your company’s brand become stickier and more profitable.

Some thoughts about branded entertainment:

• The brand has to fit the story to make the best connection.
• While the brand is integrated into the story, you don’t want the piece to feel like the brand is first priority. That makes it feel, “icky”.
• Many people, especially Generation Y and younger, accept a branded message as long as they get something that they want. I could care less about the GE stove shots in Top Chef since I get to watch these chefs.
• Whatever branded entertainment you create, it has to be something that you’d want to watch.

Is your company using branded content? How is it going? NAMA would love to hear from you.

Post written by Liz Denning, Gamma Blast, a video production boutique

I founded my company three years ago, but I struggled for a long time with the name. Part of the reason I struggled was that in the beginning, I had the same angst that many freelancers do — I was convinced I would have a hard time finding clients [particularly in the economy in late 2008], so I didn’t want to rule out any kind of work that I might be capable of doing. I felt it was best to keep my options open.

Since I couldn’t narrow my focus, the name was particularly difficult for me. I didn’t have anything in particular that I wanted to say…so it wasn’t easy to come up with a name that said nothing yet sounded amazing.

In fact, I actually named the firm one day while I was over at Centresource, one of Nashville’s great web design and development shops. Now-CEO Evan Owens was introducing me to someone and he said, “What’s the name of your company again?” And thus, of desperation, Creekmore Consulting was born!

Well, whether I knew it or not, we did have a great specialization, and we quickly built a nice portfolio of content strategy and information architecture work. I hired some employees, and we’d talk from time to time about the name of the company. “Creekmore Consulting” could be an accounting firm…or almost anything else. We did consult, but all our consultations focused on content strategy specifically. So it seemed silly to keep such a generic name.

Then the crazy-making began. We came up with name…after name…after name…after name. We really liked several, but every time we came up with one we liked, we discovered the URL was not available.

A couple of words on URLs:

Even though we’re in 2012, we still believe that you need to own the URL that is your company name. Yes, it’s hard to find a URL that is available, but it really makes a difference. The more stuff you have to append to your name, the harder it is for people to remember.

And all of you out there sitting on URLs and not using them? A pox on you! We had several great names and the URLs were taken, but not in use. Just maddening. Of course, you can always try to buy an unused URL, but you don’t have any way to know in advance if the person who owns it is crazy or not. While we came up with some good names, we never hit on one that we felt we’d just die without, so we kept searching.

In the end, our new name [Creek Content] happened by accident. Last year at South by Southwest, I decided we really should start tweeting. [An effort at which we're still only sporadically good.] So I created an account while eating lunch one day, and I named it CreekContent. I meant to name it CreekConsult, but I didn’t realize my mistake until I’d finished creating the account. And I thought, Hey! I’m on to something there! I discovered the URL was available and I bought it right there at the bar at P.F. Chang’s in Austin, on my phone.

We didn’t officially decide to rename the company until the summer, however. We spent a day with fabulous business consultant, David Baker, and one of the first things he said to us was, “Rename this company!” It pushed us over the edge.

We got the website rebranded, a new logo, new business cards, and off we went. Of course, the administrativia continued for months — renaming the bank account, filing the name change with the city, the state, our insurance company, the IRS….getting our ongoing clients to update our billing information. But it was absolutely worth it.

While no name can completely explain what a company does, our new name plants us in the right universe before we even start talking to a prospective client. It is easy to remember and spell, and — I still think this matters — it’s shorter than our old URL.