• Tire manufacturers (established 1889).• Launched the Michelin Guide in 1900 to get

people using their tires. At the time fewer than 3000 cars on the road.

• In 1926 it focused specifically on restaurants, star rating introduced in 1931.

In other words: content marketing focuses less on adverts and more on creating and curating tailored content

What counts as content marketing?

• A blog post• A newsletter• Social Media Updates• Videos• Podcasts• Interactive content (quizzes,

video games, mobile apps, etc).• Infographics• Guides• Webinars• But also: whitepapers, in-person

events like conferences or Meetups, research pieces, etc Etc!

What doesn’t count as content marketing?

• Adverts• Cold-calls• Spam of any kind

'40% of people choose root canal surgery over hearing a sales pitch', Tim Hughes, Oracle.

Hero, Hub, Hygiene Content Pyramid

Hero

Hub

Hygiene

The big ticket event, glossy advert, research piece, white paper, seminars

The on-going insights, commentary and newsletters. Timely, relevant, expert-led content

The Basics: "Who we are", "what we do“, “sectors” “meet the team”, "contact us"

• Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads. (DemandMetric)

• 72% of marketers think that branded content is more effective than magazine advertisements. (Custom Content Council)

• 82% of marketers who blog see positive ROI from their inbound marketing. (HubSpot)

• 'Only 3% of millenials consider online advertising to be credible', Robin Hamilton, inEvidence

• 85% of B2B buyers use social media as a part of the purchasing process', Jeremy Bevan, Cisco.

• '70% of customers view brands more positively after watching interesting content on video', Kieran Kilmartin, Pitney Bowes Software

Brace yourself for some stats!

Not all content is good content – are you just adding to the noise?

It’s not something you can do just once and forget about, i.e hit ‘publish’ and then walk away.

It has to be monitored and integrated with a distribution strategy.

• What are their challenges and pain-points?• What is their role in the purchasing process (influencer or decision-maker?)• What objections do they have to the sale or action? • Where do they get their information? • How do they consume their content?• What specific words do they use to describe their problems, their customers and

their industry/market?

Who are they?

This should inform the kind of content you create (and where you create it)

BORING CONTENT

They (probably) want

I run a quiz building platform, and the person had asked, “How do I make one of these personality quizzes I see on Facebook?” I thought no one really cared to read a technical guide on how to create a quiz, so I had ignored the request. However, when I hit that point of desperation, I decided to try writing a response “How to Make a Personality Quiz." The result? We landed our first paying customer through that article.

In fact, the week after that article went up, four people signed up and paid for Interact. And since then, more than 500 paying customers have come our way just from articles like the “How to Make a Personality Quiz” article.

The personality quiz article is what I call “boring content” because it won’t be up-voted on any forums or shared on social media -- the general internet reader couldn't care less. But the thing is, to a very specific person who needs to make a quiz for their marketing, that article is extremely valuable, and answers the exact question they need answered. These people also happen to be a great fit for our business.

“

-Josh Hayman

• what thorny aspect of your business could you clarify? 

• what assumptions do people make about your business/job title?

• which question do you keep getting asked?• what search terms turn up in your statistics

time and time again, and are you answering those queries appropriately?

The more expert you become in a particular field the easier it is to forget that what you take for granted other people don't.

That's a great starting point for your next content marketing strategy: 

SEOGoogle’s SEO Quality Rating Guide states that a high quality page requires:

A satisfying amount of high quality main content (MC)• The page and website are expert, authoritative, and

trustworthy for the topic of the page.• The website has a good reputation for the topic of the page.

Additionally, the page and website should have:• A good amount of information, such as About Us, Contact, or

Customer Service Information (aka Hygiene in the content pyramid)

• Supplementary Content (SC) which contributes to a satisfying user experience on the page and website

• Functional page design which allows users to easily focus on MC and use SC as desired.

• A website which is well cared for and maintained

In other words, you should regularly update your website with focused content written by experts.

The FinTech Collective: A Venture Capital firm in NYC

Since launching news.fintech.io in March 2014, they’ve published over 1,950 daily news articles and 83 weekly newsletters to their private list of investors, entrepreneurs and

industry players, garnering more than 710,000 impressions globally.

They quickly got results

Not doing too shabby

Inspiration

• Social listening: how are people talking about you – can you change that conversation? (use a tool like Social Mention or set up alerts with Talkwalker etc)

• What are your competitors doing and can you do it better? (Buzzsumo etc)

• See what is being shared in LinkedIn/Facebook/Google+ groups relevant to your field

• FAQs: build your FAQs as a series of articles, videos, podcasts

• Read industry news and comment on it• Create and maintain an editorial calendar

Creation

• Quantity can lead to quality: it gives you more data to work with and allows you to learn from your mistakes.

• Involve your whole team, not just marketing team. People want to hear from experts – if they’re uncomfortable creating content why not interview them?

• Don’t be afraid to recycle your content (or repeat yourself). A long form blog can become a podcast, a webinar, an infographic. You can share snippets of it to platforms such as Medium or LinkedIn Pulse linking back to your site. If using video, upload it both on video networks and as a native video on other platforms.

Creation

Distribution

• Get your whole team involved, even if they’re not working in marketing. Employee advocacy is a great way to organically increase your reach.

• Vary the ways in which you share your content on social media – try out different hashtags and visuals to see what is working best. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself on faster-paced networks such as Twitter.

Action Plan

• Focus on your business’s core subject expertise• Put together an editorial calendar.• Decide who will be creating the content and how often.• Decide which platforms it will get created and shared on. • Start small and expand once you’ve mastered them.• Decide what success looks like to you.• After a month review what you’ve done: which platforms are

performing best? Which posts are popular? Do you need to modify your strategy? Is the schedule too intense?

Use a social media scheduler to not only post content but also keep track of which content is performing best on social media. I use Buffer, but there are many more out there.

Start a FIRE: tool that syncs up with your scheduler so that each external link you share links back to you

Canva for Work: secret weapon of choice for businesses without a designer