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Hello. My name is Peter Menchaca. I'm a Client Solutions Advisor at
iAcquire, and today we're going to be going over Chapters Three and Four in
Joe Pulizzi's book Epic Content Marketing.
Okay, so chapter three is titled "Why Content Marketing." And going to
start this chapter off with just a quick fact or rather two quick facts,
first being that in 1970, the average consumer received about 500 or so
marketing messages a day, whereas last year . . . rather two years ago in
2011, the average consumer received about 5000 messages a day. And that
number is set to increase exponentially as the years go on.
So right off the bat, we know that consumers are seeing more marketing
messages a day, but they're also interacting more with those messages and
were not ignoring all 5000 of these. So your messaging is important, and in
order to be recognized by consumers, your brand needs to have a strong
marketing message to grab their attention.
So let's talk about the case for content and why brands should be investing
in content. A few reasons here why this is important.
Number one-there are no technology barriers, so you or I can publish
content the same way that theoretically The Wall Street Journal or The New
York Times can. And we can potentially have the same reach, and there are
very little technological barriers for us to reach a wide market of people.
Two-there is high talent availability, meaning that there are a lot of
journalists and editors and content people from traditional media that are
making their way towards brands as brands are investing in content
marketing more and more.
Three-content acceptance.
Four-social media.
And five-Google.
So let's talk about social media and Google. So people are obviously
sharing more and more content on social media, and that kind of ties into
Google here because Google has been improving their algorithms since
they've begun. But over the past few years, they've made some very strong
steps towards being able to deliver content that is from credible websites
that has legitimate signals such as social signals, the links linking back
to that content.
And more and more, we're seeing that search engines, primarily Google, are
just becoming better and better at delivering content that people want to
read that delivers a good user experience to people. So it's really
important for brands to develop content on their sites that is legitimate
and if by doing so they're going to be rewarded by Google. So that's a big
one there.
Brands are increasingly investing in content marketing. The largest example
or the example that we talked about in the book was Adobe. So Adobe runs a
website called CMO.com, and it's kind of like a marketing newsletter. They
post various articles related to marketing, and that's not directly tied to
what Adobe does. It doesn't sell products on CMO.com, but it's a good
example of a traditional brand taking on a publisher role and being
successful with it. There are a lot of, as you can imagine, decision makers
that visit CMO.com, and it's a really good example of this new type of
content marketing.
Finally, going to [leave] it off with a quote here that says: "Publishing
is not dying. Ad-supported content is dying."
And that transitions well into chapter four, so the "Business Model of
Content Marketing." Again, going to start off this chapter with a
comparison between how to . . . we're going to talk about how media
companies compete with brands. And they compete pretty much identical in
a lot of different ways. The thing that differentiates them is the way that
they make their money, however.
Media companies like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The
Economist, all the major publication brands, they make their money through
subscriptions and advertising, whereas brands make their money through
attracting and retaining customers. So again, they're both focused on
developing high quality content and attracting readers and whatnot, but the
way they make their money is very different, and we'll talk about why that
separates the two.
The book talked about a case study of LEGO, and the example they used for
LEGO was in the 1980s and 1990s, LEGO was seeing a lot of competition from
other children's toys that specialized in construction . . . I can't
remember any off the top of my head. But basically what LEGO did was . . .
their product was very easily recycled, or it can very easily be stolen
from these other competitors, and what they did was they developed a
multipronged content approach where they developed microsites, they
developed animated series, they developed meetups. LEGOLAND was another
content initiative.
And all these things are . . . LEGO's a toy company. They build blocks of
toys for children, and you have this very traditional toy company going out
and doing all these things in a nontraditional way, and they really
benefitted from that. So they were able to gain a competitive advantage in
an industry that was very . . . people can easily come in and take their
spot. And LEGO is obviously . . . it's world renowned for its toys, and one
of the reasons for that was their content strategy that they did and their
content marketing they did in the '80s and '90s.
So why all of a sudden can brands start competing with traditional
publishers? There are three reasons-resources, equal footing, and one
versus two audiences.
So resources-what we mean by that is brands have a lot more flexibility, a
lot more money, a lot more talent and people now than traditional media
companies can, and they can pivot more. They can just invest more in their
content initiatives, and that's a major reason why we're seeing brands
competing so aggressively with these traditional media companies.
Two-equal footing essentially means that the ability to reach an audience
is no longer determined by how many newspapers you sell a day. The example
that is given in the book is when The New York Times in February of 2013
published an editorial article against Tesla Motors. They wrote a bad
review about the new Tesla car.
In response to that, typically in the past what a company might have done
is they might have taken out full page advertisements or they might have
written an article and tried to get it published in The Wall Street Journal
or something along those lines. But what Elon Musk did, what Tesla did was
they published a response on their blog that garnered a lot of attention.
And I think The New York Times even issued an apology because they had some
wrong data in their newspaper. So it just shows you that a blog of a
website of a company can compete and get the same amount of attention that
The New York Times can, and that's one of the main reasons why brands can
now compete.
Lastly, one versus two audiences. What this essentially means is that if
I'm writing for a traditional publication company, I am writing for my
reader, but I'm also writing for my advertisers, so I need to balance the
two there, whereas if I'm writing for a brand, if I'm writing for LEGO or
Adobe or Tesla, I'm not writing to appease any advertisers. I'm writing
just for the purpose of providing good content for my users, for my
readers, and that's a big difference. I don't need to have in the back of
my head, thinking-if I write this, am I going to lose advertising dollars?
And that's a really big differentiator.
So, finally, let's talk about seven ways to take the media world by storm
that the book recommends.
One is-making mobile a top strategy. It highlights just the fact that a
majority of users now are . . . not a majority but a large percentage of
people who are consuming content on the Internet are consuming it via their
mobile or tablet devices, and that number is just going to keep exploding
as more and more people use mobile.
Two is-hire professional journalists and writers. I think we talked about
this in chapter three, but there's a large market of people out there with
journalistic experience, and they're making the switch from traditional
media to the more nontraditional media, so hire those people, and they'll
do a good job.
Repurpose all of your content. So instead of writing . . . creating one
piece of content or a blog post, take that same idea but spread it out into
20 different segments and really kind of leverage your ideas more than once-
is what the book recommends.
A rent-to-own content strategy. So utilizing traditional media in a sense
that you need to publish content not just on your own assets, not just on
the properties that you own, which is what this is advocating.
Develop professional editorial practices. That one's pretty self-
explanatory.
Buy a media company. Just if you don't want to, I guess, invest in your own
content marketing, if there's a media company that's in the same vertical
that you operate in, the book suggests to buy the company. Then you
instantly kind of gain that audience that they've built up.
And, finally, prioritize your reader. That one's pretty self-explanatory.
But if you're a brand and leveraging content marketing, you have to kind of
take a step back and remember that you're doing this to attract and retain
customers. So don't let that focus kind of slip out of mind, and if you're
able to keep the eye on the prize and prioritize your audience, then you're
ultimately going to see the most amount of success.
So that was chapters three and four. This is iAcquire Cliffs Notes Tuesday.
My name is Peter. Thank you very much.