Eleven Top Tips on Content Marketing You Can't Live Without

Kate Smith, far right, and the content marketing panel

Kate Smith, Associate Marketing Director at Wiley, chaired the Turning scholarly research into content marketing gold panel in The Faculty at The London Book Fair. She deftly drew out the key issues surrounding the myths and magic of content marketing from a panel of industry experts including Laura Finn, Content Marketing Manager at the Royal Society of Chemistry, Amy Nicholson, Managing Editor at Sticky Content, and Lynne Miller, Associate Director at TBI Communications.

Read the Storify from TBI Communications here and ALPSP here.

In the spirit of all good content marketers, Kate has created a list of eleven top tips drawn from the session.

1. Start small, pick something easy 
2. Map out everything in your content ‘universe’ 
3. Identify the drivers of your funnel and audience journey 
4. Don’t get too bogged down with personas 
5. Audience is 1st, Story 2nd, Content 3rd 
6. Provide some easy guidelines – like making the first sentence of your content 140 characters 
7. Use other events like a survey someone else in your company has done and repurpose it into a short form content asset (or two, or three, or four…) 
8. Top and tail other people’s content 
9. There are different ways to consume content so repurpose the same content in different forms (a list, an infographic, a blog post etc) 
10. Check out ‘1 post Wonders’ on Tumblr 
11. Get Amy from Sticky Content’s stakeholder guide

Disagree? Add your own to the comments field below.

Kate Smith is Associate Marketing Director, John Wiley & Sons. She is a seasoned marketer and has led community marketing teams, and more recently Channel teams and B2B marketing at Wiley for the last 12 years. As a content marketing advocate Kate has been helping to change the mindset around marketing in Wiley so that that marketers are better equipped to connect and engage with customers and end-users.

Sticky Content's Amy Nicholson on 5 irritating clichés to help you plan your content marketing

Amy Nicholson: the clichés do work

When you work across different sectors, you see how common the issues are and the mistakes made. Amy Nicholson provided 5 irritating clichés that can actually help you plan your content marketing.

1. Rome wasn't built in a day

Content is a long game. You can have Harry Potter content in your pocket, but if you don't have the people, resources and time to back it up, you might as well not bother.

Know your limits, be realistic about what you can achieve, and get going where you can. As publishers you already appreciate content, editorial, publishing systems and workflow. You are in a stronger position. You really need a managing editor for content marketing, someone who is a master of your entire universe. Practical steps you can take include:

1. Maintain an editorial calendar
2. Create content departments and give them owners
3. Cultivate subject matter experts and other content sources
4. Brainstorm ideas regularly
5. Develop guidelines: style guide, tone of voice, format guidelines
6. Put in place an editorial board to review content effectiveness

2. Don't reinvent the wheel

Old habits die hard. Follow the inverted pyramid format that news rooms have used for years. Get to the point clearly for a 'stop the press' story. You should be able to edit paragraphs from bottom to the top of the story without losing understanding. Front load your content, use plain language, use style guides, consistent use of what you say and how you say it.

3. Waste not, want not

Look at your calendar and re-purpose or redistribute again and again. Think about whether or not you can write once and publish everywhere. Find a way to write for all those different channels in one go so you only have to get sign-off once: can a headline can be used for an email subject line as well?

4. All that glitters isn't gold

Ever been asked if you're on Pinterest? Ever been told you need an app (but without a good reason why)? It has to be about content first and foremost. (And content comes from what your community need or want).

5. The longest journey starts with a single step

Don't become paralysed by trying to perfect something before you get started. Try doing something and see how it goes. Your customers are an ever changing group. Digital is not a degradation of good copy. It enables you to edit live so you can feed back and optimise over and over again.

Your content toolbox should include...

• Briefing forms
• Writers' guidelines
• Content inventory
• Editorial calendar
• Copy formats
• A persuasive manner

Amy Nicholson is Managing Editor for Sticky Content. She spoke at the ALPSP seminar Content Marketing - using your publishing assets?

Connie Churcher asks 'how content can help build your social community?'

Connie Churcher: emotions and triggers that build community

What makes content shareable? The qualities or triggers are funny, sexy, shocking, moving, unbelievable/awesome, controversial, cool, illuminating or interesting, random, zeitgeist, cute, uplifting, disgusting, nostalgia.

It's about what emotions people share the most: cool, funny, up-lifting. But it's also about what these triggers can lead to. Top topics that go viral are about food, home and lifestyle.

Bear in mind that there is good viral and bad viral. Advertising doesn't often go viral. Often, it is our own lives that do. Some recent exceptions were the Old Spice campaign and Oreo. Bad viral include Habitat including #war alongside campaigns. Dapper Laughs is another example where it has come back to haunt them.

But what is this all about? Ego. Social media, as well as being a great professional sphere is also a very emotional place. When someone is sharing something they are not thinking about your brand, but more about what it says about them. People gain social validation through likes and retweets.

We speak 16,000 words a day, but much is left unsaid as we edit as we speak. A lot of inner thoughts are let out on this new medium which can lead to people being vulnerable. While 16% of adults reported better self esteem after social sharing, Thailand has issued a national health warning about adults addicted to likes.

How can sharable content help you build an engaged community? It's a simple equation:

sharing triggers + stoking the ego = user generated content (the Holy Grail)

It does the work for you with an authentic and trusted voice. Seek out and find those who are well known and trusted in a community already.

One example is the Caitlin Moran How to be a Woman campaign allowing her followers to blog on her site is a great example of amplification. 140 did and all shared to their own networks as they were validated by being on her site. But, it has to be the right area for your content.

What do you need to do these things?

• You need time. There is a really good argument for digital marketers to be partnership managers as they build partnership and relationships online
• Integrity, think of it as human to human. Twitter, LinkedIn and Google + all have professional associations where trust is a key factor. Something like a post with a photo and byline is more powerful. But this is less so on Facebook.
• You need cash. Building communities on social media does take money. The time involved has a cost.
• To build stories you need authenticity. 
• A great title and lovely imagery also help. 

Think what you want people to do with it? The more layers you add in, the simpler it has to be for the user. Make it easy for people to share. A lot of sites are monolithic. They are developed, then left. Ideally, you need continual redevelopment. A front page that changes frequently will give a fresher, more interesting look. You also need to bear in mind that social platforms may change, evolve or fall away.

Be concise... or don't! Brevity is great and works well on certain platforms. However, long form content is pretty good too. It is shared more than short term content because there is less good long form content around.

How do you stay on top of community management? Use aggregators such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. They help save time so you don't lose your day to social media channels. Some now offer services that search on key words for you so you can push out and share relevant content from other sources. Also think about sharing evergreen content over a period at different times to see how it gets picked up.

Listening tools are very useful. If you want to news-jack stories for your content, monitor keywords rather than Google Alerts (where the story has already broken). You can also use them to identify influencers who can help with user generated content.

Don't rush to create new spaces. If you do, think about the niche you can bring. Don't do it alone. Bounce ideas off people who aren't social or digital. Make sure social planning is at the start of a campaign and planning process. Get integrated into the process sooner.

Connie Churcher is Social Media Editor at Claremont Social Communications. She spoke at the ALPSP seminar Content Marketing - using your publishing assets?

Duncan Enright on what sort of content do you need and how do you make it engaging?

Duncan Enright: in all the right places

Content marketing ultimately is about selling your goods and services, but doing so using fantastic, relevant and interesting content customers are interested in. The challenge is trying to get it to them in the right places.

Making your content accessible and discoverable is the key challenge. Traditional marketing channels include newsletters, alerts, RSS feeds, direct mail, advertising, conferences, white papers and thought leadership. It is not that these are defunct, but new channels may adopt some of the characteristics.

For academic and educational publishing markets white papers are a well understand idea of an introductory and defining piece that attaches your company to the area. It's a big and valuable piece of work. What can you do to make it more digestible? Use bite size pieces through social channels, blogs and so on.

Twitter quickly distributes sound bytes of information. It can allow a group of staff to tweet. You need to think about who you can reach or communicate with. It's a personal medium - you have to engage, listen and interact. It's about growing an audience through community engagement. It's important to use the key influencers to help get the message out there.

LinkedIn enables you to identify and join groups with shared interests. You can post series of discussions across timeframe to maximise exposure. Content marketing is key as there are restrictions around marketing built into the platform. If you encourage staff to like posts it will increase discoverability. Most of all, inform, but don't sell.

SEO is better with back linking (back and forth to other good sites) and citations to raise search ranking. Online advertising and SEM generally work in Enright's experience. You can buy your way to the top of search results, particularly with 'speciality terms'. Do a simple Google Adwords and LinkedIn campaign to groups. Test with specific terms, subjects. Don't spend a lot until you analyse your results. Remember there are a range of content marketing metrics (e.g. clicks and opens for email campaigns).

YouTube is now the second most used search engine. Video brings content to life. Record interviews with authors discussing a piece of research, show examples of how researchers have used your work or do interviews around a theme to promote content collections. Visualise the author's experience and capture customer testimonials.

Community sites and webpages enable posting of free content. You can include links to related sites and content, group by subject or theme for specific audiences, then promote using the channels above.

Duncan Enright is a Senior Associate at Maverick Publishing Specialists. He spoke at the ALPSP seminar Content Marketing - using your publishing assets?

The power of storytelling: Kate Smith tells a tale...

Kate Smith: we grow up with stories

We learn about stories from a very early age. We have learnt that they are fun and engaging and they can teach us about the world. They are a fundamental part of our life.  Stories are now the lifeblood of how we relate and connect as human beings. The best stories are consistent, we can relate to them.

In 1895 John Deere produced The Furrow magazine for farmers in the US. Designed as an educational resource to enable farmers to be better. It was engaging, it resonated with the audience. The content wasn't about their products. It was about great content that was useful and relevant. They are still going today, but probably more in digital formats now!

Stories need to evolve, unfold, iterate to take us from A to B. It is harder for people to make decisions as we are bombarded by media. Creating content should help as it makes making those decisions easier through that process.

Prostate Cancer UK developed a content marketing strategy to engage with their target audience of men, who are notoriously hard to get to acknowledge the illness. They worked with footballers and pundits to reach fans. They made the campaign personal to help people engage with it.

American Express set up a small business forum that provides advice and support for small businesses. 99% of content has nothing to do with that content. They employ experts in the areas they are writing in. they have found that applications through that medium are the same as any other advertising campaign. It works and maintains their credibility.

Successful stories are credible, engage, meaningful, personal. No one says it better than Andrew Stanton (creator of Toy Story) when he spoke about storytelling in this TED talk.

Kate Smith is Associate Marketing Director at Wiley. She spoke at the ALPSP seminar Content Marketing - using your publishing assets?

Jon King on content marketing - why it matters and how can we learn from Hollywood and the Hero's journey...

Jon King on the rise of personal influence

The definition of content is information that has a story arc in it and a narrative flow. Storytelling is not new. It goes back into history and defines what we do. To be effective we need to tell a story well. The story arc is something that has been absent in classical advertising.

When you look at the rise of contemporary advertising in the 50s (the Don Draper era) campaigns were built on one thing: a unique selling point (USP) using paid media. The most successful advertising campaign of all time is Anacin. The ubiquity of media at the time meant it was successful because it was like being hit over the head again and again as the adverts were everywhere you went. Vance Packard's book The Hidden Persuaders suggested that advertising could subtly get messages across. The rise of personal influence is fundamentally breaking that model.

A Nielsen study from 2012 asked what influences your purchase decisions? 91% of people said it was recommendations from those they know. 70% peoples opinions published online, 58% editorial content, 58% banded website, 50% emails that are signed up to. Stories are now the #1 influence on consumer choice. Conversations have become media. Dove is an example of a disruptive consumer campaign that put content at the heart of their product by using real people.

The McKinsey Loop stated that paid media drives awareness and consideration that is reinforced by perfectly balanced experience through purchase and use. Today the loop has audiences exiting traditional path to seek content from key influencers. Before, you bought a BMW and then would probably never buy another type of car again. Now, people evaluate ideas, brands and services by finding rewarding content and sharing their experiences with others. Content has become the most important influencer on choice.

Getting your audience to recommend your products is effectively the holy grail, getting them to do something for nothing. Great return on investment. Unilever understand this and have gone from 90% paid advertising to 60% in 15 years an increase in owned and shared content.

King counselled to think about story versus product placement. It's not about facts and figures or the history of your company. Tell a story. Michelin were the first real content marketers. Cars at that stage were unreliable, so people got stranded in places they didn't expected. Their response? Tyres that are reliable and a range of travel guides to help you when you are stranded. They make tyres, but we don't think of them as making tyres.

Christopher Booker's Seven Basic Plots outlines the key stories that exist (although many argue there are 12 basic plots). You can map pretty much everything to one of these. The stages of the Hero's journey are: an ordinary person, called to adventure, refuses the call, meets the mentor, crosses the threshold, tests, allies and enemies, approach, central ordeal, the reward, the road back, resurrection, return with the elixir.

The Guardian signed a big deal earlier in the year for paid for editorial content. A seven figure deal with content that is indistinguishable from journalism. But it is restricted to print. Is it missing the point?

But how do you inject your company into a story? Have a point of view about the world that your key audiences will care about. Tell the truth. Influence the influencers. Produce satisfying stories. Use networks to share emotionally satisfying stories and win a disproportionate share of an audience's attention. An individual has an idea, shares with their personal network (average 192 people) and their communities (average 5 communities). Each person who is networked can influence up to 1000 people.

This is behavioural economics. It is powerful, efficient, low cost and a good long term strategic advantage for low touch points. Publish across multiple touch points to deepen brand engagement. Storytelling positions your brand ecosystem for organic growth.

Jon King is owner and principal consultant at Content Corporation. He spoke at the ALPSP seminar Content Marketing - using your publishing assets?

Royal Society of Chemistry's Laura Finn talks content with a true purpose, content with a story

Royal Society of Chemistry's Laura Finn

Laura Finn, Content Marketing Manager at the Royal Society of Chemistry, will speak at next week's Content Marketing - using your publishing assets? seminar in London. We spoke to her to find out more about what makes her tick and what makes content marketing truly work.

So tell me about yourself, how did you end up in your current role?

My marketing career started at Cambridge University Press – I wanted to stay close to books having read English, so I applied for a junior role and thought I’d give marketing a go. Since then, I haven’t looked back! I completed my CIM Professional Diploma in Marketing a few years back and I’m still based in Cambridge, I now head up a new Content Marketing team at the Royal Society of Chemistry where we work to connect the world with the chemical sciences.

What does content marketing mean to you?

I love the way content marketing challenges us to think beyond our own organisational goals and wants, and to engage with what our audience finds relevant instead. Great content is useful, it’s interesting, it solves problems and informs decisions, it immerses our audiences in who we are and why we’re here. I believe that content marketing can help us foster more meaningful relationships with our audiences and help them achieve their goals.

How does your organisation use content marketing?

As an organisation we are moving away from just selling features and benefits of our products, and towards changing hearts and minds. This fits so well with the philosophy of content marketing! My team of specialists work to create and share content that will resonate with our audiences, integrated into larger marketing programmes.

What’s the most effective piece of content marketing you’ve ever done (and results if possible)?

We don’t yet have results but I'm very excited about a recent video project that supported a campaign to increase membership numbers in industry. We filmed four members at their places of work, talking about why they love doing what they do, and how membership with the Royal Society of Chemistry has opened doors for them. Rather than talking about us, and what we thought were the key features and benefits of membership for those working in industry we could let real members decide what was important and spread the word. We are telling their story, not ours – and the resulting videos are engaging and authentic.

Engage with what your audience finds relevant

What’s the biggest no-no for content marketing in your book?

I think mistakes can often come from not asking ‘why’ – it’s very easy to get excited about content marketing ideas, and this can lead to content without a true purpose, content without a story.

My advice would be to always dig deep into the ‘why’ – that way, you can be sure that you’re prioritising effectively and that your content will resonate with its target audience.






Laura Finn will talk about 'Getting your content out there (mapping content opportunities to your audience)' at the Content Marketing - using your publishing assets? seminar. Registration still open, book now.

The truth about content marketing: in conversation with IOP Publishing's Jo Allen and Karen Watts

H92: the place to be

Picture the scene. We're at the ALPSP stand in Hall 4.2 at Frankfurt Book Fair. Plans are being discussed for the forthcoming ALPSP Content Marketing seminar and the ALPSP team have got together with two communications specialists who are getting animated about what content marketing *actually* involves.

We joined in the discussion with Jo Allen (JA) who is Head of Marketing & B2B at IOP Publishing and Karen Watts (KW) IOP’s PR and Communications Manager, and captured some of the highlights of the conversation below:

ALPSP: What does content marketing mean to you?

JA: Using your content to do the work for you. All publishers are sitting on deep seams of great content. Effective content marketing makes use of these gems and does hard work for you.

KW: I think it's about utilising your best assets rather than looking for gimmicks.

JA: We're lucky we've got Physics World, it lends itself beautifully to this arena. To be honest we've been doing content marketing for a while unconsciously, but now it's more deliberate and far more strategic.

KW: Do you mean rolling out into different channels like social media and on the website?

JA: Yes. We now have a much more holistic approach. We focus on the content first and the channel second. Content comes first. It's a similar approach to the one we have with IOP’s design studio. Instead of simply designing a printed piece or an email communication, we consider the content first and make it adaptable to all formats right from the start.

Jo Allen: content marketer extraordinaire

KW: Let's face it, content marketing drives and informs every decision we make in communications now.

JA: True, we'd struggle to make a decision that doesn't relate to it in some way!

ALPSP: What do you think is the most effective piece of content marketing IOP has ever done?

JA: The Physics World 25th anniversary issue back in 2013 was incredibly effective. We produced a special issue with lots of special features. Do you remember the 25 top list? It had five top people to watch, five best discoveries, five puzzles GCHQ created…..  that really helped the comms team with newsworthy content. It made a big splash then, and we're still using it nearly a year later.

KW: It was hugely successful.  Because a key strength of Physics World is high quality reviews of physics news, it is not always easy to pitch the content as newsworthy on its own. It was a great opportunity to showcase the editorial quality of the magazine in a different format.

JA: And we've got good mileage from it. The new digital magazine app has just launched using the 25th issue as a free download to showcase the fantastic design and functionality. We're still using it as a recruitment tool for membership for the digital only member category.

KW: On the journals side, I think the video abstracts are one of our most effective pieces of content: the stats speak for themselves. Papers with a video abstract are downloaded three times more than those without. Press releasing articles is enormously important too. A press released article will see downloads for it jump from an average of 40 to around 7,000. That's a fairly impressive rise.

Karen Watts: an Oscars-free zone

JA: Agreed.  Mind you, content marketing can go badly wrong.

KW: Oh yes, I cringe when I see people using gimmicks instead of thinking about the actual content and audience. The worst is when you see someone try to put across a personality that just isn't them. Tone of voice is crucial!

JA: Talking of personality, something we have to remember is that while our authors are physics experts, they are also human beings!

KW: Exactly, our authors and readers aren’t just an audience segment or a specialist field. They have the desire to share and connect with other people just like everyone else. When you try and be something you're not, you're doomed. It's about authenticity and relevance.

JA: True. But when you think about tweaking tone of voice and changing marketing approaches, it’s crucial to bring along colleagues. Changes in marketing strategy can be scary so we need to support them along the way...

KW: You know my pet hate? Trying to be 'current' and shoehorning celebrity news into your channels. Don't comment on the Oscars unless it's related to your topic!

And with that, the discussion concluded and normal Frankfurt Buchmesse business resumed.

Karen Watts will be presenting a case study at the forthcoming ALPSP seminar Content Marketing - using your publishing assets? on how IOP’s content marketing strategy is changing lives, one Ferrari at a time!

Register for Content Marketing - using your publishing assets?  on Wednesday 12 November 2015 in London.