Making It Happen

Making It Happen 

Creating content is hard to do. For many organizations, it falls on the backburner when the business gets busy. 

1. Make a Calendar- Look at a calendar setup to put content on a schedule that allows you to plan ahead for seasons when you may have more or less going on. Also, this can help you think through content that may have some seasonality to it. 

2. Make someone responsible- Make sure someone knows it is their job to make this happen. This is an area where working with an outside firm can be helpful because they will help ensure things happen in a timely manner. 

3. Set Reminders- Even something as simple as setting reminders on your phone can be helpful on a day to day basis.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Video Content

Video Content

Blogs are not as useful as they used to be. As we consider how to put this content out, be sure to keep video at the top of your mind. It may be as simple as holding your phone and walking while talking. You may be in a situation to bring a production company or purchase a teleprompter to help ease this process. But in our culture today, video is key. So make sure it’s part of your plan and that you are becoming comfortable being on camera. Side note: be sure to get captions for your video, as most videos on social are played without audio.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Social Media

Social Media

Social Media is the ever present content monster always demanding more and more. Two things to think about when trying to keep up: 1. If you maximize your content, you will be looking at a variety of pieces for every one piece you make. 2. Document the daily life of your organization to help fill the gaps with pieces that are easy to make. Documentation is taking pictures of a meeting or showing what has recently arrived in a shipment. These quick pieces of content, when created with the customer in mind, can be great ways to help feed the social media beast. 

1. Platforms

When picking social media platforms, start with where your customers’ attention is. If your customers are all tweens, Linkedin might not be right. If you are dealing with all B2B sales with C Suite (executive level offices) folks, TikTok might not be right. We are not going to go into details here about which platforms are best for each demographic for one main reason: it changes all the time. New ones will emerge, old ones will lose favor, and customer bases will age and change their behavior. So the key concept here is to see where the attention is being spent by your audiences and invest there. 

2. Content Strategy

How do you lay out your content to succeed? One of the keys is to understand your audience. What are they looking for? How can we entertain/educate/delight them?

Some emotions we can try to invoke from our audience are: anger, awe, surprise, amusement, joy, sadness, laughter, inspiration, curiosity. Anger can be great for political campaigns and nonprofits, but maybe not a Heating and Air company.

The following list is long but it is not an exhaustive list of content types. These types of content can help give you some guidance on how to begin creating content:

Announcements, ask a question, expert opinion, get to know you, guides, holidays, how to, listicle, memes, polls, quizzes, testimonials, user generated content.

Mediums are the way we convey the information directed by the structure: Animation, audio, document, ebooks, graphics, interactive, live video, photography, stories, text video

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Live Events

Live Events

Live events can offer you an opportunity to interact with your customers. Whether this be a lunch and learn, a trade show, or a conference that you put on, with a bit of investment, you can build great relationships. A good example of this is the Marketing AI conference put on by Paul Roetzer and PR 20/20. They established an arm of their company to begin talking about AI and then created a conference that would be used to help solidify their position as an expert. It also generates some sales of their courses and tickets. In person experiences can help motivate people to attend and give you an opportunity to further establish yourself as an expert. This can also dip into experiential marketing which we will talk about later in this book.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Webinars

Webinars

Webinars are a type of online speaking engagement. Some of the same rules apply: be wary of burdens of knowledge, provide value in what you’re talking about, and avoid the hard sell. Be sure to test your technology the day before to help remove the chance of computer errors. The advantage of webinars over speaking engagements is that they can go anywhere and be easily recorded and shared after the event.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Speaking Engagements

Speaking Engagements

If you get invited to a speaking engagement, you have been handed a tremendous opportunity. This might be harder if you are not skilled in public speaking but hopefully you will have a window in which to practice ahead of time. Speaking Engagements are generally a fabulous way to help increase your brand awareness in a community. For starters, if you have been invited. This means that someone already views you as an expert. The invitation itself is a tacit endorsement of your capabilities. Unless you tank, that endorsement will likely be received well by the attendees. Be sure to avoid the hard sell and provide ideas that are valuable to the audience. These types of events can be great opportunities to increase your email list or give out physical goodies to help build relationships.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Content Generation

Content Generation

The most difficult part of content marketing we have found is dedicating the time and brainspace to actually creating the content. Some of this can be manufactured by others. But for the content to be great it needs to originate with Subject Matter Experts. When working with busy clients, we will normally ask them to give us an outline of what they want to cover and we can usually take it from there or conduct an interview to get the information on paper. It’s important to remember that most of this content is going to be evergreen, meaning that it will be valuable for a long time as opposed to seasonal advice.

One of the most common problems in communicating is the Burden of Knowledge. The Burden of Knowledge is a communication hazard that shows up when someone who is an expert in an area fails to realize that not everyone has the same knowledge. As a videographer, I may know that white balance and working in rooms with LED lights can be an issue, but I can forget that not everyone thinks that way. Those could be two tips to set forth in content to help people but I may miss it due to my burden of knowledge. This also works out in some of the terminology that we use. People who are not thinking about their Burden of Knowledge may tend to use industry jargon which could leave a casual observer or someone who is just learning about this field in the dark. When we work on our content, we want to make sure we remove traces of the Burden of Knowledge that our potential customers would be lacking.

One other key idea in content marketing is that hard sales are a “no go.” You should use this information in a general way to show a better way to do things and lean on that knowledge. Trust that your material will naturally lead the audience to call you. Hard sales can jade an audience and undermine the content you are making. 

1. Where do we get ideas for content marketing?

When working through ideas for content marketing, here are a few places to start: What are the ten most common questions that your sales people get asked? If the same questions come up repeatedly, this is an opportunity to make content around that subject. A second idea is to look at your customer personas and brainstorm what they care about. If you are an ice supplier and a specific customer persona cares about clear ice for display, you can generate content about how to make that kind of ice or the common issues in ice production. A brainstorming session to generate ideas for content is a great opportunity to get the whole team involved. Consider: What are things that make you or your business unique? What are things you do better or only have compared to others? What do your customers care about? What are things you would want to talk about at parties?

We would suggest a brainstorming activity (like a madlib) that combines the emotion, the type of content, and the mediums directed at each of your customer personas to help develop content they would find valuable.

2. Maximize Content Usefulness
You can transform one blogpost into a lot of pieces of content for social. From that one blog post, you could write a script for a video, pull out quotes to turn into graphic, use the blog as a start for a podcast, or even create an infographic. The great part about reusing this content is that you can bring others into it easily. If you as the subject matter expert create a thorough piece of content, turning it into a bunch of side pieces of content by a marketing team will be much easier than having them try to create the primary piece of content. We love to extract as much content as possible to maximize the value of the time invested into that content and to help reach as many people as possible. Gary Vaynerchuck, better known as Gary Vee, is the Owner of VaynerMedia and Founder of WineLibrary TV. He is one of the all time great Entrepreneurs of our era. His personal brand team are the sterling examples of this practice. Check him out online by looking for @GaryVee. 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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Introduction

Content Marketing and Positioning as an Expert (Driver)

One thing we encourage almost all of our customers to do is pursue content marketing and positioning as an expert. What is content marketing? Content Marketing is the practice of creating helpful material that educates or entertains potential and existing customers to help build a deeper relationship with them. Positioning yourself or your company as an expert is along the same lines, but in this instance, the whole goal is to show your knowledge to the audience. These two plays allow you over time to build a good base for inbound lead generation.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

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