Slides from my content marketing for business talk at Marketing Camp on 23/03/2016. Find out more about Passle at passle.net or tweet us at @passle

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

4. 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!

5. 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.

6. 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"

8. • 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!

10. 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.

13. • What are their challenges and pain-points?
• What is their role in the purchasing process (influencer or decision-maker?)
• Where do they get their information?
• How do they consume their content? Online? In print?
• 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)

15. BORING
CONTENT
They (probably) want

16. 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

18. • 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:

20. SEO
Google’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.

22. The FinTech Collective: A Venture Capital firm in NY

23. 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.

24. 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’re all pretty short too

25. They quickly got results

26. They quickly got results

27. Not doing too shabby

29. 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

30. Inspiration

31. 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

32. 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.

33. Creation

34. Creation

35. Creation

36. 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.

37. 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?