Learn how content marketing can make you the hero, get you money to promote your product, and help you gain credibility to market yourself internally and externally.
35. Slidesource Tailor the messages to the stage they are in on
their journey
Give them practical tips on how to implement
your solution
Show themhow other customers solve
problems similar to theirs
Highlight features they might not know by
showing scenarios of how problems can be
solved
Help them see how they can get even more
value about what they already have
Give them a peek into other services that could
add value for them
• Read the blog
• Follow on Twitter
• Sign up for free trial tosee content used to help you
buy anduse the product to solve business issues
36. Matt is a lawyer writing about topics his law firm
specializes in.He uses Twitter and his blog to
establish thought leadership in their area of
expertise. He connects to other influencers and is a
guest blogger on other websites.
37. Deb uses her sketch notes of talks
she attends to increase her audience
As if product managers and product marketers don't have enough to do, now the demand for quality content is piled on top of the bazillion other activities you're being asked to do.
Learn why you should care, what the meaning of valuable content is, and how you can produce it to increase your credibility internally and externally.
Don’t you want to be the hero? If not, why are you in product management!?
Follow the money. You NEED marketing. They’re the only ones with a budget. And they need the CONTENT you can provide.
And your content can help you get noticed both internally and externally. Toot your own horn without chest beating. [Jeff Lash Sirius Decisions, Jon Gatrell Pragmatic Marketing]
CLICK – They had me at the title
But maybe you need a little more convincing.
Raise your hand if you care about:
How to develop a winning product strategy
Best practices for building your roadmap
9 example roadmaps to get you started
Is it worth giving your name and email address to download this ebook?
What is content marketing anyway?
[READ fast]
Flexible scalable extensible full of bull
Notice the drink and the bugged eyes. Gobbledygook!
The only thing it’s missing is cloud-based big data.
What is content marketing anyway?
[READ fast]
Flexible scalable extensible full of bull
Notice the drink and the bugged eyes. Gobbledygook!
The only thing it’s missing is cloud-based big data.
READ!
READ!
Jay Acunzo wrote the blog with the jargon monster and little naked truth. I found it looking for a great definition of content marketing.
I enjoyed what I read so I poked around his website. CLICK, then I followed him on Twitter CLICK
My philosophy about marketing is NOT to “make people want stuff”. It is TOTALLY to <CLICK> “make stuff people want”. Wow, this totally resonated with me.
I reached out to him and asked if he thought content marketing helped people find him. CLICK. “Without a doubt.”
If you don’t already know about David Meerman Scott, I recommend you check him out. CLICK He wrote the New Rules of Marketing and PR which has sold over 300,000 copies in 25 languages. I’m lucky to have worked with him when I was at Pragmatic Marketing.
A KEY LESSON: EDUCATE AND INFORM INSTEAD OF INTERRUPT AND SELL.
How often do you buy products because you read an ad in a magazine? What about reading a blog, seeing a Pinterest post, or reading an ebook? Or asking a friend for advice? Isn’t it great when they send you a link to exactly what you needed to help you buy?
Be the link friends send their friends to.
And then there is Joe, the godfather of content marketing.
Joe put a name on my marketing strategy. Content Marketing. And I was in love. Heart to heart. By the time I met Joe face-to-face, I had already read a ton of his content and was already an evangelist.
CLICK In his latest book, CONTENT INC, I found this fascinating. CLICK Build your audience first. Then create your product. I found Joe’s company through his free content. I then willingly paid to go to an executive roundtable on content marketing, and took my content marketing manager with me to Content Marketing World. He didn’t have to sell to me. I happily spent thousands of dollars because he had established his credibility through his free content.
CMI started as a blog by Joe Pulizzi in April of 2007. For three years Joe blogged on a consistent basis, building a loyal audience. Joe’s blog, his multiple books, and speaking around the world led to the formal launch of CMI in 2010. CMI was named the fastest growing business media company by Inc. magazine in 2014.
In consulting, don’t you bring your audience with you as your business evolves? [DISCUSSION]
Pragmatic Marketing was on a similar trajectory with Steve Johnson as our thought leader. Named 7 times by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America
Steve was blogging on product management and product marketing before the blogging was coined.
CLICK
His ebook, The Strategic Role of Product Management was downloaded over 100,000 times
When I joined Pragmatic Marketing in 2000, the company had trained 5,000 product managers in 7 years. The company had 7 people. In the first decade of the 21st century we grew to over 100,000 people trained. A lot of that growth was directly attributed to the content marketing machine. People were always amazed at how few employees Pragmatic had.
Sweet spot.
Use cases
User stories
Use scenarios
CONTEXT – what problems do your personas have that are pervasive and they’re willing to pay to solve?
This is an outside-in way to build content. Listen and then talk. These are two sides of the same coin to communicate.
To really make a connection with someone, you need to listen for understanding before you talk, not just listen to respond.
Who do you listen to?
Decision makers? Users? Technical reviewers? What about external influencers? Or indirect selling or consulting channels?
If these groups have different needs or different points of view, you’ll need content that resonates directly with them.
Which brings us to the customer journey.
The journey is not the sales funnel. It is a continuous path from buying to using and back again, if you are to have a repeatable business. You’re not selling pet rocks. One time, next customer.
You need content at each step. It’s rare that a single piece of content fits all steps on the journey at the same time. And the buyer’s experience with your content matters. Just like you need a “product management” type for consulting services (which are products), you need someone thinking like a product manager about content. What problem does it solve? How can we solve it with a great user experience so they tell their friends and come back for more.
FIND – establish your credibility, illustrate understanding of the problem, offer free advice; lead TO your product not WITH your product; focus on being found; be where your buyers are (LISTEN before TALK)
CONSIDER – comparisons to old way/new way/competition; demonstrate the value you deliver not only with the product but with the quality of content they get even before they are a customer; buyers guides, customer success stories.
BUY - Good content for ebooks or blogs: help your buyer buy. Create a piece that helps them sell your products or services internally. ROI calculators, helping buyer get over perception of risk.
The Strategic Role of Product Management was frequently downloaded by Product Managers who used it to sell their executives on bringing in Pragmatic Marketing to train the entire PM organization.
USE – getting customers to value quickly
ADAPT – tips and tricks on how to adapt your product to customers problems; customer success stories illustrating the continued value they get, customer communities
RENEW – Renewal should be easy if you’ve delivered a product that solves a problem the company still needs solving. The content you provide during USE is to reinforce the value throughout the customer’s journey so renewal happens automatically.
You’ve probably heard this before. READ
But what is rarely mentioned is that Steve preceded this quote with CLICK “Picasso had a saying”
I love provocative quotes.
However, I am NOT <CLICK> advocating STEALING or plagiarizing someone’s content. Ever. Always give credit for someone else’s work.
Let’s help each other spread valuable content. Which brings me to <NEXT>
Should I curate or should I create?
CLICK
Curating other people’s content is a great way to get started. Do it to <READ BULLETS>
CLICK
But to DIFFERENTIATE yourself, you also need to CREATE original content.
Create to <READ BULLETS>
Should I curate or should I create?
CLICK
Curating other people’s content is a great way to get started. Do it to <READ BULLETS>
CLICK
But to DIFFERENTIATE yourself, you also need to CREATE original content.
Create to <READ BULLETS>
What are your capabilities? What part of the content should you buy, build or partner?
You should BUILD the market stories, at least some of them. If you outsource this, how else can you differentiate yourself?
If you’re not a writer, outsource it (buy) or partner with someone internally. There are a LOT of freelance writers out there who can interview you to tell the market stories and turn it into an article or blog.
[good discussion point]
Remember, marketing is the department with money. They need the stories, they usually have money to turn them into consumable content. But be the hero with the core asset – the market expertise. What your buyers care about, what you do to make their problems go away, why they should do business with your company.
You have an idea
You create content. There are many forms your content can take to create an awesome experience for your audience.
There are so many ways to publish your content today.
Ebooks, videos, tweets, linkedin updates, memes, blogs, slideshares, periscopes, photos, speaking engagements, webcasts, bylined articles, infographics
STORY: My team at Sage recently released a new content theme on collaboration in construction.
They wrote a blog post on the topic. In the next newsletter, they referenced the blog and saw an immediate spike in forms being filled out as a result. To illustrate the engagement: buyers opened the email, clicked on the link that took them to the blog post, read the entire blog post, clicked on an infographic illustrating the problem, and clicked a link on the infographic which took them to a form for the final ebook on the topic.
ROT – content marketing world’s term, love it!
CCO Chief compliance officer
Experience how these companies use their content to support the customer journey.
What are the 3 reasons you should care about content marketing?
discussion
I learn by example. Here are a few of my favorite resources. This will be included in the deck I’m posting on Slideshare.