Relevant and Valued

The improbable story of the content marketing Goldfish!

Content marketing by financial services companies is commonly based on meeting informational needs of consumers in order to convert prospects or develop existing customer relationships. Choosing a new credit card may be a lower engagement decision than, say, selecting a pension plan, but innovative credit card company Goldfish is taking a different approach to content strategy nonetheless.

Associating itself with National Storytelling Week which kicked off yesterday, the focal point of the campaign is the stories told at the website meandmygoldfish.com by respected British celebrities about the relationships they have built with their credit cards. 

Comedian and writer Meera Syal tells a tale of motherhood and sleep deprivation. Anthony Horowitz , author and script writer, of a diving holiday in Egypt. Comedian Rik Mayall writes of a planned trip to the pub which turns into a surreal adventure. The stories are written around the 'Me and My Goldfish' brief with the Goldfish less of the flexible plastic friend and more taking on the personality and dialogue of the 'sole' (as one of the storyteller puns) mate. Adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes portrays his Goldfish as a trusty compass for a treacherous journey across frozen wastes.

It shouldn't really work but it kind of does.  Far from being the strongest fiction ever written, it's quirkiness is charming. You can read the tales or you can listen to or watch the authors narrate them. And you can bookmark the stories or email them to a friend.

The distinctive thing about the fishy tales is that they have absolutely nothing to do with product.  Why? Because, 'these stories tell us more and more about the relationships we have built with our cardholders over the last 12 years.'   This is using content for a pure branding exercise. Even the calls-to-action are understated on the marketing site, although when you go through to goldfish.com proper, the copy and design embodies direct marketing best practice.

But is it effective?  Without access to the key data, it's difficult to say but they've certainly differentiated and - with the help of teaser billboards throughout the UK - grabbed attention. And in a world where one credit card is much the same as another, that's not a bad thing.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

Content: the missing link between search and action

The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott is a Relevant and Valued book for marketers who want to harness the power of their content for tangible sales results.

Meerman Scott positions his book within the growing movement that heralds pull tactics rather than push tactics as the marketing currency of the digital age:

'The Web is different. Instead of one-way interruption , Web marketing is about delivering useful content just at the precise moment that a buyer needs it.'

He also argues strongly that the worlds of PR and Marketing have become blurred on the Web and that much of the PR profession is living in a rose-tinted world of traditional media focus, ignorant of the fact that marketers need to be where their customers are and the irresistible power of online marketing to reach individual customers directly and efficiently. 
Key lessons of The New Rules of Marketing and PR include:

• Web marketing is about 'understanding the keywords and phrases that our buyers are using and then deploying micro-campaigns to drive buyers to pages replete with the content they seek'.
• Niche markets can be reached profitably online.  Creating messages that appeal to niche marketers can be achieved through the generation and dissemination of effective content.
• Visitors to your website want to solve problems. You need to understand what these problems are and present content that helps them find the solutions they are seeking.
• 'The media have been disintermediated.'  Write press releases but distribute them online to have maximum impact on your customer base who will find them directly through their search activity, especially when you are selling direct to consumers: exploit the fine line between PR and direct marketing.
• Particpate in the debate!  Astute marketers engage and inform by joining conversations online, without alienating by over-selling. 
• Focus relentlessly on buyers and what they're looking for. Create personas and write for these personas.
• Measure and test everything, use results to refine content and improve its impact.

Meerman Scott is convincing and entertaining. The short chapters allow the reader to dip in and out and quickly gather ammunition to use in practice, key points illustrated by engaging and succinct case studies about real world practioners. This book comes highly recommended.

Above all the message I particularly enjoyed is that great content not only strengthens an organization's brand but calls its readers to action: 'on the Web, smart marketers understand that an effective content strategy, tightly integrated to the buying process, is critical to success.'

Or to put it another way, content is the missing link between search and action.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

Monitor the content that others are generating about you and your business

Who in your organization is responsible for monitoring the content that's being generated about it and its products and services?

We've all heard the buzz around UGC and UCM - User-generated content and Consumer-Generated Media - but this is far from just a passing fad.  As the lines have blurred between consumers and producers, so-called prosumers (a term coined as long ago as 1980 by Alvin Toffler) have emerged to become critically influential players in the conversations taking place in your market.  Mainstream media reviews and articles still remain vitally important to influencing opinion but focusing on these alone is the marketing equivalent of listening in to one end of a telephone call and hoping to understand the detail of everything that's being said.

Your challenge is to market-watch efficiently. But like consumers, the attention of marketers is scarce and because we're all so oversubscribed with information, it's hard to cut through the white noise and follow what our customers are saying about us.

What's the best way to monitor the conversations in the blogosphere? Google offers a solution with its Reader, which styles itself as an 'inbox for the web': enabling you to source, consolidate and manage what's being said about you on the internet. 

Not a unique idea but the most consistently impressive solution available says Steve Rubel who evangelizes about Google Reader in his blog at Micropersuasion.com 'Become a knowledge management ninja with Google Reader':

'In this era of data smog, the knowledge worker who can act like an agile ninja by consuming vast quantities of information, synthesizing it and getting it in the hands of the right people at the right time is invaluable'.

Reader enables you to organize, file, tag and share feeds and web content easily and efficiently.  If you're having a problem keeping up with all the conversations in your area of specialism, then it's a fantastic solution because when you log in, the homepage consolidates all the content updates for you. Cancel your email subscriptions and replace them with RSS feeds that you can subscribe to within Reader, with unread posts clearly visible. You can also organize the feeds into folders to ensure that you are able to differentiate quickly between multiple conversations that you are following: for example, you may be a marketer who needs to keep the different info streams apart because you are responsible for several products or product groups in your portfolio.

But is simply monitoring the content enough?  How about re-using it in your own marketing messages or joining the conversation yourself?  This is a core topic of Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR,  a full review of which will appear in the next Relevant and Valued.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

Why is content not a board level responsibility?

Gerry McGovern reflects on why senior managers don't respect the value of writers and the content they create in a post about Sears Roebuck: the first corporation was built on content. He wonders why this is the case:

'People who create content, unfortunately, are often their own worst enemies. They see writing a good piece of content as the objective. That is not the objective. The objective is to make a sale. The objective is to help a customer solve a problem.'

This got me thinking: why do organizations not value their content more highly and how can we work to improve that situation?  Of course, as McGovern suggests, we need to work hard to sell to the board what content can do for profitability and company value but how?

The answer is accountability.  We need to develop and seek adoption for metrics to measure the value of the content we generate. We need to show the links between what we write and the impact it has on results. It's easy for publishers: content is their business and the value is in the content. But for everyone else, we've got some work to do.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com

Unaccountable content marketing sucks

A pervasive theme of Relevant and Valued is the importance of making all marketing activity accountable. Mark Stevens' Your Marketing Sucks: the hard-nosed guide to implementing ROI marketing is a call-to-arms for those who believe that marketing spend that does not have a quantifiable impact on financial results and on company value, is marketing spend wasted.

Stevens calls his approach Extreme Marketing, which takes as its starting point that if it can't be measured then it should be cancelled. His basic tenet is that 'to be effective, marketing must produce positive arbitrage - that is, it has to generate more dollars than the dollars you invest in it.'

It's a no-nonsense, hard-hitting read, full of uncompromising gems like:

'Not only is it possible to design marketing so that the initiatives and tools you create can generate customer relationships (and ultimately sales), it is near criminal to accept anything less'.

Great content marketing also demands that accountability is built in to the strategy from the outset. By stating measurable goals and objectives upfront as part of your strategy development, it follows that you are more likely to embed measurement in every single campaign.

Defining the point in the customer journey that your marketing is intended to impact, is a useful methodology for achieving accountability. Starting with a definition of the problem in terms of the action that you are trying to get the customer to take will ensure that you build in tools to measure what the customer does in practice.  This approach will also help you to choose the medium that best delivers your objectives, by ensuring that not only is it appropriate to the context and informational needs of those you are targeting - but that it also supports a mechanism to track actions taken. If you can't build in usable metrics, then there's no point in running the campaign.

The benefits of this principle are highlighted when you consider the specific stages in the customer journey defined in Content marketing tactics and when to use them:

• ACQUIRE --- select a medium that enables you to clearly track how many 'strangers' you persuade to give you permission to start a marketing relationship with them as a percentage of those you initially target. Downloadable White Papers are a great example of this. You can measure the number of people who visit the web page against the number that download the Paper or, if integrated into an e-marketing campaign: the number that download as a percentage of those you have mailed. 
• CONVERT ---conversion metrics are of course essential in any online or direct marketing environment. Defining a clear call-to-action, you need to know how many have taken it as a proportion of the total prospects. A telemarketing campaign that follows up those who have downloaded the White Paper is an example.
• RETAIN AND GROW --- when the prospect becomes a customer, many marketers forget the importance of measuring the value of the ongoing relationship.  But investing in existing relationships is often more profitable than driving new ones.  What the content marketer needs to know here is the impact on lifetime customer value or on repeat purchases of the ongoing content marketing engagement. So if you're producing a custom magazine, you need to ensure that you understand the consequences of the subsequent action taken by your reader as a result of interacting with that content.  Track this through your CRM, build clear calls to action into the content and measure specific outcomes that way.
• RECRUIT AND AMPLIFY --- if you're asking an existing customer to help you recruit other customers, then the medium you use needs to build in a tracking mechanism to help you quantify the success of that objective.  The content here could be either the incentive or a way of promoting the benefit of recruitment. For example, if your content is viewed as of specifically high value, you could reward an existing customer with a free subscription, free book or access to premium content in return for their success in signing up a new customer or prospect. Alternatively, you could use a simple discount reward and faciliate this through your existing content marketing relationship to sell the benefit of participation. Either way, you should link the outcome back to the marketing that drove it.  As the best medium for recruitment and amplification is frequently the Internet, this goal of complete transparency is increasingly simple to achieve.

Many of us will recognize the refrain: 'it's impossible to measure but... [delete as applicable] anecdotally we know it makes a difference/if we don't spend the money this year, we'll lose it next year/we have to do it because that's what our competitors do.'

Mark Stevens' Extreme Marketing suggests that this is woolly thinking.  If you can't prove it adds value then it probably destroys it.

Be relevant, be valued and get your customers to act.

www.relevantandvalued.com