When people talk about good advertising, they often bring up “The Big Idea.” They may dredge up the classic “Think Small” campaign for the Volkswagen Beetle. Or point to the legendary “Big Brother” ad where Apple successfully positioned itself against IBM. Or bring up the more recent Chipotle Back to the Start explainer video.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’d be overjoyed to come up with a big idea for every piece of content I put out. But let’s face it, even for biggest, most well-funded brands, big ideas are few and far between.
What’s the poor content marketer to do?
As it turns out, real marketers are achieving very good success with the pretty-darn-good idea. Rather than settling for a plain-vanilla white paper or webinar or social campaign, the following marketers came up with one new twist. As it turns out, incorporating that one unique touch can make a demand- or lead-generation campaign pretty darn successful.
The More Experts the Merrier
Lots of companies work with analysts like IDG, Forrester, or Gartner to conduct research that they can then promote in thought-leadership reports. But Blackbaud put out a new spin on the old analyst thought-leadership report. Instead of including thought leadership from just one analyst, Blackbaud brought together ten to fifteen external industry experts to write about a topic of interest to the company’s non-profit audience. It has used this technique to create a series of npEXPERT eBooks. The most recent installment shares tried-and-true donor-retention strategies, tips, and ideas.
The company has also repurposed the eBooks into a complimentary webinar series in which each author does his or her own webinar. These webinars are tied into a lead-nurture track that ultimately leads to one of the company’s many products. Customers who register for a webinar are put on one of these lead-nurture tracks based on what the company knows about them from their registration form and from what they downloaded.
Overall, the company has been very pleased with the success of the campaign. Said Frank Barry, Director of New Growth Ventures and Partners in Blackbaud’s global payments business, “The most recent eBook is the Number 1 asset we’ve ever published. We’ve downloaded over 15,000 copies.”
Fun with Twitter
Recently, when CA was faced with the challenge of creating awareness for its new Mobility Management solutions, it wanted to come up with a fun and creative way to get the word out.
The company had decided to roll out the new solution at the GSMA Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona in February of 2014. This event is a combination of the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile industry and a conference featuring prominent executives representing mobile operators, device manufacturers, technology providers, vendors, and content owners from around the world. CA had lined up speaking engagements and had a large booth on the show floor. A third part of its plan was to run a large social-media program to promote related content to people who were participating or interested in the event.
The company sent CA staffers to the conference and had them take pictures and sound bites that it could use to promote the company on Twitter. CA chose to focus on Twitter as it has become the default channel for real time activity at conferences, more so than Facebook or LinkedIn. Explained Andrew Spoeth, CA’s Social Media Marketing Director, “Twitter’s a very efficient way for people at conferences to share information quickly and find content that matters.”
CA tweeted three types of content:
- Product information for people shopping for what CA has to offer who were close to the purchase decision.
- Content about ideas, trends, and thought leadership for potential future customers. These included blog posts and infographics that would appeal to a larger group of people.
- Fun content for everyone. Said Spoeth, “We leveraged cartoons that tapped in to the conference experience. Those went nuts. We had thousands of retweets.”
“Those three things worked together really well,” said Spoeth. “As a result, CA ended up being one of the most popular Twitter accounts (retweets plus mentions) at the conference, and among 70,000+ Twitter accounts that were tweeting about the event in total.”
Customer-Created Thought Leadership
What do you do when want to create a hugely ambitious thought-leadership program, but have only four people on staff and a lean budget?
If your company is a leader in Open Source computing, you get your customers and community to help with the heavy lifting.
I recently attended an American Marketing Association event that featured a talk by Jason Hibbets, the Editor and Community Manager of Red Hat’s opensource.com site. Designed as a thought-leadership vehicle for Red Hat, said Hibbets, “The site publishes stories about the broader impact of open-source software and highlights how open source affects the world around us.”
The site contains a wide range of content of value to the open-source community. Recent stories include case studies about how open source is used at Facebook, how it powers research at CERN, and how it’s helping to save the Odia Indian Language. It covers news, development tips and tools, and recent presentations about open source. The site publishes themed content weeks, such as Women in Open Source or Back to School with Open Source. Evergreen resources include the “What is Open Source” page or the “What is OpenStack” page.
One of the key tenants of the open-source movement is that anyone can freely use, change and share the code. Moreover, the software is built by communities that volunteer. Red Hat thus doesn’t build the software per se; rather they donate considerable resources to support the people that build its software.
Red Hat’s Opensource.com thought-leadership portal used the same business model to create the content for the portal. The site’s four-person full-time staff writes about half of the 18 new pieces that go up each week; the other half of the content comes from the community. In addition to actively soliciting stories from the community, the team has recruited ten external moderators.
Overall, the site looks to be meeting its goal of providing thought leadership and building community. The site has 20,000 followers on Twitter. It also receives significant traffic from search.
As these examples show, putting an interesting and creative spin on standard marketing tactics can be just the edge you need to achieve success with your content-marketing efforts.
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