If you’re a B2B marketer, I bet you’d love it if all your prospects took identical, predictable steps toward making a purchase.
It’d sure make content planning and distribution a lot easier.
But today there are too many channels, pain points, timetables and corporate decision trees for there to be a consistent approach to procurement across all organizations.
While the B2B buyer journey isn’t always as linear and logical as we’d like, the three-stage buyer’s journey helps marketers understand how to give their prospects the content they need from the point of need to the point of sale and beyond.
What is the B2B buyer journey?
The buyer’s journey describes how a potential enterprise customer recognizes a need, gathers information on potential solutions and ultimately makes a purchase decision. It’s general enough to apply to different industries, budgets and channels. And it’s just specific enough to help you use it as a jumping-off point for your content strategy.
What are the three stages of the buyer’s journey?
- Awareness: Your potential customer knows that there is a problem.
- Consideration: They evaluate potential solutions.
- Decision: The solution perceived to be the best is purchased.
The most effective marketers use the three stages of the buyer’s journey to develop content that helps each unique prospect become a paying customer. The content planning starts here, with a comprehensive assessment of your audience’s content needs at each stage.
The scenario: You’re a marketer for a company that provides performance management and employee recognition software to large enterprises. Your audience is human resources decision-makers. Their titles include Chief Talent Officer, VP of Human Resources and Human Resources Director.
1. The Awareness Stage
At the awareness stage, your potential customers are aware that they have a problem. Your job is to make them aware that your company can solve it.
To grab the attention of prospects in the awareness stage, we write content that speaks to their pain points.
For an HR leader, these pain points might include:
- We have an inconsistent culture across our offices
- Our current HR system requires too much training and administration to use effectively
- Employee morale is flagging
- We aren’t attracting top-tier talent anymore
- Performance isn’t assessed in the same way throughout our organization
Whether it’s a white paper, tip sheet or blog post, every piece of content should address a specific problem for HR managers. So, building off our list of pain points, we can generate content ideas:
- “We have an inconsistent culture across our offices” leads to a white paper: “The HR Leader’s Guide to Supporting a Unified Company Culture”
- “Our current HR system requires too much training and administration to use effectively” leads to a tip sheet: “The 7 Features Your HR Platform Must Have to Serve the Modern Employee”
- “Employee morale is flagging” leads to a research report: “More Than Free Snacks: 6 Surprising Reasons Today’s Employees are Unhappy”
- “We aren’t attracting top-tier talent anymore” leads to a blog post: “How the Most Sought-After Employer Brands Are Attracting Top Talent (Hint: It Isn’t Money)”
- “Performance isn’t assessed in the same way throughout our organization” leads to a contributed article: “How to Standardize Performance Management Across Your Organization in 5 Steps”
Because each of these content ideas ties back to a pain point for HR leaders, you can add them to your editorial calendar knowing that each asset will help your target audience in the awareness stage.
2. The Consideration Stage
Let’s say a VP of Human Resources found a blog post of yours through a Google search, and she’s now seeing that your HR platform might be the upgrade to her current system that she’s looking for. This person has just entered the consideration stage of the B2B buyer journey. She has a few other potential vendors in mind as well, so at this point, she has a list of priorities in mind as she evaluates her options:
Features
Many prospects will be looking for specific features, so make sure that the functionality of your solution are clearly communicated on your company website. These should be tied to benefits whenever possible.
Third-party Validation
Prospects don’t want to just take your word for how great your solution is. They want to hear from experts and actual users to get a sense of how innovative, reliable and valuable it is. You can give your solution a leg up on the competition in the consideration phase if you showcase user reviews, credible analyst reports, case studies and customer testimonials on your site.
Test Drive
If they’re still intrigued, prospects will want to try the actual productto see how easy it is to use and better understand how it would add value to their organization. Make it as easy as possible for your prospects to schedule a demo or a free trial so that they can get a sense of the product first hand.
Once your prospect has had time to digest all of this information and compare it to your competitors, the time has come to make a decision.
3. The Decision Stage
As your prospect enters the decision stage, there’s still work to do, and your content can help lighten your lift. The details that still need to be ironed out can include:
- Ease of implementation
- Maintenance requirements
- Pricing and terms of contract
The most effective way to alleviate any fears of high implementation costs is to provide case studies and testimonials of successful implementations. You can also create easy-to-understand implementation and maintenance guides to put your prospects at ease. If ROI is still a concern, an ROI calculator can help your prospects see the value of your solution for themselves and also share it with their internal stakeholders to secure final approval to purchase.
Your Content Should Improve the Customer Experience, Too
Did you make the sale? Congrats! Your content successfully guided your prospect from need to purchase. But the B2B buyer journey doesn’t actually end after your prospect becomes a buyer.
This is the beginning of a relationship between your new customer and your brand, so make sure your content is helping them have the best customer experience possible. That can include thought leadership videos that help them do their jobs better, tip sheets for getting the most out of your solution, and emails alerting them to cool new features.
Word of mouth is the absolute best way to get more sales and shorten your sales cycle times, so invest in your new customers by crafting amazing content for them, and you’ll be rewarded many times over with new referrals who are ready to buy.
When it comes to content marketing ideas, we can’t get enough. Even if there isn’t a new product, service, feature or event to promote (and there’s rarely a shortage of those), there’s always the desire to keep your brand relevant. To do that, your content marketing ideas have to be as strong as possible before you commit the time, energy and resources needed to successfully execute them.
The next time you’re brainstorming ideas, ask these questions to improve your content marketing ideas until they’re the best they can be.
- What key insight is powering this idea? How can we build on that insight even more?
- Are there any ideas, concepts or past campaigns that relate to this idea? What can we learn from those and apply to this idea to make it even stronger?
- What is the central message of this idea? Are there any opportunities to fine tune that message or build upon it?
- What channels should we leverage to make this campaign successful? Are there any unconventional channels that we could consider? Where will our audience be more receptive to hearing this message? How can the idea adapt to each channel?
- Are there any external events, trends or movements that we can leverage or align with this campaign or idea? How can we position our campaign to piggyback on that momentum?
- How can we amplify this idea? How can we make it bigger? What if we had no budget at all? What would that look like?
- How can we make this smaller? How can we hyper-target this so that only our target audience is reached? How can we give a group of people an experience they won’t stop talking about?
Asking these questions can help you channel the creativity of your team to produce content marketing ideas that will win buy-in and generate results. Got any more to add to the list? Let us know on Twitter.
Move over, blog.
It used to be every company had to have one. And, for the majority of brands, a blog is still a savvy way to publish your expertise and POV on timely topics.
But there’s a format better suited to showcase the full strategic range of B2B and association brands’ thought leadership chops.
Say hello to the mighty content hub.
If you’ve been tempted to write it off as content marketing’s latest shiny toy, think again. The content hub is here to stay.
Look around and you’ll find a growing number of content hubs on the websites of forward-thinking brands such as GE, Intel, Wells Fargo and CDW. The big daddy of them all, American Express’ Open Forum, is still one of the best-done and best-known. (It launched in 2007 and has been pioneering the format ever since.)
Content hubs and thought leadership are a match made in content marketing heaven. They showcase content value, track the audience and capture data—the trifecta of content marketing best practices. Win-win-win.
If you’re still not sure about this whole content hub business, here’s your primer.
What’s a content hub, anyway?
Done right, a content hub is more substantial than a blog and more focused than a website. The best B2B content hubs provide contextual depth and authoritative breadth on a select handful of strategic industry topics that matter to your industry or vertical audience—and your brand business goals, of course.
Think of the content hub as command central for your B2B brand’s publishing prowess. It invites your audience to come in, hang their hats and stay awhile. Go ahead, it says: Sink into the issues and formats that matter most to your career and industry.
Keep in mind that you’re not inviting your audience to hang their hats and stay awhile in your rented home, owned by someone else, like Facebook, for example. (Thanks, but no thanks, Mark Zuckerberg.) A content hub is an owned asset. All data, content distribution and audience insights belong to you, B2B brand, free and clear. Smart move.
Content hubs also may increase user engagement, time spent, number of content pieces consumed and trackable markers on the road to conversion. The upside is enticing: 96 percent of B2B buyers say they want content from industry thought leaders, according to a 2016 study by Demand Gen Report.
For these reasons, and many more, the content hub is the go-to format of strategic opportunity in thought leadership content marketing. In a way, it’s the new online magazine. While, yes, the magazine continues to thrive in print (despite predictions of its demise late last decade), its online equivalent is far closer to the content hub than the blog.
A search for an official definition of content hub brings up zilch, so here’s my very own, homegrown one, tailored to B2B: A content hub is a one-stop-shop digital experience built to house and leverage all the content—no matter the format, channel or platform—created by a brand to showcase expertise and inspire its audience to act on its business goals in measurable ways.
Designed to look like the most engaging media sites, content hubs usually live in a dedicated area of a brand’s website. In terms of design, you might see lots of content squares lined up in pretty rows. Each content box has an image and headline, sometimes a teaser, and always a call to action when the user hits the article page. Once consumed, each piece pays it forward, teasing another related content experience—article, infographic, video, listicle, podcast, social object … or whatever content marketing dreams up next.
“Content hubs and thought leadership are a match made in content marketing heaven. They showcase content value, track audience and capture data. Win-win-win.”
Kim Caviness
Why do we trust content hubs?
We’re attracted to content hubs because they satisfy a deeply human need to learn and thrive through information gathering and social connection. If we want to get all psycho-sociological about it, we could say the content hub is an online proxy for three distinct old-school, real-life spaces we’ve traditionally sought out for professional education and inspiration:
The Newsstand—Discovery. “Hey, look at all these great B2B magazines about my industry. Who knew? I’m going to stand here longer than expected and flip through them all, so I can stay ahead at work and impress my boss.”
The Conference—Connection. “I’m going to network with others like me and schmooze, learn and recharge, as I think about my future and what I want to accomplish next in my professional ambitions.”
The Library—Authority. “I can go deep in this trusted, evergreen archive of expertise and search for everything I need to know about my industry. Looking back thoughtfully helps me look forward—and succeed.”
What these three places have in common is they offer information and put users in charge of how to get it. Similarly, the B2B content hub’s value prop is control. For you and your audience.
Content hubs are built to empower a brand and its target users with front-end UX and back-end CMS wizardry. They’re usually better at this than the blog and the website. Here’s how they differ:
A blog prioritizes time. The most recently posted article or infographic is what users encounter first. They typically have to visit other sections of the site or dip into archives to find what else that brand stands for.
A website prioritizes navigation. Visitors must first decode navigation items to determine authority, plot their next move and understand where to find value. That’s fine, but it’s not putting the user at the center of a relevance-first content experience.
A content hub prioritizes relevance. Readers are welcomed by lots of smart, attractive thought leadership content and invited to select the topics that matter most to them by using filters and tags. Through skillful design, experience choices and strategic CTAs, brands can guide users toward content choices that deliver on their own business purposes.
Ultimately, audiences and brands have an equal say in organizing meaningful editorial experiences that benefit both sides.
This is part two in our ongoing series on content hubs:
- Part 1: Why the content hub is a content marketing powerhouse
- Part 2: The 9 benefits of content hubs for your brand
- Part 3: The checklist—is a content hub right for you?
If you’ve got a story to tell and thought leadership is your content marketing mantra, there’s no better format than a content hub.
That’s because content hubs are the heart and soul of a brand’s data-driving, editorially innovative, audience-hustling content marketing program. It’s your brand storytelling meet-up, your online home for visitors new and old, your content lab for innovation.
Let’s break down the benefits of the mighty C hub.
Brand authority
Content hubs showcase your industry expertise and insider access in a singularly authoritative way. How smart, comprehensive and ahead of the competition is your brand? The answer lies in your hub, where your audience can easily access the best, most relevant and most complete—and we mean complete—range of topics, verticals and formats your brand chooses to offer. All your expertise is on full display. That’s thought leadership at its best.
Centralized experience
A defining element of content hubs is that no matter the content source or format—article, infographic, social, UGC, white paper, YouTube video, whatever—it all lives in your centrally organized, beautifully designed, UX-optimized hub. The user is happy and the host brand is happy, because the content makers can easily manage and optimize the front end from one CMS. The back end is seamlessly managed via one dashboard with access to all the analytics.
User personalization
Relevance rules. And one of the most important benefits of content hubs is users’ ability to filter their content desires. This allows brands to present a comprehensive range of the topics, pillars, related CTAs and tags that further your brand’s thought leadership cred, across a rich range of formats, topics, platforms and channels. Is your user a visual learner? Offer her a video or infographic. Another prefers long-form? Guide him to white papers and articles. A blog is more of a one-way conversation, starring you. A content hub offers up your smarts in a way that’s more about them: your end users. Ultimately, that will be better for both of you.
Audience buy-in
Good design matters. And delivers. Successful content hubs take design inspiration from modern media experiences relevant to the world of your audience. Where do your readers go for news and entertainment when they’re not thinking about you or work? Take a cue from that. The goal is to have visitors arrive and instantly feel that you “get” them because you’re offering an experience that seems so oddly familiar. Which is why, if you get it right, they’ll instantly find themselves trusting you—subconsciously, of course. Offering them a media-like content experience announces: “Don’t worry: I’m giving you something. I’m not trying to sell you anything—yet.” Plus, search engines reward collections of well-designed pages intelligently linked to each other and that offer quality content. Which means that your audience has a greater chance of being served your beautifully designed content experience as an official SERP response to its Googling.
Back-end control
Good news! You don’t have to bug dev for every pesky little content-design thing. Because a content hub is powered by a content-optimized CMS, your team has more levers to pull. This means content creators can handle a wider variety of inputs. And your analyst has just one dashboard to track—no more having to go pull data from different accounts for social, YouTube, blog, podcast, white paper downloads, CRM and so on. A content hub organizes all your data inputs into one centralized dashboard. Plus, the more your users click around the hub, the smarter your brand gets about their needs and wants. That way, you can serve them more relevant, personalized content via targeted e-newsletters and on future hub visits. All power goes to you.
Relationship drivers
Content hubs are relationship powerhouses. Per a 2016 Demand Gen Report study, nearly half of buyers view three to five pieces of content before they’re ready to talk to a rep. By design and function, content hubs were created to deliver these touch points. They’re built to skillfully suck in your target audience and tease them along the content continuum, guiding them from, say, article to video to newsletter to white paper to—ta-da!—your ultimate success-metric CTA. If you get the give value/take value dance just right, you provide so much quality, contextual expertise and positive UX to your audience, they forget you’re trying to sell them something. They’re hooked.
Lead generation
Are you one of the 74 percent of marketers that HubSpot says cite lead conversion as nirvana? Behold the content hub. By very definition, a C hub uses content experiences to skillfully hustle audiences through the funnel. As it moves them from awareness to conversion, a brand can choose to reveal or withhold high-value content in exchange for commitments, such as email address, opinions or membership renewal. Because of their interlinked front and back ends, content hubs can be lead-gen gold.
Measurement & distribution
Like J Lo, the C hub has a beautiful back end. Content hubs make it easy for brands to track metrics across channels and platforms in one unified dashboard. This helps brands improve content experiences, stay connected to users, get smarter about their business prospects, and distribute brand value across e-newsletters, paid and personalized future touch points.
Moneymakers
Content hubs are right at home hosting third-party advertising, sponsored partnerships and native advertising. Their organization reinforces church-and-state separation by allowing brands to label revenue-generated vs. editorially “clean” content. Transparency and trust are cornerstones of thought leadership easily delivered by content hubs’ flexible design and media-like environment.
This is part two in our ongoing series on content hubs:
- Part 1: Why the content hub is a content marketing powerhouse
- Part 2: The 9 benefits of content hubs for your brand
- Part 3: The checklist—is a content hub right for you?
It happens to all of us. Some weeks, we’ve got so many new content ideas we can barely get them all down. But occasionally—probably more often than any of us would care to admit—the well runs dry.
What’s a content marketer to do? Go out searching for new content marketing ideas, of course.
Here are four tried-and-true tactics for generating new content marketing ideas:
Address the pain points of your target audience.
When in doubt, always come back to your audience. Because if your new content doesn’t resonate with them, then you might as well save yourself all the effort of creating content in the first place. Take a walk, go to a movie — do anything but create content your audience will ignore.
So how do you know what your audience cares about? Start with their pain points. If your audience is tax accountants, then their pain points might include:
- Document management: How do I keep track of all the physical and digital documents I need to close the books?
- Regulation and compliance: How do I stay on top of evolving reporting guidance and tax rules that I need to follow?
- Company culture: How do I ensure my staff and colleagues are both productive and satisfied in their careers?
- Managing stress and burnout: How can I care for my mental health when pressures mount — particularly during busy season?
Notice that I phrased each pain point as a question in the first-person. This is a really effective way to put yourself in the shoes of your audience. It also provides you, the content marketer, with a jumping-off point to find content marketing ideas and execute on them. If your content — whether it’s a blog post, podcast or video — can answer a question your audience has, that’s a content home run.
Look at what the competition is doing—and do it better.
I often see marketers get a little too obsessed about what the competition is doing, but a little bit of competitive content research can go a long way.
There’s really no magic number to how many competitors you should look at, but any more than five is verging on overkill. Simply write down the competitors whose lunch you are most interested in eating and, one by one, take stock of the content they are creating across channels.
If you want to get audit-level granular, create a spreadsheet and document the following for each piece of content:
- Topic
- Audience
- Theme
- Sophistication Level
- Tone
- CTA (Is there one? What is it?)
- Shelf Life (Timely or evergreen?)
Deep competitive content audits can help you build a long-term content marketing strategy, but if you’re just looking for new content marketing ideas, then that level of analysis might not be necessary.
As a quick-and-dirty exercise, you can just skim the headlines of the blog posts, reports and videos of your competitors. Any topics that are performing well (e.g., they’ve garnered lots of views on YouTube or attracted a lot of comments or social shares) could be worth pursuing. The catch is that you can’t just replicate the content of your competitors. You need to either find a new angle on the topic, or execute the same angle more effectively. Preferably, you do both.
For example, maybe your competitor has a 300-word blog post titled “Tracking On- and Offline Docs in a Digital World” that’s gotten some traction on social media. In it, they’ve provided three high-level tips that most accountants have probably tried before. As you pursue this content marketing idea, seize the opportunity to go deeper in your research as you uncover novel solutions to this audience-specific problem. Reach out to actual tax accountants who have solved the document management problem. Email them, get them on the phone, and really drill down into the processes, software, tips, and methods they use to wrangle financial documentation. After putting in the work, you could have a new 1,200-word blog post: “Tax Accountants Share These 11 Proven Ways to Manage Physical and Digital Documents.” Same topic? Yep. Same content? Nope — yours is way better and has a great chance of outperforming the competition over time.
Consider how the latest news relates to your audience.
If you’re looking for quick content inspiration, newspapers and magazines can be your muse. New technologies are always coming to market. Companies are being founded, scaled and acquired. Different generations, from high schoolers to seniors, are adopting new trends and behaviors. Interest rates, unemployment numbers, company annual reports — economic news never stops.
And all of it can relate to your audience. Your job, as a content marketer, is to make that connection for them. How does the devaluation of a once-high-flying fintech impact accountants? How does virtual reality relate to people with dementia? How do interest rates affect AirBnb hosts?
All intriguing content ideas, but don’t delay. The sooner you can publish your thoughts on newsworthy topics, the more likely your efforts are to get results.
Find trending conversations on social media and add your POV.
Although social platforms emit more noise than a group of Harley Davidson enthusiasts on their way to Sturgis while you’re just trying to enjoy an al fresco brunch, thought-provoking topics do bubble up on social media with impressive frequency.
Keep an eye out for question-posts that attract lots of answers, like this one. Threads comprising several posts linked together that generate strong engagement can also serve as inspiration for new content ideas. Trending social conversations show you that there’s already interest in the topic, so you can use that insight to create high-performing new content for your own brand.
Just remember: Your new content ideas can’t just be interesting to you—they must always be engaging to your audience.
Imagination and Staples have won Best Print Publication at the 2022 Content Marketing Awards (aka the CMAs) for Staples Worklife magazine. It’s been a rewarding partnership with the team at Staples, and we’re proud of the recognition the magazine has received from the Content Marketing Institute. But even more importantly, Staples Worklife has allowed the incredible people behind the Staples brand to shine through engaging storytelling and cutting edge design, while also sparking new conversations and strengthening existing relationships between Staples and its customers.
About Staples Worklife magazine
Disruptions have rocked the world of work. Business leaders face numerous challenges: low employee engagement, high attrition rates, malware attacks and more. Staples set out with a strategy to position itself as a solutions provider and a thought leader in the work-life space. Staples Worklife magazine exemplifies the brand’s voice as the smart, friendly colleague at work who offers helpful advice. Articles feature tips from business experts as well as recent research on workplace trends. After spending some time with Staples Worklife magazine, team leaders have tactical advice that will help them and their employees work and collaborate more effectively.
As part of Staples’ brand refresh, one of the new objectives for the company was to showcase the people behind the brand. To achieve that, we needed to tell the stories of the people behind the brand. In a recent issue, we wove in internal Staples SMEs to showcase their expertise. For example, Staples’ head of technology answered crowd-sourced questions about tech challenges in the “Problem Solver” advice column.
Brand magazines can be highly effective sales tools, and Staples Worklife is no exception. The magazine is used an icebreaker to prompt conversations between Staples’ sales team and its top business clients. To facilitate that dialogue without pushing products, we find subtle ways to incorporate helpful office supplies that solve common workplace challenges. For example, in a recent feature titled “A Better Way,” an illustrated guide offers tips and tech tools for mastering video conference setups.
Staples Worklife is distributed to decision-makers and problem-solvers at companies around the country. In 2021, we covered the biggest trends in the workplace: the Great Resignation, mental wellness, Gen Z employees, hybrid work, sustainability and DEI initiatives.
As we all navigate new ways of working, Staples—and its knowledgeable staff—will continue to be a helpful, engaging resource.
Writing a blog post every week. Getting your Twitter account over 10,000 followers. Generating a hundred qualified leads this quarter.
Setting goals is one thing. But hitting them? That’s a little trickier.
Once the excitement of setting a goal wears off, your momentum can flag as you work toward it. Before you know it, they’re out of reach.
This scenario has happened to everyone, so it probably sounds familiar. So what’s the problem? What’s keeping you (and everyone else) from sticking with it and hitting your goals?
They’re probably not fun enough.
That’s according to Dr. Ayelet Fishbach, Jeffrey Breakenridge Keller Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. She’s also the author of Get it Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation.
In an article she penned for Psychology Today, Fishbach writes: “Most of us intuitively plan to put the fun aside so we can get serious about our goals. But the latest research from my lab and others’ tells us this is the wrong approach.”
Enjoyment, she says, is mission critical for making good on your resolutions or goals.
“Humans and animals alike respond strongly to immediate outcomes,” she says. “If doing something makes you feel good while you do it, you’re more likely to persist than if you think it’ll make you feel good in the future.”
Here are a few of her takeaways aimed at giving yourself the best shot at achieving your goals and enjoying the process along the way:
Be realistic about what it will take to hit your goals.
First, set your goals while in the environment and mindset you’ll be in when you’re actually working on them.
Sounds strange, but think about it: Are you more likely to set reasonable, achievable goals while watching the sun set over the water, or on a Wednesday while at your desk?
In that same article, Fishbach writes: “When setting a resolution, you don’t pay enough attention to how it’ll feel a month or two later. … Instead, to make your future-self more likely to follow through, set your resolutions when you’re in a similar state and therefore, sympathetic to the person you’ll be when pursuing them.”
Choose the more exciting route to your goals.
Maybe your goal is to get better at making persuasive business presentations. If you’re deciding between a seminar or an improv class, go with the option you think will be the most fun. Remember: comfortable doesn’t tend to mean fun. So get out of your comfort zone and shake things up. You’re more likely to stick with the option that pushes you into new experiences and discoveries.
Make the journey to your goals a first-class trip.
Sometimes, work is just a lot of… work. Even if your goal is to compile some dry reports on deadline or edit some messy audio for a podcast series, Fishbach recommends making the pursuit of the goal fun by pairing the activity with something you enjoy. The reality is that hard work can be a slog, but you can still make the process more enjoyable. For instance, try compiling a special hype-up playlist or treat yourself to a fancy Matcha latte.
Reframe your goals.
How we think about our goals can have a huge impact on our desire to do what it takes to achieve them. Fishbach points to a 2019 academic study on college campuses in which the cafeterias found that students ate more food that was presented as delicious, rather than healthy. “College students were more excited about eating ‘Herb ’n’ Honey Balsamic Glazed Turnips’ than ‘Healthy Choice Turnips,’ even though they were the same turnips presented with different descriptions,” she says. Make your goals the Herb ’n’ Honey variety.
In other words, keeping things fun does more than just make your work life more enjoyable. It also pays dividends when it comes to achieving goals. As you’re setting your next content marketing goal at work, try to do it at your desk on an ordinary weekday, choose the most exciting way to achieve that goal, incorporate elements that make your process more pleasant, and even reframe the goal to give yourself the best shot at sticking to it. More than anything else, try to have some fun.
Back when I was in journalism school at the University of Missouri, digital media was a hot new topic. The tried-and-true principles of writing and design weren’t quite working the same way on a computer as they did on magazines and newspapers. As a result, we were all—students, professors and working journalists—trying to figure out the most effective, engaging ways to tell stories that would be accessed via a computer.
At the time, we didn’t know that mobile phones would soon become even more popular media consumption devices than our computers. (I was still rocking an LG flip phone that played a polyphonic rendition of “When the Levee Breaks” every time I got a call.)
Today, the pace of change hasn’t slowed a bit. New technologies like virtual and augmented reality, voice search and linguistically advanced chatbots are continuing to challenge marketers, product designers and communicators of all stripes.
But there are some basic best practices for writing digital content that continue to serve us well at Imagination. Below, I share nine web writing best practices that you can lean on to consistently craft effective digital content.
Writing for the Web: Best Practices
- Know your audience. The prerequisite for good content (web or print) is a detailed understanding of your audience. For example, content crafted for “marketing directors at Fortune 500 technology firms” is usually more effective than content created for a broad audience of “technology executives.” In some cases, you may need to develop personas to gain a clearer understanding of specific audiences.
- Use bullets, lists and subheads. Digital audiences frequently scan online content for highlights. By using bullet points, lists, subheads and other strategies, you can align your content with the visual needs of your audience.
- Make your most important points early. Most site users don’t read “below the fold,” i.e., they don’t scroll down when consuming online content. Don’t bury key messages — make your most important points early on the page to ensure they are seen by the highest number of users.
- Eliminate unnecessary words. Web copy is concise and succinct. When you read through draft content, you can usually eliminate a handful of words to clean up the copy. Getting rid of unnecessary words makes copy crisper, more concise and easier for users to digest.
- Understand what you want the user to do next. Effective web content motivates the user to take the all-important next step. The next step could be downloading a content asset, requesting a demo, going deeper into the site for more information or other steps that move the user along the buyer journey. Craft your content and Calls to Action (CTAs) in a way that makes it easy for the user to understand what comes next.
- Consider SEO — but don’t be straight-jacketed by keywords. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps drive organic search traffic to your webpage. Although keywords matter, Google and other search engines place a high value on content that is useful, relevant and informative. No keyword stuffing!
- Collaborate with design. In the digital universe, copy and design work together to communicate key messages and incentivize users to action. Copywriters need to work closely with design throughout the content development and creation process. At a minimum, writers should have visibility to wireframes before they start writing copy.
- Remain consistent. When it comes to format, voice, tone and style, users don’t typically like surprises. Once they pick up on the “rules” of your content, it will help them quickly navigate and absorb information throughout the site.
- In headlines, make your point quickly and succinctly. Often, just naming the service or industry is enough in H1 headings. For sub-heads (H2 headings), sum up the purpose of the content it’s introducing as clearly as possible.
Like everything, these digital content best practices will no doubt evolve as new platforms, technologies and user behaviors emerge.
Have any you’d like to add? Reach out to us on LinkedIn or Twitter—or contact us to discuss how we can help you level-up your brand’s digital presence.
Podcasts are here to stay—but what will they look like in the future?
After outlining the history of podcasts and how to create a podcast, this is what Imagination’s Senior Audio Manager Peter Kosmal sees in the future of podcasts:
Interactivity
The future of audio will feature heightened interactivity. Over the course of the pandemic, 36% of smart speaker users reported using their devices for music and entertainment more than before, according to some NPR and Edison Research. As usage continues to increase, Kosmal predicts that smart speaker technology will continue to advance. For instance, Steve Henn, who leads content strategy for Google, told GeekWire he imagines a future where smart speakers enable interactivity or choose-your-own-adventure experiences.
Accessibility
The future of podcasting will be more accessible. Emerging technologies, particularly voice search, will make this possible. Using a voice command for a smart speaker is infinitely easier than bringing up a podcast on your phone. Plus, audio command technology provides a better experience for those who are visually impaired. We’ll see advancements in accessibility as faster and better transcripts of audio are available, which will enable users to not only find the podcast they were looking for but find the section of the podcast they’re looking for, according to Jonathan Gill, founder and CEO of Backtracks, who wrote an article for Forbes on the future of podcasting.
Inclusivity
The future of audio technology looks a lot more inclusive. Diversity and inclusion is important to listeners—particularly in Gen Z. It just goes to show (in addition to being the right thing to do) that successful podcasts in the future will connect communities—not exclude—and reflect diverse audiences and perspectives in their content.
If you believe Elon Musk, artificial intelligence (AI) is a bigger threat to the human race than nuclear weapons. But before the machines gather the self-awareness and gumption to chuck us into the trash bin of time, it will first come for the SEOs.
For years, I’ve convinced myself that the technology might displace the jobs of auto plant workers, truck drivers and possibly even home plate umpires, but artificial intelligence would never be able to write a story, paint a picture or compose a song (Eno’s generative music notwithstanding).
Now, after reading Steven Johnson’s article for The New York Times about the latest artistic efforts of supercomputers, I’m not so sure.
One version of AI known as a large language model can in fact invent stories that, while not the most thrilling, at least are feasible. Johnson posits that if the trend of linguistic progress continues, large language models will be able to answer many of the questions we currently use Google Search for today.
If Google were able to harness the potential of this technology, it could fundamentally alter how search works in the future.
Rather than being an intermediary between a person’s question and someone else’s answer, Google would generate the answer using its large language model, which would rapidly pull information online from multiple sources and stitch it together in a way that is current, cogent, full of context, and actionable for the person who asked the question.
Pitted against tomorrow’s über-sophisticated AI, your company’s blog post likely won’t stand a chance.
Sounds bleak, but I believe there’s hope: You can protect your content from the wrath of the robots.
Most SEO content answers a specific question, like “How do I program my garage door opener?” or “How can I take advantage of tax-loss harvesting?” It’s this type of content that AI will master first.
So let the machines have their practical, cut-and-dry content. If you want your content to survive in the era of AI, your mission is to create a novel content experience that your audience can’t be generated by a supercomputer.
Here are five ways to do that:
Share forward-thinking ideas.
A.I. will be able to slice and dice existing content to serve up answers, but it will likely have a much more difficult time offering new ideas, frameworks and strategies that can help people prepare for, navigate or shape the future. That’s where your brand has the opportunity to step up and be a thought leader. Draw on your unique experience, skills and expertise to identify trends, make predictions and offer new solutions for your audience. AI will not be able to match the unique perspective you bring to the table.
Ensure all content springs from your brand values.
Values and morality are a well-documented shortcoming of AI, although very smart people are working on it. Exploit this weakness while you can.
As you plan your content for this year and beyond, try mapping each piece of content to a specific brand value. For example, a video conferencing company might map an article about the communication preferences of people with different work styles to its value of collaboration. This exercise can help your values come through more clearly as themes within your content and make sure that any off-brand content is nixed before it can be worked on. And thanks to your content’s value-driven POV, it will have more than a fighting chance against any soulless AI content.
Do your own original reporting.
One thing you can do that an AI can’t is talk to your customers, your internal experts, your partners and your target audience and weave their perspectives into a piece of content. Journalists call this reporting, and it’s fundamental to how they tell honest, engaging and enlightening stories. There’s nothing stopping you from practicing a little journalism yourself as you create content, and it will help you establish an authentic connection with your audience that no AI will be able to achieve.
Give your experts a platform to share their ideas and personalities.
While not every one of your colleagues will want to get in front of a camera or even pen a blog post, a select few might be very into the idea of sharing their enthusiasm for their area of expertise with a broader audience. Whether it’s a video series, a podcast or a consistent presence on the company blog, empower your internal thought leaders to create content. Every brand is different, but I recommend giving them the freedom to be themselves. People are drawn to personalities, so rather than reining it in, encourage them to let it out. It will make the content more engaging and competitive against its boring AI competition.
Invest in an active social presence.
While Google is the place to find what you’re looking for, social media platforms are where you find the content you didn’t know you wanted. So to get eyeballs on your content, you need to be sharing it across social. But if you stop there, the supercomputers win. You also need to engage with your audience to start and sustain conversations. Like a socially active human, you should listen, respond, follow and repost within your community. And if you’re sharing articles, videos, podcasts and graphics that follow some of the tips above, your brand will be seen as a valuable contributor of content that your audience can’t find anywhere else.
OK, I’ll be honest… I have no idea if or when the robots will be able to generate content that out-competes your brand’s SEO content. But assume that it will in five years, and design your strategy accordingly. Your content and your brand will be stronger for it, because they will feel all the more human as a result.
Full disclosure: Reviewers of business books do not read every word of every book. The stack of books never seems to get any smaller. Deadlines loom. And to be honest, business books are usually pretty formulaic: anecdote masquerading as meaningful example, what I see that no one else in history has ever seen, revolutionary methodology followed by 10 steps on what to do next—oh, and sign up for my seminars to learn more. Reading enough of these leads the harried reviewer to a process where you skip the anecdote, go directly to the blinding realization, scan the 10 steps. Review done. Business books by former CEOs are even worse. (I was amazing. Here’s why. Here’s all the famous people I met while CEO-ing.)
There are exceptions, of course, like the books written by Dan Heath or his brother Chip or with his brother Chip. Together the two have written four bestsellers that have sold over 3 million copies worldwide.
Here’s why these books are exceptions. The examples are actually meaningful examples, not just anecdotes, and the methodology is not so much revolutionary as staring you right in the face. Dan Heath’s Upstream, like the books co-authored with his brother, have that smack-yourself-on-the-forehead-but-of-course quality.
Heath’s point in this book is that businesses, governments and whole economic sectors—health care being the obvious one—are organized to fix problems after they occur. Broken arm? Here’s a cast. Too many customer complaints? Try more customer service reps. High crime? Hire more police officers.
But what if the arm was never broken in the first place, or the customers had nothing to complain about, or the crimes were prevented instead of prosecuted?
One police officer stands on the corner getting to know the people in the neighborhood and providing a visible deterrent to crime, the other hides around the corner to catch someone breaking the law and arrest them. Which one did more to foster public safety? The first one. Which one was rewarded? The one with the fat book of tickets written.
The ticket-giver works downstream because that’s the way the system is organized. The friendly neighborhood patrolman works upstream, preventing the problem before it occurs. Move upstream and you will save money and improve your reputation and the health of your business—or improve your community, or increase the number of kids graduating from high school, or reduce the number of homeless people.
Expedia discovered that over half of its customers called customer service—20 million people, equivalent to the population of Florida—all needing the same thing: a copy of their itinerary. The booking people were happy, however, because 40 million people made reservations. The web people were happy because the booking process worked efficiently. And the customer service people were rewarded for handling all those calls in under two minutes. No one thought about preventing the calls in the first place, which were costing Expedia $100 million a year.
To be clear, this book does not offer a methodology as such because the remedies are unique to the situations it describes. However, organizations that reverse from downstream to upstream share some commonalities. This book does not give you the bony finger in the face telling you what to do, nor does it ask you to sign up for anything you have to pay for. Instead, it offers free access to a newsletter, a book club, a reading list, and a podcast.
There’s no self-promotion, no name-dropping, and no chapters you’ll want to skip. It just describes a truly different way to organize your business and how you conduct it.
One question you’re bound to be asking: How do you measure things that didn’t happen? Heath even has an answer for that, actually several, because, unlike most business books, he’s not promising snake oil to solve everything.
My question is: Who’s the teeny guy in a hat smoking a pipe, covering up page numbers 27, 28, 29, and 30 but appearing nowhere else in the book?
Upstream by Dan Heath
Avid Reader Press, 2020
It’s a great time to start a podcast. In 2021, there were 120 million podcast listeners in the U.S.—a number that Statista expects to grow to 160 million by 2023.
So what’s stopping you from launching your own?
If you’re intimidated, no need to worry. Creating a successful podcast can be within reach. Check out episode two of “Listen Up: A Podcast Primer” and follow the steps below to create your own podcast.
1. Set goals for your podcast
Before you create your podcast, ask yourself one question: What do you want your podcast to achieve? The answer to that question might be generating more brand awareness, engaging on a deeper level with your audience, or maybe it’s just having fun and learning about the medium.
If your goal is more measurable, determine what your key performance indicators (KPIs) will be as you embark on your podcasting journey. For instance, to measure how well you’re doing with audience engagement, you could track your podcast’s ratings, the number of episode reviews or listener comments. If you want to track audience growth, you could measure your subscriber numbers and social shares of your episodes.
As you’re setting your goals, keep in mind that podcast ROI can be trickier to pin down than the ROI of, say, a sales team. In his book Association Podcasting, Blake Althen discusses the concept of “unintended return on investment.” That is, if your podcast is interesting, well produced, and consistent, then your listeners will become fans of the show—and, by proxy, fans of your brand. While this effect can be difficult to measure, it can make a real impact on the bottom line of your company.
2. Determine the format and style of your podcast
Prior to recording, you’ll want to determine your podcast format and style. The interview format is popular. With this style, the host typically leads a discussion with a thought leader or subject-matter expert. According to Peter Kosmal, Senior Audio Manager at Imagination, this style of podcast lends itself well to exploring niche topics.
You could also consider a podcast that’s more like a roundtable conversation among multiple guests, led by a host. “This is great for building rapport and has a natural energy that can be lacking in a standard interview,” Kosmal said.
There are plenty of podcasts that are more than recorded conversations as well, such as narrative podcasts like the popular Welcome to Night Vale and Open Source Heroes, which weave together a story over multiple episodes, while documentary-style podcasts like Serial and Radiolab tell a true story over multiple episodes in an engaging and polished way.
If you decide that a podcast is too much of a commitment, there are still other ways to use audio in your content strategy. For example, you can embed audio snippets into a piece of content to add a new dimension of interactivity while enhancing the story you want to tell.
3. Do everything you can to help your podcast stand out
Now that you’ve established your goals and identified the format and style, you’re ready to start producing your podcast. You’ve got some decisions to make: Are you going to record and produce your podcast completely in-house? Or will you send your audio files to a production company for editing? Or will you find a full-service podcasting partner to help hone your content, record your shows, and edit them concisely?
No matter which option you choose, keep in mind these four elements of a successful podcast:
Specificity
“You need to clearly define what your podcast is about and find your niche,” Kosmal says. “Don’t think about casting a wide net.” Hundreds of thousands of podcasts are launched each year, he points out. Most of the successful ones are targeted to a specific audience. The old adage, “If you try to please everyone, you’ll end up pleasing no one,” definitely applies to podcast creation.
Novelty
Beyond the topic you choose to focus on, you can decide how you approach and execute it. What can you do to put a unique spin on your audio storytelling? Look at your competition and try to identify any conventions that you can subvert to stand out. Podcast hosts typically interview guests, but what if the guests were to interview the host? If everyone else is staying surface level and broad, what if your podcast went deep on specific topics?
Repeatability
A successful podcast consistently delivers the goods to its audience while offering up something fresh in every episode. If you can find that sweet spot between reliable quality and spontaneous excitement, your audience will keep coming back for more. Also: Don’t make the mistake of overcommitting yourself to a demanding publishing schedule. Publishing a new episode even once every two weeks is challenging, and if your audience looks for you and you aren’t there, they could drop off and never come back.
Quality
Sound quality, music, editing and hosting—each of these elements can either enhance or detract from the listening experience. “Audiences won’t have patience for poor quality audio or meandering conversation,” Kosmal says. Make sure the team working on your podcast has the skills and equipment to produce a professional-sounding podcast.
4. Host and distribute your podcast to the world
After you’ve produced your podcast, you need to release it to the public to start building an audience. There are a variety of different places users can find and subscribe to podcasts, but the primary places are Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
To distribute your podcasts, you’ll also need a hosting service. Libsyn, Buzzsprout and Podbean are a few of the most popular, but there are a lot of options with various price points. Most hosting services provide analytics, which can help you track the podcast KPIs you defined in step one. As you move forward on your podcasting journey, regularly review your performance to see how you’re progressing toward your goals.
Looking for more episodes of “Listen Up: A Podcast Primer”? Check it out on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.