Category: Digital Marketing

It is impossible to pass a day without hearing the term “whitepaper”. Most of the times, it is used in an incorrect manner and most of the times, companies continue to publish documents that they claim are “white papers”. A white paper originally referred to an authoritative document published or released by Government bodies. It referred to official reports that Governments used to publish from time to time with regard to making policies, forming opinions and even for advocating changes. Here lies the clue of what a white paper is. Many Governments published documents that were known as white papers but were propaganda material. They tried to sell their ideas to people with the help of facts and figures so that they could persuade citizens to form an opinion and people adopt these changes. Increasingly, corporations and companies began to adopt a similar strategy to convince their target audience using factually correct information. Currently, when we refer to a white paper in the context of B2B communication, we refer to documents that are released by corporations in order to persuade, make a point, develop a case and convince the reader to buy a product or service. White papers today and content marketing strategy The advent of Internet has only helped for content marketing to evolve. Today, a content marketing strategy isn’t complete without publishing whitepapers from time to time. Most companies spend a lot of time conducting research and gathering facts in order to publish white papers that help to sell their products. For instance, a company that manufactures a particular type of wooden frame might make a case for its product by describing the problem of termites and how its wood is resistant to termite attacks. There is already a problem and the company tries to present the problem & find a solution, which usually is its own product. White papers of today are marketing tools that are widely accepted and acknowledged. One does not need to pretend that a white paper isn’t trying to sell a product. It is a brutally honest document that relies on facts and figures, an existing problem & how that problem is solved by a product or service that it offers. This sort of document helps companies to build credibility not only among clients and consumers but also among competitors. It helps when a different company cites your white paper while it creates its own. It is almost the way scientists cite each other’s works to make a point in their favor. The format, length and style of a white paper A white paper needs to, usually, be of at least 6 pages in length. It needn’t exceed 50 pages, according to an article published on Hubspot. It needs to contain illustrations, charts, references, and might even include case studies & interviews. Usually, a white paper needs to have a title page, table of contents, an abstract, an introduction, a section that describes a problem, a section that possibly could be a solution and a section that offers a solution in the form of a service or a product that the company offers. One could publish these white papers in a PDF format and the tone needs to be professional, well-written and thoroughly edited. You could also get a graphic designer to design the layout and format. A white paper is different from an e-book A white paper is neither an e-book nor a blog post. It is the most difficult and expensive document a company can publish. An e-book, on the other hand, can be more creative and less professional in nature. Always make sure that your white paper is well-researched and well-written. It needs to help you to gain credibility not only among clients and consumers but also within the industry peers. Your reader needs to be able to recognize that you know what you are selling and what your product or service needs to be bought, with the help of honest facts & figures. If you are planning to publish a white paper, make sure that you seek the help of professional writers and editors who would be better able to guide you. After all, every white paper needs to be published only after careful planning.

One of the interesting phenomena that we have observed is that people tend to be more open to ideas if they were presented by people they follow on Twitter, rather than by advertisers themselves. This may not be so surprising, after all and it has been proven time & again that people often depend on known people to gather information and opinions. Twitter is one of the top 3 social networking sites and it has already carved out a niche for itself. Being one of the most popular media to offer customer services, Twitter has been used by businesses to reach out to the target audience. However, if your target audience is not open to your soliciting and is averse to the idea of being marketed something, how do we tackle? Twitter might provide you some answers. As we mentioned before, Twitter can be thought of as a medium where known and unknown people, who share similar interests, gather & converse, share information and just observe. With that in mind, if a product or service is endorsed by certain influential people on Twitter, chances are, reluctant prospects will slowly open up to your marketing campaigns. In this article, let us take a look at how you can use Twitter to market to a reluctant audience. Lurk around your prospects Social media provides a valuable opportunity to learn about our prospects in a deep and intimate manner. It is simply not possible to follow our prospects and learn what they like & don’t, if we stick to traditional methods of studying consumer base. With a strong social media team, you can lurk around their Twitter accounts, see what they talk about and understand why they share certain links more often than others; you can understand them in a way that is not possible on other media. Twitter helps you to collect valuable information without being invasive or annoying. Lurking around your prospects’ accounts is a great way to understand their buying behavior. Connect with your prospects’ influencers Most of your prospects follow other people who might be more influential than they are. They might respect these influencers more than others and might often retweet links that they share. They might engage in conversations with these influencers and noticeably, have a more positive tone in interactions. You need to follow these influencers and even try to connect with them. If they are willing, you can try and collaborate with these influencers to create marketing campaigns that are subtle & persuasive. If there is a local celebrity with a few hundreds of ardent followers, you can rope in that celebrity for a marketing campaign without looking all that obtrusive. This is a great technique to reach out to audience who might not be willing to respond to your marketing communications. Keep your interactions on Twitter friendly Twitter is a social platform and people expect friendliness & polite behavior. It is not a place to engage in hardcore marketing techniques and that will only drive away people from you. In order to succeed, you will have to be friendly, less salesy and approach people with a less threatening demeanor. Do not try to push your products or services without forethought. Engage in conversations and offer to help them with your services & products when you see there is a need. Being polite and friendly on social media can take you a long way & even the most reluctant user might finally start opening up to your communications. Twitter can urge a reluctant audience to pay more attention Though we might believe certain prospects are difficult people to market to, approaching them in an unobtrusive manner can help you to break the ice. Twitter can provide a platform that is as non-invasive as possible and help you build valuable relationships that will assist you in succeeding in your marketing campaigns. It might take a while but Twitter will help you to understand your audience and device marketing strategies that will actually make even reluctant people begin to show more attention to you & your messages. Twitter is, indeed, becoming an obvious choice for marketers who want to reach out and understand their target audience better, even if they are reluctant.

There has been a lot of discussion related to measurement and how companies are investing in content marketing but are just not doing enough to measure the dreaded ROI. This is a very justifiable argument and everything that is done towards building a company needs to be measured for its success or the lack of it. Measuring ROI helps you to attach a number to your investment and its returns. It lets you do things, which you probably were missing out on and it also helps you to stop spending money on tasks that are not bringing you any benefits. With that in mind, we need to stress that measurement can actually kill your marketing strategy. Eric Wittlake wrote about how measurement of marketing has reduced actual marketing strategies to a dog that is controlled by its tail. Measurement needs to be controlled by marketing strategies and not vice-versa. Unfortunately, this fallacy has been repeating much too often. A good example is the way we are letting our content marketing strategies be controlled by measurement. While measurement can certainly help us to become more focused on our content marketing approach, it need not result in mechanical “strategies” that ultimately alienate your customers or readership and thereby, defeat the originally intended purpose. Your consumers are not robots It is often wrongly assumed that content can easily be created, if one understood one’s consumers. Consumers are not as homogenous as we would like to believe. Any content strategy needs to take this into account. While measurement can help you to define and understand who is actually viewing your content & making those important decisions to choose your services or products, what remains important is to create content that appeals to humans. Humans are not robotic. One cannot measure or even predict human behavior accurately. While measurement has all the right intentions in place, it risks mechanizing your content strategy and thereby, considers your consumers as robots. That would be a bad decision to make. Content need to add value to your business It is easy to find statistics related to your content strategy. After all, measurement is all about attaching numbers that will help you. These numbers and data about what works & what doesn’t can help you measure your ROI and also design future content strategies. However, content is not only about ROI and marketing. It needs to add value to your business. IT needs to set it apart. Apart from being a marketing strategy, content is also a branding strategy. It helps you to set your company apart from your competitors and thus, add value to your business in the long term. This is a very important factor to note and many businesses often take measurement way too seriously & create content that appears manufactured. Measurement need not result in distractions Often, measuring content strategies leads us to invest in more advertisements, forms and thank you notes. All these can end up becoming distractions from your original content. If your clients or consumers are forced to fill up forms at each level, they will end up becoming annoyed and might find something else to do. Obviously, this cannot be a very effective strategy of any sort, to distract your own readers from what they need to be looking at. Pay attention to aesthetics and how your website appears & do not only go by the measurement aspect of it. While measuring one’s ROI is a great thing to do, one needs to also make sure that resulting strategies do not distract people from the actual content. Can measurement really ruin your content strategy? Well, the bottom line is that it might or might not and it depends on you. You need to understand that content marketing is not a mechanical task and it cannot be reduced to numbers in a simple way. While numbers and data will help us to understand if a content marketing campaign is successful, one needs to also understand that content marketing itself is not a very robotic task. It deals with actual human beings who all have their individual differences. As long as you put in that extra effort to not alienate your consumers, measurement can only help you.

Content curation is the art of aggregating and refining the best pieces of information scattered across the web to deliver a concise, presentable and meaningful content to your target audience. It is done in order to save their time and to give them an overview of “what’s not to be missed” content. There are various tools that help in content curation. Before you curate your content, it is essential to identify your target audience. The aim of your content curation needs to be clear with a sharp focus on a specific topic. Earning a tag of a content curator takes a lot of time as it needs consistent efforts to produce high-quality curated content. A content curator needs to be branded as a person and not a company as human factor gives leverage to your content, thereby, increasing its visibility. Let us take a look at the various tactics of content curation: 1. Share your content on social media Sharing content on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook automatically stimulates users to start a discussion on that. A little piece of quality information shared by you in your own words with a relevant link generates likes and comments on Facebook. Marking your posts with a hashtag in Twitter helps the users to trace content posted by you related to a particular topic. Higher the quality of your content, higher the retweets you get. If your tweets contain a relevant link, the probability of retweets increases. The reason why your content gets a boost on social media is that the social media users are innately motivated to recommend and share the content with their friends. 2. Build upon 3rd party content Internet is flooded with content. There are various niche websites that cater to intellectuals and experts on a particular subject. Apart from that, there are blog posts, social media content, newsletters, online magazines, online news articles and a lot more sources. Quality content is hidden across all these sources. It is very difficult for your followers to do this exercise of aggregating content by picking and choosing only what is important. No wonder that is why they look up to you. With months of research for quality content, you know exactly what sources to look for. Pick up the best 3rd party content, merge it to form your own commentary and share it with your target audience. It is definitely going to impress them. 3. Ask experts to answer a question This is one of the best initiatives you can take as you get to share “hot and raw” expert opinion with your audience. Create an interesting question that really needs a discussion or choose an interesting phrase that needs to be defined. Invite experts in the field to express their views on that question or define the phrase. This will create a completely original content for your followers. Experts will feel elated to have been given an opportunity to share their views on the subject. This curation strategy reinforces your image as a curator, because unlike other strategies where the content holds the risk of becoming monotonous dominated by your individual expression, brings in top-class and varied 3rd party opinion. 4. Aggregation of curated lists with proper classification and commentary There are many people who curate content for different purposes. Look for the content, which is already curated. Make a compilation of such curated lists. Curated list can be a mixture of social media links, blog post links, e-books, white papers, research papers and so on. Identify similar lists and classify them under different categories so that it is easier for the viewer to read what they like. Add your own summary and opinion by annotating the curated lists wherever possible. Don’t make a long curated list as it de-motivates your viewers to go through it entirely. Instead, post the content in installments. This will give a comprehensive view to your audience and they will keep coming back to you. 5. Customer-generated content: Request your target audience to comment People love to share their opinion online to gain popularity. Start a debate or invite suggestions from your customers and fans for deciding the best look for a bridal gown. You will be amazed to see the amount of content generated when you promise to post the best suggestions on your website. Once you fulfill your promise, following the same strategy will be a lot easier for you in the long-run as people develop faith on you and they start giving even more serious suggestions. You can also lure them with the surprise gift from your store for the person with the best suggestion. Try to keep this a time-bound strategy. 6. Invite fans to contribute towards community-generated content Many online review portals follow this strategy to get a real-time opinion from the users of product or service. Customers are free to express their dissatisfaction, criticism or appreciation for a service. It is a continuous process which evolves with time. The direction of the discussion changes depending upon the subsequent commentary. This type of community-generated content curation needs some moderation to avoid objectionable and inciting content on the website. You can set the terms and conditions for commenting. You can also set parameters for reviewing a particular service or product. For instance, if it’s a mobile phone review site, you can classify the reviews and comments on the basis of the model name. 7. Create a list of top 10 curated content Review the curated content across the web and rank it from one to ten according to your understanding. The use of the phrase “Top 10 ‘your subject’” is a definite eyeball grabber. It, in itself, reflects that you have worked hard to rank the best content. Ask your fans to comment upon what they feel about the top 10 list. If their opinion differs, you can incorporate the differences in your next list to create a better list. Similarly, depending upon the frequency of your posts