Year: 2018

“The stock market is not the economy.”

When the stock market is up, it doesn’t always follow that the economy is great. When the stock market crashes, it doesn’t always mean the economy is bad.

That’s as true today as it was 25 years ago when I first got into marketing. And it’s a great reminder to avoid basing business decisions on faulty connections.

Over the years, I’ve learned an adjacent lesson about content and audiences: Popularity isn’t a sign of differentiation. People don’t necessarily regard what is popular among online audiences or the media as high quality – or even true.

If you successfully chase trends and feed popular content to audiences, you have not necessarily differentiated your content. On the other hand, differentiating by taking a contrarian or highly niche view of what’s popular doesn’t always work either. How do you blend popularity and differentiation?

#Content popularity isn’t

Yes, writing is hard.

When writing for content marketing, the process becomes even more challenging. You have no time to sit and wait for inspiration or the muse to help you craft engaging text. You have content plans to follow and deadlines to meet.

That’s when fear arises.

Raise your hand if one of these whispers creeps into your mind when you try to write:

• “A better article exists already. My content is a pathetic copy.”
• “I’m not good enough. I can’t write better than [your guru’s name here].”
• “So much info! Can I structure all of it? I’ll miss something essential.”
• “What should I write?”
• “They won’t like it. I’ll get rejected.”
• “My draft sucks; it’s boring.”
• “Johnny writes 1,000 words every day. I’m too slow.”

Writing fears fall into two categories: doubts about your abilities or concern over others’ judgment of your work. You can tame blank-page syndrome,

Nice content material writers know how one can craft tough concepts into tales that make the viewers desirous to learn or watch extra.

Expert entrepreneurs know how one can construct content material into highly effective campaigns that compel audiences to behave.

Your job requires excellence for each – and every little thing else advertising and content material creation entail. No marvel content material entrepreneurs report feeling pressured and overwhelmed.

The assets on this article will assist you to improve your group’s content material capabilities, to allow them to craft participating model tales and smash your model’s advertising targets.

Observe the skilled suggestions, methods, and steering beneath to make all points of promoting content material creation simpler to handle – and extra more likely to obtain success.

I’ve organized them that will help you reply these three questions:

• Who will create/contribute to the content material?
• How will our content material creations

When a model creates a brand new content material advertising or content material technique staff, they usually ask, “What perform or division ought to the content material staff report back to?”

My reply? “Sure!”

Now, I’m not attempting to be a wise aleck. (Effectively, I’m a little bit bit, do you even know me?) However severely, my sure comes from years of serving to implement content material groups in dozens of companies. My affirmative response signifies an important factor isn’t to whom content material studies; it’s that content material groups report back to the enterprise.

When it studies right into a perform, equivalent to model, advertising, gross sales enablement, demand gen, PR/comms, and even (sure, actually in a single case) finance, the enterprise acknowledges content material advertising is an actual factor with actual duties, energy, and capabilities to have an effect on enterprise outcomes.

“What outcomes?” you may ask.

Effectively,