Tendo Communications

Blogging

Your Ticket to Shareable Content

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We all want our content to be read and shared, but in today’s oversaturated world, it can be difficult to break through the noise. While there’s no tried-and-true recipe for success, you can learn a lot from articles that have gone viral, garnering thousands of views and social media shares. Here we take a look at four popular B2B content marketing articles and unmask their secret ingredients so you can incorporate them into your own content.

1. Content Marketing Tips for B2B Organizations—Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fishkin

This Moz blog post has been shared almost 7,000 times since it was published in January. Why? For starters, it addresses a specific pain point. Knowing that many B2B marketers struggle to find relevant advice in a predominantly B2C-focused content marketing industry, Fishkin narrows in on obstacles unique to B2B organizations and offers helpful solutions in a casual, relatable voice. He also uses a video format and incorporates a whiteboard as a visual aid to ensure that the wealth of information presented is easily digestible.

2. Here’s Why Your Team Should Invest More Time on Content Marketing by Salesforce

This compelling infographic from the Salesforce Canada blog provides a comprehensive overview of the effectiveness of content marketing and how sales teams can implement it in their own B2B organizations. The complex and data-heavy information could have been lost in translation in a more traditionally formatted article, but an infographic enables readers to easily visualize important processes and statistics. Plus, people are three times more likely to share infographics on social media than any other form of content. Considering that this post boasts around 3,800 shares since its debut in February, we’d say an infographic could be your ticket to viral success

3. Content Marketing Will Drive B2B Digital Marketing in 2016 by Prasant Naidu

Naidu’s blog post on his personal LinkedIn page uncovers meaningful insights about the future of B2B marketing, but the key to its popularity is actually the practice of cross-posting content on LinkedIn. A nearly identical version of the article was published on Naidu’s company website a week earlier, but that post received only 254 shares—a tiny fraction of the LinkedIn post’s impressive 3,200 shares. While it’s difficult to drive traffic to a standalone site, millions of people visit the LinkedIn homepage every day. To better reach your target audience, you can join popular groups related to your industry and submit your content to be featured. For example, Naidu’s post was featured in the Social Media and Marketing and Advertising groups, each of which currently has over 10 million members.

4. 4 B2B Content Secrets You Fail to Use by Dan Stelter

In this Content Marketing Institute article, Stelter points out how B2B organizations can identify missed opportunities, backing up his observations with independent research. This alone should have been enough to generate a respectable number of shares. However, the added bonus of the Content Marketing Institute’s prominent, pre-written “Click to Tweet” links embedded throughout the article takes this post to the next level. This powerful marketing tool makes it simple for readers to share content snippets with their networks, which may help explain why nearly half of the article’s shares come from Twitter. CMI makes it a standard practice to include such links in all of its articles.

We aren’t suggesting that following these tips will automatically ignite a viral phenomenon that renders millions of views. When lightning strikes, it’s usually sparked by a combination of good timing, luck, and truly compelling content—whether it’s shocking, fascinating, or funny. However, these techniques will make your content more reader-friendly and shareable, creating a foolproof recipe for garnering more views.

Influencer Series: Navigating the Seismic Shifts in Digital Marketing

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In our second interview in a series with leading technology marketers, we talk to Jill Welch, the director of digital content strategy at VMware, about why it’s so important to put the customer first, and how data and customers are the driving force behind successful content creation. (Read our first interview here.)

Before joining the digital marketing team at VMware, Welch, a veteran of the technology industry for 20+ years, held positions at Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and InfoWorld.

You’ve led teams at large enterprise technology companies for a large part of your career. What tricks have you learned along the way to help you navigate the challenges inherent at large companies? 

The jobs have always been difficult. Content is what customers have been engaged with throughout the buying decision journey, and there’s a self-service model now. Customers do their own research—that’s been a trend for many years. But you get to a big company and everyone is a content expert and a self-publisher, and everyone has an opinion. And yet content is always the last thing they think about, which impacts quality.

You will find people who understand content—people who are your advocates and have respect for the work you do. My team tries to demonstrate its value by involving our stakeholders, trying to change their culture, and getting them to care about what we care about. I always emphasize that content is the face of your company and it’s your reputation. Reputations are hard to build and easy to tear down.

The other thing I stress with my team is to build relationships with those stakeholders. Get to know them and understand their pain points. Get them to realize that we’re trying to help solve their problems, too. We have a distinct skill set and we can actually help drive their goals and objectives through our content strategy. But they’re not going to value our opinion until they know who we are and we’ve developed that mutual respect via the work we do.

How do you take advantage of all the data at your fingertips?

One of our bigger challenges is that when we work with stakeholders and business units, they are often focused inward on their products and what they want to do. It’s our job to get them to step back, refocus, and think about the customer. I’ve always been an advocate for the customer—for the content they need that is most relevant to them.

Data has always been our savior. Sometimes when we have to do something for political reasons, and our instincts say no, we can come back with data and maybe it’ll prove us wrong. We get surprised all the time when we look at data. Our customers change, demographics change, needs change. Anyone who is smart right now is testing, iterating, and measuring. That’s what makes us successful.

We constantly iterate what we deliver to our customers based on data. That’s the advantage of the web versus coming from a company like InfoWorld. It was a great magazine, but we didn’t know if people threw it away or if they passed it along until we had the online version—the beauty of the web is that you can’t argue with data.

What are the biggest changes you’re seeing in digital marketing at enterprise companies?

The focus on customer experience is huge. There’s also more onus on demand generation. There’s more pressure on digital marketing. We’re being asked to drive pipeline and we’re responsible for numbers in a way that we weren’t before. It’s now so measurable. You can’t create great content and not measure it—and you have to keep measuring and iterating. And if you can make a customer experience more targeted, there’s data that shows that they will share their personal information.

There’s also more respect for digital marketing because we can measure. We can show our impact and value in terms of business outcomes. Today’s tools and automation have really changed digital marketing and made it so exciting. You have to keep up because there’s so much going on and so much innovation. When I started at Sun 15 years ago, it was about page views and click-through rates. That’s not the case anymore.

We also know more about our customers—who they are and what they need. That makes our lives easier. We’re not “spraying and praying” like we once did. We’re creating targeted, relevant content at the right point in the journey. Ultimately, we are accelerating buying decisions by serving up the most impactful content at the right decision point.

Is VMware shifting away from content campaigns to “always-on” marketing?

We are focused on both, but our customers aren’t sitting around waiting for a campaign. It’s not the core trigger. The core trigger, as a customer, is the business objective. That’s what my team is focused on. What problem is the customer trying to solve, and do we have the right content at the right stage of the journey that we can serve up dynamically? That’s what we mean by always-on at VMware.

And when we talk about demand content that spans from awareness to post-purchase and loyalty, it’s not necessarily behind a gate; if I’m an IT guy and I’m trying to make a buying decision, you better have content front and center for me. Don’t make me log in. If I have to log in, it better be super high-value content that I can’t get anywhere else. If I can Google that information and find it, then you’ve failed.

How do you communicate the importance of content to folks who are less knowledgeable about content’s role in digital marketing? Has that changed over time as the role of content has evolved?

I don’t think it’s changed that much. Data helps us tell our story, but I still think we have an uphill battle.

Our launches are a good example, because content is the last thing that comes in. Our stakeholders don’t always put themselves in the shoes of the customer and ask important questions: How did this content perform last time? Should we do this again? Is this going to resonate with our customers? Our jobs will always require us to have a bit of the salesperson in us.

The trick is to find a stakeholder who shares some of your content values—someone who cares about it and is just as passionate. Get them to do pilots with you and tell their story with you. That helps make change. But we still need to build relationships and demonstrate our value with data.

You need smart, passionate people on your team—people who understand the customer, the product, and the stakeholder and what we’re all trying to solve for. We’re always trying to get people to care about what we care about.

Every company is a content publisher these days, and VMware competes for mindshare in lots of top-level themes (like virtualization). How do you create content that rises above the noise?

Understanding your customers and their pain points. How are you solving their problems and making them look like rock stars in their organization? The mistake a lot of companies make is that they focus the story on them versus the customer or prospect. It is hard for me to understand how brands can forget to focus on the customer.

It’s got to be a seamless experience. As a customer, I better not have to work too hard for this. The content better be at the right level. Don’t send me in a circle. If we know what content resonates at certain stages, we need to serve it up. We need to analyze our content, measure our mistakes, and stop doing things that don’t work. These things sound really simple, but they are not always part of the process.

How do you feel about the digital marketing world right now?

I think it’s an exciting and inspiring time for this kind of work if you’re someone who likes to learn. Digital marketing is just wonderful. And it’s great for people like me with short attention spans because there’s always something new to learn.

Breathe New Life Into Your Blog Post With These DIY Image Ideas

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Earlier this spring I covered the annual conference and trade show for one of our large tech clients. And when I say “cover,” I mean good, old-fashioned news reporting. I served as the writer for our client’s blog, which supported the event. I spent hours each day running up and down the trade show halls, interviewing employees, crisscrossing the show floor, and sitting in on keynote speeches. It made me a bit nostalgic for my old newspaper days.

This assignment, however, wasn’t new to us here at Tendo. Several colleagues before me had this same task, and we have been adhering to the following (time-tested!) process to develop each blog post:

  1. Conduct on-site blog interview
  2. Take a photo from the show floor or relevant session
  3. Write a 500-word blog post
  4. Insert the photo into the blog post
  5. Publish the blog post

This year, I was ready to breathe new life into this event coverage and blog series, and I wanted to help achieve our goal of higher page view counts than last year’s engagement. In order to do that, I had to do something more visual, as strong visuals are a reliable tactic for increasing page views.

I turned to Adobe Photoshop to quickly create graphics that I could load into Lithium (a blog hosting site) as .jpgs, and my tactic worked. Our total blog post views, as well as our average blog post views, increased by more than 5 percent compared to our 2014 results. These tactics were simple and easy to do, but most importantly, they made our client’s blog more relevant and engaging. Here’s how you can use imagery to increase your views, too.

Highlight a great quote or number by designing it as an image

You need a piece of information to go into a graphic. Ask yourself, if you were telling a friend back home about the conference, what fun fact would you share with them right away? For me, I could see the huge amount of planning this event required, so I knew there had to be some interesting numbers that I could pull into an image. I found out how many gallons of coffee they planned to dispense at the event (3,000 gallons), and I included that in a post. Simple, yes—but interesting.

Great quotes from keynote speeches are one of the best things to pull into a graphic. In newspapers, we call that a “pull quote.” It’s easy to do in Photoshop, or even in a simpler program like Microsoft Office Publisher. Here’s how I did it:

  1. Create a darkly colored (filled-in) box on the page.
  2. On top of the colored box, overlay a text box. Make the text a lighter color, preferably white. This color scheme will set the pull-quote image apart from the blog text that will populate the majority of the page.
  3. If you’re using Publisher, use your computer’s “snipping tool” to create a .jpg. Be sure to save that snipped image to your desktop, or somewhere safe.
  4. As you upload your blog, you can simply attach the image you just created as a regular photo. It’s as easy as that.

This is also ideal for content that you can’t squeeze into the blog post itself. I had a short Q&A that I conducted with an attendee who was a software engineer, but I didn’t have a specific scheduled post that it would fit in. So, I trimmed the copy down to three short questions, designed it as an image (following the steps above), and added it as a sidebar to one of my daily wrap-up posts.

Incorporate a Flickr slideshow

Our client hosted an activities night for attendees on day two of this three-day conference. They brought in bands, food stations, and a variety of fun games and arcade areas. People are always interested to see how these tech companies take breaks and get their attendees to kick back and relax. For that, I discovered how you can embed a photo slideshow into a blog post on Lithium using Flickr. I took a collection of about 40 photographs, quickly edited them (getting permission from any person I photographed up close), and published the slideshow in Lithium. That post was the highest-viewed post of our “during the event” blog coverage. Here’s how to create a slideshow yourself:

  1. In your Flickr stream, click on “albums.”
  2. Click on the album you want to post.
  3. Once inside the album, within the address bar at the top of your browser, add the characters “/show” to the end of the album link. Press enter. You will generate a slideshow with a black background.
  4. At the top right corner, click on “Share.” A “Share this Slideshow” menu generates. The second code listed is the embed code. Highlight and copy that text.
  5. Paste that text into the HTML box of your draft blog post, and voilà—you’ve just embedded a photo slideshow.

Still not convinced? Consider this: HubSpot wrote a piece earlier this year about visual additions to content marketing. Be a part of the trend and add visuals to your “old school” blog posts today!

Don’t Give Long-Form Content Short Shrift

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In an age when the average smartphone user reportedly has an attention span less than that of a goldfish, you might think that the shorter a piece of content is, the more likely it is to engage its intended audience. While there is definitely a case to be made for brevity, long-form content also deserves a place in your content mix.

What is long-form content? According to an article in Forbes, “while there is no exact definition of what ‘long’ means, most experts peg it at 1,200 to 2,000 words when it comes to the written form.” Typical formats include eBooks, white papers, and case studies, as well as longer videos and blog posts.

Not every topic merits long-form treatment. To decide whether a subject deserves such treatment, you need to consider who you’re trying to reach, the context in which they will consume the content, and the goal you want to achieve.

Filling the top of the funnel

Customers in the awareness and consideration stage are a prime target for long-form content. Longer treatments provide details that can draw in people and enable your company to demonstrate expertise in a particular area. People willing to devote the time to longer pieces are more likely to be seriously interested in your company’s products or solutions, as opposed to someone spending just a few minutes skimming short social media posts.

Longer pieces such as case studies give you the space to provide in-depth examples of how your company has helped customers overcome business challenges. Studies show that people find customer success stories to be one of the most compelling types of content. As Forbes columnist Tom Kaneshige put it, “marketing content must be chock full of customer stories, fact-based data, or other relevant information that lifts it above the noise.”

A longer treatment also allows you to tell a story about the value your organization can deliver. You can describe your business’s key differentiators in greater detail than a quick blog post would allow. For example, a client recently asked me to provide the foundational content for the launch of a new microsite. They commissioned a series of five eBooks around their core offerings, as well as a long research report. As a bundle, this content helped validate my client’s authority on important topics and set the stage for more informed discussions with customers. And when readers discover content that demonstrates creative thinking and problem solving, they’re more likely to share it.

The gift that keeps on giving

Long-form content can serve as the basis for a variety of shorter assets—chunk an eBook into multiple short blogs posts, tweet out snippets or stats from a white paper, break up long videos into shorter edits, and create standalone infographics from case study graphics. In true recycling spirit, you can point back to long-form content from your short form content, extending your original investment.

Of course, long or short, what matters most is the quality of the message you deliver. What do you think is the ideal length for content? Let us know.

How to Boost Engagement and Raise Online Influence

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Customer contests are a time-honored tradition, harking back to the days of the first Pillsbury Bake-Off in 1949. Nowadays many contests have shifted online. Brands constantly encourage followers to like posts, retweet content, and submit photos, because incorporating user input into social media posts offers a low-cost, effective way to increase followers and amplify a point of view.

Capitalize on user content

A client of ours recently spoke at an industry event. The presentation was well received. The audience was engaged and participated in a lively discussion. When the client later posted a link to the presentation on Twitter, he noticed that conference attendees were repeating one phrase in particular from his presentation. Thinking quickly, our client capitalized on the momentum generated by the conversation by creating a hashtag, which is now associated with him and his company’s solution.

In addition to capitalizing on the momentum with the hashtag, the client entered into the discussion and kept the conversation going by expanding on the ideas raised in the presentation. Just by participating and sharing the conversation with his followers, the client reached a much broader audience and he boosted his online influence.

Describe real-world challenges

A blog post I recently wrote for another enterprise technology client featured questions voiced by conference attendees at a session dedicated to discussing top customer pain points.

The post described real-world business challenges customers face. It then outlined strategies to overcome those challenges, as well as the audience reaction to the proposed solutions.

Infusing content with real customer input makes readers aware of potential new business opportunities and/or associated risks. You gain the opportunity to reiterate how best to overcome these challenges, which burnishes your reputation as a thought leader.

You don’t have to rely on live events to generate customer input. You can post presentations on channels such as LinkedIn, BrightTalk, or SlideShare, or encourage viewers to comment on video posts and podcasts and then incorporate their responses into your social media posts.

Spark online conversations  

Incorporating content from your audience drives engagement and boosts online influence in a number of ways:

  • Entice your audience. Customer stories are one of the best ways to attract people’s attention. They demonstrate your understanding of customer concerns and show that you will listen to the needs of future customers down the road.
  • Extend the conversation. Rather than just broadcasting a point of view, you can engage with your audience and develop a loop of continuous feedback.
  • Broaden your message. When people share content with hashtags specific to your presentation or event, they’re expanding your reach and growing your profile as a thought leader. And most importantly, people will be more interested in you and your company when they see the volume of conversation.

Everyone knows the value of word-of-mouth. By sharing customer input, you can use people’s experiences to amplify your brand and encourage an ongoing conversation.

Blog Overload: Not Another Word, Please!

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The most important goal of a B2B blog post is to resonate and satisfy the informational needs of your audience. But for a post to resonate, it has to be seen. The sheer volume of information available to your audience, though, makes getting seen incredibly difficult. It boils down to attention economics—a numbers game. In today’s age of blog overload, how do you get yours to stand out?

One strategy we’ve used to break through the clutter is to be visual. The infographic below contains key insights that have helped us drive better results with our blog posts.

Blog_Overload_-_infographic

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