The Content Marketing Imperative - Michael Brenner, Head of Strategy, NewsCred

What Is Marketing?

Ask most people and they will tell you that marketing is an ad, a banner or some kind of promotion. But weren’t there 4 “P’s” in Marketing 101?

5,000 2/3 86% 44% 90%

marketing messages per day

of U.S. on the “Do Not Call” list

Of people skip TV ads

direct mail is never opened

of emails are never opened

So we support the myth by bombarding our audience with messages they don’t want.

The average attention span of a person has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds.

This, along with the increasing channels and formats of information available is altering our brains.

The average attention span of a Goldfish is 9 seconds.

(Statistic Brain)

Goldfish have longer attention spans than the average human today.

Less likely to click on a banner than…

Banners have 99 problems and a click ain’t one. Business Insider cheekily reported that you are more likely to get struck by lightning or win the lottery than see a click on your banner.

As a whole society, we’re bored! Bored with content we don’t want.

And this is having a dramatic impact on certain industries like the newspapers who have seen a dramatic loss of nearly $50 billion in revenue since 2000.

60-70% of marketing content goes completely unused

(Sirius Decisions)

Almost 70% of your content budget is completely wasted

73% of people surveyed wouldn’t care if the brands they use disappeared from their life.

(Co.Exist)

And your customers could care less if you even exist.

Marketing has a marketing problem. And it’s reflected in the interest of global monthly searches over the last decade

But there’s hope. Seth Godin said: “content marketing is all the marketing that’s left” as brands struggle to meet the needs of today’s digital consumer.

What is Marketing?

“Marketing is knowing your customer so well that your product sells itself.” - Peter Drucker “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” - David Packard

http://lucasgalo.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/h-and-g-lg.jpg

And that brings us to stories. From the day we emerged from caves, we’ve been telling stories about how to survive and how to thrive.

But it’s not really about the information we convey in stories, it’s about the emotional connection those stories make.

Your customers are expecting you to care more about them than about you. They are expecting you to touch their hearts and inspire their minds.

It’s not just about creating great content, it’s about delivering great content. And then you need to go one step further and pour your fans a beer.

Where I Started

What Does SAP Do? Interesting? Is The Customer The Hero?

SAP AG is a German multinational s o f t w a r e c o r p o r a t i o n t h a t makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer r e l a t i o n s . H e a d q u a r t e r e d in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, with regional offices around the world, SAP is the leader in the market of enterprise applications in terms of software and software-related service.[2] The company's best-known software products are its enterprise resource p lanning appl icat ion systems and management (SAP ERP), its enterprise data warehouse product – SAP Business W a r e h o u s e ( S A P B W ) , S A P BusinessObjects software, and most recently, Sybase mobile products and in-memory computing appliance SAP HANA. SAP is one of the largest software companies in the world.

(Wikipedia)

Almost All Our Content Addressed “Who is SAP? / Why Should You Chose SAP?”

(@MylesBristowe and CommCreative)

We Were Not Answering Our Customers Top Questions

99.9% of our web traffic from visitors who already knew us or bought from us

Less than 0.1 % were net-new or early-stage prospects

Less than 10 keywords generated all the early-stage search traffic

How Much “Early Stage” Search Traffic Do We Get?

Not Enough Early Stage Visitors: Asking “What is Big Data?” 100,000’s of searches / month

Too Many Later Stage Visitors: Asking “What is SAP Software” 100s of searches / month

What is a Content Strategy?

Delivering the content your audience needs, in all the places they go (by persona, buyer stage, channel, type)

Managing content as an asset with an ROI

Thinking and acting like a publisher (and like a business)

To Reach Our Audience We Need To Act Like Publishers

*search engine optimization

Business Innovation Blog from SAP: http://blogs.sap.com/innovation

Mission: To earn our audience’s attention by helping them grow their business, out-perform their competition, and advance their careers. To act like a publisher by creating content people actually want to consume.

Content Marketing Objectives: Reach, Engagement AND Conversions

Traffic, engagement and leads we would have NEVER seen!

Recognized by Fast Company, Digiday, Content Marketing Institute, more…

Software

Content

NewsCred provided everything SAP needed to scale content marketing

Enterprise Software End-to-end software that helps brands manage every step of the content marketing process, from creation, discovery and workflows, to distribution and analytics.

Licensed Content We’ve built relationships with over 4,500 publishers, giving you the ability to publish stories from award-winning sources on topics that resonate with your audience.

Custom Content We provide custom content through The NewsRoom, our exclusive network of hand-selected writers, photographers, videographers, and designers.

What do you need to create a content marketing strategy?

1. Content is Not A Campaign – Focus on Strategy

2. Effective Content Combines Brand-Created, Licensed and Syndicated

3. Focus on Quality That Scales

NewsCred is powering content for the world’s leading brands. Come talk to us!