Don't Fish with Dynamite - What Fishing Can Teach Us About Content Marketing

DON’T FISH WITH DYNAMITEWHAT FISHING CAN TEACH US ABOUT CONTENT MARKETING

Don’t Fish With Dynamite - What Fishing Can Teach Us About Content Marketing 2

DON’T FISH WITH DYNAMITEWHAT FISHING CAN TEACH US ABOUT CONTENT MARKETING

As a company with roots across Minnesota and Wisconsin, Docalytics is helping evangelize the merits of content marketing & analytics in terms even a Cheesehead can understand. This has required us to build content marketing analogies that align with the common interests of every man, woman and child throughout the Midwest. A little bit cheesy maybe, but stick with us...

When looking for something to compare content marketing to, our first choice was beer (a staple in many households throughout the Midwest), but that was ineffective. Unlike drinking beer, serving content alone won’t automatically make your offering more attractive. So, we went with our second choice – bass fishing – and quickly found five powerful similarities that will help you become a more effective marketer.

In today’s business environment marketers must be a bit more savvy. To be the go-to source of information for your prospects, you must ensure your content is available where and when prospects are looking for answers. In other words, when fishing for customers, be thoughtful and never fish with dynamite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheesehead


Join us on the Lake!

1 - Do Your Research and Be Patient

2 - Landing a Trophy Fish

3 - Choosing your Bait Wisely

4 - Don’t Fish with Sh*t

5 - Fishing Smarter with Technology

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TABLE OF CONTENTS


1 Do Your Research and Be PatientBoth fishing and content marketing take time and require prep work in advance. Anglers can’t just expect to toss in an arbitrary lure and immediately get a meaningful bite. Smart fishermen spend time researching their surroundings to understand the habits of the fish they’re trying to catch. Understanding where those fish tend to swim, when they’re most active, and what bait they’re most likely to strike is key.

Similarly, the most effective content marketers research their audience and know where their buyer personas are most likely to spend time on the web, when they’re most likely online, and what content topics they’re most likely interested in. As a marketer, you’ll be most successful if you monitor and measure the activity patterns of your audience so you can strategically place content where you know key prospects are likely to engage.


1 Do Your Research and Be Patient, Cont...

Most importantly, it’s critical your team has the patience to commit to a longer-term strategy. Inbound efforts take time to evolve into predictable lead generation campaigns, so it’s imperative that your organization has realistic expectations across the board, especially within the ROI-dependent C-Suite.

The Takeaway: “For content marketing to be effective, you must do your homework and prepare for slow beginnings with increased performance over time.”

Don’t Fish With Dynamite - What Fishing Can Teach Us About Content Marketing


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Landing a Trophy Fish71% of B2B marketers cite lead generation as a primary objective for their content marketing effort. Like fishing, these marketers’ main goal is to land the highest number of the biggest fish possible with each campaign. That said, unlike fishing, a marketer can’t simply look at the “size” of a lead and assume that that characteristic alone is enough to determine which leads are marketing qualified, and which may need to be tossed back and nurtured further.

With that in mind, it’s important for marketers to use tools that track lead activities and engagement with content. These insights can help you identify the type of content a prospective customer has spent time consuming and better illustrate how they’ve moved from Top of Funnel (TOFU) to Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) content over time. 2014

http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2012/10/2013-b2b-content-marketing-research/



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Landing a Trophy Fish, Cont...

Once you have this kind of engagement tracking in place, you will need a tool that allows you to score leads based on these metrics. The combination of engagement metrics with lead scoring will ensure your marketing team provides the most qualified leads to sales. When your sales team is empowered with quick data about their leads’ content engagement, they know more about their prospects’ interests and preferences and can tailor their approach accordingly.

The Takeaway: Putting processes and tools into place to identify & capitalize on high-value leads is crucial to content marketing success.



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Choose Your Bait Wisely60-70% of marketers report leveraging long-form content such as whitepapers, ebooks and presentations as glittery lures to attract soon-to-be qualified, TOFU prospects. These tactics have proven to be some of the most effective for building brand awareness and thought leadership, while efficiently capturing new leads for B2B marketers.

In some ways, the topics covered within your TOFU content is irrelevant, as long as the topics covered catch the attention of your buyer personas and provide quality information that increases brand awareness. Once you’ve attracted prospective customers with your lure of longer form content, you’ve effectively placed hooks that will facilitate relationship building. It will then be more likely for those contacts to turn to you when they are in need of your product or service.

http://www.toprankblog.com/2012/11/100-b2b-content-marketing-statistics-for-2013/



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Choose Your Bait Wisely, Cont...

Once that hook is set, pay attention to what each new contact is most interested in by tracking the content they spend their time consuming. By tailoring your nurturing to individual interests, it will significantly decrease the time needed to advance that new contact into a marketing qualified lead.

The Takeaway: The most effective way to maximize returns on content marketing is to provide the right content tothe right prospect and the right time.



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Don’t Fish with Sh*t!Over the past several years, as B2B marketers have increased production of ebooks and whitepapers, quality and credibility have suffered. More and more, these content pieces are quickly thrown together to meet tight timelines and have been degraded into vehicles to advertise products & services rather than serving as valuable educational tools.

Even with tight timelines and high demand, writing authoritative content that serves only your needs is like fishing with a Baby Ruth bar as bait. It might seem okay to the person fishing, but to the fish, it looks like a floating piece of sh*t.

Editor’s Note: This is a candy bar - we promise!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCVr9alzSbo



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Don’t Fish with Sh*t!, Cont...

So as your business develops its content strategy, think about what will be most appetizing to your prospective customers and leave your own motives at the door. If you succeed in consistently delivering and effectively distributing quality content, the leads you are hoping to catch will naturally follow.

The Takeaway: Create impactful, high-value content by trulyunderstanding what your audience wants to learn and focus on those topics.



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Fishing Smarter with TechnologyFishermen today have invested in tools that help them better understand where the fish are hiding and the best ways to catch them. Similarly, the most savvy marketers today are taking advantage of an explosion of technologies that provide packaged insights around what content is resonating best and how individual leads choose to engage.

These technologies include social monitoring tools, lead nurturing tools (like Marketing Automation Platforms) and services that let you track user engagement across all your content efforts.

Using these tools will provide you with insights into how your content is being consumed so you can learn to create more engaging and effective content in the future.



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Fishing Smarter with Technology, Cont...

Use marketing analytics tools to help you answer the following key questions:

Is your content engaging?

What sections interest readers most?

What distribution channels drive deepest engagement?

How does content formatting impact reader engagement?

Is content sharable and on which networks?

Did some parts of the content cause readers to lose interest,and which sections were they?



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Fishing Smarter with Technology, Cont...

Now most marketers are not experts in analyzing data, so like the best fishing technologies, which are built to be used by any level of fishermen, the best marketing tools are the ones that can package a wealth of complex data into formats that provide simple, actionable insights. Look for simple information like lead engagement scores or at-a-glance content assessment offered through various analytics platforms. Once you have the right tools in place to measure how your reader base engages with the content you’ve created, you’ll gain a much better understanding of what maximizes engagement and use that info to more quickly move leads through the marketing and sales funnels.

The Takeaway: Use technology tools to measure your contentmarketing efforts and adjust your strategies for continuous improvement.



Reel It in For MeNow you’re thinking like a fisherman. You know how important it is to understand your fish so you can be prepared with the right bait at the right spot at the right time. More importantly, you know how these principles apply to content marketing – put simply: You need to understand your target audience so you can create the quality content they want at the time and in the place they’ll be looking for it. You also know how critical it is to monitor how your audience interacts with your content so you can adjust over time to meet their needs better. Commit to watching your content evolve over time and be patient – it will take time to gain a following and generate a positive return, but when you do, the leads you’ll “hook” will be well worth it.

Tell us about yourself and your content marketing practices in the form at the end of this piece and we’ll take you out on one of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes to put these teachings to practice!


About DocalyticsDocalytics’ powerful cross-platform technology allows customers to track user interaction with documents and sales collateral such as whitepapers, eBooks, case studies, presentations, sell sheets and other documents.

Docalytics empowers businesses to produce better content, get more sales-ready prospects and prioritize sales outreach.

For the first time your sales and marketing teams will be able to track exactly how prospective customers engage with your content - while more efficiently capturing lead data as a prospective customer engages with the document versus having to capture everything upfront before a visitor can determine the relevancy of the content.

Fore more information visit www.docalytics.com

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About the AuthorSteve Peck, Co-founder at Docalytics, has a passion for content and is constantly conceptualizing it. He’s been known to draft blog posts while riding chair-lifts, structure eBooks with his two toddlers and as you just experienced create definitive guides when fly fishing. He also firmly believes the best ideas always come after a few pints.

http://www.docalytics.com