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Chapter 7

Ways to Unearth Your Content Tilt

I think being different, going against the grain of society is the greatest thing in the world.

ELIJAH WOOD

To succeed with Content Inc., you need to create a platform that is the leading informational or entertainment resource around your content niche. This is not easy to do. Many entrepreneurs have ideas about what it is they want to create content around; they just don’t go that extra mile to clearly differentiate themselves.

This chapter will help you do just that. Here are a number of strategies and tactics you can leverage to help identify your content tilt.

Ian McAllister, general manager for AmazonSmile, Amazon’s charitable arm, states that before a new product is presented for development at Amazon, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, requires that a full press release be written as if the product were fully built and ready to launch.

“Iterating on a press release is a lot less expensive than iterating on the product itself (and quicker!),” says McAllister.

This type of approach is critical for visualizing our Content Inc. strategy and identifying what makes us stand out. It is our differentiating factor. Amanda MacArthur, managing editor for Mequoda Daily, details the critical parts of the Amazon press release method. In leveraging Amanda’s words with a content marketing viewpoint, this is how to find your content tilt: Heading—Name the content area in a way the reader will understand.

Subheading Describe who the market for the content is and what benefit they get.

Summary Give a summary of the content and the benefit.

Problem Describe the problem your content solves.

Solution Describe how your content elegantly solves the problem.

Quote from You A quote from a spokesperson in your company.

How to Get Started Describe how easy it is to get started.

Customer Quote Provide a quote from a hypothetical customer that describes how they experienced the benefit.

Closing and Call to Action Wrap it up and give pointers where the reader should go next.

According to Fast Company, “The point is to help [Amazon employees] refine their ideas and distill their goals with the customer in mind.” It can do the same for you and your Content Inc. strategy.

LEVERAGING GOOGLE TRENDS

Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping, believes that Google Trends is the most important and most underutilized tool when it comes to locating your content niche. Davis, now a worldwide keynote speaker, includes a section in every one of his presentations on the power of Google Trends.

Google Trends is a free tool offered by Google that shows the search results and patterns of keywords worldwide or specific to regions. For example, if you type “kitchen blender” into Google Trends, you’ll see that the searches peak every December in every year, conveniently right around the holidays and gift-giving season

Figure 7.1 Search results on Google for “kitchen blender” peak every December.

Now let’s go back to Jay Baer and his example (from Chapter 5) of someone starting a knitting blog: “I like knitting and I’m going to start a knitting blog. Really! There are 27 other knitting blogs. Why would anybody read yours? What is different? What is unique? What is interesting? Why would anyone stop reading the knitting blog that they’ve been reading for the last three years and read yours?” Here’s where Google Trends earns its stripes. If we do a Trends search for knitting, we find that overall searches (Figure 7.2) are actually down for that term (not a good sign).

Figure 7.2 Search patterns via Google around the term knitting over time.

But if we dig a bit deeper, we’ll find gold. Moving down the page, as Figure 7.3 shows, you see a section called “Related searches.” Here’s where we find our tilt. Under the “Topics” area, we find that information around loom knitting (the product category) is up 300 percent in searches. If we look under the “Queries” section, we find that “loom knitting” is breaking out, as well as “knitting for beginners,” “knitting a scarf,” and “knitting stiches.” Figure 7.3 By scrolling to the bottom of a Google Trends search, you can discover related searches and breakout terms.

If we go back to Jay’s example, instead of just focusing on knitting in general, the data might be telling us to focus on innovative methods for using a knitting loom (for beginners).

ASK YOUR POTENTIAL READERS

This is such low-hanging fruit that I almost didn’t include it as a strategy. Asking your customers or potential readers seems like such a simple thing to do, but sadly it’s rarely done.

I recently conducted a workshop for one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world. When I came to the section about building the content mission, senior marketers were asked if they ever surveyed or talked to their customers to identify content gaps or opportunities to tell different but needed stories. Unfortunately, each one of them said that the marketing team hadn’t been employing any surveys or asking their audience what their pain points, needs, or wants were in any way.

Here is an opportunity to take advantage of what large enterprises don’t do well—talk to your readers. Whether you ask potential readers (which could be your friends or family) face-to-face or you send out a survey (using a tool like SurveyMonkey) via e-mail, either or both ways should be part of your regular strategy. This is especially critical in the beginning stages as you are discovering your niche.

Setting Up Listening Posts

I started in the publishing industry in February 2000 at Penton Media. I learned what great storytelling was all about from my mentor, Jim McDermott. Jim constantly talked about the importance of “listening posts.” Listening posts are all about getting as much feedback from a variety of sources as possible so you can find the truth.

Setting up listening posts is critical for all editors, journalists, reporters, and storytellers to make sure they truly know what is going on in the industry. For you, listening posts are critical so that you can identify your content tilt and make sure it’s an opportunity for you to differentiate yourself. All of us need listening posts to truly discover our customers’ needs. The following are all means of getting feedback from customers in effect, functioning as listening posts.

1. One-on-one conversations. Adele Revella, one of the leading thinkers around audience personas, believes that nothing can replace talking to your customers or audience directly.

2. Search of keywords. Using tools such as Google Trends and search engine keyword alerts will allow you to track what customers are searching for and where they are hanging out on the web.

3. Web analytics. Dive into your web analytics. Finding out what content your readers are engaging in (and what they aren’t) can make all the difference to your success.

4. Social media listening. Whether through LinkedIn groups or Twitter hashtags and keywords, you can easily find out what your customers are sharing, talking about, and struggling with in their lives and jobs.

5. Customer surveys. Survey tools like SurveyMonkey can easily be deployed to gather key insights into your customers’ informational needs.

TESTING TILTS

Jay Acunzo from NextView Ventures employs a testing strategy every time he’s considering a new content area. Recently, while gathering data for a target content area, he took small subsets of his database and sent out test content to different groups. For each one he measured the open rate, the click-through, the on-site engagement, and the unsubscribe rate. He did this for six weeks and, at the end of the process, identified a clear and overwhelming winner in a certain content subcategory.

Matthew Patrick, founder of Game Theory, whom we met in Chapter 3 and who has one of the most popular YouTube channels with over 4 million subscribers, found his niche through testing as well. According to Matthew, “I really started to approach the platform in a very experimental way. I would do A/B tests; I would run very small experiments with descriptions and things like that. And over time I was able to really get a sense of how users engage with this platform, but also how YouTube and their algorithms work to kind of sort videos and spread them across the system.” Once the data told Matthew what made a hit and what didn’t, he built his model around that, which skyrocketed his Content Inc. model to success.

REPOSITION THE CONTENT AREA

The Content Marketing Institute was launched in April 2007. Even though I had used the term content marketing on and off for the previous six years, it was still new marketing terminology.

The dominant industry term at the time was custom publishing. From conversations with senior marketing practitioners (CMI’s target audience), I could tell that that term was not something that resonated with them. But was there an opportunity for content marketing? Could changing the industry terminology be our content tilt?

I tinkered with the Google Trends tool and looked at a number of phrase variations. Here is what I found as it related to the dominant industry term (custom publishing) and an emerging term (content marketing).

Custom publishing. If this were a stock for purchase, we at CMI definitely wouldn’t want to own it. Every year people searched for this term less often. In addition, many of the articles referred, not to our idea of brands creating content, but to customized print books. This confusion was a problem.

Content marketing. The term didn’t even register on Google Trends. I began to think that if enough of the right content was created, a movement around the term could be started. With confusion around the other terms such as branded content and custom content, it was likely that the industry needed a new term around which to rally key thought leaders. In addition, without a clear leader in the “content marketing” group, CMI could move quickly and gain search market share if done correctly. As you can see in Figure 7/4, this strategy paid off.

Figure 7/4 The terms content marketing and custom publishing have taken opposite paths, according to Google Trends.

So a combination of talking to our audience and using free tools like Google Trends helped CMI define its content niche and “tilt” around this name change.

HubSpot, the extremely successful marketing automation enterprise, employed the same strategy with the term inbound marketing (Figure 7.5). In 2006, HubSpot launched a blog around the concept and developed a book (called Inbound Marketing), a video series, and an event called Inbound. As you can see, the community gathered around this term and helped thrust HubSpot into a leadership position.

Figure 7/5 Content areas can be exploited with a name change and a lot of valuable content. The term inbound marketing is an example of this.

DOING THE WORK

I’m winding down this chapter with an invaluable lesson and quote from Ira Glass, the popular host and producer of This American Life. Glass stated the following on his show: Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Sometimes, to find your content tilt, you simply have to get started, do the work, and discover the opportunities. Jeff Bullas, the most popular social media strategist in Australia, started out his content platform by writing about celebrity news (his first post was about Jennifer Anniston). After months of creating content, Jeff found his groove specific to the emerging practice of social media. Jeff had to do the work to get to the content tilt.

The same situation happened with Jay Baer. Jay initially launched a blog primarily about e-mail marketing. In an interview, he said: And I discovered in about 30 seconds that every time I wrote about email marketing I got 150 visits to the site, and every time I wrote about social media I got about 1000 visits to the site. And after that happened for a while I though, hum … I don’t have a degree in statistics, but I see a trend here.

So I said, we’re going to write about social media until somebody tells us not to write about that, so I spent all my time writing about that. Then I had done a bunch of social media consulting in the past and said, well I guess if there’s that much demand for this information then that’s going to be the focus of the business, and it was.

Jay would never have found this out if he had not put himself out there creating content. It’s completely acceptable that you take your best shot (like Jay did) at a content tilt and start developing the platform. Maybe then you will find the Content Inc. niche that will drive your success.

CONTENT INC. INSIGHTS

One of the most underutilized marketing tools on the planet is Google Trends. It is your job to leverage this tool to unearth your content tilt.

If you focus on listening to customers first and selling second, it will open up amazing new opportunities to position your company.

Sometimes to find your content tilt, you need to do the work. Perfection is unattainable with content, so if you have stalled your plans until you find the right tilt, the best prescription may be to just begin the creation process.