Asking "why?" is an important strategy for content marketing. Our content should focus on delivering value to our customers beyond the product or service we provide. It should ultimately answer the question of "why" our customers care about us. Use this classic problem-solving technique to discover the heart of your story, by asking "why" five (or more) times.

In this video post, Robert Rose, co-author with Joe Pullizzi of "Managing Content Marketing," discusses what brands can learn from big-screen storytelling, as well as from Joseph Campbell: creating "heroic" content that speaks to your audience such that they readily carry your brand's story to others.

In Best Practices, Mediocre Results , Robert Rose claims marketers who focus on measuring up to others are less willing to take risks and less likely to stand out.  Here, he offers tips about how to move beyond best practices—and become more than just average. 6 Ways To Move Beyond Best Practices 1. Turn worst to best As an exercise, take your worst performing tactic (maybe it’s print) and ask yourself, “If tomorrow this was the only way I could market, how would I do it differently?” 2. Turn best to different Pretend you learn the conversion rate on your best content marketing tactic ranks dead last among your peers who use the same tactic. What would you do differently? 3. Burst your bubble What would you do if demand for your product or service   fizzled out (e.g., demand for camera film)? How would your story change to meet the challenge? 4. Join a new clique What if you applied best practices from another industry to your business? Learn what’s going on in an industry completely different...

Why a hyper focus on measurement and incremental gains makes marketers average. Let’s talk about how a myopic focus on measurement can suck all the innovation and success out of our strategy. Here is an experiment: Walk around your office and ask everybody three questions. The first question: “Should companies be innovative?”  I’ll take a wild-ass guess and predict a 90-percent-plus response in the affirmative. Then, independent of that answer, immediately ask the next one. “Has our company ever been innovative?” Here, you may get that confused it’s-4 p.m,-and-I-haven’t-had-my-Snickers look. They may ask “Do you mean are we innovative right now?” And you’ll reply, “No, I’m asking whether we have ever been innovative? Ever?” Here, your mileage will vary, but I’ll bet you one thing to be 100 percent true. Of those who said “yes” to the second question, when you ask them the third and final question, everyone will cite a success. You see … everybody LOVES innovation. You know, just so long...

As we take a collective breath before we head to Cleveland to experience how content, marketing strategy, Rock & Roll, and more orange than we ever knew existed can be mixed together, Joe Pulizzi and I wanted to offer up a little surprise. Before I get to the surprise, let’s talk a little about how we can make content marketing real in our organizations. At this point, you’re no doubt convinced of the “why” of content marketing; it’s now a question of “how”: How do we make it a reality in our organization? We know that the ideas in content marketing aren’t new — we’ve all been doing it for years, in varying ways. But really, there’s been no standardized way to create repeatable, manageable, and measurable processes to manage content marketing. As we’ve worked with some of the biggest brands in the world on creating content marketing strategies, we’ve see some of the same things coming up again and again, including certain challenges, tools, solutions, and processes that just simply...

Ask any good author what their story is about and you will almost certainly not get the plot (what happens in the story) but rather the themes (what the story is about). Take, for example, the recently released hit comedy Bridesmaids.  The story is not about the raunchy shenanigans that go into planning a wedding, but it’s about how life “moves on” with or without you, and you must take charge of it.  In fact, the climactic scene for the main character is not the big wedding, but rather an argument two of the bridesmaids have that convinces Annie (one of the bridesmaids) that she has to “fight for herself.” Continue reading

Okay quick – how many marketing consultants does it take to change a light bulb?  There is no shortage of punch lines here.   “It depends – how large is your budget?”  Or – “We don’t know – they never seem to get past the requirements stage.”  Or, here’s my favorite (maybe because I made it up) – “Four, one to change the bulb and three to blog how Seth Godin would have done it.” Okay, jokes aside – you may have seen that we have formally launched CMI’s consulting practice (CMIC). I’m so very pleased to have a leading role in helping CMI organize this important initiative, and I’m honored to be working alongside such a stellar group of people.Continue reading

When we think of mobile and content these days, the conversation usually goes to publishing content for mobile devices such as iPhones, Blackberries and Android phones.  While the mobile platform is interesting – and something other CMI contributors have covered – by “mobile” I actually mean something quite different. I’m talking about content mobility: migrating content from one CMS to another.Continue reading

My college roommate used to hold up his giant screwdriver and say – “this is the only tool I’ll ever need.” And, he’d hammer nails with it, open boxes with it, open beer bottles with it (yes, college was like that for me). It was everything he needed. Sadly, the same can’t be said for different web content management software. So, if you’re neck deep in a content marketing strategy, it’s a sure bet that you’re also, in some way, wrestling with a web content management system (CMS). Continue reading

There’s a great quote that I love that says, “Budgeting is just a way to worry about money before you spend it.”  As you get ready to move into the planning season for your 2011 budget, it’s a good time to start thinking about things you might do to increase your chances of getting increased budget for content marketing. So, with no further ado – here are some quick checklist items to do as you prepare your content marketing budget.Continue reading

In last week’s post, I walked you through how to map your content to your buyer personas and sales funnel. By having this information, you can start to see where your gaps in content are. So, what’s next? You need to fill in the gaps and put a plan in place to measure what is and isn’t working.Continue reading

If you’re a B2B marketer you’ve inevitably heard sales say things like this: “Yeah, we’re getting leads from all that content you guys in marketing are writing – but they’re all tire kickers.” Or (my favorite): “We don’t need more leads. . . we need better leads.”  What now? You want to be able to address these questions from sales with answers that are really specific. For instance, wouldn’t it be nice to be armed with this kind of info?Continue reading