Lindsay Tjepkema
Content marketers today face a constant struggle between keeping up with the volume of content they’re expected to produce and getting creative to produce rich, quality work that deeply impacts their audience.
Content marketing is recognized as a powerful tool, driving higher conversions than traditional marketing. However, the teams creating that content are using an outdated playbook that focuses on serving algorithms before audiences by constantly churning out posts targeting bots over brains.
In an Accenture survey of more than 1,000 marketing executives across the globe, respondents were unanimous: Content overload is a top challenge. And 50% said they currently have more content than they are fully prepared to manage.
The strategies that made content marketing so riveting at its start haven’t evolved to meet the challenges of today’s marketers as they compete for their audience’s attention in a vast landscape of newsletters, podcasts, video series, blogs and social media.
With too much content to create or manage and too little time to measure its success or repurpose what they’ve already created, marketers need a new plan of action that puts creativity before quantity, audience before engine, and sets connection as the top priority. They need an amplified marketing strategy.
What is amplified marketing?
The amplified marketing approach puts captivating conversations at the center of your content strategy. Those conversations — with industry experts, customers, internal thought leaders, influencers and decision-makers — serve as the source material for all your marketing assets, streamlining your content creation, aligning your teams across channels and giving your audience the insights they’re seeking.
Amplified marketing turns to powerful metrics to identify what resonates with an audience and what’s not catching on. By extracting more value from the content they create and assessing its success, marketers can work more efficiently, effectively and creatively.
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Start with a conversation
Amplified marketing starts with a good conversation with someone who knows what they’re talking about on a topic your audience wants to explore. How do you do that? Bring the focus back to the audience.
Consider what questions they need answered, what new ideas they’re missing out on and what subjects excite or inspire them. Instead of developing a list of topics for content marketers to research and write about, put together a list of people who can offer your audience those answers, insights and big ideas.
The conversations can be with a subject matter expert, a leading voice, a provocative change-maker in your industry — someone knowledgeable who has a story and wants to share it. They don’t need to be “known,” but they should have passion and skill and, most importantly, be relevant to your audience.
Instead of painstakingly producing blog post after blog post, passing it on to your audience and hoping something sticks, an amplified marketing strategy fosters a connection between your audience and the expertise they’re seeking, with marketers as the connective tissue.
Your audience has infinite options. They can read, watch and listen to anything in an instant. Amplified marketing asks you to focus on creating value — not just volume — so your audience will notice.
Record the conversation and share it
The conversation can be as formal or informal as you want, but be sure to record it. Using video or audio, capture that chat, interview or panel. Use whatever works for the people involved in the conversation: Zoom, Teams, Skype or just simple gear for an in-person talk.
What you’re capturing might be part of an event; it might be a podcast interview; it might be a webinar you put together. Make it a great conversation by asking unexpected questions, uncovering fresh perspectives and keeping your audience’s interests at the forefront.
How long should it be? It’s like so many teachers have said: as long as it needs to be. The length of the conversation doesn’t matter as long as it piques your audience’s interest. Whether it’s a five-minute chat or an hour-long discussion, you can use it to fuel your content. Just keep it focused on the expert and what they have to offer your audience.
Once you’ve recorded a conversation rich with ideas, insights and flavor — the kind of content your audience wants — share it.
Wring it out across other channels
Too many marketing strategies stop at sharing an interview, podcast, event keynote, panel discussion or webinar once. After the time and care you put into that great conversation, don’t share it once and move on to creating something new. Amplified marketing treats each conversation as a wellspring, capable of generating a collection of videos, audio clips, articles and social media posts.
Wringing out a robust piece of content into a dozen smaller bits that highlight great moments and intersect with other topics makes the job of content marketers easier, saving time and money while making the most of the work you’ve already done. To do all of that, you need tools that support your work by housing those conversations, transcribing them, indexing what you’ve captured and making it easier to create shorter video and audio clips of the most resonant moments.
Then you can share those clips on social media or embed them in blog posts and email marketing. Pull the transcript and use it as the basis of a handful — or a dozen! — newsletters, blog posts, white papers and e-books that link back to the full conversation. Turn your video into a podcast or a series of podcasts.
Amplifying your conversation gets the most out of the value you created while keeping your content aligned so your audience can follow the conversation across channels. It lets your team create an array of content from an authentic, meaningful conversation designed to satisfy your audience’s curiosities instead of the infinite demand of search engine algorithms.
Measure and reflect
Amplified marketing is audience-driven and focused on producing creative, high-quality content. To make that work worthwhile, you have to know whether it’s engaging your audience by measuring what’s succeeding, what could improve and what just isn’t working.
Instead of moving to the next conversation, evaluate how the audience received your content so you can be strategic as you develop the next batch. Taking the time to look at metrics will pay off in the long run by ensuring your brand stays on the pulse of audience interests rather than barreling ahead with content that doesn’t resonate. You’ll avoid pouring time, money and resources into something that’s not working.
But to gain insights from those metrics, they should be easy to access and go beyond vanity metrics to provide actionable data. Consider tracking these brand awareness and demand indicators as you review your content:
- Audience growth.
- Traffic growth.
- Social shares.
- Social media mentions.
- Verbal mentions to team members.
- Traffic to conversation-driven content.
- Conversions from conversation-driven content.
- Content’s impact on the buying cycle.
- Revenue attributed to content.
The insights gleaned from this measurement will help your team build a dynamic road map for your marketing that guides the selections of guests and topics and helps strengthen your brand. Using a platform that relays those metrics quickly and clearly lets teams change tactics midcourse and keep improving their output while refining their focus.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
An amplified marketing strategy is recursive: You’ll repeat the process and be better equipped, more informed and more strategic each time. As you drive your audience interest, you’ll drive revenue.
Once you’ve recorded a great conversation, used it to fuel a host of content and measured that content’s success, don’t stop. Take what you learned and start another conversation. Keep digging for what your audience wants most, finding voices that bring them value and asking questions that no one else is. While you’re looking for the next powerful voice, don’t forget to mine what you’ve already created.
By using tools that allow you to search for keywords and topics, you can quickly uncover related past content ripe for repurposing. Amplify that work by breaking it down into new content. Then keep going.
Equip your teams to excel
Content marketing has asked too much of marketers for too long without the promise of results, serving search engines before audiences. An amplified marketing strategy gives the control back to marketers and brings the focus back to the audience. It starts with a voice that speaks to your audience, captured with audio or video. That conversation fuels smaller nuggets of insight and knowledge that are easy to tease out and distribute across platforms, giving continuity to your content.
By incorporating tools to measure how the content is performing, you can adjust your strategy, giving the audience more of what they like, more of what drives them to your website and more of what enables conversion.
Your teams will align to make more compelling content, more efficiently, with your audience at the heart of their work.
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