Abridged with the author’s permission from MarketingExperiments Blog.
At our strategic partner Eloqua, CMO Brian Kardon recently created a new role at the company—director of content marketing—and filled it with an old face—Joe Chernov. Joe was the global director of communications and social media at Eloqua—where he was responsible for analyst relations, press relations, and social media.
One of your first decisions upon heading up content at Eloqua was to launch Eloqua’s new It’s All About Revenue blog. Even though Eloqua is an established company, launching a new blog from zero is an ambitious (and daunting) endeavor. How did you use social media to begin to build an audience? And how do you continue to use social media to promote content and deepen that engagement with your audience?
JC: Here’s an unpopular answer: You have to earn it. For the most part, our good posts generate lots of views, our not-so-good posts generate few views. Believe me, I know: I own the “least viewed” post award.
Now this isn’t to say you can’t effectively promote your own blog. There are a number of practical steps you can take to build an audience:
- Invite guest contributors or interview known figures in your industry. In other words, involve people that have a vested interest in promoting their post to their followers.
- Mix media. Video, illustrations, and graphics tend to be hyper-consumable formats.
- Don’t be afraid to stir the pot. Sometimes controversy is a good way to attract new visitors. Everyone rubbernecks, even online. But market at the margins. Your central focus should remain on the quality of your content.
What are the main things companies should focus on to drive demand and leads with content?
JC: Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Use your blog as the hub of the content wheel.
- Stop thinking of Twitter as the goal, consumption is the goal. Twitter’s value is that it is a useful tool in directing people to points of consumption
- Don’t expect the world to find you. Yes inbound marketing works, and your blog should be your hub. But of the 20,000 downloads (in the first month) of The Content Grid and Social Media Playbook [two internal documents posted on the company blog], nearly half occurred “in the wild” (SlideShare, Scribd, Facebook).
- Assume that 50% of your time will be spent in the dialogue phase of content marketing. Creating remarkable content, distributing it broadly and measuring the impact is, together, only half of the battle. Engaging in a dialogue everywhere you publish your content is vital for success. It’s also the best trigger for sustained interest and long-term word-of-mouth.
- In the end, remember that this is a meritocracy. Good marketing isn’t going to turn bad content into a success.
Daniel Burstein is the Editor for MarketingExperiments, the first Internet-based research lab to conduct experiments in optimizing marketing and sales processes. Check out the full version of the interview, which contains many more insights than we had room for here.
