Epic content marketing : how to tell a different story, break through the clutter, & win more customers by marketing less

353 Pages·2013·33.08 MB·English

by  Joe, Pulizzi

More Praise for
Epic Content Marketing

“Joe Pulizzi has made me a content believer! Starting today, we will start
to develop our business content with a devoted discipline to behave
more like a great media company.”

Katherine Button Bell,

Vice President & Chief Marketing officer,

emerson

“Joe Pulizzi may know more about content marketing than any person
alive. he proves it in these pages.”

Jay Baer,

New York Times Bestselling author

of Youtility: Why Smart Marketing

Is About Help Not Hype

“the future of successful brand building, and especially the art of solidi-
fying the emotional connection between people and brands, will require
expertise in Content Marketing. Epic Content Marketing gives all the
details practitioners need without overcomplicating.”

ProfeSSor Joann SCiarrino,

Knight Chair

Digital advertising and Marketing,

university of north Carolina–Chapel hill

“Joe Pulizzi is the godfather of our burgeoning profession of Content
Marketing. he lays out the objectives, principles, and core strategies of
our field in a way that’s easy-to-understand, inspiring, and entertaining.
if your company doesn’t yet realize that it’s a media company, with all
the challenges and advantages that implies, you’re missing the most
powerful way to connect with your customers.”

Julie fleiSCher,

Director of Media & Consumer engagement,

Kraft foods

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Epic
contEnt
MarkEting

How to tell a Different Story,
Break tHrougH tHe Clutter, anD

win More CuStoMerS By Marketing leSS

JoE pulizzi

new york Chicago San francisco athens london Madrid
Mexico City Milan new Delhi Singapore Sydney toronto

Copyright © 2014 by Joe Pulizzi. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States
Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or
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publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-181991-6

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For Adam and Joshua . . . do or do not, there is no try!

Phil. 4:13

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v

C o n t e n t s

Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv

Part I
Content Marketing—there and Back again

CHAPteR 1 What Is Content Marketing?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

CHAPteR 2 The History of Content Marketing. . . . . . . . 13

CHAPteR 3 Why Content Marketing?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

CHAPteR 4 The Business Model of

Content Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

CHAPteR 5 The Business Case for

Content Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

CHAPteR 6 Tomorrow’s Media Companies. . . . . . . . . . . .49

Part II
Defining Your Content Niche and Strategy

CHAPteR 7 More Right or Less Right. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69

CHAPteR 8 What Is Epic Content Marketing?. . . . . . . . . 75

vi
CoNteNtS

CHAPteR 9 The Goal of Subscription. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83

CHAPteR 10 The Audience Persona. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

CHAPteR 11 Defining the Engagement Cycle. . . . . . . . . 103

CHAPteR 12 Defining Your Content Niche. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

CHAPteR 13 The Content Marketing Mission

Statement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119

Part III
Managing the Content Process

CHAPteR 14 Building Your Editorial Calendar. . . . . . . . . 131

CHAPteR 15 Managing the Content

Creation Process. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

CHAPteR 16 Content Types. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

CHAPteR 17 Finding Your Content Assets. . . . . . . . . . . . .203

CHAPteR 18 Extracting Content from Employees. . . . 211

CHAPteR 19 The Content Platform. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

CHAPteR 20 The Content Channel Plan in Action. . . .223

CoNteNtS
vii

Part IV
Marketing Your Stories

CHAPteR 21 Social Media for Content Marketing. . . . . 231

CHAPteR 22 Alternative Content Promotion

Techniques. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .253

CHAPteR 23 Leveraging a Social Influencer Model

for Content Marketing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .267

Part V
Making Content Work

CHAPteR 24 Measuring the Impact of Your

Content Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

CHAPteR 25 The Evolution of Your Epic Story. . . . . . . .299

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

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ix

Foreword

Have you heard of SAP? If you are a business professional, then
you probably have heard of us. You might know that we are German-
based. Maybe you even know that we sell business software that powers
the financial and accounting systems of large companies. But we are
much more than a German-based software company. And we are much
less known to the average consumer.
I bet you didn’t know that 80 percent of our customers are actually
small or medium-sized businesses. Our software powers 74 percent of
the world’s transaction revenue and 97 percent of the 1.8 billion text
messages sent every day across the globe. Our customers distribute 78
percent of the world’s food supply, 76 percent of the world’s health and
beauty products, 82 percent of the coffee and tea we drink each day, 79
percent of the chocolate, and 77 percent of the beer we drink.
As you can see from the illustrative examples above, our communi-
cations challenge is solved through stories. Stories not about what we
sell but stories that explain what we do for our customers. We believe
that the power of stories lies in making the reader and the consumer part
of the story. We believe in Epic Content Marketing.
Stories are nothing new. They’ve been around for as long as we have.
The earliest humans gathered around the campfire and figured out that
effective storytelling was the best way to pass on the information that
was vital for survival. They knew that truly connecting with their audi-
ence in an emotional way was a matter of life and death.
Fast-forward 10,000 years or so and we see that the emergence of
the web, mobile accessibility, and social media have changed some of
the ways we tell stories. It has allowed anyone to become a publisher of

x
ForeWorD

content. it allows us to tell stories in as little as 140 characters and six-
second videos.

the world is now swimming in content and information. While
content consumers are having fun creating and consuming all of this
content that moves around the world in milliseconds, marketers and
businesses are struggling in a growing battle for customer attention.

the era of one-way, single-threaded, brand-directed mass communi-
cations is officially over. and yet most of the content and the messages
coming out of businesses today are firmly stuck in the good old days. as
marketing tactics have become less and less effective, businesses have
responded by creating more and more promotional content that no one
wants, no one likes, and no one responds to.
Businesses are responding to a world with too much content by cre-
ating more content. and as each piece lands on their websites and in
social streams, they send the same message to their audience: we only
care about ourselves.
We care about telling you “who we are” and “what we do.” We talk
about the big-name logos of our customers. We invite you to spend an
hour with us so we can tell you how smart we are. We create content
about us, for us because we think that is what we are supposed to do.

the problem: no one is listening, reading, or acting on this content.

e-mail open rates, banner click-through rates, telephone contact rates—
all going down!

the only way to reach your audience in today’s information-drenched,
content-saturated world is through Epic Content Marketing that emo-
tionally connects with the people you are trying to reach.

i met Joe Pulizzi at a conference just a few short years ago. i was so
thrilled to meet him because i heard him talking about how content mar-
keting is nothing new but that it is still a young and immature discipline
at many brands. i heard Joe show examples from some of the greatest
brands in the world like John Deere, Procter & Gamble, and red Bull.

i could relate to the content marketing challenges Joe discussed.

and so after one of his talks, i walked up to him, introduced myself, and
asked him how a business-to-business brand could accomplish the same
as these well-known consumer brands.
Joe’s advice was simple and straightforward. he suggested i create
a content marketing mission statement, to start with a small pilot that
connects with our brand’s “higher purpose,” and to start highlighting for
our team those companies that are creating epic content: content that is
truly worth creating.

ForeWorD
xi

and so that is how we got started. We realized that we were creating
too much promotional and product-specific content that wasn’t being
downloaded, read, or acted upon. We ran reports on our websites that
showed us that we were reaching the few who wanted product informa-
tion and were ignoring the many who were not even sure that there was
a technology solution to their problem. in short, we had a content gap.
We are trying to highlight that gap to the various groups across
our company that create content. But content production comes from a
great number of sources across the company. it is not just marketing but
also communications and Pr. Sales support. Customer Service. Product
development and technical engineers. all these groups and more are
creating content.
We have found that the biggest obstacle is in the “why?”—helping
our teams to understand that if we think and act like a publisher, we will
create more of the content our customers are looking for. and less of the
content they ignore. one of the biggest challenges in content marketing
is to put the needs of our customers ahead of our own and to tell stories
that connect with people.

to help our teams, we identified our potential customers’ top ques-
tions and search terms. We are documenting the questions about how
technology and innovation can help a business with its biggest prob-
lems: how to grow, how to reduce costs, how to beat the competition, how
to gain loyal customers.
We are also meeting with teams across the organization to walk them
through the step-by-step process of how to answer those questions using
the content types and channels that our customers are using.

at a minimum we are trying to show them how to be helpful. ideally,
we hope not to just educate our future customers but also to entertain
them. to help them become successful in their careers. We know that if
we do this, they will not only know who we are and what we do but also
that we are a partner for their business.

at SaP, our customers have a lot of questions. and we are doing our
best to answer them. We are staying focused on them and their needs.
on telling stories that connect. But we have a long journey ahead.

not all of our content is epic yet. But we’re working on it. Creating
Epic Content Marketing is a long process . . . but the first step is to just
accept that we have to market differently today to survive and flourish.
Wherever you are in your content marketing journey, this book that
you either physically have in your hands, have displayed on your tablet,
or possibly are listening to while you are working out can make all the
difference for your business, your department, your career. heed Joe’s

xii
ForeWorD

advice like we did and watch your customers start to look at you differ-
ently . . . less like someone trying to sell them something, and more like
a true resource and informational expert.

isn’t that what all marketers and business owners want?
today, no matter how big you are or what budget you have, this is
achievable. are you ready?

MiChael Brenner

Vice President of Marketing and Content Strategy

SaP