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Content Marketing Best Practices from Joe Pulizzi

Hubspot Inbound Now Video Interview also a Case Study In Creating Like a Publisher

 

Whether you are new to content marketing or an advanced practitioner you can learn something from the recent Hubspot Inbound Now interview with Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 and founder of the Content Marketing Institute.

Anytime I can hear or read Joe's insights it's a worthwhile time investment. 

The Hubspot process is an excellent example of thinking and creating content like a publisher: 

• Be a resource for new ideas and insights
• Acquire content by interviewing subject experts
• Use audio and video as acquisition methods (more than just interview)
• Transcribe the audio
• Offer the content in multiple formats for consumption convenience: text, audio and video
• Amplify -- in this case they blogged about the interview for another distribution method
• Promote -- others will help you do this

 

Inbound Now #16 – Content Marketing Best Practices & Tips with Joe Pulizzi (@JuntaJoe) from Hubspot.

 

Interview Outline

To wet your appetite I'll provide a brief outline of the highlights, including specific quotes: 

Definition of Content Marketing 

Why Content Marketing  

Key mistakes 

"I think that overall it’s we’re very used to thinking like marketing people, which is we want to sell. With content marketing, we first have to think about the needs and the pain points of our customers and create content that answers those questions. If we do that right, they then pay attention to us. They then buy from us. They then talk about us. It’s easy to talk about. It’s hard to do."

"55 percent of brands outsource some part of the content marketing process. We know that’s going on right now, but it doesn’t matter if they do it themselves or they do it outside. Sometimes it’s easier to do a little bit of both. What we see in a lot of bigger brands is they have a content coordinator, or maybe it’s under social media, whoever that’s under. And then they work a lot of journalists or a lot of content agencies to get out that work." 

Re-purposing 

Acquisition and capture processes 

" ...the processes probably are not set up to capture that content. So that’s what we need. How do we set up a process to capture that content?" 

We have a lot of content 

"I think that we have the content. There’s no shortage of it. It’s just how do we set up a process within our company so we can extract that story and figure out what are the really important things that we need to tell our customers and which channels should we use." 

Content vs. Commercials 

"You brought up the idea of commercial. I don’t have any problem with a company taking their commercials and putting it on YouTube, but don’t have any expectations that a lot of people are going to watch that. Use that as more of an archival resource. 

I talked to a contractor the other day that had something like 40 or 50 commercials. I said, 'Great, put those on, but don’t think that people are going to rush to YouTube and search for all kinds of stuff and find you. You might get a couple. It might help in some part of the sales process, but probably not. What’s more effective is if you are answering your customers’ pain points through a piece of video content that you probably didn’t have before.'" 

Use multiple channels 

"We do a print magazine, but we also have six or seven different digital versions of that magazine. We have podcasts that are integrated with that magazine. We have white papers integrated with that. That’s all online. So even though one of the channels is print, there’s no such thing as a print magazine today. You’ve got so much digital wrapped up in the integration of that. You’ve just got to make sure you know what your objectives are.

So I would just say focus on what your objective is, and first of all, you can focus on some kind of a behavior. It doesn’t have to be a sales behavior. It would be nice if it is. But at the end of the day, what’s their behavior? Are they making actions, and then can you show that as some kind of an increase in some portion of your key performance indicators?" 

Listen: Get input from customers, sales, customer service (everywhere) 

"Talk to your salespeople. Talk to the front line. Most of the salespeople that I talk to, the marketing department is not going to them and getting their input about what the challenges are to the customers. Customer support, talk to them. You’ve got to have a process." 

Relationships -- one person at a time 

"Gary Vaynerchuk was quoted in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. He said, ‘We’ve done what so many companies don’t want to do because it’s so hard. Because we build relationships one person at a time.’ And that’s what we’re talking about with inbound marketing, with content marketing – we’re building relationships one at a time, and it’s fantastic and it works, but it’s hard work and it takes time." 

It's a Marketing Evolution 

"If you’re not thinking of yourself like a media company you’re doing yourself a disservice. I wouldn’t call it a revolution, I’m calling it an evolution of the marketing department into a publishing department. 

Most companies are still not there yet. You see content spurts and you see content as part of campaigns.

Be like media companies and provide really helpful resources to customers on a consistent basis in video, text form, and iPad and everything else." 

Advice for small businesses 

"I would say figure out the content niche where you can be the leading expert in the world. That means you’ve got to get really small. 

You can be the leading expert in that because we’re so nichified with media today. You’ve got to think of yourself in content."

Customer Interviews for Marketing and Selling Content

At our recent SMEI breakfast we had an excellent conversation on customer -- and video -- interviews. As a result, I suspected that most B2B marketing professionals don't have a successful framework for thinking about, much less acquiring, effective customer interviews for marketing and selling content. Follow on conversations with organizations large and small confirmed my suspicions. 

What do you call them? Success stories? Testimonials? Case studies?  What is the "come from" behind your approach? What is your primary intent? To have your customer tell your prospects things about you that you can't (or shouldn't) tell yourself? 

Or are you "coming from" a perspective of "helping buyers make effective buying decisions" by getting your customers to share insights that address specific buying questions -- by role, issue, buying stage, solution alternative? 

What is the "job" recorded customer interviews are expected to do? How do these expectations differ when you ask marketing vs. sales?  

There is a place for customers telling their (your) story. But it's limited in the grand plan of content requirements. Captured properly, customer insights can perform many "jobs" throughout the buying process. 

Do you have a formal process for conducting customer interviews? Does it look like this one? 

There is nothing wrong with this approach. It appears to be a universal approach. But it's also un-differentiated and not consistent with today's content marketing principles for creating relevant, educational content to help buyers make better buying decisions. 

 

Customer Acquisition Framework 

Here is a start at such a framework and interview process:

1. First, make a distinction between different communication objectives and approaches for customer interviews. Customer insights can help: 
   • Capture attention / generate  interest -- with short provocative sound bites 
   • Explain --  important insights that educate a buyer 
   • Tell -- a story 
   • Advocate -- make a case 
   • Answer -- questions, objections 
   • Persuade or Prove -- deliver proof points 
2. Use the frameworks you've established for the Customer Buying Process and the Questions Customers Must Answer to make their buying decisions. If you have these well documented it will lower your preparation time and improve your interview. Make sure you've aligned those questions to each stage of the buying process. 
3. Make role-based distinctions in the questions, issues, value criteria that are important to your buyers. 
4. Plan for later stage points that: influence  buying and value criteria that are favorable to your company, address customer questions and objections (you will have to talk with sales to get these), and address "step backs" in the buyers process that stall or derail too many deals.

 

Recommended Interviewing Techniques 

Here are specific recommendations:  

• Decide the important areas you want the customer to address, what specifically you want them to say. You really don't have much time with them. You must prioritize. 
• Align each customer and individual speaker to a specific set of questions -- not general -- ask yourself what customer questions they can best speak to? 
• Prepare multiple questions to elicit those points. You may have to ask the question in a variety of ways. 
• Provide preliminary input to your customer before the interview in the form of a checklist. Tell them you're hearing customers ask these questions. Ask if they are comfortable addressing them, allow them time to think and prepare. 
• Tell the customer you know people have a very short attention span, so you are looking for short, direct answers to specific questions, not long stories. Explain you will let them complete every point, but you may ask them to repeat their answer in a more succinct fashion. You need this, prepare them. 
• Don't be afraid to ask customers if they would be comfortable making a specific point (which you provide them) -- in their own words of course. 
• Keep it light, people will fatigue quickly, often as early as 20-30 minutes. You'll see fatigue showing up in bobbles and mistakes that require re-takes at the customer's request. At this point it's time to wrap up so as not to embarrass the customer. 

This is just a start. Please help me refine an effective framework for capturing customer interviews for the various marketing and selling purposes our organization's require. 

Here are links to helpful articles. Can you see the "come from" expressed in these articles? What distinctions are made between content suited to marketing's early/top of funnel and education purposes, versus proof point messages required by both buyers and sales in the latter stages of the buying process? 

Customer Success Stories Speed the Sale

Best Practices for Customer Success Stories

25 Ways to Build Trust and Sales with Customer Success Stories

The Power of Testimonial Videos

Reflection Films Website

Visible Gains Website