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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

Second Voice Vignettes for Telesales and Prospecting

As a sales professional, telephone selling is a key element of my sales job, especially in the critical, initial stages of prospecting and engaging new customers. For many sales people this is a frustrating, time consuming, low probability of success activity.

Here's an approach that significantly improves your odds, provides value to your prospects, gives you important feedback and, for now, will clearly differentiate you from other sales people.

I've been thinking about the binary nature of sales prospecting and cultivating initial customer relationships. Consider, with most sales calls:

1. We either connect, or don’t
2. Leave a voicemail, or not
3. Send an email, or not
4. The prospect answers, or doesn't
5. Is willing to talk, or not
6. Is interested, or not
7. Is willing to meet, or not
8. Is the right person or not, etc.

Of course, the odds of a favorable outcome for each option don't favor us.

But what if there were a third option?

I use "second voice vignettes" to capture prospect attention, to help them understand why I'm calling, to get feedback on whether my message resonates or might be relevant to the prospect, to make it easy for my initial contact person to refer me to the appropriate person.

At each stage of the above process it provides a third option that significantly increases my chances for success.

Here's pretty much how it works:

1. I create a short (three minute or less), personalized vignette that addresses the relevant business, sales, marketing or communication issues of my prospect (this is what our business is all about, the process is noted in many places)
2. I send the vignette in a VERY short email with a customer oriented, compelling title (the art of this is critical and is addressed well by many experts)
3. I make my call and if the prospect doesn't answer, I leave a message (the message is also critical, covered elsewhere, but it MUST be oriented to the business issues I'm looking to discuss -- and not be "pitchy"
4. In the message I refer the person to their email "to view a 3 minute custom streaming video that I assembled to introduce them to the issues I'm interested in discussing." I also suggest that my email be shared with others in the organization who have responsibility for the issues
5. If I connect with the prospect, my conversation is very short, issues oriented, requesting of a fifteen minute meeting -- but I'm now focused not on binary options, but more open dialog about the impact of the issues, how they are prioritizing them, etc.
6. The vignette helps me approach the prospect from a problem solving, educating perspective, to see if they would be open and interested in viewing my vignette. It gives me another tool to support the full range of questions that prospects use to delay and diffuse sales inquiries
7. When the prospect views the vignette, I get an email notification (each time). This gives me feedback (and motivation) that my message and issues might be relevant. It helps me prioritize this prospect for follow up.

This method is no panacea. But it is a game changer. It intrigues and captures prospect attention. It helps the prospect understand why they should talk with me. It helps me capitalize on that attention in much more impactful ways than an email message.

If I've selected the right issues, I have a high probability the prospect will listen to my three minute message. Think about it -- three minutes! Audio and visual impact vs. a couple of text sentences that will be skimmed in seconds from an email.

This always reminds me of the infamous Crocodile Dundee scene when he's in New York City with his girl friend who tells him to give the punk assailant his money because "he has a knife …"

Once you start using customized, personalized vignettes, you'll realize the phone and email are limited communication tools for prospecting. You need a bigger knife.

Risk of User-Generated Video Content

I'm really interested in John Jantsch's new book The Referral Engine. But I'm not sure I'll be reading it.

I have a full reading list and limited time. I primarily read material referred to me from a trusted source. It's a new book, so I'm waiting for reviews to emerge.

That's why today I jumped on the Twitter link to this "review" by Jim Kukral.

Warning: there is some negativity in this blog, delivered in the spirit of feedback and insight, born of disappointment and frustration.

A Review IS a Referral

Think about it. A "review" is a referral. I would hope that a book about referrals would teach someone how to provide a referral. This glaring omission in this particular review has me questioning whether it's missing from the book as well.

I'm making these criticism because we're dealing with professionals here. Not some geek … oops, after writing that I went back to Jim Kukral's website bio only to read (his words) "I'm a geek marketer." NO, really?

But he is a professional marketer, writer and speak. He's important enough that John forwarded a free, pre-release copy of his book for the review.

My primary point is not the poor quality of the review or video production. Although the poor content, production and delivery quality is relevant to my main point.

Organizational Risk

This video is a terrific example of what companies should fear when they think of user generated video content. And this was from a professional reviewing a high profile marketing and selling book.

Just because we can turn on a webcam, record a talking head and throw it up on YouTube doesn't mean we should. John Chambers of Cisco has bought the company that makes the Flip camera. He's advocating that sales people record their own customer video testimonials.

Is your organization ready for this? What about the adverse and unintended consequences?

Are you ready to address the issues and impact on quality and brand, perceptions about your company, best practices, standards, "costs" (more than but including monetary costs), legal, and wasted time, to name just a few?

Sales people and marketers do find video content especially compelling. Imagine "arming" your sales channel with PowerPoint, print brochures or PDFs when your competition is delivering relevant, compelling video. Reminds me of the old sales cartoon where the Indians are storming the fort and the general doesn't have time to meet with the salesman selling the brand new gatling gun!

What's a marketing function to do?

Think Like a Publisher

This is a fantastic opportunity to "think like a publisher."

Publishers have specialists that perform different duties to publish the finished product. Some acquire source content, others edit, manage, editorialize, write, layout, etc.

The potential of video communications is so compelling it won't be stopped. The question is will you get out ahead with an effective strategy, plan and support program?

Remember the old adage: "Give me a fish and I'll eat for today, teach me to fish and I'll eat for the rest of my life." I like to add my coda: "Yes, but who's going to stock the pond?"

Marketing should be stocking the pond. Creating content like publishers. Writing the obituary before the person dies.

When a sales person needs to send a video it must be ready. When your marketing automation system needs to send nurturing, educational, video content it must be relevant. When your social media strategy requires people on your business front line to be engaging using compelling, relevant content, with what will you arm them?