Experiences- the 7th Era of Marketing

by Robert Rose

  Year after year, Content Marketing Institute’s annual survey shows that “producing enough content” and “producing engaging content” are among the top challenges for B2B and B2C marketers.

  But understand that these are just symptoms of a greater challenge. The problem is not the marketer’s actual ability to create enough engaging content. The problem is that we are convinced we don’t know how to create value with content.

  This is how it typically goes:

  1. We think we don’t know how to create valuable content so…

  2. We don’t prioritize the time to create it (if we had a nickel for every time we’ve heard “content comes after my day job” we’d be rich) which…

  3. Feeds the perception that we need to create A LOT of it, so that we hedge our bets on the content that will be successful so….

  4. We outsource it to agencies, freelancers, or people who we think “understand content creation” better than we do which over time produces…

  5. Derivative, unoriginal content that doesn’t differentiate our brand or approach at all which…

  6. Convinces us that our story (or value we could provide) isn’t nearly as interesting as we once thought it was and this…

  7. Brings us back to #1 above.

  This needs to change.

  CATEGORIZING CONTENT

  So, how do we create value with content? Well, we can teach with content. We can evangelize with content. We can tell stories that make emotional connections with content. But first we have to know what type of content we’re creating. Categorizing content by type not only improves our effectiveness, it also helps us know when and where to outsource content production as we scale.

  Now, we couldn’t resist using a play on the classic four P’s as a method of defining content archetypes. If you don’t care for these, please develop your own. The point is: do it.

  1. THE PROMOTER

  Promoter content is the content we’re most familiar with. We already create this type of content every day. Examples include our website, brochures, case studies, advertisements, and landing pages. This is the content we create to describe the value of our products and services—and propagate it through all the different channels we manage, including the Internet, mobile, social, television, and print.

  The four archetypes of content purpose help the team focus on what effect we are trying to have with our content.

  Target Attributes of Promoter Content

  Promoter content engages our audience’s needs and wants, leading them toward a commitment. It is structured to persuade—to make an argument in our favor. It may be structured as a story, or as a simple call-to-action. The renowned social scientist Robert Cialdini has done important work involving this kind of content; his book, influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, is one of the seminal works in this space. In a blog post for Harvard Business Review, Cialdini discussed attributes of persuasion:

  “Research shows that persuasion works by appealing to a limited set of deeply rooted human drives and needs, and it does so in predictable ways. Persuasion, in other words, is governed by basic principles that can be taught, learned, and applied.”59

  Goals of Promoter Content

  Put simply, promoter content drives decision. It is meant to appeal to the audience and drive commitment to an action. It is content that is designed to get the sale, drive a subscription, initiate a conversation with a sales person—or in some other way persuade the audience to take an action that furthers the business.

  2. THE PREACHER

  Preacher content evangelizes our remarkable ideas. We develop this content to attract new audiences.

  Target Attributes of Preacher Content

  Preacher content drives an audience’s discovery and awareness. Its purpose is merely to be found and promote a larger idea in an easy-to-consume way. Examples of preacher content include “top 5 blog posts,” “listicles,” or the “weekly newsletter.” Or, preacher content can be part of a social strategy that pushes out curated content.

  This is the content that has truly exemplified the “inbound marketing” movement, where content’s purpose is to “be found.” As Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah say in their book, Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs:

  “To make this double win work for your company, you need to create lots of remarkable content. The people who win really big on the web are the media/content companies, who have a factory for creating new content. Each piece of content that has links to it can be found through those sites linking to it and through Google, and it can be spread virally through social media sites.”60

  Goals of Preacher Content

  The purpose of preacher content is to drive awareness and engagement. As Halligan and Shah also say in their book, “the trick is to stand out by becoming remarkable (unique and valuable) to a segment of buyers.”

  3. THE PROFESSOR

  One of the key goals of content is to use it to solve customers’ problems. One way to do that is to position your company or someone in it as a “thought leader” or (as we prefer) “authority” on a particular topic—and, in that capacity, educate your audience.

  Target Attributes of Professor Content

  Professor content feeds our audience’s interests and passions. Examples include any type of content that offers to “help” and “teach,” rather than sell, persuade, or make aware. Jay Baer’s book, Youtility, is one of the most important, and popular, books on this type of content. In it, he says:

  • “If you sell something, you make a customer today. If you help someone you may create a customer for life.”

  • “There are two ways for companies to succeed in this era: be ’amazing’ or be useful. The latter is much [more] reliable and viable.”

  • “Youtility is marketing so useful, people would gladly pay for it.”

  Goals of Professor Content

  The purpose of professor content is to drive meaning. It establishes us as an authority within our industry and engenders trust that our expertise will make the customer’s life better. This content should be so extremely valuable and unique that it can’t be found anywhere else. This means that it will be more carefully crafted than any of the other types of content we produce. It will also, almost assuredly, be sourced in a much different manner.

  4. THE POET

  This may be the most misunderstood, but most talked about, of all the content types, primarily because it is most often associated with “telling the story” of the business. To be clear, all of the content types should contribute to the story of the brand and, more importantly, its approach to creating differentiating experiences for audiences. However, poet content differs from other content types because it helps us connect emotionally. It is the only type of content that can actually change a belief.

  Target Attributes of Poet Content

  Poet content drives feelings and beliefs in our audience. Examples include any type of content that appeals to the pure emotions of our audience. We are looking to make them laugh, cry, or feel some emotion that aligns with our story or purpose. We are, in essence, bringing them along on a journey—the way any storyteller would. If our goal is to introduce something that will truly change a paradigm of thought, or require a new way to look at things, poet content is truly the only kind of content that has this power.

  One of the most interesting examples of this is Coca-Cola’s effort to “share happiness.” As Jonathan Mildenhall, who was then vice president of global advertising strategy and creative excellence for the company, told Robert Rose in an interview, “…[the] more we can fill the emotional well of our audience, we have to trade on it less and less.”

  Filling the emotional wells of our audience is the heart of poet content.

  Goals of Poet Content

  The purpose of poet content is to drive emotionality. Poet content aims to make our audience feel differently. It focuses on changing a belief about a particular thing.

  HOW
THE ARCHETYPES DIFFER

  The first thing to make clear is that all of these archetypes have a distinct purpose. The key is to understand the differences, so that when we’re creating a purpose-driven piece of content, everyone is on the same page about what kind of content we are creating. Let’s look at a summary:

  The desired effect, or purpose, of each archetype of content can help us understand the balance of all the content the marketing teams are creating.

  Now you may ask yourself, “Can’t every bit of content contain all of these archetypes?” The answer is, theoretically, yes. But, having all of the purposes embedded into the content rarely makes it better, and often ruins it.

  Think about the last time you saw a TV commercial clearly advertising the existence of a new product, while it taught you some important lesson in an emotional way. Never seen it? I don’t think we have either.

  But it’s not that it can’t be done, and certainly many pieces of great content do blend two or more elements. Here are some of the key differences:

  1. Promoter content almost always talks about our company, product, or service. This is true marketing and ad copy, plain and simple. One of the most common mistakes that content marketers make is inserting promoter content into professor content and calling that a differentiated experience. Think about that white paper that’s really just a case study in disguise.

  2. Preacher content is often ephemeral. It’s commonly topical and created in near real-time. It’s also usually part of a high-volume strategy—so it doesn’t have the same care and feeding going into it as a deep research piece might. One of the most common mistakes of a nascent content marketing strategy is assuming that all you need is preacher content. If there’s no substance behind the evangelizing, you’ll quickly run out of parishioners.

  3. Professor content is, by definition, unique to the brand’s approach. It must be high-quality, well-thought-out content. It is the content we invest in—the content that represents our unique approach to the world—and it’s often hand-delivered. This content helps us build trust with our customers by showing that we share a similar point of view. A common mistake here is the “nothing to no one” phenomenon. A brand is fearful of taking a distinct point-of-view on a topic, thinking they might disenchant a small segment of a potential audience. Then, by trying to be everything to everyone, they end up being nothing to no one.

  4. Poet content is also, generally speaking, more sparingly used by most brands. It is meant to change a belief or affect feelings, so it is almost always well considered. It is different than professor content because, ultimately, it is simply intended to create an emotional bond with the audience. It doesn’t have to “teach,” deliver an “authoritative point of view,” or provide any other type of usefulness. It just needs to deliver a compelling emotion that aligns with the brand’s point-of-view.

  A piece of preacher content can also be a piece of poet content. Your brand might offer up a high-volume Twitter stream with the sole purpose of making people laugh. Or you might argue that the classic Sarah McLachlan commercial imploring us to donate to the ASPCA, while pictures of sick and abused pets are shown, is a mix of promoter and poet content.

  The key is not to get so far into classifying each piece of content that putting each piece into an archetypal bucket becomes more important than the goal. The critical thing to understand is the goal for each piece of content and its purpose.

  A B2B TECHNOLOGY COMPANY EVOLVES ITS CONTENT PURPOSE

  Consider this example of a large B2B software firm in Silicon Valley. This company produces different software across a number of different business functions.

  John, a new senior-level enterprise sales representative, was brought on to work at the company because of his expertise in the financial services industry and especially because of his work at large banks. Upon his arrival, John discovered that he would be selling all of the different types of software the company offered. There was certainly no way he was going to be a subject matter expert on each piece of software, but he knew that he’d have access to sales engineers who would help him.

  But within days, John found himself overwhelmed with content. Product marketing teams added him to their email lists and soon he was receiving daily emails from each group with content assets attached. Each email would go something like this:

  Dear Sales Rep,

  Attached please find the latest (infographic/case study/brochure/spec sheet/webinar link/white paper, etc.) for the XYZ product suite. This content represents the latest and most up-to-date thinking in the XYZ space. Please use this content as a key piece with your prospects. You’ll also find this content on the HammerNet (their cute name for the marketing/sales intranet).

  Thank you for your help with XYZ product suite. Oh, and we’ve also attached the latest white paper and sales deck slides that you should be using in all of your pitches.

  Sincerely,

  XYZ Product Marketing Manager

  There was only one problem: this exact, same email came daily from seven different product marketing teams and also from an industry-focused consulting group that would send him duplicates (along with their own content that focused on how great they were).

  By the end of the first week, John received 500 emails of content covering all of the company’s products and services. It was four gigabytes of digital assets every week. He decided to make Monday mornings his day to go through all that content and “learn” about each of the products, so that he could make sense of each piece and file them as “sales content,” “thought leadership,” “general marketing,” etc.

  By the end of his first quarter at the business, the email was just too much for him to keep up with. To make matters worse, John was getting regular weekly emails from IT, asking him to prune his inbox as he was going over the storage quota. He began to delete emails on Sundays from the most egregious product marketing teams. John’s Monday “learning sessions” quickly dissolved and he prioritized potential client meetings, team meetings, and other things instead of learning.

  By the end of his third quarter, John had hacked his own solution to the problem. He noticed that of all the content he received, a fairly large portion of it ended up, final-approved, on the company website. So, when preparing for a potential client pitch or trade show where he would need the latest materials, he simply went to Google and used the command to search the company’s site. (He found the company’s website search lacking.) Then, he would find and pull those materials, knowing that if they were on the website, he could actually use them. He forwarded those materials to another agency, which he had engaged separately for himself and his team. He then asked this agency to create pitch decks and other materials that he would use.

  So, all in all, of the four gigabytes of content the product marketing teams were sending him weekly, this enterprise sales rep was using exactly none of it.

  This company clearly needed to evolve.

  Once John’s story became more widely known, other sales reps admitted to doing similar things. Some disregarded all of the content, unless it came from product marketing teams that they liked. Some filtered buckets of email to their spam folder and asked product marketing teams for materials only when they needed them. Some only used the HammerNet intranet system as a document repository.

  The company decided to create a better way. They developed a content creation and curation process focused on sales enablement. As a first step, this group acted as a filter. They received the onslaught of email from each of the product marketing teams. Their job was to take all of this content and repackage it, combine it, reuse it, filter it—basically curate it so that the feed that would go out to both the intranet and by email to the enterprise sales reps contained only the best content.

  This group created a training and engagement program in which they would not only send an email, but also create events sharing best practices about the use of certain content in the sales process. They created a feedback loop from th
e sales reps about which content resonated the best in pitches, which content was hardest to use, that which they didn’t understand, and that which was most popular. They created metrics in the intranet as well. With deeper engagement from the reps, they could measure not only what the reps said was the most popular content, but identify what content was ACTUALLY the most downloaded. They fed this back to the product marketing teams.

  We worked with this team to create a designation and operating model around the creation of content. They discovered that some product marketing teams created only promoter content. Some were very heavily weighted to professor content (thought leadership) and therefore didn’t send much at all. Some were only sending high-velocity “blog post”-type material and having a terrible time differentiating.

  Using this model helped them improve the way they created and promoted content. For example, when they received a piece of professor content, they would create three preacher content pieces as a promoter for it (as a rule). They weren’t offering just a “publishing” or “curation” service, but providing valuable insight into the purpose of creating content to begin with.