#papershare

Screenshot by Derek Handova. PaperShare's six tips for content marketing strategy has a couple of diamonds in the rough among the pedestrian advice.

PaperShare is what it describes itself as the content marketing cloud solution with real-time distribution that delivers leads from content. That’s a lot of buzzwords to cram into one elevator pitch. They’ve probably been reading VentureBeat or TechCrunch to get in good with impressionable young VCs fresh out of Stanford Grad B-school. In any event, this startup issued a set of six tips for content marketing late in 2013. Maybe there are only so many tips for content marketing. Or maybe we’ve all been reading the same B2B collateral. Even so, among the fairly pedestrian tips PaperShare offers there are a few diamonds in the rough. To wit, their six content marketing tips are:

Know What You Want From Your Content

Drive it with Data

Experiment

Engage Your Influencers

Keep it Organized with a Calendar

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Let’s drill down on these tips and see what we’ve really got. Some stuff you’ve heard before, but some may come as news to you.

Know What You Want From Your Content Actually, knowing what you want from your content in advance of creating it would be an original idea, or at the least something most people are in too much of a hurry to ask themselves while they are frantically scrambling to pull stuff together. PaperShare says whether it’s leads, names, distribution, branding, industry recognition or awareness, deciding the end goal for your content strategy will focus your efforts and also drive its creation. Just like outlining a 12th grade essay before writing it, having a plan for your content marketing will make it easier to whip that stuff out.

Drive it with Data Your content is only as good as the data that backs it up. PaperShare counsels you to measure everything from beginning to end. Start by using keyword search data to see what’s on the minds of your customers and prospects. After that, you need to benchmark your data. Chances are your company is not a monopoly and competes with other firms.

These companies will be facing the same issues as you. They may have published this data. Or they may have created and distributed it “offline.” Ask your customers or prospects if they have any PowerPoint slides from the competition. Some of them may be helpful and supply this resource. Failing that, research analysts will be another good source of confidential information from your competition. With coveted data in hand, you can now guesstimate conversion rate targets for your content marketing.

Experiment The only way to know if what you are doing in your content marketing is working is to test it. We’ve seen this one before, but PaperShare seconds that emotion with their advocacy for A-B testing. To make sure you know what is happening in your A-B test, PaperShare says you should only change one variable of your contenting marketing at a time. That way you’ll know the cause and effect of any differing results from social media. For example, try similar tweets on Twitter but change just the keyword, leaving the other words alone.

Engage Your Influencers Part of engaging your influencers is to offer them valuable content without asking for anything in return. This insight from PaperShare goes to the core of what social media is all about. The content cannot just be valuable, it must be something that is closely guarded and normally gated for highly qualified prospects. Perhaps, this is a sneak peek at some proprietary research you’ve had your analyst firm working up for you. Exclusivity will drive perceived value of the content. As this content slowly leaks out to your influencers’ networks, it will support your overall customer engagement.

Something like engaging influencers needs to function by the 80-20 rule. Give them content 80 percent of the time without asking anything in return. Then 20 percent of the time, you have carte blanche to think you can ask for something in return. PaperShare says you need to ask gently, whatever that means. I think you need to ask politely but if these people owe you in a philosophical sort of way don’t be afraid to call in a favor. If these influencers have been into you for a while, they should be more than happy to help you out the one or two times you ask for it.

Screenshot by Derek Handova. PaperShare tips' impact on content marketing strategy will vary depending on which social network you are using. Photo credit: mkhmarketing / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Of course, how you ask for reciprocation will vary by the social network within which you are operating. The norms and mores of engagement will differ among the major social media channels on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and other more vertical channels. For example, it is perfectly acceptable to ask for a retweet on Twitter but perhaps a more borderline call on Facebook to ask for “likes.” And on LinkedIn, the norms of professional networking would strongly discourage any direct solicitation for “likes.”

Keep it Organized with a Calendar Here’s another one we’ve heard before: keep an editorial calendar for your content marketing. You do need to have your blog or other social media efforts on a schedule. But I don’t think PaperShare means that you need to blog at exactly the same time every week or even every month. However, you do need to keep your followers hungry and wanting for more. So you should maintain some sort of loose itinerary. In reality, for a blog people expect some amount of irregularity. You might blog three days in a row one week then not utter a peep for the next three weeks. Just don’t let your blog or content marketing gather cobwebs.

For regular social media such as Twitter or LinkedIn, you should be logging in every day to check on things. If you are a B2C company, you should be doing the same with your Facebook account. If there are any substantive comments, forward them to the appropriate department at your company. If there are complaints of a material nature, you’ll need to attend to these immediately.

Don’t Invent the Wheel For god’s sake, stand on the shoulders of the giants who preceded you. After all, Rae Dawn Chong went on a “Quest for Fire” so that you wouldn’t need to figure out how to use a couple of sticks, kindling and understand the concept of friction to produce flames. PaperShare says that if you are on a tight budget and cannot create all the content you need to accomplish your marketing, then you must use a tool—probably the PaperShare cloud solution—to curate content from elsewhere that serves your end purposes.

Share and Share-Alike As we’ve seen previously in social media collateral, some of the best tips will reside within the echo chamber of B2B marketing. Others may catch us offguard, because we might have missed them hiding in plain sight. PaperShare’s “6 Killer Tips for Building your Content Market Strategy” is a little bit of both. Still that shouldn’t stop you from getting one of their killer complimentary customer consultations.