Everyone and their mother keeps telling you that content marketing is the key to success and all you need to do is tell a story, right?
True, but it only works if your story is serialized over an extended stretch of time. If, instead, you think the occasional white paper or ebook is going to change your fortunes, think again.
I call it ‘embedded content marketing’ because, like the modern-era journalists who ‘embed’ with military units to tell the story of war vs. a battle, organizations need to think the same way.
Remember, business (and even many consumer) buyers aren’t stumbling across a single piece of content and proclaiming a Eureka moment where all questions are resolved. They’re buying over time and in varying degrees of readiness and from different professional motivations (e.g. one hails from marketing, another from IT, another from the C-suite). They’re feeling out their peers, sniffing about your website, reading blogs, downloading white papers, and so on. In other words, it’s a journey experienced over time.
Which means your corporate story needs to be told in a deliberate, well-conceived journey of its own. It needs to introduce, enrich, expand, answer, and otherwise play out pretty much the way your buyers’ brains expect it to. Only then is direct engagement likely.
Call me to write a white paper and I’m likely to ask the usual questions: What’s the focus? Who is the audience? What outcomes are you seeking? In other words, the usual.
But if you expect that that one content product will stand on its own, you’re mistaken. White papers, yes, but so too blog posts and video and Web content. Rich, meaty content complemented by content ‘lite.’ Text-driven and graphically-enriched. Plan it, map it across a multimedia-inspired editorial calendar, and assign a brand journalist (internal or third-party) to own it and take responsibility for it over the next year.
Yes, your very own embedded journalist.
Want more doug food? Doug Rekenthaler Jr.
I eat my own dog food, meaning I only write about topics that I personally have found to be effective business marketing tools. So if you're interested in having posts like this sent to your inbox in a convenient weekly digest, click here. I promise not to waste your time (or mine).
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