Building Your Digital Content Marketing Ladder
In order to reach the goals you’ve set for yourself as a company, as a marketer, as a brand, you need a way to get to them, a path that helps you understand what you should be doing next. Rather than just do stuff haphazardly or because everyone else is doing it, take a few minutes to apply some structure to your digital marketing assets.
Here’s a sampling of some digital content assets you have at your disposal:
- eBook downloads
- Email newsletter
- Webinars
- Blogs
- Social networks
- Basic website
Which should you be doing? In what order? Not very clear, is it? After all, beyond having a website, everything else seems a bit like a digital potluck dinner. There’s no implied strategy, no sense of what should come next after putting your digital shingle out there.
In order to achieve the goal of getting someone to buy something, you can either push them along or you can provide them with a clear avenue, a ladder in which the next rung is reachable and there’s something worth attaining by taking the next logical step. Each rung on the ladder requires additional effort and commitment, so there’d better be something increasingly good waiting for the prospective customer.
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In this example – and it’s just an example, because your process will vary – getting someone to visit a website is fairly simple. It requires no commitment beyond clicking on something. A slightly higher level of commitment comes from a social network relationship. Clicking the Like button or adding someone in a G+ circle requires very little effort but does have a bit of commitment to it. As you go up the ladder, more and more is asked of the prospective customer, until they are swiping the credit card.
Let me emphasize again that the above is just an example. It’s almost certainly not how your digital content assets work. For example, if you require registration to download an eBook, you’re automatically asking more of someone than just asking them to sign up for a newsletter because there’s a good chance you’re asking for more information.
This will seem counterintuitive, but I’d recommend starting from the top down, building items down the ladder. You may find that you have such a compelling newsletter or such a compelling webinar that people willingly make the leap, like Jackie Chan jumping up a fire escape. You’ll also pull the most qualified prospective customers this way, the folks who are ready and willing to make a leap for you. Each rung lower that you build will bring in more people, but because the effort to reach each subsequent rung gets less and less, those people will move up the ladder more slowly.
Sit down with your team and decide what your content marketing ladder looks like. Doing the exercise of matching content to commitment will help you prioritize your content creation and get people moving in the direction you want them to go: up the ladder to being your customer.
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Foodblogging: Yes, I A/B Test My Meat
At every steakhouse I’ve ever been to, they tout how their dry aged steaks are the best thing since Moses brought tablets off a mountain. Most of the time, they are reasonably good, but not worth the price of admission. For those unfamiliar, dry aging a steak is effectively partially dehydrating it, on the premise that less water in the steak means more flavor when you eat it.
After much Googling, the general idea behind DIY dry aging is to put your steak in the fridge, and let it pull some of the moisture out. Not satisfied with just a culinary experiment, I decided to do an actual A/B test, the same as I advocate with marketing. A couple of friends wryly noted this as well:
Yes, I A/B test my meat.
So here’s the basic setup for dry aging a steak:
1 or more steaks (I used a relatively cheap chuck steak cut)
1 teaspoon of kosher salt per steak
1 plate
2 cloth kitchen towels
To start, lightly sprinkle a bit of the salt on each side of the steak, ideally using up 1/4 of the salt per side. You’ll salt twice each side total. Once you’ve salted, wrap it in the towel so that both sides are touching the meat and let it sit for 12 hours. After 12 hours, remove from the fridge, re-salt, change the towel, and let sit for another 12 hours. Do this and you’ve got dry aged steaks, or at least partially dehydrated ones that function the same as at a high end steakhouse.
To make it a true A/B test, I started another set of steaks in a salt and pepper brine at the same time the dry aging process started. Same exact cut of meat (from the same package), same treatment, same duration, except that it’s in a wet brine rather than a towel.
After the 24 hours were up, I put both sets on the grill.
You could see a visible difference in speed of cooking as well as how the meat reacted to high heat; the dry aged steak warped a little since the outer layers had less moisture content.
How did it taste, though?
There was a noticeable differential in taste, but to my admittedly untrained palate, one wasn’t worse than the other. The dry aged steak had more flavor consistently during chewing, but was less tender. The brined steak had more initial flavor and was more tender, but lost flavor faster during chewing.
Which would I choose? I think it’d depend on the cut of the steak as to which application is better suited for any given piece of meat. For a thicker cut, like a T-bone or a porterhouse, I’d probably go with a brine as it’d get the salt to the interior faster, and wouldn’t require 48-72 hours to dry out. For thin cuts like the chuck, a top sirloin, or a London broil, I’d lean towards dry aging.
The true A/B test, however, isn’t between wet brine and dry age, but between dry age at home for the price of the meat vs. a 300-900% markup at the steakhouse of your choice. You absolutely can get the same results at home for a price tag that is significantly less…
… beefy.
/sunglasses
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Stop talking about the hammer
Do you feel like you’re writing the same blog post over and over again?
Do you feel like you’ve got nothing left to tweet about, nothing left to post about, nothing new to put into your newsletter?
There’s a good chance that you’re stuck because you’re only talking about the hammer. What in the world am I going on about? Imagine you had a hammer. There are lots of different kinds of hammers, to be sure. Some are shiny, some are dull, some are large, some are wood and stone, but if your job was to create content about a hammer, there’s only so much you could say about it without going into re-runs, without feeling like you’ve said everything there is to be said.
The trick is that once your audience is familiar with the hammer, once you feel bored describing the hammer, stop talking about it and start talking about what you can do with it. You can build a house with a hammer. You can shatter diamonds with a hammer. You can climb icy mountain cliffs with a hammer. Suddenly, there’s a lot more to talk about. Talk about how your customers are building neighborhoods for the poor with hammers. Talk about how carpenters can use hammers more efficiently or safely.
As a side benefit, anyone who doesn’t have a hammer will probably want one after you’ve shared your amazing stories about what you can do. Anyone who doesn’t know how to use a hammer will probably want to hire you to teach them, or possibly just hire you to use your hammer skills in their stead.
Of course, I’m not talking about just hammers here. I’m talking about any tool, from Twitter to Google+ to pay per click ads to… you get the idea, don’t you? If you’re stuck as a marketer, you’re focusing too much on the hammer and not enough on what you can do with it. Being a Twitter expert isn’t nearly as interesting as being an expert who has built money-making campaigns using Twitter. Talking about Google+ is exciting only for as long as you can describe the tool. At a certain point, you’ll have said everything there is to be said and you’ll need to start talking about what you’ve built using it.
If you feel bored or stuck trying to create content about whatever product or service you’re responsible for marketing, focus instead on the nearly infinite ways you can do interesting things with it and you’ll never be bored again. As an added bonus, your equally bored audience will suddenly find new and interesting insight from you, too – and maybe buy some hammers from you in the process.
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How to beat social media lock-in
Mark Zuckerberg, at yesterday’s Facebook event, announced to the world that the metric that matters to him is sharing, not raw numbers of users. The words coming out of his mouth certainly don’t match the actions of his company. Consider the recent move to block the Facebook Friend Export extension for Google Chrome.
Don’t believe the hype. The social endgame is very much about users and locking them into a platform. Facebook is notoriously difficult to get data out of as an end user; developers have it marginally easier with APIs, but the average mom & pop shop isn’t going to be coding against Facebook’s APIs any time soon.
If the race to lock in users seems familiar, it’s because this is a battleground we’ve visited many times before, from mainframes to desktop operating systems to portal web sites to mobile phones to social media. While in the short term, consumers will benefit from networks competing on features (since price is arguably not a competing point right now), in the long term, the social turf wars will be to consumers’ detriment as every network attempts to lock in users in some fashion. Even Google’s admirable Data Liberation Front won’t have much traction with the average end user because honestly, who wants to go through the hassle of re-uploading all your data to another service?
What should you be doing to ensure maximum flexibility and the most number of options?
1. Diversify. Each network is struggling to replicate features that the others have. Facebook’s “awesome” product launch yesterday was a rehash of features debuted in GMail three years ago. As a result, each network can functionally do most of what its competitors can do.
What I do to make the networks work for me and keep people engaged in multiple spots is to use each network for a different purpose. Twitter is my water cooler and top of funnel engagement point. It’s where I meet the most new people, find the most new people, and introduce myself to them.
On my Facebook fan page, I’m less active but there I share tools, tips, and things I’ve stumbled across. I put stuff there as a corkboard to some degree, just as a way of remembering things that are useful.
On LinkedIn, it’s all about groups and professional connections. I serve as a hub to a network of over 6,700 people to pass along connection requests, job stuff, and help to administer the Marketing Over Coffee group. Some of my Twitter content gets replicated there, but LinkedIn is much more about the connections between people and what I can do for them.
Google+ is rapidly becoming my idea sketchboard. A part of this post started out as a pithy post on G+ yesterday. When I saw a lot of people share and comment it immediately, I knew I had something worth writing about, so G+ has also become something of a focus group for me.
2. Export, export, export. There’s a reason I tweet every week about connecting on LinkedIn and mention it on Facebook and other networks. LinkedIn is one of the few networks that gives you your connections outright in a nice CSV file. Google’s Data Liberation Front is another. I make copies of my network weekly and store them as files on my laptop.
3. Unify through email. Lots of people don’t check social networks like crack addicts looking for their next hit. Most people, myself included, have plenty to do during our days without hitting Refresh on our Facebook wall once a minute. To that end, I try to bring together all my content in my monthly newsletter and weekly #the5 wrapup. Email is still the most reliable push mechanism for reminding people you exist and are worth interacting with if you do it right.
4. Don’t bet the farm. This is the corollary to #1. Don’t bet the farm on any one social network. Plenty of people made this mistake with MySpace. Don’t you let history repeat itself. Yes, Facebook has 750 million users right now. It’s the king of the hill. So was MySpace in the day. Let history guide you – keep your options open, establish a presence on new networks as it makes sense to do so, and don’t assume that Facebook’s current dominance will be any less fleeting than MySpace’s.
I do agree with Zuckerberg when he says that social media has reached an inflection point where questions about its longevity can safely be put to bed. It’s another method of communication that’s here to stay in some form. Just don’t assume, as he implies, that Facebook is the only social media game in town. Diversify, export, and keep your options open.
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Social Media Strategy in One Slide
Want to encapsulate social media strategy in one slide, something you can print out, hand to someone else, possibly have engraved on a piece of wood or plastic to beat people with? I’ve got you covered:
Want to download this as a printable PDF? Click here and it’s yours.
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