We’re going to take a look at what this means for content marketers. But first, let’s do a quick refresher.

What is ChatGPT?

 As we wrote a few weeks ago:

ChatGPT is a large language model trained by OpenAI to generate human-like text based on the input it receives. It’s a variant of GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3), the machine learning model that’s considered to be one of the most advanced technologies for generating convincing, high-quality written content. ChatGPT was specifically designed for conversational text generation, meaning it’s good at generating responses to questions or requests on a wide variety of topics based on the data with which it was trained. Meaning, it’s essentially a super-helpful chatbot. 

While its true innovation is its conversational interface, it has taken the business world by storm (and by surprise) for its ability to quickly churn out convincing but ultimately undistinguished and occasionally problematic copy, arguably no worse than what you’d expect from a low-cost SEO content chop shop. (See our first impressions.)

What Was E-A-T?

As a content marketer, you may not be playing with ChatGPT yet but you should certainly be familiar with E-A-T, the content quality framework used by Google’s quality raters (real, live human beings by the way, not part of the algorithm). This framework — along with the more recent helpful content update (this one is part of the algorithm) — helps ensure that the results that top the rankings are actually useful to humans, and not just keyword-jammed junk that feeds (and fools) the machine.

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. And Google’s massive 175-page quality raters guidebook defines what each of these means.

To be clear, E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor per se. There’s no “E-A-T Score,” for example. It’s essentially, as I understand it, a set of principles to guide the otherwise subjective human review of web content that serves as one — of many — inputs into the algorithm. That said, E-A-T has only gotten more important since its first introduction in 2014, and should also be an important framework for anyone writing human-first content for the web. Here’s how you might think about all this: Whenever a content strategist urges you to focus on quality content over quantity of content, E-A-T offers a bit of insight into what “quality” (an otherwise amorphous idea) actually means — at least as far as Google is concerned.

What’s E-E-A-T, with an Extra E?

On the heels of ChatGPT, Google has upgraded E-A-T to E-E-A-T, with the added E representing “Experience.” As Google defines it:

Consider the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic. Many types of pages are trustworthy and achieve their purpose well when created by people with a wealth of personal experience. For example, which would you trust: a product review from someone who has personally used the product or a “review” by someone who has not?

While it’s difficult to say whether the update is a specific response to the rapid-fire rise in ChatGPT’s popularity or a more general response to janky content, it’s certainly a blow across generative AI’s bow. Why? Because while AI might deliver (or at least approximate) expertise, authority, and trustworthiness to one extent or another, it cannot have the kind of first-hand life experience you do.

What E-E-A-T Means for Your Content?

Google would tell you that Experience, like Expertise and Authority, is a component of Trust — the central factor for defining content quality. Like so:

But you can also think of Expertise and Experience as close cousins when it comes to demonstrating that you truly know what you’re writing about. And that you’re likely to be a living, breathing human with the right balance of knowledge (expertise) and real-world experience. Put another way, the Extra E rewards content creators who serve up the right amount of street smarts to go along with their book smarts.

Writing for Expertise might have you tapping into and attributing content to your organization’s best subject matter experts. Name them, display clear and complete bios alongside their content, publish author pages that collect their ideas as they’re expressed over time, and so on. Experts are a fantastic source for frameworks, advice, tips, and conveying factual information. To the extent that these things are in the “common canon” of your industry (and don’t need to be up-to-the-moment accurate), AI-generated content might do the trick. But when it comes to unique insights, fresh thinking, proprietary models, or a perspective that cuts against the grain (frankly, anything that makes your content original, differentiated, and authoritative), human experts win.

Writing for Experience might have you casting a wider net to gather practical perspectives from frontline employees involved with implementing your solutions, honest reviews or compelling stories from your customers, opinions from your target market, and other been-there-done-that-earned-the-badge evidence that only comes with lived (well, umm…) experience. While your SMEs might bring these things to the table, the nature of your content and the essence of your storytelling would be very different from straight-up expertise content. And while AI like ChatGPT could arguably serve up some form of “people say” proxy for experience, only real humans can bring true, first-hand perspective to the table. Experience is the unique purview of people.

Gathering a record of that experience — by identifying and engaging the right people, by asking better questions in well-run interviews, and so on — is (and will likely remain) the unique purview of the well-qualified human content creator.

5 Content Types That Show Experience

So, while there might be a time and place for ChatGPT-generated content, people are the secret sauce when it comes to trust, authority, and infusing your marketing with high amounts of Expertise and Experience. Let’s take a look at just five content types you should consider for amping up your organization’s Experience factor in particular.

• Incorporate practical how-to content into your mix. Calling upon people inside your organization or outside its walls who have been there, done that. Consider interviewing people in the trenches who can go beyond the process to share unique insights and implications, to highlight struggles in additional to successes, to offer practical and actionable advice based on personal perspective. Pepper your expert content with real-world examples from (named!) practitioners to bring concepts to life and show how to make ideas actionable.

• Elevate the voice of the customer. Give actual users of your product or solution a platform for sharing their stories. While case studies or testimonials might meet the bar here, go above and beyond by letting the companies you work with write (or speak) about the issues facing their organization, peers, and industry in ways that are honest, authentic, and not merely fodder for pitching your product. Interview clients for profile pieces. Round up the best thinking from multiple clients (or prospects) fo listicles that actually deliver valuable tips.

• Conduct original research. Survey your market, poll your audience or interview users about topics that matter to them. Produce and promote reports based on the findings. Reuse and repurpose data, insights and verbatims to feed your content channels.

• Use audio and video to bring experience to life. Produce a walk-through or talk-through that gives a first-hand look at work or process. Host a webcast, podcast, or video interview series featuring conversations between your experts and experienced outsiders. Show your solution in use, on-site (if that’s the sort of thing you sell). Clearly this one works well with any of the previous ideas. The key though lies in real faces and real voices delivering real perspectives.

• Host a conversation for your community. There’s a rising trend toward B2B communities as a marketing tactic. Those communities might live on a branded or private site, on a social platform like LinkedIn or even Facebook, or (heck) in the real world at a hosted event. Regardless, connections between people and open, honest conversations among them are their lifeblood. The resulting content — whether in the form of accessible threads in which professionals in your sector share ideas and opinions, or in the form of repurposed content that bubbles up and highlights those ideas and opinions (blog posts, social posts, round-ups, and more) — is ripe with real experience.

And that’s just a start. What are some other ways you can bring Experience to life in your content?

When you look at “Double E” E-E-A-T, it’s clear that Google sees what’s coming with ChatGPT and other AI writing tools: More and more low-value, cookie-cutter content. And they’re going all-in on one way to recognize and ultimately reward the content creators who demonstrate a greater commitment to giving voice to real people writing for real people.

Why? Because they know that an AI can’t gain the lived experience to make content that is as real, relevant, and resonant as a human who has actually walked the walk.

Looking back at the five content ideas we’ve shared it’s obvious that each requires you to do things that a tool like ChatGPT doesn’t do well (or really, at all). Get real input from real people and frame it in a way that provides value to your audience and delivers ideas that aren’t available from anyone (or anything — beep beep boop boop) else.

And that makes for a better, higher-quality content experience for more than just a search engine — which, after all, is what content marketing is all about.

The post Google’s E-E-A-T Update and ChatGPT: Food for Thought first appeared on VERDINO.

ChatGPT was specifically designed for conversational text generation, meaning it’s good at generating responses to questions or requests on a wide variety of topics based on the data with which it was trained. Meaning, it’s essentially a super-helpful chatbot. But a chatbot that is far more advanced than any you’ve likely interacted with online.

Its conversational interface makes ChatGPT easy (and fun) to use. And the fact that OpenAI has released a free version has attracted more than a million users in just a few days, resulting in nearly as many opinions about exactly what this technology means for human professions as diverse as writing and coding, for companies (like Google), and for entire industries — like education, media, or marketing.

Ah, marketing. Yes…

What Will AI Like ChatGPT Mean for Marketing?

And what will it mean for content marketing — the kind of marketing we do for B2B brands here at VERDINO — in particular?

So first, we asked ChatGPT itself. Here’s what it came back with after just a few seconds:

The mainstream adoption of AI tools in content marketing could have a significant impact on the field. For example, the use of AI language models could allow content marketers to quickly and efficiently generate large amounts of high-quality content, allowing them to keep up with the increasing demand for fresh, engaging material. Additionally, AI tools could provide valuable insights into consumer behavior and preferences, helping content marketers to create more targeted and effective campaigns.

Not bad. Reasonable. Coherent. A bit — shall we say — generic.

And then we checked it out firsthand to get a sense of what it can actually do.

Granted, we’ve experimented with other AI writing assistants over the course of the past year or so, with varying degrees of success — so this wasn’t the first time I’ve witnessed a machine churning out copy that could pass for something written by a human. But over the past couple of weeks, I’ve asked ChatGPT to write articles, headlines, social media posts, and even my own bio. I’ve had it outline a content strategy for a client. I’ve challenged it to rewrite many of these in the style of Shakespeare, the Bible, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, and the poet Billy Collins. In all cases, ChatGPT performed surprisingly well with far less effort than required with the other AI writers we’ve tried.

Now, don’t get me wrong: It hardly rated a 10 out of 10. Its work (and words) lacked nuance and personality. It excels with facts while struggling with opinion, although even ostensibly factual information contained obvious errors and (as OpenAI notes on their site) is prone to bias. Overall though, ChatGPT is surprisingly good — although not nearly as great as some people think.

Even OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman took to Twitter to warn:

ChatGPT is incredibly limited but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness. It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. It’s a preview of progress. We have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness… Fun creative inspiration; great! Reliance for factual queries; not such a good idea.

So, there’s that. But still, AI tools like ChatGPT do have some practical (and productive) applications for content marketing, even today, despite their shortcomings. Let’s have a look…

Five Benefits of ChatGPT for Content Marketing Today

• A Bit of Inspiration: Although ChatGPT is not directly connected to the internet (meaning, it can’t run a real-time search like Google does), it’s training data certainly contained reams and reams of content culled from the web. Based on that, the tool is reasonably good at suggesting solid topics and even titles for blog posts, articles, or even ebooks based on what you tell it you’re looking to communicate.

• Basic Research and Backstory: ChatGPT can generate basic definitions, cogent summaries, and generalized explanations of common topics — the kind of stuff you might include in an article to make sure it covers the basics. It doesn’t cite sources, can’t go deep into specifics, or tap into the most current information available, but sometimes reasonably recent, generally available background information is all you need to give readers the context they need to understand where you’re coming from.

• First Draft Content: For companies writing about well-covered topics, ChatGPT offers a partial solution through its ability to churn out competent, coherent articles within seconds. While this is generally not sufficient on its own (and this might be the number one reason AI won’t replace top-quality writers any time soon), AI writers can certainly save human content creators valuable time that’s better spent adding color, perspective, personality, and other points of distinction.

• Search Engine Optimization: ChatGPT can assist in keyword research and generate meta descriptions, titles, and (as noted above) entire articles — albeit formulaic ones — focused on those keywords. Granted, any competitor armed with similar prompts is likely using ChatGPT to get similar guidance, resulting in look-alike marketing across your category. And if ranking matters to you (and it does), it’s unlikely that raw AI-generated content will pass muster after Google’s helpful content update.

• Content Reuse and Repurposing: We do a lot of versioning — it takes time. ChatGPT is really quite good at taking long-form text you provide it, and reworking it into summaries, teasers, social media-friendly copy, descriptions, and more. I’m not saying you won’t need a human editor to check its work or add some personality, but AI can be really useful with the nuts-and-bolts of content atomization.

Of course, none of this means AI doesn’t have some major drawbacks — for now…

Five Limitations of ChatGPT for Content Marketing

• Lack of Creativity and Differentiation: Because ChatGPT is trained on content that already exists, everything it produces amounts to a synthesis of information that’s already available online. While this is often helpful (and trusting an AI to do the work certainly shaves time off the research process and saves human writers time spent summarizing well-known facts or backstory), it’s hardly a recipe for net new ideas. If your company and every one of its competitors uses similar prompts to generate articles on a given bread-and-butter topic for your industry, you’d end up with (more or less) copycat content that will be devalued by Google and — more importantly — your audience.

• A Dated Worldview: ChatGPT — like most language models at work today — is only trained through 2021. So, it knows about COVID, but not the Great Resignation, the tech industry layoffs, or the looming recession. It can’t tell you this year’s Pantone color or this week’s latest 2023 marketing predictions from Gartner. It isn’t aware of its own popularity or any of the online chatter about its implications! If you work in a rapidly changing industry — as most of our B2B technology clients do — it’s woefully out of date on the latest developments impacting your company and your customers.

• Errors: As I’ve already noted, ChatGPT is likely to incorporate factual errors, bias, and even harmful information (although it is, allegedly, trained to avoid inappropriate conversations and demur when asked for an opinion on a sensitive topic). Compounding the challenge, ChatGPT doesn’t cite sources. Aside from raising an ethical concern (and maybe a legal one), this makes it difficult to fact-check its output and diminishes the information’s credibility in the eyes of a skeptical business reader. It also means you’re going to need some really, really good editors in your stable.

• No Brand Championship: Even where ChatGPT or any other AI writer nails the nuts-and-bolts, it can’t infuse an argument with your organization’s unique perspective; align that perspective to your understanding of your audience, value prop, or messaging framework; present it in your distinct voice and tone; or align it to your editorial standards. Maybe one day, but not today.

• No Understanding or Expertise: Ultimately, while ChatGPT might be intelligent and informed, by definition it lacks expertise. (Technically speaking, it also lacks understanding — meaning that while it strings together logical statements it doesn’t possess any true understanding of what it writes.) As it relates to B2B content marketing though, clearly it hasn’t worked in your industry, served your customers, lived in your thought leaders’ heads, or walked in your executives’ shoes. It’s never going to interview your internal experts, facilitate conversations with your customers, or reach out to industry influencers. In other words, it lacks the basis for unique insight that comes from being in (or in the case of your agencies, closely aligned with) the business.

Don’t get me wrong.

I am not arguing against the use of AI in content marketing or minimizing the degree to which AI will disrupt and ultimately transform marketing in the (very near) future. Buckle up. We’re at the very start of a wild (and for many, bumpy) ride that will leave some behind while empowering others to leap ahead.

BUT… As far as I’m concerned, the shortcomings I’ve noted make this early iteration of ChatGPT a so-so writer and an even worse marketer. Don’t fire your agency just yet — or more precisely, fire your existing agency and check out what we have to offer .

What it is, though, is a useful tool for human marketers. Whether you’re client-side or at an agency, a tool like ChatGPT can improve your efficiency, effectiveness, speed, and (yeah) the cost of getting work done.

Your Assignment

I know. Marketers love it when an agency gives them work to do. But really, you owe it to yourself to give ChatGPT a try (if you haven’t already). See for yourself what it can do, how the experience feels, and where it struggles with your prompts. Decide for yourself if the content it creates hits or misses the mark for your brand. Consider the ways in which it might fit into your workflow.

And all the while, think about Seth Godin’s take on the real, larger, longer-term implications of ChatGPT and other AI tools like it:

If your work isn’t more useful or insightful or urgent than GPT can create in 12 seconds, don’t interrupt people with it. Technology begins by making old work easier, but then it requires that new work be better.

The post ChatGPT: What Every Content Marketer Needs to Know Now first appeared on VERDINO.

This article contains recommendations that we stand by, as of 3pm ET on Friday, November 11. But the situation with Twitter is changing by the day. We’ll be refreshing this content as new developments cause us to rethink how marketers should move forward.

 

 

Twitter is pretty important to us, here at VERDINO. No, we’re not the world’s most active tweeters (twits? twitterers?) anymore, although we may have been among the earliest. And no, we don’t offer Twitter management as a standalone service, although we often create the social assets our clients use to promote their thought leadership content.

But in a way you might say our agency was born on Twitter. It’s where Amanda and I first met. And my 2010 book microMARKETING, which laid out a framework that we still draw some inspiration from today, coincided with the mainstreaming of Twitter as a community and content marketing channel.

And now, as I’m sure you know Twitter is at an inflection point. Recently acquired by Elon Musk for a cool $44 billion, the platform is undergoing an almost shocking amount of change. Stripped to a skeleton staff. Struggling to maintain content moderation guardrails. Shedding power users and advertisers. Struggling to set a new course. And stumbling around the introduction of new revenue models. Some analysts and insiders even say that the future of the platform itself is at risk, which is especially concerning given that one of those people is Elon Musk himself.

Any marketer that maintains a presence on the popular social media network might — and should — be asking what this means for them. Essentially: Should I stay or should I go?

From our perspective, there’s no easy answer as long as there are so many unknowns. But we do think there are some smart near-term moves. And these are the kinds of moves we’re recommending to our clients. Now to be clear, our clients tend to be B2B technology companies but these principles should apply regardless of your industry. Most are up to speed on the major plot points but aren’t necessarily following the details of the drama as it unfolds — this might be you too.

So, what are we telling marketers to do about Twitter, right now (as of the moment I hit publish on this post… given the speed at which the situation is changing, we’ll no doubt be updating our POV early and often)?

• 
  
  • Protect Your Brand
  • Pause Paid Advertising and Promotion
  • Do Not Subscribe to Twitter Blue (Yet)
  • Otherwise, Stay the Course (For Now)

 

Now, let’s dig into each of these for some specifics, the background details you need to know, and the reasons why we think these are the right moves right now.

 

 

Protect Your Brand

 

Arguably, every recommendation that follows could fall under this header. But there are a number of specific things we’re recommending our clients do — a number of things that are, in fact, good practice regardless but are especially important given the greater volatility of Twitter as a company and higher risk profile of Twitter as a marketing platform.

Before diving into the specifics, I want to point out that these recommendations apply for your official corporate profiles and any key or high profile executive profiles. For that matter, you may want to share these best practices with your entire workforce given that every member of your team is a representation of your business and your brand.

Here goes:

Proactively Defend Your Identity

We go deeper into the new Twitter Blue paid subscription below, but here it warrants a mention specifically as a matter of brand reputation. As the flubbed initial rollout (since rolled back) demonstrated, offering any user the ability to buy a blue checkmark with no verification of identity opens the floodgates for scammers and impersonators. This past week alone saw the launch of faux profiles for a wide range of corporations, celebrities, and politicians. We’ve already seen real, economic fallout from this as Eli Lilly’s stock tanked after a blue check impersonator promoted free insulin.

Granted the risk runs higher if you’re Eli Lilly or Coca-Cola than if you’re (let’s say) a mid-sized B2B SaaS platform. Still, you never know — until you know. Be vigilant. Routinely search for accounts that use your brand name or trademarks to parody or impersonate your organization; report anyone who violates Twitter’s rules against impersonation. (To be frank, it’s unclear how effective this will be given both the ongoing confusion over moderation policy and the very real staffing issues following massive layoffs. But our POV is that it’s important to at least try.)

Again, the same applies for key people in your organization. A scammer tweeting inaccurate or inappropriate content from an account posing as a member of your c-suite or representative from your sales team can do irreperable harm.

Review and Refresh Your Profile

While you’re at it, this isn’t a bad time to review and refresh your profile to ensure that the bio copy, avatar, header image, and other information (location, website, etc) are current and correct. Given the rising confusion over how users can recognize official or verified accounts, you might consider adding language to your profile and even text in your profile or header images to reinforce your status as the real deal. You might also compose and pin a tweet to the top of your profile, letting visitors know they’ve foudn the right (real) company and offering an alternative way to contact your company — email, phone — if they need support or service.

This is in no way foolproof but isn’t a bad idea in lieu of buying Twitter Blue which (see below!) we reocommend you hold off on for the time being — not that Blue is even an option at the time of this posting.

Secure Your Account(s)

Now is the perfect time to update passwords, confirm accurate personal or professional profile information, remove inactive or outdated users who may have authorization in your publishing tools, and activate two-factor authentication.

If possible, you may even want to remove any payment account details just to be safe. Granted, this may not be feasible if you’re running ad campaigns (see below) or have an active Twitter Blue profile (see below).

Save Your Content

If your content is valuable or you consider it important to maintain a record of your tweets, you might want to download an archive of your data — now and periodically throughout this period of uncertainty. If worse comes to worst, this will ensure all is not lost (I know, that sounds dramatic) should your account be compromised or deactivated, or if Twitter ceases operations.

Cleanse Your Community

From what we’ve seen, many B2B brands treat their social media communities (their follows and followers) as a set-and-forget situation. That’s probably never a good idea, and now there’s a reasonable excuse to clean things up. To be clear, I’m not saying ‘clean house.’ But a thoughtful review of the accounts you follow and those who follow you, combined with a judicious round of unfollowing, blocking and (to the extent it matters anymore) reporting suspicious profiles, may help reduce your risk of engaging with bots, scammers, and bad actors.

 

 

Pause Advertising and Paid Promotion

 

If you’re the kind of company we tend to work with here at VERDINO, odds are you’re not spending seven figures on Twitter ads. But many B2B marketers do use the platform to promote thought leadership, as a PPC channel for lead generation, to reach clients and prospects, and more. If this is you, we’d recommend pushing pause on any paid programs. Simply put, the platform’s direction is unclear, the environment has become riskier in absence of effective content moderation, and the stability and viability of the company are in question.

Here’s what you need to know, as you think this through.

Putting aside how you feel about Elon Musk and your POV on whether the world’s richest man should control one of the world’s most important communication channels (a concern that extends to other billionaires buying other media properties, of course), there is a practical and unequivocal argument for pushing pause on paid Twitter programs: the age-old issue of content moderation and brand environment.

Musk has openly stated his position as a free speech absolutist — a stance that is already being put to the test (more on this below), is not inherently ‘bad’ but is arguably irrelevant as free speech applies to government overreach and Twitter is not the government, and raises the concern that a platform without guardrails will be an unfit environment for marketers.

It’s not surprising that one of the first things Musk did after closing the deal was tweet an open letter, ensuring brands that Twitter will not turn into a ‘free-for-all-hellscape’ and hold a big brands pow wow that left some of the company’s biggest advertisers unconvinced. GM had already pushed pause on its spend pending “more information about the site’s direction under new ownership” — a position the automaker says is typical whenever a media property changes hands but is more notable here given that GM competes against Elon’s Tesla. Agency giant IPG has advised its clients to push pause too, while GroupM hints that some of its clients have asked that their ads be put on hold.

If you’re concerned about whether Twitter remains the right place to promote your thought leadership, interact with customers, or engage prospective employees, your concerns would not be unfounded. According to one watch-dog, hate speech has soared on the network since Musk’s takeover. Following widely publicized layoffs and the less-widely-publicized voluntary departure of Yoel Roth, Twitter’s content moderation czar, it’s unclear how (or if) Twitter intends to make the platform safe and welcoming for all. For these reasons alone, suspending your paid support of the platform is a smart move.

Now, let’s say you’re not at all concerned about the ad environment.

The company’s instablility alone should be enough reason to exercise caution with your paid media dollars. The recent layoffs cut deep, so deep that Musk has been trying to lure some employees back into the fold, even as other key leaders resign from their roles. One engineer has gone public, warning that the remaining organization is insufficient to maintain the platform and sustain operations. Musk himself has warned that the company may be headed into bankruptcy.

 

 

Do Not Subscribe to Twitter Blue (Yet)

 

Musk’s Twitter Blue aims to be a paid subscription tier (currently planned at $8/month after horror author Stephen King haggled the price down from $20/month) that will ‘earn’ paying users a coveted blue checkmark, priority visibility on the network, and presumably, the ability to edit tweets already offered under an existing, less expensive Twitter Blue paid plan.

If you need a short and sweet rationale, the new Twitter Blue is not yet clearly defined so I’d recommend that you hold off until you know what you’re actually buying. It has been introduced, halted, switched up, then halted again. The Twitter team (including Musk himself) have also suggested that there might be a different “official” tag applied to notable accounts to distinguish these from purchased blue checks.

But as you keep an eye on this, here’s what you need to know.

On pre-Musk Twitter, the verification process that bestowed blue checks on notable accounts and the Twitter Blue subscription that offered additional features (most notably, the ability to edit your tweets) were wholly separate. A blue check was granted to a select set of accounts after review and verification for authenticity. While you could certainly poke holes at the process for being unnecessarily opaque, and scratch your head at why certain notable individuals were never verified, the method did at least ensure that the Coca-Cola, IBM, or (I don’t know) Valerie Bertinelli you were tweeting with was indeed the real deal. Twitter Blue was (and at the moment, remains) a paid service, mostly for users who want the ability to correct typos — an often requested feature that Twitter has so far resisted making generally available — or enhanced bookmarking features.

On Musk’s Twitter, the blue check becomes a pay-to-play vanity mark that requires no verification and introduces plenty of room for confusion. Already, a number of ‘parody’ accounts have cropped up, taking advantage of purchased blue checks to impersonate well-known businesses and publish tweets that fall well outside brand guidelines. While Musk has claimed he will suspend any account impersonating a business or brand, so far this seems to apply mainly for old school verified accounts impersonating him (to prove a point), not the malicious actors spinning up fake accounts for airlines, tech companies, gaming companies, celebs, and politicians.

That said, the forthcoming paid plan does offer some notable benefits when it comes to reach and engagement. Twitter Blue accounts will (according to statements from Musk and company) be prioritized in search and in the feed itself. Conversely, unpaid accounts are likely to find their tweets buried in the feed, not unlike what happened when Facebook started demoting organic Page posts as a means of forcing increased ad spends. For B2B marketers, the implications are clear: Eventually, you’ll pay or you’ll pay.

Now, some of your corporate profiles (or even some of your key executive profiles) may already have a blue checkmark. Word is, you’ll lose the badge unless you purchase the paid plan. Word is out on whether you’ll be granted a separate “official” badge in its place and, if so, what this will entail.

And some of you may already be paying for the legacy Twitter Blue features at a lower monthly fee. My sense is that your features will remain as-is and you will not be given a blue check unless you upgrade to the new Blue. At some point, I assume old Blue will be retired so that all subscribers are forced to make a yes or no decision on the new plan.

Confused? Yeah, we are too.

Presumably, this will all get cleared up and you’ll want to consider whether there is a role for Twitter in your marketing plan, then detemine if and how Twitter Blue supports that plan (or doesn’t). While I’m generally skeptical of keeping too close an eye on what the competition is doing (as it can lead to copycat content, among other things), I’d recommend you do watch for patterns as this plays out. Certainly, you wouldn’t want to be the only account in your niche without a verification mark (even if the value of that verification mark is suspect at the least).

 

 

Otherwise, Stay the Course (For Now)

 

Every time a social media platform announces a substantial change, people threaten to close their accounts and take their chatter elsewhere. So, of course, the same pattern is playing out here. Power users have been threatening to close their accounts since the acquisition was announced. Some twitterati are flocking to non-profit social site Mastodon as a back-up plan. Despite all this, Musk says membership growth and usage are up. In contrast to the stories about brands halting ad spends, I’ve not heard of any brands outright closing their accounts or pausing organic activities.

While at some point it might become obvious that Twitter is fading fast, for now we’re telling clients to stay the course with organic, unpaid activities. As long as the platform remains viable for the distribution of content for your intended audience, remain active. Stick to your regular content calendar. To the extent you engage directly with members of your audience, continue to do so — with the caveat that your team will need to be extra cautious about interacting with parody accounts, accounts impersonating others, bots and other malicious actors, and (as always) online trolls. We’d have given you the same advice last month (or last year!) but it’s especially salient now, at a time when there’s a heightened risk of mischief or worse.

 

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If you need help or even just a bit of advice on handling these decisions in your own organization, don’t hesitate to give us a shout.

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A written content marketing strategy can provide a number of key benefits for your company. These include helping you market, sell, create thought leadership, generate demand, and differentiate from your competition. In this blog post, we’ll discuss why every b2b technology company needs a content strategy.

What is a content marketing strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a well-structured, documented plan for how you will create, publish, and manage the content that fuels your brand marketing, demand generation campaigns, sales process, or account-based marketing strategies (among other things). A sound content strategy helps you focus your content production on your audience’s needs, ensure that all of your content is high-quality, and avoid duplicate or outdated content.

In the simplest sense, there are four key components of a content marketing strategy: audience, objectives, messaging, and tactics.

• Audience: Who is your target audience? What are their needs? What kind of content will they find valuable?

• Objectives: What are your business goals? How can content help you achieve them? And what are your audience’s ‘jobs to do’? How can your content help them complete them?

• Messaging: What themes or topics will you cover? What are the core messages (talking or writing points, so to speak) that should be clearly and consistently conveyed in your content? What is your brand voice? What tone should you use in your content?

• Tactics: How will you create, publish, and manage your content? What distribution channels will you use? How will you attract audience and keep them engaged?

In practice, the strategic planning process and specific components of your strategy may be more nuanced — but if you’re new to content marketing strategy (or new to content overall), the simple take above should give you a good place to start.

How does content marketing strategy benefit B2B tech companies?

Having a content marketing strategy can help you in a number of ways. Let’s look at just a few.

First, it can obviously help you market your business better. A strategy will provide you with a focused framework for using compelling content to engage, attract, influence, and ultimately convert ideal customers into informed buyers. By creating high-quality, informative content, you can establish yourself and your company as experts in your field. This will make it more likely that prospects will turn to you when they have a need, and that they will recommend you to their colleagues.

A good content marketing strategy also defines the ways in which the content library you create can directly support your sales team in their efforts to close more business. The best way to use content to support sales efforts is to create targeted assets for each stage of the sales funnel. For example, at the top of the funnel, you might create content that helps prospects learn about key issues in their industry or for their profession, better understand their own needs, and learn how the category of solutions you provide can help them solve these issues and address these needs.

As prospects move down the funnel, you can create content that helps them compare your solutions to alternatives, and make a more informed buying decision.

If you’re using an account-based marketing (ABM) program to target key accounts, content can play a major role. The first step is to create a list of targeted accounts. Once you have your list, you can use account-based intelligence tools to research the specific needs of each account. With this information in hand, you can create truly targeted content that speaks directly to the needs of each specific account and the requirements of the individuals that make up that account’s buying committee. This content can be used in a number of ways, including:

• In emails and other outreach to decision-makers at targeted accounts
• As gated content that prospects must fill out a form to access
• On landing pages designed for specific targeted accounts

How can a B2B technology company differentiate with better content?

Differentiation is critical for any business, but it’s especially important for B2B technology companies. There are so many options available in the marketplace, and it can be difficult for buyers to understand the differences between products and services. That’s where content comes in. By creating targeted content that highlights the unique features and benefits of your products or services, you can help prospects understand why you’re the best choice for their needs.

At the same time, a robust full-funnel content marketing strategy governs the ways in which your organization uses thought leadership to influence the way your buyers think about key issues facing their own industry, sector, or profession. And allows you to establish a unique, differentiated perspective on these issues.

What are some content challenges for B2B technology companies?

There are a few challenges that B2B technology companies face when it comes to content, all of which factor into content strategy decision-making.

First, business technology buyers tend to be skeptical, and they can be turned off by marketing speak, unsupported claims, and technobabble. That’s why it’s important to create content that is honest, transparent, and helpful.

Second, business technology buyers are often very busy, and they may not have time to read long-form content. That’s why it’s important to create a mix of content types, including short blog posts, infographics, and videos. This doesn’t mean there’s no role for long-form. When it’s truly useful, it can play a prominent role in establishing brand relevance at the top of the funnel and validating purchase decisions lower in the funnel. But a smart strategy will establish clear roles for various asset types to ensure that your content is actually consumed by your intended audience.

And third, B2B technology companies often have a lot of complex products or services, and it can be difficult to explain them in simple terms. That’s why it’s important to work with true subject matter experts when creating content, and often to use clear and concise language.

Considerations like these should inform your organization’s overarching content marketing strategy, as they will influence key decisions about content formats, asset types, brand voice, writing style, and even workflow.

How do you develop a content strategy?

The first step is to understand your audience. Who are they? What are their needs? What kinds of content will they find valuable? Once you have a good understanding of your audience, you can start developing a content strategy that meets their needs.

The second step is to determine what kinds of content you will create. Will you write blog posts? Create infographics? Shoot videos? The type of content you create will be determined by your audience’s needs and preferences.

The third step is to create a content calendar — or more broadly, a tactical plan. This will help you plan and organize your content so that it is released in a consistent, timely manner. be sure to document relevant and realistic workflows that specify who is responsible for what steps of the process, how your writers will partner with your subject matter experts (or whether your SMEs will be doing the writing themselves), how you’ll work with outside agencies, freelancers or media partners, and how any given content asset will move from idea and outlining to approval, publication, and promotion.

The fourth step is to determine how you will promote your content. You can’t just create great content and expect people to find it. You need to promote it through social media, email marketing, paid advertising, and other channels.

As you go, be sure to involve all stakeholders in the process, and get buy-in from everyone on the team. Content is very much a team sport. More involvement, greater buy-in, and stronger alignment across teams and functions always result in smarter, smoother, more successful implementation over time.

We can help

If you’re ready to develop a content marketing strategy for your b2b technology company, we can help. Contact us today to learn more about our content marketing services. We’ll work with you to create a custom content strategy that meets your unique needs and helps you achieve your most important business goals.

The post Why Every B2B Technology Company Needs a Content Marketing Strategy first appeared on VERDINO.

While it is certainly a sound decision for event hosts to cancel or postpone their large gatherings — and for sponsors and exhibitors to pump the breaks on their event marketing — the near-term uncertainty is likely to have a long-term negative impact on many companies’ sales pipelines.

After all, the average business-to-business (B2B) brand invests upwards of 20% of their total marketing budget in events and relies heavily on this spend to drive a substantial volume of qualified leads.

So, it’s not surprising that our B2B clients — especially those selling B2B technology solutions — are asking us to help them rethink how they should invest their demand generation dollars as coronavirus takes trade shows off the table. And we thought it would be useful to share some of the advice we’re giving our clients as a way of sparking your thinking about which alternative demand generation tactics might work to keep your sales team’s pipeline flowing in the wake of COVID cancellations.

You might argue that, even in the digital age, there’s no true substitute for in-person interactions. But we do think that there are (at least) eight ways that B2B marketers can replace lost event marketing lead flow by tapping into what we see as the three core components of any exceptional event experience:

• The delivery of high value content
• The fostering of meaningful community interactions
• The foundation for high potential commercial opportunities

Let’s look at these three areas and the eight lead generation options we would recommend to any B2B marketer looking to reallocate 2020 budget away from trade shows and other live events.

Content

Naturally, many trade show attendees come for the presentations — the inspiring ideas and practical how-to delivered by keynote speakers, expert panelists and hands-on breakout facilitators. Since cancelling conferences in no way reduces business people’s desire to learn, B2B marketers now have an outsized opportunity to generate demand for products and services by delivering value through education and information.

• Run Your Own Virtual Events. If you’re like most of our B2B clients, webinars are already part of your marketing mix. And many events pros are already predicting that the current crisis will usher in a new era for virtual gatherings. Think about how your organization can lean into this dynamic by satisfying your prospects’ desire for high quality live presentations (while drawing registrants into the top of your sales funnel). Offer your own online events that showcase your internal subject matter experts, host highly regarded outside experts, and give your prospects and customers the inspiration, insights and practical ideas they seek.

• Double-Down on Quality Content. Obviously, ‘live’ is just one way to deliver valuable information for an audience, and nearly all B2B marketers count on content marketing to feed the pipeline. As cancelled trade shows free-up funds, some of the savviest marketers we’re talking to are already reinvesting those dollars into the production of high impact evergreen content assets that pack a real info-punch — white papers and e-book, reports and resource guides, tools and tip sheets, blog posts and bylined articles, videos and podcasts can all play a key role in educating your audience and attracting opt-in subscribers for demand-driving nurture campaigns. Speaking of which…

• Deliver Content-Rich Nurture Streams. A properly-done email nurture program is the digital conversation that keeps on giving. Analyzing, optimizing and upgrading your nurture email templates, copy and assets can be an efficient and effective way to keep new leads and the prospects you know moving from interest to action.

• Invest in Content Distribution. We’ve said it before: content consumption is far more valuable than content creation. And content marketing doesn’t just mean ‘marketing with content’; you also need to actually market your content. Shift trade show dollars to content promotion and paid distribution. Ensure you have a proper plan for sharing your content on your own digital channels, putting your content into the hands of your sales people for use in prospect conversations, engaging industry influencers in reaching new audiences, and putting dollars toward tactics like PPC, social ads or syndication platforms, like Outbrain or Taboola (to name just two options).

Community

As much as attendees come for the content, they also come for the community: the conversations, sidebars, socializing and sharing that happen when you gather a few hundred or a few thousand peers in close quarters. What was once a key benefit for attending industry events has become a major liability in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

So, as real-world social distancing becomes more commonplace, online social interactions will become even more valuable than they are today for business professionals. So, not surprisingly, smart, effective social media engagement by the best marketers your organization could ask for — aka your employees — can go a long way toward replacing the handshakes and hallway conversations that so often turn into post-conference sales pipeline.

• Step Up Your Social Selling. For the typical cost of a trade show booth, your company can put the right policies, plan, playbook and platform(s) in place to enable your sales team to engage prospects more effectively on key business networks like LinkedIn and Twitter.

• Enable Employee Advocacy. Already on-board with social selling? Expand your program to involve everyone across the organization. And whether you’re empowering your sellers or unlocking advocates in all areas of the business, you’ll want to consider investing in an amped-up content workflow to ensure that your people know exactly what to say, how to say it and where to share it — with a consistent approach to internal communications to share important content initiatives, useful and usable tools like pre-drafted social post copy, images and templates, and more. In fact, our own clients see stronger understanding, alignment and uptake among their teams when we provide them with employee-sharable content and equip them with the know-how and processes to engage their social connections with precision and purpose.

Commerce

This brings us to the third leg of any successful trade show experience — and frankly, the reason you invested in a presence in the first place: the opportunity it provides for you to tell your company’s story to a targeted community of potential buyers. So, now might be a good time to invest in upgrading how your company tells that story and promotes your products through your key online show spaces.

• Spruce Up Your Site and Social Presences. Clearly, if you had invested in an exhibit at a now-cancelled conference, you planned to showcase your solutions and maybe even introduce some new ones. Now might be a good time to reinvest unspent event marketing money in a professional audit of how well your website conveys the true value of your products or solutions to your customers. Make sure site content about everything you offer is clear, compelling and current. Invest in creating powerful customer success stories. While you’re at it, build new or optimize existing LinkedIn Showcase Pages that can serve as an always-on solution center for anyone who otherwise might have stopped by your booth to learn more about what you offer. In fact, you might find that making better use of your digital real estate is a more effective, more consistent way to attract qualified prospects than your show floor square footage was.

• Enhance Your Employer Branding. Here’s a bonus idea for filling another pipeline that matters to your business: qualified job candidates. Even if sales demand is the main reason you’ve invested in trade shows, these events do double duty by creating more awareness for your business, building your reputation among your peers, and attracting industry pros who are open to new opportunities. So, if in-person events have been an important means of filling your talent pipeline, its smart to reinvest funds in building out content-rich ‘why work here’ pages on your website, slice-of-life employee stories, executive statements (videos, letters, speeches) that convey your leaders’ vision for the business, or even better job descriptions.

———————–

The reason we’re already discussing options like these with our clients is that they (and we!) understand that reallocating marketing money quickly and decisively– even (or maybe especially) in the face of uncertainty — is vital for marketing teams that want to keep leads flowing to sales as one of the key sources for those leads dries up.

We don’t often end our blog posts with a pitch, but if you do want to spend a few minutes discussing how you can reallocate your 2020 marketing budget in the wake of conference cancellations, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

The post Eight Ways B2B Marketers Can Reinvest their Trade Show Budget Amidst COVID-19 Cancellations first appeared on VERDINO.

Help is here — well, not here, but on the Content Marketing Institute blog where I’m writing about how you can use simple content templates to deliver consistent, high quality content every time. I lay out a detailed step-by-step process we use with our clients and even provide a downloadable template example to inspire you to create your own. Content strategists will recognize the process and template as taking first steps toward structured content — for everyone else, just think of them a simple way to improve your digital customer experience by providing your audience with better, more consistent content that — as an added bonus — is easier for your organization to create.

Read 6 Steps (and One Tool) to Clean Up Content Messes.

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When a customer engages with your company, they do it primarily through content. Content plays a role — explicit or implicit — at each and every touch point, for each and every customer, at each and every stage of their relationship with your business.

It’s in the pitches you make and the proposals you provide. It’s in the words your CEO uses when she speaks to the press and the answers your call center operators offer when dealing with a product issue. It’s in your collateral and on the tips of your client relationship managers’ tongues. It’s printed on your packaging and written in your manuals. It’s in every little call-to-action, instruction, and error message, It’s what you say about yourself on your website and what clients say about you when they talk to others. It’s how you attract talent and it’s pretty much the only reason you have an intranet.

Your company doesn’t just create content. Content creates your company.

[bctt tweet=”See why @verdino_co says, ‘Your company doesn’t just create content. Content creates your company.'” via=”no”]

To put a finer point on this idea: your content is your product. For the customer, your content (even if they would never call it ‘content’ or think of it as something different and distinct from your product — which is my point exactly) is not an afterthought. It’s what they actually bought. Or what they bought into, at least.

[bctt tweet=”To your customers, your content isn’t an afterthought. It’s a big part of what they actually bought.” via=”no”]

With this in mind, ask whether your organization treats content as just another thing you also do — or applies the same level of priority, sense of purpose, long-range vision, and  rigorous planning as you apply to your so-called “core” products. And let’s not kid ourselves: there is such as thing as a wrong answer. Content is too important to your company. And content is too important to leave to your content department. Content is at the heart of everything you do. At a time when most companies find themselves competing mainly on the basis of customer experience, content is the experience your customers have.

In an age when the only difference between your product and your competitors’ is the story attached to it, content may even be the only thing you have left.

The post Content Is the Only Thing Your Company Has Left first appeared on VERDINO.

Then odds are, your content team is acting as producers when they should be thinking like publishers.

Too many content initiatives are measured by output. Not enough are measured by outcomes. The unit of creation becomes the unit of measure. Unchecked, this results in runaway production of low quality, poorly-managed content that goes unused by its intended audience. And where great content has the potential to create a great company, crappy content (here, I’m using this precise industry term to encompass not only badly-done content but also any content — even the “good stuff” — that fails to achieve its purpose) has the potential to kill one. It costs too much, it strains your resources, it violates the covenant with your audience.

I know that content professionals devote some brain-space to distribution, promotion, and measurement — but these things don’t seem to get nearly the same level of attention as production, and as a content strategist I see this imbalance (and its negative effects) time and time again. “See what sticks” becomes the strategy and, really, that’s no strategy at all.

In a recent CMSwire interview, content strategist Karen McGrane points to the same problem:

Content marketing as a strategy is a bit overblown. The idea that the foundation of marketing could sit on creating (and then throwing away) ever more content is simply not viable over the long term. Content strategists like myself are frequently faced with the challenge of sorting through website analytics that show few — if any — people actually look at the content. It’s not uncommon for web pages to have fewer than 50 visits in a year. It’s not uncommon for PDFs to receive zero downloads. The problem is that content marketing isn’t a strategy. It’s about volume, and SEO, and seeing what sticks.

There is a legitimate, obvious, deceptively simple content strategy solution to this challenge: create less content. But there’s a corollary too: make sure the content you do create is actually consumed.

[bctt tweet=”‘See what sticks’ is neither a #contentstrategy nor a #marketingstrategy. Put consumption ahead of creation.” via=”no”]

As usability consultant Gerry McGovern writes, this — not production — is the job of the true content professional.

Most organizations have more than enough capacity to create content but have very few of the skills required to make that content findable and usable… The current model in most organizations that I visit is to reward the production of content… We must move to a consumption / use model. We must measure and reward findability. We must measure and reward use. We must stop measuring the person who creates the content and instead measure the person who is supposed to use the content.

Boom! Drop the mic.

The value of content lies not in its creation, but in its consumption.

Said so simply, this sounds obvious but for many organizations, it isn’t. According to one study by Ascend2, nearly half of businesses name lack of content creation resources as a significant problem. (If McGovern’s statement above is accurate, these businesses might be misplacing the blame, but I digress.) Do you know what percentage of businesses cite content consumption as an issue? Neither do I — the researchers didn’t even ask. But with the majority of business content going unused by its intended audience, issues like accessibility, findability and usability (not to mention, usefulness, relevance and value) surely plague more programs than content creation bottlenecks alone.

[bctt tweet=”The value of your content lies not in its creation, but in its consumption.” via=”no”]

And so…

If content is your currency, it’s critical that you peg its value to the right benchmark. And when content creation is costly, content consumption is priceless. Nobody should fault you for creating less content; your business should reward you for getting more of your content consumed by the right audience. I believe this distinction matters even more than the one between quantity and quality, for even quality content is crap if it doesn’t achieve its intended outcome. And achieving your intended outcome begins with reaching your intended audience.

On the one hand, this means shifting the emphasis from production to publishing — putting the right rigor around setting strategy, understanding usability, and ensuring findability. On the other hand, it means prioritizing promotion. “If you build it, they will come,” can’t compete with, “if you want them to go, you must let them know.” After all, content marketing as a tactic depends on marketing your content as a strategy. It may be one of the best ways to protect the investment you’ve made in producing the best possible asset you can, and its certainly a key factor in ensuring positive ROI.

[bctt tweet=”#Contentmarketing as a tactic depends on marketing your content as a strategy. — @verdino_co” username=”verdino_co”]

The post Content Creation is Costly. Content Consumption is Priceless. first appeared on VERDINO.

The devil’s in the…

When you’re racing toward deadlines, it can be tempting to gloss over details. When you’ve got content approvers or other team members who aren’t giving the right level of scrutiny to the content produced by your team, you risk letting details slip.

You may know people within your organization who might say: What’s one webpage headline in a different case? What’s one typo in one sales presentation slide? What’s one icon that no one can figure out? What’s one outdated company fact on your website? What’s one broken link? What’s one downloadable asset file name that says “draft version 11” at the end?

People notice details. Details matter.

What may seem like a tiny, unimportant detail could mean the difference between your audience understanding your point… or not. It could be the difference between your audience believing your thought leader is actually a thought leader… or not. It could be the difference between your audience having a positive experience with your content and your company… or not. It could mean the difference between your audience feeling they can trust you… or not.

Living proof: Taylor Swift’s response this week to Kanye and Kim Kardashian West’s claims that Taylor signed off on some “that’s so Kanye” lyrics aimed at her in his new song Famous. In a mobile note she posted to Twitter, Taylor had a specific point of view she wanted to convey, but it was overshadowed by a tiny detail in the upper left-hand corner of her content: the word Search.

Small detail, right? Wrong. This one little word led readers to believe she had a response written up in advance. This harmed her reputation, her credibility and has put her back into the headlines not for taking a stand or defending her point of view, but for posting content that didn’t feel genuine.

Look, sometimes, details slip by. It happens to everyone – I sent an email to a prospect last week that had a typo, and I’m still thinking about it. But the more you get everyone in your content operation bought in to your strategy and your process, the more everyone can serve as content hawks to eye any details that look incorrect, outdated, misplaced, or just off – before they get in front of your audience.

Standing apart from the herd…

Another important content element to focus on early in your strategy phase and certainly before you get in front of an audience is message differentiation.

Differentiation can be tricky.

In your industry, chances are your company is going to say some similar things to what your competitors or even partners say to your shared audiences. You may offer similar products or services that do similar things. You may acknowledge similar market needs. But there’s no reason you need to sound like everyone else when you’re sharing information or insight.

A lack of differentiation can make your audience tune you out or even harm your reputation – one blah experience and your audience could go from considering you to putting you on the “no, thanks” list. And you don’t want to make it difficult for a client to choose you – the less you differentiate, the more digging that client will have to do to get the answers he or she needs to make a decision.

If you’re saying what you think seems like the right thing to say, or you’re lacking in the messaging, voice and tone department, you risk content becoming more of the same old stuff that’s out there.

Which brings me to ‘D’ número dos: the Melania/Michelle speech debacle.

Look, I give Melania Trump a lot of credit for getting up in front of a large crowd at the 2016 Republican National Convention – with millions more at home watching – when it seems clear that she doesn’t relish her turn at the mic. I applaud her for her poise under all that pressure.

That said, it’s clearer than those glass doors in the Windex birds campaign that Melania’s speech parroted several lines from Michelle Obama’s DNC speech in 2008.

Trump’s camp has claimed that these lines are simply universal ideas and values, and has stooped to quoting Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony to grasp for a point, but, people can read. People can watch footage. It’s pretty apparent that something’s amiss. And it’s a pretty weak defense if all you can say is that the speech echoed things have have been said by other people (and animated ponies?) before.

When it comes to content differentiation, there is a major issue here.

Any content creator, and perhaps especially a content creator with this big an audience and this high-stakes a moment, should have the sense and the willingness to look for opportunities to develop a differentiated story. No one is looking for content with heard-it-before empty phrases – you can find that already in 5 seconds with a search engine and a decent wifi connection.

Your audience craves content that shares information and tells stories in unique ways, content that educates them about new topics, content that opens their eyes to ideas or perspectives they hadn’t considered before, content that enables them to make decisions, content that entertains them… Not content that they already saw eight years ago.

As a content creator, take pride in finding a new angle or surfacing a new topic. And as a content consumer, demand better than blah.

What kind of content producer are you going to be?

So, what’s a content strategist or content marketer to do? Don’t be a Taylor Swift or a Melania Trump speech writer circa July 2016.

As you’re planning and developing your content programs, messages, topics, and assets, make sure you and your team have the right skills, tools, and timelines in place so that you don’t risk overlooking details that may seem small but could have a big impact on the success of your content. And as you’re bringing brand stories and insights to life, take an informed view so that you are creating differentiated content that brings something of value – whether that’s education, empowerment, or entertainment – to your audience.

The post Details & Differentiation first appeared on VERDINO.