Can a People-Centric Social Media Strategy Scale?

by Rosalia Cefalu

May 30, 2013 at 2:00 PM

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Remember when social media was social? Now, among the deluge of complaints, emoticons, and spam, individuals and businesses alike now find it nearly impossible to find and manage those one-to-one conversations that matter. Instead, social media strategies have become automated, impersonal, and actually contribute further to the exact problem they were put out there to solve for: streams of noise, shouting, and irrelevant messages.

Developing a people-centric social media strategy is a huge opportunity for companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors. A seemingly “faceless” brand making a personal connection over social media is such a rarity, that when it does happen, the resulting positive emotion from the recipient is remarkable in comparison to the avalanche of noise out there.

But is that really scalable? Should we even care about scale when it comes to social media marketing? Can it be both, or is that a pipe dream we should all just abandon?

The Problem With Using Automation to Scale Social Media Marketing

The first step to scaling a social media strategy is often automation. And while automation can be great for spreading your message across your various social media platforms in an efficient way, it’s usually not how you engage in a personal, one-to-one conversation.

When, for instance, Justin Timberlake tweets that he “Loves each and every one of his fans!!” I don’t really get that warm, fuzzy feeling as if he’s talking to me personally.

Now, if he tweeted at me specifically giving me kudos on the love letter I emailed him back in ‘01, well, that would be a completely different story. Not only would I be thrilled that this person I adore is contacting me individually, I’d be extremely impressed that he pulled in actual details from the interactions we’ve had in the past (albeit these interactions have been mostly, well, completely one-way.)

The Easiest Way to Scale Social Media Is Around People

Have Messages Come From a Real Person

You see, your company is a living, breathing entity, made up of many people and departments. Your most important relationships to manage are with your prospects, leads, and customers, and social media is a rich, nutritional resource for fostering these relationships. Social media is meant for messages from the real people in your company, to the real people out there on the internet.

So then, you may ask yourself, how can I scale my social media and still keep it personal? The solution is sort of obvious: have your social media efforts come from a real person. What’s more personal than that? “Well, Lia,” you might be thinking, “that sounds pretty obvious, but I don’t have unlimited resources, and I can’t hire as many social media managers as I’d like.” That, my friend, just may be a blessing in disguise ...

Have Messages Come From the Right Person

This personal social media strategy not only becomes scalable, but becomes much more effective when you distribute the responsibilities of your entire social media strategy across the various departments of your organization, to the most relevant people. At any given time, you have people in every part of your funnel. Marketing wants to hear from prospects. Sales wants to know what their high quality leads are saying. Customer Service needs to know what issues actual, paying customers are facing.

These individual people, or the folks on those teams, are the highest authorities in your company to interact with their given segment of your funnel, and should be the ones on social media engaging in conversations with their specific audience.

Every Department Needs a Social Media Strategy

Start by identifying the departments that will play a role in your social media strategy, what their goals in participation are, and help them customize their social media feeds to satisfy those goals. Here are three examples of the people you can delegate your social media responsibilities to in order to scale a more personal social media strategy.  

Who: Social Media Manager

Goal: Find and Attract Prospects

Your social media manager can’t manage every potential prospect, blog subscriber, lead, opportunity, and customer -- and even if he or she can now, as your reach grows, it will become untenable. Instead, your social media manager should prioritize those people who aren’t already in your contacts database, and focus on delivering them the kind of helpful content and experiences that will encourage them to convert on an offer. To set up your social media manager's monitoring stream, you would want to focus on terms around the keywords you’re already targeting in your SEO strategy, mentions of your competitors, your industry, and of course, mentions of your company itself.

I'm also a believer that there should be one DRI -- directly responsible individual -- for everything, so your social media manager may be the person who you elect to be responsible for triage. This means anything that falls through other people's monitoring streams and needs to be escalated would fall on this person's plate. 

Who: Sales Representative

Goal: Address the Needs of High Quality Leads

In order for your sales reps to get the most out of social media, they need to be able to sift through their feeds in order to find messages from leads they’ve already engaged with. This requires creating lists based off of your contacts database or CRM to monitor in your social media feeds. HubSpot’s latest tool, Social Inbox, does this by pulling the same segmented lists you would use to send personalized emails, allowing you to customize the keywords and terms that matter the most to your sales reps, and elevate those messages above the rest of the social media pandemonium.

Who: Customer Service Representative

Goal: Delight Customers

There's no worse feeling than when you’ve already handed over your money to a company, you begin experiencing frustration, and you can’t get in touch with a real person. By elevating your customers’ social media messages above the rest of the messages flooding your feed, your customer service representatives can nip a problem in the bud, filling your social media feeds with more :) and less >:( . Even better than this would be taking your communications a step further and entering your customer into a campaign that will check up on them again in a few weeks to see if any of their problems have escalated further. If your social media monitoring tool is integrated with your contacts database and marketing automation tool, this process is seamless and efficient.

Does a Person-Centric Social Media Strategy Really Push Your Business Goals Forward?

Of course, the ultimate goal is to get your content in front of the right people in order to drive them from stranger, to customer, to a promoter of your brand. But when push comes to shove, people want to do business with other humans, not machines who automate content sends. In fact, if you browse social media today for mentions of those classic, large, “faceless” brands, you’ll see a whole lot of negativity from people, and not a whole lot of love.

Conversely, when your company conducts itself on social media as a real person who listens, reacts, and responds like a human being, your company gets treated like a ... well, like a human being. If your audience knows that there’s a real person on the other side of the screen, they’re far more willing to give positive or constructive feedback, as opposed to ruthlessly blasting your company on social media for a minor inconvenience. Not only that, they’re more likely to relate to your company, and ultimately, choose to do business with you.

Google Launches Dramatic Redesign of Google+, Emphasizing Context and Content Discovery

by Pamela Vaughan

May 17, 2013 at 9:00 AM

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You may have caught wind of some of the announcements coming out of the Google I/O conference over the past couple of days. And while we made some high-level observations here yesterday about how this year's emphasis seems to be on context, there was one announcement we thought deserved more of our attention: the complete redesign of Google+.

Uhh ... yeah. Did you miss that? We kind of glossed over it, too. So in this post, we'll pick apart what's different about Google+'s new look -- which Google is rolling out over the next week -- and what these changes mean for marketers like you.

What's New With Google+?

First take a quick look at the changes to Google+ in this 57-second video from Google: 

 

If you can't remember, here's a quick, very recent blast from the past screenshot showing you how Google+ used to look, thanks to TechCrunch:

 

 

Now onto the specifics. Here's what's new and exciting about the Google+ redesign:

1) Consistency Across Devices

According to a 2012 Google study about multi-screen usage, 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal. In other words, people may start reading an email on their phone on the train home from work, but finish reading it at home on their tablet -- or maybe they watch a commercial on TV and then turn to their laptop to research the product. Based on what we know about users' multi-screen habits, it's no wonder Google's design changes to Google+ attempt to achieve consistency across all devices. While the Google+ tablet and mobile apps had already accomplished a consistent look and feel, prior to the redesign, this same consistency had been lacking in the web platform. The Google+ redesign makes the experience across all devices much more cohesive through the following changes ...  

2) Multiple Columns 

Depending on the size and orientation of your screen, Google+ users may now see one, two, or three columns of content on their main Google+ stream, their personal profiles, and Google+ Business Pages. Here's how this looks on HubSpot's Google+ Page, for example:

Very Pinterest-esque, am I right?

3) Larger Sized Media

Similar to the more prominently displayed starred content you see on Facebook, Google+ users will notice that certain media content such as photos and videos will sometimes span the width of the full Google+ stream, like you see in the example below. However, it's not clear how Google+ decides which cards (i.e. the individual posts resembling tiles, or "cards") get featured more prominently, and unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be something individual publishers or page admins have control over.

Cover photos, both on personal profiles and on business pages, have been blown up significantly as well (obnoxiously so, in my opinion). As a result, it's important for marketers to make sure the image they use for their business page's cover photo is high resolution. When it comes to sizing, Google+ indicates cover images must be at least 480 pixels wide and 270 pixels tall.

4) Animations

Google+ users will also notice that a lot of features are animated now, boosting the interactivity of the social network. For example, the sidebar navigation slides out from the left when you hover over the home icon on the top left, the sharebox bounces toward the center of the screen, and the cards flip and fade (more on this shortly).

5) Related Hashtags 

One of the limitations of the former Google+ design was that it lacked depth. While users could scroll up and down to scan posts, there was really no way to go deeper and explore a particular topic even further. The redesign solves for this by automatically adding hashtags to the content you share. Google+ will look at your post to determine what it's about, hashtag it accordingly, and then rank relevant conversations across the network. When users click on the hashtag, the card flips, and users can browse related content right there (see below). Users can also add their own hashtags or remove the ones automatically generated by Google whenever they want.

6) Stand-Alone Hangouts App

Google+ has also transformed Hangouts into a free, stand-alone application which includes text, photo-sharing, and live video features, available for Android, iOS, and the desktop. The revamped version of Hangouts features richer, more responsive messaging; conversation histories; notifications that sync across your devices (so you only see them once); and free, face-to-face video chatting. It's also available practically everywhere -- download Hangouts from Google Play, the App Store, and the Chrome Web Store, or access it via Gmail or Google+.

7) New Photo Features 

The final set of new Google+ announcements has to do with its new photo features, which include cool things like ...

• Automatically backing up pictures taken with your mobile devices, as you take them
• Automatically highlighting higher quality photos and weeding out duplicates, blurry images, and bad exposures
• Automatically enhancing photos to improve elements like brightness, contrast, etc.
• Automatically animating a sequence of photos or grouping photos into a single collage

Here's What We're Dealing With, Marketers

In thinking about the Google+ redesign, I'm picking up three main marketing themes here: 1) an emphasis on context, 2) an emphasis on content discovery, and 3) an emphasis on visual content.

1) An Emphasis on Context

No surprise here, especially given that context seems to be the overarching theme of the I/O conference this year -- as well as a very hot topic for marketers these days. We've talked before about how leveraging contextual information to inform your inbound marketing can make it much more powerful and effective, and Google+'s new features like related hashtags are clearly aimed to help deliver more relevant and contextual content to its users. As a marketer, use this to your advantage, tagging your Google+ posts with relevant hashtags to make your content more discoverable. Which leads me to theme numero dos ...

2) An Emphasis on Content Discovery

Aside from the element of discovery that Related Hashtags bring to the table, the Pinterest-like redesign of Google+ makes content discovery much easier, surfacing more, better scannable content through the new tiled design. And while it seems like there's an algorithm behind which images and video Google decides to display more prominently, marketers should recognize the chance that the visual content they share may get featured more prominently than text-based content. (Man, these segues are uncanny ...)

3) An Emphasis on Visual Content

With its Pinterest-like resemblance, there's no doubt that the Google+ redesign puts a much greater emphasis on visual content. It's no surprise either, given the effectiveness of visual content in social media. The takeaway here for marketers is pretty straightforward -- invest in visual content creation. Especially considering the chance that Google+ may feature your visual content more prominently, marketers who excel at creating visual content have a better opportunity to stand out from other content in users' Google+ streams.

A Day In The Life Of The Internet - Infographic

A Day In The Life Of The Internet

There are close to two and-a-half billion people online around the world – this number has grown a heady 566 percent since the year 2000 – and 70 percent of them use the internet each and every day. As you might imagine, with that kind of presence, which amounts to more than a third of the global population, quite a lot happens over the course of each 24 hours.

You want some examples? You got it. Each day, an average of 139,344 new websites go live. An incredible 144 billion emails are sent and received. 500 million people log into Facebook. Hundreds of millions of tweets* are written and exchanged, and, perhaps most amazingly, 60 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute.

This infographic takes a closer look at a day in the life of the internet.

The number in the visual is a little shy – it’s now closer to one billion tweets every 2-3 days

Mary Meeker's Newest Internet Trends Report a Must-Read for Marketers

by Dan Lyons

May 29, 2013 at 2:00 PM

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Mobile internet usage is soaring past desktop usage. Wearable computing is poised to supplant mobile computing as the hot new thing. Basic business processes, things like logistics, manufacturing, and transportation are being reinvented. And marketers are spending money in the wrong places.

Those are among the findings in a new report on the state of the internet from Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

Meeker, a former top Wall Street analyst, puts out a big report once a year laying out the most important trends on the internet. And it’s all contained in this SlideShare. Below that, I've also pulled out some key findings that I thought marketers might be particularly interested in.

KPCB Internet Trends 2013 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Interesting Insights for Inbound Marketers

1) The U.S. is not the center of the internet universe. At the end of 2012 there were 2.4 billion people on the Internet, up 8% from last year. The country with the fastest growth in internet users last year? Iran, up 205%. The U.S. ranks 10th in number of internet users, with 244 million. China ranks first, with 564 million.

2) Ad money is going to the wrong places. There’s a huge gap between the amount of time people spend on mobile devices and the amount of ad spend directed at mobile. Mobile takes up 12% of our time, but gets only 3% of ad spend. Print media is the opposite, getting 6% of our time but pulling in 23% of the ad dollars. Conclusion: Expect to see money moving out of one of those buckets and into the other.

3) Content is exploding. The amount of digital information created worldwide, tagged, and shared has grown 9-fold in the past five years, and should quadruple again by 2015.

4) Short form is hot. Snapchat’s number of “snaps” per day has grown to 150 million in April, up from half that two months earlier and virtually zero a year ago. By April, Vine was being used by 8% of iPhone owners, up from 2% in January.

5) Google+ is doing better than you think. It’s now the #4 social media site, behind Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. And it’s closing in on Twitter.

6) Mobile keeps booming. Mobile traffic represents 15% of all internet traffic, versus less than 1 percent in May 2009. By this time next year mobile should approach 25% of global internet traffic. Today in China more people access the web via mobile devices than via PCs.

7) The web is about to get a lot bigger. Wearable computing should be even bigger than mobile. Every cycle of computing (mainframes, minicomputers, PCs, desktop internet, mobile) brings in a bigger audience. Meeker believes the trend will continue with wearables. And while we may laugh at Google Glass, remember that people also laughed at PCs. Heck, Barron’s once famously scoffed that Amazon.com should be called “AMAZON.BOMB.”

8) We’re not producing enough techies. In the U.S., five companies -- IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, and Qualcomm -- have 10,000 job openings right now. Every year we graduate about 51,474 computer science majors for 122,300 job openings requring a computer science degree.

The 5 Social Media Metrics Your CEO Actually Cares About

by Meghan Keaney Anderson

May 29, 2013 at 9:00 AM

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This is Brian, our CEO.  

Aside from his outstanding taste in headwear, Brian is also known around HubSpot for his unwavering vision of what it will take to build HubSpot into a once-in-a-generation company.

He's also a data guy. An MIT alum and lecturer, Brian knows how to separate useful data fromvanity metrics, and he's quick to let you know what truly counts as an indicator of how our company is faring at delivering on its promise.

While we proudly think of Brian as a unique leader, this laser focus on measuring the right metrics is something I'd wager he shares with CEOs across the board. And when it comes to social media, in particular, vanity metrics abound. So here are some social media metrics that actually matter to our CEO --- and likely yours, too! 

1) Channel Reports: Are we spending our time and money in the right places?

It never feels like you can move fast enough when you're trying to build something remarkable. And inbound marketing done well takes time. Most marketers are spending more than 6 hours a week on social media marketing, trying to grow their audience and attract visitors. And with all of the social channels available, it can be tough to know which ones are actually working for your business and which are just filling up your time without producing worthwhile results. As a result, one of the key metrics we track at HubSpot is how many visits, leads, and customers each individual social channel is generating.  

If you're a HubSpot customer, you can find this data in the Sources report (example below), and you can export it to send to your CEO along with the rest of the data that matters for social media decision-making. 

If you're not using HubSpot's software, you can get a reasonable amount of data to help you decide where to spend your time using Google Analytics. Within Google Analytics, there are both site referral reports and a report called 'Social Activities.' While these reports don't trace all the way through to the customer level, they will show you how many visits and interactions your social media efforts are generating, which are good starting proxies for where to invest your time.

If you haven't yet chosen which social media channels to get started with and aren't sure where to begin, IMPACT Branding, a HubSpot Partner, has a helpful guide for choosing the right channels for your business and deciding what to measure.   

2) ROI Data: Is social media generating leads and customers for us?

This is the true bottom line metric for growing our company. If Brian Halligan were to wiz by our social media team's desks at 2 in the afternoon, this is what they should be prepared to holler out to him. "Hey Brian! 17 customers from social media so far this quarter. Nice Sombrero!" This is also among the most elusive of social media metrics. According to Adobe, 52% of marketers cite difficulties in accurately measuring ROI as their biggest source of frustration in social marketing.

To achieve it, you have to be able to plug your marketing analytics into a contact database or CRM. Doing so allows you to connect marketing activity directly to sales activity and achieve a full-funnel view of your efforts. It also helps you keep the right ratio of inbound and outbound methods. You can start to use that data to see how social media contributes to your overall marketing strategy, and make projections about what you can expect it to deliver in the coming months. Knowing this allows your team to set goals and make adjustments when necessary in order to outperform prior months. 

 A view of all of our channels working together to generate customers

3) Customer Response Rates: Are we responding to customers in social media?

More and more customers are taking to social channels to raise questions, express frustrations, or otherwise engage with the companies they buy from. A 2013 Study from NM Insight accurately highlights this sea change. It found that 1 in 3 social media users prefer contacting a company over social media than by phone. However, of all consumers tapping social media for customer service inquiries, only 36% report having their issue solved quickly and effectively, and it's critically important to Brian (and the rest of us) that our customers not be on the wrong side of that ratio. 

When we first set up Social Inbox, among the very first Twitter streams Brian created for himself was an elevated view of our customers. Below is a screenshot of his tailored lists -- 'Customers Talk regarding HubSpot' is a stream achieved by integrating our social media monitoring with our contacts database and stripping away anyone who isn't a customer. It allows Brian to get to know our customers better and get alerted anytime they mention an experience with HubSpot. (You can read more about each of these targeted streams in Brian's recent blog post, "A CEO's Guide to Twitter Listening.")

Each of us can count on Brian to forward a customer tweet in social media to make sure we're keeping up on it, too. But what he's also going to want us to track is how often customers are mentioning our brand and how many of those inquiries receive responses. Depending on your volume of activity, it can be hard to catch every single inquiry, but as community managers, we should be striving for a 100% connect rate. There's little else more frustrating for a customer than a question ignored, even if it's unintentional. Regardless of whether you can achieve a 100% connect rate, you should at least be tracking how many customer questions go unanswered so you have a metric to work against.

4) Opportunity Response Rates: Is our sales team finding and responding to opportunities in social media?

In a recent survey of 511 predominantly B2B sales reps and executives, A Sales Guy Consulting found that 72.6% of salespeople using social media outperformed their colleagues who were not using social media. What's more, 54% of salespeople can track at least one closed deal back to social media engagement. Social sales is growing in importance, and in efficacy. That being said, integrating social media into your sales strategy is a transition, and it requires a re-allocation of time. Just like in marketing, you have to be able to justify that time through hard data. As you're getting started, run an experiment. Set up social searches on keywords and, if possible, create targeted streams of your current leads. Then start tracking:

• How many interactions are you having with prospects and leads in social media?
• How many mentions of your company are you responding to?
• How many closed deals have involved social media interactions?

Marketing can lend a hand in this by monitoring social media and forwarding relevant mentions or questions to your sales team. Try it ardently for a full sales cycle and measure your results. If it's working for your team, start to streamline and report on the above numbers as a standard report for your CEO.

5) Reach and Virality: Has social media helped us grow our reach?

Number five is a tricky one. It may seem like the easiest to measure since reach numbers are built-in to social media channels. But that number alone is not much more than a vanity metric. Here's why: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and virtually every other social network will tell you how large your audience is, but a large audience doesn't automatically guarantee any outcomes for your company. What matters is what that audience does with the content you share. So if you're reporting to your CEO that your audience grew month over month without also showing the percentage of that audience that is engaged and reposting your content, you're only delivering on part of the equation. Here's why growth in audience activity matters more than audience size alone: 

• Social Search: Search engines take social cues like social shares into account when they're ranking your content. If you tweeted your article and you have 1,000 followers compared to your competitors' 50 followers, you have a much better chance of generating social shares and a much better chance of ranking in search. But it's the shares more than the audience that are important to measure.
• EdgeRank: Similar to search engines, Facebook determines which posts are prioritized in its News Feed by the favorability of the posts as measured by how many people interact with it (learn more about how EdgeRank works here). So the more people who interact with your content, the more likely it will generate the activity needed to keep it prevalent in the feed. Be careful with this though -- don't let click-worship lead you toposting gimmicky things just for the sake of interactions. Make sure your content stays useful. 
• Cultivating Evangelists: My colleague Pamela Vaughan has written a helpful post about this very topic: "Why Companies Need Social Media Followers Who Won't Ever Buy." There are lots of people who will never be in a position to consider or buy our software, but it's still important for our company to develop those relationships and make those connections. Like any effort that affects our bottom line, this one is important to measure and report on. 

There's a statistic from a Regan.com report that I can't shake from my mind. They surveyed 2,714 communications professionals and learned that nearly 70%  of them are dissatisfied or only “somewhat satisfied” with how they measure social. And if the marketers are unsatisfied, think of how that translates to the executive level. Yes, the options for what to measure are widespread. The trick is to narrow in and get data for what really counts for your business. 

A Methodical Approach to Content Marketing

CONTENT MARKETING

By Ryan Farrell, Published May 28, 2013

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It is a popular trend these days. When asked what is a golden strategy for gaining traction and sparking conversation online, the default term that gets tossed around with more reckless abandon than a frisbee at a Phish concert is “make great content”

And I have to be honest, though I’ve been guilty myself of uttering this tidy little idiom, I have also found myself extremely dissatisfied by the use of this platitude as a good explanation for a successful content strategy. In my opinion it is tantamount to saying the secret to weight loss is “eating less food”. If only it were just that easy. The trouble is, saying that the secret to online success with content marketing is to “make great content” is not an incorrect explanation, but it is with absolute certainty, an incomplete one.

Any time you are dealing with a product that can be observed by an audience subjectively, whether it be a song, a film, a web tool, an application, or an infographic or a blog post, the most important step that must be taken before creating that product is to thoroughly understand how many people actually care about what you are making, and what it is that makes them care about it in the first place.

So let’s take a step by step approach to crafting something that will engage your audience.

Step 1. Take Inventory of the Size of the Conversation

You’ve decided to engage in content marketing, excellent choice… it works extremely well when done effectively. However, the whole name of the game is maximizing conversational reach with minimal effort.

What’s the easiest way to gauge reach? An effective first step is to simply count the blogs that are already talking in your space. One way to do this is with Google operators. For this chart I used the “allintitle” operator and then plugged in the applicable title tag that webmasters use to describe their sites (i.e. “wedding blog” “car blog” etc). Use it as a quick resource for outlining some of the more voluminous blog conversations on the internet. For more info on how I sourced this data: Google operators cheat sheet

Once you’ve taken inventory of the size of your conversation, the amount of people actually talking about your potential topic of interest and whether or not you feel it’s substantial enough to get you some traction, then you can move on to the next step.

2. Identify Your Topic of Interest:

Now, I do realize that there is no such thing as “perfect content” nor should there ever be. However, it is entirely possible to make something that is “very good” if you just understand what people are interested in beforehand, and how you can contribute to that interest in a meaningful way.

Let’s take a hypothetical situation as an example. Say you work in finance as an independent consultant. You have looked to engage the small but influential inventory of bloggers in the “finance” category and get them to advocate for you by sharing your content. Blog conversations directed toward you mean more than just engagement, they mean social shares, connections, relationships and links… all the necessary elements that make the world of internet commerce spin around.

Working in finance, it would immediately occur to you to craft content specific to only-finance, but is it completely out of the realm of possibility that you might be able to engage other bloggers as well? Perhaps jump into the “food” and “travel” conversation while you are at it? If you shook your head and said “that’s preposterous” then I’d like to direct your attention to the “Big Mac Index” an interactive tool created by the Economist for gauging worldwide currency that uses a McDonald’s Big Mac as a form of utility.

That landing page on the economist has links from all over the blog landscape pointed at it, from travel to finance, economy and food… lot’s of people are talking about it. Now, I know what you’re saying, “Well sure people link to it… it’s from the Economist” but check out a similar strategy from Kaiku Finance who used ice cream to gauge international travel costs. Kaiku had nowhere near the editorial platform of the economist, but they still were able to tap into the same venn diagram of multiple conversations.

Open up your content so it radiates into more categories, while still maintaining relevance, and your chances for expanded exposure will increase exponentially. Remember, the whole name of the game in content marketing is maximizing conversational reach with minimal effort.

Step 3. Identify Influencers

This one sometimes borders on the platitudinal precipice that “great content” sits on. Of course you want to identify influencers! The idea of using famous or influential people to endorse your stuff predates the internet. However, when we are talking about content marketing on the internet, the approach to identifying and engaging them has definitely changed.

A truly useful engagement of an influencer online is a two way street. And I’m not talking about sponsored tweets or endorsed posts, but something much more organic that will get markedly better results. If you want to engage an influencer in a meaningful way that benefits both you and them:

A: Identify an influencer who regularly talks about you topic of interest using social search and analysis tools such as Topsy or Followerwonk

B: Analyze their interests and conversation. What aspect of your conversation are they most interested in?

C: Ideate a piece of content that you think they would be interested in promoting or sharing, and pitch it to them. For a downright dirty (but extremely effective) approach to pitching influencers, check out Noah Kagen’s Pitch to Seth Godin a few weeks back… then maybe shower afterwards.

D: If they say “yes” then make your content and make it fast… you’ve got a precious window of time where you hold their attention, and you’ve got to maximize it.

The below chart is just a visual representation of a tracked hashtag over a period of 20 days… the large red bar all the way to the left, that’s the easy target influencer… but not necessarily the most “influential” one. Experiment with your own combinations of social and web signals, Alexa is still a great resource to gauge how much web traffic a site actually gets, and if all else fails, the twitter search function isn’t going to disappear anytime soon.

Step 4. Craft Your Content

Ok, so you’ve identified your influencer, you’ve gotten to know their content strategy, you may have even gone the extra mile and acquired their email address. Now you’ve got to identify and ideate the content that’s going to grab their attention. Easier said than done. This is where good old fashioned psychological intuition can come in handy.

Are they verbose? Given to thought leadership and pontification? Make them an infographic that takes a fresh data driven approach to their topic of interest. If you’ve got the gumption, try to challenge a closely held hypothesis that they often speak about… if your data is sound then you may not only earn their endorsement… you might also earn their respect. Probably wouldn’t hurt to do some serious homework first. Your more prolific economists, entrepreneurs, and social media and SEO bloggers fall squarely into this category.

Or, are they the creative type, possessing an extremely well honed stylistic eye? These bloggers are typically not interested in spreading new or inflamatory information, they are however very interested in spreading new techniques that can compliment their work. Design bloggers, copywriters, photographers, musicians and some more sanctimonious music bloggers fall into this category. Targeting and reaching out to them requires an intimate (almost inside joke worthy) knowledge of their work and interests. Try building something that makes their life easier, see if they respond.

No Matter what type of personality you are targeting, they typically have one thing in common, a low threshold for time-wasters. The online space is full of busy individuals who love when a conversation is dropped in their lap. A good piece of content contributed by you gives them a fresh perspective on a topic they hold very dear.

John Steinbeck once wrote “Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.”

And I know what you’re thinking, “Hey Ryan, did you just punchline this post about content marketing with a quote from Steinbeck? Whoa buddy! better watch it, your megalomania is showing!”

And yes, I tend to agree that quoting Steinbeck in a post about marketing is something of a literary blaspheme, but that doesn’t mean it does not apply. The only difference here is that you as marketers in the online space have an advantage over Steinbeck. He had to imagine his target audience, you get to read their tweets.

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/a-methodical-approach-to-content-marketing-0494247#mksyZ0ZP6kSlgLAf.99