I attended a panel discussion on the power of content in your marketing efforts. The panelist agreed that content is really important, but it is becoming clear that lots of content is more important than spectacular content. Content like white papers or blog posts take a lot of time to put together, so you may not be able to have a lot of white papers or blog posts. Ideally you want to create different content for your personas, different content for where the reader is in the sales funnel, etc. For 5 personas and 5 levels in your funnel, you need 25 different content items. As you personalize content more and more, you need lots more content than you think. There are companies that can help generate lots of content, such as compendium.com, which was recently purchased by Oracle.
They also talked about how distribution of content is equally or more important than the content itself. They sited statistics that showed people are much more likely to convert to customers based on trusted sources of content. Which content do the trust? Recommendations by friends is obviously one highly trusted source. It turns out that content from an employee’s personal account is much more trusted than content from your brand account. So if your employee sends out a tweet using their own account, readers are more likely to engage with that content than if the exact same content was distributed via the company’s Facebook page.
Think about that. We put a lot of time and money into our company’s Twitter or Facebook account. But people will pay more attention if your employee tweets from their personal account. Getting employees to post on behalf of the company is a challenge,
but there are many ways to enable this, including some new systems such as addvocate.com.
So a big takeaway for me is that you need to have a strategy around content marketing and take content distribution techniques very seriously.
I’d definitely agree with you that stats show people pay more attention to individual Twitter profiles as opposed to corporate brand profiles when it comes to content distribution and sharing of information. I’m interested to check out the company you mentioned in your post. I love that their platform provides visibility into performance metrics for corporate advocacy!