New Content Marketing Rules for Busy Brands Seeking Traction

In 2015 LinkedIn has emerged as the proverbial 200 pound gorilla in the content marketplace and expect them to morph to a GoPro media company at some point.

Content marketing overall for 2015 will probably mirror what’s required for success on LinkedIn: recognizing it’s a crowded saturated world and publishing is critical to success, along with tenacity of purpose.

LinkedIn is Noisy and Don’t think it isn’t. But, it’s well worth the effort to publish content on the platform.

Republish all blog posts on LinkedIn. Be aware, as LinkedIn is a higher authority web site than most business if you don’t change the Header and Content Formatting (significantly) or you may lose SEO results.

I disagree with others about ROI on LinkedIn.

The platform is crowded and you are competing with a lot of content that is not curated in any shape fashion or form, other than LinkedIn’s secret sauce arbitrary algorithm or thought leader designation.

The real value in publishing on LinkedIn is not just about generating profile views for your personal account or business page on LinkedIn, it’s in publishing and then sharing this content across the social web.

Posts on LinkedIn have brand cachet that your web site may not have. Helping you generate more brand traction vs. what you can accomplish via your own blog.

Key Metrics for Publishing on LinkedIn

• Publish at least 15-20 times per month.
• Week days are best time to publish during 9-5 EST.
• Know your status updates (publishing) is only going to reach under 1% of your connections.
• I have over 13k connections on LinkedIn, I’ve been on the platform for 8 years and I only see 75-200 view of my published posts.

Yes, “likes” on posts help to push your content out on this platform, like any other.

But, getting that “silver bullet” thought leader designation seems to help the most. The criteria seems to be A) personal brand of a Richard Branson or B) a published author that some geek within LinkedIn has identified.

Of course publish your content via Groups, but be sensitive to the rules of the road in the Group and to the admin’s likes/dislikes.

Leverage economies of scale with your staff: they should all share company content via their accounts with at least 3-5 times per post per week. Again, your competing with noise.

This post will give you an in-depth overview of how to create a meaningful presence on LinkedIn.

As we move forward into 2015 expect to see more brands like LinkedIn acquire or morph to a media brand like GoPro.

New Content Marketing Absolutes for 2015

1. Recognize your customer is untethered from your brand; one in five shoppers never left their couches in the most recent holiday shopping season.
2. Get a savvy content marketer on staff (easier said than done) or partner with a good content marketing agency. “Savvy” means writes well, can edit, understands content syndication and publishing.
3. Know risk and reward “live” together: YouTube generates 6 billion hours of views per month. That’s a lot of traffic and visual marketing drives brand engagement like text never could or would.
4. Repurpose and reuse content across all channels. The up side to distraction in the marketplace is 30-50% your target market isn’t going to know you are reusing content.
5. If your content isn’t smartphone enabled you’re dead in the water.
6. Anticipate the ongoing fascination with all things celebrity or sex related (or both) is not going to change.
7. Grok what owned media is (media you control in essence) and amplify your content across all to stand out.
8. Speed kills and thrills. Get to market is the coin of the realm. See: ideas are cheap and tactical execution is not.
9. Nimble brands are going to win in the marketplace: see Yahoo’s challenges the last 5-7 years. Not to take anything away from past success; but, nimble is not part of the DNA and Merissa Mayer has not changed that.
10. Get ready to pay to promote your content. Organic reach is dropping as marketers and brands embrace content marketing.
11. What are your business objectives? These have to dovetail with content marketing. Content marketing must drive leads and incremental revenue.
12. Great content marketing requires more resources. You need the right staff, an allocation of 20-30% of your marketing budget for content creation, publishing and advertising.
13. Expect the chase for the next cool kids publishing platform like Medium or Tumblr to continue. Venture capitalists are investing in media companies like never before and “advertising” models are now legitimate as the only source for revenue.
14. Old school commenting methods for branding are dying a slow death as mainstream publishers embrace social media log in requirements for commenting.
15. Your content should be platform agnostic. If not you have to tweak it, which raises your costs and requires more time. #speedkillsandthrills

Content Marketing Resources for Busy Brands

• Visually: marketplace for sourcing infographics and other types of image content: community model is still being fleshed out.
• Scripted: Submit a job, industry and guidelines and your brand is matched with a provider. Content: just about anything: blog posts, tweets, status updates, newsletters, PR, custom photos and more.
• Elance: Submit an RFP and get bids from contractors; expect 75% to be from outside U.S., providers; rates and quality vary tremendously; “Odesk” now part of Elance.
• Contently: Structured for brands and providers (journalists and others), with built in portfolio capability: does great job of connecting brands and journalists.
• Bllogger Link Up: Cathy Stucker’s stellar site for connecting bloggers and brands in need of content marketing services.
• Zerys: Automated back end managing bids and costs for content sourcing, connecting writers with jobs and brands/agencies with per-qualified writers.
• Writer Access: “white label writing” resource for brands and agencies: writer recruitment automation and content production.
• LinkedIn Groups: great for sourcing content writers, requiring more front end work vs. automated platforms; posting gigs capability controlled by group admin requiring their “permission” in some cases.
• Scoop.It: great source for sourcing and curating news and/or thematic topics for sharing on social channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and RSS); morphing to a mini social network, requiring more and more time to leverage the platform with an associated learning curve.
• Pinterest: your brand’s Pinterest account is a ready made source for images; repurpose and cross pollinate these images in other forms of content marketing: newsletter, blog, social shares and even as Twitter cards.

 Key Takeaways for Best Practices Content Marketing in 2015 and Beyond

• Invest marketing resources on platforms you control (web site) and remember social platforms are always in flux.
• Get internal stakeholder support: key managers and executives.
• Know your audience and what their needs are. What and how content will engage and inform.
• Map out the right content formula.
• Use an Editorial Calendar to tame the content beast.
• Maximize your Content Mileage as much as possible.
• Create and deploy a process for measuring and reporting.

Creating great content is in itself challenging:  publishing, syndication and advertising add layers of complexity to the process.

Today’s consumers and professionals are distracted as never before and media’s unbending onslaught makes repetitive marketing essential to success!

50% of your time shoiuld be spent on publishing content after it’s been created and paid platforms are a necessity for any mid sized company.