Don’t Ignore the Obvious: Content Marketing Insights from Chad Pollitt
Like many conferences, last week’s 2015 Experience Inbound event highlighted a number of best practices that are seemingly obvious, yet often ignored. Chad Pollitt’s presentation was a prime example. Pollitt, the co-founder of Relevance.com, discussed the need for consistency in an organization’s content marketing plan. With over 3 million pieces of content being written and published every day, potential customers are overwhelmed with information. Given that level of content competition, organizations that don’t have a consistent topic will quickly lose the attention of whatever audience they may have gained.
Pollitt also warned against defining one’s competition too narrowly; while many organizations think they are fighting for share of mind among their direct competitors, the reality is that your content actually competes with every single post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and other social channels. In Pollitt’s view, the key to grabbing and holding an audience’s attention is to give them quality, relevant content on a consistent topic or set of related topics. Seems obvious, eh?
Another seemingly obvious – but often overlooked – element of audience building is content promotion. Believe it or not, you need to be thinking about content promotion even before the content is written. By focusing on the promotional aspect of your organization’s content first, you will be able to set that content up for more views, translating into more feedback from viewers…which ultimately helps to increase the quality of your future content. Another conference speaker, Ryan Panzer, encouraged marketers to use Google Trends when creating these plans and researching potential topics. While I took his remarks with a slight grain of salt (since Panzer is a Google employee) Google Trends is a robust tool. Among other things, it can help identify regional topics of interest, searches related to particular topics, and the terms/keywords that can be used to lead specific target audiences to your content.
Like most of the other speakers at the conference, Pollitt firmly believes in the “content is king” mantra and doesn’t think it will change anytime soon. Thus, it is crucial for marketers to leverage their content and reach the right leads with every piece they publish. To do anything less would be to ignore the new realities of digital communication.