Selling Without Selling: Takeaways from an SVC seminar with Content Harmony

I took a day off work to attend Selling Without Selling, a seminar at the Seattle School of Visual Concepts, hosted by Kane Jamison from Content Harmony.  The seminar was about getting a handle on the process of creating and publishing content, so that your business builds a larger relationship with customers than what is contained in the typical sales pitch collateral.  I took pages of notes, but I will summarize some of the best nuggets that I took away from the day.

Content Marketing: creating useful and interesting content, to attract and captivate target customers.  Create a connection that influences their buying decision, and delivers value separate from primary products/services.  The way that people buy things has changed: rather than going to sales people to get information, buyers can avoid contacting anyone throughout the entire buying process.  Building content assets builds trust and credibility, allowing customers to get to know you, so that you're a resource when they are ready to buy.  The long term value is high, and when refreshed, can deliver value for many years (an evergreen asset).  And the cost per lead can be seriously reduced, although it may take months if not years for the cost savings to appear.  Strong content programs cover many points in time when people need information.

Awesome video: The Greatest Misconception in Content Marketing -- from Moz.  

The great resources from Kane can be found online, the one-day content marketing conversation, and the 12 questions to ask yourself about your content strategy set the foundation for what Content Harmony calls the Minimum Viable Content Strategy.  

We walked through the 12 questions to ask yourself about your content strategy, and by answering the questions, you can build out a written content strategy, which is the back bone of a successful content strategy.  Nailing down the personas of the people you are trying to reach will dictate the kind of content you want too build for yourself.  The content strategy should be periodically reviewed, to be sure that it is still serving the target customers.  A monthly review and tweak, and an annual or semiannual revisit and overhaul is important for following the consumer trends.  Larger audiences will react to changes in the content strategy faster than smaller audiences.

Talk about goal setting for your content program.  Define both success and failure, and compare to the sales funnel, to make sure you're covering all the points in time when people need content (funnel: awareness, engagement, conversion, and retention).  A good way to build out your content is to start answering customer questions and providing content that covers the funnel, and build a spreadsheet with all of your general topics.  Group the topic ideas by Top of Funnel, Middle of Funnel, Bottom of Funnel, and Post Funnel.  Then connect each topic idea to ways that you can measure (website page views, inquiries, filled out transaction pages, and things like that).

Working through, and answering, the 12 questions in their process will be the foundation of your documented content strategy.  Start with 3 or 4 goals.  Too many goals means you haven't really identified what you're goals actually are.  Start at the bottom of the funnel and work up.  Connect and integrate with the mission statements of the company, and the goals of those you're serving.

Create your one- or two-page personas for your target customers.  Make sure to define who will do the work, and how much time and/or money to commit to the task.  Be realistic.  The internal piece is usually time or personnel, and the external piece is the budget or resources needed.

What are we going to produce?  The type of content, broken down by funnel stage.  Be realistic in your goal setting, set a high goal, a low goal, a just-break-even goal, and what abject failure would look like.  For topics, put together an editorial mission statement, what you stand for, not what you sell.  Create an umbrella direction statement for yourself to follow.  Compare to the sales funnel, and ask yourself what questions people will be asking themselves at every stage of the funnel.  Do this for each customer segment AND each stage of the funnel AND each product.  Translate all of your question answers into multiple media formats: write a long blog post or white paper, turn into a video (even if it is a slideshow with a voice over), and into a podcast, and into an annotated gallery, and into smaller all-text articles, and into infographics.  This will turn one large topic project into tons of useful content for every type of person, that you can spread out over months.

Finding topics: use Google autofill in the search bar, and start searching for things you think your customers might be asking.  Use the autofill topics to start building your editorial calendar (this also gives you your keywords for the eventual content when you post it).  KeywordTool.io is a great website to use to automate this process, and it will give you tons of topic variations to write about.  Other topics areas: look to your competitors and see what they do well, and think about topical competitors, who aren't selling to your customers, but are resources that your customers might look to for information.

In your content calendar, create a glorified spreadsheet calendar to direct when things should be posted.  Can be as complicated or as simple as you want.  Trello is a good tool for setting up to do lists and passing the tasks along.  Make sure you know what your brand's voice is, make a persona for your brand (as well as your customers), this can be contained in or related to your editorial mission statement.  What you stand for, not what you sell.  Create deadlines, and a general timeline for building things, and include a post-launch timeline to recycle and update the project.

For social strategy, Kane admitted that social media is largely a cost to most businesses, and fits just as well into customer service as to marketing, because many if not most of the comments you field on social will be customer complaints and questions.  But, it's important to keep posting so your business looks active and engages your existing customer base.  If you're deciding where to spend your money on post promotion, post a few times a week, and look back on the previous week to see what had the most organic traffic, and choose the best performer to promote.  Never use the "boost post" button on Facebook, you'll get better rates if you go through the ad manager, which doesn't cost anything to have, only to use.  You can double or triple your organic exposure over and above your paid exposure, like a multiplier.

His rule of thumb for social media content: 20% your company content, and 80% curated content from other sources.  This can be fine for your general content strategy as well, because you can still be a resource for your customers by finding what they need for them, and making them go through you to get it.  You can add some value to someone else's video by simply annotating it and providing a paragraph on why you like the video, or the article, and direct people to it themselves.  Make sure you read what you're sharing, and watch the videos you're recommending.

For newsletters or email update letters, it's nice sometimes to use an A-B strategy: for different customers, provide one newsletter that has their custom subscribed content in it, and alternate that with a general "what's popular among everyone" newsletter.  That way you can expand people's horizons, provide them what they specifically want, and not write as much or as often (because you can recycle highlights from each subcategory into the general newsletter).

The word BLOG comes with baggage.  Call your blog section Articles, and leave off the dates unless they are super necessary.  Consider updating existing articles with a "last updated on" date line, so it stays fresh even if the content didn't significantly change.  If your content will be just as good in 6 months, leave off the date.  Filling out a page can also mean creating a really good and comprehensive FAQ, which will save you a lot of man-hours answering emails and things.  A good FAQ can help your customer support, and retention rates, as it makes it easier for people to use your product once they bought it.

Our final thoughts for the afternoon were on making blog posts better, and will be much better said in the slide deck provided online.  

Very big shout out to Kane Jamison from Content Harmony, and the School of Visual Concepts.  Of the sources we consulted, Moz.com, The Content Marketing Institute, and KeywordTool.io are great, other resources include HubSpot, Buzz Sumo, SEMRush, Open Site Explorer.