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The

Content Code

SIX ESSENTIAL STRATEGIES FOR IGNITING YOUR CONTENT, YOUR

MARKETING, AND YOUR BUSINESS

MARK W. SCHAEFER

Copyright © 2015 by Mark W. Schaefer

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that neither the author nor the publisher is engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.

• From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers.

Schaefer Marketing Solutions www.businessesGROW.com First Edition: March 2015 Publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Cover, Interior Layout and Design by Sarah Mason www.uncommonlysocial.com

Ebook formatting by Polgarus Studio www.polgarusstudio.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schaefer, Mark W. The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business Mark W. Schaefer - 1st ed. ISBN-10: 069237233

For my Alpha Audience. We create content but content also creates us. This is for those who read, think, and grow with me each day.

Table of Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE The Ignition Switch

CHAPTER TWO Structure, Strategy, and the Content Code

CHAPTER THREE Building Shareability into Your Content

CHAPTER FOUR 22 Practical Ways to Achieve Content Ignition

CHAPTER FIVE Building an Alpha Audience

CHAPTER SIX Borrowing Trust

CHAPTER SEVEN The Heroic Brand

CHAPTER EIGHT Distribution, Advertising, Promotion, and SEO

CHAPTER NINE Social Signals and Social Proof

CHAPTER TEN The Mystery of Authority

CHAPTER ELEVEN The Future of Content and Ignition

References

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Introduction

Each time I’ve written a book, I’ve tried to solve a problem and answer an important and complex question on the mind of my customers, my students, and my friends in the business world. My previous books have provided answers to questions like …

Can you help me figure out Twitter? Social media is overwhelming … where do I start? How do I begin and sustain a blog that actually helps my organization? How do I become significant—perhaps even powerful and successful—on the web?

So far, so good. As long as I encounter big questions that require more than a blog post to answer, I suppose I will keep writing books. Here’s the question at the heart of The Content Code:

I’m a professional marketer working as hard as I can. I’m producing content, engaging on social media, and spinning right along with the revolving door of every digital marketing innovation and new platform. Why is my business not getting anywhere?

Here’s the short answer: Because you’re living in yesterday’s world. The persistent myth that surrounds much of marketing today is that content is king. And if you can just produce enough of this scintillating, ripped-from-the- headlines, epic and amazing stuff … dripping with keywords, stuffed to the headlines with relevance, decorated with Pinterest-worthy graphics and videos, and podcasts and listicles … you’ll win. We’re stuck with a misconception that the most worthy content rises to the top, scorching the search rankings, and becoming a dazzling beacon for eager customers. And at one point, that was probably true. Early in the web’s history, the balance between the content available online and our capacity to consume it was grossly out of balance. We were insatiable consumers, spending hours discovering the new information sources coming at us on the emerging World Wide Web. But the balance has shifted. Dramatically.

While most marketers have understandably had their heads down producing content and building their audience, it’s time to look up again and see that we need to build a third competency – an ignition plan. The new priority of content transmission is a combination of art, science, and maybe even a little mathematical magic that includes these six factors of The Content Code:

Brand development Audience and Influencers Distribution, Advertising, Promotion, and SEO

Authority Shareability embedded into each piece of content Social proof and social signals

The beauty of The Content Code is that it’s accessible to anyone and businesses of any size. Whether you have a little time for marketing each week, or you can dedicate full-time resources to content ignition (and this is beginning to occur), this book is filled with hundreds of ideas that will help you triumph in the chaotic information marketplace today. The future is more than copy writing. The future of marketing is copy igniting. So let’s get to it. Let’s discover The Content Code.

Tweets are now being used for political polling, for defining consumer sentiment, for creating detailed buyer personas, and even for the inspiration to write new television plotlines. One blogger counted more than 300 independent applications dedicated to helping you manage, measure, and engage on Twitter.

… and the list goes on and on. Rarely does a week go by when there isn’t some significant, new Twitter-related innovation available for marketers. You could literally make a career out of studying nothing but Twitter. Now, multiply that by every digital platform in the world and you’ll start to feel a little dizzy! And while this feverish pace of change is something to reckon with, it’s not even the biggest worry for marketers. There’s another, more important, mega-trend impacting almost every marketing strategy, tactic, and innovation in our industry: Malignant information density.

In the beginning, there was … not much

Sometime around 1987, I plugged my first laptop computer into a wall phone socket and dialed up an Internet connection through AOL. Do you remember that buzz-screech-hiss sound of a dial-up connection? That was the sound of excitement! I vividly recall downloading my first photo of a galaxy from the NASA site and calling to my wife and children to witness this miracle. A color photograph through the phone line! In only 10 minutes of download time! In hindsight, that seems pretty lame, doesn’t it? But I tell this story to make an important point. In the early years of the web, interesting content was scarce and we had lots of time to wait for that download. Grasping all that has happened between that first buzz-screech-hiss and today is vital if you want to understand the significance of The Content Code. Back then, the seemingly astonishing ability to access a single piece of digital content was a thrill. We were starved for content and stared with wonder at anything we could obtain through this new electronic conduit. Fast forward to 2009, the year I became a serious content creator. At that point, the web was still a relatively uncrowded content space. There were roughly one-third as many bloggers as there are now … and even fewer podcast producers, video-makers, Pinterest pinners, Facebook posters, and Instagram photographers. The social media/content model for a personal or business brand was easy: Create great content, spend a little effort on search engine optimization and

promotion, and build your business when people found your goods and services through Google. Those days are coming to an end, and as you’re about to see, it’s a pretty predictable revolution.

The third digital revolution

So far, there have been three distinct phases of digital marketing. These upheavals haven’t replaced each other, but rather have built upon progress and moved us forward. The first digital revolution occurred at the dawn of the web in the late 1990s when companies like AOL, Netscape, and Prodigy shook up the nascent Internet. Your business priority was simply getting out there and establishing a website. So the dawn of the Internet created a business focus on PRESENCE. Once you had a site, it needed to be found. Enabled by companies like Alta Vista and ultimately Google, by the late 1990s your business priority turned to search engine optimization (and a $30 billion industry was created!). An emphasis on DISCOVERY was the priority for the second digital revolution. Today, we’re firmly in the third digital revolution, which has been enabled by social media and mobile technology. Your business goal in this phase is UTILITY—to help and serve people at their point of need, whether they’re looking for a movie review, the best price on a laptop, or product information at the point of sale in a retail store. (And oh yes, there’s a fourth revolution in sight, but you’ll have to wait for Chapter 11 for that!) As each phase progressed into the next, life became more difficult for marketers. If you were a pioneer and had an early website during the first revolution, you had an advantage until your competitors caught on. Likewise, if you were the first to crack the code on SEO in the second phase, Oh Happy Day! You led the search results as long as your competitors lagged behind. If they figured it out, once again it became more difficult, and expensive, to compete. Today, the world has become more difficult for digital marketers because your competitors have also figured out they need to be fueling their helpful Internet presence with content. If you were first and dominant in your niche, good news, good news, good news! But if the niche is filling up, you’re probably discovering a business state I characterize as Content Shock. Let’s unpack that idea a little because it represents the marketing problem at hand: There is just too much content and too precious little time for people to consume it. How does that affect your business strategy?

Western World consume content an average of 10 hours a day! There is no person reading this book, and no person you have ever known, who has lived in a world where the amount of content consumed is not going up. How much higher can it go? 11 hours per day? 13? 14? I don’t know. Nobody knows. Some gamers already consume content 18 hours a day or more in one sitting. Is that our future? Sleep, consume, sleep, consume? The point is, we’re approaching a physiological limit to content consumption. This intersection of finite content consumption and the explosion of content availability is creating a marketing industry tremor I characterize as Content Shock.^2 In a scenario in which content supply is exponentially increasing while content demand remains flat, you have to work a lot harder just to preserve the same amount of “mindshare” you have with your customers today. And that scenario is exactly what is happening.

The evaporation of content marketing as we know it

Here’s an example of what many businesses are experiencing in the Content Shock age. A mid-sized sporting goods company in America’s Pacific Northwest had carved out a small, profitable niche and served an international group of customers, by following a classic social media marketing playbook:

They were consistently creating a variety of helpful, high quality content pieces, many of them featuring customer stories. They reached out to popular athletes using their products and featured their adventures, stories, and videos. They actively engaged with their audience on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook and had at least doubled their online audience for three consecutive years. They had invested in more content creation every year and had even hired their first full-time community manager, an extraordinary commitment for the small company with just 17 employees.

Despite their well-conceived marketing effort, their organic reach on Facebook (the number of people who see their content without advertising support) had declined 90 percent in nine months! How did this happen? A few years ago, if you did a reasonably good job with your content and engagement, you could expect that Facebook would “show” your post to about

30 percent of the people who follow you. Although this success rate varies a lot by industry, organic reach has declined in a cataclysmic freefall since 2011 to the point where it is near zero for most businesses, including my customer. Why? Facebook’s explanation is that there is an excessive amount of content. An average Facebook user can see nearly 2,000 stories in their daily newsfeed. That is far too much to consume, so the company uses an algorithm called EdgeRank to sharply edit what shows through to your customers. For a small business that has depended on Facebook to connect with customers—and there are a lot of them—there are seemingly only two choices:

1. Spend even more money on producing high- quality content, hoping it might squeak through to a customer’s news feed, or 2) Pay Facebook to promote or boost the post. Either way, competing at this new level comes with a cost. But even this strategy of throwing money at the problem is backfiring for many. As more people seek to buy a limited number of Facebook ads, the ad prices are rising, pushing the price out of reach for many small businesses. And even if you can afford to advertise, research shows^3 that users are now blind to sponsored, branded content on Facebook. Given the repetitive and typical billboard-style/interruptive/insipient nature of the content it's not surprising. And that is Content Shock in action. This isn’t just a consumer goods problem or a Facebook problem. One study concluded that between 60-70 percent of the content on a B2B company website is unseen.^4 The problem exists in every digital channel. Information density is like a blacksmith’s hammer pounding down on our marketing programs, forging new ideas and strategies and pummeling the old ways of doing business. It’s time for something new.

Implications of information density

I believe there are other, less obvious implications of this trend.

1. Deep pockets have an advantage. As each new media channel emerges, it’s originally fueled by crude “local” content, but the eventual winners are the content creators with the deepest pockets. When television started, the airwaves were filled with local programming (sort of like the bloggers of their day!). All the cooking shows, game shows, and variety shows used local talent. Today, corporations have taken over and there is virtually no “local” content left on TV. Years ago, the most popular YouTube videos were locally produced home movies. Today, the most-viewed videos are dominated by big brands and slickly-produced films and music videos.

social sharing as the primary benefit of social media^5 because 70 percent of consumers say they are more likely to make a purchase based on a friend’s social media updates. That’s a powerful number, which is why it’s somewhat mystifying that nearly all the marketing industry dialogue has focused on creating more content, creating content more efficiently, automating content, and finding ways to measure content. But as the eMarketer study shows, brand power isn’t coming through content. It’s coming from content transmitted by our trusted friends. Content marketing may start with writing, but the money is made by IGNITING. And that’s where the conversation needs to be now. The most breathtaking content that remains undiscovered on a website has no more value to a business than a manuscript for a sensational novel that is locked away from sight in a dark, cold vault.

Why content isn’t king

Here’s something that is obvious to any person trying to carve a successful path in marketing today: Content marketing has little to do with content anymore. Allow me to tell a funny story about how this revelation dawned on me. My early days as a blogger were fraught with frustration. I believed my content was as good as anybody else’s, but it wasn’t attracting any reader engagement, let alone business opportunities. Mine was a quiet, lonely little corner of the web. I was following the Big Blogger Best Practices by publishing consistently, connecting with others to form a community, and writing posts that were thought-provoking and original. Yet, my content languished. In my blog’s second year, I was beginning to find my voice. I confidently wrote original posts on influence marketing, electrifying digital trends, and new marketing insights. And still, my ideas were met with stone-cold silence. At the same time that I was churning out these meaningful posts, Chris Brogan, an extremely popular entrepreneur who blogs about marketing and business issues, published a post that was exactly 37 words long. For your edification and entertainment, here’s his entire post:

“If you’re going to speak to people, speak TO (or even better WITH) them. Don’t look at your slides, read your slides, and tell me what’s on your slides. I know how to read. Stop it. Okay?”

That’s the whole thing. What made this post remarkable is that it received nearly 400 social shares, or more than 10 shares per word. It received more than 50 unique reader comments —more reactions than the total words in the post! The comments were uniformly enthusiastic and even included descriptions like “brilliant!!!!” and “awesome.” I’m going to go way out on a limb and say it was not an epic post. In fact, it’s pretty standard presentation advice that has been delivered since the days of flip charts and transparencies. If someone gave you this advice in a company training program, you might roll your eyes and yawn. I’ll even hypothesize that Chris would admit his post doesn’t teeter into a category of “brilliant” posts! Years later Chris and I would become friends, but at that moment I felt resentful and angry that a dull 37-word post received more web traffic than my blog had received in an entire year. What was going on here? If the Internet is the great equalizer, a meritocracy where all good work is rewarded, and if great content always rises to the top like the social media gurus were telling me, why did this post ignite and mine didn’t? I hypothesized at the time that if Chris wrote a post titled “I’m feeling a little gassy today” it would have been tweeted 300 times. I actually encouraged him to do this as an experiment but alas, he declined. The world is poorer for it. How did Chris get to a place where just about any content he published lit up the web like he’d struck a match in a fireworks store? Did content marketing success have anything to do with his content … or did he possess some personal magic that I didn’t understand? Was there a secret content launch code I was missing? I wanted to figure this out! And honestly, if I was going to succeed as a marketing consultant and teacher, I had to figure this out. One of my (few) blog readers reflected my own exasperation in a blog comment at the time: “The people who claim great content always rises to the top are already in a dominant market position. For those of us starting out, trying to scratch out a presence, it seems that no amount of work gets us noticed. How do we crack this code?” Indeed. What IS THE CODE? Others were beginning to uncover clues to this formula, too. My friend Marcela DeVivo, an SEO specialist, business owner, and blogger in Los Angeles, expressed a similar frustration with her content failures:

“I wrote a post about social media audits and published it on my blog. It received no comments or social activity AT ALL. I later submitted