Developing Content: 5 Things to Know

Rob shares his best tips for developing content. Our favorite? Make time to procrastinate. Read the rest on the blog.

Just the other day, Dan described me to a client as one who salivates over a good piece of content needing to be written. For whatever reason, that description stuck with me (am I that slobbery?)- But the more I think about it, the more I realize he wasn’t that far off! I do get pretty excited over crafting a good story for readers, with all the juicy details arranged just right for maximum impact and “a-ha” moments. And I love digging into a new topic that I haven’t written about before- reading what other people have to say about it, speaking with established experts that know it all too well. Then there’s that moment when you finally dare to think you know enough to pull off a story. I still get a charge every time all the pieces suddenly line up.

If you too are a content creator like me or looking to dive into developing content for your business, here’s a few things I suggest you consider before you make that leap.

Know Your Sources

I have built an entire career writing about industries, products, and processes about which I know very little (at least at the get-go). Over time, and through years of work, I familiarized myself with each of them. Sometimes enough to be able to pull off a piece of content without much research. But having a good source I could refer to for information about the topic was always absolutely crucial to my success. Whether it’s a website, person, or collection of documents, without a good source, it can be very hard/ impossible to ever get a piece of content off the ground.

Know Your Audience

This step will help you develop the right tone in your content. Before you begin writing, be sure you know very well the target audience to whom you’re writing. What is their knowledge of the topic? Are they an informed, long-time client looking to keep up on industry best practices? Or are they a new customer searching to solve a problem they’ve never dealt with before? If your topic is technical or advanced in nature, and your intended reader is uninitiated, it might require some skillful distillation of information so that your content hits home. Or, if you’re writing to experts, doing your homework to learn the appropriate industrial phrases and jargon can make your tone sound like it knows what you’re talking about.

Know Your Keywords

Before you start writing, it’s essential to know your keywords for several reasons. First off, it helps you organize your content- making sure you touch on and address all the necessary points. Second, what good is a piece of digital content if your intended readers can’t find it?

Know Your Word Count

How long do you have to establish your credibility, develop your ideas, make your case, defeat the counterpoint, or educate your reader about the topic? Long-form content lets you take your time, easing your readers into the subject, going off on tangents where applicable, providing several examples to back up your arguments. But with shorter pieces of content, you might be required to adopt a news style of writing- getting quickly to your point and cutting out the fluff.

Know Your Deadline

I’m convinced that procrastination is an essential component of the creative process. Letting an idea bounce around in the back of your mind as you work on other projects until it’s fully formed can help your writing exponentially. But even a perfect piece of content is useless if you miss your deadline. Knowing how long you have to complete your work can help you strike a balance between letting the idea marinate and doing the writing. And if you don’t have a deadline, set one. Sometimes it takes a sense of urgency to help force your idea out onto the page.

So there you have it. Hopefully, these tips help you develop the content you’re looking for. But if you need more help, don’t be afraid to reach out to us!

If Buzzfeed Wrote a Digital Content Guide

We all know Buzzfeed. But what if Buzzfeed wrote a digital content guide? Jocelyn digs into what makes the viral content producer so successful.

Let’s Get Engaged

I think it is safe to assume that we all know what Buzzfeed content looks like. If you have been on Facebook in the past 10 years, you have likely seen a family member, friend or distant acquaintance – who is technically your Facebook “Friend” – share a piece Buzzfeed content. But what would a digital content guide created by Buzzfeed look like?

Buzzfeed creates content to make it viral – meaning they want it to become as popular among the broadest audience possible. And whether you are a fan of its content or not, you can admit they know how to make their blogs, videos and posts sharable across a mass audience.

But how can you apply this to your business’s social media content or blogs? We’ve pulled together three tricks you can steal from Buzzfeed for this digital content guide.

Lots of visuals

Law of life: People like to look at stuff. So, make sure the content you are sharing has quality and engaging stuff to look at. When sharing a post on social media, adding a photo can increase Engagement Rate by 2.3X when compared to a post without a photo – and Engagement Rate increases even more when paired with a video.

What’s going on now

Buzzfeed creates topical content that relates to mass audiences. To increase engagement on your social media posts or blogs, make sure you tie your content in with a current event. The current event could be events in pop culture, in the news cycle or recent happenings in your company. If it is recent news, your audience will be excited to hear it!

Consistency is key

Say it with me now, consistency. Buzzfeed is a powerhouse of content and continuously churns out videos, blogs and images. If your business does not have the time to produce content consistently- don’t worry, that’s okay! If your business does not happen to be a digital media corporation, and only has the capacity to develop one blog every two weeks, don’t be discouraged. Start there and begin developing relationships with your audience.

By taking these three tips into account when planning your next content calendar or getting your fledgling content strategy off the ground, hopefully you too can enjoy the success and increased visibility of a piece of your content going viral.

Want some help with your digital content strategy? We can help!

Creating the Best Content Development Strategy

Creating a content development strategy is one of the easiest ways to get the most out of your content marketing efforts. Here’s how to create one.

Creating a content development strategy is one of the easiest ways to get the most out of your content marketing efforts, but it’s also one of the most easily overlooked. When you’re focused on getting the next thing done on your to-do list, taking the time to evaluate what you’re doing and why isn’t at the top of your priorities. Whether you’re blogging to support your sales team, or you’re building a brand from the ground up, these seven tricks will help you create a content development strategy flexible enough to grow with your objectives.

Align Your Goals

Seems simple, right? But nailing down both your departmental goals as well as your overall business objectives is huge. Sometimes lead generation isn’t the answer; sometimes you need greater awareness or reduced customer attrition. Knowing both what you need to focus on and what’s keeping your boss’s boss up at night is the key to create a strategic content marketing program.

Understanding business objectives is one of the first things we focus on with our clients. It’s one of the reasons why our proposals include a large discovery section and only an idea of the work we might do together. Until you know where you need to go, it’s tough to find a way to get there. I can give you best practices until the cows come home and then leave again, but the best strategy is going to be rooted in your goals.

Find Your Hidden Resources

This was always one of my favorite stupid human tricks when I worked client side. I used to worm my way into the hearts of IT and make friends with my sales team. I’d badger my product managers and stalk my account leads. I’d bake for my customer reps and push my way into meetings of kinds. I was That Marketer.

When you remove all of the business gibberish, we tell stories. It doesn’t matter if you’re in marketing, PR, or HR. We’re all here telling a story about the organization for whom we work. Those stories can come from surprising places. Think about who talks to your clients, customers, or prospects daily. Who knows their pain points? Who answers questions day-in and day-out? Find those people and pick their brains (gently). Save their words, learn their language, and connect that to your strategy. Infuse the data-driven side of your content strategy with the very human side of those stories.

Set Your Pace

Think about the last big project that you never finished. Maybe it’s the deck in your backyard you meant to update or that sewing project you started a year ago but never quite got to. You were so motivated when you first started, but life took over, and it fell to the bottom of your list. It happens. And that project stares at you like a lost puppy, just begging to be completed.

Content development strategies are big projects that live on the fringes of our daily work. My to-do list is primary evidence of this. What’s the one thing that just never gets finished? Content. Blogs, social media, downloadables, case studies… all of it cycles through my email until it’s completed, and I need to start the next one. On our agile board, those post-its are the matriarchs of my time: they sit there, staring at me, daring me to ever move them to complete. And unlike most significant projects, they don’t have an endpoint. Wouldn’t it be great if they did? Write two blogs this week, done for life! SEO completed. Take that content marketing!

The worst part is that you may feel like you’re failing if you don’t set a giant goal driven by 72 statistics and a pace that would set the world on fire. It would be utterly fantastic if we all had time in the day to match that kind of speed- or if we had a large team and a budget to rival that big sports stadium downtown. If we had leadership that understands the six-month lead time between content production and results, O’Keeffe would probably be out of business if that were the case. Content production farms – it’s the future!

The reality is that the best pace for your content development is the one you can stick to. Maybe you’ll be able to post five days a week in the future and maybe you won’t. Perhaps you can only really do one blog per month, but that blog is going to be well-researched and aligned with your goals. That’s okay. Quality is so much better than quantity, and a consistent pace matters more than bursts of content with a sad desert in between.

The real answer is that something is better than nothing- and a regular, well-done something is the best of all.

Get Inspired

I’ll admit it: sometimes I stare at my keyword research and my eyes glaze over. Blah blah, SEO, blah blah, gated content, blah, blah lead gen. Research the keywords, write the content, post the content, optimize the content, track the content, share the content. It’s kind of sad, eh? We find this amazing thing, this content marketing thing, and somehow us former English kids who were told we’d end up living in a box proselytizing about poetry, are somehow paid for writing for a living, and we get annoyed with it.

We get paid to write. Isn’t that the most fantastic thing? I remember the first time someone offered me a job as a copywriter (shout out to Chris for plucking me out of project management). It blew my mind. And we’re all like that here at O’Keeffe. We all have these stories of finding our way in communications and realizing that this was the thing we wanted to do with our lives. Book nerds, media nerds, hunting down the most exciting tales and finding a way to get paid for it.

You have to find the truth of what you’re writing. Go beyond your audience, beyond your research, beyond best practices. Whom are you writing for and what do they care about? Why does it matter?

Write It Down

I know what I’m doing, you say. I’ve got a spreadsheet, and I’ve sent emails. In the business world, that’s about the same as a blood contract. And yet documenting your content development strategy matters. There’s a massive difference between thinking you know your plan and working out the details in ink. Outline who your brand is, whom you want to talk to, and what they care about. Detail why it matters. Create a nice little one-pager (or three-pager, we don’t judge here) and save it.

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve created a content marketing strategy for a client and then six months later, some yahoo from accounting is confused about why we’re spending so much time blogging. This is why, my dear yahoo. Because these are our goals, this is our strategy, and this is why it matters.

Here’s our favorite template: Content Marketing Strategy Template

Determine KPIs

Ah, those famous key performance indicators, drivers of some of the most inane business conversations that I have had the displeasure of having. But we need them. They’re the bumpers to our terrible bowling, the speeding tickets to our lead foot, and the fences to our furry squirrel hunters. When you can go anywhere and do anything, you don’t have a sense of where you need to be. (Didn’t think I could get all esoteric on KPIs, did you?)

KPIs are the corn starch to your sauce: they hold it all together. And laddering your KPIs into your business strategy is the best way to understand how your glorious content development strategy is performing. You need a dash of common sense and some patience to make this work because the fact is that you can track anything and you might end up tracking everything.

Cut through the noise and figure out what matters to your bottom line.

Analyze and Test

So you went through all of this, and you’ve got a strategy, and it’s full of KPIs, and you’re making that sweet, sweet content happen. You’re done, right? Incorrect, my amigo. Now is the fun part! It’s time to start playing with your strategy and testing what works better. Generally speaking, you’re going to stick to that A/B test (in other words, change one thing and see if said change makes things better or worse- “things” being KPIs) because multivariate testing always makes me want to call my old stats professor from grad school. If you’re very enthusiastic about this part, you can even test for statistical significance if your sample size if hard enough. And if you’re frowning right about now, you can squint at your results of less than 100 and say very sagely, “this isn’t large enough to be statistically significant, but that’s an interesting result.”

What’s Next

So that’s all I’ve got — your seven tricks to creating the best content development strategy. If you’d like a free analysis of your current strategy, let us know. We enjoy answering questions, and we know sometimes your budget isn’t quite there to hire an agency yet.

The Buying Behavior

Humans are hard-wired to buy, and our decision to buy is driven and exhibited by a necessary behavior.

Are you speaking to your audience?

As marketers, we survive and thrive on what we’re able to help our organizations sell. Thus, for many of us throughout our careers, our sales counterparts…and sometimes we…are schooled in one sales technique after another.

Solution selling, for instance, is one popular methodology, which is driven by the idea that sales’ job is to help solve problems we believe are plaguing our consumers. Another method is Target Account Selling, which is focused primarily on converting smaller customers into larger customers.

These and most of the myriad other sales techniques can be effective, and each has its place. However, none are foolproof and often rely on both Sales and Marketing, making educated assumptions about their prospective customers. Each methodology can benefit from incorporating one science-driven reality that many of us still neglect. “Consumers buy because they find a product or service appealing to them, and they believe the information they receive about that product or service.” This means that organizations trying to sell their wares must find consumers who are naturally inclined to want their products or services or who, due to some external circumstance, are currently looking for the product or service being offered.

The Learning Pathway

The concept is simple. Humans are hard-wired to buy, and our decision to buy is driven and exhibited by a necessary behavior. Psychology Today describes this behavior as the Learning Pathway, and breaks it down as follows:

“A customer must learn about a product or service and relate it to their specific situation. There are three learning domains—Cognitive, Constructivist, and Experiential—that guide our buying behavior. The buying journey begins with the Cognitive domain, which is the intake and assimilation of new information.”

In 21^st Century marketing terms, “new information” can be referred to as “content.” This is where marketers figure into the sales mix. We fill the role of researcher, compiler, translator, and distributor (or conveyor) of new information in the form of the content we create. This means we need to arm our salespeople with the most current information translated into the most compelling content delivered using the most innovative and measurable tools.

According to a 2016 Demand Gen Report, 47% of buyers viewed 3 to 5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative. Translation: nearly half of the consumers felt the need to research before buying. Moreover, where did they go for this content? In today’s world, their content channels could include blogs, traditional media, infographics, Twitter, videos, email, whitepapers, presentations… Shall I go on?

That same Demand Gen Report also noted that 96% of business-to-business (B2B) buyers want content with more input from industry leaders. Translation: buyers want to know what those they respect say about the products or services they’re considering purchasing.

Marketing automation leader HubSpot reported in a 2016 survey that 62% of consumers prefer to consult a search engine to learn more about a product rather than talk to a salesperson. Only 29% prefer a sales pitch.

Furthermore, a 2017 study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute found that content marketing gets three times more sales leads than paid search advertising. Translation: quality content published regularly motivates consumers to buy exponentially more often than traditional paid search campaigns. This statistic flies in the face of what we marketers have been taught for more than a decade of 21^st-century marketing.

Focus on the Message

So, what does all of this mean to you? Well, if you’re trying to sell something, you need to focus as much, if not more, attention on how you market your product or service as you do on how you sell. Also, while your core business might be the manufacture and sale of widgets, you also need to consider yourself a publisher of information about the widgets you sell. The more accurate and compelling information you can create (or repurpose from and attribute to other sources) and distribute, the more opportunity consumers will have to find your content and the more motivated they will be to buy from you.

As we come to understand the buying behavior better, we must be willing to change our practices when it comes to selling and marketing. Fortunately, at no other time in history has it been more accessible, quicker, and more convenient to produce and distribute content. We can take advantage of today’s technology to disseminate information about our brands, products, and services. We can control where, when, and how we find our prospects and target our information. So we can take comfort in knowing one proven truth about behaviors: they can be trained.

More Than a Brand

Have you ever thought of a brand as not just representing a product, but an entire industry?

I grew up in the Midwest, where asking for a “coke” meant more than just a Coca-Cola. In Dayton, Ohio, a coke, at least in the 70s and 80s before the onslaught of alternative sodas, energy drinks and flavored waters, could have been any one of the half dozen soft drinks that existed in my sugared-water world. The Coca-Cola brand had risen far above its productized state. To my family, friends and me, it “was” soft drinks. When asked for a “coke,” the salesperson would ask, “Which do you want? We have Coke, Pepsi, 7-Up, Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper.” That reality, for Coca-Cola at least, must have given new meaning to the tagline, “Have a Coke and a smile.”

Driven to Succeed

What brought this bit of nostalgia to mind for me was a recent article I read about The Michelin Man. The article explained how Michelin first came up with The Michelin Man in 1894. One of the Michelin brothers noticed that the pile of bicycle tires displayed on the Michelin stand at the Lyon Universal Exposition in France looked like a man made of tires. (By the way, tires then were a pale white color, prior to the black die being added to make them the color more familiar to us today.) The company adopted the likeness, and in 1898 featured The Michelin Man in his first poster. Over the years, The Michelin Man evolved as tastes changed, and of course became synonymous with automobile tires, rather than bicycles. Believe it or not, initially, The Michelin Man drank and smoked cigars—two traits that would never pass muster today. But that’s the thing about a strong brand…it’s not afraid of change, and it knows when and how to remain relevant. Thanks to that self-awareness, along with the company’s ability to expand into a global supplier of quality tires, Michelin largely defined the tire industry, and later the automotive industry. The proudly plump mascot even transcended automotive to represent travel, fine dining and all things top quality for consumers around the world. Michelin accomplished this by understanding their industry and their customers (“Hey! People like to get in their cars and go out for a nice dinner. So, let’s create a list of the world’s finest dining establishments. And we’ll call it the Michelin Guide!), which drove them to not only innovate, but to build a personality around a character that began as a simple pile of tires thrown together for an industry trade show.

The Search is Over

Of course, we can’t discuss brands that outshine their competitors without acknowledging the brightest bulb in the room—Google. When we need to find a product, need a quick answer to our Tuesday night trivia (while the other teams aren’t looking, of course) or just have to know what people are saying about us, we google it. We’ve become so used to using Google for our searches that we’ve turned the monstrous noun into a verb. My computer’s spell check feature doesn’t even bother to point out that I’m spelling “google” with a lower-case “g.” After all, when’s the last time you heard someone say, “I’m going to search on Yahoo!” or “I’ll Bing it?” Just doesn’t happen anymore. Did it ever, really?

More Than Just a Noun

Perhaps that’s the key…to defy the rules and norms of grammar. Choose a brand name that functions equally well as both noun and verb, and could even get by as an adjective on occasion. Then, within your content marketing strategy, position your brand name to fill in for a commonly used and more generic-sounding word or colloquialism. When’s the last time you sneezed, and someone said, “Here, have a Kleenex,” and handed you a box of tissues that could have been any one of a number of alternatively branded facial tissues?

If You’re Not First, You’re Last

Please excuse the Ricky Bobby quote, but it’s true. Or, at least, it used to be true. Those brands that were first to market in their industries, or at least made a better first impression within their markets, became the default generic brands for their industries. (Kimberly-Clark invented facial tissues in 1924 and brought them to market as Kleenex. But Ginger ale, Root beer, and Dr. Pepper all preceded Coca-Cola as soft drinks. And Charles Goodyear invented vulcanized rubber in 1839 but died 40 years before his name would be attached to the famous tire. It wasn’t until 1888 that John Boyd Dunlap became the “second” inventor of the pneumatic tire.)

Today, as marketers, we continually hear how times are different, and to succeed we must think differently, act more quickly, find new ways to attract and speak to our customers, and leverage technology to help us differentiate ourselves. That all is true, but it’s not so different from how our predecessors did it a century or more ago. They identified opportunities, and they embraced them. As times changed, their brands evolved with it, making sure to make all the relevant changes while retaining those key traits that continue to position them as leaders in their respective industry.

While luck always plays a role to some degree, we must keep our eyes and ears open for opportunity, and grasp that opportunity to define not just ourselves to our customers, but define ourselves as the brand in our market.

Four Commitments to Create a Great Content Loyalty Strategy

A great Content Strategy is not a sprint to the finish line; it’s a marathon. You cannot turn it on and off as you redirect resources to other company initiatives.

A great Content Strategy is not a sprint to the finish line; it’s a marathon. You cannot turn it on and off as you redirect resources to other company initiatives. It is a continuous dialogue between your brand and your customers. Think of it as a relationship that must be continuously nurtured. To be successful, you must commit your organization.

Commitment #1

Every content strategy professes to build brand loyalty with existing customers. So why are the majority of companies engaged in content marketing focused on top-of-funnel goals like demand gen and brand awareness? According to Accenture Research, 66% of consumers spend more on brands to which they feel loyal. Commit to the goals of your content strategy and stay focused. Do not become distracted by requests from sales for leads. A lead gen strategy is not a loyalty strategy.

Commitment #2

Truly commit to the loyalty strategy. Reports show that marketers committed to using a long-term content strategy were 63% more likely to reach their goal of building customer loyalty. Your best new business opportunity is with your existing loyal customers and the word-of-mouth (WOM) they with generate on social platforms.

Commitment #3

Get comfortable using metrics to improve your work. Access to campaign metrics through platforms like Supermetrics, Google Data studio, and others will provide the data. However, it’s up to you to slice and dice the data for your application. To improve the effectiveness of your content strategy with metrics, be clear on your big picture goals. Make sure you are measuring things that indicated you are reaching your goals. Track performance against these KPIs every month. Create a spreadsheet that tracks marketing goals and KPIs. Regularly review your plan for gathering performance information and who will be responsible for collecting and reporting this data.

Commitment #4

Focus on loyalty. Educate your customers to nurture loyalty. Fill the informational needs of your audience with entertaining content. Use social media stories, video and blogs to create your brand voice. By focusing on your customer, their wants and needs, your brand will become clear with your customers.

A History of Storytelling

Storytelling is an essential component of the human experience. Rob Dietrich shares a history of storytelling from caves to epic poems to modern technology.

Storytelling has always been an essential component of the human experience. Humans have an innate desire to tell and listen to stories. A child asks her parent for a story before bedtime. A teacher tells his students a story to help make a lesson stick. Friends share advice by summarizing past experiences with each other. Stories entertain and educate us. They help us relive the past and prepare for the future.

From Caves to Epic Poems

The first example we have of human storytelling is on the walls of caves in Chauvet, France. In 1994, archeologists discovered paintings that depict various animals- deer, lions, wooly mammoths- as well as the eruption of a volcano. Researchers believe the inhabitants of the cave valued these illustrated stories so highly that they considered them to have sacred or magic properties. Carbon dating places these illustrations around 36,000 years old.

The ancient Egyptians took storytelling to the next level. Their hieroglyphic language, a series of pictographic symbols, is widely considered to be history’s first example of a written language. Developed around 5,000 years ago, this writing system allowed them to communicate more detailed ideas. Decoding this alphabet revealed ancient Egyptian stories about life at the time, beliefs about the afterlife, kings, wars and plague. The stories also revealed the evolving complexities of storytelling, such as humor and satire.

Around 2,700 years ago, Homer united the ancient Greeks with his epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. These stories were recorded and distributed to the surrounding city-states, and have been credited for establishing the Greek culture. It is highly likely that this was the first time humans realized the fantastic power contained by a good story!

“If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton

Storytelling Meets Technology

As history progressed, humans took and improved upon the stories written by the generations before them. The ways and types, along with the manner of telling stories became numerous. Shakespeare captured the imagination of the masses with his plays. In 1556 the first newspaper was published in Venice, covering the economic, political and military happenings of the time. Improvements in printing press technology and the spread of community theater allowed a wider circulation of stories and ideas. Then the 20^th century arrived bringing the radio, movies, and TV. These media opened up a whole new world of ways to tell and share stories, removing any barriers that lack of education and an inability to read previously put forth. Then, of course, came the Internet and the digital age of storytelling and idea sharing.

While the complexity, styles, manners, and themes have changed over history, storytelling has been around since the first prehistoric humans were able to point and grunt. Whether they’re creating a culture and unifying a nation or lulling a child to sleep, never underestimate the power of a well-told story.

Want some help telling your story? We can help!

Five Reasons Why Traveling the World Can Make You a Better Marketer

In celebration of graduating Northern Kentucky University with my Master of Science in Business Informatics, I recently traveled to Cuba, making it the 17^th foreign country I’ve visited. During my trip, I reflected on how I got there, why travel is so important to me, and how it has impacted my professional, and personal, life.

Traveling can give you a much-needed break and disconnect from the office, along with the 24/7 stream of messages flowing into your inbox. While that’s true, there’s plenty of benefits to your career and professional development that you will take home with you. Think of these five reasons as lifelong souvenirs after taking that trip abroad.

Open Your Eyes to New Perspectives

Like presents, people come in all different shapes, sizes, and backgrounds. Being a successful marketer requires having a great deal of empathy. You must know what your audience cares about, what their pain points are, and what they are sensitive to. The best way for you to grow your sense of empathy and ability to shift the lens of how you see the world is to see the world, put yourself out there, and meet others that are different.

Think about creating audience personas. It’s a best practice to create an audience persona, with an actual name so you can make this process more personalized, and then discover the persona’s wants, needs, pain points, lifestyle, and so on. The foundational skill for this process is empathy, and no marketing textbook, influencer, whitepaper, or conference can teach it to you.

Develop a Sense of Multiculturalism

A large chunk of managers who are sent abroad end up failing. If getting an overseas assignment is something that excites you, then you’ll want to get a head start on getting experience abroad. When working with, and marketing to, people of other cultures, it’s critical to be aware of their cultural norms and sensitivities. This includes having at least a basic working knowledge of their language, political climate, history, food customs, religious practices, culturally-specific phrases to say or avoid, and nonverbal communication, including tone-of-voice, hand signals, gestures, and spatial orientation. If you get any of these wrong in your marketing tactics, then you might do some massive damage to your brand, or even get into legal trouble.

A facepalm worthy example of a brand shooting itself in the foot is the United Kingdom based Tesco supermarket running a Ramadan promotion featuring smoky bacon flavored Pringles. Think about that for a second… There was also this rough example of people publishing a post so wrong that it landed them in jail. A pair of Instagram influencers focused on travel who posted a revealing picture of their butts at the world-famous Wat Arun temple in Thailand, a Buddhist country (wow did they mess up!). They were arrested for this picture and deported back to California after spending two weeks in jail, although they could have faced several years in prison. For additional context, many temples in Thailand require modest apparel to be worn out of respect (shorts aren’t even allowed at some), so that single Instagram post was an enormous disrespectful slap in the face to the Thai people.

On a positive note, having a multicultural bent enables you to ask questions and do your research before launching a new marketing campaign. Not only will you avoid an embarrassing blunder, but you will also be able to cultivate a deeper understanding and appreciation of a culture different than your own. This makes you a smarter and more engaged global citizen while also empowering you to build authentic connections with people different than you. Ultimately, you’ll be able to engage more in-depth with a culture and reap the rewards both professionally and personally. As the United States is a very diverse country, having multicultural awareness and communication skills will benefit you at home and abroad.

Discover Different Ways People Receive Information and Communicate

People around the world communicate in different ways and through different platforms. As marketers, we need to understand where our target audiences spend their time, how they like to get their information, and which communication channels they use. Knowing this information allows us to craft relevant marketing campaigns for our target audiences and optimize content that’s deliverable to them.

By traveling, you’ll get a better understanding of a society’s culture, which has a major impact on how they receive information. If you’re in PR, you’ll need to know which media outlets operate in that country, what their reputation is, and if they have any bias towards a certain topic. While researching this information, the knowledge you gathered on your trip could help you weed out certain media outlets or digital platforms quickly.

Being Adaptable and Able to Switch Gears on the Fly

You can have the most ingenious marketing campaign or strategy crafted, yet things won’t always go your way. Your targeted audience might not respond to your ad, your content calendar might not cultivate much engagement, or your campaign might not yield conversions. It can happen to the best of us. What will set you apart is your ability to take these circumstances, adapt to them immediately, and make changes to improve the outcome.

How does traveling play into this? Well first, no travel itinerary goes 100% according to plan. I’ve had my fair share of “WTF do I do now?” experiences in unfamiliar countries. This recently happened to me within my first hour of being in Cuba. I forgot to ask the taxi driver who picked me up from the airport to call the Airbnb host and let him know I would arrive at the apartment momentarily. So, I got dropped off on the street in the middle of Havana in front of an apartment building without the host anywhere to be found. With my elementary level Spanish, I asked a senior woman on the street, who luckily happened to live in the same building, to call him. She and I could barely understand each other, but she was very kind and helpful, and he showed up 15 minutes later!

As marketers, we need to understand that plans don’t always go as expected. Creating contingency plans is always a good business practice, but sometimes weird things happen that not even the contingency plans cover. That’s why it’s important to train yourself to be adaptable in unfamiliar situations and scenarios where things go wrong. Traveling gives you the skills to shift your plans, think creatively for outside of the box solutions, and ask for help from people at a moment’s notice.

Discovering, Appreciating, and Capturing Beauty in all its Forms

When is the last time you looked down the street, stopped, and thought to yourself, “Wow, this is incredibly vibrant and beautiful with many stories behind it,”? It can be easy to glance over, but even typing that very sentence made me take a closer look down Main Street in Covington’s Mainstrasse (my neighborhood) and have a moment of appreciation for all the culture and history behind it. Traveling gives you that appreciation for all the beautiful things that the world and life have to offer, which can directly result in a more creative eye. Visual content is the trend in marketing right now with no end in sight. On social media, your posts better at least have a compelling image tied to them if a video isn’t possible.

Traveling will give you that curiosity to explore, appreciate, and capture beauty in all its forms. As you snap and record away, you’re going to refine your photography and videography skillset. You’re also going to learn to look for appealing visual content in ways that you never did before. For me, my first trip abroad to Italy in high school solidified my interest in photography and travel, and then taking a professional photography class while studying abroad during my undergrad in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, Costa Rica, has given me an eye for capturing visual content that I wouldn’t have otherwise. You don’t need to be a professional photographer or videographer to capture beautiful visual content worthy of sharing; you just need to know how to look for it, recognize it, appreciate it, and then represent it through the appropriate marketing channels.

Final Thoughts

In the end, traveling alone won’t make these five reasons come to life for you. You are responsible for that. Travel is the vehicle, and you’re the driver. You own these experiences and the outcomes of them. If you go to a country and just want to spend time at the all-inclusive resort’s pool while only interacting with people who can speak English, then you’re going to lose out on a lot of experiences and context that will help you grow. Successful marketers think outside of the box, are willing to take some risk to be innovative and reap great rewards, have an open mind, and are adaptable to all the unexpected curve balls that may be thrown at them. Traveling the world will help you build and refine these skills. No marketing class, book, whitepaper, blog (even this post), or whatever piece of content can teach these to you. There’s only one way to do that, and that’s to experience the world yourself.

In case you’re wondering, Cuba is an amazingly vibrant, beautiful, fun, and safe country to explore. To get a glimpse of what I experienced in Cuba, check out my album!

When You’re a Marketing Team of One

When you’re a marketing team of one, things get more complicated. Things like schedules and strategies and goals can quickly get usurped for the latest marketing fire unless you’re able to get ahead of the rest of the organization. I should know – I was a marketing team of one for a good chunk of my career before joining the O’Keeffe tribe.

Here are the top five things I wish I’d known early in my career as a marketing team of one.

Documentation is your best friend.

It sounds like a no-brainer, right? Document things. Easy peasy. But when you’re a team of one, you’re likely juggling priorities across the business and, depending on the history of the organization, and who you report to, you may be dealing with conflicting ideas on how you should move forward.

Hence documentation.

It’s more than just a recap of emails after meetings (although those are essential). Think about how you can best communicate your strategy and your wins across the business. Would a monthly report help? How about a note breaking down wins via email with a why it matters summary? Find ways to bring your leadership and the rest of your organization along on this magical marketing journey with you.

Stay connected within the marketing community.

As a marketing team of one, you will likely be the only person who gets excited when a significant client tweets at you or when you double your open rate on that biweekly email send. Find your local marketing community and make nerdy friends. Sometimes a lunch spent talking segmentation is the boost you need to push out your new content strategy. Your local AMA is an excellent resource for this, but so are Meetups, user groups, and events or conferences.

Make friends, and you’ll always have someone to call to celebrate a big victory or talk you off a ledge when Salesforce breaks.

Keep a roadmap.

Depending on the nature of your organization and whether you’re setting the long-term strategy, you’ll need to keep an eye on your initiatives. Sometimes you’ll be working through a tough time with your sales team, and you’ll need a way to refocus on what’s next. Your roadmap will be your strategic marketing bible and help you cut through priorities. It’s easy to get overwhelmed as a team of one. Being able to reference that roadmap can help your leadership stay focused on where you can make the most impact.

Do the math.

Let’s face it: pulling your monthly analytics isn’t a high priority when you’re managing a giant marketing strategy. But it’s also the one thing that will help you see the light at the end of the long, complicated white paper you’re writing. Being able to see your progress is hugely motivating, and that process of continual optimization isn’t possible without a historical perspective on your efforts. It’ll also save you if you ever want to find a new home because showing concrete results is the best way to land your next gig.

Find time to get creative.

When all of the pressure rests on your marketing shoulders, it’s easy to stay head down and ignore the outside world. You’re just trying to knock out this week’s social posts – there isn’t time for nerding out with a whiteboard and reviewing your personas. The single best way to stop stress and burnout is to stay creative and engaged in your work. Make the time to develop new strategies, review fun ideas, and learn skills that help set you apart. It keeps your brain fresh and your marketing strategy even fresher.

Being a marketing team of one isn’t easy. I’d wager that it’s one of the hardest roles to fill as a marketer. That kind of ownership and responsibility can be insanely fun if you’re able to ride through competing priorities, times of loneliness as you long for a team, and all those conversations explaining just what exactly you do to the rest of the organization.

Did you read this and think, gosh, I wish I had a marketing buddy like the O’Keeffe tribe? We’d love to work with you and help you tell your story. Send us a quick message and let’s talk.

Why Companies Need B2B Content

Businesses in every industry have valuable stories to tell about their products and services. However, many are not utilizing the power of content, and their stories aren’t being heard. I believe it is important that companies incorporate content marketing into their lead generation and sales processes to give customers the information they really want. So, why is content important for B2B businesses? I’ve put together a list of my top reasons.

Quality content builds credibility and authority

Consistent, quality content can help establish your company as a leader in your industry. By writing thought leadership pieces, you are proving your expertise to those who might need your services. Gaining that credibility and authority is important when it comes to strengthening your relationship with current customers, as well as attracting the attention of new ones. The more you write and publish, the simpler it will be for you to convince your target audience that you are an expert in the business subject you’re promoting and selling. Your thought leadership de-risks their buying process.

Buyers are always looking for helpful content

According to LinkedIn, 79 percent of small businesses say that industry specific news and articles are the most valuable pieces of content they look for on social media. 79 percent! This illustrates that companies are out there reading and looking for answers. It’s important that your company is part of the conversation.

The B2B buying journey can take some time

The buying journey for B2B companies can often take much longer than it does for B2C companies. This is because you are building a relationship with your potential customers, rather than asking for a simple transaction. Because the process can often take some time, it is important to stay in touch with prospects throughout their journey. Helpful and relevant content acts as a great touchpoint and provides a way to initiate discussions and ensure loyal follow-up. It also doesn’t hurt that 74% of B2B buyers choose a vendor that’s first to help them with useful content, according to LinkedIn.

Google recognizes quality content

A high SEO ranking is the cherry on top of producing quality material. Marketing is a great way to promote your brand and reach new customers, as well as get recognized by Google, who will award your efforts with a good ranking. You just have to make sure you are publishing quality content consistently. However, while it can be tempting to write purely for SEO purposes, always be sure to focus on writing compelling content about the things your target audience would be most interested in. There is no downside to optimizing your content for SEO, but don’t lose sight of your primary goals when you create and deliver content.

Every B2B company has a story to tell and an audience to share it with, whether it is current clients, prospective clients or industry colleagues. Providing and publishing relevant content can make a major difference in creating a rewarding customer relationship. B2B businesses are embracing the benefits of content each day and are seeing direct results. Make sure your company doesn’t miss out on opportunities that content marketing can provide.

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