Matt Duffy

The tough question about content marketing in regulated industries

Recently our good friend Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs came over to visit us here at Schwartz. We asked her if she’d sit down for a quick video interview with our own Laura Kempke, SVP Content Marketing Services, and Ann agreed.

Before the interview, Ross Levanto, another SVP here at Schwartz, and Laura and I took Ann out for some tasty Thai food at Green Papaya in Waltham and basically laughed through the entire lunch. Some of the fun was focused on Ross finishing two entrees before the rest of us finished one, but a lot of our discussion was around content marketing. We got on the topic of creating content for the healthcare industry and other highly regulated industries and how challenging that can be. Ann admitted that in previous interviews she had been asked about how organizations in regulated industries should go about creating content, and that she always hated answering that question. It is in fact, quite a loaded question, and one that’s not easy to answer without looking at a specific organization’s situation.

After lunch we returned to Schwartz for Laura’s interview with Ann. About 2 minutes into the interview Laura proceeds to ask Ann the exact question about regulated industries that Ann told us she hated. Ann of course answered it amazingly well, and laughed with us afterward about how Laura tried to “stick it to her.” After we told this story to some other folks at Schwartz, a few members of our digital team thought it would be funny to hear the story directly from those who were involved. Here’s what happened: 

Posted by Matt Duffy on May 3, 2011 at 1:38 PM
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Why Schwartz is NOT like Color Me Badd

One of the best award show monologues ever was delivered by Chris Rock at the 1997 MTV Video Awards. He looked out into the audience and told everyone not to expect to see each other the next year because in the music industry, it’s “here today, gone today.” He said “Sir Mix-a-lot…he ain’t mixin as much as he used to is he?”

One of the other bands he called out for being in the "where are they now" category was Color Me Badd. For those of you who don't know this pretty awful band, Color Me Badd was the only group with two top 20 hits in 1991. I remember this because I was a college senior and danced like a complete fool at parties to their tunes. Most of the bands with hits in 1991 didn’t last because that’s the way the music industry is – the same holds true almost every year. It also can ring true for the PR and marketing industry. Most of the firms started in 1991 either disolved during one of the bubbles or because they couldn’t adapt to the changing needs of the communications landscape.

I’m proud to be part of a firm that was started in 1991 and is celebrating its 20 year anniversary this year. I joined Schwartz just a year and a half ago, so I can’t take any real credit for the firm’s longevity, but what I will say is the agency has been able to adapt and change as communications channels have changed. In an industry like the music industry where it’s sometimes “here today, gone today,” I’m glad that Schwartz is able to celebrate its 20th birthday this year. If we had thought of it, we should have played some Color Me Badd songs at our anniversary parties.

I hope you enjoy this quick video we put together as part of the celebration:

Posted by Matt Duffy on March 31, 2011 at 11:33 AM
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3 Simple Tests for Before, During, and After Delivering Content to Your Audience

I read two good blog entries yesterday about how marketers need to make sure they’re creating content that is engaging. One of them was a piece in PRWeek written by Schwartz president Bryan Scanlon. (I’m sure you’re all shocked I would speak highly of a blog written by my boss.) The other was a blog by Ann Handley of MarketingProfs, of whom I’m a big fan.

Both of them make basically the point that sometimes marketers lose track of the ultimate goal of content – to connect with or engage a community. In other words, yes, it’s important to create A LOT of content, but it’s more important that the content is educational and not overly self-promotional so your audience will come back for more. A marketer could create five eBooks and ten webinars in a year and say to their CEO, “You wanted content marketing, well mission accomplished!” But in reality, it only moves from being content creation to actual content marketing if you can show that you connected with the audience.

So how do you do this? There are many different ways to test whether your content is engaging, but as a start, I thought I’d just provide one thing to think about at each stage of deploying your content:

Before Deploying Content:
This has been said before (and probably said best in Ann Handley’s book Content Rules), but before you put any content “out there,” you should make sure it’s solving a problem for your target audience. Ask yourself: “does my content explain a problem and provide a solution or does it only explain how my product/service works?” Ideally you’d present the problem, and help your audience to see many ways to solve it that will eventually lead them to you for help. Start with making it interesting, and hopefully the customers will come to you. This always reminds me of what 1960’s ad executive Howard Luck Gossage said: “People don’t read ads. People read what they’re interested in and sometimes it’s an ad.”

While Content is Being Consumed:
Two words: trackable links. This is not at all a new way to measure engagement, but all of your content pieces should contain trackable links within them so you have data on which links were interesting enough for people to click on. It’s ok to say “500 people downloaded my eBook,” but it’s not a real measure of engagement unless you look at what they did once inside the eBook. You can also go way beyond data about clicks when measuring video content engagement using tools from VisibleGains and others. It’s critical to know how long people viewed certain segments and where there was drop off.

After:
This may also seem obvious, but the best measure of engagement is what your audience does with the content after it was consumed. Did they forward or share the content with others or tweet about it? Did they come back and consume more content from you later (content that you were, of course, smart enough to push out to them)? Did you check in with them within a week and ask what they thought of the content? I’d rather have 200 people read a piece of content, share it, and return later for more content, than have 500 people read some content and never come back.

Posted by Matt Duffy on February 8, 2011 at 10:32 AM
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Can you really jump-start a Content Marketing program in a week?

Last week we had about 100 marketers in the room for our breakfast roundtable on content marketing here at our headquarters outside of Boston. (Watch highlights from the first half of the event). We came up with an interesting premise for the event:  one week before the event we would pick the name of an attendee out of a hat and create some free content for their company and show it at the event.

Cool idea, right? We thought it was, but I have to admit that my biggest concern was around how much cooperation we’d get from the marketer we chose. As it turned out, we chose a great company in downtown Boston, Exari (note: they’re not a Schwartz client), and their marketing team was more than willing to let us dive in, grab pieces of content they already had, film people in their offices, and immerse ourselves in their message for a week. Exari is a growing document assembly software company that helps companies automate the creation of NDAs, contracts and other legal documents. Here were the big issues, as we saw them:

• Exari was driving a lot of visitors to their site, but wasn’t converting enough to leads. The company has great blogs, but hasn't created a lot of content that merits asking for registration information
• A lot of Exari’s target customers (CFOs and other top executives) don’t necessarily know there is a software solution to address their document assembly woes
• Our SEO team noted that “NDA” is by far the most-searched term related to Exari’s products, so NDA-related content may be a good way to cast a big net
• The Exari site was in need of compelling video content to tell their product story.

So here’s what we did:

• We created a short (6 page) white paper for them with the word “NDA” in the title, focusing on the benefits of automating the creation of NDAs and other corporate documents. (Note: Exari is making final edits to the white paper now). We also had a new white paper template designed for them.
• We created a landing page for the white paper in HubSpot (Exari is a new HubSpot customer), to show how they could easily deploy the content on their site without involving their IT staff as well as offering them an easy way to collect visitor data through Hubspot’s contact forms.
• To help Exari highlight the business need for their solution, we got a group of CFOs and other executives to give us quick sound bites about the arduous process of manually creating documents. We also added a brief impromptu video intro from the Exari founder.

We presented the content at the event and got a great response from the attendees, and more importantly, from Exari. The speakers at our event also gave some good additional tips about the content. Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs.com, who has a great new book called Content Rules, made the point that you have to think very carefully about which content should be behind a registration wall; ideally it shouldn’t just be a re-hash of existing blog content. Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot (who also has a great book out), added that eBooks are great for lead generation, so it sometimes makes sense to take the content for a whitepaper and present it in eBook form.

Overall I believe we got our message across that creating content doesn’t have to feel like writing War and Peace. If we could do it in a week for a company that isn’t even a client, we think every marketer should take the plunge for their company.

Posted by Matt Duffy on December 21, 2010 at 3:17 PM
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How hard is it for a company to get VC funding in 2010? Ask the experts.

With all of the recent talk of a potential double-dip recession, start-ups and later stage companies seeking funding may be asking themselves whether the already-cautious VCs are about to become even more cautious. A recent survey by the Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Project confirms that some VCs and angel investors are indeed becoming more risk averse and looking to put more money into existing portfolio companies rather than test the waters with an unfamiliar start-up. This doesn't mean that companies seeking funding should abandon all hope, however. First of all, it should be pointed out that the double-dip recession may not even happen, as Hale Stewart explains in his recent blog post. Second of all, there are positive signs in the investment community, such as some data released by VentureDeal showing that many sectors saw increased funding in Q2 over Q1.
 
In situations like these, it's sometimes nice to put aside the survey data and statistics for a minute and just listen to real people, in this case VCs, discussing what they think. We had the chance to talk to some leading VCs, CEOs and start-up gurus at the AlwaysOn VentureSummit this summer, to ask them their thoughts on the economy. While these conversations also happened before the recent scare about a "double-dip," what you'll hear in their answers is a generally positive attitude about things to come. What you'll also hear as a bonus is how these industry leaders answered our question about which online video they most recently watched - something members of the digital group here at Schwartz are always interested in hearing. 

Posted by Matt Duffy on September 8, 2010 at 4:45 PM
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