Content Marketing Requires Brick and Feathers
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Transcript of Content Marketing Requires Brick and Feathers
Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers
Visit us at vocus.com Social Search Email PR
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Heavy and Light: Why Your Con-tent Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers
Visit us at vocus.com Social Search Email PR
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Created for Vocus
by Jay Baer of Convince & Convert
Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers
Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers
“
Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and FeathersDo you remember the trick question from grade school? Which weighs more, five pounds of bricks or five pounds of feathers? As you may remember, they of course weigh the same. After all, five pounds is five pounds. But in social media and content marketing, not all communication has the same heft or impact, and you need to produce communica-tion of both the light and heavy varieties.
What is a Feather?
Feathers are the tsunami of flotsam and
jetsam that constantly envelops us on-
line today like a Snuggie comprised of
words and photos. Feathers are tweets.
Feathers are Instagram photos. Feath-
ers are status updates. Most blog posts
are feathers. Like a feather, these
content executions are lightweight,
ephemeral, temporal and disposable.
You might love a feather. You might even
share a feather. But a feather by itself - or even
a whole pile of them - is unlikely to have enough persuasive
power to cause you to make a purchase.
What is a Brick?
Bricks are the building blocks of digital com-
munication. They are the longer, more
in-depth executions that break through
the shower of feathers by having extra
heft, production value and relevancy.
Bricks are ebooks like this one. Bricks
are webinars. Bricks are infographics.
Bricks are “real” videos (Vine and Insta-
gram videos are typically in the feathers
category). You may not love bricks in the
same way you love feathers, because bricks
are often more serious and detailed. You’ll never see a brick
meme. But bricks have a lifespan that feathers do not. Bricks
are downloaded, saved or printed out.
Bricks are what Ian Greenleigh, author of the forthcoming
new book, “The Social Media Side Door,” calls “rocketship
content” because they can be quickly elevated within orga-
nizations to reach the desks of decision makers. You don’t
often forward your CMO an Instagram photo (or even a blog
post, usually). But you do forward well-executed bricks.
Feathers drive interest;
bricks drive action.
“
Kicking the Tires, Invisibly
It’s important to recognize that the vast majority of your
prospective customers are located below the water line.
It used to be that we created sales through relationships,
via face-to-face or telephonic connection. No more.
Increasingly, sales are now generated through information.
Research from Sirius Decisions finds that in busi-
ness-to-business (B2B) scenarios, 70 percent of the pur-
chase decision is made before the prospect ever contacts
the company. The same dynamic exists in many B2C
environments as well. I recently gave a presentation to a
large conference of automobile dealers who told me that it
is now routine for potential buyers to show up at the deal-
ership knowing more about the vehicle than the salesper-
son trying to convince them to purchase. Those prospects
don’t need the salesperson to inform or educate them, as
they’ve done all of that themselves without the dealership
ever knowing about it. Customers are information ninjas
today, kicking the information tires right under your nose.
Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers
Google published an extraordinary book in 2011 called “The
Zero Moment of Truth” (http://www.zeromomentoftruth.
com). The findings in the book are based on an omnibus
research project that surveyed tens of thousands of Amer-
ican consumers across a panoply of shopping categories
(financial services, electronics, restaurants, etc.). What Google
discovered is that in 2010, consumers across all categories
needed 5.3 sources of information before making a pur-
chase. In 2011, just one year later, consumers needed 10.4
sources of information before making the same purchases.
Whoa. In one year, the same people needed twice as much
information before buying the same items.
This is mathematical evidence of the information ninja
phenomenon. Customers today are hyper-researching
everything, and if you’re not accounting for some of those
10.4 sources of information, you are making your prospec-
tive customers work too hard to determine whether you’re
the right solution.
An Abundance of Feathers
There are two ways you can
succeed in this environment of
hyper-researching customers:
with a TON of feathers, or with
a methodical combination
of feathers and bricks. The
first option is perhaps best
demonstrated by River Pools
and Spas, an installer of in-
ground, fiberglass swimming
pools in Virginia.
In 2009, River Pools almost went out
of business. There wasn’t much demand for pools in the
5.3 sources
10.4 sources
2010
2011
depths of the Great Recession, and the company was in
desperate straights. Fortunately, River Pools is co-owned by
Marcus Sheridan, who is now a marketing consultant and
proprietor of the excellent blog, The Sales Lion (http://www.
thesaleslion.com). Faced with a future that was uncertain
at best, Marcus decided to go crazy with feathers in an
attempt to save his company. He created a blog, and wrote
several hundred posts at night and on weekends. Each post
answered an actual question he or his partners had heard
from prospective customers in the previous few years.
Eventually, the River Pools blog published more than 1,000
blog posts and they are still writing, writing, writing.
The company didn’t just survive - it thrived. Today, River
Pools receives more website visits than any other swim-
ming pool site in the US, including the big manufacturers.
River Pools has a brick - an outstanding ebook comprised
of their most popular blog posts - but they mostly succeed
with feathers alone. This is only possible because Riv-
er Pools has an almost unfathomable volume of
feathers, and their customers have a nearly
unquenchable desire to self-educate.
Remarkably, the average new River
Pools customer views more than 105
blog posts before contacting the com-
pany. One. Hundred. Five. Talk about
rolling around in a pile of feathers!
Even more amazing is the fact that 75
percent of new River Pools customers
purchase a swimming pool without ever
talking to a company representative. Why bother?
All the questions they had about the company and its prod-
ucts were already answered with an enormous collection of
blog post feathers.
The 19 year-old Dude
River Pools and Marcus Sheridan are atypical, however. The
far more likely scenario is that companies eschew bricks
(because they are more difficult, expensive and time con-
suming to produce) and continue producing only feathers,
but without anywhere near the colossal volume exhibited
by River Pools. The biggest problem with most social media
and content marketing programs is that they are all feath-
ers and no bricks, but without enough feathers to make that
imbalance actually succeed.
iPad 10:15PM
105
Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers
To paraphrase Gary Vaynerchuk, author of the forthcoming
new book, “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook,” most marketers be-
have like 19 year-old dudes; they attempt to close the deal
on the first date.
I have been present in meetings (and more than a couple)
where smart businesspeople have said, “We’re getting good
traffic to our blog, how come we’re not generating any
leads?” This is the classic 19 year-old dude mentality, trying
to quickly close everything and everyone. Show
me a blog post, or status update, or one-off
photo that addresses enough buyer ques-
tions to drive sales by itself, and I’ll show
you an exceedingly rare piece of con-
tent. The secret of River Pools isn’t the
power of any one or two or even ten or
twenty blog posts. The secret is that they
have more than 1,000 rock-solid blog
posts that literally address every facet and
nuance of the category. Your blog doesn’t, of
that I’m almost positive. Mine certainly does not.
Is it possible to succeed with only feathers? Yes, as River
Pools demonstrates. But ultimately, what is the easier path;
to create so many feathers that you leave no stone of inqui-
sition unturned, or to create a reasonable number of feathers
augmented with a few bricks? I’ll embrace the latter in almost
every case, as it requires less time and expense overall.
The Buyer’s Journey
A key to understanding and implementing the bricks and
feathers* approach is recognition that prospective custom-
ers need different pieces of information - and have different
questions - at various stages of the purchase consideration
cycle. At the very beginning of their relationship with your
company, these potential buyers may not know anything
about you whatsoever. Thus, their first question may be
something akin to, “What is it that these guys sell?” Inci-
dentally, this is why it’s so irksome that many companies,
especially in the software industry, are so vague in their own
descriptions of their offerings, with enormous dollops of
jargon sloppily filling an unsatisfying informational donut.
I’m happy to say that Vocus is an exception here, as a visit to
Vocus.com tells you straight away that: “Vocus completely
integrates social, search, email & PR with smart software
solutions that help you attract,
engage and retain customers.”
That is, of course, by no means
enough information to make a
purchasing decision, but at least
we know what types of problems
Vocus can ostensibly address.
As the prospect learns more
about your company through their
research, the questions they have
about you change and become more spe-
cific. Once you know what Vocus does generally,
you may now need to know whether it allows you to send
Tweets, or whether it works with teams with multiple mem-
bers, or what the software costs.
This is the buyer’s journey; the process by which he or she
steadily uncovers information about you, and, with each
new finding, recalibrates your worthiness and suitability.
Dating works the same way, does it not?
The first time you meet someone, your initial question
(typically not voiced, but very much present) might be: “Is
this person a creeper, and a present danger to me?” Once
past that barrier, you consider other elements such as
appearance, sense of humor, political and religious lean-
ings, whether they think Louis C.K is funny or offensive, etc.
This is the “dater’s journey” and is fundamentally the same
inquisitive process that prospective customers undergo.
To maximize your chance of winning a customer, you
should create different types and formats of content that
are most appropriate for each stage of that buyer’s journey.
The Right Tool for the Job
The excellent online presentation “From Content to
Customer” published in 2011 by the marketing
automation software company Eloqua, pro-
vides a framework for the buyer’s journey
that includes four stations: Suspects,
Prospects, Leads and Opportunities, and
suggests that certain information pack-
ages are more likely to be consumed by
each, especially in B2B scenarios.
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Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers
Suspects are the broadest audience with nearly no under-
standing of your company and its offerings. Suspects want
to know what your company knows, not what you sell. This
is where blogs like Marcus Sheridan’s for River Pools and
Spas can be a tremendous difference-maker. Eloqua also
recommends “infotainment” for Suspects, like Facebook
status updates and Instagram photos. Feathers are perfect
for Suspects.
Prospects are defined as having supplied personal informa-
tion in exchange for more information. At this stage, Pros-
pects want information that relates to their particular inter-
ests. Once someone becomes a Prospect, they need bricks
that address their needs, such as direct mail, events, online
Webinars, reports and guides.
A Lead is a Prospect that meets specific, pre-determined
criteria, making them disproportionately likely to become
a customer. Leads desire very specific information address-
ing their circumstances. Brick formats to consider here
include white papers, ebooks and product comparisons.
Opportunities are potential customers that are ready to buy.
This is when prospects cross the chasm from self-serve to
full-serve. This is when personalized relationship-building
takes over the process. In short, this is when marketing
yields to sales. Marcus Sheridan writing blog posts reaches
Suspects. Marcus Sheridan showing up in your living room
to talk about swimming pools is all about Opportunities.
There really aren’t any bricks for the Opportunity stage, as
that’s when business gets personal.
In summary:
Suspect = Feathersblog posts, social media
Prospects = Brickswebinars, videos, infographics
Leads = Brickswhite papers, ebooks, comparisons
Opportunities = Human Contactscalls, emails, meetings
Bricks as Youtility
One of the temptations of marketers, especially when
creating content for Prospects and Leads, is to produce
bricks that are only about the company and its products
and services. “This prospective customer has demonstrated
interest,” goes the theory, “so we need to give her more
information about us.” Actually, no. By the time the poten-
tial customer reaches the Prospect or Lead stage, she has
probably already consumed just about everything you’ve
made available for easy download. Remember, the average
River Pools customer reads 105 blog posts. The self-serve,
below the water line phase is much more comprehensive
than we typically believe. What this means in practice is
that Prospects and Leads don’t need much more informa-
tion about YOU, they need information that helps THEM.
Ideally, bricks at this stage are truly
and inherently useful, with a value prop-
osition that is freestanding. They are, in
fact, so useful that people might actu-
ally pay for them. They are a “Youtil-
ity,” as defined in my best-selling
book by the same name. This ebook
is sponsored by Vocus, but isn’t about
Vocus. As you are reading this, do you
feel good about Vocus as a company?
Does a heightened understanding of
bricks and feathers give you a better sense
for how you might effectively utilize software from Vocus?
Is this information so useful that you’d pay a couple dollars
for it, if I asked you to do so? I hope so, as do they. What you
are reading is a Youtility brick: marketing with intrinsic val-
ue, given away for free, that informs more than it promotes.
Syncapse has a Youtility brick that’s targeted to Prospects
and Leads, and is also “real-time relevant,” meaning that it
focuses on a particular timeline, location or circumstance.
Capitalizing upon seasonal creation of marketing budgets
for the following year, Syncapse created an online Face-
book Advertising Spend Calculator and launched it in
September 2012. A technology company that helps large
business-to-consumer marketers understand and optimize
their social media, Syncapse is trying to get companies to
think about social (especially social advertising) as an an-
nual program, rather than a series of short-term campaigns.
Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers
Users of this free tool answer a
series of questions about their
business, their objectives and
their use of Facebook, and the
tool scans the brand’s Facebook
page in real-time, providing a
recommended annual budget
for Facebook advertising for the
following year.
As companies continue to expand their
social media participation, two big questions become im-
portant, according to Max Kalehoff, vice president of prod-
uct marketing at Syncapse. The first is, “What’s the ROI of
what you’ve already invested in?” Then, secondly, “What
decisions are you going to make differently in the future?”
Kalehoff says the Facebook Advertising Spend Calculator
helps answer those questions.
“What we’ve done with the Facebook Ads Investment
Calculator is provide a very easy, nearly spoon-fed meth-
odology for surfacing the most important questions about
your brand and its situation in the marketplace, in order to
extract the strengths of Facebook,” says Kalehoff.
As one of the first tools of its kind online, the calculator is
being used often, spreading throughout organizations, with
multiple people kicking the data tires. It’s rocketship content.
“They’ll put in various parameters and then they’ll run it
several more times, changing the parameters and then
within the next 24 hours you’ll see anywhere from two
to ten of their colleagues come back on the site,” Kalehoff
asserts. “It’ll help you contextualize and have a reference
point for budgeting if you’re looking to see how much mon-
ey of your total pie you should allocate to social media. We’re
really hoping to stretch the thinking of what’s possible.”
Isn’t that more effective than a webinar or white paper that
tells potential customers just how awesome Syncapse is,
filled with the typical case studies, testimonials and plaudits?
Bricks and Backlinks
As you probably know, a sizable factor in how web pages
and websites are ranked by Google and Bing is the number
of links from other sites, as well as links included in social
media mentions. In almost every case, bricks will attract
more links and mentions than will a feather. Because bricks
are more comprehensive, with enhanced production val-
ues, they are likely to be talked about, commented upon and
linked to in ways that an individual blog post will not (other
feathers, like social media updates, are unlikely to get many
links at all outside of social media itself).
In this way, effective bricks collect links that benefit your
entire site from a search rankings perspective. In some
industries, this is a significant bonus provided by bricks.
The Digital Dandelion
While you of course want your bricks to be available on
your own website (to get the backlinks, if nothing else),
please don’t believe that your owned digital real estate
is the only potential home for your bricks. In
fact, for most companies, of all the places
online that their content could live, their
website gets the least amount of traffic,
not the most.
The best way to maximize the value
of your bricks is to become a digital
dandelion, spreading your valuable
and useful information to as many
corners of the Web as possible. This
means making your ebooks available on
Slideshare; and then creating an infograph-
ic of ebook highlights and running it as a guest
post on related blogs; or making a video summary of the
ebook for YouTube; or even making several Vine videos that
describe specific elements of the ebook (how’s that for effi-
ciency, feathers that summarize a brick!)
You want bricks to get attention, period. Stop overvaluing
your own digital real estate and undervaluing real estate
you don’t control.
Market Your Marketing
Another facet of bricks that separates them from feathers is
that they have enough breadth and value to be proactively
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Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers
promoted. You know what happens when most companies
launch a branded mobile application or ebook, or webi-
nar that effectively combines information and promotion?
Nothing. You’ve heard the saying, “If a tree falls in the forest
and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The
same logic works in these scenarios: “If you create a brick
and don’t tell anyone about it, did it ever exist?”
When you finish completing the brick, you
haven’t reached the marketing finish line;
you have just reached the starting line. Too
many businesses break out the cham-
pagne just because something new was
made. Remember, Youtility is all about
being useful, which means “full of use.”
The objective is not to make information.
The objective is to make information that
customers and prospective customers will use.
However, because creating bricks - while more complicated
than making feathers - is often an inexpensive proposition
when considered in the context of the overall marketing
program of a company, these efforts are viewed as relatively
minor and thus don’t receive dedicated promotional sup-
port, even at launch. Instead, bricks end up getting promot-
ed no differently than feathers: a link here, a mention there.
This dramatically curtails exposure - counteracting the
entire premise of the brick.
And this is where social media can play an important role in
your content initiatives.
“ Content is fire; social media is gasoline.
“
In almost every case, companies would be better off spend-
ing more of their social media communication promoting
truly useful bricks than promoting the fact that the compa-
ny exists and has products and services. The fact is, whether
they are using Vocus or some other platform, a sizable per-
centage of social communication is essentially, “Our com-
pany is awesome, click here to let us prove it.” That’s nei-
ther interesting nor effective. Instead, you can and should
use your social messaging to draw attention to your bricks,
useful (hopefully) content that informs, persuades and is
elevated within the organizations of potential buyers.
How Much is Too Much?
How many feathers do you need? As Marcus Sheridan
demonstrates at River Pools, if you adopt a feathers-only
approach, you ideally need enough feathers to answer
every customer question.
If you opt for a mixture of bricks and feathers, you still need
to answer every question, but you can do so with a core
stable of feathers, augmented by a collection of more spe-
cific bricks that address the needs of Prospects and Leads.
The best way to think through this in your organization is
to create a list of all questions that prospective customers
might have, segmented by persona and stage of the buyer’s
journey. Then, determine whether each question would
best be answered by a feather or a brick. Of course, as not-
ed above, there are many different types of brick and feath-
er executions, but in this planning process, I like to think
of each question and ask, “Blog post, or bigger?” meaning,
“Can this question be thoroughly addressed within the rela-
tively limited confines of a single blog post, or could/should
it be expanded or combined with other ques-
tions, and handled via video, ebook,
webinar or other brick?”
Once you’ve determined via this
process the questions that are
answerable via feathers, and
which via bricks, adopt an ed-
itorial calendar that method-
ically creates those answers.
It’s unquestionably easier to do
this for feathers, as adhering to a
schedule of routine blogging and/
or social media participation is much
simpler than consistent production of more
robust content executions. But you can (and should) make
a calendar for your bricks, too. For example, I agreed to
create this ebook with Vocus a couple of months ago, and
the company has several more in the queue. Your results
(and appetite for planning) may vary, but I advise to have
your bricks plan built at least 90 days in advance, and an
objective - for small and mid-sized companies - of four to six
legitimate bricks per year.
Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers
Comparing Bricks and Feathers
Now that you’ve read about the roles of bricks and feathers*
in your content marketing and social media, here’s a handy
comparison chart for reference. Think of it as a special
Youtility, just for reading this far!
Bricks Feathers
Executions ebooks, webinars, videos
blog posts, social media
Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
Prospects, Leads Suspects
Life Span Weeks, Months Hours, Days
SEO Potential Strong Minimal
Difficulty to Create Higher Lower
Location Your site, plus else-where
Your site, your social media
Youtility More intrinsically valuable
Less intrinsically valuable
Volume needed Less More
About the Author
Jay Baer is a hype-free digital marketing strategist, speaker,
author, and founder of marketing services firm Convince
& Convert.
Jay has consulted with more than 700 companies on digital
marketing since 1994. He was named one of America’s top
social media consultants by Fast Company magazine. His
Convince and Convert blog is ranked as the world’s #1 con-
tent marketing resource.
His new book about making marketing useful is called
Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help not Hype and
is a New York Times best seller.
*Special thanks to Chris Sietsema, head of digital operations
at Convince & Convert, for pioneering the “bricks and feath-
ers” concept.
About Vocus
Marketing has evolved. To succeed on a local or national
level in today’s world, marketers need to make digital chan-
nels work together to generate brand awareness, demand
and revenue.
Vocus offers a unique solution. Our software inte-
grates powerful features of digital marketing, including
social, search, email and publicity. It sends real-time
marketing opportunities directly to you in the form of leads,
prospects, social media conversations, curated content and
media inquiries.
With our marketing consulting and services team ready to
help, Vocus delivers marketing success.
Find out more at vocus.com
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