On Tuesday 20th November we attended the first Content Marketing Show in London, a new offshoot of BrightonSEO. As you can probably guess, it was a day dedicated to content marketing in all shapes and sizes, with a diverse line-up of speakers giving insight into how to source, create and promote your business using content.

We decided that instead of the usual conference round-up post, we would compile the best advice from the day into a complete guide to content marketing. We’ve also added our own insight based on our experiences at Silicon Beach as well advice from top industry experts. Hopefully this will serve as a one-stop resource to learn about content marketing – but don’t forget that we do run regular content marketing workshops in Brighton! We also touch on content marketing from an SEO perspective on our SEO courses if you want to learn more about how content works as part of a wider marketing strategy.

We’ve picked our top 16 points, but if you feel we’ve missed anything then please let us know in the comments or tweet us @sbttraining and we’ll be happy to add it in.

TL;DR - Tell Stories, Draw an Emotional Response, Everyone is Influential, Be Bold, Be Different, Be Nice, Know your Audience, Know yourself, Use the Tools at your Disposal, Use Data to Drive Content, Perfect your Briefs, Pitch it Right, Content Flows, and finally If in Doubt, Steal from the Experts. Read the rest of "How to do Content Marketing – (Almost) Everything you Need to Know"

Posted by Aaron Charlie in Blogging & Content Marketing, Marketing, News, SEO, Social Media, Web Analytics on November 23rd, 2012| 7 Comments »

After two excellent presentations from Lauren Pope on Agile Content Strategy and Ian Humphreys on the importance of Narrative, Tom Ewing from BrainJuicer explained “How to win at Pooh sticks”.

Tom argues that the dominant metaphor for the internet used to be the ‘page’; just a static visual. These days it’s now more like a ‘stream’. Content flows into your world, each individual piece of content is minimally significant but collectively it gushes down on us. This has been termed ‘nanoculture’.

This point is well-made: people no longer draw their content from one or two sources but have feeds from Twitter, Facebook, news-sites and any number of other social networks.

But while all social media makes up this flow of content it’s Twitter that is the obvious prime source.

News, pop-culture, politics, business and more all make up the content  but it’s not just the information that we receive but also how we interact with it that defines our individual stream.

Stock in Our Stream

Most of our stream flows past us and in days, weeks or months it will be forgotten. Content that sticks is termed ‘stock’ and yet what one person considers stock will merely be part of the stream for others.

The anthropologist Mimi Ito argues that it’s the culture not the features that defines a network, and therefore helps to define your stream.

Creation, replication and mutation is how the culture of a network is defined. Pinterest for example embraces a culture of creation and replication while memebase embraces mutation.

Feeling Machines

Antonio Damasio says “we are not thinking machines that feel but feeling machines that think” and so our stream will be defined by emotional not logical responses. Tapping into those emotional responses is where good content marketing lies.

You can’t divert or interrupt the stream but you can shape it. Alter the way people think about things by shaping the narrative of their stream: using a horoscope as an example – it doesn’t predict the future of an individual but instead shapes the way an individual thinks about their future.

Tapping into the Stream

Empowering an individual as well as entertaining them is a prime way to shape their flow.

Further to this, tapping into surprise as an emotional response can be used as a way to shape a person’s stream, what they share and therefore their behaviour. But surprise alone is not enough, it needs to be mixed with a little bit of happiness!

So the recognition of the need to shape an individual’s stream coupled with a knowledge of what emotional responses to try and trigger will allow a content marketer to create content that influences and sticks with their audience.

Overall Tom’s talk gives us some pertinent points to think about when creating our content: what emotions to target and how to tap into people’s streams.

Posted by Jackson Rawlings in Blogging & Content Marketing, Marketing, News, Social Media on November 20th, 2012| No Comments »

Today we’re at the first Content Marketing Show at Conway Hall in London enjoying a day dedicated to content marketing, now linked closely to SEO and social. Throughout the day we’ll be writing up our favourite talks and getting them up on the blog as quick as possible!

First up was Philip Sheldrake, who believes we’re all influential, even if most of the room didn’t think they were when asked (except one brave soul at the front).

If you don’t feel influential, then consider that we are more influenced by 150 of our nearest and dearest than by the other 7 billion people in the world combined. So you’re influential after all!

Going back 100 years, Philip took us through a history of content, from early newspapers up to the modern day which he describes as thousands of monkeys churning out words. Reminds me of a few guest post requests we’ve received…

Something a lot of marketers will agree with is that you can’t ‘do’ viral content, no matter how much a client or stakeholder wants you to. Things either go viral or don’t, it’s up to us to look at what does go viral and what doesn’t and work out what can be repeated to make viral more likely. But you can’t just make something go viral.

You must be looking at content outcome metrics – how has content helped the business? This is needed to communicate the benefits of content to those not in content – saying tweets have increased by 3 times in the past years doesn’t help anyone.

Highlighting a growing trend, not all content marketing is ‘human-to-human’, machined media has growing potential influence. Content sourced, presented and published by machines for humans. Think the BBC Olympics coverage – all auto-generated, but humans interacted with it by reading, sharing and engaging with it.

This new approach could be a possible way of producing content for businesses who don’t believe they have the resources to generate enough human created content.

Actionable takeaways:

• Content should be for humans and for machines
• You can’t ‘do’ viral, it either happens or doesn’t
• Content has to be justified by ‘outcome metrics’
• Content doesn’t have to be ‘human-to-human’
• Everyone is influential!

Posted by Craig Charley in Blogging & Content Marketing, Marketing, News on November 20th, 2012| No Comments »