content marketing

How This Marketing Program Cleaned Up: A Case Study in B2B Storytelling

A version of this story appeared in Total Annarchy, my fortnightly newsletter that helps you be a better writer, storyteller, marketer. Get it in your inbox; you’ll love it. * * * Pop quiz time: You run Marketing at a B2B company that sells industrial floor-cleaning equipment. You want to amp up awareness and demand with your audience of commercial and municipal facilities managers. But it’s… well, industrial, floor, and cleaning. What would you do as a tactic in your 2020 content strategy? Pick one: Point a camera at your CEO in a regular fireside chat to demonstrate how the brand is there for you in these trying times Hire an Instagram influencer and their family to literally eat off a scrubbed, sparkling, Covid-free floor Launch an old-school, year-long essay contest to find stories about janitors If you’re Tennant Company… you go all-in on #3. And I love it. It speaks

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Green Bean Casserole: Content Marketing Genius? Thanksgiving Side Dish? Or Both?

In 1955, Dorcas Reilly invented Thanksgiving Green Bean Casserole. Dorcas worked in the test kitchen at Campbell’s Soup, where she wrote the recipe in response to a question from the Associated Press: What’s a good Thanksgiving side dish that uses ingredients found in most American kitchens? The dish she invented went viral. Millions of Americans made Green Bean Casserole that year. And the next. And every year since. And this week—more than 60 years later—it’ll be served on an estimated 20 million Thanksgiving tables across the US, Campbell’s says. Today, Dorcas’s casserole accounts for 40 percent of Cream of Mushroom soup sales. You might be skimming here… so I want to be sure you caught that Marketing ROI stat again: A. SINGLE. RECIPE. DRIVES. 40! PERCENT! OF! SALES! That makes Dorcas’s 100-word recipe one of the most lasting and successful content marketing efforts of all time. So why did Dorcas’s

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How to Find Your Unique Brand Voice [with Examples]

The brand voice you use in your marketing is potentially a huge differentiator. It’s also vastly ignored by most companies—especially business-to-business companies. That spells plenty of opportunity for you and your company. “Back up,” you’re thinking. “What’s ‘tone of voice’? That thing I studied in Humanities?” Yes. And also no. Brand voice is how our writing or copy sounds in a reader’s head. You can say the same thing in different ways. If you have an unadorned sausage, for example, you might ask for a condiment by saying… “Hand over that mustard.”“Can you pass me the mustard?”“Pardon me… would you have any Grey Poupon?” The difference between those is the tone of voice you use. Brand voice signals three things: Who we are. Why we do what we do. What we are like to deal with. In marketing, the voice we use when we communicate with our prospects and customers

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Why We Need Smaller Stories in Content Marketing

 Image source: Gratisography I talk a lot about thinking BIGGER in your marketing: sharing a bigger story to put your company in the larger context of what people care about. But today, I’m focusing not on big… but on small. I’m focusing on the need to tell the smallest story possible. Small stories are specific. Small stories are human-scale. Ira Glass, host of This American Life, spoke at Columbia University about the need to tell important stories—about refugees and climate change, to name but two—even if most of us are sick and tired of hearing about them. We’re sick of them, Ira told the Columbia Journalism School graduating class of 2018, because such stories have “the two key ingredients of any story you don’t want to hear anything else about: (1) it’s depressing and… (2) YOU ALREADY KNOW THE STORY.” Refugees: 60 million displaced people. The largest refugee crisis since

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It’s Time to Challenge Our Content Marketing Assumptions

  I originally wrote this post as an open letter to Content Marketing that began: “Congratulations on making it another year…” But that sounds somber and a scooch melodramatic, doesn’t it? Maybe. But the end of an old year and the start of a new always make me a little somber—and that’s been especially true this year. Maybe it’s because the recent past has felt more warped and wounded than many. Or maybe it’s more personal than that. Maybe it’s just because my beloved little dog Abby is showing early signs of senility. She just asked to go outside for the 8th or 9th time today and as I type this she is barking her head off at some goblin or shadow or (more likely) tree branch that threatens our happy home. Which is both sad and hilarious. Isn’t aging for us all? Abby knows that it’s probably a tree

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Calling BS on Facebook’s Edict That Writing Is Dead

Facebook is predicting the end of the written word on its platform. And perhaps suggesting that words more broadly are doomed. “The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, who leads Facebook’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.” In five years’ time, she added, Facebook “will be definitely mobile, it will be probably all video.” Stats show that the written word is becoming obsolete, replaced by hipper, accessible images and video. She did throw writers a bone: Words are disappearing—save for the fact “you’ll have to write for video.” Did you catch that? “have to.” Have. To. Our words are like the last triceratops wandering an increasingly balmy earth. In search

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What Marketing Can Learn from the Most Outstanding Meal I’ve Ever Had

What if we thought about Marketing the way this restaurant thinks about dinner? One of the best things about being a marketer is that your work intersects almost everything. (It’s not like being a professional shepherd, say. The disjoint is greater between the work of sheep-herding and the rest of the world.) One of the worst things about being a marketer is that your work intersects almost everything. We’ll be standing in line at the post office, and a woman behind me, whom I know vaguely from somewhere (maybe our kids played soccer together?), is telling me about renovating her house. She’s figured out who has the best take-out. She knows all the best laundromats. She wonders whether she might launch a crowd-sourced online resource for locals who might value such information… The next thing I know, I start verbally mapping out a whole website and marketing plan for her.

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Content Marketing Grows Up: My 2016 Prediction

Content Marketing wakes up one morning in a place it doesn’t recognize, and tries to piece together what happened last night… and all the previous nights, too. (Because, if it’s being honest, last night wasn’t an occasional bender—it had become a lifestyle.) It takes a hard look at itself and wonders with a measure of regret: “How did I end up here?” Everyone said Content Marketing had such potential. Everyone said it was the hope for the future that would save marketing from itself. Everyone said Content was the very thing that would align storytellers, artists, writers, technologists, and analysts. Everyone said they’d all work together to create marketing that doesn’t feel like marketing. The Content Marketing champions toiling and sweating in marketing departments worldwide stuck out their necks for Content Marketing, too. They believed in it, and they convinced their bosses and clients to believe, too. Everyone said they’d

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