content marketing

5 Keys to Developing a Strong Tone of Voice in Your Content Marketing

One of the biggest branding mistakes that companies can make is to not pay enough attention to their tone of voice. “Voice” sounds high-minded, doesn’t it? More suited for the literary world rather than the business world? But tone of voice just refers to how you sound in your writing. In marketing, your tone of voice can be a significant differentiator. (Along with a few other key things.) It’s a strong advantage, because a lot of companies aren’t yet thinking about it. Businesses often spend a lot of time on their logo and color palette and other things they think of as “branding”—the look and feel of their website, collateral, signage, fonts, and so on. But very few take the time to consider the branding that a unique voice can give a company. A key question is this: Mask the logo on your site. Do you sound different, unique—like yourself? […]

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Bigger, Braver, Bolder Content Marketing: 3 Examples from the Cutting-Room Floor of My Latest Presentation

This week I debuted a new presentation at Content Marketing World about creating bigger stories, braver marketing, and more buff, ripped marketing writing with bolder tone of voice. (I’m giving this same talk at INBOUND15 tomorrow.) If there were a 12-Step Program for PowerPoint Recovery, I’d be going to meetings thrice weekly. I tend to build bloated slide decks overstuffed like a post-Thanksgiving gut, with examples of great content and marketing I love. And then I have a heck of a time killing my darlings. Because to me they are all precious. And, also, I don’t want to let my marketer-audience down… because what if the exact example I leave out about that one automaker’s effort is exactly the inspiration the marketing manager for Burt’s New and Used Auto needed to see? Can you tell I overthink this stuff? Luckily, this time around, I’ve worked with my brilliant and talented

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Jargon: A Marketer’s How-Not-to Guide

My daughter and I were at a college’s Accepted Students Day, which is basically where school administrators wine and dine prospective incoming freshmen in the hopes they’ll choose that institution out of all those a student might’ve been accepted to. The “wine and dine” bit would be metaphorical—because there is no actual wine involved. But we did get a nice chicken sandwich and quinoa salad at lunch. I could’ve done without the red onions in the quinoa, though. I piled them at the edge of my plate. Anyway, at one point we were all gathered in an auditorium to hear about student life. The heads of various departments spoke, including Campus Security, Student Activities, and Housing. They were trying hard to make student life there sound awesome: Community! Traditions! Camaraderie! Emotional support! And the beds are soft! And the food is locally sourced! And the sun shines ALL. YEAR. ‘ROUND! I’m

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A Writing GPS: The Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your Next Piece of Content [Infographic]

The writer Andre Dubus (House of Sand and Fog) has described writing as inching your way along a very dark, very long tunnel: you can make out the next few feet in front of you, but you’re not quite certain where you’ll end up or when you’ll get there. What helps with the uncertainty and enormity of the task is to start with some kind of process to guide the way. Process? Ew. I know. Process is one of those things that in many parts of life I consider hopelessly boring and mind-numbing. Like alphabetizing canned goods. Or peeling beets. But in writing, process is necessary, because you need a kind of road map to get you to where you need to be. So here’s an infographic based on the 12-step writing GPS I outline in more detail in Everybody Writes. This GPS gets you from one place to another:

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Basecamp Is Barking Up the Long Tree with ‘The Distance’

Just about a year ago, Basecamp, a project management software company, launched a quirky little lovely monthly online magazine called The Distance. The Chicago-based company hired a journalist to produce one long-form illustrated story per month, profiling a company that has been in business 25 years or longer and has thrived the old-fashioned way: through hard work, and without outside funding or partners. The site would not feature Basecamp customers or prospects. Nor would it feature technology businesses. And it would initially rely on in-depth, long-form storytelling (and, you know, ridiculously good writing!) rather than video and audio. It has editors polish and hone the pieces, so the story feels fine like feature writing — not rough-hewn like blogging often can. Today, the site still doesn’t prominently feature any Basecamp lead-generation tactics or corporate messaging or calls to action or obvious Basecamp marketing within the monthly profiles—save for a whisper

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50 Shades of Mediocrity: Does Content Have to Be Good, or Just Good Enough?

When a franchise like 50 Shades of Grey enjoys crazy success, is it a signal that content doesn’t have to be good to be crazy-successful? Popularity is only one measure of success, of course. And for most of us in the content marketing world, it’s not a very good one. Yet popularity is still very often the thing that persistently defines value. (Witness the popularity of popularity lists.) On the one hand I get it, and on the other, I think it’s weird. Is it the goal for your business to have the most followers on Twitter? Or is it to attract more customers than your competitor? “Best” is rarely the same as “popular,” as Seth Godin has pointed out. And “most-read” is rarely the same as “most-loved,” as I’ve talked about here. “If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work,” Hemingway famously said.

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6 Things You Can Learn from an Unfunny Marketer’s Funny Redemption

Fifteen years ago, my friend Doug Kessler swore off any attempt at “comedy” after an attempt at funny dissolved into flat-out failure. Doug, who runs marketing agency Velocity UK in London, recalls the white-hot shame of it all: “We wrote a script. Sent it to client. We expected some review and back and forth… but when they said ‘Great! Let’s shoot it!’… we did. “It was SO not funny and SO stupid that I’m still blushing 15 years later.” But, more recently, Doug started to rethink things. Because what’s working in B2B marketing is (quite often) the offbeat story and the funny vignette. In October, at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, speaker Tim Washer talked about the powerful pairing of B2B and improv, and Doug realized that “it was crazy to close off such a fruitful direction just because I’d failed once.” So here’s the Velocity shot at redemption, created for

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The Simplest Content Strategy

Creating ridiculously good content is hard. Which is why you have to squeeze every drop of juice out of whatever content you create—as C.C. Chapman and I wrote in the fifth “rule” in Content Rules: “Reimagine; don’t recycle.” “Recycling is an afterthought; good content is intentionally reimagined, as its inception, for various platforms and formats,” we wrote. “[C]reate content that comes to life in various formats, across many different platforms, and that can address multiple audiences.” In other words, instead of using a “one and done” approach, treat anything you develop as pieces of a larger whole. View all of the pieces of content you plan to create as expressions of a single, bigger idea. Or, alternatively—if you are starting with something larger, like a white paper or an e-book—think about how you can create smaller chunks of shareable content from that single content asset. Jason Miller of LinkedIn draws

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This New Book Will Make You a Content Marketing Rock Star

Too many business books feel like cover bands. They might be entertaining enough, but ultimately what they deliver feels a little lacking—a substitute for the real deal. Which is why I love this new digital book launching this week from my friend Jason Miller, Welcome to the Funnel – or, WTTF, as I affectionately call it. Jason self-published it, and he asked me to write the foreword. I’m allergic to books that deliver the why but not the how. So I love the practical, specific, how-to of WTTF. This isn’t a book of inexplicit generalities, amorphous marketing platitudes, and vague “best practices.” Instead, this book delivers the playlist you need to create content that will deliver results for your organization. It’s a detailed guide that will, as the subtitle says… Turn Your Social and Content Marketing Up to an 11. Why am I confident of that? Because Jason Miller is

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