CCO May 2022 (Preview)

Here's one vision of how Web 3.0 might reshape content marketing's future, plus tips and ideas you can use today to improve your content power.

CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER

May 2022

In This Issue

FEATURED ARTICLES

Will Web 3.0 Thrust Content Strategy
Into Its Next Evolution?
How will blockchain, NFTs, and the metaverse reshape the way brands approach content marketing?

Sign up for access to this subscriber-only content:

How Northwell Health Increased Trust Amid a Collision of Crises
Can a content marketing program thrive while battling multiple crises at once? The Well by Northwell Health proves that it’s possible.

How to Raise Your Brand's Voice on Issues That Matter
You’re weighing in on a hot social issue or cause. But are you doing it responsibly and authentically?

Take Your Content Around the World With This Proactive Plan
Watch this Content Marketing World presentation for a sensible and scalable approach to content globalization.

• General Manager: Stephanie Stahl
• Editor-in-Chief: Jodi Harris
• Creative Director: Joseph Kalinowski
• PR and Video Consultant: Amanda Subler
• Project Manager: Angela Vannucci

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Already a subscriber? Check your email for a link to the full issue.

DEPARTMENTS

Customer Journey Maps: Your Content Marketing Superpower
Journey mapping helps you see through the eyes of your customers. Use this streamlined process to keep your content focused on the details that matter most.

Sign up for access to this subscriber-only content:

Don't Let Team Burnout Derail
Your Content Engine
A content team that’s too stressed out can’t function at its best. Fight back against fatigue with these expert tips.

Earn an A+ for Content Originality
The best way to win the battle for audience attention is not to play like everyone else. Here’s how to break away from the pack and make your ideas pop.

Follow These Leaders for Content Education
and Inspiration
Looking for your next binge-worthy marketing blog, podcast, or video series? You can’t go wrong with these CMI community faves.

Progress marches on – don't get trampled under it.

Content marketers are no strangers to game-changing disruptions. They've come so frequently that we've grown accustomed to wearing our adaptability like a badge of honor.

Our industry provides us with plenty of chances to experiment with emerging ideas and concepts. The tricky part is learning to turn each new challenge into an opportunity to improve our content and grow as skilled leaders.

Take the evolution of Web 3.0. Not all that long ago, the idea of a metaverse or a blockchain-based currency may have seemed like a science-fiction fantasy on par with The Matrix or Ready Player One. Today, they’re poised to reshape the way consumers engage with brands.

At least, that’s one possibility Robert Rose sees on the horizon. “In marketing, Web 3.0 may bring immersive participation and intelligent peer-to-peer transactions to the customer experience approach,” he writes in this issue’s cover story. “It represents a potential power shift in allowing consumers to control their personal data.”

Of course, whether that vision will come to pass remains to be seen. For now, Robert suggests that you proceed on any Web 3.0-fueled path with caution: “Take the view many adopted in the early 2000s toward modern digital marketing, content, and SEO: Pay attention. Learn. Evolve. But know that nonsense abounds.”

In the meantime, don’t ignore the need for ongoing improvement in your existing programs. We’ve packed this issue with tips, ideas, and suggestions to help you keep improving your existing programs while you keep an eye on future evolution.

No one knows for certain where our industry is headed. The more you embrace the possibilities and expand your capabilities, the more valuable your content program and experiences will be to your brand and the audiences of tomorrow.

Will Web 3.0 Thrust Content Strategy Into Its Next Evolution?

How will blockchain, NFTs, and the metaverse reshape the way brands approach content marketing?

Web 3.0 will revolutionize content marketing strategy. Maybe.

By Robert Rose

You can’t throw a rock these days and not hit a media site capitalizing on some primer on defining Web 3.0 (or Web3), NFTs, metaverses, and what it all means to marketers.

Go and read them. Most are pretty good. If you need some direction:

AdAge has a great guide and a constantly updated list of brands using NFTs.
Consultant and all-around smart guy Jeremiah Owyang has an excellent list and primer on NFTs and brand marketing.
Joe Pulizzi and I did a recent podcast episode on Web 3.0 and what it means for marketing strategies.
The Creative Show recently featured a primer and discussion about NFTs.

I won’t provide a bunch of definitions here. Instead, I’ll offer a point of view on what I think it all means to content marketing as a business strategy.

Spoiler alert: Web 3.0 has more kinship with content marketing than traditional brand and direct marketing and advertising. In fact, Web 3.0 may just be the evolution of content marketing.

Let’s dig in a bit.

Content marketing is evolving from owned media to Web 3.0

In the earliest days of modern content marketing (2008-2009), Joe Pulizzi and I said that the content approach to marketing wasn’t new. It had just found its time.

The oldest content marketing examples include John Deere’s Furrow Magazine, Michelin Guides, and Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, which promoted his printing business.

Most of these great examples were from brands looking to launch a new product or engage an existing customer base for loyalty. Looking at the history of content marketing, you’ll see so many customer loyalty magazines, employee engagement magazines, and content designed to teach customers how to use innovative products (Jell-O’s recipe book, for example).

In the early 2000s, content marketing evolved from side projects or campaigns to become a continuing and strategic business function. The trigger for this change was the expansion of the first disruptive Web 1.0 technology – web search.

The power of search engines forced product and services brands to become functionally competent at developing owned media properties. That enabled businesses and customers to circumvent traditional media and develop direct relationships.

I highlight that development because elements of Web 3.0 will prompt a similar trend.

Web 3.0 isn’t new – we’re just catching on to its promise

Early concepts of the metaverse date back to the early 2000s. The virtual Entropia Universe featured some of the first sales of digital property (what we call NFTs today). In 2009, a club in the Entropia Universe sold for more than $600,000 – the largest virtual world object ever sold at the time.

The marketing hype around virtual currencies goes back to 1999 with Beenz and Flooz (yes, those are real names).

Beenz positioned itself as “the web’s currency.” The site paid people in “Beenz” for doing things such as viewing ads or signing up for a service. The company raised nearly $100 million and is considered one of the greatest dot-com disasters of all time.

Beenz launched around the same time as Flooz, a virtual currency startup (promoted by actress Whoopi Goldberg) that used its internet currency as a loyalty program to internet merchants.

Watching Flooz ads with Whoopi puts in perspective some of the current crypto platform commercials featuring Tom Brady and Matt Damon.

Web 3.0 concepts in the early 2020s are like content marketing concepts in the early 2000s. The ideas aren’t new, but they may transform into solid business strategies because technology has caught up enough to make these concepts useful.

Web 3.0 concepts aren’t new – technology has finally caught up enough to make them useful as business strategies."

But it’s very early. So, take the view many adopted in the early 2000s toward modern digital marketing, content, and SEO. Pay attention. Learn. Evolve. But know that nonsense abounds.

Web 3.0 shifts the balance of power over customer data

We’re living through the earliest stages of a seismic transition in computing and virtualized digital connections. Web 3.0 technologies
almost certainly will impact the way consumers experience, consume, transact, and behave.

The early promise of Web 3.0 echoes content marketing. Why? Web 3.0’s first iterations are about how people acquire and share content as a
social signal, join virtual communities, and ultimately co-create valuable customer experiences.

In marketing, Web 3.0 may bring immersive participation and intelligent peer-to-peer transactions to the customer experience approach.

It represents a potential power shift in allowing consumers to control their personal data.

Here’s what that means: As Web 3.0 technology emerges, you can start to envision how a consumer might use a digital wallet to store not just cryptocurrency but also personal information (name, email address, company, location, etc.).

Consumers could share access to that data with any company they desire without handing over the actual data. And they could revoke that access any time they want.

Your marketing database, then, would consist of dynamic access to tens of thousands of wallets rather than tens of thousands of static entries in a database. You’d retain the ability to target content experiences based on correct data because consumers would have every reason to keep their data current.

However, the consumer also would be empowered to revoke that access (i.e., opt-out). Retaining the relationship would require delivering great value.

You can see how content-driven marketing experiences might evolve from paid, shared, and owned media platforms. In Web 3.0, the consumer
(not the brand or marketer) controls the connection, which allows the relationship to extend across all the platforms they use.

In Web 3.0, consumers control their connection to a brand – and hold the power to extend that relationship across all their platforms."

The blockchain reaction for content marketing

Blockchain technology enables these new decentralized capabilities for new customer experiences. It supports direct peer-to-peer transactions without a centralized service provider to facilitate them. You can already see this happening across the web:

Decentralized finance decreases the requirement for banks.
Decentralized commerce reduces the need for centralized cash register providers.
Decentralized media networks decrease the dependence on social networks as virtual gathering points.
Decentralized content, marketing, and advertising fundamentally change the digital relationship between customers and businesses.

I call this the “tokenized customer experience,” or “tokenized CX.”

Tokenized CX is just content marketing evolved

The mantra of marketing and customer experience is to “deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.” To know all three components typically requires businesses to track the consumer’s identity and their content behavior.

Marketers may soon be able to issue “tokens” (or smart contracts) powered by blockchain technology to enable more automated, secure, and trusted customer experiences.

These tokens can enable any transaction involving digital artifacts (including ads, downloadable assets, subscriptions, or access to communities). They empower consumers to help shape their experience and enable marketers to do that without surveillance-style efforts.

And they enable marketers to develop more creative content and marketing experiences. Brands such as Timberland and BMW have launched virtual worlds. Other brands have begun to create experiences within existing virtual worlds.

For example, JP Morgan set up a virtual lounge within the Decentraland metaverse platform.

The kicker? In all these early entries, the scope is almost entirely a content marketing approach.

Timberland describes its virtual world as a “vibrant tour of the brand’s history via a mix of storytelling, art, music, and characters.” The company declares, “(T)his is not a game; it’s a story.”

TimbsTrails – Timberland's immersive virtual experience.

The BMW virtual world is an education and thought leadership platform, creating an engaging way to learn about “electric mobility, urban mobility, and sustainability.” And the JP Morgan virtual lounge (for now) is simply a place to see presentations on the crypto economy.

Sound familiar? Each approach delivers a new content marketing experience.

Tomorrow’s content marketing
and Web 3.0

These are the earliest days of Web 3.0 technology’s impact on the customer experience. Anyone who says they have it all figured out – whether they declare it the biggest scam or the biggest revolution – is likely wrong. No one knows.

Anyone who says they have Web 3.0 all figured out is likely wrong – for now."

In the Content Marketing Institute’s early years, I often said content marketing was still in the first inning. Web 3.0 is still in spring training.

The early days of Web 1.0 were all about pages, emails, blog posts, and downloads of documents through a browser. So, marketers needed to focus on publishing content. Lots of content. Marketers needed to answer every customer question, provide a deep repository of knowledge, and make everything easy to find through commercial search engines.

Web 2.0 pushed marketers to create responsive (and contextual) approaches to delivering the right content throughout the customer journey. For the last 10 years, marketers have worked toward targeted one-to-one conversations and a 360-degree view of their audiences.

Along the way, data started to outshine content. The focus shifted from creating findable content to finding intent signals that let marketers anticipate needs and engage with people more effectively.

As data becomes more precious and content marketing becomes a more sophisticated business function, things are about to change again. How they’ll change remains a question.

Political, economic, environmental, and even social challenges may affect Web 3.0’s development.

But if it continues to develop along its current trajectory, expect a customer experience evolution based on tokenized CX. Empowered consumers will shape products or services as they interact with brand experiences. Marketers may develop a co-creation relationship with audience members and customers.

Put simply: Marketing in Web 1.0 helped customers FIND something better. Marketing in Web 2.0 helped customers EXPERIENCE something better. The promise of marketing in Web 3.0 is to help customers CREATE something better.

We’re not there yet. But pay attention. It will be an interesting ride. CCO

Robert Rose is the founder and chief strategy officer of The Content Advisory, the education and consulting group for the Content Marketing Institute. He’s provided content marketing and strategy advice for global brands such as Capital One, NASA, Dell, McCormick Spices, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Follow Robert on Twitter @Robert_Rose.

Dive deeper into Web 3.0 at ContentTECH

Join us for a session on Nonfungible Content: NFTs and Content Management, part of the Future of Content track at ContentTECH Summit on May 31 - June 2 in San Diego.

Explore the ContentTECH Summit program here and use promo code CCO200 to save $200 on registration.

How Northwell Health Increased Trust Amid a Collision of Crises

Can a content marketing program thrive while battling multiple crises at once? The Well by Northwell Health proves it’s possible.

A keen focus on customer data and empathetic storytelling improved Northwell’s content impact, grew its referral traffic, and reduced its marketing spend – all at once.

By Ann Gynn

Northwell Health diagnosed a multi-symptom problem in 2017.

“We were undergoing a crisis of trust. Amid misinformation and manipulative messages, expertise had never been needed more, especially in the world of health and wellness,” says Julie Shapiro of Northwell Health, New York’s largest health care provider.

Sound familiar? As it turned out, Northwell’s prescription for the trust crisis positioned it well to address the global health crisis that struck a few years later.

The Well by Northwell Health launched in 2017 as a digital publication on a mission to deliver expert guidance and empathy at moments of truth in people’s lives through a variety of content features.

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How To Raise Your Brand’s Voice on Issues That Matter

Sure, you’re being responsive by weighing in on a hot social issue or cause. But are you being responsible and authentic in how and why you’re doing it?

Show up, or shut up!

Research shows 70% of consumers believe it’s important for brands to take a stand on social and political issues. But before you use content as your podium, answer these questions to ensure your views will be received as credible, useful, and authentic.

By Ahava Liebtag

The words and actions of brands — including yours — matter. Politics and other areas of our culture are becoming more polarized. When you are authentic about your values and causes, you can build loyalty with your audience.

Not voicing an opinion could even hurt a brand’s credibility. According to a recent study by Sprout Social, 70% of consumers surveyed believe it’s important for brands to take a stand on social and political issues. In that same survey, more than 60% thought brands had the power to reach large audiences and create real change.

Should you weigh-in or
stand back?

Your organization doesn’t need to acknowledge every issue – especially if it might conflict with your brand’s core values. To decide whether to make a statement, your leadership team should reflect on these questions:

Who are we as a brand? Does this issue intersect with our vision or brand mission statement? Is this an important topic, and can we make a meaningful statement? Will we demonstrate to our audience that we are accountable for our stance?
What do our customers and employees expect from us? Are consumers asking or commenting about our brand and the issue? Do our employees want us to take a position?
What do we stand for? What are our company’s core values? Does it make sense for us to say something or stay silent on this issue?
What will our silence say? A brand’s silence can speak more than a statement. Consider what saying nothing may signify.
Who should say something? In general, the CEO or leader of the organization should make a statement. In the Sprout Social study, 56% said it’s important for CEOs to take a stand on public issues. But if individuals from marginalized communities or people personally affected by an issue work for your organization, consider encouraging them to share their stories or voice their own thoughts, as well.

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Take Your Content Around the World With This Proactive Plan

A Content Marketing World 2021 presentation (exclusively for CCO subscribers).

Should you standardize or localize? Translate or recreate?

Apply these insights to your content to make sure it’s yours.

Enterprises tend to take a fragmented, ad-hoc approach to scaling their content for use across all the regions in which they operate. By developing a well-rounded content plan, you can better balance content globalization and localization and ease your team’s decision-making around both processes.

In her presentation at Content Marketing World 2021, consultant, author, and globalization expert Pam Didner explained how to build that plan, including the five key elements to account for and the information you’ll need to address each of them effectively. CCO

Join us at Content Marketing World 2022, September 13-16 in Cleveland, for more strategies to meet today’s challenges and prepare for a profitable future. Learn more here and use promo code CCO100 to save $100.

Subscribe to watch this full-length Content Marketing World video presentation.

Customer Journey Maps: Your Content Marketing Superpower

Journey mapping helps you see through the eyes of your customers. Use this streamlined process to keep your content focused on the details that matter most.

Transform random acts of content into connected experiences.

Convince & Convert’s Jenny Magic shares a journey mapping shortcut that will put your content at the intersection of your buyers' needs and your brand's CTAs.

By Jodi Harris

Did you bring a map (digital or otherwise) with you on your last road trip? Most people do – It’s the best way to ensure that you arrive exactly where you intended to go.

Yet relatively few marketers create a map when planning content. They should. A customer journey map is a great way to lead prospects and customers to a destination that meets their information needs (and your marketing goals.)

The journey mapping process also can provide the
strategic direction your team needs to know what

kind of content to create to help move website visitors and other prospects through the sales cycle.

Though journey mapping can seem like a complex and tedious time suck, it doesn’t have to be.

A streamlined journey mapping process helped fintech company Datasite transform random acts of content into connected, customer-centric experiences.

Convince & Convert’s Jenny Magic worked with Datasite Vice President of Marketing Americas Marcio Moerbeck to create the company’s customer journey maps. Here’s a detailed walkthrough of the process they followed (and a template you can use to get started) from their presentation at Content Marketing World 2021.

Marcio and Jenny also explain why customer journey maps are a critical part of any content marketing strategy and what they can help your brand achieve in this short video:

Datasite's Marcio Moerbeck and Convince & Convert's Jenny Magic explain why customer journey maps are critical to a successful content marketing strategy.

What is a customer journey map?

A journey map is a visual representation of the customer journey that defines:

All the points where customers and prospects interact with your brand
What they want to accomplish at each one
The path they take from point to point as they move toward a purchase

Jenny describes it as representing the intersection of buyer needs and your organization’s calls to action.

“It's thinking about what they need, what we need, what do we want them to do, and why would they want to do it. It helps content marketers get out of their own heads and see their brand through the eyes of customers,” she says.

A journey map helps content marketers get out of their own heads and see their brand through the eyes of customers."

Journey mapping is a marketer’s “secret superpower,” Jenny says. “The intersection of your brand strategy, your personas, and your journey maps is true content marketing gold.”

Why create customer
journey maps?

Viewing your brand’s value through that lens helps you evolve your content experience to become more customer-centric.

That’s particularly important because customers want to do their own research. According to TrustRadius research, 87% of buyers want to self-serve part or all of their buying journey, and 57% of buyers already make purchase decisions without ever talking with a vendor representative.

And they’re less patient with marketing that prioritizes the brand’s messages and goals over a useful and contextually relevant content experience.

“Every single content preference study gives marketers a thumbs down on whether or not the content is objective versus being biased; whether it is focused on substance over style; whether it’s the right amount of material or an overwhelming volume, and finally, whether or not it’s extraneous to their research,” Jenny says.

“This means [marketers] are not doing a fantastic job telling them what they need to know to make that decision.”

Working through the mapping process keeps you focused on customers by:

Enabling cross-team alignment around customer needs: The mapping process brings sales, marketing, and customer support together to define what customers need to know before they buy, what they need after they purchase, and the stories marketing can tell to support those interactions.
Guiding content priorities: It's easy for teams to get distracted by the next shiny object, the next social media channel, or some exciting idea from the C-suite. A journey map that clearly articulates audience needs helps ensure the team stays true to what your audience wants and needs.
Inspiring customer-centric content. Auditing your content during the mapping process can reveal topic gaps you should create content to fill.

A streamlined customer journey mapping process and template

Jenny's recommended process focuses on a narrow set of information selected to help you plan more effectively and create higher-performing content.

I’ll walk you through the steps of this process, using a template Jenny built in Airtable to illustrate the steps (you can access her template here). You can use Excel, Google Sheets, or any other project management tool to create a similar tracker.

Step 1: Define your personas

List your customer personas in the first tab on the far left of this template and fill in their most important characteristics. Jenny’s example shows details for three personas (A, B, and C), including their job titles, who they report to, and their role in the decision-making process.

For journey mapping, Jenny recommends including only those details that are relevant to the decision journey – mindset and motivation.

These are the must-have insights she includes:

Triggers: What drives their interest in changing their current solution or taking action on a new purchase?
Influences: Who or what influences them on decisions like this?
Value proposition: Which of your advantages and benefits will resonate with them most?
Motivations and frustrations: Why have they chosen to engage with your business, and what do they need to do or solve right now?

TIP: To avoid bringing unintentional biases into your work, don’t give your personas names. “If we use a gendered name like ‘Driven Daniel,’ we instantly picture a male, and that may not be [relevant] to the decision process,” Jenny says.

Step 2: Define calls-to-action (CTAs)

Click image for a larger view.

In the second tab, fill in your top 20 or so business CTAs – the activities that drive consumers toward a purchase decision.

Jenny says marketers tend to rush through this step or skip it entirely. But this step keeps content teams focused on desirable business outcomes rather than vanity metrics.

Think about these CTAs in terms of the behaviors you want to drive, such as:

Assessing readiness to make a purchase decision
Learning how to evaluate our type of solution
Requesting a demo

Bring sales and customer support teams into your planning conversations to share insights and real-world scenarios at this stage.

“Sales might have a whole set of activities that they're judged and rewarded on that are often very different from the [marketing team’s] CTAs – and very different from what the support team wishes our clients knew once they signed on the dotted line,” Jenny says.

The exercise enabled our teams to come to a consensus on a set of CTAs that we can go and activate. That’s a win!"

She recommends bringing the teams together and getting them to agree on which CTAs to prioritize. Although this part of the process can feel arduous, Marcio confirms that it delivers important benefits:

“The great moment of this exercise was that we came to a consensus on a set of CTAs that we can go and activate. Be patient and be resilient through that process because, for us, that was the win,” he says.

Step 3: Define your customer experience

When filling in the fields in the journey map tag, don’t nitpick every word choice or haggle over the fine details. Just summarize the essential information. In the remaining columns, Jenny recommends distilling your customer insights into answers to these four questions:

What are they thinking about? What pain points and drivers brought them to this point of their journey?
What are they asking? What questions do they have, and how and where are they asking them? What are they curious to learn or eager to understand better?

What are they doing? What kinds of behaviors can we observe online to confirm our assumptions about them?
What do they want? What will it take to satisfy their current needs and move on to the next stage? What behaviors could we trigger to move them through the funnel more quickly?

Then, add the most compelling CTA (from the list you compiled in Step 2) for each customer journey stage.

Think of this step as a narrative exercise that results in a first draft, Jenny says. It’s not meant to serve as a definitive resource to answer all your content planning questions.

But you can still celebrate making it this far: “The great moment of this exercise, outside of all the work that we did, was that [all parties] now agree on a set of CTAs to activate. That's important,” Jenny says.

Step 4: Audit your existing content

A comprehensive content audit is never a bad idea. But Jenny suggests speeding things up for journey mapping with this focused approach:

List the titles of your 50 highest-performing evergreen content pieces. They’ll serve as a representative sample of your best content.
Determine which of your CTAs would be most relevant for each asset.

In Jenny’s full template (not pictured), you’ll see additional fields you can fill in if they’re important to your business (such as the asset’s URL, and target formats and channels).

But even if you just outline the content you have and the CTAs each one aligns with, the process will reveal two key content insights:

Gaps: You’ll find out if you lack content for specific CTAs or topics. This insight will help you set priorities for future content creation.
Waste: You’ll identify topics you’ve covered sufficiently (or more often than you need to). You can deprioritize these topics in your list of new content to create. Transform random acts of content into connected customer experiences.

Guide prospects to the destination they desire

These steps help you create the framework for a living content plan you can build on by adding more insights and ideas over time. As you brainstorm new content pieces or look for ways to refresh and repurpose the assets you’ve already created, use this template to set priorities and track results through your creation and distribution workflows.

Deciding what content pieces to create – and how to connect them to provide a seamless, customer-focused experience – can seem intimidating in the absence of a linear process. Try Jenny’s suggestions to help simplify your decision-making, increase your strategic focus, and achieve better marketing results. CCO

Jodi Harris is director of content strategy at CMI. She describes her role as a combination of strategic alchemist, process architect, and creative explorer. Prior to this role, Jodi spent over a decade developing and managing content initiatives for brand clients in the entertainment, CPG, health care, technology, and biotech industries, as well as for agencies and media brands. Follow her on Twitter at @Joderama.

Don’t Let Team Burnout Derail Your Content Engine

A content team that’s too stressed out can't function at its best. Fight back against fatigue with these expert tips.

Poor content quality and missed deadlines can be signs your team’s tanks are running on empty. Here’s how to get things back on track and keep your content engine humming along.

By Julia McCoy

The site hasn’t published a new post in over a week. Timely topics and keywords never get tackled because no one can look up from what they’re already doing. Poor-quality content gets published because the team just needs to get something into the world.

The effects of those and other headaches for time-starved, burned-out content marketing teams ripple. What can you do to minimize or even prevent them? How can you help everyone stay on track so your content marketing hums along without speed bumps?

These five practical ways can help you stay ahead and on point with your content schedule. And I’ll share bonus tips to help individuals avoid disruptive procrastination and burnout.

1. Set a regular publishing schedule the whole team respects

This first point may seem elementary, but it’s crucial. Don’t just say, “Well, we publish a blog every few weeks. It depends.”

That’s not a schedule – that’s an estimate nobody can pin their hat on. Get specific and document it in your content marketing strategy. For example, detail how many blog articles will be published each month – tie a number to a time, such as, “We publish one new or updated blog every week.” Get equally specific with all types of content you publish: videos, emails, social media posts, etc.

Your whole team should know and respect the documented schedule. Record it in your content calendar and keep the publishing cogs turning according to the schedule. That means deadlines are not nudge-able. They’re firm.

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Earn an A+ for Content Originality

The best way to win the battle for audience attention is to not play like everyone else. Here’s how to break away from the pack and make your ideas pop.

Don’t mistake cookie-cutter commodities for creativity.

The real key to standing apart from your content competition? Never stop with your first idea. Keep searching until you find an angle that makes it unique.

By Jonathan Crossfield

Coming up with new content ideas isn’t easy in today’s content-saturated online world. But that’s not surprising when so many marketers compete to attract the same audience within the same topic while drawing upon the same information or facts.

If your business sells auto parts, you might publish regular articles on car maintenance. But how many unique or original takes on 10 things to check regularly on your car can there possibly be?

As it turns out, this hasn’t stopped hundreds of such articles from being published, as evidenced by the Google search results I received:

10 Important Things You Should Check On Your Car Regularly
Routine Vehicle Maintenance 101: What You Should Know
Car Maintenance Checklist: 9 Essential Steps That Anyone Can Do
10 Essential Car Maintenance Tasks That Anyone Can Do
10 Important Car Maintenance Tips
Car Care Basics: 10 Car Maintenance Tips for Beginners
Top 10 Maintenance Items To Keep Your Car in Top Shape
10 Things to Know About Car Maintenance
10 Maintenance Things Every Driver Should Know How To Do

Other than settling on a different number of things to check, there isn’t a whole bunch of difference between them. You can probably guess most of these things without reading the articles: tire pressure, oil, water, spark plugs, etc.

Why would someone read any of these articles beyond the first click? What additional value is gained from reading multiple variations of “check your tire pressure?”

Inside the auto parts company, a checklist might seem to make sense as part of its content library. But beyond its website, the content is in an impossible fight to attract readers – battling for rank, armed with the same keywords and information as so many others.

This isn’t content marketing; it’s SEO to the death – where the winning edge is more likely to be determined by each page’s Core Web Vitals than the oh so similar content.

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Follow These Leaders for Content Education and Inspiration

Looking for your next binge-worthy marketing blog, podcast, or video series? You can’t go wrong with these CMI community faves.

We asked the Content Marketing Institute community for their go-to resources. They came through with more than 40 storytellers they rely on to learn about new topics, dig into the nuances of familiar ones, and inspire their own content creation. Here are just a few of their top picks.

Blogs and articles

Optimist
I came across their website and blog via the Tech Bound podcast. I think I’ve read close to every blog post on their site, scouring for more information as it relates to growth content marketing and content strategy.

They also have a Slack channel called Top of the Funnel, where there’s a lot going on. There are chats, conversations, webinars, AMAs. It’s a trove of content marketing resources. I also subscribe to their YouTube channel, where they house so many great guests and conversations around the world of growth content marketing. — Emma-Jane Shaw, head of content, Uku Inbound

Reforge
Reforge is one of my favorite resources. The content they put together reflects the quality of their education programs, and you get great insight into the minds of experts – folks who have been in the trenches doing this work for a long time. Often, the experts haven’t built up a large social following nor are doing much education outside of their day jobs. And that’s because they don’t have to. They’ve built such credibility and are making enough money that they don’t need to invest in additional personal branding strategies. Reforge finds these folks and works with them to share their insights with their community, and it’s amazing. —Tracey Wallace, director of content strategy, Klaviyo

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