September 8, 2014
As the Content Marketing World conference and expo descends upon Cleveland this week, I can’t help but think about who’s doing content marketing well. I’ll tell you who I think is doing a great job of content marketing: Jimmy Fallon. He has mastered the art of repurposing content and distributing it across multiple channels, all while keeping the ultimate goal – his audience, not himself – in mind.
So what can your B2B brand learn from Jimmy Fallon’s content marketing efforts?
Create bite-sized pieces of content
Fallon does an excellent job of breaking apart his hour-long show into smaller, more consumable pieces of content, then distributing them across multiple platforms. (Check out The Tonight Show’s Facebook page if you want to see some examples.) How can you apply that concept to your organization? I’d suggest starting with pieces of content you already have which may be large or overwhelming in their totality. For example, do you produce technical or white papers? Consider creating an infographic breaking down one of the concepts talked about in that paper, or having an engineer do a short video explaining it. It’s about making the content you have consumable – think in terms of many small bites rather than one huge, heavy meal.
Know which content resonates with your audience
While I can’t be sure, my guess is that Fallon has an analytics team working behind the scenes to determine what kinds of content work best – which content his audience reacts to most positively. That’s why you see pieces of content like this, this and this shared – see a theme? So how can a B2B company apply that same logic? Track which articles in your newsletter get the most click-throughs, or which conference presentations you give are best attended. This will provide insights to help you continue tailoring your content to what your audience wants. Then use that insight to recreate that same “magic” over and over again.
Don’t assume a “one-and-done” mindset
This is something I see B2B companies do a lot. Marketers finish a newsletter, produce a brochure or finalize an industry presentation, then breathe a sigh of relief and move on to the next project on the to-do list. Content marketing is about re-sharing content you own – weeks, even months later – across many different platforms, multiple times. Fallon will share the same piece of content (in slightly different forms) on his website, Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube page and many other places – and each piece of content is shared more than once, often over the course of weeks or months. Don’t assume that once is enough, or that your audience is ready to consume the content the first (or only) time you put it out. (Fallon smartly understands that part of his audience might be asleep the first time a piece of his content is shared.) Apply that same mindset to your B2B content marketing efforts. If you go with a one-and-done mentality, you’re likely losing a lot of leverage you could have gotten out of one piece of content.
B2B marketers don’t need to only look to other B2B companies for best practices in implementing a content marketing strategy within their organization. Sometimes you can find inspiration in an unlikely place. Like, say, after your local evening newscast.
Photo Credit: Getty Images
Tagged Under: CONTENT MARKETING, CONTENT MARKETING WORLD, JIMMY FALLON,MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS, SOCIAL MEDIA
