Outside In Marketing: A Pragmatic Approach to Content Marketing

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology Digital Marketing Webinar. I'm Mike Moran, founder of Biznology and a senior strategist at Converseon, Revealed Context, and Solo Segment. I'm the co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. and Outside-In Marketing and sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly. I'm a veteran of IBM, managing groups on IBM.com for 8 years and retiring from IBM in 2008 as a distinguished engineer. Today you'll be hearing from James Mathewson, who will present Outside-In Marketing: A Pragmatic Approach to Content Marketing. But before we start, we need to recognize our sponsors. Barnraisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GaggleAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try GaggleAmp for free today. Geris Corp., a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. IBM Press, publishing the highest quality content for critical business and technology topics. Mountaintop Data, a B2B marketing intelligence company providing marketing lists as well as data cleaning, data appending, and data maintenance services. As we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and will email you that link later this week. During our speaker's presentation, you can use GoToWebinar to ask a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event and press the Send button. I'll select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to James. In the handout section of your control panel, you can find a PDF of today's presentation. Today we'll be using the Twitter hashtag #BizKnowWebinar in case you'd like to share information during the webinar. While we're waiting for the last few attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology monthly newsletter and daily articles are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. James Mathewson is one of our Biznology authors and author of 2 books, Outside-In Marketing: Using Big Data to Guide Your Content Marketing and Audience Relevance in Search: Targeting Web Audiences with Relevant Content. James has 20 years of experience in building effective digital content for audiences. As editor-in-chief of ComputerUser.com, he grew an audience from 0 to 1.75 million monthly visitors in 6 months. As editor-in-chief of IBM.com, his work led to double the engagement rates with IBM.com content. He is currently a distinguished technical marketer for IBM, building the big data analytics systems to help marketers plan, publish, and iteratively improve marketing content for their target audiences. At the end of the webinar, we will randomly choose 6 attendees to receive free copies of our new book, Outside-In Marketing. So if you've ever struggled with targeting content to your audience, this is the webinar for you. James, take it away.

Thanks, Mike, and welcome everyone. I just wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about the books in a, in a bit more detail. To start with. So the first book, Audience Relevance in Search, I wrote in 2010. And in that book, I showed people how to use the words, the language of clients and prospects, primarily from search engines, to build content that is relevant to them. And for practitioners and people who built digital content, it was very effective and popular. But at a certain point, I, you know, found some issues with executives embracing the message. And so the practitioners wanted to do it, but they couldn't always do it because executives often said, no, we want to do it a different way. And so instead of writing a sequel to the book, or I should say a second edition, I wrote with Mike's help Outside-In Marketing. To help executives take the next step and embrace this new way of doing marketing, which is basically marketing in the language of your clients and prospects. So what is outside-in marketing? Some people might say, well, you know, content marketing is all about storytelling. And I'm here to say that no, it's not really. Storytelling is important at a certain stage in the buyer's journey, but if you lead with your stories, if your brand stories are the most important things in your marketing messaging, you are going to turn a lot of customers, potential customers away. You are not going to communicate with them on and in their terms. If you look at this picture here, you have a bunch of people sitting around a campfire, and they are the paradigm of a captive audience. They are sitting there understanding exactly what is going on. They are really into it. They've got nowhere to go. There are no time issues present in this picture. And that is the kind of environment where storytelling works. But on the web, people are not captive. They are active. They are interested. They are moving around. They are trying to find the information they are looking for in the shortest possible time and with the least amount of effort. And so storytelling has its place, but it doesn't work particularly well in digital. And if you think of content marketing as storytelling primarily, then I think you are not going to get to a pragmatic approach to content marketing. Another common way of characterizing content marketing is through branded content. Think about custom publishing both in print and digital, and building these experiences that you then send out and distribute and syndicate. Around to different places with your brand stamped all over them. And the kind of content marketing that we are talking about with outside-in marketing is not branded content. Yes, you have to build your brand, but there are ways of doing it using client language that are much more effective in digital than if you are constantly stamping your brand on everything and thereby saying, I won't talk to you unless you can understand what my brand is. And really, most people don't understand what your brand is until they are given messages on and in their terms. So what is outside-in marketing? And I like to use inside-out marketing as sort of a counterfoil for it. So branded content, using company brand language primarily throughout your marketing messages, is inside-out marketing, whereas in outside-in marketing, we use client language. We try to understand what those— what clients are looking for, primarily through search, what the user intent of their queries are in search. We try to build content for their buyer journeys that matches those queries. And rather than pushing content to them unwillingly, We attract audiences to our content. This good content that is on and in their terms pulls them into your experiences and helps guide them through their buyer journey. Inside-out marketing requires heavy and broad advertising. You have to get their eyeballs in front of your content, and they don't just do that by accident. And so you spend a lot of money pushing stuff to the various different channels to get them to see your content and to use it. Whereas with outside-in marketing, you don't necessarily need advertising at all, but if you do have advertising budgets, you can just use them to amplify the natural traffic that you're getting and the natural engagement you're getting from your efforts. Inside-out marketing interrupts audiences. Basically, you think about the paradigm of sitting at the— in front of the television and sitting back and watching a program and then having a break for advertising and what the mental model of that is. You're basically creating cognitive dissonance in the minds of the audience and they're not so inclined to accept your messages unless there's some sort of gimmick or trick to them. Whereas with outside-in marketing, you're basically intercepting them on their natural journeys through their content information cycles and trying to get them to use your content as part of that information journey. And the mental model for that is that they are already engaged and they are already with you. You don't have to use a trick or any sort of gimmick to convince them. And then the other thing about inside-out marketing that is somewhat ineffective is the fact that it creates a lot of these one-time campaigns. As soon as a campaign is done, as soon as it's been played, you know, it's sort of discarded, and then we start with a new campaign. And in digital, this creates a lot of what we call space junk. You have these fragments of old campaigns with messaging and branding that are no longer acceptable to the company, and expunging that from your digital experiences and building an experience that works for your clients and prospects with all this space junk in the way can be very harmful to your customer experiences. Whereas with outside-in marketing, you use what we call evergreen campaigns. You basically, you understand what language they're interested in and you build content around that language. And the content grows, you improve it as you measure and iterate and improve over time, and eventually you have something that has a large audience, regular people engaging with it. And in that context, you can amplify with a campaign or 2. But those are just, again, they are sort of like your advertising, narrow targeted small things. The other thing about inside out is the fragmented media. I mentioned all the space junk. Expunging from your digital experiences these old brands such as In IBM, it was no small feat to take Smarter Planet out of our sight. And all of the ways in which our content was interwoven into the Smarter Planet campaign became a real challenge for us. But if you use evergreen content, if you are not talking about smarter or anything, you are just talking about whatever that thing is, you can integrate the media together so that the the content that comes from starting with search query analysis and leads to content that works in digital can then be used in other media as well. It's not as though when people are in digital they think fundamentally differently than they do elsewhere. It's just that, you know, there are different interaction patterns. So that's the whole approach, is creating integrated media by starting with the language of your clients and prospects. And that's ultimately what we mean by a pragmatic approach to content marketing. So just a little bit of reasoning as to why. I built my first search course for IBM.com in 2007. And by 2008, people were saying search is dead. And the whole mantra of search being dead has been a continuous theme for the last 8 years. And really, this chart shows why that's just not true. Sure, search query volumes have leveled off on the desktop, but in mobile, we're seeing huge query volumes. And primarily what we're seeing is queries that are formed in the form of a question because, you know, they're voice queries. So voice search is a huge trend that we see, and it actually makes it easier to understand what the user intent is behind a query when somebody asks a question in natural language. And really all you have to do is mine those questions that they're asking and answer them, you know, in, in, in ways that are accessible to them. And really that's the spirit of trying to do outside-in marketing from a writing perspective. The other thing that we see is that, you know, back when search was relatively in its infancy, people searched a lot on brand names. And branded queries have consistently dropped over the last 10 or 11 years. And in place of branded queries, we see a lot of unbranded queries. So basically, they're asking questions about their own problems. They're trying to find solutions about things that are in their language. And they're trying to ultimately find the solutions to those problems on commercial sites. So that's your job, is to mine those unbranded queries. And when they land on your content that is brand-neutral, to condition the conversation towards your brand ultimately, but only when they're ready. And here's a quick way in which that works. First of all, let me back up a little bit. So how do we create clear content? Clarity is secured by using the words, nouns and verbs alike, that are current and ordinary. And normally when I give this slide in a live setting, I ask people who the famous content strategist is. But since we are on a webinar, I will just say it.

It's Aristotle.

It's Aristotle. So 2,300 years ago, Aristotle was basically forming the basis for all communication by saying that really, in order to communicate with people, you have to use their words. And their words, again, we mine primarily through search queries, although we can also do social media listening to find out what the words that are common and ordinary are. And the way Google says it is focus on the user and all else will follow. And that's really what we're trying to do. We're trying to build user-centered content systems. And in order to understand what those users are saying and asking, you basically, again, you mine their queries. So Google becomes a proxy for what the user is looking for. So here's a user, Emily. And in every— it's very simple, really. In every decision point of Emily's journey, Well-designed content is a differentiator between success and failure. So let's just say that Emily searches on something and clicks an organic result and lands on your page. She's going to scan it for relevance. In digital, they're not captive audiences, so you have to demonstrate right up front that this content is relevant to their query. And the best way to do that is actually through text, that they scan for words and phrases that are close to, or at least semantically relevant to the query. And if you don't have that text above the fold, they're going to bounce. So the first decision point is to build content that is easy to scan and understand. And then once she scans and determines that it's relevant, she'll begin engaging with the page. But if she determines that it's not relevant, she bounces. And she goes back to Google and she tries to find something else. And this experience is not, is not neutral. It's a negative experience for your brand. You get enough of them and people start to think that you, you know, you don't know what you're doing. And it's also a negative experience for your search equity because Google actually measures these bounces and counts bounces against the quality of your content. So Designing in a way that helps her scan and determine relevance is really the most important thing. Once she does determine that it's relevant, she engages, meaning she reads, she scrolls, she clicks. Are we giving her the right and quality asset, the thing that's going to actually answer her question or solve her problem? And that's the second decision point. And again, if you don't provide that, then It's another— you lose. It's another potential to create an adversary. But if you provide something that actually answers her question or solves her problem, you win. And now you have somebody who's an advocate. So this is how we brand using the language of our clients and prospects. We create experiences that users can begin to trust our brand because we're providing them with the content that they need to solve their problems. So that's for one particular query. Let's, let's take a whole client journey. The way we just slice up the client journey in IBM is discover, learn, solve, try, and buy. There are other parts of the journey, but in the interest of space, I'm just using these. So in discover, we say, here's a typical query: what is big data? So we happen to have a page in ibm.com that ranks well for big data, and all it really does is answer that question. A lot of people wonder what big data is. And we have an answer that's vendor-neutral. And then we have a few trends below that show how big data is changing over time and what you can use big data for to improve your business. Well, Emily, who's a CMO, wants to know, how about big data for marketing? So maybe this asset is on that page previous, but maybe she can find it directly through search. And it's a It's a video that basically explains 4 ways in which you can use big data to transform your marketing. Okay, so big data is going to help me transform my marketing. Who are the players, the major players in this space? So she searches for big data platforms, and these are the platforms that she gets. And she becomes interested in one particular, and that would be Watson Analytics. So she wants to try it. And so she tries it. She finds out that it, it could really help her marketing organization understand how to create more compelling messages and get them in front of more people, which is really the goal of marketing. But she has to sell it to her, her executives in order to get it bought in. So here in the buy phase, we have content that is primarily from third parties that show the importance of using, in this case, Watson Analytics to improve the bottom line for marketers. And so we have content through the entire journey for this particular audience member. And, and if you unpack it in terms of queries and then you build the content that matches those queries, you can build whole client experiences around mining search data and understanding the content that that resolves from that. But it's not just Emily, it's also her whole buyer group. She has influencers on the left, and she has people that she needs to influence on the right. And we have to have content for all these people. So we work towards a model of sort of one-to-one marketing where we're trying to understand what each person in this buyer group needs, what their content journeys are like, and then we, we build content for them. So here's a quick case study. In 2010, we discovered— and I was on the team that discovered— that we didn't have any content in Google or Wikipedia for the queries that people cared about in cloud computing. And there are reasons for it. We were basically trying to brand our content with things like capacity on demand, dynamic infrastructure, basically our words for the same thing, cloud computing. cloud computing. We did have other places in IBM.com where people were trying to do this, and it was fragmented and difficult. So this was the fragmented experiences that we had, and we said, let's build an experience that is all about the words and phrases that people care about when they're looking for cloud solutions. So this was the, you know, the strategy that we came in— outside-in marketing. And we built this experience. I had to use the Wayback Machine to find it, but You can see that we had a faceted search function front and center that had all the words and phrases at the time that were most important to people looking for cloud computing solutions. And behind each one of those buttons, there was content for it. And as you can see, since then, the search query volumes have changed somewhat, but they've been pretty consistent. And building a content experience around this and adding to it as— and helping it to grow and make it evergreen has really turned us around from a side player in cloud computing to ultimately the number 2 player according to Gartner. And this is the kind of experience that we have. Basically, it's a landing experience that answers the question. There's nothing about the IBM brand on it to start with because the query is, what is cloud? But it's simple and it communicates the message. And behind each one of these links, they can start a journey that they gets ever more branded as they go. And this is how our SEO visibility has, has, has gone since we launched the site in April of 2011. And, you know, we've had a couple of bumps in the road, but primarily it's been up and to the right because we've continued to measure and iterate and improve, build this evergreen model of content as we went. So that's for one site. How do we scale it? We scale it by, by moving from, from left to right. We're, you know, originally SEO was all about afterthought. Can you optimize this page for search? And then we started thinking about it in terms of using keywords as an input to content planning and building experiences. But that was okay until we realized that we built a whole bunch of them that were duplicative. And so now we're building these coordinated experiences where we're trying to get brands to work together To build common experiences that ultimately serve clients first. Ultimately, we'll have a unified experience, although that requires a paradigm shift. We have to have everybody in the organization understanding all the KPIs and having the same set of data to work from. And that's the transformation that we describe in our book.

Outstanding.

It's all about how do we get everybody in the organization basically to think in terms of what clients are looking for and to build the content that meets their needs. And ultimately, when you make this transition, you go from brand-first content to user-first. It's all about building the user-first experience. And the hard part in the cultural change that we are helping to transform is getting executives to make that leap. that if they put the user first, they're going to make their numbers. And, and that's something that, you know, one executive at a time, we're able to do at IBM. So that's the end of my portion of the presentation, and I'm going to push it over to Mike for questions.

Thanks, James. I'm sure attendees have a much stronger idea of how to integrate big data into their content marketing, but you didn't answer every question. I've got several good questions teed up for you, and I'd like to remind our audience it's not too late to ask your own question by typing it into the questions box in your GoToWebinar controls. Remember to stick around to the end to see if you've won a copy of Outside-In Marketing. We're about to start firing questions at James, but we need to thank our sponsors once again. Barnraisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GaggleAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try GaggleAmp for free today. Geris Corp., a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. IBM Press, publishing the highest quality content for critical business and technology topics. Mountaintop Data, a B2B marketing intelligence company providing marketing lists as well as data cleaning, data appending, and data maintenance services. Now on to your questions. Our first question, James, is, do I have to stop doing inside-out marketing, or should I be doing both?

Well, certainly you can do both, and they can complement one another as long as you have a system of understanding how the two work together. So I like to think about it as, as the, you know, the outside-in approach is to gather prospects into your content. And then you're conditioning the conversation towards a branded message. And once you have the branded messages built, then you can push those to people. But if you understand who they are, you can do a better job of targeting your push inside-out approach towards them. Where inside-out doesn't work is you don't have the segmentation of who the audience is and who's going to be receptive of these messages. But like for email marketing, you know who you're talking to, you know who, you know, what their concerns are, and you have the branded content that can meet their needs. Go ahead and send that to them in a targeted one-to-one way.

Very good. Next question: How do I figure out what customers want so that I can do outside-in marketing?

So it's all about customer intent modeling, which is a little bit scary, I think, for a lot of people because there's a there's some inference that goes on between the queries that they're asking and the content that you would need to answer the questions behind those queries. But it really does start with trying to unpack what that question is. As I said in the talk, more and more all the time, people are using voice, so they're actually asking questions. But even if they're not asking questions, you can, you can unpack a query in terms of the questions that, that the audience has for them. And then the second part is actually looking into all of the different search results for those queries. So what does Google think is an appropriate answer to that question? And looking especially for those queries that, that where you have competitors ranking on the first page in Google and you're not ranking. Those are your opportunities to engage with the clients that your competitors also have identified as important clients to work with. So that's really the first approach, and you can refine it over time using metrics to, to measure the results of your content. In some cases, you'll find that, you know, we thought this was going to be a really good piece of content for this query, but it doesn't turn out that it's working very well. So then you, then you try something else, and ultimately, you know, you can get about 80% of the way there through customer intent modeling And the rest of the way you have to let the machine learn by iteratively improving content over time. Terrific.

We've got time for one more question. Can outside-in marketing be applied to clients in the non-enterprise area? Specifically, I have a client who is a small automotive magazine with 60,000 subscribers.

Yes, I think actually enterprise is It's just more difficult. But if you're a small— if your client is a smaller business, the range of queries, the number of queries, is a small— it's a smaller set. And the thorny issues of governance between one unit or another kind of aren't there. So really, it's, I think, easier if you have a very prescribed audience for the magazine and you have— you understand what their queries are. and then you build a content model based on satisfying or answering the questions to those queries, you can do a really good job of targeting content to your audience.

Terrific. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for questions. Thanks to James for these great ideas, and thanks especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. Now it's time to announce the attendees who will receive free copies of our book. The winners are Valentina Vendishenkova, Paula Malan, Leo Walker, Elsa Capitan White, Paul Hammonds, and Joe Kitka. Congratulations to all our winners. Eileen will send you confirmation emails shortly. And if you had any questions that we didn't have time to answer, you can email your questions to Eileen as well. eileen@mikemoran.com, and she'll be sure to get them to James for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link for the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, Digital Marketing Directions: Key Trends Driving Digital in 2017, with Tim Peter, scheduled for 11 AM US Eastern Time on January 10th. We hope to see everyone back here then. Bye everyone!

Bye.