Tag Archives: content marketing

Content Master: The Morton Arboretum

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As the leaves of autumn give way to the bare branches of winter, the Morton Arboretum is a place of both refuge and inspiration. The preserve west of Chicago has a well-deserved reputation as a destination for hiking and bicycling amid the trees, ponds, and fields that comprise the 1,700-acre grounds. But the arboretum doesn’t assume that its reputation alone will attract visitors. To ensure that the natural playground remains top of mind amid the many digital and offline distractions vying for its patrons’ attention, the Morton Arboretum also happens to be a powerful content machine.

The arboretum’s content strategy is twofold: use digital to attract visitors, and offline content to support the organization’s mission of protecting and appreciating the natural world.

Visual Storytelling the Digital Way

The Morton Arboretum creates awareness and engagement by sharing content across the digital world where its patrons share their own content, on social spaces ranging from Facebook to Instagram, thus demonstrating that if you want to attract an audience, you need to be present where they live and search for things to do.

And the arboretum speaks the language of its audience: imagery. For instance, in October and November, the arboretum’s Instagram account offered an explosion of fall colors enticing the Instagram community to experience the bright red leaves of a sour gum or a golden yellow cork tree. The arboretum’s growing Pinterest community takes advantage of Pinterest’s organizational tools, with images organized under boards ranging from Gardening Ideas to Winter Trees. On YouTube, the arboretum offers more immersive tours that give potential visitors a taste of what they’ll find if they stop by. For instance, the arboretum recently posted a video tour of Illuminations, during which the grounds come alive with a festive light show at night. But YouTube is also a learning destination, offering how-to videos on topics such as tree pruning and watering plants and trees.

On Facebook, the arboretum also includes user-generated images, thus drawing from a broader palette of images and creating more engagement from its Facebook followers. Facebook and Twitter also act as sources of updates on the events that the arboretum offers around the year. In fact, its Facebook page is a textbook example of a how an organization can use a local page to generate awareness where people conduct searches for things to do nearby. The arboretum makes it easy for visitors to learn about events such as its Boo Breakfast for children, and the arboretum cross-promotes content on other social spaces, including TripAdvisor reviews. By being transparent and informative, the arboretum makes Facebook an important digital touch point that complements its website, which serves as its hub for learning more about things to do there. Patrons can also sign up for an email newsletter that curates content as frequently as needed.

A Learning Experience

The arboretum’s not-so-secret weapon for engaging its audience is educational content. Its website modestly claims that “we engage students, families, teachers, and life-long learners to dig a little deeper into the science of trees,” which is putting things mildly. The arboretum is practically a year-round school, offering lectures, classes on topics such as nature art and photography, and opportunities to get involved in conservation. The arboretum does a masterful job segmenting educational content for different audiences. Here are just a few examples:

  • School groups: for grades PreK-5, the arboretum hosts classroom visits in which educational leaders provide courses such as plant investigation and the basics of trees. Its half- and full-day field trips offer deeper dives into nature for ages ranging from kindergarten to high school. Kindergarteners might learn about using the five senses to explore nature, whereas high schoolers can get involved into the maintenance of the park by acting as restoration stewards during their field trips.
  • Adult programs: the arboretum empowers adult visitors to enrich their understanding of nature and discover their inner artists. During chilly winter Saturday mornings, visitors can take winter bird walks, in which small groups discover the habits of the birds who winter at the arboretum. The Nature Artists’ Guild encourages patrons to express their artistic sides through paintings, drawings, and other creative endeavors — really a form of user generated content.

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Image source: The Morton Arboretum

One of my favorite arboretum activities is to immerse myself in learning at the Sterling Morton Library. The curved shelves full of neatly arranged books, comfortable chairs, and high ceiling create a welcoming environment to learn the old-school way: by burying your nose in books about the natural world the arboretum has vowed to protect. The library reminds me that a location need not provide blinking lights, video, and pulsating music to be immersive. The silence that invites quiet exploration of the mind is as immersive as sound.

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All the content has a purpose: to support the arboretum’s self-proclaimed role as “the champion of trees.” The exhibits, the classes, and the tours all ladder up to a mission to get everyday people involved in protecting the natural world. And the arboretum supports its mission in obvious ways, such as the Vanishing Acts traveling exhibit. Vanishing Acts: Trees Under Threat was developed with the Global Trees Campaign to raise awareness for threatened and endangered trees. What makes Vanishing Acts special is that you can take the exhibition with you. The exhibition is designed to be set up in public spaces appropriate for learning about tree conservation. As such, the arboretum offers a program to help others set up the exhibition, including a how-to guide for constructing the exhibit. Consider Vanishing Acts an old-school way of creating sharable content.

 Questions for Brands

  • Are you creating content that will engage your audience at a location level?
  • How well do you employ visual storytelling to share your brand?
  • Are you distributing that content where your customers are going to find it?
  • How well does your content support your mission?
  • How well do you involve your audience in the branded content you create?

Other Brands to Examine

  • Nordstrom, for its mastery of content on platforms such as Pinterest.
  • Starbucks, for capitalizing on social spaces to generate awareness for its stores.
  • Bass Pro Shops for providing activities such as 3D Archery
  • Weber Grill Restaurants for offering grilling classes and special events

For brick-and-mortar businesses, sharing meaningful content is increasingly essential to combat the ever-present threat of such as video games, Netflix, and apps that make it all too easy to remain planted on our sofas in the comfort of our homes. The Morton Arboretum can teach any brick-and-mortar business the power of immersive content.

Portions of this blog were adapted from a post I wrote for SIM Partners.

 

Content Marketing: There Is No Try

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Pity the CMO. She is responsible for growing a business and ensuring that her company’s brand remains relevant even as constantly changing market forces and technologies make her life one steep learning curve. And it seems everyone wants to tell her how to do her job. She’s supposed to get closer to the customer. She has to forge a deeper relationship with the CIO and carve out time to learn the nuances of big data. Oh, and don’t forget: become a digital ninja or die. Well, now I have piled on with some advice of my own: lead your company’s charge into content marketing.

My recently published CMO.com column, “10 Content Marketing Tips for the CMO,” addresses content marketing’s increasingly prominent role on the CMO’s agenda brand-building agenda. As a consultant who specializes in helping companies support their business goals with content marketing, I am encouraged CMOs are investing into branded content. To help CMOs be more effective with content marketing, my post offers advice such as the importance of developing a documented content-marketing strategy. But the most important tip in my column is this: set the example. Content marketing isn’t someone else’s job. It’s yours.

Content marketing is a reflection of your company’s ideas, personalities, and culture — starting at the top. Go ahead and dip your toes into the content marketing waters. Doing so might seem awkward at first. But I assure you, if you take the time to write emails at work or occasionally snap a photo with your smart phone, you’re already employing some of the mechanical tools of content marketing: writing and visual storytelling. All you need is a strategy, commitment, and guidance to hone your content-marketing skills.

Being a content marketer will help you become more empathetic to the needs of your employees and more sensitive to how your brand can and should reflect your culture. And as my post points out, being a content marketer doesn’t have to mean committing yourself to writing a litany of blog posts and white papers. More importantly, setting the example is the first step to creating a culture of content.

As a wise character from a certain classic blockbuster movie once said: Do. Or do not. There is no try.

New Report: Content Marketing Is “the Show Horse” of Customer Acquisition

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Content marketing is the show horse of customer acquisition and retention — and second only to social media as a digital marketing spending priority among U.S. brands, according to my newly published report for Gigaom.

The report, Workhorses and Dark Horses: Digital Tactics for Customer Acquisition, examines how companies use digital to acquire customers (beyond awareness building). Content marketing emerges as an essential priority along with email marketing, social media, and search engine optimization. Workhorses and Dark Horses counsels brands to apply content systematically across digital touch points to guide prospects them along a path to acquisition and conversion.

64 Percent of Marketers Use Content Marketing Regularly

Workhorses and Dark Horses is based on a new Gigaom survey of 300 U.S. digital marketers. We wanted to understand how brands are using digital marketing tactics across the marketing funnel, spanning awareness, customer acquisition, conversion, and retention. We also asked marketers to tell us about their 2014 spending priorities. Our survey affirms that digital marketing is being used consistently across the entire customer experience. Here’s what we learned about content marketing:

  • 64 percent of marketers use content marketing regularly, making content marketing the fourth most popular tactic behind email, social media, and search engine optimization (SEO). The popularity of both content marketing and SEO together underscores the importance of inbound marketing.

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  • Marketers find content marketing most useful for awareness building and customer retention.

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Why You Need to Hustle Content: A Lesson from The New York Times Innovation Report

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The recently leaked New York Times Innovation report has become required reading because the document provides a candid snapshot of a legendary brand struggling to embrace the realities of running a business in the digital era. In unsparing language, the internal report indicts The New York Times for failing to master “the art and science of getting our journalism to our readers.” I believe The New York Times Innovation report offers many lessons for content marketers regardless of your industry. Among those lessons: it’s not enough to produce great content. You have to be a content hustler, too.

Content hustling means sharing an idea across multiple distribution channels ranging from a brand’s website to its social media spaces. Content hustling requires companies to empower employees to act as brand ambassadors, relying on their personal networks to share corporate thought leadership. Essentially The New York Times takes itself to task for being a woeful content hustler.

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Gini Dietrich Discusses Content Marketing in 2014 and Beyond

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What does the future of content marketing look like? According to Gini Dietrich, founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, succeeding with content in 2014 and beyond means being visionary, practicing brand journalism, embracing native advertising, and telling employee stories.  The co-author of Marketing in the Round and publisher of the Spin Sucks blog delivered her points October 17 via a keynote presentation at Content Jam, an annual event where marketers discuss the state of the art in content marketing.

Before looking forward, Dietrich looked back. She reminded everyone that content marketing is not new: John Deere started publishing a magazine for its customers in 1895, and brands like Michelin and Betty Crocker became publishers of useful content long before digital came along.

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By 2007, seven out of 10 publications in the United Kingdom were produced by corporations. According to a study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 93 percent of marketers use content marketing, and more than half of marketers are going to increase their spending in this area. So what are the forward-thinking brands doing with their content spend? According to Dietrich, successful content looks like this:

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What is content marketing?

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Occasionally I am asked how content marketing differs from other forms of building a brand. After all, doesn’t all marketing contain content of some sort?
Two recent blog posts I wrote for the iCrossing Content Lab illustrate how content marketing consists of building your brand by sharing useful ideas that engage  people. For instance, the February 15 post “How Clorox Used Content Marketing to Help Me Fix a Toilet” discusses a Clorox how-to video that rescued me from a plumbing problem (a perfect example of a brand engaging you by sharing a useful idea).
And on February 16, I reviewed a new Altimeter Group report that contains some excellent examples of how brands are applying content marketing, one of them being the case of Eloqua, which has differentiated itself through a compelling thought leadership program run by Joe Chernov.
My own employer iCrossing uses content marketing to build connected brands (or brands that build close relationships with consumers by being useful, usable, visible, desirable, and engaging). In 2011, iCrossing issued a noteworthy report designed to help companies become content publishers in real time, and then, as discussed here, iCrossing made a number of other moves to deepen its content marketing expertise, especially to help brands create more personal relationships with audiences. As a result of iCrossing’s commitment to building its own brand through useful content, Jeff Ernst of Forrester Research cited iCrossing as an example of how to differentiate through thought leadership.
I also recommend following the Content Marketing Institute to immerse yourself in content marketing.

What is content marketing? The future of marketing.

L’Oréal and Procter & Gamble: content marketing masters

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In our always-on marketing world, it’s tempting to never look back. But sometimes reflection can be instructive. For instance, I was just reviewing a January 2011 Forrester Research report that cited trends for CMOs to watch in 2011. If you give the report a close read, you find Forrester forecasting the uptake of content marketing – something that did not jump out at me when I read the report nine months ago:

Brands will begin managing owned media like a product. Marketers are taking a more hands-on approach when it comes to the creative product by producing their own content. This past year, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart stole a strategy from the early days of soap operas and developed three prime-time made-for-television movies through P&G Studios. Meanwhile, Converse launched a community-based recording studio called Converse Rubber Tracks.

In fact, the rise of content marketing, which merited a small mention in Forrester’s report, has become an important part of the CMO’s agenda. And major brands like L’Oréal and Procter & Gamble have made content marketing (defined as building your brand by sharing useful information that engages people) an integral part of their marketing.

L’Oréal: beautiful content

In 2010, L’Oréal asserted itself as one of the most digitally savvy beauty and skincare brands in the L2 Digital IQ Index: Beauty & Skincare report (which was created with the support and sponsorship of my employer iCrossing). Among L’Oréal’s forward-thinking Continue reading →

We are all content hustlers

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It’s ironic Google+ allowed the digital elites such as Chris Brogan early access to Google+ while asking corporations to hold off creating brand profiles. Just about everyone I know on Google+ (including me) uses the social platform to hustle their own content as well as any corporation could.

We are all content hustlers now. In fact, it’s the proliferation of platforms like Google+ and check-in sites like GetGlue that continues to transform everyday consumers into marketers of our own content.

You check into GetGlue on a Friday night to watch Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and the next thing you know, someone responds to your check-in by asking for your opinion, and then you write a mini review in reply. In a matter of minutes, you become both moviegoer and amateur critic.

Case in point: yesterday morning, I needed to do some quick online research to find a business and its street address. I visited Google to do a simple search. Immediately I encountered a Google Doodle that cleverly honored Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday by playing snippets of I Love Lucy via the image of an old-style console TV. How cool! I just had to share the Google Doodle with my friends.

But sharing wasn’t enough: I needed to add my own opinion (my contribution to your content stream) about how the Google Doodle brilliantly synthesized utility and entertainment. Within minutes, I posted a CBS News article about the doodle, plus a brief comment on my Facebook, Global 14, and Google+ content streams. I also wrote the obligatory tweet.

And I wasn’t even working up a sweat – or tapping into the many other platforms I could have used to spread my content (however brief it was) across the digital world.

Within minutes, my mindset had changed from searcher of information to publisher. And then I did what any good content publisher does: checked my metrics. Did I get any retweets? Facebook Likes? +1s? Had I found a responsive audience for the content I was hustling?

A few take-aways:

  • A Google search became an exercise in content publishing. But I also forgot to complete my original Google search, ironically. The content publisher lurking inside me was competing with the simple reality of getting on with my life.
  • Although access to social media sites makes it easier for us to hustle content, not all the content we create is worth hustling. As guitarist Jack White said in the documentary It Might Get Loud, ease of use does not make us more creative.

Yes, we are all content hustlers. But just because we can does not mean we should. Fortunately we can block and manage content, too, by paring our friend lists and curating our information streams (e.g., with Google+ Circles), although doing so is not always as easy as it looks. I’ll let you judge whether I’m hustling content you care about.

Content + community + analytics = real-time marketing

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On the iCrossing Content Lab blog I’ve been talking about how content marketing is a CMO-level priority, as have many other bloggers. But being a priority is one thing; how do senior marketers make content marketing a reality? To address that issue, today my employer iCrossing launched the Live Media Studio, which is the interactive ad industry’s first-ever resource dedicated to real-time marketing.

Based in New York, the studio uses analytics-based insights about digital consumers to develop branded content and engage communities for clients in real time.

In the studio, iCrossing plans and manages the daily editorial production and publication of branded content (such as videos, infographics, articles, blog posts, and tweets) to engage communities. The studio relies on a team of audience researchers, Emmy award-winning content producers, and WOMMA-trained audience managers experienced in real-time content creation.

iCrossing researchers use analytics-based approaches to understand the interests and behaviors of our clients’ communities. Their insights inform the content we develop and community management approaches we undertake.

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