Aha! Content Marketing
The market is noisy. The press is preoccupied.
“How do I get MY story out there?”
The secret is strategic and persuasive Content Marketing. But not just run-of-the-mill storytelling. The content has to work for you. It’s got to be search-friendly. It must move your audience to action. You’re in the process of building your strategic digital footprint, but how do you ensure that footprint is aligned with your corporate strategy and company purpose?
You need a strong Message Architecture, powerful thought leadership platform, and a digital presence cemented with content, key search words, and memes.
That’s where we come in.
PHASE I: ARTICULATE YOUR STRATEGY
BUILD YOUR MESSAGE ARCHITECTURE
Through a positioning workshop, you’ll discover your corporate DNA and learn how to leverage it. You’ll learn the ins and outs of strategic positioning and how to articulate your unique role and relevance to your target audience. You’ll also learn to look at the market through six distinct lenses - Core, Category, Community, Context, Competition, and Criteria.
We’ll walk you through Andy Cunningham’s tried and true framework and help build a Message Architecture - your blueprint for communication success. In addition to aligning your business and influencing potential customers, the Message Architecture will act as your messaging overview for years to come.
PHASE II: RISE ABOVE THE NOISE
develop a thought leadership platform
It’s noisy out there. Your competitors are vying for attention from the same audience and many of them are using the same channels to reach that audience. It’s easy to get overlooked, overshadowed, and out-communicated.
How do you rise above the noise?
It’s not enough anymore to just tweet about product updates or to push promotional email campaigns. You need to elevate your brand by communicating an idea that goes beyond the products you sell or the services you provide. You must also connect with your target audience in a way that both resonates with and influences them. A thought leadership platform can do just that.
If the idea is truly sticky and the thought leadership platform credible, meaningful, and emotional, it can go viral and the company that owns it will become associated with a bigger idea or ideal that inspires customers, prospects, investors, and influencers. The goal is to move from concept to conversation. And the bigger the better. When this happens, corporate valuations increase.
phase II: Stay there
Execute your strategy with content
With a thought leadership platform and Message Architecture in place, you’re ready to put your story out there. The content you create must speak authentically to both your corporate brand and your thought leadership concept. Not only does it need to reach your target audience and its influencers, it must also move them to action.
Content Marketing is the solution to the ever increasing need to stay relevant, top of mind, and topical. But how you build a brand matters. Our Content Marketing Team will work with you to develop, create, and deploy a lasting communication strategy.
How to Do It
1. Expose a need, or maybe even a longing, that is both emotional and that requires an ecosystem — or movement — to fulfill.
2. Determine the requirements that form the basis of this need, and ensure that the company’s value proposition can fulfill it.
3. Brand the thought leadership platform with a phrase (think Salesforce’s “No Software” or IBM’s “Smarter Planet”) and connect it to the corporate essence without ever using your corporate name. A thought leadership platform should never be a commercial.
4. Establish the requirements that meet the need in a significant speech (a TED talk, for example), a white paper, or a book.
5. Disseminate the concept in every conceivable way including studies to illustrate it, PR to amplify it, advertising to increase awareness about it, talks to spread it, etc.
what you’ll need
Clear articulation of the thought leadership platform concept and brand
Resolution on seminal content vehicles
A one-page plan articulating the objective, strategy, and implementation of the thought leadership platform
Seminal content (speech, white paper, book, etc.)
Widespread dissemination of the platform via PR, social media, blog posts, web copy, email campaigns, and targeted ads
A microsite for readers arriving from links and memes in the copy
Analytics to measure engagement
(The strategy will be customized to your business needs with an option to add video content production.)
