Categories
Content Marketing

Ranking in Content Marketing

Content marketing rests on a simple premise: Great content will attract interest from readers.  It sounds simple — but the ingredients of great content, on closer inspection, seem ineffable.  We can come up with any number of criteria necessary for great content.  But satisfying these criteria won’t necessarily result in lots of people finding your content, and using it.  It is possible to have great writing about useful topics that is promoted diligently, and still find that the content fails to generate expected interest.  Hard work alone doesn’t explain outcomes.

How then does content marketing rank highly? I’m not an SEO, so I’m not going to offer SEO advice here.  I’m using the SEO term “ranking” in a more general sense of gaining visibility based on audience expressions of interest.  It may be  ranking in SERPs, or in social media shares, or bookmarks, or another metric that indicates how people vote for what content they find most useful.  The key to the ranking question is to think about online content as a market, where there are buyers and sellers.  Unfortunately, it is not a simple market, where there is a perfect match for everyone.  Some sellers never find buyers, and some buyers never find the right seller either, and have to settle for something less than optimal.  Online content is sometimes efficient, but very often is prone to market failure.

Navigating through the Content Glut

Like many other people who work with online content, I believe we face a content glut.  There’s too much content online. Too much content is ignored by audiences.   Many organizations consider it acceptable to create content that only receives one or two hundred views.  A shocking amount of content that’s created is never viewed at all!  It would be easy to dismiss all this content as low quality content, but that would not capture the full story.  It’s more accurate to say that this content doesn’t match the needs of audiences.  Not all content needs to generate high numbers of views — if it is intended for a narrow, specific audience.  But most content that’s created has a potential audience that’s far larger than the actual audience it attracts.  It gets lost in the content glut.

To understand how audiences select content, it helps to consider content as being traded in one of two different markets.  One market involves people who all have the same opinion about what is great.  The other market involves people who have different ideas about what is great.  It’s vitally important not confuse which group you are writing for, and hoping to attract.

More formally, I will describe these two markets as a “winner-takes-all” market, and as an “auction” market. I’m borrowing (and repurposing) these terms from Cal Newport, a Georgetown computer science professor who wrote a career advice book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You. His distinction between winner-takes-all verses auction markets is very relevant to how online content is accessed, and valued, by audiences.

Winner-Takes-All Markets

When a large audience segment all want the same thing — applying the same standards —  it can create a race to determine who provides the best offering.  It gives rise of a winners-take-all market.  

Let’s illustrate the concept with a non-content example. Sport stars are a classic winner-takes-all market.  Fans like players who score exceptionally, so the player who scores most generally win the most fans.  The top players make much more money than those who are just short of being as good as them.  Fans only want so many stars.

Many content topics have a homogenous user preference profile.  Nearly everyone seeking health information wants up-to-date, accurate, comprehensive, authoritative information.  The US National Institutes of Health is the gold standard for that kind of information.  Other online publishers, such as the Mayo Clinic or WebMD, are being judged in comparison to the NIH.  They may be able to provide slightly friendlier information, or present emerging advice that isn’t yet orthodox.   But they need to have thoroughness and credibility to compete.  Lesser known sources of health information will be at a disadvantage.  Health information is a winner-takes-all market.  The best-regarded sources get the lion’s share of views.  Breaking into the field is difficult for newly established brands.  When everyone wants the same kind of information, and all the content is trying to supply the same kind of information, only the best content will preferred.  Why settle for second best?

 How do you know when a topic is a winners-takes-all market? A strong signal is when all content about the topic, no matter by whom it is published, has the same basic information, and often even sounds the same.  It is hard to be different under such circumstances, and to rank more highly than others.

Another example of a winner-takes-all market for content is SEO advice.  If you want to learn about (say) the latest changes Google announced last month, you will find hundreds of blog posts by different local SEO agencies, all of which will have the same information.  Only a few sources will rank highly, such as Moz or Search Engine Land.  The rest will be add to the content glut.

It is extremely hard to win the game of becoming the most authoritative source of information about a topic that is widely covered and has a uniformity of views.  Generally, the first-movers in such a topic gain a sustained advantage, as they develop a reputation of being the go-to source of information.  

There are a couple of tactics sellers of content use in winner-takes-all markets.  The first is to set-up a franchise, so that the publisher develops a network of contributors to increase their scale and visibility.  This is the approach used, for example, by Moz and other large SEO websites.  Contributors get some visibility, and build some reputation, but may not develop solid brand recognition.

The second tactic, advocated by some content marketing specialists, is to develop “pillar” content.  The goal of this tactic is to build up a massive amount of content about a topic, so that no one else has the opportunity to say something that you haven’t already addressed.  You can think of this approach as a “build your own Wikipedia”.  Some proponents advocate articles of 5000 words or more, cross-linked to other related articles.  It’s an expensive tactic to pursue, with no guarantees.  In certain cases, pillar content might work, for a topic that is not well covered currently, and for which there is a strong demand for extremely detailed information.  But otherwise, it can be a folly.  Pillar content tactics can trigger an arms race of trying to out-publish competitors with more and longer content.  In the race to become authoritative, the publisher can lose sight of what audiences want.  Do they really want 5000 word encyclopedic articles?  Generally they don’t.

Winner-takes-all applies to a competitive (non-captive) market.  If you have a captive audience (like your email list) you can be more successful with generic topics. But you will still be competing with the leaders.

Don’t forget: the characteristic of winner-takes-all markets is that there are few winners, and many losers.  Make sure you aren’t competing with a topic you are unprepared to win with.

Auction Markets

The defining characteristic of an auction market is that different people price stuff differently.  There’s no single definition of what the best is.  People value content differently, according to what they perceive as what’s unique or special about it.

A non-content example of an auction market is hiring an interior decorator.  It’s a very diverse market: decorators serve different segments of buyers (rich, budget, urban, suburban,…), and within segments people have widely different tastes (eclectic, mid-century modern, cutting edge, traditional…).  Different decorators are “right” for different people.  But that doesn’t mean there’s no competition.  Far more decorators want to design interiors that could be featured in Architectural Digest than there are clients looking to hire such decorators.  There’s an overabundance of decorators who favor the white sofa look that gets featured in Architectural Digest.  And budget buyers may have trouble finding a budget decorator who has sophisticated taste and who can hire affordable and reliable contractors.  It’s hard to get the niche right, where buyers want what you can offer.  

 The value that audiences assign to content in auctions depends on the parameters they most care about. A broad topic that has wide interest can potentially be discussed in different ways, by tailoring topic so that it is targeted at segment, offering a unique point of view (POV), or by accommodating a specific level of prior knowledge about the topic. 

Many areas of content marketing are auction markets.  Some consumers are enthusiastic about learning the details of  products;  others are reluctant buyers worried about costs or reliability.   For example, home repair is a topic of fascination for a handyman. It’s a chore and headache for an exasperated homeowner dealing with an emergency.  

Auction markets rank on the basis of differentiation.  Brands make an appeal: We are right for you! Others are wrong for you! And by extension: We are wrong for people who aren’t like you!  Brands aim for what  could be called the audience-content-brand fit.  The moment a brand tries to become a multi-audience pleaser, it risks losing relevance.  It is then playing the winner-takes-all strategy.

Audience segments most value content that addresses specific needs that seem unique, and is not offered by others.  This places a premium on differentiation.  Segmentation is based on approach.  How content addresses a topic will mirror how audience segments coalesce around themes, interests or motivations.

Many marketers have trouble addressing fuzzy segments.  Groups of people may be drawn to a combination of overlapping interests, be looking for fresh points of view, and have varying levels of knowledge.   Such segments are fiendishly hard to define quantitatively.  How many people fit in each box?  It can be more productive to define the box as a idea to test, rather than as a fixed number.  Auctions discover segments; they don’t impose them.  People vote their priorities in auctions.  One can’t know what people want in an auction before it happens.  By their nature, auctions are meant to surprise us.  

Auctions are fluid.  People’s interests shift.  Their knowledge may grow, or their willingness to learn may lessen.  It is even possible for an auction market to morph into a winner-takes-all market.  Today’s hottest debates can turn into tomorrow’s best practice orthodoxy. 

Matching the Content to the Audience

Ranking is fundamentally about being relevant.  Brands must offer content that is relevant.  Yet in the end, it is audiences who judge the relevance.

Marketers will find their content lost in the content glut if they fail to understand whether the audience segment they want to reach wants content that’s unique in some way, or wants the kind of content that everyone agrees is the best available.  

Brands should aim for share of mind, not just raw numbers.  Many marketers start by thinking about hypothetical reach.  They imagine all the people who, in theory, might be interested in the topic abstractly, and then work to improve their yield.  They create content they think a million people might want to read, without testing whether such an assumption is realistic.  They then try to improve on the minuscule portion of people viewing the content. That approach rarely builds a sustained audience. 

 It’s better to garner 20% of a potential audience of 1000 people, than 1% of a segment of 20,000 people, even if the raw numbers are the same (200 views).   A well-defined segment is essential to figure out how to improve what you offer them.  If everyone want exactly the same thing, then knowing what people want is that much easier.  But being the best when delivering to them is that much harder,

— Michael Andrews

Categories
Content Marketing

Sincerity in Content Marketing

Content marketing is the new advertising.  It is ubiquitous and often unloved — despite the desperate efforts of marketers to make people “love” their content.  Everywhere we see signs of public fatigue with content marketing.  Striving for the next hit, content marketing has become ever more insincere.

Sincerity is an old-fashioned concept that’s not discussed much anymore.    The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes how sincerity has become so unfamiliar to us:

“The older concept of sincerity, referring to being truthful in order to be honest in one’s dealings with others, comes to be replaced by a relatively new concept of authenticity, understood as being true to oneself for one’s own benefit”.

In other words, sincerity has largely been replaced by “authenticity” — which translated into jargon of marketing, is branding.  No need to worry about the truth as others see it — just worry about what’s true as you define it yourself.

Branding is a game of association.  Companies try to establish a brand image.  They offer to convey that image to customers who are willing to buy their brand.  Content has become major prop in communicating a brand image.

Stories Marketers tell themselves

When content involves stories, sincerity is considered negotiable.  Seth Godin, the marketing personality, wrote a book with the title “all marketers are liars storytellers”.  The implication is that people don’t care how truthful content is, as long as they like it.  For some reason, stories seem immune to “black hat” manipulation.  It’s just a story after all.

Some of the earliest, most pervasive, and most successful examples of content marketing comes from the cigarette industry.  For some reason these examples have never make it into the Hall of Fame of content marketing.  Tobacco companies are exactly the kind of company that would want to hide their involvement with the content.   You had an undesirable product, cigarettes, attempting to become associated with desirable activities, such cricket, wine, food, art or horse racing.

  • Do you like art? Read the Benson and Hedges exhibition catalogue of the exhibit at London’s Royal Academy.
  • Do you like music?  You can read the Benson and Hedges concert program for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
  • Like theater? You can read the program for a production by Andrew Lloyd Webber, courtesy of Benson & Hedges.
  • Like cooking?  Read Benson & Hedges 100’s Presents 100 of the World’s Greatest Recipes by noted chef James Beard.

 

Cigarettes make you sporty.

 

It’s laughable to imagine that a cigarette maker would have a genuine interest in such a wide range of high culture.  But we see many examples of firms producing branded content that is far removed from their core business.  Demographic driven content gives us things such as carbonated beverage manufacturers producing content about extreme sports, and toothbrush manufacturers dispensing parenting advice.

Who is the Hero?

A good deal of content marketing trades on the concept of the hero’s journey.  Make the customer the hero in your stories, the advice says.  I encounter unsophisticated hero-centered marketing each day, in the form of an email announcing various online certificates I can enroll in for a fee.  The sender promises to make me a rock star or ninja in some career that’s red hot.

Mara Einstein writes in her book Black Ops Advertising that much content marketing “plays on what academics call ‘hope labor’ or ‘aspirational labor’ the expectation that we might be able to earn a living by participating in activities like this.”  They promote hope, rather than discuss reality.

When content marketing appeals to hero’s journey, it promises to re-brand the buyer to become a better version of themselves.

Einstein says “content marketing is often about creating stories that present the customer as the hero not the product even to the point of taking the brand out of the story altogether.”   This is why carbonated drinks manufacturers sponsors content about extreme sports.  It is hard to make the product the hero.  So they change the subject to imply consumers of the product can be heroes through their interaction with the product.

The hero’s journey in content marketing does not always involve pretending the customer is a rock star.  Sometimes the pitch is to make you a hero by showing that you are a good person.  This is the premise of  “cause based marketing”.  This form of marketing is especially difficult to untangle.  It can be unclear who is meant to benefit, the consumer, the marketing organization, or the cause that is the subject of the marketing.

The hero. of the story.  Image: By Greudin – Own work, Public Domain

 

Imagine you become concerned about an issue such as the plight of donkeys.  You’ve learned from a charity’s content marketing  that donkeys are very sweet animals but they’re often mistreated.  The charity producing the content is dedicated to helping donkeys.  You like the organization but you want to do more than simply give them money.  So instead of converting on their call to action, where they ask you give the money,  you decide to help donkeys directly.  You discover another charity that allows you to volunteer your time at a sanctuary overseas that also helps donkeys.   The original charity that raised your awareness of the plight of donkeys doesn’t have volunteer opportunities.  Does it have a right to be upset that you did not give it money?  You supported their cause and broader mission.  But you have not acted on their called the action or supported their organization financially.   From the reader’s perspective, is the point of the content to help donkeys or to help an organization?

A cause can sound good, but it isn’t always what’s most important to act on. Content marketing is very good at optimizing how compelling a cause seems. But it has nothing to say about whether the cause is important to begin with.  The people who give money to donkey charities typically live in countries like the UK where working donkeys are few in number, and are well treated compared to poor countries.  As one news commentary noted, donkey causes are “one of those charities which raises money easily and out of all proportion to the relative urgency of its good works.”

Cause marketers may be authentic, in the sense of “being true to oneself for one’s own benefit.”  But they aren’t always sincere, in the sense of putting their own self-interest to the side.  They produce content too focused on the question of what inspires an individual, instead of what’s worthy of being inspiring.

Emotions and Disinterest

Content marketing talks in lofty terms about informing and educating audiences, attracting and delighting them.   It all sounds lovely, even altruistic.  The brand wants to be our friend.  But friendship is a ridiculous concept for a brand to promise.  Brands are organizations, not people, and are incapable of friendship.  They can be liked by individuals, but they can’t return that emotion to individuals.  Pretending to be friends with individuals strains credibility.  And credibility is exactly what brands need in order to be considered sincere.

Organizations have measurable financial goals.  They expect content to support those goals.  In the past, content was often produced without clear goals.  Organizations have become better defining goals for their content.  These goals are not always the same goals that audiences have.  So the organization may try to change the audience’s goals.

Organizations use content marketing to change how customers feel in order to get them to take action.  The more that content marketing tugs at emotions, the more likely the content will  become confused about whose interests are being served.

When marketing content makes promises or implies outcomes, it needs to be sincere if it expects the appeal to be sustainable over time.  The firms that have built the strongest customer reputations over time are the ones that have remained true to serving their customer’s interests, and not just their own.  Sincerity can be good for business.

Sincerity may seem like waffly concept.  But it’s an idea that has been debated for millennia.  Two famous ancient thinkers give us some guideposts to think about the concept.

Cicero believed that the right ethos (character) is necessary for audiences to

  • Be receptive
  • Be attentive
  • Like and trust you

One’s ethos (internally generated) is not the same as one’s brand (externally projected).  It’s about inside-out driven, rather than outside-in driven.  It is not about how one wants to be seen.  It is about one’s values.

Aristotle defined how ethos affected credibility according to three dimensions:

  • Virtue — having the same values as the audience
  • Craft  — the confidence that the speaker knows what they are doing
  • Disinterest — the speaker has no bias, is caring.

The concept of disinterest is especially important.  Everyone knows that marketing content exists to generate revenue.  How can brands demonstrate that they really care about the customer, instead of just wanting their money?  It requires  transparency.

The enduring wisdom of ancient philosophers tells us that character matters.  That credibility rests on sincerity.  To focus on values, rather than optics.

How can publishers be sincere?  Is it in their self-interest to do so?

In the short term, brands face pressures to make customers feel powerful and worthy, even if nothing about them has changed.  For companies selling fast moving consumer goods to adolescents, marketers expect a fresh cohort of their target market will arrive to replace any cynicism that could accumulate from the current cohort.   Reality sometimes catches up, and the next cohort of prospective customers decides the brand is toxic.  This happened to the feel-good branding of Nike’s “Just Do It!”, which got flipped when customers became concerned about their labor practices.  The risk of making the customer the hero of your brand is that they feel personally liable for any shoddy behavior you may do.

When companies need to maintain a relationship with customers, the appeal of heroism is not sustainable.  The long time customer realizes their life hasn’t been transformed, despite what’s implied in the marketing.  Even Apple is finding that such a pretense is hard to keep up.  Tens of millions of customers haven’t suddenly become creative by buying Apple products.

Making Content Sincere

The path to sincerity involves clarifying what the customer wants.  Too often brands assume customers will share the same outlook that they are promoting.  The goals of building an audience for a brand can get warped into making the audience into the brand.

Don’t confuse your brand with branding the customer. Individual people have their own identities, which are rarely identical to any company’s or nonprofit’s.  Even religious organizations can’t push too hard telling people who they are and how they should feel.  Those that try to do this are considered cults.  Companies have also been accused of doing this as well.

Brands should talk about their values, and what they are doing to make those values a reality.  Very few customers know what a firm’s corporate mission is, because it is vague and hidden.  A mission doesn’t need to be original, but it needs to matter to consumers.  And it needs to be simple, stressing one key idea, such as value, access, quality, or helpfulness.  Avoid the “we are going to change the world” nonsense of some branding.

Sincere content avoids phony self-deprecation.  It doesn’t say: “Because of you, we’re committed to…” or “You make what we do possible.”  Sincere content articulates the organization’s own identity.  It reveals the firm’s goals, and actions.  Let customers choose if your values are their values.

Patagonia provides a counter example to hero-narrative cause marketing.  They promote environmental causes because their management is committed to these causes.  They suggest they aren’t motivated by self interest, to the point of discouraging people from buying their products unnecessarily.  One can debate the merits of Patagonia’s strategy.  But it is a refreshing change from the stealth marketing of other companies that attach themselves to causes or mine the insecurities of their customers.  It is not typical lifestyle branding that implies people can confirm their identity by giving money to an organization.

Let people support a philosophy, rather than ask them to adopt one.  Organizations should not use content marketing to promote themselves as gurus seeking followers.

Don’t confuse the hero’s journey with the user’s journey.  Unfortunately, these two concepts get conflated.  The user journey looks at what real people do.  The hero’s journey is about what imaginary people ideally might do.  The user journey is based on actual customer scenarios.  The hero’s journey is based on escapism.

If organizations what to empower people, they should use content to help them practically.

Talk about what you can do for people.  Don’t hide behind stories to imply you offer something that you don’t.  Is that testimonial a commitment of what your brand can do for anyone, or is it a micro-celebrity endorsement?

Publishers should help people understand all options they have.   Start with an issue and then present the options available.  Help customers narrow down what’s best for them. Customers can DIY or do nothing.  They can choose to use an option from a competitor.  Or they can use to give money to a sincere organization that shows them what’s better about what they offer compared to the alternatives.  Transparency brings valuable credibility to a brand.

Products don’t make people successful.  Products merely solve specific problems.  Content needs to focus on how the products help solve those specific problems, instead of promising to transform a life situation. That is real empowerment.

— Michael Andrews

Categories
Content Marketing

Product-Content-Marketing

I recently visited the Smithsonian’s American History Museum to see an exhibit on food in American culture.  I noticed a Tappan microwave oven in an exhibit case, the kind of microwave that was in use during my early childhood.  If I ever needed evidence that I’m getting older, it’s seeing something from my childhood in the Smithsonian’s collection.  My family didn’t own a Tappan microwave, but I recall a neighboring family did.  When it came to microwave technology, my family wasn’t what, in today’s parlance, would be called an early adopter.

We take microwaves for granted today, but in the early years of microwaves they were exotic.  They were radically different from conventional ovens, and expensive: originally over a thousand dollars.  Selling something so “disruptive” to families required making them seem enticing, simple, and idiot-proof.   The product needed to promise to be easy, and deliver on that promise.  We all want to feel competent, even when using a microwave oven.  We don’t want exploding liquids or gooey muck being our payback for committing to a new technology.

In addition to its historical cultural significance to the Smithsonian’s curators, this particular model was also notable for an unusual feature not normally seen on ovens of any kind.  At the base of the microwave was a drawer that contained recipe cards.  I started to wonder if the designers included the recipe card drawer as content marketing to get hesitant shoppers to buy the microwave, or as product content designed to make sure owners get full satisfaction from their decision.

Early microwave with recipe drawer at the base
Early microwave with recipe drawer at the base

Content marketing and product content are two widely used terms that are sometimes applied to similar circumstances.  Are they distinct ideas, do they overlap, or are they fundamentally the same thing?

Let’s consider another example that’s more current.  Last week I got a sample of shampoo to try out.  Unlike the normal shampoo I use from the same brand, this shampoo involved two parts.  That doesn’t sound too challenging: I just needed to figure out which part to use first.  As I’m about to step into the shower, I open the package and see instructions.  Fortunately they weren’t long, as I wasn’t wearing my eye glasses at this point.  I can see the instructions mention the phrase “apply vigorously”.  Every time I’ve ever read instructions for shampoo or any other soap they implore me to apply the stuff vigorously.  The instructions seemed to convey no information worth noting.  However, at the end of the instructions is a call-to-action telling me to go to a website to watch a video that provides more detailed information on how to use the product.  I suppose some people have waterproof tablets to watch videos in their showers these days, but I again am not an early adopter in this area.  A week later, I have half a container of Part Two left over, while Part One is finished.  I still have not watched the video.

Is the video for the shampoo content marketing encouraging me to try the product, or product content telling me how to use the product?

In the view of some people, trying to make a distinction between content marketing and product content is counterproductive.  They will recommend integrating the pre-sales and post-sales experiences.  Many people who develop instructional information for products argue that this content is increasingly important to customer purchase decisions.  I agree that many synergies are possible between content focused on pre-sales needs, and those focused on post-sales needs.  But I don’t believe we can yet declare that distinctions between pre- and post-sales content have disappeared.

Historically, there was a clear division between content to support marketing and content to support product use.  Marketing content made people want the product, while support content told people how to use the product.  The terms content marketing and product content have emerged over the past decade to address new priorities.  Products and services can involve a growing number of features that consumers expect will work together to solve their high level problems and make their lives more enjoyable.  Consumers expect proof for outcomes promised, and to understand differences between choices offered.  Content marketing focuses on promoting the value of using a product or service in the context of the customer’s life situation, instead of making vague promises or touting meaningless advantages as was traditional in marketing content.    Product content highlights choices and options available, instead of having a remedial focus as customer service content historically has.  Both content marketing and product content aim to be useful to customers, but they still have distinct roles.

Content marketing is still largely focused on pre-sales, or in encouraging repeat sales.  Content marketing collateral is generally distributed and accessed separately from the product or service it concerns.  Product content — any information relating to specific decisions customers must make relating to product features — will frequently occur after the purchase, or at least very near the time of purchase.   Often, product content is embedded in the product itself, rather than being accessed separately.  In the case of services, product content is often integrated in smartphone apps that let customers use the service, and choose options.

Two critical questions face corporations today:

  1. When is the content accessed?
  2. Where is it accessed?

When and where content is accessed has become more murky because sales is increasingly a process, rather than a discrete event.  In the past, the period before the sale, and after the sale, were distinct.  Today, sales is an ongoing process of evaluation.  Companies may sell platforms on which to sell additional products and services, such as when Amazon’s Kindle displays ads for book titles it promotes.  Customers need to configure products prior to purchase, and may reconfigure them after becoming a customer. Many digital products are sold as services that have a limited duration, and must be renewed.  Many products are sold on a trial basis, where customers can try before they commit to buying.  A growing range of content can be embedded in product user interfaces or service apps, but often companies need to rely on email and web channels to communicate, educate, and complete transactions.  The product is not always the ideal channel for the audience to consider the content.

These questions don’t have predefined answers.  They require thinking deeply about the ultimate purpose of the content.  Even if content can support multiple goals, helping existing customers use a service while encouraging them to expand their usage, it doesn’t follow that all these goals be given equal emphasis.  When the same content seems like it exists to serve several different purposes, it can confuse both audiences, and stakeholders in organizations.

Let’s return to the example of the video explaining the shampoo.  I initially wasn’t aware the video existed.  The content wasn’t in the right channel for me to access it when I became aware of it.  I wasn’t clear if it was promotional content, or truly instructional content.  I didn’t know if I needed to see it before using the product, while using the product, or perhaps after using the product.

The content’s purpose also impacts how organizations divide responsibility for the content.  Who was responsible for the video, marketing or customer service?  Sometimes it’s not obvious who should own the content, because organizations can’t dictate to customers what to do.  I routinely get a message from a cloud service that I’m approaching a storage limit, and can buy more storage.  But I may wish instead to learn how to reduce my usage of storage, rather than hear about how I can get more of it.  I’m annoyed that I seem to be hitting the limit, since I’m not aware I’m using the service that much.  This is a common situation, where companies look to up-sell at a moment when customers are starting to doubt the value of the service itself.  There’s a mismatch of views about the purpose of content needed.

When designing content, companies must always be clear about the customer’s purpose.  Even though good support content can increase customer loyalty, support content is not the same as marketing content.  Customers have different purposes when looking at marketing content and support content.  They want it at different times, and often through different channels.  Both content marketing and product content are becoming more user focused.  These content types are inter-related and should be coordinated.  Yet content marketing and product content still serve distinct roles, and it’s important to offer the right details at the right time in the right channel.  Be wary of those who repeat the slogan that all content is marketing content: they are likely to deliver the wrong content to audiences.

— Michael Andrews