#the tap water is an underappreciated detail to me.

[rontra]

and you know what. she would say yes

#ive been laughing about this so i had to go draw it. here you go #the tap water is an underappreciated detail to me. #john constantine #zatanna #dc comics #uh. i mean #johnzee #like. yea i guessMDBH

[mostly-mundane-atla]

Hi! Your blog is awesome. I don't know if I'm allowed to ask non-atla questions, so I hope this is okay. I'm working on a non-avatar ttrpg campaign that takes place both in a (fictional/fantasy) northern tundra region AND during a magical endless winter. The people in it aren't based on any specific culture but, given that they're successfully living in similar environments & have for countless generations, I want to draw as much inspiration & knowledge from real-life circumpolar cultures & native science as much as possible. Do you have any advice or even just fun, underappreciated ideas for winter tundra survival, things someone who grew up in a desert like me wouldn't think of on my own? If you need/want more direction: I'm particularly looking for clothing, shelters, resource gathering-practices for non-food (esp what kinds of resources would be valuable), as well as like, any fun details that evolve naturally in a culture that formed in the tundra that you'd want to see represented. I hope that makes sense ^^; Thanks so much if you decide to answer, have a good day either way <3

[I am SOOO sorry this took so long! Tumblr kept not saving my progress when i tapped "save draft" so i had to rewrite a few of these passages a few different times]

Don't worry about asking, friend, i get cultural questions all the time and i'm happy to share.

Note: my knowledge is almost entirely based on coastal tundra peoples with access to marine mammals. That's not to say it's impossible for people to live farther inland, just that it's not my area of expertise.

Clothing

Just about everything you wear is going to come off of a dead animal. This doesn't necessarily need to be the case if your fictional culture has a means of raising hardy livestock for fiber and a history of woven textiles, but even then skin clothes are warm and generally quite hard-wearing and are a good fit for living in these circumstances.

This amount of fur means lice are a perpetual problem. If you want to make that an immersive part of the game, you can work in a mechanic for checking scalps and clothing and bedding for lice.

Bird skins can also be used for clothing and waterfowl specifically has the benefit of water resistance. Fish skin can also be used for similar properties. Animal intestines can be made into a waterproof material if sewn with sinew and soaked before finishing.

On that note i'd recommend making a list of available animals and what qualities and textures their skins and furs have. Even if you don't intend on being incredibly descriptive with clothing, it's something better to have and not need than need and not have. And if you do anything else creative in a similar setting you have your nifty little source to consult.

When it comes to the actual construction of the clothes, you want a loose fit. Trapped air ia a great insulator and you want clothes to be easy to move in. Another benefit for loose-fitting upper body garments in cold weather is you can pull your arms in and keep them by your much warmer core. Not only will this option keep you comfortable, it can also prevent muscle injury or getting frostbite

Mittens can be worn on a string yoke. This doesn't have to be exclusive to children either. Wind can pick up out of nowhere and lost mittens means fingers exposed to arctic cold which can mean gangreen and amputations down the line.

Swimming or running to deliver a message may involve stripping nude, even in cold. Clothes soaked in water or sweat are deadly in the cold.

Clothes may be stored in bags outside when not in use. The low temperatures can kill bugs and bacteria. On a similar note, boots and coats are best to be hung to dry as soon as one is indoors for the day. This may mean it's normal for people to be topless indoors.

Boots should never have holes or tears. Frostbite and resulting gangreen is already bad enough but you especially do not want it on your feet

Shelter

You're going to want dwellings to have as few rooms and windows as possible and small doors. The fewer walls you have, the easier it is for heat to circulate throughout the whole dwelling. You'll probably want one room separating the door and where you sleep. Remember: trapped air is a great insulator.

The culture I've reconnected with is semi-nomadic so the permanent houses are not always occupied and a village can seem abandoned when it's just on its "off season". You can take that or leave it depending on what you're going for.

Even if the dwelling is not a tent, you're probably still going to have poles serving as a supporting frame.

Sod houses are common due to the availability of sod (the grass and the dirt its roots are tangled in). Tents made of warm, waterproof skins (like walrus skin) are also an option.

An easy way to insulate such a dwelling is to build a wall of packed snow around and fill the gaps with loose, airy snow. This traps air the same way down feathers do.

Non-Food Resource Gathering

While I imagine you meant obtaining resources outside of hunting, in a tundra or tundra-like setting, a lot of your resources are going to come from dead animals. Your garments and shelters and bedding are likely to be made of animal skins, with hollow and/or fluffy fur for warmth, or smoked intestine or fish skin, sewn with tiny stitches and soaked to keep everything flush, for waterproof boots and overlayers. Antlers and tusks are good carving materials for things like spoons and closures and slabs for armor and handles and also talismans and smoking pipes and beads and art. Baleen is good for art too, as well as boot soles and smaller sleds and beautiful baskets. Sinew and rawhide are good for thread, ties, and rope. Bones have a near infinite amount of uses from tiny wing bones to make sewing needles to huge whale bones used to build houses.

For the purposes of working this into a roleplaying game, i'd second the recommendation of keeping a list of animals in your universe and their properties, as well as the things that can be gathered from or made of them. A sort of crafting recipe guide would allow all kinds of quests and sidequests.

There are, of course, non-animal resources to gather for non-eating purposes. Soapstone is the traditional material for oil lamps. Grasses can be woven into baskets for any number of purposes, including supports to give the uppers of one's boots more structure. Wood, in the form of slices of tree trunks, can be hollowed out into bowls and small tubs and buckets or, as logs or slats, can make up flooring. Sturdy branches can be used for frames in houses, boats, and drums, and tree resin makes both good glue and antibiotic salve for closed wounds. Sod, also called turf, makes a good building material and moss is exellent insulation in boots. You can make a list of these too, if it helps.

If your fictional culture has a strong tradition of metallurgy, then they'd also mine for metal that can be used for knives. If not, slate is another option that requires significantly less fire. You could even have both and make the metal a status symbol.

Fun Details to Represent

There are so many lovely little things that show up in arctic cultures

First, a gift economy. Where a cash economy relies on a fairly individualistic culture where you work for someone else to earn capital and exchange that capital for goods and services, a more collectivist and interdependent culture natural to the harsh conditions of the tundra tends to result in a gift economy. The currency in a gift economy, to perhaps oversimplify, is favors. Someone does you a good turn, you remember that, and when you're in a position to help, you return the favor. Usually this means basic material things like hospitality and food, but the "gifts" exchanged can also be luck! King Islander boys would often wish hunters setting out at dawn good luck, with a slab of driftwood as a token of that luck, and if the hunters were successful, they'd give the boys who wished them luck a share of their catch. I believe it was Frank Ellana who remenised that this was what the world was like before money.

Another thing that would be nice to include is parenting practices considered fairly gentle to a Euro-American perspective. Physical punishments are traditionally treated as abuse and scolding a child is not only seen as wrong but something an adult ought to be ashamed of. Discipline is instead a series of moral lessons, teaching children why what they did was wrong and using stories as examples of the consequences. Given the amount of stories about the dangers of abusing a spouse or child, i'd say a lot of these lessons were proactive and preventative. Knowing someone will be hurt by it is considered enough of a deterrence to stop bad behaviors. Traditional potty training, for example, is also gentler in comparison; starting at a younger age (about six months) with more emphasis on praise and encouragment than routine. The goal here is to teach the baby to signal when they need to go so they can be taken out of mama's atigi and relieve themself in a hygenic manner instead of holding it until they get permission. Even our take on kissing is based on inhaling instead of pecking with the lips. This kind of gentleness is usually overlooked to instead focus on the badass hunter image or overall "cuteness" so it would be nice for it to be referenced.

Oral histories would be pretty neat too. I think the idea of learning to be a historian of oral histories is an interesting one and i think it has a lot of potential plot hooks for an rpg.

That's all i have for now. Sorry for the delayed response time. Happy gaming, and i'm always up for further discussion if you would like ^-^

[shslguitarist]

ALRIGHTY--

For the Romantic F/O Takeover Ask Game: 2, 3, 11, and 14 for Neopolitan; 8 for Marceline Abadeer

For the Nature Emojis F/O Ask Game: 🌲 for Akane Taira; 🍂🌹🌻 for Himiko Toga; ⭐️ for Blake Belladonna and Lapis Lazuli

Sorry for, like, always sending so damn much and sort of having it be all over the place lmao. Do whatever you want (not /s); I just wanted to give some variety

All of this will be under the cut!

2. Where is your favorite place to kiss them and how do you like to kiss them? Them for you?

🍦: [holding a sign that reads: I kiss him on his cheek and I give him a gentle kiss here and there. He likes to kiss my hand, mostly because half the time we’re fighting, he enjoys taking my hand to kiss the top of it. He’s annoying but...I can’t say I hate him.]

3. What are your pet names for one another?

🍦: [holds a sign reading: He calls me Vanilla Ice, I hate him for it. But I get to call him shortie, even though he’s taller than me.]

11. What do you do to comfort them when they’re down?

🍦: [’It’s hard to comfort him when we’re on opposing sides and sometimes if we end up in a fight, I have to tap him on the nose before taking off. I don’t want to kill him, obviously, but I can’t go easy when we’re against each other.’]

14.  Are you able to pinpoint a reason as to why you love them? What is it?

🍦: [’It’s not the easiest reason to admit but I like the way that he’s never afraid to come at me in a fight with everything he has, he’s not afraid of death, it took me by surprise. It did make me love him more than I expected.’]

8. When is a time you’ve been protective of them?

🎸: A time that Ollie boy has been protected by me huh? Interesting, it’s really hard to pick just one but there was a time that we sort ran into trouble in the Glass Kingdom...again....

Either way! I kept him safe, although I had to sacrifice a guitar on the way. But at least he’s alive, right?

___

🌲: What are some small details about your FO that you feel are underappreciated?

Akane is more than just haha lewd maid lol, she’s a good fan character and in her respective fangame, she is definitely my favourite. I’m still midway through the game so I’m sure I still have some stuff to figure out about her!

🍂:  How does your FO show their interest in your work/hobbies, and vice versa?

She will follow me everywhere and will peek her head over my shoulder if it’s something like editing. She’ll usually suggest that I take up something like hunting so she’s free to kill. Now, I’m not the one to take interest in her work or hobbies, why? Because one, she’s a villian. And two, there is no way in hell that I’m going to start drinking blood. I love her but no way. 

🌹: How does your FO react to receiving shows of affection?

Squealing, lots of squealing. And sometimes Toga will bite my hand out of happiness if I start being lovey dovey with her. She loves it, although sometimes I wish she didn’t ask me for it when we run into each other and have to fight, it makes me want to hold her.

🌻:  Who’s the better cook? Do either of you have a favorite dish, either to make or have made for them? If neither of you cook, what would you order?

I- okay listen here, if you want the house set on fire, neither of us are the best cook. If anything, we just pour some water into a cup, boil it, make some insta ramen. I mean, we do love spicy ramen so we’re not too worried about ordering out.....until we get bored of ramen.

⭐️: Does your FO have any habits that you only noticed after spending a significant amount of time with them? Do they notice any of yours?

Blake adores having her ears poked at, they always twitch and usually get mad at me but it’s a habit for her to wear a hat now. She tries to keep me from messing with her. As for Lapis, she likes to bounce her legs up and down, probably from anxiety but I can understand that. They both notice that I cling to them if I get uncomfortable or nervous, they don’t mind, they’re both angsty and would protect me. 

#🌟 ask game #ship: ocean sundae ♡ #ship: independent together ♡ #ship: sweet but psycho ♡ #ship: black fire ♡ #ship: just like you ♡ #self ship community #self ship ask meme #self shipping #self ship #fictional other

[almasexya]

Carnivorous Plants and the Things I Know About Them

I've been kicking around the idea of making a post like this and I figured it was of enough general interest to folks on Tumblr to go for it.

So

One of the things I do is grow carnivorous plants, like these

From top left to bottom right we have a Venus Flytrap, a North American Pitcher Plant, a Sundew, and a Butterwort. All of these are pictures I've taken of plants during the growing season.

Now if you look at these weird looking plants you probably wouldn't expect them to be native to North America, but they are. You can find pitcher plants all over the southeast up to the northeast into Canada, flytraps in the Carolinas, and butterworts and sundews all over the continent.

These plants are a lot of fun and easy to grow once you understand their requirements, but before we get into that, I want to take a moment and explain how they came to be in the first place.

To keep it short, carnivorous plants are carnivorous because they grow in soils that are lacking in the nutrients plants need to put out new growth. Because of this, they evolved to find their nutrients a different way - by luring, trapping, and digesting insects. While these plants still photosynthesize, they supplement this with the nutrients they absorb from insects.

Now that we've got that out of the way, I'm going to go into the basics of growing them, point by point. A short disclaimer - I'm specifically talking about temperate North American plants, since they're what I have experience growing. I can provide basic info on how to take care of tropical plants like the southeast asian pitcher plants, but as of this post I don't have experience with them yet.

Soil: For carnivorous plants, a good soil mixture is a must. These plants grow in nutrient-poor marshes, and the soil they call home is constantly wet. The main ingredient in basically any carnivorous plant soil mix is sphagnum peat moss, which is slightly acidic. The second part of the mixture is often perlite or horticultural sand. Some nurseries use a mix of equal parts peat and perlite while others use 80% peat and 20% perlite, but I've had success with both. The most important thing to ensure is that your soil doesn't have any fertilizer added to it. Because carnivores grow in low nutrient soil, any kind of medium that contains fertilizer can actually kill them.

Water: The other vitally important part of the equation (and the one that kills lots of plants when incorrectly applied) is water. Generally, unless your tap water is soft, water carnivores with distilled or reverse osmosis water. The minerals in tap water or even bottled drinking water can eventually build up and kill your plant in the same way fertilized soil does. Carnivores love waterlogged soil, and some even get flooded in nature. To approximate this, set your plant in a tray of water no more than an inch or two high. This ensures your soil stays wet without having to constantly water it.

Containers: Plastic pots are your friend. Avoid terra cotta clay pots, since they can leech minerals into the soil and also tend to dry out your substrate faster. Glazed clay containers can also work. If you're using the tray system, make sure to buy pots with drainage holes, so the water can get in. Also, a trick that lets the water in but keeps the soil from escaping is to line the bottom of the pot with long-fibered sphagnum moss. If you go with an undrained container, make sure to keep the soil wet at all times, but allow some of the water to evaporate in order to keep the water table fluctuating.

Sunlight: Since carnivores evolved their leaves to catch insects, they're pretty poor at photosynthesis. As a result, these plants love sun - the more the better. Many a store bought flytrap has perished as a houseplant due to lack of sun, so if you can, put these plants outside, in the sunniest spot you can. Generally, it's good to give most carnivores around 6 hours of sunlight per day. Many can get by with 4, but they don't often thrive with that amount of light.

Dormancy: Plants that grow in temperate or warm temperate climates tend to buckle down and hibernate during the late fall and winter months, conserving energy until spring. Generally speaking, the large traps die off, or in some cases the plant dies down to the roots, or forms a small bud that rests on the ground. Plants grown outside respond to colder temperatures and shorter photoperiods, while plants grown inside usually need some help. If you're growing your plants on a windowsill or in a terrarium, move them somewhere cold or cut down on their heating, and also diminish the amount of daily light they receive. You can also slow down on watering, though they still need some water to get by.

Temperature: Temperate and warm temperate carnivores can tolerate a wide range of temperatures, despite what you might think. My pots survived the freak snowstorm the Pacific Northwest got this February without a single dead plant. Most species can tolerate temperatures up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit and down to 20 degrees, though not for prolonged periods of time. If you see long spells of hot or cold weather coming, try and move your plants to a protected area until they pass.

Feeding and Fertilizing: Now I know what you're thinking. Fertilizer? He just told us that stuff was death! And it often is, but there are ways to fertilize your plants. Generally, a fertilizer made for acid-loving plants can be diluted and applied to the leaves during the growing season. I use Maxsea 16-16-16 on plants that are too young to easily catch prey (diluted down to a half teaspoon per gallon) and haven't had issues. Try not to spray the soil unless you frequently water your plants from overhead, as the dreaded mineral buildup can still occur. That said, if your plants are outside, they'll fertilize themselves. You can also "feed" your plants insects using tongs - keep in mind that some plants require their prey to be alive in order to secrete digestive enzymes. I'll get into prey in more detail in other posts about specific types of plants.

Flowering and Propagation: For a lot of carnivorous plants, flowering is an exhausting effort that tends to deplete the energy they would use creating traps. As a general rule, if you're not interested in seed, clip the flower stalks off. Many plants can be propagated through leaf or root cuttings, which produce genetically identical plants. Some plants also clump and form their own divisions over time, meaning all you need to do to get more is wait for a year or so, depending on the age of the plant.

Pests: Carnivores can be targeted by various pests. For insecticides, I've seen neem oil recommended, as its generally less harmful to the plant and the environment. I haven't had to make much use of these yet, so my information on insecticides is a bit of a blind spot. Generally, try and stay away from soap insecticides and aerosols, and stick to less concentrated varieties. If you're dealing with squirrels or rodents digging up your plants, I found a generous sprinkling of cayenne pepper around the plants works wonders, and does no harm to the plants.

This is a basic rundown of carnivorous plants and how to take care of some of them. I must stress there's a ton of information out there - this post is geared more towards starter plants that are fairly forgiving and simple to grow.

So why grow carnivorous plants when you can just go out and buy some petunias?

They're active: Carnivores are showy, unique plants that can move on their own through some incredibly unique and complex evolutions. Watching a Venus Flytrap snap shut or a Sundew curl around an insect is a truly special thing to see.

They're a conversation piece: The relative rarity of carnivores in cultivation means the average person doesn't know much about them, despite maybe having heard of a Venus Flytrap before. A 12" pot of flytraps, sundews, and pitchers is a surefire way to grab attention.

They can control certain pests: Carnivorous plants can act as natural pest controllers. North American Pitcher Plants gorge themselves on flies and wasps, and considering some pitchers can grow over two feet tall, they can hold plenty of them. Sundews and butterworts specialize in catching smaller prey, such as fungus gnats, fruit flies, and even fleas. These plants can work as limited, natural pest controllers, though they won't eradicate a yellow jacket nest for you.

They're endangered in the wild: The wet, marshy habitats carnivores call home are rapidly dwindling due to improper land management and development. Some are nearly extinct in their home ranges, kept going through dedicated nurseries and attempts to naturalize them in other locations. By caring for carnivorous plants, you're raising awareness of these unique, underappreciated organisms and aiding in their conservation by keeping them alive.

Phew, I realize this was a lot, but I hope it was a fun read! Let me know what you think about carnivorous plants, or if you have any questions about them. I'm going to try and go into more detail on specific plants later, but for now, I wanted to bang out the basics.

If you're looking for more information, Flytrapcare.com is a great forum, and the r/savagegarden subreddit is very helpful as well. For books on the subject, the Savage Garden by Peter D'Amato is the go to source. Nurseries I've used and can vouch for are Sarracenia Northwest (located in Oregon) and California Carnivores (located in California).

#carnivorous plants #plantblr #my plants

[sensc]

░ ✧ ❝ — plots based on [ SONGS ] ❞

here’s a list of random plots inspired from various songs on my spotify! they’re written out as m & f ( all muse a as the female & all muse b as the male ) but they can obviously be altered to your preference!

( # 01 ° * ) —― we own the night , selena gomez & the scene ; ❝  is it alright if I’m with you for the night? hope you don’t mind if you stay by my side. ❞

muse a and muse b were not only next door neighbors while growing up, but they were also the best of friends before inevitably drifting apart once high school began. muse a eventually left town to attend a university miles away while muse b stayed home to attend a local community college. now, almost a semester into their sophomore year, muse a is back in town without giving anyone a warning or reason. muse b isn’t even aware of her homecoming until muse a climbs the tree between their houses in the middle of the night and taps his window until he wakes up. it’s only then that muse b finds out the truth behind muse a’s reappearance.

... muse a is back home because something life-changing happened to her ( maybe she witnessed a crime, someone broke into her dorm, a friend passed away, a video/picture of her got around school, etc ) (( just something impactful ))

... as a result of the incident, muse a always visits muse b at night because she can’t sleep & refuses to be alone because she’ll start thinking about *the incident* all over again

( # 02 ° * ) —― colors , halsey ; ❝  you’re ripped at every edge but you’re a masterpiece and now you’re tearing through the pages and the ink. ❞  

since kindergarten, muse b has given muse a drawings. although they were mostly scribbles and shaky shapes, muse a was always grateful, unfailingly responding with a smile. this exchange continued throughout elementary and middle school, the scribbles transforming into sophisticated portraits and illustrations that showcased muse b’s artistic talent. however, during the duo’s first year of high school, muse a’s friends caught wind of the drawings and teased her endlessly. out of embarrassment, muse a stopped accepting muse b’s art and promptly told him to leave her alone. they haven’t spoken since. now, 10 years later, muse a is a small-time reporter struggling to find the story that’ll finally launch her career while muse b is a prestigious artist whose work sells for millions to culture-savvy socialites. after muse b shockingly announces his early retirement, every news outlet is dying for an interview. however, he’s always kept a low profile in the public eye, which is why he’s only allowed one network to interview him — muse a’s network.

( # 03 ° * ) ―― real , years & years ; ❝  i think i’m into you, how much do you want it too? i think i’m gonna make it worse, i talk to you but it don’t work. what have i been doing wrong? tell me what it is you want. ❞ 

muse b is an illustrator for a popular graphic novel. after struggling to find inspiration for his latest assignment, he wills to life a drawing of his dream girl — muse a. she becomes the muse that he’s been needing, even earning him a promotion. however, after muse a finds out that she can be seen by everyone and not just muse b, her desire to live a real life in the real world is ignited. now, muse b has more to focus on than just his work — the obligation to watch over the person he created, the need for her presence in order to complete ( what were once simple ) tasks, and the jealousy as muse a’s world become more than just muse b.

( # 04 ° * ) ―― r u mine , arctic monkeys ; ❝  i go crazy ‘cause here isn’t where i wanna be and satisfaction feels like a distant memory. i can’t help myself, all i wanna hear her say is are you mine. ❞ 

muse b always goes for a run at 2 am because he has trouble sleeping and every time he comes back home, muse a ( his next door neighbor ) is drunk and either fumbling with her keys or stumbling through the front door. muse b always helps her get in safely then leaves some water and advil by her bed and muse a always responds with drunken rambles of appreciation. the duo constantly exchange fleeting glances during the day, but muse b never initiates the conversation in fear of muse a being too drunk to remember his assistance while muse a never initiates the conversation due to being embarrassed by her frequent drunkenness.

( # 05 ° * ) ―― strangers , halsey feat. lauren jauregui ; ❝  we’re not lovers. we’re just strangers with the same damn hunger to be touched, to be loved, to feel anything at all. ❞

muse b has it all — a successful business under his thumb, millions of dollars that’ll sustain him until his dying day, and people who take his word as law. the only thing he’s missing? love. but unlike the age-old saying, money can buy everything. enter muse a, a high-charging escort who earns her living by sleeping with some of the world’s most wealthy men. after being setup by friends, a night is arranged between the twosome. however, unlike muse a’s regular customers, muse b wants to pay for her time instead of her body. they strike up one of the most profitable deals of muse a’s career, a deal that essentially turns her into muse b’s significant other once the moon is out. this includes spending the night, eating dinner together, late night talks, and ( most importantly to muse b ) affirmations of love. but it all ends once the sun is back in the sky and doesn’t begin again until it goes back down.

( # 06 ° * ) ―― down for me , g-eazy feat. 24hrs ; ❝  she was the only one down for me. had a hard time adjusting to new fame, my life ain’t the same since the day that you came. ❞

muse a and muse b only met once ― the first day of their junior year of high school where they crossed paths after both reaching for the last pamphlet for a local college of the arts. after a short ( and competitive ) conversation, they each swore that they would make it big. years later, muse b lived up to his promise and is now a famous rapper/musician whose name is synonymous with money, fame, and success. muse a is a college student who is struggling to get her degree and pay her student loans while still pursuing her dreams of being a dancer. muse a’s first public performance is at a small art show where a typical audience is around twenty people, which is why she’s dumbfounded when she’s in the middle of her routine and sees muse b sitting in the front row. before her set is even finished, muse b is bombarded by photographers and fans who are dying for a moment of his time, causing everyone’s eyes to shift away from muse a. while muse a is livid, she can’t help but wonder what the hell muse b is doing here.

( # 07 ° * ) ―― déjà vu , post malone feat. justin bieber ; ❝  now, tell me, is that déjà vu? ❞

muse a and muse b were childhood best friends but drifted apart ( for some reason ) and haven’t talked since they were kids despite growing up in the same town and attending the same university. recently, a group of amateur hackers have gotten into numerous people’s phones with intentions to steal and sell people’s nudes. muse a was the most recent victim and muse b bought her nudes so no one else would see them, but she found out and now thinks that he’s some kind of pervert… great! 

( # 08 ° * ) ―― if you can afford me , katy perry ; ❝  if you wanna ride, just name your price. don’t play cheap with your heart. don’t make a bet if you can’t write the check. ❞ 

muse b has always been overlooked and underappreciated, his eternal label being ‘the brain’. muse a is the complete opposite, an absolute bombshell who always has eyes on her. when their university has a bachelor auction for raising money for the end of year mixer, muse a places the highest bid of the night on muse b ― $1,000. while muse a tells everyone that she placed her bet out of pity, behind closed doors, she explains to muse b that she needs him to tutor her so she can pass her final exams. muse b, both offended and embarrassed for being naïve enough to think that she was actually interested in him, refuses to do anything more than what she paid for ― be her date. it’s only when muse a offers to double the money and pay muse b his own personal $2,000 ( alongside the school bid ) that they reach an agreement..

( # 09 ° * ) ―― the love club , lorde ; ❝  i’m sitting pretty on the throne. there’s nothing more i want, except to be alone. ❞

muse a’s life has been a whirlwind since becoming a seemingly overnight success a few years ago. although she appreciates her newfound fame and millions of fans across the world, it’s all become too much to handle. she drops everything and catches the next flight to her childhood best friend’s university ( wearing oversized sunglasses and a floppy hat to lay low ), wanting to surprise the person she hadn’t gotten the chance to speak to in months. after landing, she knocks on their dorm door but is instead met with her best friend’s roommate, muse b — a stranger. as luck would have it, her best friend has unexpectedly taken a semester off to travel ( a not-so-minor detail that she probably would have known if she hadn’t ignored their texts after her ego schedule blew up ). unfortunately, the media finds out that she’s in town and both college kids and the paparazzi are wanting a visual of muse a’s apparent breakdown. with no other option, muse a begs muse b to let her stay in his dorm until the attention dies down... to which muse b reluctantly agrees.

#indie rp #indie plot #rp plot #plot idea #i was going thru my drafts n totally forgot about this??? but someone pls give these to me!!! #❛ ✦ — wanted: plots.

[byronheeutgm]

5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

If you’re like many content marketers, when you tell your mom your job title, she reacts with a perplexed smile and something like, “Oh, so what do you do?” An explanation fit for a layperson only yields a brief, labored expression before giving way to an epiphany: “So you’re a writer?”

“Yeah,” you say, realizing that your mom is probably picturing you hunched over a vintage typewriter in a New England cabin, decked out in beatnik attire, while tapping out your great American novel and trying to figure out how you’re going to pay off those pesky student loans.

Not that you can blame Mom. After all, the term “content marketing” didn’t even exist 10 to 15 years ago. Unfortunately, many of us get this same reaction from folks in our own department.

When our colleagues do (sort of) know what we do, they treat us like we’re just off creating “cute” videos and blog posts that just keep people entertained until they can come in and do the real work, or they fail to see our contributions because they’re nested inside much larger campaigns. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how our ebook or whitepaper contributed to the stew.

If content is at the heart of all great marketing (and I believe it is), then why do so few people inside and outside of marketing understand what content marketing is and how it creates value? You and I know that our work permeates everything the department does, influencing and converting prospects in subtle but powerful ways. So why is it so hard for others to see that?

Here are five reasons content marketers are underappreciated, plus solutions for getting those who matter to see the value in what we do.

1. Everyone Thinks They Can Write, Design, and Shoot Video

Except for the most self-aware, everyone thinks they can write. They can crank out an email (albeit a terrible one) in three minutes flat, and they get lots of great responses from their friends on their personal social media accounts. So naturally, when they see your well-crafted article that just happened to be awesome enough to be published in Fast Company, some think, “Yeah, big deal. I could do that.”

The same goes for design and video. People assume that just because they can throw together a bunch of clipart in PowerPoint or get 150 likes on a video they shot on their iPhone of their daughter making her first soccer goal, our design or video work must be just as easy—more play than work, in fact.

The Solution: Accept that some of your colleagues will naturally appreciate the difference between writing for a personal blog and crafting truly useful content that fits the brand voice. Others won’t. You can blame it on the internet and social media being the great equalizers, giving every individual a platform, a voice, and a bit of overconfidence. Unless the skeptics happen to be in a position of authority over you, just embrace your inner Disney princess and “Let It Go.” Your focus should be on making sure you have the support you need from above. You can do this by building a relationship of trust with your superiors, perhaps pointing to statistics that show just how big Fast Company’s reach is, and making your work processes more transparent.

“My personal solutions,” says Vincent Orleck, CMO at BRANDish in Phoenix, Arizona, “are to either A) align myself with others who see the content value similarly to how I do, or B) guide those who don’t see it the same way in a direction that allows them to essentially ‘create’ the same content themselves so they are bought into it on their own level rather than me convincing them to do so.”

2. People Don’t Understand What Our Work Requires

We make it look easy. The hours of focused attention that we have to carve out of a distracting workplace aren’t always apparent to others—especially when we have to lock ourselves in a conference room or work from home in order to escape the constant interruptions and concentrate well enough to write. (The biggest office pet peeve cited by marketers in a recent survey? Co-workers who talk too loud. This may be why 53 percent of those polled expect most workers to be remote within just a few years—which will only make our perception problem worse.)

Even while we’re at the office, clacking away at the keyboard, composing the best blog post customers have seen in years, it outwardly looks no different than someone responding to an email or updating social media. Like synchronized swimmers, the effortless grace that is seen by spectators above the water masks the frantic effort that’s taking place beneath the surface.

The Solution: You could do a better acting job. Grunt more. Sweat more. Make sure you look disheveled and stressed out by the end of the day. Or you could map out your workflows in detail and publish them for all to see, perhaps using work management software. Once your colleagues recognize just how many text and design drafts it takes to get to one finalized and approved whitepaper, not to mention the resources involved, they’ll be less likely to take you for granted.

3. We’re Battling Conflicting Definitions About What Makes Our Content Valuable

“People in the marketing industry are at varying levels of experience,” says Orleck, “so their understanding of what truly valuable content is will vary greatly. Often what I see is newer marketers focusing more on the approach or the platforms instead of what the content actually consists of, and whether it should even be put out there.”

Just because you can publish everywhere doesn’t mean you should. And different individuals within the team can have vastly different opinions about what types of content will work with the audience—not to mention how much of that content should be produced on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Deborah Strickland, senior digital marketing strategist at Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, California, says, “I’ve seen a lot of ‘throw it over the wall’ processes, which can result in poorly produced content, content that doesn’t fit the audience, or redundant content—how many whitepapers on X do we need?”

Many marketers are being asked to manage a “content factory, spewing out tons of often disconnected material,” without regard to strategic goals, Strickland says. “In some teams, just creating content is the end goal—if it gets used, or visitors can find it, isn’t their problem.”

The Solution: To avoid arguing about subjective opinions on what is and isn’t valuable or relevant, tie all content back to the company’s strategic drivers. Understand the metrics that are being used to evaluate your output—is it about how many assets you release, how many pageviews or downloads each asset attracts, how many different platforms you’re publishing on, how many new prospects are drawn in, or some combination of the above?

In the end, if your boss admits that he’s most interested in releasing more content this quarter than last quarter, then that’s the metric you should be paying closest attention to. If he values “more, more, more,” then by all means adopt the content factory approach to get the appreciation you’re looking for.

If you can, however, take a stand against time-consuming content that has little strategic value. Pull out your documented work processes to show how many resources are involved in creating this asset, especially if it isn’t being appropriately leveraged down the line. Get those who create the content and those who release and distribute the content on the same page about how much room there really is in the pipeline. If you scale back the number of pieces you produce, you can focus on amping up their individual impact.

4. We Suck at Showing ROI

I recently read a comment on LinkedIn that implied that, because webinars bring in more leads per dollar spent than ebooks, that marketers should ditch ebooks and just invest in webinars. I fired back that people probably wouldn’t give the webinar the time of day if they hadn’t first had experiences with the brand via social, blog posts, and ebooks. We all recognize this kind of overly reductive thinking for what it is, but it does expose how marketing’s metrics obsession is making it very hard for us to gauge and advertise the value of our content.

Some of this isn’t our fault. By its very purpose and nature, a thought leadership piece placed in an industry publication isn’t going to result in measurable sales. When the content marketing team’s work is devoted to pure brand awareness, it’s difficult to evaluate in terms of return on marketing investment. “Some executives understand that marketers need a portion of the marketing budget to be exempt from strict ROMI analysis,” writes Workfront CMO Joe Staples, “because awareness campaigns that are not tied to direct revenue are essential for the growth of the brand. But for other executives, it’s a message you’ll have to impart again and again.”

Some of this is our fault. We can do a better job of translating our results into language our bosses care about.

The Solution: Words and pictures (whether still or moving) are the native language of most content marketers, while other marketers and business professionals are all about metrics. Spend some time getting fluent in the language of business.

Comprehensive work management solutions can facilitate your efforts by tying budgets directly to tasks, improving resource management and allocation, and making forecasting and reporting easier than ever. Imagine being able to prove with data that you completed 10 percent more projects this quarter than last quarter, 95 percent of which were on time and under budget, and that you improved resource allocation, too. That will earn you some appreciation from the number crunchers, but you’ll have to step out of your comfort zone in another way, too. Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders.

“To succeed, content creators must be able to do more than research, write, and communicate,” says Shelly Lucas, content marketing director at Dun & Bradsheet. “We must be literate in data, analytics, SEO, user experience, design, advertising, demand gen, community, engagement, storytelling, and multiple lines of business. The past few years, many of us have busied ourselves learning all these things. How far has the rest of marketing progressed in its knowledge (and appreciation) of content? For too many organizations, the reciprocal pendulum is stuck.”

Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders. Click To Tweet 5. The C-Suite Hasn’t Bought In

“Most of the companies I’ve seen in the past 10 years still believe the purpose of marketing is to promote the company and write about the product,” says Jack Jenkins, director of product marketing at irth Solutions. “At its core, content marketing is about understanding the customer problems you solve and then sharing your expertise in creative ways to attract prospects. This doesn’t happen overnight, and the C-level always wants immediate results.”

Jenkins points out that marketing is often expected to produce isolated email campaigns to drive leads for short-term goals. But content marketing is the long game. “Unless the leadership team understands and commits to this strategy,” he says, “content marketers will continue to struggle. It’s a mindset change that is slowly being realized in many sectors of B2B.”

The Solution: You are a master at speaking to different audiences; don’t forget that your C-suite is an audience, too. “Rockstar content teams are contextual masters,” says Lucas. “They’re good at building bridges, both internally and externally. They develop resonant concepts and narrative structures to convey memorable marketing messages to prospects and customers. They create vehicles to create market momentum. They show buyers—and brands—the way forward.” They (we) can show executives the way forward, too.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2ruAdXw

#5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

[mariasolemarionqi]

5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

If you’re like many content marketers, when you tell your mom your job title, she reacts with a perplexed smile and something like, “Oh, so what do you do?” An explanation fit for a layperson only yields a brief, labored expression before giving way to an epiphany: “So you’re a writer?”

“Yeah,” you say, realizing that your mom is probably picturing you hunched over a vintage typewriter in a New England cabin, decked out in beatnik attire, while tapping out your great American novel and trying to figure out how you’re going to pay off those pesky student loans.

Not that you can blame Mom. After all, the term “content marketing” didn’t even exist 10 to 15 years ago. Unfortunately, many of us get this same reaction from folks in our own department.

When our colleagues do (sort of) know what we do, they treat us like we’re just off creating “cute” videos and blog posts that just keep people entertained until they can come in and do the real work, or they fail to see our contributions because they’re nested inside much larger campaigns. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how our ebook or whitepaper contributed to the stew.

If content is at the heart of all great marketing (and I believe it is), then why do so few people inside and outside of marketing understand what content marketing is and how it creates value? You and I know that our work permeates everything the department does, influencing and converting prospects in subtle but powerful ways. So why is it so hard for others to see that?

Here are five reasons content marketers are underappreciated, plus solutions for getting those who matter to see the value in what we do.

1. Everyone Thinks They Can Write, Design, and Shoot Video

Except for the most self-aware, everyone thinks they can write. They can crank out an email (albeit a terrible one) in three minutes flat, and they get lots of great responses from their friends on their personal social media accounts. So naturally, when they see your well-crafted article that just happened to be awesome enough to be published in Fast Company, some think, “Yeah, big deal. I could do that.”

The same goes for design and video. People assume that just because they can throw together a bunch of clipart in PowerPoint or get 150 likes on a video they shot on their iPhone of their daughter making her first soccer goal, our design or video work must be just as easy—more play than work, in fact.

The Solution: Accept that some of your colleagues will naturally appreciate the difference between writing for a personal blog and crafting truly useful content that fits the brand voice. Others won’t. You can blame it on the internet and social media being the great equalizers, giving every individual a platform, a voice, and a bit of overconfidence. Unless the skeptics happen to be in a position of authority over you, just embrace your inner Disney princess and “Let It Go.” Your focus should be on making sure you have the support you need from above. You can do this by building a relationship of trust with your superiors, perhaps pointing to statistics that show just how big Fast Company’s reach is, and making your work processes more transparent.

“My personal solutions,” says Vincent Orleck, CMO at BRANDish in Phoenix, Arizona, “are to either A) align myself with others who see the content value similarly to how I do, or B) guide those who don’t see it the same way in a direction that allows them to essentially ‘create’ the same content themselves so they are bought into it on their own level rather than me convincing them to do so.”

2. People Don’t Understand What Our Work Requires

We make it look easy. The hours of focused attention that we have to carve out of a distracting workplace aren’t always apparent to others—especially when we have to lock ourselves in a conference room or work from home in order to escape the constant interruptions and concentrate well enough to write. (The biggest office pet peeve cited by marketers in a recent survey? Co-workers who talk too loud. This may be why 53 percent of those polled expect most workers to be remote within just a few years—which will only make our perception problem worse.)

Even while we’re at the office, clacking away at the keyboard, composing the best blog post customers have seen in years, it outwardly looks no different than someone responding to an email or updating social media. Like synchronized swimmers, the effortless grace that is seen by spectators above the water masks the frantic effort that’s taking place beneath the surface.

The Solution: You could do a better acting job. Grunt more. Sweat more. Make sure you look disheveled and stressed out by the end of the day. Or you could map out your workflows in detail and publish them for all to see, perhaps using work management software. Once your colleagues recognize just how many text and design drafts it takes to get to one finalized and approved whitepaper, not to mention the resources involved, they’ll be less likely to take you for granted.

3. We’re Battling Conflicting Definitions About What Makes Our Content Valuable

“People in the marketing industry are at varying levels of experience,” says Orleck, “so their understanding of what truly valuable content is will vary greatly. Often what I see is newer marketers focusing more on the approach or the platforms instead of what the content actually consists of, and whether it should even be put out there.”

Just because you can publish everywhere doesn’t mean you should. And different individuals within the team can have vastly different opinions about what types of content will work with the audience—not to mention how much of that content should be produced on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Deborah Strickland, senior digital marketing strategist at Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, California, says, “I’ve seen a lot of ‘throw it over the wall’ processes, which can result in poorly produced content, content that doesn’t fit the audience, or redundant content—how many whitepapers on X do we need?”

Many marketers are being asked to manage a “content factory, spewing out tons of often disconnected material,” without regard to strategic goals, Strickland says. “In some teams, just creating content is the end goal—if it gets used, or visitors can find it, isn’t their problem.”

The Solution: To avoid arguing about subjective opinions on what is and isn’t valuable or relevant, tie all content back to the company’s strategic drivers. Understand the metrics that are being used to evaluate your output—is it about how many assets you release, how many pageviews or downloads each asset attracts, how many different platforms you’re publishing on, how many new prospects are drawn in, or some combination of the above?

In the end, if your boss admits that he’s most interested in releasing more content this quarter than last quarter, then that’s the metric you should be paying closest attention to. If he values “more, more, more,” then by all means adopt the content factory approach to get the appreciation you’re looking for.

If you can, however, take a stand against time-consuming content that has little strategic value. Pull out your documented work processes to show how many resources are involved in creating this asset, especially if it isn’t being appropriately leveraged down the line. Get those who create the content and those who release and distribute the content on the same page about how much room there really is in the pipeline. If you scale back the number of pieces you produce, you can focus on amping up their individual impact.

4. We Suck at Showing ROI

I recently read a comment on LinkedIn that implied that, because webinars bring in more leads per dollar spent than ebooks, that marketers should ditch ebooks and just invest in webinars. I fired back that people probably wouldn’t give the webinar the time of day if they hadn’t first had experiences with the brand via social, blog posts, and ebooks. We all recognize this kind of overly reductive thinking for what it is, but it does expose how marketing’s metrics obsession is making it very hard for us to gauge and advertise the value of our content.

Some of this isn’t our fault. By its very purpose and nature, a thought leadership piece placed in an industry publication isn’t going to result in measurable sales. When the content marketing team’s work is devoted to pure brand awareness, it’s difficult to evaluate in terms of return on marketing investment. “Some executives understand that marketers need a portion of the marketing budget to be exempt from strict ROMI analysis,” writes Workfront CMO Joe Staples, “because awareness campaigns that are not tied to direct revenue are essential for the growth of the brand. But for other executives, it’s a message you’ll have to impart again and again.”

Some of this is our fault. We can do a better job of translating our results into language our bosses care about.

The Solution: Words and pictures (whether still or moving) are the native language of most content marketers, while other marketers and business professionals are all about metrics. Spend some time getting fluent in the language of business.

Comprehensive work management solutions can facilitate your efforts by tying budgets directly to tasks, improving resource management and allocation, and making forecasting and reporting easier than ever. Imagine being able to prove with data that you completed 10 percent more projects this quarter than last quarter, 95 percent of which were on time and under budget, and that you improved resource allocation, too. That will earn you some appreciation from the number crunchers, but you’ll have to step out of your comfort zone in another way, too. Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders.

“To succeed, content creators must be able to do more than research, write, and communicate,” says Shelly Lucas, content marketing director at Dun & Bradsheet. “We must be literate in data, analytics, SEO, user experience, design, advertising, demand gen, community, engagement, storytelling, and multiple lines of business. The past few years, many of us have busied ourselves learning all these things. How far has the rest of marketing progressed in its knowledge (and appreciation) of content? For too many organizations, the reciprocal pendulum is stuck.”

Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders. Click To Tweet 5. The C-Suite Hasn’t Bought In

“Most of the companies I’ve seen in the past 10 years still believe the purpose of marketing is to promote the company and write about the product,” says Jack Jenkins, director of product marketing at irth Solutions. “At its core, content marketing is about understanding the customer problems you solve and then sharing your expertise in creative ways to attract prospects. This doesn’t happen overnight, and the C-level always wants immediate results.”

Jenkins points out that marketing is often expected to produce isolated email campaigns to drive leads for short-term goals. But content marketing is the long game. “Unless the leadership team understands and commits to this strategy,” he says, “content marketers will continue to struggle. It’s a mindset change that is slowly being realized in many sectors of B2B.”

The Solution: You are a master at speaking to different audiences; don’t forget that your C-suite is an audience, too. “Rockstar content teams are contextual masters,” says Lucas. “They’re good at building bridges, both internally and externally. They develop resonant concepts and narrative structures to convey memorable marketing messages to prospects and customers. They create vehicles to create market momentum. They show buyers—and brands—the way forward.” They (we) can show executives the way forward, too.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2ruAdXw

#5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

[christinesumpmg1]

5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

If you’re like many content marketers, when you tell your mom your job title, she reacts with a perplexed smile and something like, “Oh, so what do you do?” An explanation fit for a layperson only yields a brief, labored expression before giving way to an epiphany: “So you’re a writer?”

“Yeah,” you say, realizing that your mom is probably picturing you hunched over a vintage typewriter in a New England cabin, decked out in beatnik attire, while tapping out your great American novel and trying to figure out how you’re going to pay off those pesky student loans.

Not that you can blame Mom. After all, the term “content marketing” didn’t even exist 10 to 15 years ago. Unfortunately, many of us get this same reaction from folks in our own department.

When our colleagues do (sort of) know what we do, they treat us like we’re just off creating “cute” videos and blog posts that just keep people entertained until they can come in and do the real work, or they fail to see our contributions because they’re nested inside much larger campaigns. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how our ebook or whitepaper contributed to the stew.

If content is at the heart of all great marketing (and I believe it is), then why do so few people inside and outside of marketing understand what content marketing is and how it creates value? You and I know that our work permeates everything the department does, influencing and converting prospects in subtle but powerful ways. So why is it so hard for others to see that?

Here are five reasons content marketers are underappreciated, plus solutions for getting those who matter to see the value in what we do.

1. Everyone Thinks They Can Write, Design, and Shoot Video

Except for the most self-aware, everyone thinks they can write. They can crank out an email (albeit a terrible one) in three minutes flat, and they get lots of great responses from their friends on their personal social media accounts. So naturally, when they see your well-crafted article that just happened to be awesome enough to be published in Fast Company, some think, “Yeah, big deal. I could do that.”

The same goes for design and video. People assume that just because they can throw together a bunch of clipart in PowerPoint or get 150 likes on a video they shot on their iPhone of their daughter making her first soccer goal, our design or video work must be just as easy—more play than work, in fact.

The Solution: Accept that some of your colleagues will naturally appreciate the difference between writing for a personal blog and crafting truly useful content that fits the brand voice. Others won’t. You can blame it on the internet and social media being the great equalizers, giving every individual a platform, a voice, and a bit of overconfidence. Unless the skeptics happen to be in a position of authority over you, just embrace your inner Disney princess and “Let It Go.” Your focus should be on making sure you have the support you need from above. You can do this by building a relationship of trust with your superiors, perhaps pointing to statistics that show just how big Fast Company’s reach is, and making your work processes more transparent.

“My personal solutions,” says Vincent Orleck, CMO at BRANDish in Phoenix, Arizona, “are to either A) align myself with others who see the content value similarly to how I do, or B) guide those who don’t see it the same way in a direction that allows them to essentially ‘create’ the same content themselves so they are bought into it on their own level rather than me convincing them to do so.”

2. People Don’t Understand What Our Work Requires

We make it look easy. The hours of focused attention that we have to carve out of a distracting workplace aren’t always apparent to others—especially when we have to lock ourselves in a conference room or work from home in order to escape the constant interruptions and concentrate well enough to write. (The biggest office pet peeve cited by marketers in a recent survey? Co-workers who talk too loud. This may be why 53 percent of those polled expect most workers to be remote within just a few years—which will only make our perception problem worse.)

Even while we’re at the office, clacking away at the keyboard, composing the best blog post customers have seen in years, it outwardly looks no different than someone responding to an email or updating social media. Like synchronized swimmers, the effortless grace that is seen by spectators above the water masks the frantic effort that’s taking place beneath the surface.

The Solution: You could do a better acting job. Grunt more. Sweat more. Make sure you look disheveled and stressed out by the end of the day. Or you could map out your workflows in detail and publish them for all to see, perhaps using work management software. Once your colleagues recognize just how many text and design drafts it takes to get to one finalized and approved whitepaper, not to mention the resources involved, they’ll be less likely to take you for granted.

3. We’re Battling Conflicting Definitions About What Makes Our Content Valuable

“People in the marketing industry are at varying levels of experience,” says Orleck, “so their understanding of what truly valuable content is will vary greatly. Often what I see is newer marketers focusing more on the approach or the platforms instead of what the content actually consists of, and whether it should even be put out there.”

Just because you can publish everywhere doesn’t mean you should. And different individuals within the team can have vastly different opinions about what types of content will work with the audience—not to mention how much of that content should be produced on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Deborah Strickland, senior digital marketing strategist at Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, California, says, “I’ve seen a lot of ‘throw it over the wall’ processes, which can result in poorly produced content, content that doesn’t fit the audience, or redundant content—how many whitepapers on X do we need?”

Many marketers are being asked to manage a “content factory, spewing out tons of often disconnected material,” without regard to strategic goals, Strickland says. “In some teams, just creating content is the end goal—if it gets used, or visitors can find it, isn’t their problem.”

The Solution: To avoid arguing about subjective opinions on what is and isn’t valuable or relevant, tie all content back to the company’s strategic drivers. Understand the metrics that are being used to evaluate your output—is it about how many assets you release, how many pageviews or downloads each asset attracts, how many different platforms you’re publishing on, how many new prospects are drawn in, or some combination of the above?

In the end, if your boss admits that he’s most interested in releasing more content this quarter than last quarter, then that’s the metric you should be paying closest attention to. If he values “more, more, more,” then by all means adopt the content factory approach to get the appreciation you’re looking for.

If you can, however, take a stand against time-consuming content that has little strategic value. Pull out your documented work processes to show how many resources are involved in creating this asset, especially if it isn’t being appropriately leveraged down the line. Get those who create the content and those who release and distribute the content on the same page about how much room there really is in the pipeline. If you scale back the number of pieces you produce, you can focus on amping up their individual impact.

4. We Suck at Showing ROI

I recently read a comment on LinkedIn that implied that, because webinars bring in more leads per dollar spent than ebooks, that marketers should ditch ebooks and just invest in webinars. I fired back that people probably wouldn’t give the webinar the time of day if they hadn’t first had experiences with the brand via social, blog posts, and ebooks. We all recognize this kind of overly reductive thinking for what it is, but it does expose how marketing’s metrics obsession is making it very hard for us to gauge and advertise the value of our content.

Some of this isn’t our fault. By its very purpose and nature, a thought leadership piece placed in an industry publication isn’t going to result in measurable sales. When the content marketing team’s work is devoted to pure brand awareness, it’s difficult to evaluate in terms of return on marketing investment. “Some executives understand that marketers need a portion of the marketing budget to be exempt from strict ROMI analysis,” writes Workfront CMO Joe Staples, “because awareness campaigns that are not tied to direct revenue are essential for the growth of the brand. But for other executives, it’s a message you’ll have to impart again and again.”

Some of this is our fault. We can do a better job of translating our results into language our bosses care about.

The Solution: Words and pictures (whether still or moving) are the native language of most content marketers, while other marketers and business professionals are all about metrics. Spend some time getting fluent in the language of business.

Comprehensive work management solutions can facilitate your efforts by tying budgets directly to tasks, improving resource management and allocation, and making forecasting and reporting easier than ever. Imagine being able to prove with data that you completed 10 percent more projects this quarter than last quarter, 95 percent of which were on time and under budget, and that you improved resource allocation, too. That will earn you some appreciation from the number crunchers, but you’ll have to step out of your comfort zone in another way, too. Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders.

“To succeed, content creators must be able to do more than research, write, and communicate,” says Shelly Lucas, content marketing director at Dun & Bradsheet. “We must be literate in data, analytics, SEO, user experience, design, advertising, demand gen, community, engagement, storytelling, and multiple lines of business. The past few years, many of us have busied ourselves learning all these things. How far has the rest of marketing progressed in its knowledge (and appreciation) of content? For too many organizations, the reciprocal pendulum is stuck.”

Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders. Click To Tweet 5. The C-Suite Hasn’t Bought In

“Most of the companies I’ve seen in the past 10 years still believe the purpose of marketing is to promote the company and write about the product,” says Jack Jenkins, director of product marketing at irth Solutions. “At its core, content marketing is about understanding the customer problems you solve and then sharing your expertise in creative ways to attract prospects. This doesn’t happen overnight, and the C-level always wants immediate results.”

Jenkins points out that marketing is often expected to produce isolated email campaigns to drive leads for short-term goals. But content marketing is the long game. “Unless the leadership team understands and commits to this strategy,” he says, “content marketers will continue to struggle. It’s a mindset change that is slowly being realized in many sectors of B2B.”

The Solution: You are a master at speaking to different audiences; don’t forget that your C-suite is an audience, too. “Rockstar content teams are contextual masters,” says Lucas. “They’re good at building bridges, both internally and externally. They develop resonant concepts and narrative structures to convey memorable marketing messages to prospects and customers. They create vehicles to create market momentum. They show buyers—and brands—the way forward.” They (we) can show executives the way forward, too.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2ruAdXw

#5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

[mercedessharonwo1]

5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

If you’re like many content marketers, when you tell your mom your job title, she reacts with a perplexed smile and something like, “Oh, so what do you do?” An explanation fit for a layperson only yields a brief, labored expression before giving way to an epiphany: “So you’re a writer?”

“Yeah,” you say, realizing that your mom is probably picturing you hunched over a vintage typewriter in a New England cabin, decked out in beatnik attire, while tapping out your great American novel and trying to figure out how you’re going to pay off those pesky student loans.

Not that you can blame Mom. After all, the term “content marketing” didn’t even exist 10 to 15 years ago. Unfortunately, many of us get this same reaction from folks in our own department.

When our colleagues do (sort of) know what we do, they treat us like we’re just off creating “cute” videos and blog posts that just keep people entertained until they can come in and do the real work, or they fail to see our contributions because they’re nested inside much larger campaigns. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how our ebook or whitepaper contributed to the stew.

If content is at the heart of all great marketing (and I believe it is), then why do so few people inside and outside of marketing understand what content marketing is and how it creates value? You and I know that our work permeates everything the department does, influencing and converting prospects in subtle but powerful ways. So why is it so hard for others to see that?

Here are five reasons content marketers are underappreciated, plus solutions for getting those who matter to see the value in what we do.

1. Everyone Thinks They Can Write, Design, and Shoot Video

Except for the most self-aware, everyone thinks they can write. They can crank out an email (albeit a terrible one) in three minutes flat, and they get lots of great responses from their friends on their personal social media accounts. So naturally, when they see your well-crafted article that just happened to be awesome enough to be published in Fast Company, some think, “Yeah, big deal. I could do that.”

The same goes for design and video. People assume that just because they can throw together a bunch of clipart in PowerPoint or get 150 likes on a video they shot on their iPhone of their daughter making her first soccer goal, our design or video work must be just as easy—more play than work, in fact.

The Solution: Accept that some of your colleagues will naturally appreciate the difference between writing for a personal blog and crafting truly useful content that fits the brand voice. Others won’t. You can blame it on the internet and social media being the great equalizers, giving every individual a platform, a voice, and a bit of overconfidence. Unless the skeptics happen to be in a position of authority over you, just embrace your inner Disney princess and “Let It Go.” Your focus should be on making sure you have the support you need from above. You can do this by building a relationship of trust with your superiors, perhaps pointing to statistics that show just how big Fast Company’s reach is, and making your work processes more transparent.

“My personal solutions,” says Vincent Orleck, CMO at BRANDish in Phoenix, Arizona, “are to either A) align myself with others who see the content value similarly to how I do, or B) guide those who don’t see it the same way in a direction that allows them to essentially ‘create’ the same content themselves so they are bought into it on their own level rather than me convincing them to do so.”

2. People Don’t Understand What Our Work Requires

We make it look easy. The hours of focused attention that we have to carve out of a distracting workplace aren’t always apparent to others—especially when we have to lock ourselves in a conference room or work from home in order to escape the constant interruptions and concentrate well enough to write. (The biggest office pet peeve cited by marketers in a recent survey? Co-workers who talk too loud. This may be why 53 percent of those polled expect most workers to be remote within just a few years—which will only make our perception problem worse.)

Even while we’re at the office, clacking away at the keyboard, composing the best blog post customers have seen in years, it outwardly looks no different than someone responding to an email or updating social media. Like synchronized swimmers, the effortless grace that is seen by spectators above the water masks the frantic effort that’s taking place beneath the surface.

The Solution: You could do a better acting job. Grunt more. Sweat more. Make sure you look disheveled and stressed out by the end of the day. Or you could map out your workflows in detail and publish them for all to see, perhaps using work management software. Once your colleagues recognize just how many text and design drafts it takes to get to one finalized and approved whitepaper, not to mention the resources involved, they’ll be less likely to take you for granted.

3. We’re Battling Conflicting Definitions About What Makes Our Content Valuable

“People in the marketing industry are at varying levels of experience,” says Orleck, “so their understanding of what truly valuable content is will vary greatly. Often what I see is newer marketers focusing more on the approach or the platforms instead of what the content actually consists of, and whether it should even be put out there.”

Just because you can publish everywhere doesn’t mean you should. And different individuals within the team can have vastly different opinions about what types of content will work with the audience—not to mention how much of that content should be produced on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Deborah Strickland, senior digital marketing strategist at Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, California, says, “I’ve seen a lot of ‘throw it over the wall’ processes, which can result in poorly produced content, content that doesn’t fit the audience, or redundant content—how many whitepapers on X do we need?”

Many marketers are being asked to manage a “content factory, spewing out tons of often disconnected material,” without regard to strategic goals, Strickland says. “In some teams, just creating content is the end goal—if it gets used, or visitors can find it, isn’t their problem.”

The Solution: To avoid arguing about subjective opinions on what is and isn’t valuable or relevant, tie all content back to the company’s strategic drivers. Understand the metrics that are being used to evaluate your output—is it about how many assets you release, how many pageviews or downloads each asset attracts, how many different platforms you’re publishing on, how many new prospects are drawn in, or some combination of the above?

In the end, if your boss admits that he’s most interested in releasing more content this quarter than last quarter, then that’s the metric you should be paying closest attention to. If he values “more, more, more,” then by all means adopt the content factory approach to get the appreciation you’re looking for.

If you can, however, take a stand against time-consuming content that has little strategic value. Pull out your documented work processes to show how many resources are involved in creating this asset, especially if it isn’t being appropriately leveraged down the line. Get those who create the content and those who release and distribute the content on the same page about how much room there really is in the pipeline. If you scale back the number of pieces you produce, you can focus on amping up their individual impact.

4. We Suck at Showing ROI

I recently read a comment on LinkedIn that implied that, because webinars bring in more leads per dollar spent than ebooks, that marketers should ditch ebooks and just invest in webinars. I fired back that people probably wouldn’t give the webinar the time of day if they hadn’t first had experiences with the brand via social, blog posts, and ebooks. We all recognize this kind of overly reductive thinking for what it is, but it does expose how marketing’s metrics obsession is making it very hard for us to gauge and advertise the value of our content.

Some of this isn’t our fault. By its very purpose and nature, a thought leadership piece placed in an industry publication isn’t going to result in measurable sales. When the content marketing team’s work is devoted to pure brand awareness, it’s difficult to evaluate in terms of return on marketing investment. “Some executives understand that marketers need a portion of the marketing budget to be exempt from strict ROMI analysis,” writes Workfront CMO Joe Staples, “because awareness campaigns that are not tied to direct revenue are essential for the growth of the brand. But for other executives, it’s a message you’ll have to impart again and again.”

Some of this is our fault. We can do a better job of translating our results into language our bosses care about.

The Solution: Words and pictures (whether still or moving) are the native language of most content marketers, while other marketers and business professionals are all about metrics. Spend some time getting fluent in the language of business.

Comprehensive work management solutions can facilitate your efforts by tying budgets directly to tasks, improving resource management and allocation, and making forecasting and reporting easier than ever. Imagine being able to prove with data that you completed 10 percent more projects this quarter than last quarter, 95 percent of which were on time and under budget, and that you improved resource allocation, too. That will earn you some appreciation from the number crunchers, but you’ll have to step out of your comfort zone in another way, too. Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders.

“To succeed, content creators must be able to do more than research, write, and communicate,” says Shelly Lucas, content marketing director at Dun & Bradsheet. “We must be literate in data, analytics, SEO, user experience, design, advertising, demand gen, community, engagement, storytelling, and multiple lines of business. The past few years, many of us have busied ourselves learning all these things. How far has the rest of marketing progressed in its knowledge (and appreciation) of content? For too many organizations, the reciprocal pendulum is stuck.”

Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders. Click To Tweet 5. The C-Suite Hasn’t Bought In

“Most of the companies I’ve seen in the past 10 years still believe the purpose of marketing is to promote the company and write about the product,” says Jack Jenkins, director of product marketing at irth Solutions. “At its core, content marketing is about understanding the customer problems you solve and then sharing your expertise in creative ways to attract prospects. This doesn’t happen overnight, and the C-level always wants immediate results.”

Jenkins points out that marketing is often expected to produce isolated email campaigns to drive leads for short-term goals. But content marketing is the long game. “Unless the leadership team understands and commits to this strategy,” he says, “content marketers will continue to struggle. It’s a mindset change that is slowly being realized in many sectors of B2B.”

The Solution: You are a master at speaking to different audiences; don’t forget that your C-suite is an audience, too. “Rockstar content teams are contextual masters,” says Lucas. “They’re good at building bridges, both internally and externally. They develop resonant concepts and narrative structures to convey memorable marketing messages to prospects and customers. They create vehicles to create market momentum. They show buyers—and brands—the way forward.” They (we) can show executives the way forward, too.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2ruAdXw

#5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

[conniecogeie]

5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

If you’re like many content marketers, when you tell your mom your job title, she reacts with a perplexed smile and something like, “Oh, so what do you do?” An explanation fit for a layperson only yields a brief, labored expression before giving way to an epiphany: “So you’re a writer?”

“Yeah,” you say, realizing that your mom is probably picturing you hunched over a vintage typewriter in a New England cabin, decked out in beatnik attire, while tapping out your great American novel and trying to figure out how you’re going to pay off those pesky student loans.

Not that you can blame Mom. After all, the term “content marketing” didn’t even exist 10 to 15 years ago. Unfortunately, many of us get this same reaction from folks in our own department.

When our colleagues do (sort of) know what we do, they treat us like we’re just off creating “cute” videos and blog posts that just keep people entertained until they can come in and do the real work, or they fail to see our contributions because they’re nested inside much larger campaigns. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how our ebook or whitepaper contributed to the stew.

If content is at the heart of all great marketing (and I believe it is), then why do so few people inside and outside of marketing understand what content marketing is and how it creates value? You and I know that our work permeates everything the department does, influencing and converting prospects in subtle but powerful ways. So why is it so hard for others to see that?

Here are five reasons content marketers are underappreciated, plus solutions for getting those who matter to see the value in what we do.

1. Everyone Thinks They Can Write, Design, and Shoot Video

Except for the most self-aware, everyone thinks they can write. They can crank out an email (albeit a terrible one) in three minutes flat, and they get lots of great responses from their friends on their personal social media accounts. So naturally, when they see your well-crafted article that just happened to be awesome enough to be published in Fast Company, some think, “Yeah, big deal. I could do that.”

The same goes for design and video. People assume that just because they can throw together a bunch of clipart in PowerPoint or get 150 likes on a video they shot on their iPhone of their daughter making her first soccer goal, our design or video work must be just as easy—more play than work, in fact.

The Solution: Accept that some of your colleagues will naturally appreciate the difference between writing for a personal blog and crafting truly useful content that fits the brand voice. Others won’t. You can blame it on the internet and social media being the great equalizers, giving every individual a platform, a voice, and a bit of overconfidence. Unless the skeptics happen to be in a position of authority over you, just embrace your inner Disney princess and “Let It Go.” Your focus should be on making sure you have the support you need from above. You can do this by building a relationship of trust with your superiors, perhaps pointing to statistics that show just how big Fast Company’s reach is, and making your work processes more transparent.

“My personal solutions,” says Vincent Orleck, CMO at BRANDish in Phoenix, Arizona, “are to either A) align myself with others who see the content value similarly to how I do, or B) guide those who don’t see it the same way in a direction that allows them to essentially ‘create’ the same content themselves so they are bought into it on their own level rather than me convincing them to do so.”

2. People Don’t Understand What Our Work Requires

We make it look easy. The hours of focused attention that we have to carve out of a distracting workplace aren’t always apparent to others—especially when we have to lock ourselves in a conference room or work from home in order to escape the constant interruptions and concentrate well enough to write. (The biggest office pet peeve cited by marketers in a recent survey? Co-workers who talk too loud. This may be why 53 percent of those polled expect most workers to be remote within just a few years—which will only make our perception problem worse.)

Even while we’re at the office, clacking away at the keyboard, composing the best blog post customers have seen in years, it outwardly looks no different than someone responding to an email or updating social media. Like synchronized swimmers, the effortless grace that is seen by spectators above the water masks the frantic effort that’s taking place beneath the surface.

The Solution: You could do a better acting job. Grunt more. Sweat more. Make sure you look disheveled and stressed out by the end of the day. Or you could map out your workflows in detail and publish them for all to see, perhaps using work management software. Once your colleagues recognize just how many text and design drafts it takes to get to one finalized and approved whitepaper, not to mention the resources involved, they’ll be less likely to take you for granted.

3. We’re Battling Conflicting Definitions About What Makes Our Content Valuable

“People in the marketing industry are at varying levels of experience,” says Orleck, “so their understanding of what truly valuable content is will vary greatly. Often what I see is newer marketers focusing more on the approach or the platforms instead of what the content actually consists of, and whether it should even be put out there.”

Just because you can publish everywhere doesn’t mean you should. And different individuals within the team can have vastly different opinions about what types of content will work with the audience—not to mention how much of that content should be produced on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Deborah Strickland, senior digital marketing strategist at Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, California, says, “I’ve seen a lot of ‘throw it over the wall’ processes, which can result in poorly produced content, content that doesn’t fit the audience, or redundant content—how many whitepapers on X do we need?”

Many marketers are being asked to manage a “content factory, spewing out tons of often disconnected material,” without regard to strategic goals, Strickland says. “In some teams, just creating content is the end goal—if it gets used, or visitors can find it, isn’t their problem.”

The Solution: To avoid arguing about subjective opinions on what is and isn’t valuable or relevant, tie all content back to the company’s strategic drivers. Understand the metrics that are being used to evaluate your output—is it about how many assets you release, how many pageviews or downloads each asset attracts, how many different platforms you’re publishing on, how many new prospects are drawn in, or some combination of the above?

In the end, if your boss admits that he’s most interested in releasing more content this quarter than last quarter, then that’s the metric you should be paying closest attention to. If he values “more, more, more,” then by all means adopt the content factory approach to get the appreciation you’re looking for.

If you can, however, take a stand against time-consuming content that has little strategic value. Pull out your documented work processes to show how many resources are involved in creating this asset, especially if it isn’t being appropriately leveraged down the line. Get those who create the content and those who release and distribute the content on the same page about how much room there really is in the pipeline. If you scale back the number of pieces you produce, you can focus on amping up their individual impact.

4. We Suck at Showing ROI

I recently read a comment on LinkedIn that implied that, because webinars bring in more leads per dollar spent than ebooks, that marketers should ditch ebooks and just invest in webinars. I fired back that people probably wouldn’t give the webinar the time of day if they hadn’t first had experiences with the brand via social, blog posts, and ebooks. We all recognize this kind of overly reductive thinking for what it is, but it does expose how marketing’s metrics obsession is making it very hard for us to gauge and advertise the value of our content.

Some of this isn’t our fault. By its very purpose and nature, a thought leadership piece placed in an industry publication isn’t going to result in measurable sales. When the content marketing team’s work is devoted to pure brand awareness, it’s difficult to evaluate in terms of return on marketing investment. “Some executives understand that marketers need a portion of the marketing budget to be exempt from strict ROMI analysis,” writes Workfront CMO Joe Staples, “because awareness campaigns that are not tied to direct revenue are essential for the growth of the brand. But for other executives, it’s a message you’ll have to impart again and again.”

Some of this is our fault. We can do a better job of translating our results into language our bosses care about.

The Solution: Words and pictures (whether still or moving) are the native language of most content marketers, while other marketers and business professionals are all about metrics. Spend some time getting fluent in the language of business.

Comprehensive work management solutions can facilitate your efforts by tying budgets directly to tasks, improving resource management and allocation, and making forecasting and reporting easier than ever. Imagine being able to prove with data that you completed 10 percent more projects this quarter than last quarter, 95 percent of which were on time and under budget, and that you improved resource allocation, too. That will earn you some appreciation from the number crunchers, but you’ll have to step out of your comfort zone in another way, too. Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders.

“To succeed, content creators must be able to do more than research, write, and communicate,” says Shelly Lucas, content marketing director at Dun & Bradsheet. “We must be literate in data, analytics, SEO, user experience, design, advertising, demand gen, community, engagement, storytelling, and multiple lines of business. The past few years, many of us have busied ourselves learning all these things. How far has the rest of marketing progressed in its knowledge (and appreciation) of content? For too many organizations, the reciprocal pendulum is stuck.”

Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders. Click To Tweet 5. The C-Suite Hasn’t Bought In

“Most of the companies I’ve seen in the past 10 years still believe the purpose of marketing is to promote the company and write about the product,” says Jack Jenkins, director of product marketing at irth Solutions. “At its core, content marketing is about understanding the customer problems you solve and then sharing your expertise in creative ways to attract prospects. This doesn’t happen overnight, and the C-level always wants immediate results.”

Jenkins points out that marketing is often expected to produce isolated email campaigns to drive leads for short-term goals. But content marketing is the long game. “Unless the leadership team understands and commits to this strategy,” he says, “content marketers will continue to struggle. It’s a mindset change that is slowly being realized in many sectors of B2B.”

The Solution: You are a master at speaking to different audiences; don’t forget that your C-suite is an audience, too. “Rockstar content teams are contextual masters,” says Lucas. “They’re good at building bridges, both internally and externally. They develop resonant concepts and narrative structures to convey memorable marketing messages to prospects and customers. They create vehicles to create market momentum. They show buyers—and brands—the way forward.” They (we) can show executives the way forward, too.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2ruAdXw

#5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

[fairchildlingpo1]

5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

If you’re like many content marketers, when you tell your mom your job title, she reacts with a perplexed smile and something like, “Oh, so what do you do?” An explanation fit for a layperson only yields a brief, labored expression before giving way to an epiphany: “So you’re a writer?”

“Yeah,” you say, realizing that your mom is probably picturing you hunched over a vintage typewriter in a New England cabin, decked out in beatnik attire, while tapping out your great American novel and trying to figure out how you’re going to pay off those pesky student loans.

Not that you can blame Mom. After all, the term “content marketing” didn’t even exist 10 to 15 years ago. Unfortunately, many of us get this same reaction from folks in our own department.

When our colleagues do (sort of) know what we do, they treat us like we’re just off creating “cute” videos and blog posts that just keep people entertained until they can come in and do the real work, or they fail to see our contributions because they’re nested inside much larger campaigns. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how our ebook or whitepaper contributed to the stew.

If content is at the heart of all great marketing (and I believe it is), then why do so few people inside and outside of marketing understand what content marketing is and how it creates value? You and I know that our work permeates everything the department does, influencing and converting prospects in subtle but powerful ways. So why is it so hard for others to see that?

Here are five reasons content marketers are underappreciated, plus solutions for getting those who matter to see the value in what we do.

1. Everyone Thinks They Can Write, Design, and Shoot Video

Except for the most self-aware, everyone thinks they can write. They can crank out an email (albeit a terrible one) in three minutes flat, and they get lots of great responses from their friends on their personal social media accounts. So naturally, when they see your well-crafted article that just happened to be awesome enough to be published in Fast Company, some think, “Yeah, big deal. I could do that.”

The same goes for design and video. People assume that just because they can throw together a bunch of clipart in PowerPoint or get 150 likes on a video they shot on their iPhone of their daughter making her first soccer goal, our design or video work must be just as easy—more play than work, in fact.

The Solution: Accept that some of your colleagues will naturally appreciate the difference between writing for a personal blog and crafting truly useful content that fits the brand voice. Others won’t. You can blame it on the internet and social media being the great equalizers, giving every individual a platform, a voice, and a bit of overconfidence. Unless the skeptics happen to be in a position of authority over you, just embrace your inner Disney princess and “Let It Go.” Your focus should be on making sure you have the support you need from above. You can do this by building a relationship of trust with your superiors, perhaps pointing to statistics that show just how big Fast Company’s reach is, and making your work processes more transparent.

“My personal solutions,” says Vincent Orleck, CMO at BRANDish in Phoenix, Arizona, “are to either A) align myself with others who see the content value similarly to how I do, or B) guide those who don’t see it the same way in a direction that allows them to essentially ‘create’ the same content themselves so they are bought into it on their own level rather than me convincing them to do so.”

2. People Don’t Understand What Our Work Requires

We make it look easy. The hours of focused attention that we have to carve out of a distracting workplace aren’t always apparent to others—especially when we have to lock ourselves in a conference room or work from home in order to escape the constant interruptions and concentrate well enough to write. (The biggest office pet peeve cited by marketers in a recent survey? Co-workers who talk too loud. This may be why 53 percent of those polled expect most workers to be remote within just a few years—which will only make our perception problem worse.)

Even while we’re at the office, clacking away at the keyboard, composing the best blog post customers have seen in years, it outwardly looks no different than someone responding to an email or updating social media. Like synchronized swimmers, the effortless grace that is seen by spectators above the water masks the frantic effort that’s taking place beneath the surface.

The Solution: You could do a better acting job. Grunt more. Sweat more. Make sure you look disheveled and stressed out by the end of the day. Or you could map out your workflows in detail and publish them for all to see, perhaps using work management software. Once your colleagues recognize just how many text and design drafts it takes to get to one finalized and approved whitepaper, not to mention the resources involved, they’ll be less likely to take you for granted.

3. We’re Battling Conflicting Definitions About What Makes Our Content Valuable

“People in the marketing industry are at varying levels of experience,” says Orleck, “so their understanding of what truly valuable content is will vary greatly. Often what I see is newer marketers focusing more on the approach or the platforms instead of what the content actually consists of, and whether it should even be put out there.”

Just because you can publish everywhere doesn’t mean you should. And different individuals within the team can have vastly different opinions about what types of content will work with the audience—not to mention how much of that content should be produced on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Deborah Strickland, senior digital marketing strategist at Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, California, says, “I’ve seen a lot of ‘throw it over the wall’ processes, which can result in poorly produced content, content that doesn’t fit the audience, or redundant content—how many whitepapers on X do we need?”

Many marketers are being asked to manage a “content factory, spewing out tons of often disconnected material,” without regard to strategic goals, Strickland says. “In some teams, just creating content is the end goal—if it gets used, or visitors can find it, isn’t their problem.”

The Solution: To avoid arguing about subjective opinions on what is and isn’t valuable or relevant, tie all content back to the company’s strategic drivers. Understand the metrics that are being used to evaluate your output—is it about how many assets you release, how many pageviews or downloads each asset attracts, how many different platforms you’re publishing on, how many new prospects are drawn in, or some combination of the above?

In the end, if your boss admits that he’s most interested in releasing more content this quarter than last quarter, then that’s the metric you should be paying closest attention to. If he values “more, more, more,” then by all means adopt the content factory approach to get the appreciation you’re looking for.

If you can, however, take a stand against time-consuming content that has little strategic value. Pull out your documented work processes to show how many resources are involved in creating this asset, especially if it isn’t being appropriately leveraged down the line. Get those who create the content and those who release and distribute the content on the same page about how much room there really is in the pipeline. If you scale back the number of pieces you produce, you can focus on amping up their individual impact.

4. We Suck at Showing ROI

I recently read a comment on LinkedIn that implied that, because webinars bring in more leads per dollar spent than ebooks, that marketers should ditch ebooks and just invest in webinars. I fired back that people probably wouldn’t give the webinar the time of day if they hadn’t first had experiences with the brand via social, blog posts, and ebooks. We all recognize this kind of overly reductive thinking for what it is, but it does expose how marketing’s metrics obsession is making it very hard for us to gauge and advertise the value of our content.

Some of this isn’t our fault. By its very purpose and nature, a thought leadership piece placed in an industry publication isn’t going to result in measurable sales. When the content marketing team’s work is devoted to pure brand awareness, it’s difficult to evaluate in terms of return on marketing investment. “Some executives understand that marketers need a portion of the marketing budget to be exempt from strict ROMI analysis,” writes Workfront CMO Joe Staples, “because awareness campaigns that are not tied to direct revenue are essential for the growth of the brand. But for other executives, it’s a message you’ll have to impart again and again.”

Some of this is our fault. We can do a better job of translating our results into language our bosses care about.

The Solution: Words and pictures (whether still or moving) are the native language of most content marketers, while other marketers and business professionals are all about metrics. Spend some time getting fluent in the language of business.

Comprehensive work management solutions can facilitate your efforts by tying budgets directly to tasks, improving resource management and allocation, and making forecasting and reporting easier than ever. Imagine being able to prove with data that you completed 10 percent more projects this quarter than last quarter, 95 percent of which were on time and under budget, and that you improved resource allocation, too. That will earn you some appreciation from the number crunchers, but you’ll have to step out of your comfort zone in another way, too. Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders.

“To succeed, content creators must be able to do more than research, write, and communicate,” says Shelly Lucas, content marketing director at Dun & Bradsheet. “We must be literate in data, analytics, SEO, user experience, design, advertising, demand gen, community, engagement, storytelling, and multiple lines of business. The past few years, many of us have busied ourselves learning all these things. How far has the rest of marketing progressed in its knowledge (and appreciation) of content? For too many organizations, the reciprocal pendulum is stuck.”

Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders. Click To Tweet 5. The C-Suite Hasn’t Bought In

“Most of the companies I’ve seen in the past 10 years still believe the purpose of marketing is to promote the company and write about the product,” says Jack Jenkins, director of product marketing at irth Solutions. “At its core, content marketing is about understanding the customer problems you solve and then sharing your expertise in creative ways to attract prospects. This doesn’t happen overnight, and the C-level always wants immediate results.”

Jenkins points out that marketing is often expected to produce isolated email campaigns to drive leads for short-term goals. But content marketing is the long game. “Unless the leadership team understands and commits to this strategy,” he says, “content marketers will continue to struggle. It’s a mindset change that is slowly being realized in many sectors of B2B.”

The Solution: You are a master at speaking to different audiences; don’t forget that your C-suite is an audience, too. “Rockstar content teams are contextual masters,” says Lucas. “They’re good at building bridges, both internally and externally. They develop resonant concepts and narrative structures to convey memorable marketing messages to prospects and customers. They create vehicles to create market momentum. They show buyers—and brands—the way forward.” They (we) can show executives the way forward, too.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2ruAdXw

#5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

[maryhare96]

5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

If you’re like many content marketers, when you tell your mom your job title, she reacts with a perplexed smile and something like, “Oh, so what do you do?” An explanation fit for a layperson only yields a brief, labored expression before giving way to an epiphany: “So you’re a writer?”

“Yeah,” you say, realizing that your mom is probably picturing you hunched over a vintage typewriter in a New England cabin, decked out in beatnik attire, while tapping out your great American novel and trying to figure out how you’re going to pay off those pesky student loans.

Not that you can blame Mom. After all, the term “content marketing” didn’t even exist 10 to 15 years ago. Unfortunately, many of us get this same reaction from folks in our own department.

When our colleagues do (sort of) know what we do, they treat us like we’re just off creating “cute” videos and blog posts that just keep people entertained until they can come in and do the real work, or they fail to see our contributions because they’re nested inside much larger campaigns. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how our ebook or whitepaper contributed to the stew.

If content is at the heart of all great marketing (and I believe it is), then why do so few people inside and outside of marketing understand what content marketing is and how it creates value? You and I know that our work permeates everything the department does, influencing and converting prospects in subtle but powerful ways. So why is it so hard for others to see that?

Here are five reasons content marketers are underappreciated, plus solutions for getting those who matter to see the value in what we do.

1. Everyone Thinks They Can Write, Design, and Shoot Video

Except for the most self-aware, everyone thinks they can write. They can crank out an email (albeit a terrible one) in three minutes flat, and they get lots of great responses from their friends on their personal social media accounts. So naturally, when they see your well-crafted article that just happened to be awesome enough to be published in Fast Company, some think, “Yeah, big deal. I could do that.”

The same goes for design and video. People assume that just because they can throw together a bunch of clipart in PowerPoint or get 150 likes on a video they shot on their iPhone of their daughter making her first soccer goal, our design or video work must be just as easy—more play than work, in fact.

The Solution: Accept that some of your colleagues will naturally appreciate the difference between writing for a personal blog and crafting truly useful content that fits the brand voice. Others won’t. You can blame it on the internet and social media being the great equalizers, giving every individual a platform, a voice, and a bit of overconfidence. Unless the skeptics happen to be in a position of authority over you, just embrace your inner Disney princess and “Let It Go.” Your focus should be on making sure you have the support you need from above. You can do this by building a relationship of trust with your superiors, perhaps pointing to statistics that show just how big Fast Company’s reach is, and making your work processes more transparent.

“My personal solutions,” says Vincent Orleck, CMO at BRANDish in Phoenix, Arizona, “are to either A) align myself with others who see the content value similarly to how I do, or B) guide those who don’t see it the same way in a direction that allows them to essentially ‘create’ the same content themselves so they are bought into it on their own level rather than me convincing them to do so.”

2. People Don’t Understand What Our Work Requires

We make it look easy. The hours of focused attention that we have to carve out of a distracting workplace aren’t always apparent to others—especially when we have to lock ourselves in a conference room or work from home in order to escape the constant interruptions and concentrate well enough to write. (The biggest office pet peeve cited by marketers in a recent survey? Co-workers who talk too loud. This may be why 53 percent of those polled expect most workers to be remote within just a few years—which will only make our perception problem worse.)

Even while we’re at the office, clacking away at the keyboard, composing the best blog post customers have seen in years, it outwardly looks no different than someone responding to an email or updating social media. Like synchronized swimmers, the effortless grace that is seen by spectators above the water masks the frantic effort that’s taking place beneath the surface.

The Solution: You could do a better acting job. Grunt more. Sweat more. Make sure you look disheveled and stressed out by the end of the day. Or you could map out your workflows in detail and publish them for all to see, perhaps using work management software. Once your colleagues recognize just how many text and design drafts it takes to get to one finalized and approved whitepaper, not to mention the resources involved, they’ll be less likely to take you for granted.

3. We’re Battling Conflicting Definitions About What Makes Our Content Valuable

“People in the marketing industry are at varying levels of experience,” says Orleck, “so their understanding of what truly valuable content is will vary greatly. Often what I see is newer marketers focusing more on the approach or the platforms instead of what the content actually consists of, and whether it should even be put out there.”

Just because you can publish everywhere doesn’t mean you should. And different individuals within the team can have vastly different opinions about what types of content will work with the audience—not to mention how much of that content should be produced on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Deborah Strickland, senior digital marketing strategist at Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, California, says, “I’ve seen a lot of ‘throw it over the wall’ processes, which can result in poorly produced content, content that doesn’t fit the audience, or redundant content—how many whitepapers on X do we need?”

Many marketers are being asked to manage a “content factory, spewing out tons of often disconnected material,” without regard to strategic goals, Strickland says. “In some teams, just creating content is the end goal—if it gets used, or visitors can find it, isn’t their problem.”

The Solution: To avoid arguing about subjective opinions on what is and isn’t valuable or relevant, tie all content back to the company’s strategic drivers. Understand the metrics that are being used to evaluate your output—is it about how many assets you release, how many pageviews or downloads each asset attracts, how many different platforms you’re publishing on, how many new prospects are drawn in, or some combination of the above?

In the end, if your boss admits that he’s most interested in releasing more content this quarter than last quarter, then that’s the metric you should be paying closest attention to. If he values “more, more, more,” then by all means adopt the content factory approach to get the appreciation you’re looking for.

If you can, however, take a stand against time-consuming content that has little strategic value. Pull out your documented work processes to show how many resources are involved in creating this asset, especially if it isn’t being appropriately leveraged down the line. Get those who create the content and those who release and distribute the content on the same page about how much room there really is in the pipeline. If you scale back the number of pieces you produce, you can focus on amping up their individual impact.

4. We Suck at Showing ROI

I recently read a comment on LinkedIn that implied that, because webinars bring in more leads per dollar spent than ebooks, that marketers should ditch ebooks and just invest in webinars. I fired back that people probably wouldn’t give the webinar the time of day if they hadn’t first had experiences with the brand via social, blog posts, and ebooks. We all recognize this kind of overly reductive thinking for what it is, but it does expose how marketing’s metrics obsession is making it very hard for us to gauge and advertise the value of our content.

Some of this isn’t our fault. By its very purpose and nature, a thought leadership piece placed in an industry publication isn’t going to result in measurable sales. When the content marketing team’s work is devoted to pure brand awareness, it’s difficult to evaluate in terms of return on marketing investment. “Some executives understand that marketers need a portion of the marketing budget to be exempt from strict ROMI analysis,” writes Workfront CMO Joe Staples, “because awareness campaigns that are not tied to direct revenue are essential for the growth of the brand. But for other executives, it’s a message you’ll have to impart again and again.”

Some of this is our fault. We can do a better job of translating our results into language our bosses care about.

The Solution: Words and pictures (whether still or moving) are the native language of most content marketers, while other marketers and business professionals are all about metrics. Spend some time getting fluent in the language of business.

Comprehensive work management solutions can facilitate your efforts by tying budgets directly to tasks, improving resource management and allocation, and making forecasting and reporting easier than ever. Imagine being able to prove with data that you completed 10 percent more projects this quarter than last quarter, 95 percent of which were on time and under budget, and that you improved resource allocation, too. That will earn you some appreciation from the number crunchers, but you’ll have to step out of your comfort zone in another way, too. Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders.

“To succeed, content creators must be able to do more than research, write, and communicate,” says Shelly Lucas, content marketing director at Dun & Bradsheet. “We must be literate in data, analytics, SEO, user experience, design, advertising, demand gen, community, engagement, storytelling, and multiple lines of business. The past few years, many of us have busied ourselves learning all these things. How far has the rest of marketing progressed in its knowledge (and appreciation) of content? For too many organizations, the reciprocal pendulum is stuck.”

Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders. Click To Tweet 5. The C-Suite Hasn’t Bought In

“Most of the companies I’ve seen in the past 10 years still believe the purpose of marketing is to promote the company and write about the product,” says Jack Jenkins, director of product marketing at irth Solutions. “At its core, content marketing is about understanding the customer problems you solve and then sharing your expertise in creative ways to attract prospects. This doesn’t happen overnight, and the C-level always wants immediate results.”

Jenkins points out that marketing is often expected to produce isolated email campaigns to drive leads for short-term goals. But content marketing is the long game. “Unless the leadership team understands and commits to this strategy,” he says, “content marketers will continue to struggle. It’s a mindset change that is slowly being realized in many sectors of B2B.”

The Solution: You are a master at speaking to different audiences; don’t forget that your C-suite is an audience, too. “Rockstar content teams are contextual masters,” says Lucas. “They’re good at building bridges, both internally and externally. They develop resonant concepts and narrative structures to convey memorable marketing messages to prospects and customers. They create vehicles to create market momentum. They show buyers—and brands—the way forward.” They (we) can show executives the way forward, too.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2ruAdXw

#5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

[dainiaolivahm]

5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

If you’re like many content marketers, when you tell your mom your job title, she reacts with a perplexed smile and something like, “Oh, so what do you do?” An explanation fit for a layperson only yields a brief, labored expression before giving way to an epiphany: “So you’re a writer?”

“Yeah,” you say, realizing that your mom is probably picturing you hunched over a vintage typewriter in a New England cabin, decked out in beatnik attire, while tapping out your great American novel and trying to figure out how you’re going to pay off those pesky student loans.

Not that you can blame Mom. After all, the term “content marketing” didn’t even exist 10 to 15 years ago. Unfortunately, many of us get this same reaction from folks in our own department.

When our colleagues do (sort of) know what we do, they treat us like we’re just off creating “cute” videos and blog posts that just keep people entertained until they can come in and do the real work, or they fail to see our contributions because they’re nested inside much larger campaigns. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how our ebook or whitepaper contributed to the stew.

If content is at the heart of all great marketing (and I believe it is), then why do so few people inside and outside of marketing understand what content marketing is and how it creates value? You and I know that our work permeates everything the department does, influencing and converting prospects in subtle but powerful ways. So why is it so hard for others to see that?

Here are five reasons content marketers are underappreciated, plus solutions for getting those who matter to see the value in what we do.

1. Everyone Thinks They Can Write, Design, and Shoot Video

Except for the most self-aware, everyone thinks they can write. They can crank out an email (albeit a terrible one) in three minutes flat, and they get lots of great responses from their friends on their personal social media accounts. So naturally, when they see your well-crafted article that just happened to be awesome enough to be published in Fast Company, some think, “Yeah, big deal. I could do that.”

The same goes for design and video. People assume that just because they can throw together a bunch of clipart in PowerPoint or get 150 likes on a video they shot on their iPhone of their daughter making her first soccer goal, our design or video work must be just as easy—more play than work, in fact.

The Solution: Accept that some of your colleagues will naturally appreciate the difference between writing for a personal blog and crafting truly useful content that fits the brand voice. Others won’t. You can blame it on the internet and social media being the great equalizers, giving every individual a platform, a voice, and a bit of overconfidence. Unless the skeptics happen to be in a position of authority over you, just embrace your inner Disney princess and “Let It Go.” Your focus should be on making sure you have the support you need from above. You can do this by building a relationship of trust with your superiors, perhaps pointing to statistics that show just how big Fast Company’s reach is, and making your work processes more transparent.

“My personal solutions,” says Vincent Orleck, CMO at BRANDish in Phoenix, Arizona, “are to either A) align myself with others who see the content value similarly to how I do, or B) guide those who don’t see it the same way in a direction that allows them to essentially ‘create’ the same content themselves so they are bought into it on their own level rather than me convincing them to do so.”

2. People Don’t Understand What Our Work Requires

We make it look easy. The hours of focused attention that we have to carve out of a distracting workplace aren’t always apparent to others—especially when we have to lock ourselves in a conference room or work from home in order to escape the constant interruptions and concentrate well enough to write. (The biggest office pet peeve cited by marketers in a recent survey? Co-workers who talk too loud. This may be why 53 percent of those polled expect most workers to be remote within just a few years—which will only make our perception problem worse.)

Even while we’re at the office, clacking away at the keyboard, composing the best blog post customers have seen in years, it outwardly looks no different than someone responding to an email or updating social media. Like synchronized swimmers, the effortless grace that is seen by spectators above the water masks the frantic effort that’s taking place beneath the surface.

The Solution: You could do a better acting job. Grunt more. Sweat more. Make sure you look disheveled and stressed out by the end of the day. Or you could map out your workflows in detail and publish them for all to see, perhaps using work management software. Once your colleagues recognize just how many text and design drafts it takes to get to one finalized and approved whitepaper, not to mention the resources involved, they’ll be less likely to take you for granted.

3. We’re Battling Conflicting Definitions About What Makes Our Content Valuable

“People in the marketing industry are at varying levels of experience,” says Orleck, “so their understanding of what truly valuable content is will vary greatly. Often what I see is newer marketers focusing more on the approach or the platforms instead of what the content actually consists of, and whether it should even be put out there.”

Just because you can publish everywhere doesn’t mean you should. And different individuals within the team can have vastly different opinions about what types of content will work with the audience—not to mention how much of that content should be produced on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Deborah Strickland, senior digital marketing strategist at Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, California, says, “I’ve seen a lot of ‘throw it over the wall’ processes, which can result in poorly produced content, content that doesn’t fit the audience, or redundant content—how many whitepapers on X do we need?”

Many marketers are being asked to manage a “content factory, spewing out tons of often disconnected material,” without regard to strategic goals, Strickland says. “In some teams, just creating content is the end goal—if it gets used, or visitors can find it, isn’t their problem.”

The Solution: To avoid arguing about subjective opinions on what is and isn’t valuable or relevant, tie all content back to the company’s strategic drivers. Understand the metrics that are being used to evaluate your output—is it about how many assets you release, how many pageviews or downloads each asset attracts, how many different platforms you’re publishing on, how many new prospects are drawn in, or some combination of the above?

In the end, if your boss admits that he’s most interested in releasing more content this quarter than last quarter, then that’s the metric you should be paying closest attention to. If he values “more, more, more,” then by all means adopt the content factory approach to get the appreciation you’re looking for.

If you can, however, take a stand against time-consuming content that has little strategic value. Pull out your documented work processes to show how many resources are involved in creating this asset, especially if it isn’t being appropriately leveraged down the line. Get those who create the content and those who release and distribute the content on the same page about how much room there really is in the pipeline. If you scale back the number of pieces you produce, you can focus on amping up their individual impact.

4. We Suck at Showing ROI

I recently read a comment on LinkedIn that implied that, because webinars bring in more leads per dollar spent than ebooks, that marketers should ditch ebooks and just invest in webinars. I fired back that people probably wouldn’t give the webinar the time of day if they hadn’t first had experiences with the brand via social, blog posts, and ebooks. We all recognize this kind of overly reductive thinking for what it is, but it does expose how marketing’s metrics obsession is making it very hard for us to gauge and advertise the value of our content.

Some of this isn’t our fault. By its very purpose and nature, a thought leadership piece placed in an industry publication isn’t going to result in measurable sales. When the content marketing team’s work is devoted to pure brand awareness, it’s difficult to evaluate in terms of return on marketing investment. “Some executives understand that marketers need a portion of the marketing budget to be exempt from strict ROMI analysis,” writes Workfront CMO Joe Staples, “because awareness campaigns that are not tied to direct revenue are essential for the growth of the brand. But for other executives, it’s a message you’ll have to impart again and again.”

Some of this is our fault. We can do a better job of translating our results into language our bosses care about.

The Solution: Words and pictures (whether still or moving) are the native language of most content marketers, while other marketers and business professionals are all about metrics. Spend some time getting fluent in the language of business.

Comprehensive work management solutions can facilitate your efforts by tying budgets directly to tasks, improving resource management and allocation, and making forecasting and reporting easier than ever. Imagine being able to prove with data that you completed 10 percent more projects this quarter than last quarter, 95 percent of which were on time and under budget, and that you improved resource allocation, too. That will earn you some appreciation from the number crunchers, but you’ll have to step out of your comfort zone in another way, too. Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders.

“To succeed, content creators must be able to do more than research, write, and communicate,” says Shelly Lucas, content marketing director at Dun & Bradsheet. “We must be literate in data, analytics, SEO, user experience, design, advertising, demand gen, community, engagement, storytelling, and multiple lines of business. The past few years, many of us have busied ourselves learning all these things. How far has the rest of marketing progressed in its knowledge (and appreciation) of content? For too many organizations, the reciprocal pendulum is stuck.”

Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders. Click To Tweet 5. The C-Suite Hasn’t Bought In

“Most of the companies I’ve seen in the past 10 years still believe the purpose of marketing is to promote the company and write about the product,” says Jack Jenkins, director of product marketing at irth Solutions. “At its core, content marketing is about understanding the customer problems you solve and then sharing your expertise in creative ways to attract prospects. This doesn’t happen overnight, and the C-level always wants immediate results.”

Jenkins points out that marketing is often expected to produce isolated email campaigns to drive leads for short-term goals. But content marketing is the long game. “Unless the leadership team understands and commits to this strategy,” he says, “content marketers will continue to struggle. It’s a mindset change that is slowly being realized in many sectors of B2B.”

The Solution: You are a master at speaking to different audiences; don’t forget that your C-suite is an audience, too. “Rockstar content teams are contextual masters,” says Lucas. “They’re good at building bridges, both internally and externally. They develop resonant concepts and narrative structures to convey memorable marketing messages to prospects and customers. They create vehicles to create market momentum. They show buyers—and brands—the way forward.” They (we) can show executives the way forward, too.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2ruAdXw

#5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

[rodneyevesuarywk]

5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

If you’re like many content marketers, when you tell your mom your job title, she reacts with a perplexed smile and something like, “Oh, so what do you do?” An explanation fit for a layperson only yields a brief, labored expression before giving way to an epiphany: “So you’re a writer?”

“Yeah,” you say, realizing that your mom is probably picturing you hunched over a vintage typewriter in a New England cabin, decked out in beatnik attire, while tapping out your great American novel and trying to figure out how you’re going to pay off those pesky student loans.

Not that you can blame Mom. After all, the term “content marketing” didn’t even exist 10 to 15 years ago. Unfortunately, many of us get this same reaction from folks in our own department.

When our colleagues do (sort of) know what we do, they treat us like we’re just off creating “cute” videos and blog posts that just keep people entertained until they can come in and do the real work, or they fail to see our contributions because they’re nested inside much larger campaigns. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how our ebook or whitepaper contributed to the stew.

If content is at the heart of all great marketing (and I believe it is), then why do so few people inside and outside of marketing understand what content marketing is and how it creates value? You and I know that our work permeates everything the department does, influencing and converting prospects in subtle but powerful ways. So why is it so hard for others to see that?

Here are five reasons content marketers are underappreciated, plus solutions for getting those who matter to see the value in what we do.

1. Everyone Thinks They Can Write, Design, and Shoot Video

Except for the most self-aware, everyone thinks they can write. They can crank out an email (albeit a terrible one) in three minutes flat, and they get lots of great responses from their friends on their personal social media accounts. So naturally, when they see your well-crafted article that just happened to be awesome enough to be published in Fast Company, some think, “Yeah, big deal. I could do that.”

The same goes for design and video. People assume that just because they can throw together a bunch of clipart in PowerPoint or get 150 likes on a video they shot on their iPhone of their daughter making her first soccer goal, our design or video work must be just as easy—more play than work, in fact.

The Solution: Accept that some of your colleagues will naturally appreciate the difference between writing for a personal blog and crafting truly useful content that fits the brand voice. Others won’t. You can blame it on the internet and social media being the great equalizers, giving every individual a platform, a voice, and a bit of overconfidence. Unless the skeptics happen to be in a position of authority over you, just embrace your inner Disney princess and “Let It Go.” Your focus should be on making sure you have the support you need from above. You can do this by building a relationship of trust with your superiors, perhaps pointing to statistics that show just how big Fast Company’s reach is, and making your work processes more transparent.

“My personal solutions,” says Vincent Orleck, CMO at BRANDish in Phoenix, Arizona, “are to either A) align myself with others who see the content value similarly to how I do, or B) guide those who don’t see it the same way in a direction that allows them to essentially ‘create’ the same content themselves so they are bought into it on their own level rather than me convincing them to do so.”

2. People Don’t Understand What Our Work Requires

We make it look easy. The hours of focused attention that we have to carve out of a distracting workplace aren’t always apparent to others—especially when we have to lock ourselves in a conference room or work from home in order to escape the constant interruptions and concentrate well enough to write. (The biggest office pet peeve cited by marketers in a recent survey? Co-workers who talk too loud. This may be why 53 percent of those polled expect most workers to be remote within just a few years—which will only make our perception problem worse.)

Even while we’re at the office, clacking away at the keyboard, composing the best blog post customers have seen in years, it outwardly looks no different than someone responding to an email or updating social media. Like synchronized swimmers, the effortless grace that is seen by spectators above the water masks the frantic effort that’s taking place beneath the surface.

The Solution: You could do a better acting job. Grunt more. Sweat more. Make sure you look disheveled and stressed out by the end of the day. Or you could map out your workflows in detail and publish them for all to see, perhaps using work management software. Once your colleagues recognize just how many text and design drafts it takes to get to one finalized and approved whitepaper, not to mention the resources involved, they’ll be less likely to take you for granted.

3. We’re Battling Conflicting Definitions About What Makes Our Content Valuable

“People in the marketing industry are at varying levels of experience,” says Orleck, “so their understanding of what truly valuable content is will vary greatly. Often what I see is newer marketers focusing more on the approach or the platforms instead of what the content actually consists of, and whether it should even be put out there.”

Just because you can publish everywhere doesn’t mean you should. And different individuals within the team can have vastly different opinions about what types of content will work with the audience—not to mention how much of that content should be produced on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Deborah Strickland, senior digital marketing strategist at Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, California, says, “I’ve seen a lot of ‘throw it over the wall’ processes, which can result in poorly produced content, content that doesn’t fit the audience, or redundant content—how many whitepapers on X do we need?”

Many marketers are being asked to manage a “content factory, spewing out tons of often disconnected material,” without regard to strategic goals, Strickland says. “In some teams, just creating content is the end goal—if it gets used, or visitors can find it, isn’t their problem.”

The Solution: To avoid arguing about subjective opinions on what is and isn’t valuable or relevant, tie all content back to the company’s strategic drivers. Understand the metrics that are being used to evaluate your output—is it about how many assets you release, how many pageviews or downloads each asset attracts, how many different platforms you’re publishing on, how many new prospects are drawn in, or some combination of the above?

In the end, if your boss admits that he’s most interested in releasing more content this quarter than last quarter, then that’s the metric you should be paying closest attention to. If he values “more, more, more,” then by all means adopt the content factory approach to get the appreciation you’re looking for.

If you can, however, take a stand against time-consuming content that has little strategic value. Pull out your documented work processes to show how many resources are involved in creating this asset, especially if it isn’t being appropriately leveraged down the line. Get those who create the content and those who release and distribute the content on the same page about how much room there really is in the pipeline. If you scale back the number of pieces you produce, you can focus on amping up their individual impact.

4. We Suck at Showing ROI

I recently read a comment on LinkedIn that implied that, because webinars bring in more leads per dollar spent than ebooks, that marketers should ditch ebooks and just invest in webinars. I fired back that people probably wouldn’t give the webinar the time of day if they hadn’t first had experiences with the brand via social, blog posts, and ebooks. We all recognize this kind of overly reductive thinking for what it is, but it does expose how marketing’s metrics obsession is making it very hard for us to gauge and advertise the value of our content.

Some of this isn’t our fault. By its very purpose and nature, a thought leadership piece placed in an industry publication isn’t going to result in measurable sales. When the content marketing team’s work is devoted to pure brand awareness, it’s difficult to evaluate in terms of return on marketing investment. “Some executives understand that marketers need a portion of the marketing budget to be exempt from strict ROMI analysis,” writes Workfront CMO Joe Staples, “because awareness campaigns that are not tied to direct revenue are essential for the growth of the brand. But for other executives, it’s a message you’ll have to impart again and again.”

Some of this is our fault. We can do a better job of translating our results into language our bosses care about.

The Solution: Words and pictures (whether still or moving) are the native language of most content marketers, while other marketers and business professionals are all about metrics. Spend some time getting fluent in the language of business.

Comprehensive work management solutions can facilitate your efforts by tying budgets directly to tasks, improving resource management and allocation, and making forecasting and reporting easier than ever. Imagine being able to prove with data that you completed 10 percent more projects this quarter than last quarter, 95 percent of which were on time and under budget, and that you improved resource allocation, too. That will earn you some appreciation from the number crunchers, but you’ll have to step out of your comfort zone in another way, too. Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders.

“To succeed, content creators must be able to do more than research, write, and communicate,” says Shelly Lucas, content marketing director at Dun & Bradsheet. “We must be literate in data, analytics, SEO, user experience, design, advertising, demand gen, community, engagement, storytelling, and multiple lines of business. The past few years, many of us have busied ourselves learning all these things. How far has the rest of marketing progressed in its knowledge (and appreciation) of content? For too many organizations, the reciprocal pendulum is stuck.”

Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders. Click To Tweet 5. The C-Suite Hasn’t Bought In

“Most of the companies I’ve seen in the past 10 years still believe the purpose of marketing is to promote the company and write about the product,” says Jack Jenkins, director of product marketing at irth Solutions. “At its core, content marketing is about understanding the customer problems you solve and then sharing your expertise in creative ways to attract prospects. This doesn’t happen overnight, and the C-level always wants immediate results.”

Jenkins points out that marketing is often expected to produce isolated email campaigns to drive leads for short-term goals. But content marketing is the long game. “Unless the leadership team understands and commits to this strategy,” he says, “content marketers will continue to struggle. It’s a mindset change that is slowly being realized in many sectors of B2B.”

The Solution: You are a master at speaking to different audiences; don’t forget that your C-suite is an audience, too. “Rockstar content teams are contextual masters,” says Lucas. “They’re good at building bridges, both internally and externally. They develop resonant concepts and narrative structures to convey memorable marketing messages to prospects and customers. They create vehicles to create market momentum. They show buyers—and brands—the way forward.” They (we) can show executives the way forward, too.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2ruAdXw

#5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

[christinesumpmg]

5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

If you’re like many content marketers, when you tell your mom your job title, she reacts with a perplexed smile and something like, “Oh, so what do you do?” An explanation fit for a layperson only yields a brief, labored expression before giving way to an epiphany: “So you’re a writer?”

“Yeah,” you say, realizing that your mom is probably picturing you hunched over a vintage typewriter in a New England cabin, decked out in beatnik attire, while tapping out your great American novel and trying to figure out how you’re going to pay off those pesky student loans.

Not that you can blame Mom. After all, the term “content marketing” didn’t even exist 10 to 15 years ago. Unfortunately, many of us get this same reaction from folks in our own department.

When our colleagues do (sort of) know what we do, they treat us like we’re just off creating “cute” videos and blog posts that just keep people entertained until they can come in and do the real work, or they fail to see our contributions because they’re nested inside much larger campaigns. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how our ebook or whitepaper contributed to the stew.

If content is at the heart of all great marketing (and I believe it is), then why do so few people inside and outside of marketing understand what content marketing is and how it creates value? You and I know that our work permeates everything the department does, influencing and converting prospects in subtle but powerful ways. So why is it so hard for others to see that?

Here are five reasons content marketers are underappreciated, plus solutions for getting those who matter to see the value in what we do.

1. Everyone Thinks They Can Write, Design, and Shoot Video

Except for the most self-aware, everyone thinks they can write. They can crank out an email (albeit a terrible one) in three minutes flat, and they get lots of great responses from their friends on their personal social media accounts. So naturally, when they see your well-crafted article that just happened to be awesome enough to be published in Fast Company, some think, “Yeah, big deal. I could do that.”

The same goes for design and video. People assume that just because they can throw together a bunch of clipart in PowerPoint or get 150 likes on a video they shot on their iPhone of their daughter making her first soccer goal, our design or video work must be just as easy—more play than work, in fact.

The Solution: Accept that some of your colleagues will naturally appreciate the difference between writing for a personal blog and crafting truly useful content that fits the brand voice. Others won’t. You can blame it on the internet and social media being the great equalizers, giving every individual a platform, a voice, and a bit of overconfidence. Unless the skeptics happen to be in a position of authority over you, just embrace your inner Disney princess and “Let It Go.” Your focus should be on making sure you have the support you need from above. You can do this by building a relationship of trust with your superiors, perhaps pointing to statistics that show just how big Fast Company’s reach is, and making your work processes more transparent.

“My personal solutions,” says Vincent Orleck, CMO at BRANDish in Phoenix, Arizona, “are to either A) align myself with others who see the content value similarly to how I do, or B) guide those who don’t see it the same way in a direction that allows them to essentially ‘create’ the same content themselves so they are bought into it on their own level rather than me convincing them to do so.”

2. People Don’t Understand What Our Work Requires

We make it look easy. The hours of focused attention that we have to carve out of a distracting workplace aren’t always apparent to others—especially when we have to lock ourselves in a conference room or work from home in order to escape the constant interruptions and concentrate well enough to write. (The biggest office pet peeve cited by marketers in a recent survey? Co-workers who talk too loud. This may be why 53 percent of those polled expect most workers to be remote within just a few years—which will only make our perception problem worse.)

Even while we’re at the office, clacking away at the keyboard, composing the best blog post customers have seen in years, it outwardly looks no different than someone responding to an email or updating social media. Like synchronized swimmers, the effortless grace that is seen by spectators above the water masks the frantic effort that’s taking place beneath the surface.

The Solution: You could do a better acting job. Grunt more. Sweat more. Make sure you look disheveled and stressed out by the end of the day. Or you could map out your workflows in detail and publish them for all to see, perhaps using work management software. Once your colleagues recognize just how many text and design drafts it takes to get to one finalized and approved whitepaper, not to mention the resources involved, they’ll be less likely to take you for granted.

3. We’re Battling Conflicting Definitions About What Makes Our Content Valuable

“People in the marketing industry are at varying levels of experience,” says Orleck, “so their understanding of what truly valuable content is will vary greatly. Often what I see is newer marketers focusing more on the approach or the platforms instead of what the content actually consists of, and whether it should even be put out there.”

Just because you can publish everywhere doesn’t mean you should. And different individuals within the team can have vastly different opinions about what types of content will work with the audience—not to mention how much of that content should be produced on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Deborah Strickland, senior digital marketing strategist at Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, California, says, “I’ve seen a lot of ‘throw it over the wall’ processes, which can result in poorly produced content, content that doesn’t fit the audience, or redundant content—how many whitepapers on X do we need?”

Many marketers are being asked to manage a “content factory, spewing out tons of often disconnected material,” without regard to strategic goals, Strickland says. “In some teams, just creating content is the end goal—if it gets used, or visitors can find it, isn’t their problem.”

The Solution: To avoid arguing about subjective opinions on what is and isn’t valuable or relevant, tie all content back to the company’s strategic drivers. Understand the metrics that are being used to evaluate your output—is it about how many assets you release, how many pageviews or downloads each asset attracts, how many different platforms you’re publishing on, how many new prospects are drawn in, or some combination of the above?

In the end, if your boss admits that he’s most interested in releasing more content this quarter than last quarter, then that’s the metric you should be paying closest attention to. If he values “more, more, more,” then by all means adopt the content factory approach to get the appreciation you’re looking for.

If you can, however, take a stand against time-consuming content that has little strategic value. Pull out your documented work processes to show how many resources are involved in creating this asset, especially if it isn’t being appropriately leveraged down the line. Get those who create the content and those who release and distribute the content on the same page about how much room there really is in the pipeline. If you scale back the number of pieces you produce, you can focus on amping up their individual impact.

4. We Suck at Showing ROI

I recently read a comment on LinkedIn that implied that, because webinars bring in more leads per dollar spent than ebooks, that marketers should ditch ebooks and just invest in webinars. I fired back that people probably wouldn’t give the webinar the time of day if they hadn’t first had experiences with the brand via social, blog posts, and ebooks. We all recognize this kind of overly reductive thinking for what it is, but it does expose how marketing’s metrics obsession is making it very hard for us to gauge and advertise the value of our content.

Some of this isn’t our fault. By its very purpose and nature, a thought leadership piece placed in an industry publication isn’t going to result in measurable sales. When the content marketing team’s work is devoted to pure brand awareness, it’s difficult to evaluate in terms of return on marketing investment. “Some executives understand that marketers need a portion of the marketing budget to be exempt from strict ROMI analysis,” writes Workfront CMO Joe Staples, “because awareness campaigns that are not tied to direct revenue are essential for the growth of the brand. But for other executives, it’s a message you’ll have to impart again and again.”

Some of this is our fault. We can do a better job of translating our results into language our bosses care about.

The Solution: Words and pictures (whether still or moving) are the native language of most content marketers, while other marketers and business professionals are all about metrics. Spend some time getting fluent in the language of business.

Comprehensive work management solutions can facilitate your efforts by tying budgets directly to tasks, improving resource management and allocation, and making forecasting and reporting easier than ever. Imagine being able to prove with data that you completed 10 percent more projects this quarter than last quarter, 95 percent of which were on time and under budget, and that you improved resource allocation, too. That will earn you some appreciation from the number crunchers, but you’ll have to step out of your comfort zone in another way, too. Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders.

“To succeed, content creators must be able to do more than research, write, and communicate,” says Shelly Lucas, content marketing director at Dun & Bradsheet. “We must be literate in data, analytics, SEO, user experience, design, advertising, demand gen, community, engagement, storytelling, and multiple lines of business. The past few years, many of us have busied ourselves learning all these things. How far has the rest of marketing progressed in its knowledge (and appreciation) of content? For too many organizations, the reciprocal pendulum is stuck.”

Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders. Click To Tweet 5. The C-Suite Hasn’t Bought In

“Most of the companies I’ve seen in the past 10 years still believe the purpose of marketing is to promote the company and write about the product,” says Jack Jenkins, director of product marketing at irth Solutions. “At its core, content marketing is about understanding the customer problems you solve and then sharing your expertise in creative ways to attract prospects. This doesn’t happen overnight, and the C-level always wants immediate results.”

Jenkins points out that marketing is often expected to produce isolated email campaigns to drive leads for short-term goals. But content marketing is the long game. “Unless the leadership team understands and commits to this strategy,” he says, “content marketers will continue to struggle. It’s a mindset change that is slowly being realized in many sectors of B2B.”

The Solution: You are a master at speaking to different audiences; don’t forget that your C-suite is an audience, too. “Rockstar content teams are contextual masters,” says Lucas. “They’re good at building bridges, both internally and externally. They develop resonant concepts and narrative structures to convey memorable marketing messages to prospects and customers. They create vehicles to create market momentum. They show buyers—and brands—the way forward.” They (we) can show executives the way forward, too.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2ruAdXw

#5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

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5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)

If you’re like many content marketers, when you tell your mom your job title, she reacts with a perplexed smile and something like, “Oh, so what do you do?” An explanation fit for a layperson only yields a brief, labored expression before giving way to an epiphany: “So you’re a writer?”

“Yeah,” you say, realizing that your mom is probably picturing you hunched over a vintage typewriter in a New England cabin, decked out in beatnik attire, while tapping out your great American novel and trying to figure out how you’re going to pay off those pesky student loans.

Not that you can blame Mom. After all, the term “content marketing” didn’t even exist 10 to 15 years ago. Unfortunately, many of us get this same reaction from folks in our own department.

When our colleagues do (sort of) know what we do, they treat us like we’re just off creating “cute” videos and blog posts that just keep people entertained until they can come in and do the real work, or they fail to see our contributions because they’re nested inside much larger campaigns. It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how our ebook or whitepaper contributed to the stew.

If content is at the heart of all great marketing (and I believe it is), then why do so few people inside and outside of marketing understand what content marketing is and how it creates value? You and I know that our work permeates everything the department does, influencing and converting prospects in subtle but powerful ways. So why is it so hard for others to see that?

Here are five reasons content marketers are underappreciated, plus solutions for getting those who matter to see the value in what we do.

1. Everyone Thinks They Can Write, Design, and Shoot Video

Except for the most self-aware, everyone thinks they can write. They can crank out an email (albeit a terrible one) in three minutes flat, and they get lots of great responses from their friends on their personal social media accounts. So naturally, when they see your well-crafted article that just happened to be awesome enough to be published in Fast Company, some think, “Yeah, big deal. I could do that.”

The same goes for design and video. People assume that just because they can throw together a bunch of clipart in PowerPoint or get 150 likes on a video they shot on their iPhone of their daughter making her first soccer goal, our design or video work must be just as easy—more play than work, in fact.

The Solution: Accept that some of your colleagues will naturally appreciate the difference between writing for a personal blog and crafting truly useful content that fits the brand voice. Others won’t. You can blame it on the internet and social media being the great equalizers, giving every individual a platform, a voice, and a bit of overconfidence. Unless the skeptics happen to be in a position of authority over you, just embrace your inner Disney princess and “Let It Go.” Your focus should be on making sure you have the support you need from above. You can do this by building a relationship of trust with your superiors, perhaps pointing to statistics that show just how big Fast Company’s reach is, and making your work processes more transparent.

“My personal solutions,” says Vincent Orleck, CMO at BRANDish in Phoenix, Arizona, “are to either A) align myself with others who see the content value similarly to how I do, or B) guide those who don’t see it the same way in a direction that allows them to essentially ‘create’ the same content themselves so they are bought into it on their own level rather than me convincing them to do so.”

2. People Don’t Understand What Our Work Requires

We make it look easy. The hours of focused attention that we have to carve out of a distracting workplace aren’t always apparent to others—especially when we have to lock ourselves in a conference room or work from home in order to escape the constant interruptions and concentrate well enough to write. (The biggest office pet peeve cited by marketers in a recent survey? Co-workers who talk too loud. This may be why 53 percent of those polled expect most workers to be remote within just a few years—which will only make our perception problem worse.)

Even while we’re at the office, clacking away at the keyboard, composing the best blog post customers have seen in years, it outwardly looks no different than someone responding to an email or updating social media. Like synchronized swimmers, the effortless grace that is seen by spectators above the water masks the frantic effort that’s taking place beneath the surface.

The Solution: You could do a better acting job. Grunt more. Sweat more. Make sure you look disheveled and stressed out by the end of the day. Or you could map out your workflows in detail and publish them for all to see, perhaps using work management software. Once your colleagues recognize just how many text and design drafts it takes to get to one finalized and approved whitepaper, not to mention the resources involved, they’ll be less likely to take you for granted.

3. We’re Battling Conflicting Definitions About What Makes Our Content Valuable

“People in the marketing industry are at varying levels of experience,” says Orleck, “so their understanding of what truly valuable content is will vary greatly. Often what I see is newer marketers focusing more on the approach or the platforms instead of what the content actually consists of, and whether it should even be put out there.”

Just because you can publish everywhere doesn’t mean you should. And different individuals within the team can have vastly different opinions about what types of content will work with the audience—not to mention how much of that content should be produced on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Deborah Strickland, senior digital marketing strategist at Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, California, says, “I’ve seen a lot of ‘throw it over the wall’ processes, which can result in poorly produced content, content that doesn’t fit the audience, or redundant content—how many whitepapers on X do we need?”

Many marketers are being asked to manage a “content factory, spewing out tons of often disconnected material,” without regard to strategic goals, Strickland says. “In some teams, just creating content is the end goal—if it gets used, or visitors can find it, isn’t their problem.”

The Solution: To avoid arguing about subjective opinions on what is and isn’t valuable or relevant, tie all content back to the company’s strategic drivers. Understand the metrics that are being used to evaluate your output—is it about how many assets you release, how many pageviews or downloads each asset attracts, how many different platforms you’re publishing on, how many new prospects are drawn in, or some combination of the above?

In the end, if your boss admits that he’s most interested in releasing more content this quarter than last quarter, then that’s the metric you should be paying closest attention to. If he values “more, more, more,” then by all means adopt the content factory approach to get the appreciation you’re looking for.

If you can, however, take a stand against time-consuming content that has little strategic value. Pull out your documented work processes to show how many resources are involved in creating this asset, especially if it isn’t being appropriately leveraged down the line. Get those who create the content and those who release and distribute the content on the same page about how much room there really is in the pipeline. If you scale back the number of pieces you produce, you can focus on amping up their individual impact.

4. We Suck at Showing ROI

I recently read a comment on LinkedIn that implied that, because webinars bring in more leads per dollar spent than ebooks, that marketers should ditch ebooks and just invest in webinars. I fired back that people probably wouldn’t give the webinar the time of day if they hadn’t first had experiences with the brand via social, blog posts, and ebooks. We all recognize this kind of overly reductive thinking for what it is, but it does expose how marketing’s metrics obsession is making it very hard for us to gauge and advertise the value of our content.

Some of this isn’t our fault. By its very purpose and nature, a thought leadership piece placed in an industry publication isn’t going to result in measurable sales. When the content marketing team’s work is devoted to pure brand awareness, it’s difficult to evaluate in terms of return on marketing investment. “Some executives understand that marketers need a portion of the marketing budget to be exempt from strict ROMI analysis,” writes Workfront CMO Joe Staples, “because awareness campaigns that are not tied to direct revenue are essential for the growth of the brand. But for other executives, it’s a message you’ll have to impart again and again.”

Some of this is our fault. We can do a better job of translating our results into language our bosses care about.

The Solution: Words and pictures (whether still or moving) are the native language of most content marketers, while other marketers and business professionals are all about metrics. Spend some time getting fluent in the language of business.

Comprehensive work management solutions can facilitate your efforts by tying budgets directly to tasks, improving resource management and allocation, and making forecasting and reporting easier than ever. Imagine being able to prove with data that you completed 10 percent more projects this quarter than last quarter, 95 percent of which were on time and under budget, and that you improved resource allocation, too. That will earn you some appreciation from the number crunchers, but you’ll have to step out of your comfort zone in another way, too. Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders.

“To succeed, content creators must be able to do more than research, write, and communicate,” says Shelly Lucas, content marketing director at Dun & Bradsheet. “We must be literate in data, analytics, SEO, user experience, design, advertising, demand gen, community, engagement, storytelling, and multiple lines of business. The past few years, many of us have busied ourselves learning all these things. How far has the rest of marketing progressed in its knowledge (and appreciation) of content? For too many organizations, the reciprocal pendulum is stuck.”

Content marketers have got to get better at touting their work and being their own cheerleaders. Click To Tweet 5. The C-Suite Hasn’t Bought In

“Most of the companies I’ve seen in the past 10 years still believe the purpose of marketing is to promote the company and write about the product,” says Jack Jenkins, director of product marketing at irth Solutions. “At its core, content marketing is about understanding the customer problems you solve and then sharing your expertise in creative ways to attract prospects. This doesn’t happen overnight, and the C-level always wants immediate results.”

Jenkins points out that marketing is often expected to produce isolated email campaigns to drive leads for short-term goals. But content marketing is the long game. “Unless the leadership team understands and commits to this strategy,” he says, “content marketers will continue to struggle. It’s a mindset change that is slowly being realized in many sectors of B2B.”

The Solution: You are a master at speaking to different audiences; don’t forget that your C-suite is an audience, too. “Rockstar content teams are contextual masters,” says Lucas. “They’re good at building bridges, both internally and externally. They develop resonant concepts and narrative structures to convey memorable marketing messages to prospects and customers. They create vehicles to create market momentum. They show buyers—and brands—the way forward.” They (we) can show executives the way forward, too.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

http://ift.tt/2ruAdXw

#5 Reasons No One Cares About Content Marketing (and What to Do About It!)