Content Marketing

6 Steps to Develop a Style Guide to Create Consistency in Your Content Marketing Messaging

September 29, 2016 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

As a content marketer who is often called upon to write brand content, it’s important for me to understand the voice of the brand I’m writing for, who their audience is, and what actions they want someone to take after consuming a piece of their content. That’s why one of my first requests upon working with a new brand is to gain access to their style guide.

Unfortunately, many brands have not taken the time to develop their own style guide, and instead direct me to take a look at their website, or their CEO’s regular contributed column on a popular website.

This is what you call a missed opportunity.

First, I’m going to have to spend time searching out these sources and reading them (and those are billable hours if it’s a consulting project). Then I’m going to have to follow up with all the questions that are still unanswered for me after reading them (do you use the Oxford comma or not? What is the current brand description? What tense should I be writing this in?).

My final piece will then likely have to go through a couple of rounds of edits to meet your actual internal style, which is locked in the head of your primary proofreader and editor. Now you can never completely avoid edit rounds, but I’ve found that having a well-thought-out style guide can considerably cut down on how extensive those edits end up being.

I know that creating your own style guide can seem intimidating if you’ve never done it before, so I’ve outlined the steps I take when creating a new brand style guide from scratch. [Read more…] about 6 Steps to Develop a Style Guide to Create Consistency in Your Content Marketing Messaging

Building Your Content Curation Road Map: 5 Steps to a More Efficient Content Curation Process

July 24, 2016 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

Content curation can become a time suck, resulting in content that’s shared on social but not otherwise leveraged by your content marketing plan. Which is why you need a content creation road map. This starts by defining your content curation objectives, mapping them against the appropriate curation tools, planning what to do with that content after it’s curated, and measuring your curated content’s effectiveness and using that data to refine your process.

Defining Your Content Curation Road Map

For a lot of people, their content curation process is something along the lines of logging into their computer first thing, scanning their social media channels, sharing a few items, and wondering where the past 2 hours went.

That’s not a process. This is a process:

Find relevant content
Organize your curated content
Share the content in the right channels and content vehicles

To break it down even further, my content curation process looks like this:

Define objectives
ID appropriate curation tools
Decide what to do with that content after it’s curated
Measure the content’s effectiveness
Refine the process

Invest in Yourself or Become Obsolete: Schedule Time for Your Professional Development

September 18, 2015 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

Several years ago, in a marketing team meeting, as we discussed our professional development plans for the upcoming quarter, one of my colleagues blurted out “I don’t have time to for professional development. I’m too busy. I can’t take a day to go to a conference or a workshop.”

Neither our boss nor the rest of the team let her off easy on that comment. The marketing landscape is changing every day, with new tools and tactics to be aware of coming at you all the time. If you simply throw up your hands and say “I’m too busy!”, where do you see your career heading?

My friend Gini Dietrich brought this up over on the Spin Sucks blog recently. And since professional development for content marketers was the topic of my recent #CMworld chat, this seems like a great time to share some of my favorite tips and resources for professional development. [Read more…] about Invest in Yourself or Become Obsolete: Schedule Time for Your Professional Development

Why I’m Attending my Third Content Marketing World (and You Should Too!)

August 24, 2015 by Erika Heald 2 Comments

In just two short weeks, I’ll be in Cleveland taking part in my third Content Marketing World in as many years. With so many conferences, many in more glamorous locations, what keeps me coming back for more? In one word: community.

Throughout the year, I get to check in with the Content Marketing World community through the Tuesday morning (my time) #CMworld twitter chats. I love seeing the familiar faces each week, and enjoy have a place to catch up on what’s new on content marketing and hear from my peers as to what’s working. I leave every week with a number of ideas to put into practice for myself and my clients.

But I have to say, although I look forward to kicking off my Tuesday mornings each week with the chat, nothing beats having a week of content marketing immersion in Cleveland at the conference. That’s my time to focus 100% on learning more about content marketing and connecting in person with the awesome folks I’ve gotten to know through twitter.

I will admit I’m more than a little sad that I won’t be having Brandie McCallum by my side this year though. She was absolutely the best conference buddy I’ve ever had. It’s hard to believe that was our first time meeting in person because she instantly felt like an old friend. That’s the power of the #CMworld community for you.

I’m charging my backup power supplies, packing my Hello Kitty notebook, and prepping my Evernote notebooks (more here on how I prep for the conference). How are you getting ready for Content Marketing World? Can’t wait to see you there!

P.S. If you’re attending the conference, add yourself to my Content Marketing World 2015 list.ly to connect with other attendees and speakers.

My 10 Key Takeaways from Content Marketing World 2014

September 18, 2014 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

Last year, I headed out to Content Marketing World as a self-employed content marketing consultant, eager to connect with other content marketers working with technology start-ups on creating effective content marketing organizations. This year I was back on the plane to Cleveland for the conference, but this time as a client-side marketer, building a global content marketing infrastructure for my employer, the business planning and execution platform Anaplan. What’s amazing about the conference we regulars refer to by its weekly twitter chat hashtag #CMworld is the conference had just as much value to me in both of these roles.

A few of the highlights for me included:

Meeting so many twitter folks IRL
Sharing my content curation presentation in a packed lunch session
Spending a day in the Tech/Software Lab soaking up great content from some amazing content marketers
Kevin Spacey’s awesome closing keynote
Walking the exhibit hall and getting a first-hand look at a diverse selection of content marketing tools
Picking up Ann Handley’s book Everybody Writes hot off the presses!

I did a ton of live tweeting, and sharing others’ comments and insights on twitter throughout the week. Here are 10 of my favorites of those takeaways from the twitterverse:

Of effective content marketers 54% document their content strategy; only 11% of ineffective do
Want demonstrable ROI from your content? Focus on the MOI! (Moment of Inspiration) via Andrew Davis
Secrets to creating MOI? #1 Build suspense. #2 Foster aspiration. #3 Drive empathy. #4 Harness emotion.
Gini Dietrich shared a simple and useful content hub structure by Andy Crestodina, as a strategy for breaking through online content clutter and getting your content found
Smartling shared an interesting infographic on the meaning of numbers world-wide, which definitely gave me pause as a global marketer
Content marketing lesson from @Buzzfeed? Spend 20% of your time on the title. It’s important!
PR 20/20’s Paul Roetzer shared a free toolkit to help assess the skills and skills gaps for your content marketing team
Kingman Ink was out in full force, taking amazing visual notes, like this one from REI’s session
“The audience doesn’t care about the platform they care about the content.” Kevin Spacey, truth telling in his closing keynote
57% of IT pros surveyed by LinkedIn knowingly giving false lead form data
What were some of your big takeaways?

P.S. During Andrew Davis’ opening keynote, he shared a few highlights from the Caine’s Arcade short film. It’s a great story. If you haven’t seen it, take a coffee break and watch it here:

3 Quick Tips for Making the Most of Content Marketing World 2014

September 8, 2014 by Erika Heald Leave a Comment

It’s Monday and I’m in Cleveland so that can only mean 1 thing: It’s time for Content Marketing World 2014!

This time last year, when I headed out to Content Marketing World, I’d just embarked on taking a year to work as an independent content marketing and social media consultant. The conference had amazing content, gave me a number of great takeaways, and inspired a number of great conversations with other content marketers in more than the usual 140 characters (shoutout to the weekly #cmworld twitter chat!)

I’m back this year, in a completely different capacity. Not only am I back in a full time staff role (Head of Social Media and Content Marketing) for a global business planning and execution Cloud-based startup, Anaplan, I’m also presenting a lunchtime session on content curation. And I have a big fat list of twitter chat peeps I hope to run into (which was part of the inspiration for creating this crowd-sourced listly of CMworld conference attendees.)

After a fab lunch at Urban Farmer a stone’s throw from the convention center, I’m getting myself setup for two days worth of learning, ideation and note taking, and thought I’d share my tactics for making the most of the conference.

#1 Make sure you know who you want to meet, and make it a priority to do so!

I have to give a hat tip to Brandie McCallum for getting me to make my personal list ahead of time. Of course, having the conference speakers and attendees listly going helped in actually compiling my personal must-meet list. It doesn’t matter where this list lives, as long as you can carry it with you. In my case, since I am an introvert and wanted to see if I could be personally introduced to a few folks, I put mine in a note in a shared Evernote notebook. Which brings me to the next point…

#2 Setup a note taking system.

For best results, you want to have all your notes in one place, whether that means your orange Content Marketing World notebook or a digital file. I’m setting up my session notes in that shared Evernote Notebook so I can easily share them w/my team back in the office after the conference. I’ll be taking down my notes via my laptop but with my iPad mini also at hand. I’ll use the iPad for snapping photos I want to share and for keeping an open mind map file to track ideas that will inevitably come to me as a results of being at the event.

#3 Use a tool to make livetweeting easier.

I typically use Hootsuite as my dashboard for livetweeting because I can easily keep an eye on the other tweets going in the conference stream, any replies sent to me, and my sent tweets, all in the same dashboard tab, side by side. This helps me easily keep tabs on what others in my session are sharing. That way, I can amplify other POVs, and save on some typing to boot!

For those of you who were at Content Marketing World last year, what are some of your tips for making the most of the event? Let me know on twitter and in the comments.

Content Marketing

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