The author argues that effective marketing content should be useful to the target audience rather than overtly promotional. She discusses how creating and freely distributing useful content through various publishing channels transformed her consulting firm's marketing approach. Specifically, the author notes that readers don't like being sold to directly and will instead associate a brand positively with high-quality, useful content even without a sales pitch. She provides examples of how freely publishing content in different formats can earn customer loyalty and data over time through ongoing engagement.

1. Make Your Marketing Content Useful
BY NANCY DUARTE
Marketing messages are for consumption, just like products. Your audience will value your brand
and engage with it if you create content that’s more meaningful than all the listicles and other
hackneyed advice out there — content that’s worthy of publication in its own right. That’s not
to say you should recycle your white papers and expect people to ferret out what’s useful. Good
content meets audiences where they are, and it’s tailored to them.
John Battelle alluded to all this in his 2009 prediction that agencies would become publishers,
and vice versa, and I just knew he was right. So I began writing books and digital content to help
my firm’s target audience address a pressing need — creating and delivering effective business
presentations. That decision transformed my company. Until that point, we had done no formal
marketing. In the few years since, we have experimented with almost every possible publishing
channel.
One of the first things I learned is that readers don’t like it when you try to sell them something. If
the content itself isn’t useful, people won’t consume it and your pitch will be lost on them anyway.
You can sell more overtly through other avenues, but trust that your readers are smart enough to
associate the value of your message with your brand. They’ll know where to look when they need
the goods or services you provide.
For example, take Red Bull, the energy drink maker. Though it uses traditional marketing tactics,
such as sponsorships and commercials, it also produces The Red Bulletin, a monthly magazine
(print and digital) that delivers stories about sports, adventure, music, and other topics its target
audience cares about. Whether or not you purchase Red Bull energy drinks, you can connect with
the brand and lifestyle.
Offering content like this for free doesn’t mean taking a loss. My firm initially released my book
Resonate as a multi-touch digital offering on iTunes for $17.99. When we changed the price to free,
people downloaded more books in the first week than we sold the entire previous year. Because it
got a lot of traffic, the book was promoted on the iBooks homepage, which exposed it to an even
broader audience. And our business saw a huge bump in inbound project queries, which trumped
the revenue we would have received from book sales.
Distributing through channels with analytics is key, though. In the traditional publishing model,
the publisher and reseller retain the names of your readers, but when you are the publisher of
your message, you get “paid” in loyalty and data — lots of data. Use marketing software to make
sense of all that information and to look for patterns in who is consuming your content, which
pieces people spend the most time reading, and so on. If the content is compelling enough,
FROM HBR.ORG
9:00 AM JULY 4, 2014
[continued]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nancy Duarte is the author
of the all-new edition of
the HBR Guide to Persuasive
Presentations, as well as two
award-winning books on the art
of presenting, Slide:ology and
Resonate. Her team at Duarte,
Inc., has created more
than a quarter of a million
presentations for its clients and
teaches public and corporate
workshops on presenting.
Follow Duarte on Twitter:
@nancyduarte.
brought to you by

2. readers will willingly give their e-mail addresses to get it. That’s more valuable than cash, because
unlike a transaction, ongoing communication creates and strengthens connection.
The more shareable the media, the better. If you create a great slide, for instance, people will
pass it around and reuse it. It’s a self-contained, easy-to-copy bit of insight. One of our publishing
experiments was to release a full-color, full-length book for free in PowerPoint. The book,
Slidedocs, established guidelines for using presentation software as a publishing tool, and the
numbers showed that the market was hungry for that information. To date, it has yielded 145,288
views on SlideShare, 100,000 views on our website, and 21,420 e-mail addresses. We offered
a piece of useful content, and we were rewarded with an outstanding new community of fans,
followers, and friends.
A good book seems to sell itself. Ideally, marketing content should function the same way.
Your material will be read — and spread — if it’s useful to others. So find out what your target
customers are craving, and feed it to them.
MAKE YOUR MARKETING CONTENT USEFUL | NANCY DUARTE
WWW.HBR.ORG
If the content is
compelling enough,
readers will willingly
give their e-mail
addresses to get it.