This document provides a practical guide to content marketing based on insights from successful content marketers. It discusses topics like understanding your audience, creating great content, making content spreadable, defining engagement, and measuring success. The document emphasizes thinking like a publisher to produce valuable content and moving from a PR-focused strategy to a more content-led approach. It provides advice from industry professionals on finding what content works and leveraging existing content within organizations.

1. Walking the content
marketing walk
A practical guide to content marketing, written and
curated by Reading Room.
This ebook is optimised for reading on screen. Save a tree and don’t print it out.

2. We’re not like the others…
There are hundreds of blogs and ebooks justifying why you should be doing content
marketing. This isn’t one of them. Here at Reading Room we’ve been helping our clients
grapple with the much tougher question of how to deliver a successful content marketing
programme.
So what sort of content works for which audience and how do you go about producing
it? What are the proven methods to drive engagement and is there such a thing as ‘viral’
content?
To get to grips with these questions (and more besides) we put some successful content
marketing professionals in a room and shared our mutual experiences and insight.
This is the result.
Reading Room - ‘Walking the content marketing walk’
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3. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
Creating great content
Know thy audience
Really basic, but before you can decide what to say you have to really get to know your
audience – not just top-level stuff but right down to what they had for breakfast this
morning (we’re exaggerating, but you get the idea). You’ve also got to know your medium
and adapt your content accordingly.
Content doesn’t go viral because it’s
awesome, there’s a lot of work to get it in the
right places and you need to understand the
conversation hooks and the community it’s
going to.
Chris Quigley, Rubber Republic
We decided to start using social media
because people were searching for us there
and they couldn’t find us.
It’s worth thinking of your content in layers
– a photo might hook the general public into
the story, but then you can give them more
detail – the statistics, the wider background
so they’re more informed.
Steph Gray, Helpful Technology
Maria Marquez, London Business School
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4. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
http://www.eloqua.com
http://jess3.com
The Content Grid produced by
Jess 3 and Eloqua illustrates a
really simple approach to thinking
about content in terms of your
audience and how different
content types contribute to your
objectives and KPIs.
Walking the content marketing walk
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5. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
Find out what works
The holy grail of content marketing
A fairly obvious one in theory but harder to do in practice, there are still things you can do
to maximise your chances without resorting to sheer blind trial and error.
To get your content to go viral you have
to create a piece of content that has
conversation hooks that fit in to particular
communities. We score our content against
different criteria, then we identify the types of
communities it could be attractive to – so in
this case music, dance, creativity, cars, and
just general viral communities. That’s how we
decide what will work.
Chris Quigley, Rubber Republic
You’ve got to suit your content to the medium
you’re using, so for example statistics work
really well on channels like Twitter. We also
found regional variation around the world,
so we had to adapt the channels we were
using to be able to speak to the people we
wanted.
Chris Woods, hanover
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6. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
Viral Ad Network seed content to over 5000 sites so when it comes to viral
they know what they are talking about. Their Viral Rank scorecard is a great
way to evaluate the viral potential of a creative idea.
Reading Room - ‘Walking the content marketing walk’
So, how’d it go?
http://www.viraladnetwork.net
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7. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
Make it spreadable
The holy grail of content marketing
Getting your content to be shared is the holy grail of content marketing, so making your
content easily shareable is a prerequisite to success.
Spreadable media moves between commercial and non-commercial economies. For
the producer, the content may be a commodity or a promotion; for the consumer, it
is a resource or a gift…When they pass that content along to their friends, they do
so because they value their friends far more than because they want to promote the
economic interests of producers… Media producers need to understand the set of
values and transactions which shape how their media flows in order to understand
when and how it is appropriate to monetize the activities of their consumers.
Henry Jenkins “Spreadable Media”
The bottom line is, to make content work you have
to start thinking like a publisher.
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8. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
Make it spreadable
Re-purposing content is a good place to start: just because you’ve got a behemoth of a
report doesn’t mean you’re stuck just tweeting a link to download the whole thing. You
can slice and dice it in all sorts of ways.
Blogger outreach
Blog post/ series of posts
Audioboo file
Research report
Slideshare presentation
of highlights
Infographic
Video of report’s authors
discussing issues
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9. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
Make it spreadable
The holy grail of content marketing
We took the thought leadership pieces,
repurposed them, and seeded them all over
the place – we made them into presentations
on Slideshare, got our CEO to talk about
them and then videoed him, and linked the
videos and presentations to the actual report,
so users could access the information easily.
The effect was we went from no one reading
these reports to tens of thousands of web
referrals.
Government consultations produce big pdf
files which aren’t shareable, but if you turn it
into different versions for different audiences
you reach many more people: so we turned
one into a ten-page plain English version,
a Slideshare presentation and a 3 minute
podcast version.
Chris Woods, hanover
Steph Gray, Helpful Technology
You can take anything you have and
transform it to make it shareable, but it has to
be in the right format.
Maria Marquez, London Business School
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10. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
Make like a publisher
From PR to publishing
Creating successful content requires quite a change of mindset within your organisation.
Traditionally marketing has been very PR-led, with the usual paraphernalia of press
releases and journalists. Content marketing dispenses with that, because if your content is
good it’s not really necessary. You’re producing content that’s worth reading, bypassing the
journalists altogether.
This sort of change is difficult to effect instantly. So start off small and advocate gently.
Set up a working group of like-minded colleagues, and foster your company’s digital
awareness through a few events, or a show-and-tell session at the annual conference. Win
people to your cause gradually, and eventually it will gain momentum of its own.
Reading Room - ‘Walking the content marketing walk’
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11. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
Make like a publisher
From PR to publishing
A lot of companies feel they’ve got their heads round PR, but digital comes last in their
considerations – maybe just thinking ‘we’ll put a press release up on our website’. But
this PR-led content strategy has to change to a more content-led approach, which
demands a massive re-think and that can be quite painful.
Charles Bodsworth, Institute of Leadership and Management
Internal buy-in can be a struggle – but manage to
push one thing through and you can hold it up as
an example of best practice. Then whenever the
naysayers try to torpedo your initiative you can
wheel it out in defence.
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12. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
Don’t make life harder for yourself
A framework to operate in
The chances are somebody in your organisation is already using social media to publish
content, or is in a better position to talk to your customers and prospects than you are.
So give them a framework to operate in and let go of the idea of doing all the social media
centrally. But make sure everyone understands which channel is suitable for which kind of
content, and give them objectives specific to each channel. That will help keep the whole
content marketing effort focused.
Reading Room - ‘Walking the content marketing walk’
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13. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
Don’t make life harder for yourself
A framework to operate in
A lot of our faculty members and staff were active on social media already, and
producing research; but it wasn’t living in the marketing department, it was sitting with
the faculty, it was sitting with the students – we have a very active student body who
organise events which attract high profile speakers, but as the marketing department we
weren’t making the most of that. So we needed to leverage what we already had, partly
because it made sense to use it and partly because we don’t have a huge budget.
When we were creating the framework we made sure it wasn’t just marketing – we got
people from across the School to join us, for example the alumni relations team deal
with social media for the alumni because they have the best relationship with them. To
stop it getting fragmented we all meet up every 6 weeks or so to discuss what we’re
doing.
Maria Marquez, London Business School
If you’ve got a large, diverse audience, consider
segmenting your channels and the content you
provide through them. That way you’ll only be giving
people content that’s relevant to them.
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14. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
Look, no hands!
You don’t have to micromanage your content-makers
Lots of organisations worry about guidelines for content because they have a (perfectly
legitimate) fear of getting into trouble. But you don’t have to micromanage your contentmakers; in fact, the content you’ll produce will be much more genuine (and valuable) if you
don’t, and if you do you’ll put people off using blogs and other content channels to talk to
your audience.
But equally that doesn’t mean you can take your hands off the steering wheel without
risking a re-enactment of the final moments of The Italian Job. Your content-makers need
guidance, but very gentle – we’re not in Stalinist-era broadcasting, after all.
We launched a social media framework,
which we kicked off with an internal
campaign. We published guidelines for social
media and created a space on the staff
intranet to help us get buy-in from everyone.
Maria Marquez, London Business School
Reading Room - ‘Walking the content marketing walk’
Lewis Silkin advertises itself as a ‘rather
more human law firm’, so if we’re going to
be on social media we should be expressing
our personality because it’s our brand,
particularly because our work is all about
relationship-building.
Mark Grant, Lewis Silkin
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15. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
So, how’d it go?
Defining engagement
Decide beforehand what you’re going to count and what you aren’t. Should you include
Facebook likes, or do they require so little effort on the part of the user that they’re not a
good enough barometer of success? Or should you accord a ‘like’ 1 point, but a comment
5 points?
Best selling author, Brian Solis, says that businesses are working with an incomplete
definition of engagement:
Engagement is defined by how a brand and consumer connect and interact within their networks
of relevance. Simple. But, it’s also incomplete. It’s not just about the moment or competing for
attention, it’s about the aftereffect. Engagement is measured by takeaway value, sentiment or
feelings, and resulting actions following the exchange… engagement is not defined through likes,
comments, shares, RTs or impressions. This activity is simply a result of engagement.
Brian Solis, “Engagement aint nothin but a number”
Solis argues that “marketers and developers are focusing on stimulating movement, which
by default becomes a game of competing for attention, moment by moment.” Instead,
marketers should be looking at the longer term effects.
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16. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
So, how’d it go?
Defining engagement
We use earned media and bought media
– earned media is basically online PR, it’s
approaching bloggers. It has value because
it’s genuine engagement but the risk is it
might not fly, so to militate against that risk
we use paid media – a syndicated viral ad
network. That kick-starts it and then you get
the natural shares.
Chris Quigley, Rubber Republic
Powerful images work incredibly well on
social media – this photo was seeded
on the usual Department for International
Development channels but also Reuters and
the Guardian, so as well as half a million
views on Flickr they think it’s probably been
seen by about 200 million people around the
world. Statistics alone don’t mobilise people,
but images like this make people sit up and
take notice.
Steph Gray, Helpful Technology
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17. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
It was THIS BIG
Defining engagement
Measurement of something as nebulous as the effect of content marketing can be difficult,
but it’s not impossible – even if you have to rely on an approximate ROI. And even if you
can’t measure it in sales terms doesn’t mean it’s not extremely valuable.
We measured the effect of our content
marketing by simply getting salespeople
to ask their customers how they’d heard
about us, and it transpired that we’d taken
a six-figure revenue – just by re-working the
content we already had. So that showed the
business that this was a good strategy.
Chris Woods, hanover
Does Dubstep sell cars? I have no idea.
Viral pieces are generally about the brand
element, and engagement with it; they help
change perceptions of a brand but I don’t
think people are going to click through and
‘buy now’. But our work is never a single
campaign on its own – it’s always part of
something bigger.
The video is an asset Peugeot can use…The
value of it is not just on sales. There’s always
a lot of long-tail effect, and from a strategic
point of view that has a huge amount of value
– but too often brands don’t capitalise on
that, they abandon a great creative idea.
Chris Quigley, Rubber Republic
Reading Room - ‘Walking the content marketing walk’
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18. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
It was THIS BIG
Defining engagement
By weighing conversations, interactions, and views, businesses are fed raw numbers
that demonstrate KPIs but they do not offer the insights necessary to glean ROI or
deep understanding of what people do and do not want, need, or value…
Redefined engagement opens the door to new strategies and resulting metrics that lend to
meaningful experiences and results. By designing more meaningful initiatives, businesses
can now focus on causing effect, changing behavior, or reinforcing value where previous
engagement metrics can now document the progress of progress. The ultimate measure
however is now something more substantial, such as:
Shift in sentiment
Acquisition
Satisfaction
Conversion
Brand integrity
Referrals
Leads
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19. Creating great content
Make like a publisher
So, how’d it go?
Thanks and good night
Especial thanks to our contributors
We hope you’ve found this eBook as interesting and fun to read as it was to write.
Thanks to our guests at the event who provided lots of food for thought that we didn’t
have space to fit in here:
JoJo Brook Smith – Capio Nightingale
Leah Mynett – Friends of the Elderly
Gayle Suri – London Business School
Amber Gilmore – Department of Health
Caroline Fox – Department of Health
Louise Howells – Teenage Cancer Trust
Reading Room - ‘Walking the content marketing walk’
Chris Woods - hanover
Steph Gray - Helpful Technology
Charles Bodsworth - ILM
Mark Grant - Lewis Silkin
Maria Marquez - London Business School
Chris Quigley - Rubber Republic
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20. Here’s a little bit about us
Providing consultancy, creative and technical production
We’re Reading Room, an international digital communications consultancy with offices in
London, Manchester, Brisbane, Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, and Singapore. We offer a
wide range of services that we describe as digital engagement strategy and experience
design. That means we take a holistic view of digital - increasingly blending websites,
social media, mobile and other digital communication methods to enable clients to engage
more effectively with their audiences.
Our global client roster boasts dozens of not for profit and public sector organisations
but we also work with some major international brands like Skoda, Pernod Ricard, Philips
Healthcare, G4S, Allianz Global Assistance, London Business School and Barclays Bank.
We’re also an approved digital supplier to the UK Government Procurement Service and
Design Week rated us the UK’s top digital agency. Forrester rated us highly for transaction
led design and we’re a Top 10 Global Agency in the Interactive Media Awards.
We’d love to hear from you
tel: +44 20 7173 2800
e: info@readingroom.com
w: www.readingroom.com
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21. Our international offices:
Melbourne Office
Canberra Office
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York Butter Factory
Level 1, 45 Torrens St
Unit 6, 31 James Street
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Australia
Australia
tel: +61 2 6229 9400
tel: +61 7 3253 5700
e: info@readingroom.com.au
e: info@readingroom.com.au
w: www.readingroom.com.au
w: www.readingroom.com.au
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22. www.readingroom.com
Words
Lucy Longhurst
Simon Nash
Design
Louis Divine
© 2012 Reading Room