American Conference Scores Content Points

Sometimes you can easily overlook how serious you must be to succeed at content marketing. 

Once you begin a conversation with clients, customers, citizens or fans it takes time, effort and energy to maintain the connection, keep things fresh, build audience and generate loyalty.

For example take the newly established American Athletics Conference which is staging its inaugural Women Basketball Tournament this weekend.  A dedicated digital team is communicating the match-ups between 12 teams who have traveled across the US to compete.  Located court side and venturing into locker rooms, the digital team opens up the tournament to fans beyond the arena through scores, updates, images, video and interviews.  And all done at sizzling pace.

Pre-game the Conference provides mountains of player, game and season stats that would satisfy the most passionate fans of women's basketball. 

During each of the tournament's nine games fans can follow the action live on social media through scores, video and images.  

Following each contest they can either commiserate or celebrate their team's performance with post game notes, video highlights or after action quotes from players and coaches. 

The digital team runs the Conference's 10 dedicated or personal work-related social media accounts supported court-side by a video cameraman with backpack technology and a  photographer.  Which means as fans in the stadium sip beer and enjoy the game, the team is splitting eyeballs between hoops and laptops to create a treasure trove for fans over the next four days.

Of course small business, not for profits and most government agencies will never be expected to work at such intensity.   But the American Conference offers up a content marketing lesson for each.  Get serious about engaging because you need skills, firm focus and an awful lot of stamina to succeed with the people who are most important to your organisation.

For the record the digital team at the American Conference  is @TaraPetrolino, @jamieleecorun and  @Mark_Hodgkin. They synchronize efforts with other PR and marketing staff managing traditional media arrangements including live TV coverage of each game.

Content Marketing: Infographs In 3 Easy Steps

We recently arranged this infograph through Fiverr.com
Click to expand

The digital age has bought a deluge of data and given communicators another dimension to storytelling. The downside is all those numbers and details can quickly overwhelm our ability to make sense of the information we present.

Enter the infograph, a newly arrived social media and PR tool blending graphics and data into digestible imagery, and proving popular in content marketing.

In recent times I've become an infograph fan but only recently started using them in my campaigns.  If like me, you're new to commissioning infographs, here's three simple steps to get you started when someone hands you a pile of data and asks you to make sense of it for their audiences.

Design  Firstly check what capacity there is to design or commission an infograph. If you're lucky you may have in-house talent.  No. Then a quick Google search of free infograph software will bring nearly 6.8 million results.  Or sites like Fiverr offer cheap ways to tap into experts for minimal cost. Either way there's plenty of online help available.

Numbers Next settle on the numbers to highlight.  It's similar to crafting key messages.  Decide on the most important pieces of information you feel audiences to know. That's probably the single most important call in the production process.  Sometimes you get to make it but more often it means collaborating on what's considered essential.

Icons   Successful infographs are simple.  They use clear iconography to breathe life into data.  So it's important to choose symbols appropriate to your story and which will aid the understanding of your audience.

Finally bring together your numbers, icons and other visual elements into an educative but easy on the eye graphic.

So there you have it.  Producing them is straightforward but infographs can be highly effective particularly when you need to convey complex information. 

Good luck and let me know how you go.

Content Marketing for Smaller Players

I've been in the US in recent weeks, so it's some time since my last post.  So let's start back with something good.

My Canadian colleague Martin Waxman recently gave a presentation on content marketing, storytelling and start-ups.  Here's Martin's simple but very effective approach.

Supercharged Storytelling for Startups by Martin Waxman from Martin Waxman Communications

4 Reasons To Outsource Content Creation

Peter Yorke is among India's most experienced communicators

Content marketing may be new to Australia but elsewhere it is more established. Take India for example.

My friend Peter Yorke runs a very successful content marketing agency in Bangalore India.  We recently spoke about why a company might want outside help to implement a content management strategy.  

Peter has been helping Indian B2B companies - mainly in the tech space - develop and share content with customers and others. He has been doing this for nearly five years and has come the conclusion that outsourcing content creation and strategy carries distinct benefits.

• Firstly, outsourcing provides flexibility.  It lets companies scale their content creation activity up or down depending on their budget or what's happening operationally. And  it can provide the surge capacity if serendipity delivers an opportunity too good to miss.

• Contracting content creation guarantees customer service levels.  You're paying for a content asset (piece of work) tailored specifically for your audience.  Being a commercial arrangement you can be confident it  will come in on time and within budget, making things more predictable than relying on internal staff who, let's be honest, are often diverted off to other priorities.

•  An outside agency brings a fresh set of eyes to your operations.  They can spot a good case study for online publication or turn up a story to round out a speech although it's been sitting under the noses of staff for some time.

And finally, Peter points out that content marketing is still so new, CEOs just may not have the in-house talent to start up a content marketing strategy. 

What do you think?  If content marketing is all about relationships should you keep it firmly in-house? 

Listen to how Peter uses content marketing templates to guide staff and help clients.