A well-crafted marketing asset is invaluable for any B2B company.
However, if you want to create high-quality content that adds genuine value to your prospective clients, you must first understand that content creation is a process.
Kiosked recently published a beautiful & content-rich eBook, The Advertisers' Guide to Programmatic, in an effort to give brands access to a holistic explanation of programmatic advertising.
We spoke with Kiosked's CMO, Hope Frank, as well as their Head of Content, Christine Göös, to find out the steps they took to create such an incredible piece of content.
1) Clarify Your "Why"
If you're looking to create something of substance, a piece of content that adds substantial value to the market, you need to need to work from a defined foundation.
Why this project? Why now? What are our outcome objectives?
For Kiosked, their "why" was to create a resource that offers an easy entry to understanding programmatic advertising. Rather than letting people Google programmatic-related questions on their own, they proactively looked at producing a piece of content that would serve a wide audience and contain easy to understand content in a visually engaging format.
"We wanted to create something visually beautiful, easy to read, and inspiring... To educate, delight, and add value," said Kiosked's Head of Content, Christine Göös.
2) Identify Your Target Audience
Now that your foundation is set, and your team is on board with the "why" behind the content initiative, the next step is to pinpoint who your target audience is.
Is the content focused on generating widespread awareness for your brand? Or is the content intended to move your existing prospects through a certain stage of your sales funnel?
In this case, Kiosked wanted content that would provide both advertising fundamentals, and also inspire marketers to build their own in-house creative team. So their eBook is a medley of content that has been tailored to provide the basics, but still engage with seasoned marketers.
3) Find a Champion
Any significant undertaking takes a curated team of individuals to see it through to completion.
From researchers, designers, and copywriters to senior level executives, if you want to create premium content for your target audience, you should be engaging more than only your creative team.
Keep everyone on the same page and working toward the same goal by nominating a project lead, or, as Kiosked CMO Hope Frank phrased it, a project "champion."
"It always takes a champion for beautiful work to see the light," says Hope in reference to her eBook champion, Christine, in New York and Head of Design, Minna-Kaisa Kuosmanen in Helsinki.
Your champion should be passionate about the project and about enabling each team member to contribute their best work.
4) Create an Outline
Once you know your "why", "who", and have assembled a great team with a dynamic and enthusiastic leader, it's time to start creating the asset.
To get started, you'll need to draft an outline for what you want your asset to include.
If it's an eBook, create a table of contents. If it's a video series, list working titles of the content you want to cover. Want to build a custom app? Layout what features and functions you want included to meet your outcome objectives.
For Kiosked's eBook, this stage was the ideal time to engage their sales team.
By engaging their sales team during the outline phase, they were able to identify pain points with existing customers, both local and global. This insight helped Christine (the eBook's champion) determine the specific content that needed to be included throughout the eBook.
Note: As you're building the outline, don't be afraid to draw from the well of your existing content. Get creative, but don't feel like you need to generate all new content.
5) Do Your Homework
You don't want to sacrifice the integrity of the asset because you failed to cross your t's and dot your i's.
Current & Correct Language
Get at least one industry expert from your team to fact-check your content to ensure that you're using the most current and correct language. If you're not able to get an industry expert involved, Google is your best friend!
Research
Assign someone from your team to do some digging and look into what other voices in your industry are saying. You don't want to find yourself in a situation where your competitor has created a similar asset and it looks like you've "stolen" their idea right out from under them.
Global Context
If the content you're creating is meant for a global audience, it's essential that it's formatted for each audience, with correct spellings, translations, and conversions, as applicable.
6) Set Aggressive, but Manageable Goals
Definitive deadlines are the gears that keep your content creation machine in motion.
A set of mini-deadlines spread throughout the initiative keeps all team members accountable for their portion of the project. These deadlines are also a good indicator for your project champion to assess where more resources need to be invested to get the project across the finish line.
In addition to the mini-deadlines for the individual tasks associated with completing the eBook, Kiosked set a final deadline for publishing -- a go-live date where what was finished, was published. This is an excellent way to instill urgency as you're requesting final approval from senior executives.
7) Get Your Money's Worth
You spent a ton of time creating this asset, so you'll want to make sure that you're milking it for all it's worth. Make sure that you think through a variety of ways that your target audience can engage with the resource.
For Kiosked, their eBook is a highly visual and stimulating resource that lended itself to being chopped up into bite-sized pieces they could then share.
Screenshots and visuals from their eBook can be easily repurposed as social media posts, serving as stand-alone content that points back to the original asset.
This is less about marketing the original asset, and more about leveraging the resource to add value to your audience in a variety of formats.
8) Promote, Promote, Promote
Obviously.
At this point, you know exactly who you're trying to reach with this marketing asset. So focus your promotion on both paid and unpaid tactics that will get the most engagement from that specific audience.
Social media, your website, and your email lists are great tools for unpaid promotion. And hyper-targeted paid advertising can help you reach segments of people that aren't already connected to your brand.
As you're thinking through your promotion strategy, don't forget to promote the asset internally...specifically to your global sales team.
If the entire sales team doesn't know that the asset is available, they can't leverage it to open doors or close deals...and that would be unfortunate.
Conclusion
Creating content that's both beautiful and relevant takes more than just a wish and a prayer.
It takes a highly-engaged team, committed to producing great work.
The 8-step process that Kiosked followed to create their most recent eBook isn't rocket science. But it's highly effective.
When you follow a process that's proven, you'll win. And your brand will reap the benefits.
___________________________________________________________
James Carbary is the founder of Sweet Fish Media, a podcast production service for B2B companies. He's a contributor for the Huffington Post & Business Insider, and he also co-hosts the B2B Growth Show: a podcast dedicated to helping B2B executives achieve explosive growth.
___________________________________________________________
The Premier Monetization Solution for Global Publishers
Kiosked is a global publisher monetization platform that leads the way to a new era in digital advertising. Kiosked generates new revenue opportunities for publishers with highly viewable, dynamic, and contextually relevant ad placements. Kiosked is the first company to launch programmatically traded 360° ad formats for immersive digital advertising. Headquartered and founded in Helsinki, Finland, today Kiosked has offices in North America, Asia Pacific, and EMEA. www.kiosked.com
Helsinki, London, New York, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Venice Beach