The following is a guest blog post by Erica Bell, a social media specialist who focuses on topics such as marketing and social media trends. She writes for Business.com Media, Inc., a small business resource site.

How Small Businesses Can Make a Big Splash with Content Marketing

Building brand awareness and acquiring new customers are often the biggest goals when it comes to content marketing. Businesses of all sizes are using content to get their business and brand in front of new eyes, become thought leaders, and encourage customers to continue through their purchase journey. For those that want to make a big splash with small business content, consider taking these four steps to push forward.

Know Your Audience… and Their Pain Points

Small businesses have an advantage over larger corporations. Starting off with a small foundation of customers allows you to gain deeper insight into who your audience actually is. Analytics and big data allow us to see what behaviors are typical of an audience, but in-depth conversations allow small businesses to truly understand what it is their customers want and need. Small e-commerce sites can build personal relationships for deeper engagement. Local brick-and-mortar businesses can have one-on-one conversations with customers on a regular basis about what they’re looking for and the information that helps them make a purchase. Knowing your audience, what’s going on in their area and industry, and understanding what it takes to solve problems they come across can help you create – it’s the first step in really making an impact with content marketing.

Create Relevant Content

Whether you choose to tailor content based on the profiles of those making the purchase or characteristics they share with past customers, you need to focus on creating content that is relevant to your audience. As a small business that understands the pain points of its customers, and how to solve them, creating content that addresses these is how you can guarantee your content is relevant. Address pain points, industry news and the latest trends. Many marketers struggle with creating enough content.

A recent CMI study of small B2B businesses found that 64% of respondents labeled producing enough content as their top challenge, followed by 54% citing production of the type of content that engages. Don’t be a part of the majority here. Turn to your customers, team members, and other blogs and websites for content inspiration. If you’re using a blog, videos, podcasts and multiple forms of content, consider repurposing it to ensure you have enough content that is targeted to your audience. A recent blog post from Business.com shares ways you can continue ramping up your content marketing. If all else fails focus on the people, passions and places of your own company.

Share, Share, Share

Creating content isn’t enough for you to truly make a splash. In order to make waves, your content has to be shareable and get shared. Pass what you create on to your current customers, contacts, and on social media. The same CMI study found that B2B small business marketers use an average of five social media platforms. That’s right: FIVE. Share your content across networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. The networks that are best for your business will vary, so make sure that you’re spending your time in the right places. Work with friends, family, business contacts, and partners to get your great, targeted content in front of the right people. Share and ask others to do the same.

Having a content marketing strategy is essential. You need to include the type of content you’re going to produce, timelines, and how you’re going to share that content with the world in order to achieve your goals of building brand awareness and acquiring new customers.

Everyone has reasons why they’re still using web forms on their content, despite the overwhelming evidence that they simply don’t work. Maybe they’re being mandated by another team, maybe there’s a specific piece of information you just have to have, or maybe you’re satisfied with your low conversion rates. Trust me, I’ve heard them all, and they’re all bunk.

Personally, I think there are only two reasons why people are sticking with technology from the 1990’s. First, web forms are easy for a reasonably competent marketer to set up and maintain. It’s simple HTML, and most marketers have that as a skill these days. It’s comfortable. Second is that, like most humans, they’re averse to change. There’s that whole “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, but it’s because they don’t realize that it is broken!

The great news is that we’re starting to see movement. People are figuring out that not only is there a better way, and unlike web forms, this works. What people still don’t quite have their heads around is why it works. It’s still a gate on the content, so why is social a better option? But if you’re not convinced, here are the three main reasons why other marketers are making the leap to Social Login.

Reason 1: Less Intimidating

Marketers should be able to understand this right off the bat, because we’ve all done it. You go to download a piece of content only to be confronted by a web form, and then you decide you didn’t want it that bad after all.

Despite having this experience (and we all have!), you stick with the web form anyway. Wouldn’t you rather see something like this landing page for our “Turn Your Content into Customers” whitepaper?

To a potential customer, web forms look like work. People hate filling out forms. It feels like a trip to the doctor’s office. Social Login is a friendlier way to identify a lead without making them work to get the content you want to give them. Social Login flips the equation around. Rather than asking the customer to fill out the form, you tell them “Here’s the information (from your social profile) that I want. Is that cool?” The only thing easier for a customer is not asking for anything at all.

Reason 2: Customers Opt Out

We’re going to talk about this specifically in a future blog, but with Social Login, customers get the one thing they can’t get with a web form … they can take their information back. It’s called “revocation”, and as your customers become more savvy to the power their social profile gives them, they’ll be more likely to use it knowing it’s not a one-time thing. It forces you to be trustworthy, and leaves control of a customer’s information in the hands of the customers. Reduced risk means higher likelihood that they’ll take the chance on your content.

Reason 3: Better Lead Quality

When you put up a web form, you have to trust that your customers are going to give you accurate information. If they don’t walk away from your content entirely, the few that are left are weighing the value versus what they’re giving up in their head. When that value is on the fence, the customers find a way to tip it in their favor by falsifying the data.

When you use Social Login, they don’t get that opportunity. You present them with the opportunity to use a network they’re already signed up for, and you make it so easy that the value stays in the customer’s favor.

PaperShare is betting big on Social Login. In addition to the great benefits I’ve talked about, we’re able to add the ability for customers to comment on your content with the Facebook commenting engine, and for them to share your content automatically. But the ability to tie all of a customer’s content history and profile information together in a single place is a unique feature of PaperShare (see the user report screen below). It’s incredibly powerful to have all of that information in front of you when you click to engage with a prospect on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

There are more reasons, of course, but these are the three big ones. For me, I like Social Login because it better reflects where the world is moving. One sixth of the planet is already on Facebook.  LinkedIn is quickly becoming the de facto replacement for the resume. News hits Twitter faster than the mainstream media. By using Social Login for your content, you’re helping to be part of a global conversation. Of course, PaperShare helps make that transition easy for you. If you want to learn more, try our interactive tour.

It’s been an amazing year for PaperShare, and we’ve had some great successes with our beta service. We are thrilled, however, to be coming out of beta and launching this morning at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego. It’s both exhilarating and humbling to finally launch the PaperShare vision: the idea that the existing customer acquisition process is broken, and that content is the disruptive for re-imagining this last mile between your brand and the customers you want to reach. The people we’ve already talked to about the innovations we’re bringing to content marketing are incredibly curious and ready to learn more. We’ll be spending the next couple of days showing it off to people at the forefront of social marketing and people looking for a way to fit social into their marketing mix.

Below you’ll find our full press release (on PaperShare, of course!) and if you’re in San Diego for SMMW, come by our booth in the Networking Plaza and we’ll give you a quick tour, and even sign you up for a 30-day trial so you can try it out for yourself when you get back from the show.

PaperShare Launches Real-Time Publishing Engine: Turns Content Marketing Investment Into Customers & Kills the Web Form

David Greschler
CEO
PaperShare, Inc.

Every salesperson’s dream begins with a qualified or – in sales parlance, a ‘hot’ lead – an influencer or decision-maker with an identified need that can be satisfied by the respective product or service. But what leads up to the stage of hot lead? What is the effort that delivers a hot lead?

Studies show that people engage with vendors at a much later stage in the purchasing and decision-making cycle than the past – not surprising given the freedom and opportunity afforded by the Internet. People want to be in control – which is why there is such a big drop off when people are asked to fill out a laborious form before they can access content…or they enter inauthentic identity info. In today’s world, users want a chance to evaluate and get to know a product, a company, a technology, on their terms.

Given this, it behooves today’s marketers to focus time on reaching users and prospects in the early “getting to know you” stage. This is where social can truly be leveraged – given the right knowledge. How about following someone on Twitter who has expressed some kind of interest in your product? How about opening up a ‘soft’ connection and asking for a “follow” relationship so they will be made aware of all your new and updated content? How about getting to know them to understand what content they are viewing – yours and others?

Ultimately sales is about forging a relationship and connecting to and satisfying a need. The best relationships don’t happen overnight. They are supported at the beginning by nurturing that is unobtrusive. Great content can be the basis of that early nurturing. All that is required is to cast a wide enough net that intersects your great content with those future ‘hot leads’!

At PaperShare, we see a changing rhythm to sales and marketing forged by the empowered user, the proliferation of great content to communicate value, and the transparency afforded by social channels.

The evolution of PaperShare continues with the rollout of one of our biggest features yet: The Company Reporting Dashboard

Now, when a company logs into PaperShare, what they see is what is most important to them – their content and the people interacting with it. Right from your home page you can find your most recently uploaded content, how it is performing and who is consuming it. You now have a great “home base” in PaperShare, and it’s the first thing you’ll see when you log in.

If you click on one of your published items below your Content Performance chart, you’ll be taken to our new Content History page, which is now giving you even more data on how this content is performing, as well as the sources of the user traffic. Now, when you have your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts hooked up, we’re giving you much more feedback about how the viewer found your content.

A bunch of other new features have been added recently as well, such as a new item page with inline viewing for your content, the ability to edit the tweets and messages sent with your content when it’s published, and the ability to publish to your Facebook timeline, including on Company Facebook Pages! And we have many more great features and enhancements planned in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out!

We know change is hard, so we always want to make sure that when we make changes like this, it’s for the right reasons. We’re always listening to your feedback, so please feel free to reach out to me and let us know what you think. Does this give you better insight into your content? Please feel free to email me at dgreschler@papershare.com with your thoughts.

I took the liberty of posting the Disney short Paperman a while back, “just ’cause.” Last night, it took home the Oscar for Best Animated Short. Incredibly well deserved, I think.

Fast Company has a great story about why the film looks like nothing that’s come before. As it turns out, the key is making sure that imperfections in the hand animation process are kept in the final output.

“In classic Disney animation, the character outlines do something called boiling, as the imperfections in cel after cel stack up–and they’re important, subconscious cues to the experience of animation feeling authentic.”

It’s the small errors, the imperfections, that subtly remind us that a human was involved and this wasn’t the product of a computer. I blogged recently on employees using social media, and this striving for authenticity is the same reason why Disney would want their work to feel authentic as well. As soon as a computer smooths out the rough patches, it feels more like the product of the computer than the work of other people.

There’s an important lesson there. Not everything you put out has to be perfect. I tend to struggle with this idea, because I’m very quick to find flaws in my work. I will continue to iterate on just about anything I do, and I’m rarely satisfied with anything. Even after I’ve pushed something out into the world, I might continue to tinker with it. If you’ve ever gone back and re-read any of these blog posts, you might have seen me make a few quiet changes without saying anything. (I even changed this one after it was published!) But I wonder if continuing to smooth out the rough patches in my work might be doing more harm than good. Are buffing away the imperfections making it feel less authentic?

This is why I have never been a great artist. I’ve tried to draw, and paint, and work with clay, and in the end, all I see are the flaws. It takes a truly great artist to see the humanity in the imperfection, to allow the errant strokes and misplaced pixels to live in the final work. Clearly, Paperman is a better for it’s imperfections, using them to tell the perfect love story. I don’t think I’m going to be able to flip the switch and become the kind of person who doesn’t obsess about little details, but it’s certainly food for thought.

In case you missed it, the marketing world has moved on. Content Marketing is Marketing, and if you don’t have content to publish, your marketing efforts are going to stall out pretty fast. And if you’re anything like most marketers, the hardest part of Content Marketing is the Content. “We don’t have any content to publish” is a common concern we hear from people who are frustrated with the trend towards offering more than a simple marketing message.

If that’s you, the good news is that you probably have great content that you’re sitting on and you don’t even know it. Check out our list below and see if any of these might apply to you. You might have an easier time putting out new content than you think!

Recorded Webinars

Most companies get the idea of promoting their live webinars. Fewer realize that there’s no good reason why webinars have to be a “once in a lifetime” event. Always record your webinars and publish the recording shortly after the live webinar has ended. You’ve already done the hard work in holding the webinar in the first place, recording and posting it afterwards is a free way to reuse that effort. Let go of the idea that the webinar has to be perfect, or that somehow there are reasons why you shouldn’t post the recording. Editing can take a long time, and most people would rather lose out on this great, free content rather than publicize something that might not be perfect. None of those issues kept you from going forward with the webinar in the first place, right? Get it out there, raw and unedited, and you’ve got a popular form of free video content most companies miss out on.

Blogs

If you aren’t blogging, you’re missing the boat in a bunch of ways. First, blogs are a very important way to improve your website’s search rankings, so if your company cares about search engine optimization (SEO) at all, blogging is an absolute must. That said, there’s no reason why you can’t take the content of a great blog post and repurpose it as another form of great content. For example, take your most popular blog posts, put it in a nicely formatted document, save it as a PDF and use it as a standard piece of marketing collateral. Roundups are popular as well, so find five blog articles on a similar theme, and post a roundup blog post linking back to the older content.  With very little effort, you can quickly generate new content on previous work.

Case Studies

Most marketers think Case Studies are a lot of hard work, but there isn’t any reason why they have to be. Usually, you have customers who have already told you how great your product is (social media makes this part easier than ever). You might have put a quote from them on your website as a testimonial about your product. That’s the hardest part right there; the testimonial is the first and most difficult step towards a case study! Now reach out to that customer and casually ask some probing questions. Why do you like the product? What were your goals? How did using our product help you meet your goals? Once you have those answers, see if those fit into your product’s value proposition. If they do, it’s a great candidate for a case study. The trick is to now write about it from the customer’s perspective, using those questions and answers as a guide. Use the customer’s own words whenever possible (particularly chatting customers are very helpful in this regard). Once you’re done, show it to the client and ask if they’ll permit using their name in your case study. Since it’s already done, most customers will sign off since you did the “hard” part. Boom! You’ve now got a case study you can publish in a variety of ways.

Customer Feedback

You know those customer quotes I told you about? Even the ones you can’t turn into full-fledged case studies are now wonderful examples of social proof that you can use to update whitepapers and sales material, refresh your website, and even compile into a blog post about what your customers are saying about you. At a bear minimum, you should be re-tweeting anything positive someone says about you on Twitter. Some companies even take the bold step of re-tweeting negative customer feedback. Why on earth would someone do this!? It’s an advanced technique, but it can show that your company is listening to even their detractors. What’s important is that you follow up with how you’re going to resolve their concerns.

Bonus! Have a Backlog of Content Ideas

Finally, the real secret to having a great content is to get a bunch of ideas for your content before you need them. If you can get a backlog of content built out, you can keep your content momentum going even when writer’s block eventually strikes.

Sites like Portent’s Content Idea Generator are a fun way to come up with ideas for new content. The best part is they even explain what works and why. See the example below.

There’s something to be said for just getting out there and seeing the kinds of content other people are putting out, and what’s resonating with people. There’s no reason why you can’t use someone else’s work as inspiration for your own … just don’t make it your own, you know?