New Content Marketing Infographic: “The Content Grid”

Hi Geno,

First off, thanks for reading “It’s All About Revenue” and for caring enough to weigh in with kind words and a great question. A few folks have emailed me similar questions, so I’ll take a shot at answering here.

After creating the basic grid, I circulated it to a handful of people that are much, much smarter than I am. That’s not false humility. Some remarkably smart and well known friends were kind enough to give some off-the-record input, which influenced the location of many of the spheres — and the naming of the Y-axis (originally was controlled / democratic). So the “thinking” is fairly collective. But from my POV nonetheless, here’s where I was am coming from:

Who should create: I looked at content types/channels that have an appetite for chaos. A press release, for example, is a structured, ordered document. It follows a format that has been honed with written and unwritten rules. To open up press release writing to staff would be unconstructive. Same for a whitepaper. A whitepaper is (or should be) a technical, impartial, analytically rigorous document. To have PR’s hands all over it might undermine its credibility. Conversely, the notion of a company controlling LinkedIn group comments or Geosocial check-ins is laughable. Those communities would reject (justifiably) central control. The rest were plotted along a spectrum based on, as I said, appetite for chaos.

The distribution question is trickier. This was the area of the grid that experienced the most movement. Supporters weighed in most here. It’s tricky because some channels (especially a blog) could be an awareness generator or it could be a resource for the last-mile of decision making. It would entirely depend on the content posted to the blog. So we looked at the “median” use of each of these channels and imagined what a “consumer” of that content might expect to find on the channel. Someone in a Facebook Fan Page, for example, is more likely to be getting familiar with a brand (especially in the B2B space) than looking for purchase-relevant content. Or they may already be a customer/client, and looking to “get to know” the company better. But when you work your way down the purchase funnel, customer case studies and webinars tend to answer more specific questions that relate to the individual buyer’s needs. Therefore they are on the “consideration” end of the spectrum.

Now this is not to suggest The Content Grid is based on casual assumptions. Not by a long shot. Eloqua is a “measure everything” company. So I had a tremendous amount of information to work with regarding how people buy Eloqua. That is, what types of marketing “touches” correlate to closing deals or accelerating dealflow. Those content types and channels are reflected in this Grid.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this infographic. It’s rev 1, so I imagine we’ll revisit it in time, as new channels are created or as innovators employ content in new ways.

All my best,
Joe

Hi Chanda,

That’s a great question. Here’s the “secret” (in my opinion, anyway): One great piece of content — let’s say you invest in writing a 10-page e-book — can be chopped up and the pieces can be used across all of these channels.

Say the book contains images. Pull them out and put them on flickr, tagged properly. Say you have some great one-liners in the resource. Well use them as tweets. Maybe the anchor document is also an excuse for a press release? Perhaps you can repurpose it as a slideshow and upload to SlideShare? In other words, this isn’t a one-and-done model. The same piece of content can be smashed, and the shards can be placed throughout the social Web. I wrote on my (semi)personal blog about this very question: http://jchernov.posterous.com/pr-is-marketings-new-chop-shop

I see you are involved with MeetUp (very cool company). Maybe you could collect stories from those in your meet up groups, creating a “crowdsourced” book by asking each fan to contribute one paragraph about an experience they had at your shop. That could be one way to get the content wheel spinning.

Yours,
Joe