Coffee and bacon.
Rivaled only by the likes of pizza and beer, and hot dogs or macaroni and cheese, coffee and bacon form one of the absolute power couples of the food world.
Mere days ago, along with a fellow co-worker I found a new combo to add to that mix: content strategy and B2B social media marketing.
Toward the end of October, the Minneapolis/St. Paul chapter of the national organization Social Media Breakfast held SMBMSP #94 at the 514 Studios in downtown Minneapolis. Mr. Ryan Peña, social media and events manager at Minneapolis-based Mentor Mate, was there to discuss B2B social media marketing, content strategy and employee advocacy with a room full of eager social media and marketing professionals. Boy, did he deliver.
Here are a few highlights.
It starts with strategy
Mr. Peña laid out a seemingly simple content marketing model:
The @iRyanPena Content Marketing Model:
Plan??Produce??Publish??Promote#smbmsp94
— Brandpoint (@brandpointco) October 28, 2016
A man after our own heart, Peña’s model begins with content strategy. As the room enjoyed delicious bacon and bagels, he explained that no matter what kind of content you’re working with, content strategy is where it all begins. The model was discussed further:
- Plan
Leverage social listening, search trends, market info and your staff to determine future content needs.
- Produce
Produce high-quality content that’s centered around value while ensuring you maintain a consistent production strategy.
- Publish
Keep your audience coming back by sticking to a publishing schedule. Weekly is usually best for most organizations.
- Promote
Dedicate at least a day/week to promote. This includes paid, organic and employee advocacy.
He also laid out an ambitious content mix, outlining a steady cadence of quarterly e-books, weekly blogs and videos, and their locations. He humorously followed it up with a rather complex lead-generation map, explained social and content’s roles in lead development, quickly (and endearingly) encouraging the audience not to ask him any more questions about the slide.
“Distribute like a boss”
Peña’s distribution mantra is simple: find your audience and give them what they want.
In addition to Twitter and Facebook, they’ve found tremendous success using LinkedIn and even Medium and Google+ (yes, Google+). He stressed that, for MentorMate, the number of users on a platform doesn’t matter nearly as much as how engaged those users are.
Love @iRyanPena‘s content distribution philosophy: Go everywhere the eyeballs are – don’t expect them all to come seek you out. #SMBMSP94
— Tomasz Majewski (@tomaszmajewski) October 28, 2016
He even mentioned finding social success within tools like Slack and Quora by finding active communities, answering questions and providing branded resources.
As one would expect, Ryan also covered paid social as an integral aspect of “distributing like a boss” and did it in a similar way.
He explained how he only promotes content that drives traffic to the website and almost exclusively promotes on LinkedIn. While other platforms certainly have value, it was LinkedIn that proved to have a consistently better return.
Trial and error
Ryan and his team have found what works and what doesn’t not by accident, but by trial and error.
He shared an interesting anecdote about his LinkedIn budget in which he asked, as an experiment, for four to five times the usual amount. The experiment was so successful that his “experimental” budget became the new norm.
He impressed upon us all the importance of trying new things and tracking every single step, turning failures into opportunities for success, and successes into real, sustained value for his clients and his company.
Conclusion
I always enjoy attending the SMB-MSP events but this one was especially informative (and entertaining).
In short, Peña concisely directed marketers to “create a content strategy, distribute it masterfully and track everything.”
Check out his entire deck from the presentation and make sure you check in with SMBMSP for their upcoming events and podcasts. Maybe I’ll see you at the next one.
