{"id":24554,"date":"2015-01-28T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-28T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/content26.com\/?p=24554"},"modified":"2017-02-21T14:07:50","modified_gmt":"2017-02-21T22:07:50","slug":"achieving-balance-content-kane-jamison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/987654321.space\/c26_dev\/blog\/achieving-balance-content-kane-jamison\/","title":{"rendered":"Achieving Balance in Content with Kane Jamison"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Kane<\/p>\n

Kane Jamison is the founder and most public face of Content Harmony<\/a>, a Seattle agency that provides full-cycle content marketing to clients across a variety of industries. \u201cWe define it as four rough stages,\u201d he explained. \u201cStrategy and planning would be stage one. Stage two would be production and publishing of actual content. Step three would be promotion, distribution of it. Step four would kind of be the analytics measurement, optimization side of things, making them even better, and improving over time. It’s obviously all a cycle, and things blend together.\u201d (You can see this balance in greater detail here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Content Harmony\u2019s signature service is helping its clients find the balance between those stages. \u201cAlmost all of our clients have one thing going for them,\u201d Jamison explained. \u201cThey’re good at producing content, but they don’t have a great strategy for it. Or they’re good at promoting content, but they don’t have the resources to create enough of it. They’re great at strategy, but not execution.\u201d And so they hire Content Harmony to help them bring balance \u2013 and eyes, and results \u2013 to their content marketing efforts.<\/p>\n

The Product Page\u2019s Place in a Balanced Content Ecosystem<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Product pages figure into Content Harmony\u2019s work too, and they\u2019re careful to differentiate between the expectations of marketing copy and the merchandising copy<\/a> that belongs on effective product pages. \u201cWe definitely break out the difference between copy and the more informational side of content,\u201d Jamison said. \u201cWhen we do landing pages, e-commerce pages, or product-page copy, we’re definitely going very long form.\u201d He means longer than Amazon, and more on par with Amazon\u2019s much-coveted pages for their own offerings. \u00a0We\u2019ve heard the clamor for pages a la Amazon\u2019s lush, restriction-ignoring A++ pages for the Kindle and Fire.<\/p>\n

Content Harmony uses product-page content as an essential part of a content marketing strategy, explaining to clients that really great product pages can help gain views and customers in a way that product pages on Amazon, Walmart.com, and other third-party retailers simply can\u2019t. (content26 agrees with this, which is we get pretty excited when a client understands how important their own site\u2019s product content is as part of a multichannel approach.) \u201cIf you can do it on your own site and you can make it so incredible that people will link to that instead of linking to your Amazon page, we’ve got some additional marketing value we can go after there,\u201d Jamison said. \u201cApple pages would be a good example. Nobody links to the iPhone on Amazon. They link to the iPhone page [on apple.com] because it’s that great.\u201d<\/p>\n

Content Harmony also encourages clients to invest in landing pages and, when financially possible, updated content management systems (CMSes) that can create pages that fully address current user needs (as opposed to the perceived user needs when the system was designed several years ago). Amazon A+ pages net you one part of an audience, but rich landing pages that function as resources on their own can attract and nurture another group entirely. How does Jamison overcome objections to this kind of content investment? \u201cShowing them some great examples of e-commerce landing pages, usually they go, \u2018Ooh, ah, yeah\u2026 I want that.\u2019 That’s enough to get some internal drive to improve the pages.\u201d FOMO<\/a> for the win.<\/p>\n

So What Does Success Look Like?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It\u2019s become accepted that you can\u2019t understand the success of your content without setting goals, but how do you set those goals if you don\u2019t know what success looks like? We asked Jamison how he defines success in this kind of chicken-egg situation. \u201cI did a presentation last fall that was called This Is What Great Content Looks Like<\/a>. The point of the presentation was you can’t define great content unless you define the goal of the content,\u201d he explained. \u201cApplying one single metric across all content is wrong. If you’re just looking at the value of the page in terms of end conversions, that’s flawed. You’re not looking at the full customer life cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n

As he sees it, goals fall into four buckets: brand visibility, engagement or consideration, conversion, and retention. While there is the rare piece of content that achieves all four buckets (and we\u2019ll get to that shortly), most pieces aim at just one or two. So if conversion is your goal, views are certainly helpful, but they\u2019re not the most important metric. Likewise, if you\u2019re trying to make clickbait for visibility\u2019s sake, sales may not be crucial, because that visibility will contribute to later sales. Jamison describes those rare pieces that hit all four buckets as \u201cfunnel content,\u201d because it touches every part of the sales funnel.<\/p>\n

One of those magic pieces of content for Content Harmony was an infographic<\/a> explaining tax incentives for Hawaii residents considering installing solar panels. It built visibility by being reprinted by local and national publications, and it fostered engagement by touching on the high cost of energy in Hawaii, a hot-button topic. It aided conversion by presenting the case for solar panels, and it encouraged retention by reminding people who already had solar panels that tax time was coming up. Content marketing bingo.<\/p>\n

Most content won\u2019t hit all those marks, and that\u2019s ok. So long as you know what your goals are, you know what success looks like and can adapt appropriately.<\/p>\n

Content Strategy and Content Marketing: A Fight to the Death?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

As you might guess, he has strong feelings about the separation and relationship between content strategy and content marketing, an issue of growing contention that has inspired many<\/a> impassioned<\/a> essays<\/a>. (If you want to learn more, it is quite a robust Google experience. You won\u2019t be disappointed.)<\/p>\n

\u201cI’ve got my answer ready to go,\u201d he began. \u201cFor me, the difference is strategy covers strategy, and marketing covers marketing. That sounds really obvious saying it out loud, but when you actually break that down, there are elements of organizational strategy that have nothing to do with marketing. It’s definitely an overlap, right? The two have a lot in common. I think it’s really the organizational side of things and the user experience side of things where the crossover happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those commonalities make differentiating the two difficult for the outsider \u2013 or even, sometimes, relative insiders. \u201cI mean it’s probably why it’s a priority is people don’t know what it is. As a marketer, I would come in and say that marketers are the ones screwing [the definitions] up. The content strategists that come from the IA\/UX side of things know what content strategy is to them and what it has been for a long time. The content marketers coming in have no clue what a proper content strategist does and are assigning lots of labels to things that are only related to content marketing, but they’re using the broader term.\u201d<\/p>\n

So What Should You Do to Be Better? <\/strong><\/h2>\n

Ask the expert: how can you improve your<\/em> content marketing strategy? Jamison gave us these tips:<\/p>\n