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SERVING MANY CONTENT STREAMS

WITH FEW CONTENT CREATORS:

4 CLEVER WAYS
TO CREATE WITHOUT
GOING CRAZY
 Introduction 2
Expanding the team 5
Making segmentation more manageable 9
CONTENTS
Pillar content 14
Black-plate changes 17
Conclusion 19

JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 1

 SMALL CONTENT TEAMS ARE
EXPECTED TO DO BIG THINGS
FOR MANY SEGMENTS.
HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY
KEEP UP?? KEEP UP?
A funny thing happened to me on the way to
the Forum. Actually, it was at the Forum, and
this forum was not the one found in Rome or
on Broadway, but in Boston: MarketingProfs

INTRODUCTION annual B2B Marketing Forum. I had been

invited to serve as an Office Hours Expert,
one of many one-on-one consultants on
hand to answer attendee questions or offer
advice. My designated area of expertise was
content creation.

Over the course of two drop-in sessions,

I had the privilege of meeting more than
a dozen marketers from all over the
B2B spectrum, from traditional cabinet
manufacturers to cutting-edge
application developers.

JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 2

Heres the funny thing: Many of those marketers came to me
with the same content creation concern: How do I serve multiple
segments with constant streams of content, when I never seem to
have enough resources?
From my experience talking to marketers around the world, no one
ever has enough time or budget. In other words, I have too much
money! said no marketer ever. Thats true whether youre a tiny
business or a giant tech company.
Report: Tiny teams are the norm
According to the 2017 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks,
Budgets and Trends report produced by the Content Marketing
Institute and MarketingProfs, the largest share of respondents,
55%, described their content marketing organizational structure as
a small (or one-person) marketing/content marketing team that
serves the entire organization!

Sound familiar? If your company has invested in marketing

automation, a beast with an enormous appetite for fresh content,
then you feel the ache. If your sales and marketing teams have
identified multiple and distinct customer segments that each must
be served with unique content, you know the hurt. If your nurturing
streams depend on weekly, or even daily, content updates,
your workload may be a source of nagging pain.

JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 3

WHERES THE
RELIEF?
Content marketing ambitions have
4 Clever Ways represents an evolution from those Forum
grownbut few companies have conversations. Ive taken my off-the-cuff suggestions and turned
content creation teams that have grown them into on-the-record guidelines, expanding them into a set of
with them. Truth is, fewer people are four practical, eminently doable recommendations that can help
expected to do more: more content to any content creator shoulder even the largest content loads.
more people, more frequently. In marketing, savvy content marketers can punch above their
weight. Read on4 Clever Ways is in your corner to help you win
Whats a content marketer to do?
the fight.
Fortunately, I was able to reach deep into my more than 20 years
of content creation experience to help the Forum attendees who Your challenge, at a glance:
came to my table. In return, I got a stack of business cards, the
satisfaction of being useful to others, and a new content idea: This High volume of content, created repeatedly
e-book. Many distinct audience/customer segments
Small or specialized creation teamsperhaps just one person
responsible for a whole content program or a particular channel
Tons of pressure to keep the content coming!

JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 4

 BUILD YOUR TEAM
IN RINGS
Imagine this scenario (if youre not
actually living it already): Sales and Marketing
have decided that there are five customer
personas with needs sufficiently different to
merit segmentation within the database, on
the marketing automation platform, and for
EXPANDING the content that must be served quarterly,
THE TEAM monthly, weekly or even daily.
How can your content creation team
possibly keep up with the workload?
Short answer: you cant.
But even if cant hire additional full-time
help, you need not fall into despair. What
you cannot expand physically you can
expand virtually to generate more output
from the inputs you have. The key?
Construct your team in a series of rings,
like a dart board, in which you and your
fellow full-time content creators are the
bulls-eye. Heres how it works:
JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 5
Center Ring: Core Content Producers
This is the ring smallest in size, but greatest in significance. To
shoulder the huge content load, however, you need to reconceive
your roles. Instead of thinking of yourselves as content creators
(writers, designers, videographers) responsible for every word
written, every picture taken, think of yourselves as producers who
not only create, but edit, manage, and expedite content creation
regardless of who actually executes the work.
Like the editor of a major magazine, your job is to:
Ensure consistency of message with the brand, the overall
marketing strategy, and the more granular content strategy.
Assign work (to yourself, your team, and others) that fulfills your
content objectives.
Edit, review, and revise created content to meet predetermined
standards.
Manage and oversee the content pipeline: whos doing what
work when, in accordance with your calendar and your
marketing objectives.
Middle Ring: Internal Expert Allies
In your organization, you have allies, whether you or they
acknowledge it or not. Theyre often not marketers but people
either close to your product or servicesuch as engineers,
designers, product managers, tech staffor close to your customers,
such as salespeople, consultants, and customer support staff.
Most internal experts will readily trade their insights for
exposure, but few have the time (or skills) for actual content
creation. Dont regard them as content creators, but as
knowledge contributors. Their job is to:
Inform Marketing about new products, services, features, func-
tions, benefits: what they are and what they mean to customers.
Inspire new content based on the organizations experience: how
customers benefit from your products and services; success
stories and testimonials; and how-to wisdom that can be pack-
aged (and repackaged) in a variety of content formats.
Provide on-the-ground insight on what customers and prospects
are thinking and feeling: their hopes and fears, desires and
challenges, and aspirations and frustrations.
Serve as a source of expertise, most commonly as
interview subjects for articles, blog posts, whitepapers,
podcasts, webinars, speaking engagements, and more.
JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 6
Working effectively with internal allies
The people with the most expertise tend to be the most busy. Many
will offer their collaboration in theory but object to surrendering
their precious time in practice. Do not despair. You need not win
them over all at once. Instead, focus on one or two champions
who understand and appreciate what youre doing. Make their
contributions (as advisers, contributors, or even stars) shine, and
make sure everyone else knows about it. Success has the power
to inspire. When your champions colleagues see the results (and,
perhaps, envy the attention), youll find it much easier to draw in
other experts...
Outside Ring: External Content Creators
You cannot create all the necessary content yourself, yet you do
not have the budget to sustain more full-time employees.
Fortunately, you dont have totheres a world of independent
talent eager to serve you. Many of them have a great deal of
experience in your particular industry, offering content-area
expertise deeply relevant to your market. Under your
management, these freelancers offer you a number of
attractive advantages:
You pay them only when they contribute. When there is no work,
there is no financial burden on your budget;
They offer deep talent in writing, illustration, design, video,
audio, etc.;
Freelancers, by virtue of their independence, can provide objec-
tive judgment and critical insight that can check the corporate
Kool-Aid (if you allow them to).
JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 7
Working effectively with external creatives
First, make informed decisions about which work you retain
in-house and which you assign to outsiders. As a rule of thumb:
Keep the quick, short stuff inside
The daily or near-daily work, such as tweets, grams, and
blog posts, should stay inside where people close to the issues
at hand can act or react fast.
Move the large, long stuff outside
Give the work that requires esoteric expertise, such as
long-form writing (whitepapers, e-books) and videos to the
dedicated pros. Youll still control every aspect of the project,
from establishing the theme to overseeing the execution, but
theyll take all the heavy lifting off your hands.
Two insider secrets regarding top talent
Ill let you in on a couple of secretsif you promise to tell
everyone else!
First, a good way to find the best talent: look at conference speaker
lists. Focus on the events you admire (such asahem
the B2B Marketing Forum) and take a look at whos speaking. Im
not saying you should hire anyone just by virtue of a speaking gig.
But you may want to at least give them a call. Their presence at
significant events means theyre recognized by knowledgeable
colleagues; theyre keeping pace with the latest trends, issues,
and technologies; and theyre deeply invested in their craftall
good signs of talent worth using.
Second, the best indy talent isnt necessarily your most expensive
option. You know the big agencies? Guess whatthey farm out a
lot of their client work to independent creatives. Then they put a
nice (for them) mark-up on top of it. When you work directly with
freelancers, you save yourself a hefty chunk of agency overheard.
JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 8
 CLUSTER YOUR SEGMENTS
BY BUYER BEHAVIOR
Theres something spellbinding about data. And its
true that when it is analyzed intelligently and applied
wisely, the results can be magic.

But when the very scope and availability of
MAKING data overwhelms sound critical judgment,
SEGMENTATION the consequences may not be magic but
tragic.
MORE
Case in point: demographics as a foundation
MANAGEABLE for segmentation. With easy access to so
much information about so many people, its
tempting to slice and dice individuals and
companies into neat categories based on
gender, age, region, titles, level of education,
industry code, company size, favorite ice
cream flavors, etc.
As a result, content teams often find
themselves obligated to create unique
content for many disparate segments
a road to content creation hell paved with
good targeting intentions.
Dont get me wrong. Targeting is a good
thing. But targeting is effective only when
its based on real buyer behaviors, not
arbitrary demographic assignments.

JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 9

Consider Jack and Jill. They like to climb hills and fetch water;
your job is to sell crowns. You put Jack and Jill in your freshwater
hikers segment, congratulating yourself on your perspicacity.
Except that Jack puts a premium on durability and likes to shop
by comparing online user reviews, while Jill is motivated by
style and prefers to roll into physical stores. Your segmentation
completely misses the targeting point, and your sales numbers go
tumbling after.

Now consider Mr. and Mrs. Sprat, a nice, middle class couple with
a shared interest in consuming flesh. Mr. Sprat is a lean man
with a touch of OCD; Mrs. Sprat is, shall we say, a voluptuously
proportioned woman with generous appetites. But you, the smart
butcher, ignore sex, size and psychographics, and instead, assign
Mr. Sprat to your lean meat segment and Mrs. Sprat to your
marbled meat segment. Your segmentation focuses on precise
buyer behaviors, and as a consequence, your bottom-line business
results lick the platter clean!

JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 10

How many distinct content streams do you
really need? Just ask these two questions
By Adele Revella
Many companies serve multiple audiences in different industries,
regions or other demographic categories with presumably different
interestsallegedly distinct values, goals, and objectives.
But when we focus on the buyer behavior we want to influence
on how and why people make a certain type of buying decision, rather
than unrelated personal characteristicswe arrive at a set of insights
that drive content strategy: your buyers triggers, motivations,
frustrations, and other critical factors that can make or break their
decision to choose you.
After more than 25 of years of conducting persona research and
interviewing buyers about real choices, Ive come to a startling
realization: the number of personas that make sense is usually less
than half of what companies think they need. And the correct number
of personas is apparent only when you study the differences in what
matters to buyers as they make a decision.
Think about it. Shouldnt the decision to develop an additional persona
be based on differences in what your buyers want to consume through
your content streams? In the hypothetical illustration above, most of
the crucial buying insights are shared; any content you create that
addresses these shared insights will be valued by both parties.
What about the handful of insights specific to each; do they merit
separate content streams? Ask yourself these two questions:
1. Would you generate more revenue if you built separate
streams? If not, or if the increase is marginal, creating a distinct
content track may not be worth the effort.
2. Do you have the resources (or budget) to execute separate
tracks? And would the extra expense be rewarded with
significantly improved results?
Your content segmentation strategy should be only as complicated
as it needs to be. In manyif not most casesexcellent content
can be pitched toward the common ground of insights shared by
multiple parties. When further personalization is merited, you can
often wrap your content with persona-specific introductions,
conclusions and/or examples. (See Customize core content with
variable extensions on page 17.)
Adele Revella is the founder and president of the Buyer Persona Institute,
and the author of the leading book on personas, Buyer Personas: How to
Gain Insight into your Customers, Align your Marketing Strategies, and
Win More Business.
JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 11
For better segmentation, listen, dont label
Here comes the chicken and egg dilemma: youve created content
based on buyer behaviors, but the database youve inherited has
tagged your prospects by demographics. How do you know which
prospects go into which segment/content stream?

Let them tell you. Instead of trying to guess who should get what,
A/B test two different offers with contrasting content themes, say
8 Ways to Garden for a Healthy Environment, versus 10 Secrets
for Optimal Garden Beauty. Those who respond to the former
would be placed on the environment nurturing track while
those who ask for the latter would be assigned to aesthetics.
Data based on real behaviors youve observed and measured will
always be more useful than labelsand the proprietary nature of
that data is a competitive advantage as well.

JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 12

CATERPILLAR CONQUERS
WITH CONSOLIDATED CONTENT
Challenge: Making content for five
different sectors
As Caterpillar, a world-renowned manufacturer of tractors and
earth-moving equipment, considered content plans for its SMB
audience, it assumed it had five distinct segments, two in construc-
tion, plus one each in agriculture, landscaping, and snow removal.
Developing strategies, and executing content, for each segment
seemed daunting.
Solution: Research buyer motivations
Before designing its content strategy, Caterpillar conducted perso-
na research to uncover buyer behavior: how do they research and
buy the equipment they need? What did they really need to see,
hear, and know that would influence their buying decisions?
Results: Target two personas, each with very
different content needs
The research uncovered a pleasant surprise: buyers fell into two
categories irrespective of industryexperienced equipment users
who knew precisely what they wanted, and inexperienced buyers
who had a sudden need for equipment and needed immediate help.
With that insight in mind, Caterpillar crafted two different
strategies with precise relevance to each group: detailed product
feature charts and tables for the experienced buyers, and direct
access to live representatives for newbie customers. That insight
reduced the marketing effort and delivered a better buying
experience to buyers in all five segments!
JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 13
 INVEST IN PILLAR CONTENT
FOR MULTIPLE RETURNS
Even with an expanded team and consolidated
segments, you still need to generate more with less:
more pieces of content streaming from fewer content
creation efforts.

Thats why you should consider a pillar content strategy in which you focus your efforts
on a few core, or pillar, pieces of contentsuch as e-books, magazines, or a video
PILLAR seriesfrom which many smaller pieces, such as blog posts, articles, podcasts, and
CONTENT tweets, can cascade.

JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 14

The beauty of this strategy is multi-fold:
1. It gives your content plan a meaningful and cost-effective focus.
Your pillar content can receive the bulk of your time and budget,
without sacrificing the need for variety.
2. Pursuing pillar content allows for the most efficient use of
your subject matter experts, the colleagues you tap for the
substance of your content. One deep interview for a whitepaper
can become the foundation for additional articles, case studies,
blog posts, etc.
3. Similarly, the strategy drives an effective division of labor.
Your freelance specialists can concentrate on the largest, most
complex projects, while you and your in-house talent crank out
the smaller, more frequently released tactics, such as web page
updates and email blasts.
4. You can recycle core content, multiplying the value of your
investments. Think of this as the buffalo strategy, in honor of
the Plains Indians who used every part of the animal: flesh for
meat, bones for tools, hides for clothes and shelter. Your big
e-book, for example, can become the source material for a series
of blog posts, a podcast interview, an info-graphic, a webinar, etc.
Create unique content with your
own research
Now that content marketing has moved out of the shadows and into
the marketing limelight, its harder to find topics that havent already
been covered by competitors.
Thats where your own proprietary research comes in. Research
sounds intimidating, but it neednt be. It can be as simple as a
10-question survey conducted with your most important customers.
Simple online tools make the process cheap, and your prospects
eagerness to know what their peers think make the results valuable.
Heres whats involved:
1. Create and distribute a brief survey. Target an issue of urgent con-
cern to your target audience: budget preparation, tax strategy, profit
and loss matter, logistics, etc. The point is to gather opinions and
data on a topic that is really important to your customers.
2. Compile the results. Dont just release raw statistical data. Instead,
cluster the results around core themes that emerged from the sur-
vey. Look for trends, concerns, and ideas that arose repeatedly. You
should be able to categorize the results into three to five big ideas.
3. Complement each theme with your insights. Think of each theme as
a chapter in your report, and each chapter as an opportunity for you
(or one of your colleagues) to weigh in with expert insights on the
concerns revealed by the survey. Your readers get a double-whammy:
the objective data revealed by your survey research, plus useful
expertise that addresses key trends.
JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 15
One big report serves many points
of contact
Every year, MarketingProfs cooperates with the Content Marketing
Institute to research B2B marketing behaviors and compile them
in an extensive, in-depth Slideshare report, B2B Content Marketing
Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends.

In and of itself, the report is a substantial piece of work. But as

pillar content, its the gift that keeps on giving, serving as the
foundation for:

A newsletter article that has been viewed more than 5,500 times
Core material for live on-stage presentations
Source and inspiration for a LinkedIn infographic
Key talking points for a podcast
Plus numerous Instagram, Facebook and other social media posts

CONTENT
CONTENT
2
MARKETING
MARKETING
2017 Benchmarks, Budgets,
and TrendsNorth America
SPONSORED BY
 CUSTOMIZE CORE CONTENT
WITH VARIABLE EXTENSIONS
If youve clustered your segments based on buyer
behaviors rooted in deep buyer concerns (see page 9),
youll realize that when your content speaks to those
concerns, youre actually addressing multiple segments/
industries/audiences at once.

BLACK-PLATE Butyour markets still expect, and respect, content thats tailored to their interests. So whats
a time-and-money-strapped content creator to do?
CHANGES
Keep the core content, then build extensions that vary by industry, segment, interest, etc.
In the world of print (and direct marketing), these variables were confined to the text or black
plate in the multi-plate world of four-color printing. The most expensive part of the finished
productthe graphics, layouts, and illustrationswould serve as the core and remain the
same. Yet the copy could be adjusted for different targets, cheaply.

JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 17

You can execute a core-and-extensions strategy for just about any
tactic, including:
E-books/whitepapers: Make minor changes to the titles,
introductions, and conclusions, while maintaining the same
bodies.
Videos/audio recordings: Write variable voice-overs for the
introductions and conclusionskeep everything else the same.
How-to articles: Change the introductory set-up paragraph and
maybe one sentence in the conclusion, but keep the rest.
Webinars/webcasts/live event presentations: Use one core slide
deck and then create variable slides for the title, introduction,
and the real-life examples you use to illustrate your key points.
UBM turns one e-book into a productive series
UBM, one of the worlds leading B2B event organizers, created an
e-book for one of its broad target segments: tech marketers. The
team had other, more targeted audiences they wanted to create
content for as well, and they wanted to leverage the work that had
already been done.
The solution? They used the original e-book as the foundation for
core content and swapped out key paragraphs, industry
examples, and titles to appeal to UBMs more targeted segments.
The offshoots even used the same graphical elements but with
updated cover images to relate to the corresponding audiences.
By repurposing the core of its original e-book, UBMs Technology
Group was able to create three additional content assets
effectively and efficiently.
BETTING ON YOUR BRAND BUILDING YOUR BRAND
USING THE TRIFECTA OF CONTENT, MEDIAMARKETING
Marketing To Enterprise Communications AND EVENTS TO GAME DEVELOPERS Using Content, Media, and Events to Stand Out in
& Collaboration Professionals
TO BUILD A WINNING TECH BRAND USING THE TRIFECTA OF CONTENT, MEDIA AND the
EVENTS
Information Security Industry
USING THE TRIFECTA OF CONTENT, MEDIA AND EVENTS TO TO BUILD A WINNING BRAND
BUILD A WINNING TECH BRAND
July 2016
By keeping the core of its Betting on Your Brand e-book, UBM was able to
make efficient extensions for three other industry-specific titles.
JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 18
 FLY!
I collect records, the round vinyl kind that make
beautiful music. Among my most cherished LPs is one
my parents bought almost exactly a half-century ago:
Jefferson Airplanes After Bathing at Baxters.

The music is delightfully trippy but need

not concern our content purposes. The
CONCLUSION cover is what interests us. On it, theres
an illustration of a fantastic (literally)
three-propeller tri-plane built around an
odd fuselage, an old Victorian triple-decker
in all of San Franciscos multi-colored,
gingerbreaded glory.

The joke, of course, is that such a plane

could never flyits a fantasy, a daydream,
or even an hallucination.

JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 19

As a metaphor, it suggests a crueler joke: the complex, multi-faceted
marketing matrices that too many enterprises insist on using as
a foundationa fuselage if you willfor the content marketing plan
they wish to pilot. Like the would-be Victorian home in the sky,
these matrices (so many segments on one axis, so many points
along the buyers journey on the other) are too big and unwieldy
to fly.
As a consequence, very few of these content marketing plans ever
get off the ground.
Necessity may be the mother of your inventing a simpler way to
produce content. In fact, in this e-book, weve addressed four
powerful ways content creators can make production easier.
As a parting thought, I encourage you to think of these techniques,
not as compromises imposed by limited resources, but as a means
of liberation that will make your marketing soar.
After more than two decades of creating content for hundreds of
companies, large and a little less large, Ive seen a familiar
pattern: Those that begin with complex plans end with
disappointment and frustration, wondering why their ambitions
never really took off.
Yet those that start simply, with a desire for action and a
willingness to learn and relearn from their results, get to see
their programs take flight.
Simplify your plans. Focus on action. Learn from your results.
You have what it takes to succeed with content.
Fly!
JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 20
 Jonathan Kranz is the author of
Writing Copy for Dummies and a
copywriting veteran now in his 21st
ABOUT THE
year of independent practice. His
clients include AT&T, Dow Jones,
Elsevier, Fidelity Ventures, Harvard
Business School, Liberty Mutual, Nu-
AUTHOR
ance, Symantec and many others too
numerous to list.

A popular and provocative speaker, Jonathan offers in-house

marketing training solutions to help organizations create content
that establishes authority, attracts leads, and builds market
presence. Jonathan has conducted workshops for companies such
as Hattaway Communications, Kaplan, Schlumberger,
Symantec and Xerox, and for professional development events
led by groups such as the Content Marketing Institute (Content
Marketing World) and MarketingProfs.

JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 21

ABOUT
MARKETING?
PROFS
MarketingProfs fuels your inner marketing genius by giving you
how-to marketing information and training courses taught by the
smartest people around. Check out our Content Marketing Crash Register today using code
Course12 classes designed to provide you with the tools and
inspiration for not only creating great content, but also getting that KRANZCONTENT
content in front of the right audiences with the right message at
the right time. On-demand and available anytime, anywhere.

SAVE $200

JONATHAN KRANZ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I 22