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Today Steli and Hiten are talking about Hiten’s new book The Content Marketing Playbook.  This is a very specific deep dive into the years of experience Hiten has gained from building content marketing programs at Kissmetrics, and with his personal brand helping startups.

A lot of people think that content marketing is ‘just blogging’, but Hiten quickly dispels that myth.  In fact their beginnings of content marketing at Kissmetrics was on Twitter.

Through this lesson Hiten developed a highly targeted framework for approaching content marketing.  Ask yourself these three questions to help you define and connect with your ideal customers:

  • Who are your customers?
  • Where do they hang out?
  • How should you engage them?

In addition to creating great content you can also be a curator of great content. This was the breakthrough Hiten found with Kissmetrics where they became an authority for sharing great content around measurable marketing analytics.

The top of the funnel is the weak spot in most businesses, and building the audience that you can send to your content is key.  If nobody is visiting your site then the best blog post in the world isn’t going to deliver any value.  That’s why Hiten likes building an audience, getting involved with your target audience, and then delivering value to them.

Communities like Hacker News, Inbound.org, and Growth Hackers can be great places to share great content, pose interesting questions, and communicating what you’re learning right now.  Curating other people’s great content in these communities is an easy way to get started and frame your perspective, both without creating a ton of you own original content.

Tips

Hiten: Just copying a competitor isn’t going to differentiate your brand. That mental space is taken by the established player.  Don’t just copy, iterate and find your angle to build a brand on top of.

Steli: When looking at others’ marketing content ask yourself ‘What You Like’, and ‘What’s Missing that could make this Great’.

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