Content marketing has hit its stride and entered the marketing mainstream. According to a Content Marketing Institute (CMI) study, 60 percent of marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget this year; that’s up 9 percent from 2011.

Before you start creating content in earnest, however, you need a strategy. And before you can create a strategy, you need to get a handle on the content you already have. That means cataloging all of your content—and not just what resides on your website. This list includes:

•    apps
•    articles
•    blog posts
•    case studies
•    newsletters (print and digital)
•    interactive content
•    magazines (print and digital)
•    mobile content
•    podcasts
•    presentations
•    slideshows
•    social media
•    tools (such as an online calculator)
•    videos
•    webinars/webcasts
•    white papers

It’s also a good practice to audit the content you’ve posted on sites such as YouTube, SlideShare, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

At Tendo, we recommend auditing your content at least once a year, preferably every six months. If a lot of the content you’re creating is time-sensitive (as opposed to evergreen), you should consider auditing your content quarterly.

Audience and goals
When taking an inventory of your content, think about the target audience for the content and what stage of the buying cycle it addresses. Ideally, you want a mix of content that targets all your audiences at each stage of the buying cycle. Focus your content creation efforts on the gaps your clean-up exercise uncovers.

Consider, too, whether the content type is the most appropriate and effective for the topic. For example, a customer success story currently executed in HTML or as a PDF on your website may be more effective and reach a broader audience as a video on YouTube.

Finally, review all content for how well it addresses your business goals. You may have a plethora of case studies for acquiring new customers but a dearth of content aimed at retaining your customers. Keep the distribution channel in mind, too. Different channels are more effective outlets depending on the goal. If one of your company goals is brand awareness, then sharing your content on Twitter makes sense. But if you want to improve your company’s thought leadership in the industry, a webinar or SlideShare presentation would be a more appropriate distribution channel.

Creating a variety of engaging content—and enough of it—is a challenge for most businesses. Knowing what content you currently have will help you decide what you want to keep, revise, or repurpose, or get rid of altogether. From there, you can focus your efforts on creating content to fill the gaps.

When was the last time you cataloged your company’s content?

Keep in mind, though, that how you respond matters. When it comes to negative reviews, the old adage “It’s not just what you say but how you say it” is true. Remember, you’re talking to customers who are frustrated and unhappy. You want to provide them with the help and answers they’re looking for—not add fuel to their fire.

Here are some tips to help you write responses to turn negative reviews into positive perception:

• Be friendly and courteous. Get off on the right foot by addressing the customer by name and acknowledging their experience. A little empathy, such as, “Sorry to hear about your experience!,” can go a long way in soothing an agitated customer. Finally, thank the customer for his or her comments. Even if the feedback is negative, it’s helpful information for improving your products in the future.
• Be truthful and authentic. If a customer is correct in identifying an issue with your product or service, acknowledge it. Don’t hide behind a bunch of marketing speak; be honest and forthcoming if there’s a known problem with your product. Also, don’t use boilerplate responses. It shouldn’t appear that you’re just cutting and pasting approved corporate responses from a messaging guide. Talk to the customer as if you’re having a conversation with a real person, because you are.
• Be specific in addressing customer issues. The more detailed information or steps you can provide customers on how to resolve their problems, the better.
• Ask for additional details. Too often, customers don’t provide enough details in their reviews to accurately assess the problem and provide a suitable solution. Some forums and e-commerce sites provide the ability for customers to comment on a manufacturer’s response. In those cases, respond by asking for additional information about the issue so you can more effectively troubleshoot the problem.
• Encourage customers to contact support. It sounds like a no-brainer, I know, but oftentimes you’ll find that customers post their reviews at the moment of their frustration without taking the first, most obvious step to resolve their issue: calling support. If your company provides different support centers or vehicles (phone vs. online), direct the customer to the most relevant support option for their product or situation.
• Provide a direct path to additional information. Whatever you do, don’t send the customer to your home page. Remember, you’re trying to improve the customers’ experience so you want to get them to the information they need in the fewest number of clicks. Whether it’s product specifications, a replacement model, or a software upgrade, provide the specific URL for that information.
• Create a “triage” email alias. Sometimes customers do call support and, unfortunately, sometimes their problems go unresolved. For those situations, create a special email address that you can provide as a way for customers to contact you directly so you can help escalate their support case.

Finally, don’t ignore the customers who are saying good things about your products or company online. Make sure you respond to positive reviews, too. Statistics show that peer reviews are one of the most influential factors when making purchasing decisions. It’s worth your time to say “thank you” to your brand advocates.

You can run, but you can’t hide from bad reviews, and it’s in your best interest not to. Proactively addressing negative reviews is a great opportunity to develop better customer relationships, gain valuable feedback about your products, and improve the perception of your company.

What best practices do you have for responding to reviews from unhappy customers?

If you aren’t convinced, search for the term “tablet computer” and you’ll get a taste of how much conversation is going on around these devices. Clearly they are a viable factor in the customer communications landscape.

So, should you get in on this action and build a tablet app? Well, that depends. Before you jump on the tablet app bandwagon, ask yourself some level-setting questions first.

Is your audience likely to own tablet computers?

This is the most important question to ask. Does your audience have the financial means to purchase something like a tablet computer? Are they gadget types? Are large portions of your audience already accessing your content via smartphones?

If the answer to most of these questions is yes, then consider developing a tablet app. If you don’t know the answers to these questions, conducting some audience research should be your first step.

Do you have a mobile app?

If you’re just launching your mobile strategy, a mobile app is the logical starting point, before investing in a tablet app. If you already have a mobile app that your audience is actively using, then it might make sense to follow that up with a tablet app. But before pulling the trigger on developing your tablet app, check out how well your mobile app is doing. Do you have any audience feedback, or stats on the number of downloads? How about actual usage of the app? According to an IDG study (as reported in this marketresearch.com article), the majority of mobile device owners regularly use fewer than seven apps.

If your mobile app is actively being used by your audience, then, yes, you should probably consider developing a tablet app. If your mobile app is being ignored by your audience, consider a different engagement strategy and direct those tablet app investment dollars elsewhere.

Does the tablet form factor complement your content?

Is your content highly visual or interactive? Could it be? Would a tablet app expand the possibilities of your content? Would it open up new ways to engage with your audience?

The high-resolution screens on tablet computers create a rich user experience. For content that requires a larger viewing area or full-color graphics, the tablet is a perfect format. That isn’t to say that non-graphical content has no place on the tablet (for example, I think newspapers are a great fit for it). But for highly graphical content, a tablet app might be a good consideration for creating a rich user experience.

Where is your content most likely to be consumed?

Certain types of content, like a search engine for finding a restaurant or an app that checks the traffic, will generally be accessed quickly while a person is on the go. In these cases, the person may only spend one or two minutes interacting with the content (this isn’t a bad thing—they’ve gotten what they need and continued on their way).

If your business model and/or your content is about brief customer engagement, it might not make as much sense for a tablet app. According to a study reported by eMarketer, tablet computer users spend most of their time on the device engaging in longer-term activities, like browsing the Internet, looking at photos or videos, reading newspapers and books, or visiting social media sites. (Do any tablet users out there disagree with the eMarketer findings? One of my Tendo colleague uses his tablet for location-based content all the time, but then again, he doesn’t have a smartphone.)

Do you have access to/budget for the right resources?

There are two primary rules in application development: 1) it has to work, and 2) it has to work. Has your company developed an app before? Do you have enough knowledge in-house to manage an app development project? Will you need a graphic or UI designer to work with your developer? Do you have budget for all these resources?

The bottom line here is that if you are going to invest the time and dollars toward developing a tablet app, make sure it represents your company well. That means it must be easy to use, nice to look at, and functional. If you’re going to do it, do it well.

Have you built a tablet app yet? If so, what did you learn? Tell us in the comments.

Some recent signs of overkill: Mashable answered the question, “Are we too obsessed with Facebook?” by producing an obsessive graphic of random trivia about Zuckerberg’s mildly successful project. Key takeaway: Mashable is too obsessed with Facebook. Search Engine Journal did something similar with social media in general (click the small images to go to the respective posts, with the full, sprawling graphics). This is the new infographic—the 20-minute scroll through a vertical infodump—and it’s much more tiring than the focused article it’s meant to replace.

It’s time to rein in the infographic. Not that it should again be relegated to line graphs illustrating text-heavy stock reports—the Internet has opened up too many possibilities. But what if it was better-organized than a frat party and more coherent than a flash mob? When you make one, make it count. Here are a few points to keep in mind:

It tells a story. Using clip art and numbers to create a collage of essentially disjointed data doesn’t help your reader. The graphic should tell a story or answer a question (the reason we’re reading all this data). You should be able to describe it in a sentence, and the sentence can’t be, “There’s a lot of information about X.”

It’s not an article in disguise. Look at this graphic (I’m picking on Mashable again, but they can take it). It’s little chunks of text arranged in a stack, and you have to read each of them until you hit the bottom. Once known as an article. Chopping your white paper, brochure, or blog post into colorful boxes of text delivers “info,” but just adding some icons is cheating on the “graphic” part of the equation.

The design serves the data. In the quick, easy, and unremarkable infographics, the illustrations seem an afterthought. At the other end of the spectrum, check out this interactive New York Times graphic on the distribution of Olympic medals.  (Screen shot below, but really, go look at the interactivity.)  It’s busy and multilayered, but there’s nothing there that isn’t part of the information delivery—which has been rethought and rendered in a visual way, rather than merely putting clip art next to a number. It’s a (no doubt costly) thing of beauty. Another fine, less elaborate example: This graphical representation of the most prescribed psychiatric drugs in the United States.

It’s well-organized. A lot of the “all the data, ever!” infographics are deliberate jumbles of information and font sizes. Readers should know what they’re looking at, and why. A good infographic delivers an intuitive understanding almost instantly, even before you can delve down and figure it out. For example, look at Lokesh Dhakar’s brilliant diagram of the varying formulas for common coffee drinks (again, click to go to the original post). It’s not 4,000 pixels deep and full of random statistics about how many pounds of coffee come from Bolivia and the average age of caramel macchiato drinkers in Manhattan. It’s simple, it’s useful, and the images facilitate understanding in a way that scrolling through a text list of recipes would not.

Or else it’s just fun. If you’re going to throw up a bunch of random information about a topic, make sure you’re not trying to say anything theoretically important, like profiling an industry or business trend.  Space.com marked the 45^th anniversary of Star Trek with a timeline marking off highlights and trivia related to the venerable franchise. It doesn’t adhere to every rule of a good infographic, but all it’s trying to do is entertain. And less informative, but dead funny, is the ubiquitous social media Venn diagram.

The takeaway? Don’t be afraid to use infographics—they’re a great tool in our increasingly visual, increasingly attention-deficient culture. But don’t be afraid to think outside the cartoon-filled stat box, either.

To do that, you need to know your audience—their needs, their preferences, and their behaviors. Without that vital information, you can’t create content that effectively builds awareness; impacts a potential customer’s decision to purchase your product or service; or keeps current customers engaged with your company, resulting in repeat business or referrals.

When it comes to creating content, perhaps it’s better to think of the customer experience as an hourglass rather than a funnel, as Tricia Smith suggests in a recent SmartBrief post. This would ensure you’re meeting the needs of current customers, creating information resources that are useful after they’ve made a purchase. For example, start a community on your site where customers can help each other or provide the ability to post reviews of your product or service. And these resources can be a great well of information that you can then use to create new content to help build brand awareness, for example.

This underscores a best practice we mention often to our clients: Content types and topics should be appropriate to your audience and their goals—as well as your company’s objectives. White papers, how-to articles, and webcasts are helpful for addressing the awareness and consideration stages of the sales cycle, for example, whereas online demos and case studies are useful for influencing the purchasing decision.

Finally, when you’re creating content for all phases of the sales cycle, don’t forget about SEO. A joint study (PDF) from Google and TechTarget highlights the importance of making sure your SEO efforts, such as keywords and titles, are specific to the particular stage of the sales cycle you’re targeting with your content.

What content are you creating to keep current customers engaged with your company?

Although search engines frequently tweak their algorithms, Google threw a significant curve ball when it changed its algorithm a couple months back. The search engine now assigns a lesser ranking to low-quality sites like “content farms” or others that use duplicate or recycled content.

The significance of this change is something we at Tendo have been advocating to our clients for years—content is key. If you want to ensure that your company gets found online, you need to create original, high-quality content. It’s this content that will create relevance for your site and improve your ranking on SERPs.

Producing new content on a regular basis certainly requires more time and effort. Here are a couple suggestions for creating original content:

• Start a blog. This is a great way to generate a regular stream of content. And if you’re looking for fodder, listen to what your customers are saying on your social media channels and location-based services such as Foursquare.
• Write on a topic important to your customers and/or to your industry. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just make sure to add your own unique take on the subject.
• Use content you already have. If your company produces original research, in-depth reports, or other analysis pieces, turn those into a series of articles for your site.

In defense of keywords
Although meta information, keywords in particular, hasn’t been the key to SEO success in years, that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. In fact, keywords are very important to your content. You should use language your customers use—not jargon or marketing speak—and base your content around those keywords. This will help make it clear to search engines that your page is relevant to those keywords. Also, you can use your keyword research to help identify themes for new content.

The only thing you can count on with SEO is that it will change. Creating informative content that’s relevant to your audience—customers, partners, or both—will ensure that your site gets found and give you the best chance at converting visitors into customers.

What’s your company’s strategy for creating original content for your website?

Most people know that a blog should be authentic. However, preserving this quality in writing, especially within a business context, can be a challenge. A corporate blog should support business goals, but people often equate that with selling, and selling with marketing. Things get confusing because a corporate blog typically supports marketing goals, which are to communicate the value of your company, products or services to your current and potential customers.

As with all types of communications, context is everything. Communicating business value in a brochure is different from communicating that value in a corporate blog. Saying that a product will save you money is perfectly appropriate in a brochure. But in a blog, you need to show that somehow. Reference some industry benchmarks, tell a story about how a customer improved its bottom line, or explain your personal thoughts on why you think your product really is better. Maybe it’s priced similarly to your competitor’s products, but your company has a better reputation in corporate responsibility. Maybe you just like the way your executives do business.

Maintaining this personal, insider’s perspective is a great way to infuse authenticity into your corporate blog. When it comes to the actual writing, here are some tips I often pass down to the corporate bloggers I coach:

Use the first person point of view. When writing your blog post, you should always be an “I,” never a “we”—unless you’re telling an anecdote about working with a team (for example, “we quickly realized that our initial concept wouldn’t work…”). And never, never take on the company voice in the third person. The reason people are visiting your blog in the first place is to hear from you.

Pretend you’re talking to a customer. A person-to-person conversation is the perfect way to envision a quality blog post. If you do talk to customers as part of your job, what do you actually talk about? I’d be willing to bet the conversation includes some mention of how your product or service can help them solve a problem. What kind of language do you use? Most people tend to use more casual language when speaking. Use the words you would say to a customer’s face, not the words you would print in a marketing brochure.

Pretend you’re talking to a colleague or peer. This is a great way of identifying strong blog topics that are relevant to your audience, industry and current events. If you’re having an industry-related conversation with a colleague or peer, there’s a good chance that a lot of other folks in your industry are doing the exact same thing. Bring the conversation online with your blog. Use it as an invitation to converse with your online peers. Having real conversations is the basis of an authentic blog.

Grab the mike. A lot of professionals I’ve worked with complain that, while they’re perfectly comfortable and casual in person, as soon as they try to articulate their thoughts in writing, their words become stilted, overly formal, messy, and so on. Others might simply be a little uncomfortable with the act of writing, which can come through in their language (just like body language when you’re communicating in person).

If you feel more casual, personal and authentic speaking your thoughts than writing them, do just that. Keep a small recording device handy and quickly articulate your thoughts as they occur to you. Then you can listen to it later and use what you’ve said as the basis of your post. You could also try using transcription software to put your spoken words into text. Many free and paid versions exist. Once your spoken words are in draft form, all you have to do is read through to edit out some of the idiosyncrasies of spoken language that don’t translate into writing.

Be transparent. Back in 2006, Wal-Mart was called out after its “Wal-Marting Across America” debacle. The blog featured a couple traveling by RV across the nation, camping in Wal-Mart parking lots, writing posts laced with warm and fuzzy praise for their Big Box hosts. It turned out the trip was organized and funded by Wal-Mart PR dollars. Don’t be Wal-Mart.

Go ahead and say who you are, which company you work for, what you do for them and why you’re writing the blog (What’s that? You’re not quite sure why you’re writing a blog? Back to square one!). If you’re stating your personal opinion, say so. Transparency is a key aspect of authenticity. So be a real human being and write your blog with integrity. It will pay off in the form of an appreciative and loyal audience.

Show your sensitive side. Sometimes stuff goes wrong. It happens. But the way in which a company deals with stuff when it happens can make the difference between a big PR blow-up and a relative ripple. Today’s online audience of vocal participants can be unforgiving if a company isn’t straightforward after a screw up. (See Wal-Mart debacle above.)

Flickr did a good job of ‘fessing up to a business-debilitating technology snarl a few years back when it posted on its corporate blog, “Sometimes we suck.” The post concludes by asking readers to comment and “tell it like it is.” This move likely averted the rage and brand bashing that often occurs after a big corporate blunder.

Get personal. Starting your blog post with a personal anecdote is a great way to get good and cozy with your readers right off the bat. Everyone loves a good story, so introducing a narrative helps to draw your reader in. Bill Marriott regularly tells personal stories in his “Marriott on the Move” blog, to great effect. Of course, when you’re in a position to lunch with the governor of Puerto Rico, you’ll naturally have some pretty engaging anecdotes. But even a story about driving your kid to soccer practice can be interesting if it illustrates something about what you’ll talk about in the post.

Maintaining your personal authenticity in writing, while also supporting business goals with your blog, is a true skill. But if you keep these tips in mind, and treat your blogging like a real job skill that requires focus and effort for improvement, your authenticity will come shining through.

Read what my colleague, Linda Leung, has to say about authenticity in her post, “Getting naked with corporate blogging.” You can also get more blogging tips by reading “Traits of an engaging blogger.”