Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers

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Heavy and Light: Why Your Con-tent Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers

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Created for Vocus

by Jay Baer of Convince & Convert

Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers

Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers

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Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and FeathersDo you remember the trick question from grade school? Which weighs more, five pounds of bricks or five pounds of feathers? As you may remember, they of course weigh the same. After all, five pounds is five pounds. But in social media and content marketing, not all communication has the same heft or impact, and you need to produce communica-tion of both the light and heavy varieties.

What is a Feather?

Feathers are the tsunami of flotsam and

jetsam that constantly envelops us on-

line today like a Snuggie comprised of

words and photos. Feathers are tweets.

Feathers are Instagram photos. Feath-

ers are status updates. Most blog posts

are feathers. Like a feather, these

content executions are lightweight,

ephemeral, temporal and disposable.

You might love a feather. You might even

share a feather. But a feather by itself - or even

a whole pile of them - is unlikely to have enough persuasive

power to cause you to make a purchase.

What is a Brick?

Bricks are the building blocks of digital com-

munication. They are the longer, more

in-depth executions that break through

the shower of feathers by having extra

heft, production value and relevancy.

Bricks are ebooks like this one. Bricks

are webinars. Bricks are infographics.

Bricks are “real” videos (Vine and Insta-

gram videos are typically in the feathers

category). You may not love bricks in the

same way you love feathers, because bricks

are often more serious and detailed. You’ll never see a brick

meme. But bricks have a lifespan that feathers do not. Bricks

are downloaded, saved or printed out.

Bricks are what Ian Greenleigh, author of the forthcoming

new book, “The Social Media Side Door,” calls “rocketship

content” because they can be quickly elevated within orga-

nizations to reach the desks of decision makers. You don’t

often forward your CMO an Instagram photo (or even a blog

post, usually). But you do forward well-executed bricks.

Feathers drive interest;

bricks drive action.

“

Kicking the Tires, Invisibly

It’s important to recognize that the vast majority of your

prospective customers are located below the water line.

It used to be that we created sales through relationships,

via face-to-face or telephonic connection. No more.

Increasingly, sales are now generated through information.

Research from Sirius Decisions finds that in busi-

ness-to-business (B2B) scenarios, 70 percent of the pur-

chase decision is made before the prospect ever contacts

the company. The same dynamic exists in many B2C

environments as well. I recently gave a presentation to a

large conference of automobile dealers who told me that it

is now routine for potential buyers to show up at the deal-

ership knowing more about the vehicle than the salesper-

son trying to convince them to purchase. Those prospects

don’t need the salesperson to inform or educate them, as

they’ve done all of that themselves without the dealership

ever knowing about it. Customers are information ninjas

today, kicking the information tires right under your nose.

Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers

Google published an extraordinary book in 2011 called “The

Zero Moment of Truth” (http://www.zeromomentoftruth.

com). The findings in the book are based on an omnibus

research project that surveyed tens of thousands of Amer-

ican consumers across a panoply of shopping categories

(financial services, electronics, restaurants, etc.). What Google

discovered is that in 2010, consumers across all categories

needed 5.3 sources of information before making a pur-

chase. In 2011, just one year later, consumers needed 10.4

sources of information before making the same purchases.

Whoa. In one year, the same people needed twice as much

information before buying the same items.

This is mathematical evidence of the information ninja

phenomenon. Customers today are hyper-researching

everything, and if you’re not accounting for some of those

10.4 sources of information, you are making your prospec-

tive customers work too hard to determine whether you’re

the right solution.

An Abundance of Feathers

There are two ways you can

succeed in this environment of

hyper-researching customers:

with a TON of feathers, or with

a methodical combination

of feathers and bricks. The

first option is perhaps best

demonstrated by River Pools

and Spas, an installer of in-

ground, fiberglass swimming

pools in Virginia.

In 2009, River Pools almost went out

of business. There wasn’t much demand for pools in the

5.3 sources

10.4 sources

2010

2011

depths of the Great Recession, and the company was in

desperate straights. Fortunately, River Pools is co-owned by

Marcus Sheridan, who is now a marketing consultant and

proprietor of the excellent blog, The Sales Lion (http://www.

thesaleslion.com). Faced with a future that was uncertain

at best, Marcus decided to go crazy with feathers in an

attempt to save his company. He created a blog, and wrote

several hundred posts at night and on weekends. Each post

answered an actual question he or his partners had heard

from prospective customers in the previous few years.

Eventually, the River Pools blog published more than 1,000

blog posts and they are still writing, writing, writing.

The company didn’t just survive - it thrived. Today, River

Pools receives more website visits than any other swim-

ming pool site in the US, including the big manufacturers.

River Pools has a brick - an outstanding ebook comprised

of their most popular blog posts - but they mostly succeed

with feathers alone. This is only possible because Riv-

er Pools has an almost unfathomable volume of

feathers, and their customers have a nearly

unquenchable desire to self-educate.

Remarkably, the average new River

Pools customer views more than 105

blog posts before contacting the com-

pany. One. Hundred. Five. Talk about

rolling around in a pile of feathers!

Even more amazing is the fact that 75

percent of new River Pools customers

purchase a swimming pool without ever

talking to a company representative. Why bother?

All the questions they had about the company and its prod-

ucts were already answered with an enormous collection of

blog post feathers.

The 19 year-old Dude

River Pools and Marcus Sheridan are atypical, however. The

far more likely scenario is that companies eschew bricks

(because they are more difficult, expensive and time con-

suming to produce) and continue producing only feathers,

but without anywhere near the colossal volume exhibited

by River Pools. The biggest problem with most social media

and content marketing programs is that they are all feath-

ers and no bricks, but without enough feathers to make that

imbalance actually succeed.

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105

Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers

To paraphrase Gary Vaynerchuk, author of the forthcoming

new book, “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook,” most marketers be-

have like 19 year-old dudes; they attempt to close the deal

on the first date.

I have been present in meetings (and more than a couple)

where smart businesspeople have said, “We’re getting good

traffic to our blog, how come we’re not generating any

leads?” This is the classic 19 year-old dude mentality, trying

to quickly close everything and everyone. Show

me a blog post, or status update, or one-off

photo that addresses enough buyer ques-

tions to drive sales by itself, and I’ll show

you an exceedingly rare piece of con-

tent. The secret of River Pools isn’t the

power of any one or two or even ten or

twenty blog posts. The secret is that they

have more than 1,000 rock-solid blog

posts that literally address every facet and

nuance of the category. Your blog doesn’t, of

that I’m almost positive. Mine certainly does not.

Is it possible to succeed with only feathers? Yes, as River

Pools demonstrates. But ultimately, what is the easier path;

to create so many feathers that you leave no stone of inqui-

sition unturned, or to create a reasonable number of feathers

augmented with a few bricks? I’ll embrace the latter in almost

every case, as it requires less time and expense overall.

The Buyer’s Journey

A key to understanding and implementing the bricks and

feathers* approach is recognition that prospective custom-

ers need different pieces of information - and have different

questions - at various stages of the purchase consideration

cycle. At the very beginning of their relationship with your

company, these potential buyers may not know anything

about you whatsoever. Thus, their first question may be

something akin to, “What is it that these guys sell?” Inci-

dentally, this is why it’s so irksome that many companies,

especially in the software industry, are so vague in their own

descriptions of their offerings, with enormous dollops of

jargon sloppily filling an unsatisfying informational donut.

I’m happy to say that Vocus is an exception here, as a visit to

Vocus.com tells you straight away that: “Vocus completely

integrates social, search, email & PR with smart software

solutions that help you attract,

engage and retain customers.”

That is, of course, by no means

enough information to make a

purchasing decision, but at least

we know what types of problems

Vocus can ostensibly address.

As the prospect learns more

about your company through their

research, the questions they have

about you change and become more spe-

cific. Once you know what Vocus does generally,

you may now need to know whether it allows you to send

Tweets, or whether it works with teams with multiple mem-

bers, or what the software costs.

This is the buyer’s journey; the process by which he or she

steadily uncovers information about you, and, with each

new finding, recalibrates your worthiness and suitability.

Dating works the same way, does it not?

The first time you meet someone, your initial question

(typically not voiced, but very much present) might be: “Is

this person a creeper, and a present danger to me?” Once

past that barrier, you consider other elements such as

appearance, sense of humor, political and religious lean-

ings, whether they think Louis C.K is funny or offensive, etc.

This is the “dater’s journey” and is fundamentally the same

inquisitive process that prospective customers undergo.

To maximize your chance of winning a customer, you

should create different types and formats of content that

are most appropriate for each stage of that buyer’s journey.

The Right Tool for the Job

The excellent online presentation “From Content to

Customer” published in 2011 by the marketing

automation software company Eloqua, pro-

vides a framework for the buyer’s journey

that includes four stations: Suspects,

Prospects, Leads and Opportunities, and

suggests that certain information pack-

ages are more likely to be consumed by

each, especially in B2B scenarios.

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Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers

Suspects are the broadest audience with nearly no under-

standing of your company and its offerings. Suspects want

to know what your company knows, not what you sell. This

is where blogs like Marcus Sheridan’s for River Pools and

Spas can be a tremendous difference-maker. Eloqua also

recommends “infotainment” for Suspects, like Facebook

status updates and Instagram photos. Feathers are perfect

for Suspects.

Prospects are defined as having supplied personal informa-

tion in exchange for more information. At this stage, Pros-

pects want information that relates to their particular inter-

ests. Once someone becomes a Prospect, they need bricks

that address their needs, such as direct mail, events, online

Webinars, reports and guides.

A Lead is a Prospect that meets specific, pre-determined

criteria, making them disproportionately likely to become

a customer. Leads desire very specific information address-

ing their circumstances. Brick formats to consider here

include white papers, ebooks and product comparisons.

Opportunities are potential customers that are ready to buy.

This is when prospects cross the chasm from self-serve to

full-serve. This is when personalized relationship-building

takes over the process. In short, this is when marketing

yields to sales. Marcus Sheridan writing blog posts reaches

Suspects. Marcus Sheridan showing up in your living room

to talk about swimming pools is all about Opportunities.

There really aren’t any bricks for the Opportunity stage, as

that’s when business gets personal.

In summary:

Suspect = Feathersblog posts, social media

Prospects = Brickswebinars, videos, infographics

Leads = Brickswhite papers, ebooks, comparisons

Opportunities = Human Contactscalls, emails, meetings

Bricks as Youtility

One of the temptations of marketers, especially when

creating content for Prospects and Leads, is to produce

bricks that are only about the company and its products

and services. “This prospective customer has demonstrated

interest,” goes the theory, “so we need to give her more

information about us.” Actually, no. By the time the poten-

tial customer reaches the Prospect or Lead stage, she has

probably already consumed just about everything you’ve

made available for easy download. Remember, the average

River Pools customer reads 105 blog posts. The self-serve,

below the water line phase is much more comprehensive

than we typically believe. What this means in practice is

that Prospects and Leads don’t need much more informa-

tion about YOU, they need information that helps THEM.

Ideally, bricks at this stage are truly

and inherently useful, with a value prop-

osition that is freestanding. They are, in

fact, so useful that people might actu-

ally pay for them. They are a “Youtil-

ity,” as defined in my best-selling

book by the same name. This ebook

is sponsored by Vocus, but isn’t about

Vocus. As you are reading this, do you

feel good about Vocus as a company?

Does a heightened understanding of

bricks and feathers give you a better sense

for how you might effectively utilize software from Vocus?

Is this information so useful that you’d pay a couple dollars

for it, if I asked you to do so? I hope so, as do they. What you

are reading is a Youtility brick: marketing with intrinsic val-

ue, given away for free, that informs more than it promotes.

Syncapse has a Youtility brick that’s targeted to Prospects

and Leads, and is also “real-time relevant,” meaning that it

focuses on a particular timeline, location or circumstance.

Capitalizing upon seasonal creation of marketing budgets

for the following year, Syncapse created an online Face-

book Advertising Spend Calculator and launched it in

September 2012. A technology company that helps large

business-to-consumer marketers understand and optimize

their social media, Syncapse is trying to get companies to

think about social (especially social advertising) as an an-

nual program, rather than a series of short-term campaigns.

Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers

Users of this free tool answer a

series of questions about their

business, their objectives and

their use of Facebook, and the

tool scans the brand’s Facebook

page in real-time, providing a

recommended annual budget

for Facebook advertising for the

following year.

As companies continue to expand their

social media participation, two big questions become im-

portant, according to Max Kalehoff, vice president of prod-

uct marketing at Syncapse. The first is, “What’s the ROI of

what you’ve already invested in?” Then, secondly, “What

decisions are you going to make differently in the future?”

Kalehoff says the Facebook Advertising Spend Calculator

helps answer those questions.

“What we’ve done with the Facebook Ads Investment

Calculator is provide a very easy, nearly spoon-fed meth-

odology for surfacing the most important questions about

your brand and its situation in the marketplace, in order to

extract the strengths of Facebook,” says Kalehoff.

As one of the first tools of its kind online, the calculator is

being used often, spreading throughout organizations, with

multiple people kicking the data tires. It’s rocketship content.

“They’ll put in various parameters and then they’ll run it

several more times, changing the parameters and then

within the next 24 hours you’ll see anywhere from two

to ten of their colleagues come back on the site,” Kalehoff

asserts. “It’ll help you contextualize and have a reference

point for budgeting if you’re looking to see how much mon-

ey of your total pie you should allocate to social media. We’re

really hoping to stretch the thinking of what’s possible.”

Isn’t that more effective than a webinar or white paper that

tells potential customers just how awesome Syncapse is,

filled with the typical case studies, testimonials and plaudits?

Bricks and Backlinks

As you probably know, a sizable factor in how web pages

and websites are ranked by Google and Bing is the number

of links from other sites, as well as links included in social

media mentions. In almost every case, bricks will attract

more links and mentions than will a feather. Because bricks

are more comprehensive, with enhanced production val-

ues, they are likely to be talked about, commented upon and

linked to in ways that an individual blog post will not (other

feathers, like social media updates, are unlikely to get many

links at all outside of social media itself).

In this way, effective bricks collect links that benefit your

entire site from a search rankings perspective. In some

industries, this is a significant bonus provided by bricks.

The Digital Dandelion

While you of course want your bricks to be available on

your own website (to get the backlinks, if nothing else),

please don’t believe that your owned digital real estate

is the only potential home for your bricks. In

fact, for most companies, of all the places

online that their content could live, their

website gets the least amount of traffic,

not the most.

The best way to maximize the value

of your bricks is to become a digital

dandelion, spreading your valuable

and useful information to as many

corners of the Web as possible. This

means making your ebooks available on

Slideshare; and then creating an infograph-

ic of ebook highlights and running it as a guest

post on related blogs; or making a video summary of the

ebook for YouTube; or even making several Vine videos that

describe specific elements of the ebook (how’s that for effi-

ciency, feathers that summarize a brick!)

You want bricks to get attention, period. Stop overvaluing

your own digital real estate and undervaluing real estate

you don’t control.

Market Your Marketing

Another facet of bricks that separates them from feathers is

that they have enough breadth and value to be proactively

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Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers

promoted. You know what happens when most companies

launch a branded mobile application or ebook, or webi-

nar that effectively combines information and promotion?

Nothing. You’ve heard the saying, “If a tree falls in the forest

and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The

same logic works in these scenarios: “If you create a brick

and don’t tell anyone about it, did it ever exist?”

When you finish completing the brick, you

haven’t reached the marketing finish line;

you have just reached the starting line. Too

many businesses break out the cham-

pagne just because something new was

made. Remember, Youtility is all about

being useful, which means “full of use.”

The objective is not to make information.

The objective is to make information that

customers and prospective customers will use.

However, because creating bricks - while more complicated

than making feathers - is often an inexpensive proposition

when considered in the context of the overall marketing

program of a company, these efforts are viewed as relatively

minor and thus don’t receive dedicated promotional sup-

port, even at launch. Instead, bricks end up getting promot-

ed no differently than feathers: a link here, a mention there.

This dramatically curtails exposure - counteracting the

entire premise of the brick.

And this is where social media can play an important role in

your content initiatives.

“ Content is fire; social media is gasoline.

“

In almost every case, companies would be better off spend-

ing more of their social media communication promoting

truly useful bricks than promoting the fact that the compa-

ny exists and has products and services. The fact is, whether

they are using Vocus or some other platform, a sizable per-

centage of social communication is essentially, “Our com-

pany is awesome, click here to let us prove it.” That’s nei-

ther interesting nor effective. Instead, you can and should

use your social messaging to draw attention to your bricks,

useful (hopefully) content that informs, persuades and is

elevated within the organizations of potential buyers.

How Much is Too Much?

How many feathers do you need? As Marcus Sheridan

demonstrates at River Pools, if you adopt a feathers-only

approach, you ideally need enough feathers to answer

every customer question.

If you opt for a mixture of bricks and feathers, you still need

to answer every question, but you can do so with a core

stable of feathers, augmented by a collection of more spe-

cific bricks that address the needs of Prospects and Leads.

The best way to think through this in your organization is

to create a list of all questions that prospective customers

might have, segmented by persona and stage of the buyer’s

journey. Then, determine whether each question would

best be answered by a feather or a brick. Of course, as not-

ed above, there are many different types of brick and feath-

er executions, but in this planning process, I like to think

of each question and ask, “Blog post, or bigger?” meaning,

“Can this question be thoroughly addressed within the rela-

tively limited confines of a single blog post, or could/should

it be expanded or combined with other ques-

tions, and handled via video, ebook,

webinar or other brick?”

Once you’ve determined via this

process the questions that are

answerable via feathers, and

which via bricks, adopt an ed-

itorial calendar that method-

ically creates those answers.

It’s unquestionably easier to do

this for feathers, as adhering to a

schedule of routine blogging and/

or social media participation is much

simpler than consistent production of more

robust content executions. But you can (and should) make

a calendar for your bricks, too. For example, I agreed to

create this ebook with Vocus a couple of months ago, and

the company has several more in the queue. Your results

(and appetite for planning) may vary, but I advise to have

your bricks plan built at least 90 days in advance, and an

objective - for small and mid-sized companies - of four to six

legitimate bricks per year.

Heavy and Light: Why Your Content Marketing Requires Bricks and Feathers

Comparing Bricks and Feathers

Now that you’ve read about the roles of bricks and feathers*

in your content marketing and social media, here’s a handy

comparison chart for reference. Think of it as a special

Youtility, just for reading this far!

Bricks Feathers

Executions ebooks, webinars, videos

blog posts, social media

Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Prospects, Leads Suspects

Life Span Weeks, Months Hours, Days

SEO Potential Strong Minimal

Difficulty to Create Higher Lower

Location Your site, plus else-where

Your site, your social media

Youtility More intrinsically valuable

Less intrinsically valuable

Volume needed Less More

About the Author

Jay Baer is a hype-free digital marketing strategist, speaker,

author, and founder of marketing services firm Convince

& Convert.

Jay has consulted with more than 700 companies on digital

marketing since 1994. He was named one of America’s top

social media consultants by Fast Company magazine. His

Convince and Convert blog is ranked as the world’s #1 con-

tent marketing resource.

His new book about making marketing useful is called

Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help not Hype and

is a New York Times best seller.

*Special thanks to Chris Sietsema, head of digital operations

at Convince & Convert, for pioneering the “bricks and feath-

ers” concept.

About Vocus

Marketing has evolved. To succeed on a local or national

level in today’s world, marketers need to make digital chan-

nels work together to generate brand awareness, demand

and revenue.

Vocus offers a unique solution. Our software inte-

grates powerful features of digital marketing, including

social, search, email and publicity. It sends real-time

marketing opportunities directly to you in the form of leads,

prospects, social media conversations, curated content and

media inquiries.

With our marketing consulting and services team ready to

help, Vocus delivers marketing success.

Find out more at vocus.com

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