Dave Gerhardt

Content curation is a great strategy for social media content. You don't need to always write 100% original content to be successful with social media. There are many people and accounts who have grown followings by being a curator - sourcing and sharing content that is relevant and interesting to a particular niche. You can contribute original ideas, but you can also share quotes, links, summaries, re-post other people's ideas, and build a following almost acting as a "news outlet" for the niche that you're creating content in. Example: if you're in sales, you can be sharing interesting content from around the world of sales, vs always having to have "hot takes" of your own."

One of the great things about social media is that you don't have to have perfect grammar, copy, and sentence structure to be successful. So for social media, editing is more about understanding the format of the content for the channel - for example, content on LinkedIn is going to look and feel different than a post on Twitter. Understanding how to format and write copy specifically for social media is the most important editing skill. On social media you have two seconds to get someone's attention while scrolling, so the hook and headline matter most. You need a great hook to get someone to read the first line, and then the second line should get you to read the third, and so on. Format matters.

There are a few tools that can help you generate content ideas for social media if you need help. ChatGPT can be great with the right prompts to ask questions and get ideas of topics to write about based on your business. Tools like Tweet Hunter and Taplio also have some AI built in to help you generate content ideas. You should also look internally - typically subject matter experts are writing a lot inside of a company: slack messages, emails, internal memos and updates; all of this content can be mined to find interesting topics and ideas to use for social media. This is a great way to generate social media copy.

One thing that has not been covered here is self reported attribution. This is a great way to measure the success of your content and understand where customers are finding you through content because unlike software attribution tools, here the customer is actually telling you! Self Reported Attribution aka SRA is a method of tracking and attributing the success of a marketing campaign by asking customers how they heard about a business or product. You've seen this after making a purchase before. Adding this open ended question can be a treasure trove of data to help you understand - in the words of your customers - where they found you, and figure out which channels to double down on.

Last touch attribution should be viewed as an interesting data point when measuring the success of content, but it rarely tells the whole story. Someone could have been in your marketing funnel and seeing your content and campaigns for months, and then there was one "final" piece of content that led them to contact sales, reach out for a demo, or make a purchase. Last touch - like any marketing attribution efforts - should be looked at with the other touches along the purchase journey. Great content marketers understand the buyer's journey and where content fits along the whole process, and they know that all content marketing is not "direct response marketing" so you can't measure it that way.

There are a handful of ways to think about the success of content marketing, but to actually answer this question, you first have to start with the why. What's the goal of the content piece in the first place? Today in marketing, content can quite literally be ... anything. So what are you creating and why? Is the goal of the content awareness? Conversion? Is it for customers? Prospects? Sales enablement? There are 100 different ways you can answer this depending on the goal and purpose of the content. And with marketing today, almost every channel is measurable - so you can send yourself down a hole of obsessing over first touch vs last touch. Layer the fact that in B2B there are many touch points in the buyer's journey, and ...