Hitting the right pitch

When every Tom, Dick and Sally is a creative thinker with a good idea, how do you differentiate your content marketing to ensure it gets to see the light of day? This is a question that all in-house and agency teams face.

To begin with, creative content marketing is no longer about a standalone piece of content that is focused on just print, social or video. Integrated marketing helps to give brands an edge in a competitive climate; ideas need to begin with a content marketing strategy and then come to life across print, digital, video, podcasts and more.

Here’s a few ways you can ensure that your content marketing idea makes internal stakeholders sit up and take notice.

Pitch yourself

Finding your edge is the first step in getting a ‘yes’. What makes you (or your team) the best person to tell this story or own this portfolio? Do you have access to any exclusive insights or data that will assist with the storytelling? Do you have an existing relationship with a particular niche audience? Can you help solve a particular problem they have? Can you leverage particular partnerships to help spread your story? Once you can answer all of these questions, demonstrate how you already live and breathe this topic and why your team is perfectly placed to create and distribute content for particular audiences.

Bring it back

Bring your idea into context for your stakeholders by aligning it with long-term and short-term marketing goals. Demonstrate how your brand’s business goals connect with the content marketing plan. Show stakeholders how your content will speak to audiences and prompt them to act. For every point you make in a pitch, bring it back to how it will complement the brand’s existing business goals.

Sell why it’s right for the audience

Although the saying goes ‘it’s all in the delivery’, in this case it’s more like 40 per cent. Nate Cochrane, editor of Project Manager magazine and content marketing expert describes the perfect pitch delivery as the ‘goldilocks’ of information: not too much and not too little. Establish the relevance of your idea and why a particular audience needs to see/hear it right now – timing is everything. Prove how much you already know about the audience’s behaviour. Pitch how your idea will transcend trends and stand the test of time by being authentic, valued and consistent across all content marketing platforms.

Do your research

Use evidence and data to back your idea up. Collect research to bolster a pitch, but don’t get bogged down in the facts and figures. A data trending tool such as Almighty can help predict content trends before they go viral or Buzzsumo will locate the key influencers that will best promote content. Once the pitch is accepted and you’re working with your agencies on the delivery stage, Google Analytics (and several other free Google tools) or B2B tool Idio can provide in-depth analytics, a content audit, social optimisation and much more.

Tell the story

Inspire and enthuse your audience with content that speaks to them, whatever the medium. “We believe it’s never been more important to make emotive connections between brands and their audiences,” says Andrew Coyle, Managing Director of SHERPA – a production house specialising in live action and animated video.

Georgia Lejeune, managing editor