7 steps to creating engaging content

7 Steps to Creating Engaging Content

New Tools and Tactics to Create Content That Drives Business

The Presenters

 Pelin Thorogood is a new media marketer and entrepreneur, and was recently named one of the “20 Women to Watch” in sales lead management.  Pelin also serves as a Executive-in-Residence at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management.www.schulmanthorogood.com

Andraž Tori is Co-Founder and CTO at Zemanta. Zemanta, a blogger's assistant that helps over 80,000 bloggers was responsible for enhancing over 1.3 million blog posts in 2011. Andraž is active in the semantic web technology community and has recently spoken at SemTech 2011 and Web Fest .ME 2011 conferences and is slated to speak at BlogWorld 2012 in New York. www.zemanta.com

@PelinT

@andraz

Relevance!

Relevance is KeyRelevant content is key to findability

SEO: Relevant content / structure & links to relevant external articles, blog posts photos and other images

Relevant content is key to customer engagement, stickiness and community building

Relevance Engagement Conversion

Creativity without Conversion = ZERO

#contentmarketing

7 Steps to Creating Engaging Content

1. Understand Business Goals

2. Create a Content Strategy

3. Unleash Your Inner Data Analyst

4. Know the Right Tools

5. Create Relevant Content

6. Get it Read

7. Measure & Optimize

#contentmarketing

1. Understand GoalsWhat is your company trying to accomplish?

Who is your target audience?

Are you in alignment with marketing?

#contentmarketing

2. Content Strategy

What is your content strategy based on your objectives?

What types of content do you need to support each objective?

How will you measure success?

Relevant

#contentmarketing

‘Lifecycle’ ContentReach/Acquisition Conversion Retention

Blogging White papers Email newsletters

Online press releases Explanatory videos Social media content

Infographics Customer video testimonials

Customer support content

Surveys and trend data Case studies Product tours

Viral video Data sheets Webinars

Social media content Product reviews Blog

Podcasts Webinars Contests

Blog and forum comments Advertising and search copy

Contests

#contentmarketing

3. Inner Data Analyst

Familiarize yourself with web and social measurement

Understand how content drives results based on your objectives

Know how to establish benchmarks

Use data to optimize and create better content

#contentmarketing

4. Know The RightTools

measurement distribution production

#contentmarketing

Adding links to external content provides context for your readers

Linking to own content (within reason) helps with SEO performance

Linking to previous posts builds a larger story

#contentmarketing

Content Creation Best Practices

Content Creation Best Practices

SEO best practices define “keyword focus” as one of the most important things in online writing. The “right” keywords are very much dependent on your content strategyEngaging content not only requires the use of the right words but also the right structure.

#contentmarketing

Visual Appeal

Images draw attention to the post

Images help demonstrate your points

Respect copyright laws

Take advantage of image recommendation tools that provide license information

#contentmarketing

Content Creation Best Practices

• Skyword study found an average increase of 94% for articles that included an image or infographic.

http://skyword.com/blog/96-skyword-study-add-images-to-improve-content-performance.html

#contentmarketing

Content Creation Best Practices

5. Create Relevant Content

Use data to understand what your audience is interested in and what types of content work best

Marcus Sheriden: “Your customers’ first 50 questions should be your first 50 blog posts.”

Be creative

Link to relevant external sources, including articles, blogs photos

Tell a story

Call to action

#contentmarketing

6. Get it Read Leverage your Community: Social channels, customer advocates, influencers, paid advertising, etc.

Work w/marketing and public relations

Leverage employees

Measure!

CommunityFind other writers or bloggers in your niche

Engage them on their content

Encourage them to respond to your posts

Ask for guest blog posts and reciprocate

7. Measure & Adjust Measure impact of content based on objective – leads, sales, etc.

Measure most effective type of content

Use measurement to drive content decisions

Remember: creativity w/out conversions = zero

Don’t Forget The Basics!

Segment your audience

By role, by age, by gender, by education, by intent, by behavior…

Test! Test! Test!

Across mediums, properties, audience segments…

Think Life Time Value (LTV)#contentmarketing

Results: eBeanstalk.com

Seven-week results, averaged across the four optimized pages: 

Reach: Increase in search engine traffic (29%)

Reach: Increase in paid search impressions (45%)

Engagement: Increase in time on page (153%)

Conversion: Increase in conversion to sale  (17%) #contentmarketing

Results:Convice & Convert

Four weeks of results for the 12 pages (5 rewritten, 7 new) on Convince & Convert:

Reach: Traffic from search engines increased an average of 33% across the five posts that were rewritten (optimized)

Reach: Four of the five rewritten posts achieved top 10 Google rankings for target keywords

Reach: Six of the seven newly written (optimized) posts achieved top 10 Google rankings for target keywords within 48 hours of publication

Results:

• Used Zemanta WordPress Plugin for image recommendations, Amazon Associate affiliate linking and connecting to other blogs in their niche.

• Would periodically link to LifeHacker articles.

http://bloggingyourpassion.com/how-using-the-zemanta-wordpress-plugin-can-increase-your-blog-traffic/

#contentmarketing

Results:

• Strategy paid off as one of the Lifehacker bloggers took notice and linked back to one of Blogging Your Passion posts

• Link resulted in nearly 5,000 visits.

• 6 other bloggers wrote about the same topic and linked back to the original post.

#contentmarketing

Thank You!Pelin Thorogood, Schulman+Thorogood Group

@PelinT

pelin@schulmanthorogood.com

www.schulmanthorogood.com

Andraz Tori, Zemanta@andraz | @zemanta

andraz@zemanta.com

zemanta.com

#contentmarketing