HOW TO DO CONTENT MARKETING

SO IT WORKS

(by Laure Parsons @laurex)

3 MAJOR TAKEAWAYS

• Narrow your audience; use data

• Go big: infrequent but amazing content over lots of mediocre content

• Distribution: add paid to amplify

THE AUDIENCE, THE CUSTOMER

THE JOURNEY MAP

Map out the whole customer story, beyond just the product/website

• Consider the channels in the journey, not just in the website

• Define triggers & score (new vs repeat visitors, for example)

• <40 too low engagement• 40-80 might complete action• 80+ will complete action, not

churn, etc

STUFF YOU NEED TO KNOW

• Age• Gender• Where do they live• What are their interests• Who do they spend time with• Their digital capability• How social are they

HOW TO GET CUSTOMER DATA

Using Facebook to get social data

• Find favourite interests of people who like your company• Games they like• Movies they watch• Restaurants they visit (with location)

Using Facebook Ads, click on Page Likes

• Go to Audience section• Note how many people are on there• Go to interests and see how many people like each

interests• Then go to shared reach and note the numbers

MORE WAYS TO DETERMINE CUSTOMERS WITH DATA

•ID user paths and flows within website and outside website in other measurable channels

•ID Triggers: time between visits, # of page views, clicks, referral channel, user type, time on site, user path, form submission, anything that can be measured

•Append data to your users: Towerdata and Fullcontact APIs, other APIs with EXCEL-REST, use Postman browser plugin to test out APIs to see if they are useful

•Orange - visual data analysis tool•K-Means clustering analysis (data must be normalized- try using Open Refine)

•Tribalytics: cluster by twitter followers

OR. KEEP IT SIMPLE.• Scott Edwards @scottedwards was the first marketer at

the startup bank Simple. He didn’t have a ton of resources or people who could collect data and analyze it. So he started with a tweet.

• “If you could ask one question about financial data what would it be?”

• He took the responses and wrote a highly researched article about tipping in America, comparing regional data about tipping to help people answer a question they really wanted an answer to: how much should I be tipping.

• This article got huge coverage and exposure. Scott didn’t write another blog post for over a month, and didn’t do another big content piece for 2-3 months. But that piece got so much continued exposure that it was a huge win for the bank. A little over a year later, the Simple marketing team has grown to 11, with positions waiting to be filled, and they are still focused on the big content approach.

BE AMBITIOUS. Not that often.

TEXT<VISUALS<VIDEO<INTERACTIVE

It’s better to create a few very valuable, very sharable pieces of content than a ton of small, irrelevant content.

• Text>1500 words (and well-researched and valuable) is much better than shorter articles

• Add multimedia: images, videos, diagrams reduce bounce rate and increase time on site

• Rich content is more likely to get shares

• Even old stories, when they are good, are useful for getting found

FOR B2BFor b2b, create content that isn’t about the product but is interesting to the audience. It should also be interesting to you, not what you “think people will be interested in.” For example, in-depth articles about tech startups and their roads to success could be a good topic.

CONTENT NEEDS

•simple•unexpected•concrete•credible•emotional•story

TELL THE STORY

1. What is the conflict?2. Draw the Venn diagram of your product, the customer need

3. Who is the hero? (Hint: Not the brand/product, it’s the customer)

4. Explain the outcome (happy) in the story first5. Why are you in business? 6.What do you stand for? (Let’s try: Have a mission statement or list of our commitments that we use frequently)

WHAT ARE YOUR CUSTOMERS LOOKING FOR?

1. Solve problems (big content)2. Address concerns or objections3. Talk about price4. Shed light on your community5. Let customers tell the story

DISTRIBUTIONlet’s give ‘em something to talk about

OWNED• Make sure all your marketing is integrated, website, pitches to journalists, social • Split test headlines• Email links: Where are they going? Is the page mobile optimized? If the customer is

supposed to sign up for something, make it very easy to do on mobile as well as web• 43% avg of email opens are on mobile• 80.3% of mobile users delete when the email looks bad• 30.2% unsubscribe

• Split test landing pages• Use tools like usabilityhub, litmus.com/scope (scrape html of good emails)• Make it easy to share, make sure sharing is on both top and bottom of articles/content,

and possibly in body or use a hover • Optimize what type of social channel buttons show up based on the users• Install Open Graph Meta Protocol- optimize what image gets shared• Use Facebook Connect • Set up retargeting cookies - you can also use for email retargeting , you can see what

the user looks at and send them email based on that

PAID• Good for early stage content programs• Types: PPC, Social, Influencer partnerships, Native• Thomas Smith’s guide to Successful Advertising from 1885• Prepare for ongoing management- you can’t just set it up and let it run• Leverage engagement ads - users have to hover for 2 seconds• promote G+ pages• Use retargeting• Use tools like Resonance• Tool: Unruly: social video marketing• Kaggle = 99designs of data science• In LinkedIn ads you can choose by job title to share content• Send people links to content related or community right after purchase, i.e. you just bought our product,

now you can join the Facebook group or (when we have it) contribute to our community gallery• Create lookalike audiences based on users who visited content• Twitter cards• Click to buy on Facebook and twitter- not as B2B• Run ads on competitors channels (youtube)• Influencer partnerships- pay bloggers- very successful• Think beyond website coverage- such as blogger’s email newsletters• Set up retargeting cookies on the blogger’s site

EARNED• Social Crawlytics - find the top content, pull the author data, find their social channels

and find the ones that are most influential• Find bloggers that follow you a competitor, or a topic relevant, use Followerwonk

tool• Try to get company on any top 10s or that type of thing in your industry• Manufacture serendipity: i.e find a way to have great coincidences with key journalists.

No one posts things they are *told* to, could be by paid media to make earned media to make it work. Try to become someone journalists want to follow

• Monitor journalists on Quora, Facebook (need a personal email probably) and medium

• Stalk journalists, twitterland, buzzsumo, look and see who they talk to the most, make content tailored to them. Use allmytweets lay in wait until they are ready, horo look to see which journalists talked the most about a topic

• Blogger/journalist relationships - studies show familiarity itself makes you more attractive

ROCK THIS.