You've Got Great Content Now What

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Mike Moran, founder of Biznology and a senior strategist at Converseon, a leading social consultancy. I'm also co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules. and a former IBM Distinguished Engineer. Today you'll be hearing from Andrew Skolkind, who will present You've Got Great Content, Now What? But before we start, we need to recognize our sponsors. Andigos New Media, a content marketing agency helping businesses make the most of their website, email, and social media marketing efforts. BarnRaisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationships principles and ROI. GaggleAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try GaggleAmp for free today. MENG, the Marketing Executives Networking Group, New Jersey chapter. We aren't just about networking to land a great job. We're about staying current to grow in our careers. Unison, the unagency, your secret weapon in the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. As we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes. You can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and we'll email you that link later this week. During our speaker's presentation, you can use the GoToWebinar controls to ask a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event. and press the send button. I'll select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Andrew. While we're waiting for the few last attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology monthly newsletter and daily articles are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Andrew Skolkind is one of the authors at Biznology and founder of Andigo New Media. He's a veteran content marketer with a track record of helping businesses understand how their websites can be effective marketing tools. So if you've ever struggled with gaining more attention for the content you're creating, this is the webinar for you. Andrew, take it away.

Thanks, Mike, and hello everyone. Since we're doing this fast, I'm going to jump right in. I'm sure that everyone here knows exactly what content marketing is, but just to be sure we're all on the same page, let me offer you a quick definition. Or I guess actually, this is more of an anti-definition. And as silly as this slide seems, there really is an important and fundamental truth about content marketing here. And that is that not only Do you not care about me? You don't care about what I do. What you care about is what I can do for you. And keeping that in mind and addressing that concern is really fundamental to what content marketing is and what you should be thinking about when you are doing your marketing. Here is a more, I guess, traditional definition of content marketing which you can read through here or grab it on the Content Marketing Institute website which is a fantastic resource. I certainly encourage anyone to take a look there. I'd also, before we really jump into the meat of this, I'd like to talk a little bit about great content, because that is something that we are assuming that you already have in order to succeed in content marketing. Your great content has to do some combination of these 3 things. It has to appeal to your audience, or you will never get out of the blocks. It's just that simple. Ideally, it's going to also include some kind of evidence that you know what you are talking about. Although here we want to go easy on the braggy, braggy stuff. Ideally, you are not even going to have to mention your own name, yourself directly, your firm's work. And probably most importantly, you want to make sure that your content aligns with whatever it is that you are marketing. Otherwise, you are just publishing for free, and that's a great business model for So let's jump right into an example. Let's say that you create a white paper, and it is a fantastic white paper. It outlines a problem common to firms in your target audience. It shows solutions that you've implemented. Probably you'll want to have quantifiable results that you can point to. You look like a hero without ever having to say, hey, I'm a hero. It's even written in a style that has become your company voice. So that's great. Sort of tone and brand. You put it on your website. You are expecting to pin the needle on web traffic. And what you get instead is nothing, a whole lot of nothing, crickets as we say. And notice that this isn't just any cricket. This is a very well-dressed cricket playing a sad song for you on his fiddle because your content is so lonely. So why did this happen? Even though you've already got fans and you know that there are people out there who respect you and want to hear what you have to say, What happens is that only a sliver of your fans visit your website in a given month. And by next month, the content you've posted is old news, which is what makes social media so valuable. So here's our first example of ways that we can market our marketing, so to speak, social media. In this case, I'm going to go through this example right now using Twitter, but most of this applies with slight changes in terminology to other social media. So pick your channel. We are going to talk about some others later as well. Now, you probably are not going to successfully market your company in 140 characters or less. I'm sure somebody has done it, and somebody has written a book about it even, but that is basically a lottery ticket. The goal here really is to use 140 or less well-chosen characters to instead market the marketing content that you've created, so that this way your white paper isn't sitting lonely on your website anymore. Twitter, there are 2 ways that social media and Twitter give you a much wider audience. First, it gives you a much larger percentage of your own sort of, I'll call it natural or organic audience. There are more people who love you on Twitter right now than there are people who love you on your website. And I don't say that because I know anything about you or your website. I say that because there are more people on Twitter right now than there are on your website. So you might as well take advantage of going where they are. If you add in some other channels while we are doing this and we are talking about this, let's say LinkedIn or email marketing which we will get to shortly, now you've got an even bigger percentage of the audience that you've already managed to gather, because some people like Twitter, some like LinkedIn, some avoid them all and prefer instead to be in their own inbox. Beyond that audience that you've already garnered, you've got your audience's audiences, your audience's network. That's the way social media works. If your content is compelling enough, some portion of your audience is going to engage with it and expose their audience to it. Then your network grows as you are including some of that extended audience. And happily down the road towards Internet stardom we go, although it's probably going to go slowly because even though you have this audience, they are not all going to be paying attention at the same time. That's true of social media, probably all digital media really. You want to keep— that's one of the reasons you want to keep a very consistent flow of fresh content coming. So what's the trick to gaining traction on social media? We are starting from a point where we know we've got great content. I mean, that is a given. If that is something you have questions about, it is something we should talk about elsewhere. Beyond that though, you really need to have a great headline. I'm going to spend a little time talking about that later on. It is important enough that I don't want to try and cram it in here. And then the receptiveness of your audience is important as well. You have to have a professional presentation to what you are doing which means, I mean, at a bare minimum, no typos and just awful sloppiness like that. Timing matters as well, because your audience is going to be more active in social media at certain times of the day. 3:00 AM, probably not a good time to post or to schedule your activity. And finally, what I'm calling participation. If you think that participation on a channel like Twitter starts and ends with your brilliance and just the post itself, you are not going to get terribly far. Participation really means more about interacting with others by retweeting content that is certainly going to be of interest to your audience, favoriting, following others, commenting, things along those lines. What you have to remember is that social media is social. It is about a conversation. And you have to participate in order for it to work. One more thing quickly which I neglected to put on this slide, listening is a really big part of this. Social media gives you a huge opportunity to listen to what your audience is interested in. They will tell you in no uncertain terms what they like and what they don't like. So it is worth paying attention to that. I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about all the different kinds of social media. These are sort of just the big boys. I will offer 2 ideas here though. One is to encourage you to go deeper than the usual suspects, even Google+, which I included here on purpose because a lot of folks do overlook it. Google+ really tends to punch above its weight, so to speak, which conspiracy theorists have their thoughts about since it is a Google property. But on the other hand, I'm also going to encourage you to keep a tight rein on your social media activity. In other words, Don't do anything poorly. Do what you can. Dip your toe into anything that looks of interest and looks like your audience is going to give you the opportunity to connect with them there. But if you are not going to do it well, don't do it at all. Sort of last thought on this, on social media, this quote, love this quote from Jay Baer who is really I guess a rock star we can say in social media. I would like to take it one step further though and talk about content being fuel and social media being the spark. Without fuel, you are not going to burn very brightly or for very long. But if you don't put the spark to that fuel, then you are only talking about potential heat and light. And this is more what we are looking for. All right, email marketing is another area that we should certainly talk about. It gets a lot of grief because of how overstuffed all of our inboxes are, but it is still a really fantastic way to reach people where they are. Remember, both in social media and now with email marketing that we are talking about, we are trying to get people to enter our world, to come visit us. But we can't just sit in our little world and hope folks stop in. We have to go out and get them where they are comfortable. So social media is great for that because as I said, there are more people on Twitter right now than are on probably all of our websites combined. And email, there are a lot of people who, a lot of us kind of live in our inboxes. So here are some tactics that we want to think about, some ideas to think about. This should look very familiar since we just talked about roughly the same things for social media. Great content has to be there. The subject line, we are going to talk about that in a minute. And again, you want a receptive audience. Top of that list is compliance. You've got to have people's permission. CAN-SPAM has been out there a long time. This month CASL, Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation, takes effect. So it's just more and more you really have to have people's permission. You need to be engaging, and we've been talking about sort of what that means. And then schedule, I'm fond of saying set a schedule and then don't stick to it. Which sounds at first glance like it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You should certainly meet expectations that you set if you are going to do something on a monthly, or quarterly, or weekly basis. Certainly do that, but you really should be testing the time of day, day of week, even your frequency, even whether you are monthly, or quarterly, or whatever, because your audience may just not want to hear from you that frequently. So give them what they would like. There are a lot of tools that you can make use of. Right there in the middle, MailChimp and Constant Contact really sort of own a big chunk of the small business market. But there are a lot of these others that are worth taking a look at. 4 or 5 times over the last 18 months or so, we've done evaluations with clients who have said, hey, look, we are doing email marketing and there are certain things that we want to do that we can't easily do with Constant Contact or MailChimp, whatever they might have been using. And in those cases, I think in those cases AWeber, Django Mail, and iContact are the tools that came up. So these all have different strengths and weaknesses, and I would encourage you particularly as you get more comfortable to take a look at all of them. As you grow, Infusionsoft and Salesforce are certainly going to be worth taking a look at. They are not enterprise-level tools, but they are sort of heading in that direction. And of course, there are a whole bunch of enterprise-level tools Okay, I mentioned that we were going to talk about headlines and things along those lines, because they are important. So now we get to both the most awful and wonderful slide in my deck today. And it is awful and wonderful in the way that only the New York Post can be. I am certainly not suggesting that you go out and court controversy, or even the cringes that the Post's headline writers frequently seem to be able to create. Although there is, I have to say, there is marketing value there if you've got the stomach for it. But I am encouraging you to realize that if there is one thing you invest time and money in, it's got to be your headlines. And in headlines I'm talking about headlines, subject lines, sort of the tweets that you are using to draw people to your white papers, sort of everything we are talking about here that is your inducement, your engagement factor. Because more than anything else, the subject line or headline is going to determine whether your content is engaged with on any level. Grisly murder in Queens bar is— I wouldn't know about it because it wouldn't have made the front page, and isn't an article I'm likely to read. But headless body in topless bar, I mean, how can you say no? And here, they are not overpromising or being deceptive or anything. They are just putting as brave a face, but I'm not going to go there. It really does work to draw folks in. So choose with care. Be careful about the shock factor, but definitely pay attention to the impact that this has. this whole area is going to have on your effectiveness. Not unrelated to that are SEO, pay-per-click advertising to some extent, and hashtags. Because very quickly, SEO is mostly part of the content creation process. And of course, that is ongoing, the content creation process, so is SEO going to be. But you should also be thinking about the work that you did early on. Sort of keyword research for your SEO and pay-per-click campaigns. And you should be continuing to do research with hashtags when you are thinking about your subject lines, and headlines, and page titles, and so on. Because that same language, the language that people you found are using to find you in a search engine, that's really what's going to be attractive to them. That's what's on their mind. And so if you put that into your headlines and subject lines, chances are that is going to reap you good results. Hashtags, talking about them very quickly, there are lots of ways you can search hashtags. Twitter has tools that you can use now with their advertising platform. There are outside bodies here like hashtags.org. It definitely makes sense not only from a headline writing perspective, but also from the perspective of bounce. Sort of being able to find other tools. I mean other content out there and get a sense of what the market looks like. All right, so we are actually hitting the home stretch here. I think we are pretty good on time still. Last 2 concepts I want to talk about, maybe 2 of the most important, or certainly 2 of the more overlooked. The first of these is what we are looking at right now. Courting key influencers and accessing other communities outside of your own. If you are familiar with the term blogger outreach, this is blogger outreach and then some essentially. So there are a lot of people out there creating a lot of good content. Some of them are creating content that appeals to the same audience that you are trying to reach, or that you are reaching. So obviously, if you can find a way to get in front of their audience and put them in front of your audience, you've created a win in both directions. Sounds great, and there is no real trick to it. It's just hard work. And it's hard work because it's all about building relationships. There are some tools out there that can make it a little bit easier. GroupHigh, Incubi, BlogDash are all ways to go out and find bloggers that you might not know exist and who may have surprisingly big followings. But you still have to go out and create the relationships. It's not typically the sort of thing where you are going to be able to just up and say, hey, you want to post on my blog? I want to post on yours. That's not always going to work. And you should certainly be thinking beyond your blog as well here. Google Alerts, another great way. You set up alerts for keywords, or for industry buzzwords, things along those lines. And you will frequently turn up interesting outlets, or folks who it's interesting to follow, or just engage with. Don't forget about industry and trade group publications as well, because they can be a great place for sort of guest content opportunities, and finding folks who can contribute to your content stream as well. Journalists too, if you can get through HARO, Help a Reporter Out. It's tough to wade through even once a day, much less the 3 times a day it comes out. But you can find very interesting information there and opportunities to get your expertise out there in front of others, which that's a lot of what we're talking about. I also encourage you to look closer to home. There are communities I'm sure that your frontline salespeople are involved with. They are out there talking to clients and prospects and looking for clients and prospects. So if there are groups that your team is already a part of, then you've got a leg up. You are not starting from scratch. A key thing to remember here though is that you are not just seeking outlets for your own work, you also want to find good guest contributors. Again, this reciprocity that we were talking about with social media really matters here as well. All right, last key to the kingdom so to speak, analytics and testing. Or as we like to say, measure, measure, measure. It's a great quote from Peter Drucker. Basically, every element of your content marketing work can be tracked, and you have to commit to doing that work or you are just never going to know whether what you are doing is worth your time or a waste of time. Email marketing services all include good or even very good analytics and testing tools. You can A/B test subject lines, delivery times, and different versions of your copy or the image that you use. Don't be shy about testing a lot, especially as your list grows. With a smaller list, you are not always going to get great results because of sample size, but it is definitely working, definitely worth doing. Social media tools, there are a bunch out there. There are even more sort of roll-your-own templates for spreadsheets to track activity, reach, engagement. The resulting interactions and whether they actually turn into leads, you should really consider doing the research and making sure you are tracking what you are doing on hashtags and everything else to make sure you are devoting your energy to the places that it works. Overall, your biggest tool is probably going to be Google Analytics or something very similar to it, because for most of us our website is really sort of going to be the hub of our activities. And we are going to be trying to drive folks back there. We are going to have gated content, or email signups, or all sorts of other things that help us create these, what we refer to as proxy metrics. There is only one metric that counts, and that is profit. But as you back up from there, there are these other metrics that we are going to want to track. The one thing I encourage you to do here is not to stop where most people do, which is to have their web person put the code snippet in place, and then have a quick look at the default dashboard. That's it. Or they may even dive in deeper until they get overwhelmed. Google Analytics and just about every other analytics package I know of allows you to set up customized dashboards so that you can see just the data you want to see. So you can see the data that is most relevant to the work you are doing. Even better, you can set up multiple dashboards so that A, you can look at different things different times. And B, you can set those dashboards up on a sort of role-by-role basis. So that way, each person on your team is getting the information that is most important to them. And all that is without setting up what I'm showing on screen here, the conversion goals, where you can see as someone walks through the site what their path was, how many of them started the conversion process, however you define that, how many of them finished taking the action that you want to track? And most importantly, where are they last? Where did you lose them? Because if there is one spot in particular that looks troublesome, you will want to address that. So that is all we've got time for this morning. Definitely a very high-level overview here, but I hope that I've given you some inspiration and insights to be able to do more with the great content that you are creating. And with that, Mike, I will hand it back to you.

Thanks a lot, Andrew. I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of how to promote their content, but you didn't answer every question. I've got a few good questions here from our audience teed up for you. And I would like to remind our audience that it is not too late to ask your own question by typing it into the questions box in your GoToWebinar controls. Before we get to the questions, I would like to remind you that the Biznology team provides jumpstart workshops for corporations who want to apply what they learn directly to their own business and have their team create a plan for executive approval right in the workshop. Tim Peter and I teach the content marketing course and we'll be there to guide you and help you to persuade that executive to say yes. Go to biznology.com/training for more information on all of our offerings. We're about to start firing questions at Andrew, but we need to thank our sponsors once again. Andigo New Media, a content marketing agency helping businesses make the most of their website, email, and social media marketing efforts. BarnRaisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GaggleAmp, empowering companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try GaggleAmp for free today. The Marketing Executives Networking Group, New Jersey chapter. We aren't just about networking and landing a great job. We're about staying current to grow in our careers. The Unagency, your secret weapon in the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. Now on to your questions. Our first question, Andrew, is, are there any differences in how big companies and small companies do content marketing?

There certainly are, although I don't know that necessarily there have to be. Obviously, big companies have bigger teams frequently, and they can divide content tasks up across different roles. A lot of the same stuff happens, or essentially all of the same stuff happens for small businesses. There is one person or 2 people wearing multiple hats and getting that done. I would encourage everyone though to think about this on a very personal level. A lot of this does involve social media and email marketing where you are speaking to folks in a sort of individualized way. And hiding behind a big brand isn't necessarily a great idea. Putting some personality into it really matters. And quite honestly, small businesses seem to be better at that typically than big ones. I think big ones are catching up.

That's a great answer. Next question, what are some tips for the best headlines or subject lines? I've seen where numbers get the most engagement. Is that true?

I hate to say it because I hate to encourage more of these list posts, top 10 ways to get great ROI on your content, or 7 Secrets for Email Marketing Success. But they really work, sad to say. And people want, typically they want something quick. They want it easy. They want it digestible. And headlines like that make it clear that that's what you are going to do. So for some kinds of content, that is a great strategy.

Next question, my audience is B2B. Do they really respond to the kinds of juicy headlines you've shown?

Absolutely. I don't know if they are going to respond to a New York Post style headline, but absolutely they will respond to something that piques their interest. I think all too often, and my work mostly is in B2B marketing as well, we tend to forget that at the other end, at the receiving end of the content we put out there, is a person, and they are a consumer at some level even though they are acting in a business role. But they are human, and making that emotional connection is always going to be more effective even if what you are talking about is— there are a lot of folks in so-called boring industries, whether it is widgets, or insurance, or whatever. A lot of folks say, our industry is so boring, there is nothing we can talk about. You can always find a way to talk engagingly about what you do.

Well, Andrew, that's all the time we have for today. I'd really like to thank you for these great ideas, and especially to thank our audience for your participation and your questions. If any of you had questions we didn't have time to answer, you can email your questions to Eileen— that's E-I-L-E-E-N— at mikemorangroup.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Andrew for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, Digital Marketing Directions: Key Trends Driving Your Marketing Next Year, scheduled for 11:00 AM US Eastern Time on September 16th. We hope to see everybody back here then. Bye everyone.

Bye.