INBOUND 2016: Carrie Kerpin "The Trick to Improving Content ROI: Make Your Content 3D"

Hi. Hi. How are you guys doing? Everyone's good. We're gonna have the best time right now. I'm quite excited because I'm gonna tell you all about the trick to improving your content roi. And I can give you a guarantee that you are going to laugh in some capacity in this presentation either. Hopefully, you'll be laughing with me, and if not, you'll definitely be laughing at me. So we'll see how it goes. All right, so let's talk about content and creating content that delivers you a better return, because hopefully I can give you some light on that today. I have a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that I really like. The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all. Does anyone know what the hedgehog's trick is? Get the hell away from the fox. Right. Outrun the fox. The fox is brilliant. The fox comes up with new ways to outsmart everyone. But then there's this hedgehog. The hedgehog is the one who, time and time again does the exact same thing, which is roll themselves up into a ball and go as fast as they can ahead of the fox. I like to consider myself a hedgehog. I've been doing social media marketing for a really, really long time. In fact, I've had a social media agency since 2006, which in social media years is like, forever, right? It's been a really long time. The platforms have changed, the methods have changed. Everything has changed. There's been so, so many shifts. And if I was speaking to you in 2007, it would be entirely different than how I was speaking to you in 2010. It would be entirely different from 2013, which would be entirely different from how I was speaking to you today. And yet one thing has always remained the same. And that one philosophy, that one philosophy is what has carried me through as an agency owner managing a rapidly changing environment for 10 years and growing every single year. It's really only one thing. Do you guys want to know what the one thing is? Okay, I can't tell you yet, but I will tell you soon. Okay, so before I tell you, I want to talk to you a little bit about your content. Okay, so these are some pretty basic things. So, so, simple question checklist for you. Does your content add value to the intended target? We're constantly asking ourselves this. Does your content add value? Is it something that either helps them, makes them laugh, does something that adds value to them? In fact, does your content help their online experience versus interrupt it? We all know about the concept of Interrupting online experience, right? When I talk to my friends who are not in social media and I talk to them about why they're there. And by the way, these are the people who are customers. These are the people who. Your audience, who you're trying to reach. They're like, yeah, I'm there to look at pictures of my friends, babies. I'm there to celebrate a marriage. I'm there to talk about current events. I'm there to do these things. They're not there to be inundated with content by your brand. They don't care. They don't care. And that's the reality. So I want you to think about that. Does it add value? Does it help their online experience versus hurt it because you're interrupting them? And finally, if your content's really good, does it make their face move? What do I mean by make their face move? Well, how many of you are on the T, if we're in Boston or anywhere and watching someone look at their phone? This is the face that I see everywhere, every day, all the time. Mouth hanging open, dead dead eye reading, consuming content all day. Now that I've really processed that and thought about that, I see it all the time. All the time. You're just staring at your phone and you're zoning out. I see it in Manhattan, where I work, every day. I see people walking down the street going through, is your content good enough that it makes your face move? What do I mean by that? I mean content that makes you either look at it and go, hmm, that's interesting. Or content that makes you go, oh, that's so sweet. Or content that makes you crack up. Or content that makes you shocked. Or content that makes you roll your eyes. Or content that really makes you roll your eyes. Or content that makes you cry, content that makes you really shocked. You want to create content that helps make your face move, makes the people who are watching it have a reaction of some sort. That is no easy task. My question for you on this checklist is how do you know? How do you know that their face moves? Well, you say, Carrie, you say, I'm going to look at their engagement rate and I'm going to look at their reach. I'm going to see if they're sharing it and they're going to do all of that. Yes, you have a good gauge of whether or not content makes someone's face move by the reaction to the content. But I am here to tell you that you have an opportunity to know, or at least have a much better idea of Whether or not someone's face is going to move when they're looking at your content. Before that content hits the ground. Before, not after. And if you're using the right techniques, you will know if your content is going to produce a reaction and you will know that your content will perform better. Or maybe you should think twice about that content. So let's talk about that before. Before I give you that single trick. Before I give you that single trick, I'm going to give you a special analogy. Are you ready for my special analogy? Uh huh. Thanks for my audible. Uh huh. It makes me feel a lot better. It really reinforces me. Bless your heart. You guys, this is the first time I tried to be funny in over 48 hours. This is tough. This is tough. Okay, so here we go. Mirror versus the photograph. This, by the way, is the story of my life, okay? I look in the mirror every day. Holy cow, girl, you look awesome. Look at you. And then someone like this sweet man who I've asked to take photos of me will take a picture of me. And I look at a picture and I'm like, what the hell was I thinking with this outfit? What was I thinking all the time? The mirror versus the photograph is a chronic battle. And I am here to tell you that you are creating content for while you are looking in a mirror, you are sitting in a boardroom. You are sitting with people who work in marketing. You are sitting together and you are crafting content that you think is going to perform well while you're sitting in your own vacuum and looking in a mirror. More often than not, perhaps you're not. But I know for me and I know for my agency and someone who's grown over the years, many times I have worked while looking in the mirror versus looking and working and creating content while looking at a photograph. You all get that kind of concept, okay? Mirror, photograph. We all know this as people. Now I'm going to show you how this plays out, okay? The single trick, I'm going to give it to you right now. Okay? You guys ready? You listening? Wait, wait, wait, wait. That's it. Are you listening? Are you listening? Yes. Okay, here's the deal. The single trick is to listen before you create your content. It's to listen. Let's talk about what listening is. By the way, listening is more than just listening platforms, okay? Because I am inundated with requests and thoughts from listening platforms. So we're going to talk about that. I love listening platforms, by the way. If you're all in the room, but it's more than that. It's about really using the single greatest listening tool we have, which is this public world, for better or worse, called social media, and using it to create content that makes your target audience's face move. So let's talk about how we're going to do that. First, I want to set the stage for you. We know we need listening. 76% of marketers say they know they need to be more data focused to succeed. We need data. I don't want to make any of these decisions without data. 74% agree that capturing and applying data to inform and drive marketing activities is the new reality. Data. Give me the data. Show me the data. How do they do it? How do you take the social media, huge infrastructure that's out there? There's all of this data, all of this data, and how do you transform it into something meaningful? You guys, we are drowning in data. We're drowning in. It's not that we need more data. What we need more of is insights. We need a greater ability to take in all of that listening and understand what it means. Let's talk about some of the things that we can listen for, okay? And some of this is old news. You guys are really smart. I'm obsessed with this conference and looking at all the smart attendees and the people who are here. Some of you may be doing this, but hopefully I can help you take it to the next level. For instance, when we talk about things to listen for and what's trending. What's trending is one thing, and there's many a marketer who have made a mistake in what's trending. Right? We talk about what's trending, whether or not it's relevant to us. I am not talking to you about what to talk about. I want you to know what to listen for. So when you're listening to what's trending, I don't want you to think, oh, look, this really important thing is trending, and it has absolutely nothing to do with my brand. And maybe I should comment on it. I want you to think about, okay, this is trending. This is how people feel. Is there content that's relevant that I can tap into about people and how their emotions are feeling right now? 2. How different targets speak. Guess what, guys? It doesn't mean I think we should create content that talks like all of our targets speak, because that's a lot of times really inauthentic and doesn't sound like your brand. But I want you to know how they speak, and I want you to know what it means, and I want you to think about how that might impact how they feel and therefore how the type of content you create might resonate. Next, I want you to listen to your competitors. Actually, side note, I hate listening to my competitors. It makes me crazy because it makes me, first of all, get off my own track, and it makes me anxious and it makes me all of these kinds of things, right? Especially when you have competitors around you that are doing great things and you're like, damn, why didn't I think of that? The reality is you need to know what your competitors are doing. You need to learn from it and use it to make you great. Listening to conversations, the conversations that are happening between people. One of the things that I think is key when I work with a brand that works with moms, I don't just want to see what they're saying about the diapers that they use. I want to see how they're engaging with each other. Like, let's say it's a diaper brand. I don't just want to see, okay, let me see what they're saying about your brand and what your competitors brand. I want to see what they're talking about, about life. Because at the end of the day, if we're to create content that makes someone's face move and that really inspires them to action, then we're going to have to talk about more than just our own product. We're going to have to talk about how our product makes people feel and the feelings associated with that. That is what causes our faces to move. Your own communities, of course, you should be listening to your own communities, but generally this is where people start and sometimes stop. Okay, what do you mean? Of course I'm listening. I'm looking at my replies, I'm looking at people who are commenting on Facebook. I'm looking at all of these things. Your own communities is sort of a permission to play. And then the last thing that I've added here, because I think it's so key, is forums. You know, B2B marketers struggle so much with social. I have a lot of clients who work in the B2B space. There are so many underutilized areas of conversations. And specifically within forums, I want you to look and, you know, honestly, like, first step, when I talk to people like that, just Google forums about automotive, forums about realty, you know, all of these different things like, or real estate. There's so many different things that you can look at. There are forums about just about everything. And you'll see a different level of conversation because they'll be talking around a specific industry or segment that matters to you. Don't ignore forums. Okay, so let's talk about how to listen. So I told you there's a million tools. I put some tools up here that we look at and use simply measured, likeable, local. My husband found it and actually created a listening tool for smaller businesses. Sysimos is a great listening tool. There's so many listening tools out there. There's so, so many. And I am really kind of tool agnostic in terms of how this goes, because none of them are perfect, by the way. And all of them do a good job. Right? It's a mix. What I always say with likable media, which is the agency that I run, is that it's kind of a mix of tools and talent, right? So that pull in. So you need people still pulling it in. And then you need some listening software with the people that come together, come to you. And really that's what's key. You could have all the listening data and all the listening tools in the world. It takes people to look at and understand it and see what it means. It takes people to look at it and get inspired to say, what type of content are we going to create next? And so going from listening, taking the people, you gain insights. You gain insights. So I'm going to show you actually how listening plays against insights. So I'll give you an example. So I have a great client that I love called Pure Barre. Do you guys know Pure Barre? It's like Barre Fitness, right? Lift, Tone, Burn, all of these. It's one of the fitness boutiques. It's franchise. It's great. It takes some ballet and exercise and all this stuff. Okay, you guys. So when I think about purebar, what's like, the first thing you think about would market it well, like exercise, like girly stuff, like all that. Right? It's all women that go to Pure Bar. Okay. So one of the things that you don't think about is football. So one of the things that we saw when we were listening to this active segment of women is that these women were actually hanging out in the house with their husbands on Sundays, watching football. And we saw a lot of kind of commiseration around that. We saw a lot of conversation around that. And so what we decided to do, because we were listening and we saw this trend that was sort of counterintuitive. See, I really like the counterintuitive trends because obviously there are lots of common Themes that we see from listening. But when you look for the counterintuitive trend is when you kind of win. And so what we decided to do was a football lift, tone, burn game. So every time an action happened in the football game, you would have to do something. So when your team scores a touchdown, touch your toes and hold, hold for fan counts. When someone in the room yells at the tv, squeeze your seat. Right? There's all of these different things. This went wild. This is not a fancy piece of content. And by the way, the examples that I gave you today, I did them so that they would not have to be heavily produced pieces of content. You could kind of sketch this or do something like this. This is not about the quality of the content for me. It's about the quality of the message. And so that's why I picked these types of pieces. This is a small, small, simple thing that got, you know, had to be 28 times the engagement that a typical pure bar. When I'm calculating my head, a typical pure bar post gets. Why? Because it was different, because it resonated and because we listened. We knew that it would perform well. We knew that. Okay, so let's talk about the next one. So that's one of the clients that we work with, Another client we work with. It's a great client. Okay, so it's called IBS check. Does anyone know IBS check? Uh huh. Okay, great. Yes. It's a test to check if you have irritable bowel syndrome. Can you guys imagine the content? Imagine. Thank God I got one laugh. I did promise you, I did promise you that it was going to be funny. So it makes me happy that I hear a little bit. Okay, so IBS check. IBS check. We have to think about what are we going to talk about here? Well, guess what? People really like to talk about poop. And they like to talk about poop when they, they do on the Internet. It's bizarre. Who knew they like to talk about poop in strange situations. For instance, like this special situation where this woman had to run to the bathroom while she was on her first date. That was something that a series of events that, where you might have to run to the bathroom with your ibs. Okay, we knew that it was going to perform. We knew that people were going to relate to it. And oddly enough, we knew that people were going to share it. I mean, you guys imagine. But for real, they shared it. And they shared it a lot. A lot. We were able to show with IBS check that we were actually Able to drive direct tests as you would go and you'd buy a kit to get tested and you would go and we were able to show direct quote, correlation between this type of content and going to get an IBS check kit. Crazy. Some of the other things we did, not everything is funny, right? So some of the other things we did that were really of value. You know, when I talk about a value to the intended target, we did a lot of recipe based stuff for Ibscheck and that recipe based stuff performed really, really well. Why? Because people need that. And IBS check said, oh, I can figure out how to actually be of value. Right. So by listening to that, by listening to that, a large percentage of them are talking about diet, a large percent of them are talking about their poop and how embarrassing it is. And all of this stuff in these public forums, guess what? We were able to take that and make that really move forward. Bless you. Okay, let's talk about listening in context. Okay, so I told you some of the things that you should do that I think would be really terrific. And they'll talk about some of the things maybe that you need to think about because it's not. One of the challenges with listening is it's not like, oh, I hear that everyone's talking about this, let's go, go, go. So let's talk about how we might do that. So don't speak like your target unless it's natural. So we do a lot of the content for grubhub and Seamless, which is a food delivery service. You guys know grubhub and Seamless? They're so fun. Their social, so fun. I encourage you to check it out. But people see that brand is like kind of a quirky, cool brand. And how they talk is kind of quirky and cool. And if you look at their target, you see a lot of young people who are ordering stuff and you see people who talk like this, Polar chicken pie is da bomb. So polar chicken pie is da bomb. Just because polar chicken pie is da bomb doesn't mean that grubhub and Seamless needs to reply. Yo, bro, it really is like you have to, you have to tie together and understand how you can engage and talk to these people without pandering to them. Because I will tell you for sure that if you create content that replies to this, like, yeah, it's the bomb, yo, they're going to see right through you. You know who you're going to be. Have you guys seen Mean Girls? Yeah, you're totally going to Be cool mom. Cool mom for mean girls is the mom who's, like, walking around, like, trying to be so cool like her daughters and trying to be a teenager like she's trying to be cool. Brands end up being a heck of a lot like cool mom when we try to speak like targets, unless it is a natural situation to do so. There are cases where we speak like that. I think if you look at. I think Taco Bell does a really interesting job of communicating via emoji and having that type of conversation that feels natural, but that's kind of natural for Taco Bell. That's who they are. Okay? You can listen to your target without having to speak exactly like them, and they'll still respect you and like your content. Okay, you guys know this. Don't comment on things that are totally irrelevant to you unless there's a clear connection. This was my absolute favorite social media faux pas of listening. Okay? So David Bowie dies and Crocs thinks it's really important to comment because as we know, fashionista David Bowie was rocking his Crocs big time. He was really, really into those Crocs. Really into it. Your magic will be missed, but your inspiration lives on forever, David Bowie. Thank you, Crocs. Thank you, Crocs, for feeling my pain about David Bowie and his death. No, not relevant. Not relevant. Not relevant to you at all. Zero reason, zero tie, anything like that. You want to tell me you're making a commemorative shoe and it doesn't look anything like a Croc. Maybe. But Crocs and David Bowie do not mix similarly. I only stay on this for one minute because basically every year, this happens. Every single year. I found this, actually, when I was looking for Seamless and Grubhub. And I was listening, and this was a delivery site, kcdeliver.com, a small company, and it said, dreaming of free delivery for your favorite restaurant? Use code MLK and your delivery's on us. This was on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Yep. Every year. Every year. You guys are not going to do that. But my point is. My point is just to think before you engage around these types of things. Think less about what's happening in the world and how you can contribute to that conversation versus what's happening in the world, how people are feeling and how you might add value to their lives when they're feeling that way. Either really great or really sad or really confused or all of these things. Okay? Don't open a conversation without thinking it through. You guys also probably know this, and I have some Examples actually that are at events. So first, this McDonald's. Love McDonald's. Sometimes I have been known to occasionally partake in, in a McDonald's meal. But this was a big mistake. They opened up a whole thing asking people to share their MCD stories. And when people shared their MCD stories, if buns get dropped on the floor, they still get put in the toaster. 95% of the time there's a MCD story from an employee. You see, their floor is pretty effing spotless though. I mean, this opened up a whirlwind. So user generated conversation and asking people to participate in a conversation and is tricky in two areas. First, it's tricky if your brand is problematic. And second of all, it's tricky if nobody gives a crap. Right? How many times have you opened a conversation that's like crickets. Like you have to think about why. So think about that. Similarly, at an event, Starbucks did something actually at a, at the Natural History Museum where they were going through and leaving an open source tweeting and sharing. And what happened was, and it was, it was at the Natural History Museum, they were sharing it across the web to give it greater reach. And there was an Occupy Manchester movement, an anti union movement that took over the whole feed. And so there they are at the Museum of Natural History. All of this stuff popping up over and over and over and over. Lack of control, lack of moderation around that. So when you're listening, you know that this type of stuff happens when you're listening, you know that you're leaving yourself open for these kinds of things. And when you're listening, you can create and craft a much better plan. Okay, so now I told you to listen, you know, to use tools, you know, to use talent, you know, to pull it together, you know, to listen for things that are kind of unusual, you know, to look for trends, you know, to talk about how people feel and start really kind of getting out there. I would encourage you also, by the way. So not just listening online, but listening in real life. Get some customers in there, get a panel together to talk to them. You can do that online or off. Now you have killer content that was created through a curation process. You've listened, now you've created content. So what do you do? Okay, so I'm going to give you a content calendar hack. It's going to save you time, it's going to save you money. We all like those things, right? Practical hacks. Okay, good. So regular content calendar, you may have it in any way you want. It might be in Excel, it might be in PowerPoint, it might have all of these different things. Every piece of content is laid out, what network, et cetera, what time you're posting it, how you're posting it, et cetera. When I do this, I produce, I would say, over 100 content calendars in a given month for different brands. They're all very lengthy, they're all very complicated. You've got lots and lots and lots of stuff. Stuff. But I forced my team to do one thing just a little bit differently. And so what I forced them to do was to pull out three to five posts. And when they pull out three to five posts, I want to see why they think that post is going to perform well. What listening have they done to show me that that post is going to perform well? By the way, if I did this for every piece of content, for every client, my staff would kill me. Right? It would take forever. It would be horrible. But the concept is to get them thinking and get them in that space. And so what I created for my staff that I would give to you is a curate report. Just tell me. Here's a post. This is from Cohen's Fashion Optical. Okay. It actually is targeted. Even though this post, I have to say, I had them send me a few. Had them send me this one. I would have changes if I did this myself, but I wanted to show you what really gets sent to me. This is a post designed actually to go to artsy, cool people who wear glasses. People who care about fashion and glasses. Okay. So this is their post. They're showing me that Potter's clay is a new pantone color. They're showing me that they have glasses that match it. From looking at it, I know that that's kind of a cool post, but I want to get them into a space where they're showing me why. So what is the purpose? Okay. They say the purpose of the video Driving Urgent. This was actually video Driving Urgent. Seasonal foot traffic. By showcasing options that match fall fashion trends, they're really targeting an artist community and getting people into the retail location.