CopyPress CEO and all around awesome human being, Dave Snyder was guest presenter at the February 2017 meeting of DFWSEM, where he delivered this absolutely killer presentation. Dave brought down the house with his use of gifs, and blew everyone away with his easy-to-follow instructions for creating kick-ass content and developing an effective content marketing strategy. In this slide deck, you’ll find expert insight and actionable examples that will not only help understand your audience better, but also how people learn, process, and react to content. If you’ve ever wanted to hone your content writing skills, this is a slide deck you can’t pass up! Click the link below to read the recap. https://www.dfwsem.org/a-night-of-gifs-and-content-dave-snyder-took-us-back-to-school/

1. Mind Games: The Art and
Science of KPI Driven Content

2. Understanding the Mind
Games
• How we learn and understand content
• How we react to content
• Let’s Build a Strategy

3. How We Learn and Understand Content

4. Infobesity
It is a real thing.
Content has become the high fructose
corn syrup of the web. It’s everywhere,
and while we consume it, we don’t think
much about it outside of that
consumption.

5. How to get noticed
amongst the sweets
Marketers need to tell stories,
amongst a sea of stories, that
not only capture attention, but
lead to an action.

6. It’s Like Tricking Kids
Into Eating Healthy…
You can mold great information
into amazing content that matches
what the reader is looking to
consume, or even better, draws
their attention in even if they
happen by it.

7. The Key: Find People in “Learn Mode”
Understanding what readers are looking for in the first place
Readers are looking to:
•Acquire facts or procedures
•Understand reality
•Make sense of the world
Sure there are users just wandering aimlessly looking for entertainment, but this
isn’t the segment we want. We want active participants in the content relationship.

8. Learning Styles
• Visual: Using sight
• Auditory: Using songs or rhythms
• Verbal: Speaking the information out loud
• Kinesthetic: Using touch and taste to explore the information
• Logical: A more mathematical approach to concepts
• Interpersonal: Learning in groups
• Intrapersonal: Learning alone
These learning types are called modalities.

9. Research has shown that because
most educational content is stored in
terms of meaning, there is not a true
value in teaching an individual based
on their own, individualized modality.
However, modality when it comes to
content is incredibly important.

10. For example, if you want to get someone to
remember the bones in the human
skeleton, a teacher may use a faux
skeleton that the class can see and touch.
They wouldn’t expect only kinesthetic
learners go down this path, even though
the content and context of the lesson is
overall better suited for this modality.

11. The more modalities you can pack into your content, the more likely
your content is to stick with different content consumers.
Visual and interactive content gives you the best opportunity to
explore multiple modalities.

12. Integrating Modalities
Let’s look at ways you can integrate modalities into your content to
effectively get your message to stick

13. Chunking
Chunking is a way of learning that does what it says; it takes larger
concepts and breaks them into smaller digestible concepts. This can
be done most effectively through the auditory and visual modalities.

14. Chunking

15. Interacting Images
An item is much more likely to be remembered if it can be shown
interacting with another item. In this case, we are compiling items
together to create a whole memory. In the infographic below, the artist
uses a simple use case of cows to explain complex government and
economic models.

16. Interacting Images

17. Dual coding assumes that there are two cognitive sub-systems. One is
specialized for dealing with processing imagery, and the other for
dealing with language. A good example of dual coding is the utilization
of graphs to represent numeric data. People can relate two different
fractions more quickly in graph form.
Dual Coding

18. Dual Coding

19. Kinesthetic Learning
This modality is action based. Learners retain information by
interacting with the item. Take our skeleton analogy above for
example.

20. https://www.bestlifequote.co
m/living-with-diabetes-
interactive/
Kinesthetic Learning

21. Practical Tips for Using Cognitive Science
Understanding cognitive science can allow you to create content that
is more effective by matching the right modalities with the right
message and data. However, understanding modalities and learning
techniques can also allow us to optimize content we are already
creating for it to reach maximum effectiveness.

22. Make It Concise and Scan-able
By making your content concise and scan-able, you are not only making
the content visually appealing to intrapersonal learners, but you are also
battling the infobesity issue. This is the reason really strong white papers
should be presented via abstracts with the actual white paper being a
downloadable or in some other format. Give consumers the gist and
structure with concise data in a way that entices the consumer to read
more.

23. Learn to Tell Stories
By creating a story for readers around your complex data concept, you are utilizing
multiple modalities and cognitive concepts.
Do you remember Aesop’s Fable about sour grapes? It taught us how easy it is for us
to grow to despise what we cannot have. Fables were a way to utilize storytelling to
teach complex moral concepts to children. These stories use a mixture of interacting
images and top-down processing to help consumers use existing information to fill in
the gaps of their understanding about a topic.

24. Visual Metaphors and Analogies
Similar to storytelling, adding metaphors and analogies to your content
can help clear blind spots in your consumers’ understanding. “The
Tale of Two Cows” infographic above did a tremendous job of using
this concept to help make complex economic concepts easy to digest.

25. Make it Personal
People understand concepts better when the concepts relate to them
directly. “How does this concept affect me?” is the question you
should look to answer. Taking the neuro-science one step further, you
should look to influence the emotional reaction of the consumer.

26. Going viral is a great thing, there is no debating that. However, as marketers, we need
to think about not only how our content gets shared, but how it is digested. We need to
plan around our consumers and think about how our minds work in relation to the
information we are trying to get out there.
Complex data and concepts are simply something marketers will need to learn to work
with as they develop their content strategies. Not all content can be quick hit, buffet-
style content. The key is learning to shape the content so it doesn’t get passed by in
the buffet line, and making it good enough that people want to eat as much as they can
get their hands on.

27. How We React to Content

28. Plutchick’s Wheel

29. Important Points to Theory
The concept of emotion is
applicable to all evolutionary levels
and applies to all animals including
humans.

30. Important Points to Theory
Emotions serve an adaptive role in
helping organisms deal with key
survival issues posed by the
environment.

31. Important Points to Theory
There is a small number of basic,
primary, or prototype emotions.

32. Important Points to Theory
All other emotions are mixed or
derivative states; that is, they occur
as combinations, mixtures, or
compounds of the primary
emotions.

33. Emotional Self Regulation
“being able to properly regulate one’s
emotions. It is a complex process that
involves initiating, inhibiting, or
modulating the following aspects of
functioning”

34. Emotional Self Regulation
1. Initiation Point – For this particular
conversation, this is content.
2. Result – This can be a number of
things, but the most basic concept is
traffic.

35. Example: Terror
http://www.rehabs.com/explore/meth-before-and-
after-drugs/infographic.html

36. Example: Joy, Interest
http://www.buzzfeed.com/donna
d/the-legend-of-zelda-a-history

37. What About Boring B2B Topics Though?

38. 1.32 Ways Your Employees Waste Time and Money
2.Survey: Small Business Tax Landscape and Effects
3.Small Businesses Lose $30,000 a year in Lost Sales: Stop the
Bleeding!

39. 1.How to Hire and Motivate Like Tesla
2.Warren Buffet’s Tips for Small Businesses at Tax Time
3.The Marketo Model: How they built their sales engine, and how you
can copy it

40. 1.120,000 Employees Rated Their Employers Negatively on Glassdoor
in 2016
2.120,000 Small Businesses Miss This Basic Tax Tip to Save $5,000 Annually
3.US Companies Lost an Estimated $150m in Sales Last Year Due to a Basic
CMS Issue

41. The Key: No One and Done
The likelihood that a single emotion will get
the job done is highly unlikely, just as a
single piece of content is unlikely to get
you where you want to be.
No time for back patting … only more work
ahead

42. Let’s Build a Strategy

43. I Love Content Plans Focused on
a Time Period and a Theme

44. Step 1: The timing
Quarterly or Monthly? That is the
question.
The answer will be based on
resources and KPIs.

45. Step 2: The Theme
Regardless of the length of the time
period, all of your content for that
period is going to be themed around
a single concept.
Embrace it!

46. CopyPress Example of Theme

47. ALL!!!???
Yes I said all , shut up and listen!
Whitepapers
Ebooks
Infographics
Articles
Emails

48. Step 3: Create an Editorial
Calendar
Maybe the most underutilized
concept in marketing.
Your calendar should plan out the
production, QA, publishing, and
marketing of your content.

49. Step 4: Ideation
Note in Step 3 you are planning
content types, not specific content.
You want to create about 2 to 3x the
ideas that you actually need for your
calendar. Refine and drill down

50. Some Tips on Ideation
1) Create personas for your content consumers. Who are you writing
for?
2) What ways can you carve up the same information to reach
different learners?
3) What emotions can you trigger in these consumers?

51. Personas

52. Personas

53. General Tips on Ideation

54. Step 5: Content Planning
Build an internal questionnaire to
get all the information out of
yourself and key stake holders and
over to content creators. A basic
idea is not a good idea.

55. Important Concepts for Questionnaire
1) Why will this content exist? If you write “drive traffic” you
deserve to be fired
2) What problems typically drive someone to find this type of content,
and what decision do they make?
3) Samples of competitor content that gets done what you are looking
to get done

56. CopyPress Example of Questionnaire
http://intake.copypress.com/form-
956987/COPY-QUESTIONNAIRE

57. Step 6: Content Creation
Really this is the easy part. Really
the key is to create a system that
produces quality and consistency:
1)Build team
2)Build QA System

58. CopyPress Example of Content

59. CopyPress Example of Content

60. CopyPress Example of Content

61. CopyPress Example of Content

62. Step 7: Publish
This can mean a lot of things, but
one note I have here
A Blog Does Not Fix All Issues
Emails, locked content, resource
sections could be better

63. CopyPress Example of Publishing

64. Step 7: Market
Your job isn’t to click Publish it’s to
market. Your content needs to be
pushed, and throwing it up on
Twitter isn’t enough
1)Email
2)Syndicate

65. CopyPress Example of Marketing

66. Step 8: Measure
Set up measurements all the way
down your funnel

67. Step 8: Repurpose
Use old content again. Refresh and
republish

68. Put It All Together
Identify Your Audience.
Don’t Just Think, KNOW!!!

69. Put It All Together
Understand How They Think,
Digest, and Share Content

70. Put It All Together
Think About KPIs Beyond Traffic

71. Put It All Together
Hit Your Audience Over and Over in
Different Ways

72. Put It All Together
Measure Your Wins and Fails

73. Put It All Together
Regroup and Repurpose

74. Dave Snyder
dsnyder@copypress.com
1 (888) 505-5689

75. by the end of Dave’s
presentation...
read the wrap-up post