Marketing at a publishing house can be a challenge — so many books, so little time. It can feel difficult to give each book the time and attention it deserves. But while time often feels like it’s in short supply, content never is. If you’ve been wanting to stop, take stock of what you’re doing, and create meaningful content marketing plans that maximize your impact while taking into account your time and budget-strapped realities, this webinar is for you. Brownyn Kienapple, Director of Content Marketing at PolicyMe, worked in publicity and marketing at Penguin Canada for four years, so she knows firsthand the challenges unique to the industry. Link to presentation: https://youtu.be/FW6m29tmzSE Presented by BookNet Canada on April 4, 2023, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.

1. Ainsley: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's Tech Forum
session. I'm Ainsley Sparkes, the marketing and communications manager at
BookNet. Welcome to Applying Content Marketing Hacks from Tech to
Publishing. Before we get started BookNet Canada acknowledges that our
operations are remote, and our colleagues currently contribute their work from
the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe,
Haudenosaunee, Wendat, and Mi'kmaq Peoples, the original nations of the
lands we now call Beaton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Toronto, and Vaughan.
We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the
peoples whose land you're joining from today. Moreover, BookNet endorses the
calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and
supports an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to space-making in the book
industry.
So the book industry has long been an industry of gatekeeping. Anyone who
works at any stage of the book supply chain carries a responsibility to serve
readers by publishing, promoting, and supplying works that represent the wide
extent of human experiences and identities in all that complicated
intersectionality. We at BookNet are committed to working with our partners in
the industry as we move towards a framework that supports space-making,
which ensures that marginalised creators and professionals all have the
opportunity to contribute, work and lead.
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2. So with that out of the way, it's time to introduce our speaker. Bronwyn
Kienapple is the Director of Content Marketing at PolicyMe, formerly of
Venngage and FreshBooks. She specialises in startup B2C, SEO strategy,
content partnerships, developing and implementing brand and editorial
guidelines, competitor analysis, distribution, and content performance, mark
monitoring and analysis. So now, Bronwyn, I'm gonna turn it over to you.
Thank you very much.
Bronwyn: Thank you, Ainsley. I'm very happy to be here with all of you.
Hello. I am Bronwyn. Welcome to Content Marketing. No BS, Low Budget
Guide to Driving Revenue From Content. Let's do this thing. All right. Oh.
Okay. Please ignore the fact that I don't know how to use Google Slides. Okay.
What's on the agenda today? I'll do just a little bit more about who I am, how
we do content marketing at the company I currently work for called PolicyMe,
and what has worked for us. How to set meaningful goals, what channels
should you leverage, and editorial content from SEO 101 followed by an AMA
that Ainsley will kindly facilitate. So basically, why I just wanted to come
today was to help you feel confident, clear, focused about your content
marketing, and get rid of some myths and share some of my knowledge as I've
transitioned from publishing to tech.
So a little bit more about me. Way back in the Stone Age, I did the Humber
publishing programme. Good times. Worked at Penguin pre-merger for four
years, first in PR and then in what was then called the Catchall Online
Marketing, which was just like any single piece of content ever put on the
internet. Things have probably changed since then. And I definitely welcome
your comments in the chat, etc. I'm gonna be asking for some like shoutouts
and contributions in the chat, so you can give me a little more context to where
you might be struggling since I've been out of the industry for a good 11 years
or so.
Yeah, after the four years at Penguin, I jetted off to Mexico and did some
freelance writing. And I actually became a self-published author and I had a
Kindle business online. I had a ghost pen name, yeah, pen name. And actually
did quite well for myself having a cozy cat mystery, self-publishing business.
Don't ask. People love that stuff. And then came back to Canada and got into
tech. I got hired at FreshBooks, which is a cloud accounting software. And I
learned SEO for content, and you know, I have an English lit major. So I kind
of finally figured out how to marry my love of writing with how to drive
revenue for a business. So, learned all about SEO. Got hired at Venngage, it

3. was a Canva competitor. And their main revenue driver is, and I believe was
and still is content marketing, bootstrap companies.
So, you know, we're not talking big tech budgets here, so I can definitely relate
from both publishing and tech, working with a very, very low budget. We didn't
have budget for ads or anything that required money, so we just wrote our own
stuff and made a very nice amount of money for the company doing that. Then I
got hired at PolicyMe. So, what is PolicyMe? So Canadian company, I've been
working there for the past two years. It's what you call insured tech. So it's an
insurance startup. Went from 20 to about 45, and growing fast, people. We are
backed by investors. We just closed our series A last fall. So working with bit
more of a budget. We have proprietary tech to underwrite, which is risk
assessing our applicants. We're gonna be releasing more products this year.
But [vocalization] go back. I was hired two years ago to drive revenue from
SEO content. And there was a lot of things that were hairy at that time. Lot of
blog content, none of it optimised for search, no acquisition pages, talking like
landing pages, brand recognition. Who is PolicyMe? Never heard of her. Low
domain authority. If you know, you know. And we were in the process of
migrating to a new CMS. Never recommend that starting a new job. We were
going from WordPress to Webflow. Do not recommend. So what I've been
doing over the past two years is I hired a team of two. I mapped all of our
existing content to keywords by cluster, so, like topic, term life insurance,
market insurance, etc. Added acquisition pages to the mix, redirected a whole
bunch of duplicate content, cleaned up all those hairy migration issues, set up a
backlink programme, which is driving links from authoritative sites to your site
to make sure your content can rank better. And did a complete redesign because
we hired a brand manager, and we had a new look and feel.
This is what happened. Okay, so first, I know you're looking at my analytics
screen at the top and you're like, "That traffic is slow." And in my defense, I
shall say the first year, really difficult with the migration. There was a lot of
technical issues, but we grew, we grew, we grew, we grew. And maybe the
traffic, as tech bros like to say, didn't 10X, but boy, did it convert. You can see
at the bottom is policy crates. So that's a conversion metric that's further down
the funnel. It's when you create an application and submit it, and then you have
to settle after that. So that's where the money comes in. Typically, I look at like
crates and sales. Anyway, the traffic that we were driving or we have driven in
the past two years was a converting machine.

4. So, I'm gonna be talking a little bit about how that all came to be. Okay, so how
did I do that? First of all, I really focused on what I know best personally,
which is editorial SEO. Got really, really laser focused. Did not focus on other
channels. Tried to top a funnel newsletter, got rid of it. Put organic social on
autopilot. Really didn't spend a lot of time on other types of content, and now
we're getting to a place where we can do that. But a really double-down
editorial SEO.
I focused only on SEO content that drove revenue. I ignored what I call pink
sky content. This is any content that is not directly related to your business. So
for example, 10 ways that your family can be more financially responsible. That
would be pink sky content in my industry, because it's tangentially related. It's
personal finance related, but it's not actually related to...it's not about life
insurance. So I didn't, and I know a lot of companies make that mistake. They
focus a lot on pink sky content, and then they're like, "Whoa, we have so much
traffic. Why is it not converting?" It's not directly related to your business. So,
we had a lot of it when I came in and then I just happily ignored it for the rest of
my existence. Okay, ambitious quarterly goals. Content I know can do two
things. It can assist other areas of a business, or it can be like a performance
channel. Mine is very performance channel oriented. So I focus on conversion
metrics quarter over quarter. And then if I wanna test something, I have a
completion goal. So we like, produce five YouTube videos, test it as a potential
acquisition channel.
And then I pay attention very closely during the quarter to pacing. And if we're
not pacing towards the goal, it's a fine balance of deciding when to pivot, and
making sure you're not being reactive. So we do monthly retros during the
quarter where we decide like, are we on track? Are we pacing correctly? Do we
need to change our strategy? So being agile without being too, too reactive.
Okay. Book publishing. The struggle is real. I'm sure you all know this.
Preaching to the choir. So I'm here because I wanna try to apply some of my
learnings from working in content marketing and tech to book publishing. I
know having worked in publishing, there's a number of challenges that you may
be facing which is like, you need to do everything all at once with no budget.
The most vocal author gets the most attention, you know. I remember how that
went down. There can sometimes be a lack of focus on goals, measurement, or
why we're doing something. One of my favourite meetings that I remember was
someone proposed leaving like arcs in the subway on the seats and just like
seeing what happened. Yeah, that's not...I mean that was a certain time, but

5. that's something that I was seeing when I was working in publishing. And this
might sound counterintuitive, but, you know, people working in publishing are
very creative. And there can be a lot of pressure to be creative and do things
that are out of the box, but without a clear focus on performance. So the nice
thing about tech is that sometimes it can be a little dry, but there's a lot of
safeguards in place to ensure performance, at least in a good tech company.
So I've definitely learned some breaker from tech. But as well, like the
creativity and, you know, love of books that I bring as well and my background
as a journalist. I have also worked as a journalist doing reporting. So I have that
background as well. Okay, publishing. Love it. Okay, so this webinar is for you,
but first, while I'm doing blah, blah, blah, put in the chat any specific challenges
you have with content marketing right now. Here are some suggestions that I
have, but like, what are you struggling with in terms of content marketing? I
know content marketing is very much a tech thing where it's like you have a
content marketer title, and in publishing, that tends to be rolled into a broader
title. But what are some things that you're kind of struggling with?
Some ideas I have are like, what are the right goals for my content marketing
programme? What channels should I focus on? Should I start a podcast? The
everlasting question. How do I measure what I wanna do? AI with many
question marks. How can I get buy-in on my content marketing? Why am I just
blogging all the time? How can I get better results out of what I'm already doing
etc., etc. You can see it on the screen. Let me see. I'm just gonna look in the
chat for a sec. Hi, Claire. Okay. Figuring out where to start, what's most
important. Yeah. Okay, I'll help you with that. Spending lots of time on creative
assets and receiving no rewards, no conversions, engagements. Yes, this is
definitely for you. How do I accomplish the goals created by others for the
content we share?
Sandy, maybe you can put in the chat what you mean. Like somebody else
creates the goal for you and you're co-owning the content with them? How does
that work? What's the best way to measure success? Love this question.
Measurement is my friend. I love it. Yes, all of these are great things you can
keep putting. How can we find scholarly publisher? How can we find the right
audience? Okay, I mean, audience is really important. A lot of it is just
research, right? You have to know where your audience lives. You can use
things like SparkToro and other tools to identify where your audience is online.
But it really depends like, what you're looking for from your audience. Are you
looking to build awareness? Are you looking to build conversions? But how do

6. you actually measure goals when sales are driven to multiple channels, not just
our e-commerce? I had no input in the content strategy, it was created by
inspect [SP]. To fill a strategy, Sandy, I'm here for you. It's all about knowing
what you can do and communicating that.
Okay, so if I don't get to anything that you actually say, please bring it up in the
Q&A. I have to admit, I don't have all the answers. I've never worked in a giant
tech company. We don't have a multi-attribution model. It's a little bit limited.
And I work very independently with my content marketing programme. I'm not
a self, like a service kind of...I don't have a service function, so I'm just doing
my own thing. But I'll do my best to touch on all of these questions, and you
can put it in more if you think of them. Oops, going back.
Okay, numbers. Getting clear on goals. I love and hate goals. Every quarter I
make new goals for my team. It's always we start in the middle of the previous
quarter, and it's always down to the wire trying to figure out what the numbers
are going to be. So, if you feel that, I feel your pain. But something which you
may be feeling is that like, and this happens a lot in startups, is everything
seems important. There are constantly fires to put out. You're trying to do as
much as possible, and, of course, this is the recipe for burnout, right? But also
ineffective and will not prove the worth of your content marketing programme.
So, when I get confused, which is often, because there's a million things coming
at me, I always go back to the number. This is numbers, this is what grounds
me.
Okay, so this is a framework that was taught to me actually by Jane Flanagan at
FreshBooks. I don't try to be too rigid about this, but it helps frame a little bit
better why I'm doing what I'm doing and what channels I'm choosing to focus
on, what tactics, etc. So, I like to think of it as like a Russian nesting doll.
There's four different layers. The first layer is the goal. And for a lot of you, a
goal might be like, I don't know, sell 100 books in a week or something. But I
try to think of goals as like the what. It's like the highest level. There can be
multiple goals. And it's not measurable. So, for example, my goal is acquire
more customers from content. Yours might be get more leads. It can be as
simple as sell more books. Like whatever your company's goal is, that translates
down to your team's goal, that's what the goal is.
Then you wanna try to make it measurable, more specific. It's almost like a
subset of your goal. So the objective that I have is X policy sales from SEO by
the end of Q1 2024. I also have quarterly goals, which ladder up to this, but this

7. is the end game. If it was leads, you could grow your prospect list to 50K by the
end of the year. If it's sell more books, it's like, I wanna drive X amount of
revenue from books, e-books, audio books, you can segment it. Depends. But
you're just quantifying it. So now you're getting a little more focused. You're
like, "Okay, this is what I need to do. I have a measurable result that I'm tied
to." Now often what happens is that you'll be thrown an objective, and then
you'll have to like figure out a whole bunch of tactics to meet that goal.
And that can be pretty stressful because you end up throwing a whole bunch of
tactics at an objective and hoping one of them works. The missing layer in
between is the strategy. So that's the how. It's not the tactics. This is how you're
gonna compete within your market and achieve your objective. It's how you're
gonna do it. And then once you do the how, the how will inform what you're
doing. So for example, my strategy is mapping all of my content that I currently
have to the funnel, and the customer needs finding gaps. And then the tactic
coming out of that was identify the pages that I need to continuously refresh
every month, and creating maybe X number of pages to fill these content gaps.
If it's gating, then it's like produce three gated assets, etc.
So anyway, I'm not gonna say you need to use this whole framework, but it's a
very good exercise that you might wanna try. You know, do you even know
what your goal is? Do you have an objective? Have you been using a strategy
and do the tactics, are they informed by a strategy? So it just helps you get a
little bit more focused. When I first did this exercise, it was very overwhelming.
It took me a couple of weeks at least to wrap my head around it. So I encourage
you to kind of think about it and think, "Do I have all the right information
here? Is there something I need from my boss to better inform my work? What
am I not clear on?" etc.
Next. Choosing your channels. Okay, choosing your channels, completely
critical. There are always gonna be channels that you probably can't get out of.
Like you have to produce sales enablement materials, you have to run organic
social, you have to help promote events. And I've never worked in a company
that's service-oriented, but I know that the goal is to like either outsource it or
make it as self-serve as possible, like getting the salespeople to actually create
the first draft, and then you come in and do the final edit sign-off. But aside
from the channels that you're forced to support, forced, I say, you want a
channel that you can own, that you have more control over, you can use to
prove your worth, it's measurable. So, what's that gonna be? All right. I
sincerely hope this does not confuse things more, but this helped me just kind

8. of figure out a little bit more like what the opportunities are and where I should
focus.
You know, I'm sure you've all put your heart and soul into a campaign before,
right? And it did absolutely nothing, like it's soul-crushing to...you know, you
feel like you've wasted your time. And I'm definitely not against
experimentation, but you definitely should know, like, "Okay, what channels
are already working for my business? And which ones needed to be tested with
caution." And so I think about it like this way, fuel and engine are two different
things. And if you have the right mix, that's where business growth happens.
Fuel is all the kind of content. So the business positioning, the actual content
and copy itself, the visual design. That can be like sales enablement materials,
the email content, your case study, your blog posts, that's all the fuel. The
engine is more like the metrics you use to track your growth, the channels, the
processes and the tools.
So that can be SEO is actually a channel, search engine optimisation like
Google. And that's the channel. The blog content is the fuel. Conversion rate
optimisation, landing page tests, like AB tests. So, the actual content on the
page would be content. And then doing AB tests would be a test. The actual
webinar setup like this one. Affiliate marketing, these are all engines. And
usually, like any company, not just the startup will over-index on either just
focusing on fuel, just focusing on the engine, or like having both, but like it's
the wrong mix. They don't work together. What do I mean by that? Okay, if
you're in all engine, no fuel situation, you're saying things like, "I don't need
content. Let's just up our ad spend." I mean, I wish we all had that ability, right?
That's more of a tech thing, I think. Like, it's just you get a bunch of investor
dollars and you're like, "Let's just throw some ad money at this," and then your
CAC, your cost per acquisition just skyrockets. That's like a growth marketing
mindset, not a content mindset.
All fuel, no engine, you're just publishing things, it's great, you have this
beautiful e-book, distribution plan. Never heard of her. Does this content rank
for SEO? Don't know. It's more of a like, fuel situation. And then you can get
where fuel and your engine don't jive together. So like, you actually...you're
publishing blog content, you've optimised it for SEO, so you gotta fuel engine,
but then you have all this traffic, but it's not converting. So, you know, there's
something wrong there. It could be that the content doesn't align with your
business, it, yeah, doesn't serve customer needs, you know, you're not really
sure.

9. High email open rate, high unsubscribe rate. So the content is not matching
customer needs. Lots of people working on a whole bunch of tactics and
channels, but nobody's actually connecting the dots and thinking like, "Okay,
how does this all work together, and like, drive business growth?" So that's fuel
versus engine. Okay, I'm very biased because this is my strength, but editorial
content for SEO is a great way to build a business case for your content
marketing or just marketing function. You know, it's really taken off in the last
few years. So this is when an organisation uses its blogs, landing pages,
comparison pages, any kind of like the online content optimised for non-brand
search term to drive traffic and then to drive revenues. Revenue, singular.
This requires content SEO to work together, but if you don't have an SEO
person, AI, I'll get to this later, can help you do this instead. You don't need a
dedicated consultant or in-house person to help you anymore. Usually people
specialise in one or the other, I do both. And I argue most content marketers
should know both as well. Editorial SEO is great because has a compounding
effect, whereas ads, you know, you put a dollar and maybe get $2 back, but
there's no compounding effect, you keep having to feed the beast. With editorial
content, you know, takes longer to take off, but I've really seen this within the
last six months. It just like, starts getting better and better and better. It's a really
good investment long term. It does require some like, knowledge, you know,
presenting your case, but at least there's like more awareness now that this is a
great way to drive revenue at much lower cost.
Is it right for my business? If you drive about 1000 sessions a month, you have
about 1000 referring domains. So, don't worry about that if you don't know that,
something you can find in HRAFs, it's the number of links coming back to your
site. Let's say you are an authority, and there's search volume in your industry,
which most people, this is true, you should lean in the strategy. Now, one of my
friends works for auto repair store software company, and there's no search
volume in this type of industry. So, obviously, not gonna work across the board.
But if this is you, like your business, it may be time to try this, to do a 70%
hedge bet.
It's a channel which you are able to control and to measure and which will help
prove your success. And once you prove it, then you get buy-in to do more
creative work in the future. Because there's nothing worse. I made this mistake.
When I came into PolicyMe, I did some really cool projects. I did this big
Angus Reed survey with over 1000 Canadians, the state of personnel finance in
Canada, 2022. And like I did a great e-book for it. And like the business, first of

10. all was not...in terms of brand recognition, not ready for that kind of initiative.
Nobody was caring about that. But, you know, I hadn't really proven myself
yet, though I did get the opportunity to do it. Yeah, I would've waited, but, you
know, overall, I have mostly been focused on editorial SEO.
What was I'm gonna say here? Oh, yes, book publishing. So how does this
work? You probably rely on, I looked at, for example, a Nancy, like I know
they rely a lot on like title or author keywords to drive traffic. Like skim "Seven
Fallen Feathers." Whereas Penguin UK ranks for much broader terms, like
types of poems, must read books, classic literature, Edgar Allan Poe quotes, and
other like, general search terms, which net them traffic. So, there's definitely
more out there than just like your author, your brand name, your book title to go
after out there.
Next. Customer needs. Okay. So, if you're gonna get started on editorial SEO,
it's right for your business. So you gotta set some goals and objectives, then you
move on to your strategy. So no matter what channel, SEO or otherwise, you
probably need to centre your strategy around customer needs. Do you actually
know what your customers' needs are? A lot of people say they know what their
customers need, but they actually, they don't talk to them. So, that's the
difference. And then you'll also wanna get clear in your funnel, mapping your
content. And at that point, you should do keyword research, though I break this
rule all the time. I love doing keyword research because I'm a nerd. Next.
All right. Okay, exercise time. What's the single biggest problem you can solve
with content? Apparently I can't speak anymore. So, put in the chat what you
think this is for your business. Like what is it that your customers, potential
customers struggle with that you can solve with content? So an example I have
here for my business is, please make it stupid simple for me to compare life
insurance providers and make the best choice for me. It is very overwhelming
as a newbie to come into life insurance and like, what type of product, what
company? One of our best-converting posts is a life insurance reviews, best life
insurance Canada post does amazing. What will it take to make my small
business profitable? FreshBooks has a post about the break-even formula,
which is one of their highest-traffic posts. How can I communicate quickly and
effectively in my marketing material, sales deck, or training materials? The post
is about infographics. Infographics solves so many things.
So I'm gonna open the chat and see if anyone has anything here. If you read
this, you're cool feel to my post. Okay. Would I recommend Yoast SEO or

11. similar WordPress extensions? I've used Yoast before. I don't use WordPress
anymore though. I feel like there's much better tools out there now for SEO
than integrations. I mean, WordPress probably has a host of things, but I've
used things like Phrase, Surfer. Those are all SEO tools, which are probably
much more robust than Yoast, though it's been a couple years since I used it.
Anybody else have any problems you think you can solve with content? If not,
I'll just keep going on. But just noodle on that.
All right, collecting customer needs. Okay, so get more information. This can
be whether you talk to your customers, go on online communities like Reddit. I
read Personal Finance Canada on Reddit all the time to see how people think
about insurance. You know, read industry reports. You know, any data that you
have, and I'm sure you have a lot that your company has done, map out all those
needs and try to consolidate them. Try to identify some common themes. So,
for example, like common needs in my customers are, I'm aware of life
insurance and I probably should get it, but I'm not really sure if it's for me, if
there's urgency there. You know, I'm lying awake at night thinking about how I
have kids and a mortgage, but like, I can't get motivated to actually get started.
Another need is like, please make it, as I said before, stupid simple for me to
get started. I just wanna get this done, make it easy. Another one is like, I need
to figure out how to top up my group life insurance needs. So, just try to figure
out what those needs are.
Conversion funnel. I've got all the fun stuff today, let me tell you. Okay. As any
marketer knows, no customer follows a conversion funnel from top to bottom.
There's no person...or there is some, but not many who goes from like an
informational what-is article to a solution-type post, to a product page in one
session and then converts. I mean, it happens, but like, you know, people might
come at the product stage and they go up to problem, solution, and the next day
they're in a pink sky content piece. But this just kind of works to give you a
sense of what types of content are available. Pink sky, as I said, is like stuff
that's not directly related to your business, probably should be about 10% of
your content.
It works better for bigger businesses where you really wanna drive that traffic
and try to push them into the funnel, or it can be for something like ad
retargeting, building lists, all that kind of stuff. Problem is like you're
illuminating the situation. Like the person lying in bed at night. "Do I really
need life insurance?" You know, a post about like, do I need life insurance?
You're kinda agitating the problem, getting them worked up about it. Solution

12. about 25% should be how do you solve the problem? Mention your product.
For example, 100 books everyone should read. Best life insurance companies in
Canada. And then a product page, which for you folks is probably like a
product page for a specific book. It's where you seal the deal. For me, it's like
acquisition pages, case studies, comparison pages. Should be about 15%. Yeah.
And I don't wanna overwhelm you with stuff. I'm definitely like kind of just
giving you everything I know right now. This is also something I learned from
Jane at FreshBooks. This can just help you think if you have existing content,
what stage is it at? Now, the first stage is wall of text. So, everybody's got that
down. You can just go into ChatGPT, spit out a blog post, publish it, you got
your wallet text there. Hopefully, it's partially keyword optimised. That's where
everybody usually starts. Then as you go up the levels, the content becomes
better. And this is not just for SEO, it can be for any type of content. It becomes
harder for your competitors to beat because of the quality, and thus becomes
harder for your rankings, your position, 1, 2, 3, and the search results to be
displaced.
So, you could add, make things like have...for micro-conversions, could be
CTA, could it be an opt-in downloadable, like original graphics. Then you go
up to videos and adding more SMEs, subject matter expert-type content. Then
you add tools, templates, calculators, and then first-party data. So, do not
approach this in a blanket fashion, though. I have tried this. It is bad. You don't
say, for every piece of content I have, I'm gonna level it up from one to three in
one quarter or a year. Each piece of content will have a specific need. You
know, your wall of text may be working great for you, or your competitor has
content, which might have an SME interview. They might have an original
video, or you might just need to like proactively try to up your content before
you get displaced.
So before each quarter, and I've just did this, when I build out my editorial
calendar, I scope first. So, I look at every single piece I'm committed to, and I
think, "Does this need an infographic? Does this need a video? Like does it
need an SME interview?" I get my ducks in a row ahead of time, and I decide
what the piece needs, the minimum effort for maximum results, and then I go
from there. Because I've tried just doing everything before and we all know that
never works well. Building your case. Okay, this one's tough. I mean, first of
all, what I typically recommend is you just list out all the content you have and
you say, "Does it meet this need? What funnel stage is it at? And what content
level is it that?"

13. And then you look for gaps. You're like, "Okay, I have way too much pink sky
content. Like where are my product pages? My stuff is all wallet text. No
wonder it's not ranking because, you know, it's so competitive. You know, I
have a lot of content that addresses a particular customer need, but none of
this." So you start figuring out your gaps. And then try to figure out like the
non-negotiables, the sales enablement material. Like how much time do you
have to spend at that? Can you carve out some more time to dedicate to
editorial SEO or whatever channel you wanna invest in? And then for the love
of everything, don't go all in.
I've done this before where you're like, "I'm gonna commit to this tactic, this
channel, which I'm excited about. Present it as a test. So something tightly
scoped. So I'm gonna produce one podcast episode, or I'm just gonna add audio
to my blog post and see if people even play it, if they even care about audio in
the first place. You know, I'm gonna add like, the option to get a call back from
our sales team, but I'm not gonna add like an email nurturing. I'm just gonna see
if people actually click on the button and it even works. You know, what's the
lowest possible quality YouTube video I can get away with? And like, does it
work for the audience? Should I actually invest in producing more? Do people
actually wanna top a funnel newsletter from my business or is it so saturated
with...the market's so saturated with these types of newsletters," like in my case
personal finance, but like, "there's no room for me, I should either appear in
other people's newsletters and leverage their audiences." They always say in
tech, minimum viable product. Like, "What's the smallest thing I can test to see
whether I should take this forward?" And I've been guilty of this many times.
I'm still figuring this out, how to scope things down so I can test it before I
scale it.
Okay, content production system. We're getting to the end of my presentation.
We're gonna leave about 15 minutes for questions so you can interrogate me
about all the things I didn't talk about. But content production system. This is
the holy grail. Having that like, beautiful workflow that just, you get the
quality, you get the, like, the speed, you know, everything is just ironed out.
You know, we look at our workflow every quarter pretty much and see where
we can improve. And now with the explosion of AI, of course, you know, we're
trying to figure out how we can incorporate that into our processes. One thing
we're trying this quarter is we have decided to not have any freelance writers,
and we're relying more on tools. So once we pick all of our pieces, then we use
Surfer. You can use Surfer, Phrase. These are all programmes that analyse the
SEO score essentially of your piece, give you recommendations.

14. They act as like an SEO consultant. They make it easy for you to make
changes, analyse your piece against your competitors. And then with a
programme like Surfer, you can import your work directly into Jasper, which is
an AI programme like ChatGPT, but it's a little more geared towards writing for
the web. So then you can integrate with that. And if you have WordPress, I
believe you can integrate what your copy directly into your CMS to WordPress.
Not with Webflow unfortunately. So, we're trying to build more automation.
I've been writing my video scripts, the first draft with ChatGPT. So just relying
on the tools a little bit more, but at the same time, like really being clear about
like, what's your quality must-haves? Like, do you wanna make sure you have a
very strong point of view in each piece of content? Your unique take? Like for
us, it's like most people don't need permanent life insurance. They need term
life insurance, and here's why.
Do you always wanna have two to three original sources in each piece, like
original interviews, etc.? Do you insist on using proprietary data? Do you want
to have original graphics in each piece? So that's how you can balance out with
the quality, especially using AI. And this is also how you win in Google, right?
Because they're all about helpful content. And while they're not against AI
software, they don't care how you produce your content, as long as it's helpful,
having this kind of thing will kind of act as the stopgap to say, "Okay, well, we
generated this from AI, but we also have these quality standards we're adhering
to." Having a really strong process, briefs, editing checklist, formatting
checklist, QA checklist.
We work with Trello for all of these things, but also at the same time, I can say
like, don't let it constrain you because you can get to a point where you have so
many processes, you're so bogged down. We analyse every quarter, we
visualise our workflow and we figure out where the blockers are, the time
sucks, the dependencies where we can cut. And then editorial calendar, like I
said, scoping baselines. I always pull previous six-week results, or I baseline off
of previous pieces for six weeks results. So I have numbers that can tell me
whether the piece is performing as it should, and then commit to your
deadlines.
Okay. Lots of information. I think you'll all get the slides later. So I will not go
through all of this. But quickly, just thinking about what type of content do you
have too much of? What do you need more of? Do you have clear content
clusters? What content's working for you? Why? Do you even know what your
customers want? All this fun stuff.

15. Quick tips to get started. This is where I'll end off, because I know this is a lot
of information, it's very overwhelming. Took me a long time to wrap my head
around all of this stuff. But some things that you can kind of start out with are I
highly recommend Tracey Wallace's Contentment newsletter. She has some
amazing stuff around content marketing. Marie Haynes is also, you know, a
female SEO, amazing Canadian, and she knows all the current stuff going on in
SEO. So she's the best person to read. Learn the tools. You need to make good
business decisions. Commit this quarter to learning a tool that you've been
afraid of. Scope your work and identify no-gos. Audit your checklist process
and documentations, your vendors and your tools. Do they still serve you? Yes
or no? Figure it out.
Test and then scale. Do not scale and test at the same time. Famous last words.
Have a frank conversation with your boss. Is your current content marketing
programme meeting expectations? Get clear on that. If not, that's fine. Like,
figure out how to turn it around. You know, it's partially his or her job to help
you do that. So, get them on board and figure out where you are. Yeah, these
are... And do a half or full-day hackathon. And if you need to do some content,
you know, use ChatGPT. Go nuts for half a day. Produce a whole bunch of
content and publish it. I mean, don't go nuts, but test like five posts. Like, you
know, you might be surprised. Make it fun. Try something wild. All right.
That's it for me. Thank you, everyone. Now throw it to Ainsley.
Ainsley: Thanks for this, Bronwyn. This is great. I have so many questions and
I think...
Bronwyn: So do I.
Ainsley: ...our audience do as well. I guess my first one, I was thinking when
you were talking about like the fuel versus the engine and how in book
publishing, like there's a constant stream of fuel, right? Like there's the books
themselves and they come season after season after season. You have the like
jacket copy, you have often access to the author to like do Q&As, get author
interview stuff. So the publishing is not lacking for fuel, but they are lacking for
like time often. So like, if you could say the one thing that a time-strapped
marketer and book publishing could do that would be worth its weight in time.
What would you say?
Bronwyn: I mean, one thing that I remember from publishing is that like, it can
be tough to leverage your own audience. So sometimes just providing the
author, if they have their own audience, with the right content to get out there

16. and to get their readers excited. I mean, that can be invaluable. But otherwise,
you have to figure out for your specific business, like what has worked before
to get the word out. Like is it your email list? Is that where you have the best
chance of reaching people and converting? Is it people visiting your site
organically? Do you have a organic social following or does your author
hopefully... You know, pick a channel and lean into it. Hopefully, you have
some success already so you know. Otherwise, maybe you don't have success
and you need to figure out where your readers are so you can have the best
impact. You need to do some audience research.
Ainsley: Okay. We have a question from the chat here about measuring goals.
So, if your goal is sales and driving revenue, how can you measure that when
they're going to multiple channels, right? Like your e-commerce site, but also to
the bookstore? Like how do you tell which one is driven by your efforts?
Bronwyn: It depends on your attribution system. I mean, I use Google
Analytics to look at where all my traffic is coming from, whether it's YouTube,
or organic social, or organic search, or ads. But I have to be honest, like we
don't have a robust multi-attribution or multiple source kind of system. So I
can't give you advice on that one, unfortunately.
Ainsley: It's a tough one. That's a tough one, I think. I've been out of book
publishing proper for, I don't know, seven or eight years, and I remember
talking about that back then. So it's a continuous, I think, evergreen struggle.
Somebody else is asking how do you measure performance for like a publishing
adjacent event, like a book festival? So it's year-round content, but it's like a
once-a-year event.
Bronwyn: Are we talking like an in-person kind of event?
Ainsley: Or maybe an online, but once a year contained event. Yeah.
Bronwyn: An online event. I mean, it depends. Again, it's like, it depends what
your goals are for this event... In-person. Okay.
Ainsley: Yes, in-person. Yeah.
Bronwyn: What are your goals for the event? Is it just general awareness? Like,
are you just looking for like, attendance numbers? You know, do you have sales
materials with a unique code and you're trying to get people to go back to the
site? I haven't done like event marketing in a hot minute. But it really depends
on what your goal is for that particular event, how you're gonna track it.

17. Ainsley: I have a question. How concerned do you think the content marketers
should be about AI? Like, are we all gonna be replaced?
Bronwyn: No, you can't replace a brain. I mean, that's like... Some maybe
functions. Like writers I'm sure are already feeling the hurt in terms of freelance
writers. But content marketers, like you will always be needed if you can be
strategic. So the things that I just walked you through. Thinking about
translating business goals down to your content, no AI is gonna be able to do
that. It can optimise a blog post for you, but it's not gonna tell you exactly what
your business strategy should be. The two things that I've been told are the most
valuable are being able to translate, as I said, business goals down to content.
And also being the voice of the customer. So the person who knows, who does
the research, who talks to the customers. And at every conversation is the
person who could be like, "No, like I've done this research. You know, this is
actually what the customer needs." AI is not gonna be able to chip in on that
either. That's super valuable because that always will guide and make
successful business decisions.
Ainsley: Do you think there's any concern about giving our content specifically
in book publishing over to AI?
Bronwyn: Yes. Everybody should be aware of that. I mean, you put that
into...if you ask it to repurpose something, you put it into one of these tools,
like, you know, they're gonna use it as part of their, I don't know what it is,
natural language processing, their algorithm. That's gonna be incorporated into
the machine's learning. So you should be aware that that is now in a place you
don't know where it lives. So yeah, be very careful when you're putting in
proprietary materials.
Ainsley: And another question from the chat, is repurposing content
recommended?
Bronwyn: Yes, repurposing content is where it's at. I mean, you know, that's
the beauty of ChatGPT, right? Like, I can take a blog post now. I'm not as
worried about proprietary stuff personally. So I'll put a blog post in. I'll say,
"Okay, make this into a video script, make this into five social media posts.
Give me a headline idea." I've even asked it... I should have done it with this
webinar. Like, "Give me an outline for this business slide deck." You know,
that's the beauty of AI. You can just constantly take one source of content and
repurpose it into others. I know now you can have like AI images, that's a thing.
Yeah, it's amazing what you can do and you can do things a lot faster now.

18. Ainsley: It is amazing. I mean, how many weeks has it been since it's really
been available widely and it's just... Yeah, it's hard to keep up with.
Bronwyn: Yeah. There's a lot happening, and Google has like Bard now
apparently, which is its own version. And Bing has its own like scary demon
version, which has apparently gone off the rails. So, yeah, it's a wild world out
there right now.
Ainsley: Yeah. Only more to come, I bet. So somebody's asking, "Besides
WordPress, are there other web hosting services that can ingest CSV or XML
files to update Biblio and stock information?"
Bronwyn: You've come to the wrong place. I have no clue.
Ainsley: It's a good question. We'll have to answer that outside of this webinar.
Bronwyn: All right.
Ainsley: Yeah, when you were talking about pink sky content and trying to find
a balance between the top five books about a subject, right? That was kind of
the pink sky content, a balance between that and more focused content. What
do you think for publishers would be the best thing to replace the pink sky
content? Would it be author interviews, like book excerpts, stuff like that?
Bronwyn: Yeah. I mean, it depends where the traffic or the audience is coming
from. Like those listicle stuff are gold for publishers. You know, I've talked
over the past couple years a few times to Nathan at Kobo. I know he does really
well with his like listicles, like, "Here's five recommendations this week." Like
he produces that very frequently. Apparently, that's one of his best kind of
series that he does. And I saw, like in Penguin UK, there's a lot of listicle type
stuff, best classic books that you should read, the top 100 books that everyone
should read. And there's a lot of search volume around those type of queries.
You know, people want recommendations. You know, that's why they join
places like Goodreads.
So that is actually what I consider like middle-of-funnel content because you're
looking...you're at solution stage. You're like, "Well, what should I actually
read?" And at that point, you have the opportunity to link out to your product
page so that you can make the sale. So, this is a very safe strategy for publishers
because it's like direct-to-sale, right? Like there's no nurturing that needs to
really happen. Whereas a pink sky content would be something not really
related to books. It'd be like five ways to relax on the weekend. One of them

19. would be reading a great book. You know, that's a terrible topic, but you're
trying to attract a broader audience, but with like, really no hope of converting
in the near term at least. So, listicles are always great.
Ainsley: Okay. That's good. Yeah. Okay, well, I think that might be all of our
questions for today. So I think we will say thank you very much for joining us
today, Bronwyn.
Bronwyn: Thank you.
Ainsley: That was really informative. And before we go, we'd love it if the
attendees could provide some feedback on this session. We'll drop a link to the
survey in the chat. Please take a couple of minutes to fill it out. We'll also be
emailing a link to the recording of this session once it's available. And lastly,
we'd like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage for their support
through the Canada Book Fund. And thank you to all of you for joining. And
thanks again, Bronwyn, for sharing your content marketing knowledge with us.
Bronwyn: Thank you. Good to be here. Thanks. Bye.
Ainsley: Bye.