How we do content marketing at US Lacrosse.

1. Lane Errington
Senior Manager, Content Marketing

2. Roadmap
• US Lacrosse overview
• What is content marketing?
• Content marketing at US Lacrosse
• Building a digital skill set

4. US Lacrosse
• 501(c)3 national nonprofit governing body fueled by
membership and philanthropic support
• Provides leadership, investment and resources focused
primarily on youth and high school levels of play
• 450,000 members, 88 national staff, 300 national
volunteers, 68 chapters in 45 states
• Headquartered in Baltimore

5. National Governing Body

6. Our Brands

7. Our Brand Purpose
“Educate, connect and
influence the lacrosse
community”

8. What is Content Marketing?

9. A fundamental shift
in the way brands
do marketing

10. “Content Marketing
is the only
marketing left.”
-- Seth Godin

11. Content marketing is a strategic
marketing approach focused on
creating and distributing valuable,
relevant, and consistent content to
attract and retain a clearly-defined
audience — and, ultimately, to drive
profitable customer action.

12. Traditional vs. Modern Marketing
• Interruptive ads
• Email blasts (spam)
• Direct mail
• Not targeted
• All thing to all people
• Blogs
• Social media, SEO
• Branded magazine
• Targeted by personas
• Customer-centric

13. Consumers have shut off the traditional
world of marketing. They own a DVR to
skip television advertising, often ignore
magazine advertising, and now have
become so adept at online “surfing” that
they can take in online information
without a care for banners or buttons
(making them irrelevant).

14. Selling
Shouting
Interrupting

15. Instead, consistently
deliver useful
information to your
would-be customers in
the places they go

16. Be helpful and relevant,
tell a great story,
win trust, loyalty and
business

17. Who’s doing it well?

18. How We Do Content Marketing

19. Content Marketing Story
“Meet at the corner
of education
and inspiration”

20. Three Key Questions
For ANY piece of content:
1. Who is the audience?
2. What is the goal?
3. How do we measure it?
If you can’t answer them:
A. Let me help you answer them OR
B. Come back to me when you can

21. Our key audiences
PRIMARY
• Parent
• Coach
• Player
SECONDARY
• Official
• Program leader

22. Blogging Strategy

23. Blogging Strategy

24. Editorial Calendar

25. Always
Be
Creating (and)
Distributing

26. Social Media Strategy

27. Social Media Strategy
“The point isn’t to be
good at social media,
the point is to
be good at business
because of social media.”
-- Jay Baer

28. “Content is fire.
Social media is gasoline.”

29. Distribute twice as hard
as we create

30. “If it doesn’t spread,
it’s dead.”

31. “Content is still the king, but
I would say distribution is now the queen.
Good content with poor distribution is just
that, which means it will be litter.
Bad content with good distribution is just
that, which means it won’t get watched.”
-- Bob Bowman, CEO, Major League
Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM)

32. Our Marketing Channels

33. Our Marketing Channels

34. Social Media Channels

35. Facebook Strategy

36. Facebook Strategy

37. Facebook Strategy

38. Twitter Strategy

39. Twitter Strategy

40. Twitter Strategy

41. Instagram Strategy

42. Instagram Strategy

43. Instagram Strategy

44. Instagram Strategy

45. YouTube Strategy

46. Integrating Partners

47. Integrating Partners
AUTHENTICITY

48. You are the protector of your audience

49. Road to the Rockies

50. Measurement
• Blog: 696K unique page
views in 2014, 1300%
increase
• Facebook: Reach 500K
people/week
• Twitter: 10M
impressions/month
• Instagram: Total audience
(82K) up 111% since Jan. 1
• YouTube: 450K views in Q1
Brand Channel Audience
At
Arrival
US Lacrosse Facebook 78,392 42657
Twitter 71,545 11896
Instagram 56,800
YouTube 14,779
Vine 16,569
LinkedIn 4,845
Google+ 698
Lacrosse Magazine Facebook 33,246 11688
Twitter 42,015 1411
Instagram 12,000
YouTube 1,186
Soundclou
d
US Lacrosse Convention Twitter 2,330
US Lacrosse
Championships Twitter 1,430
World Lacrosse Facebook 8,730
Twitter 9,740
TOTAL 354,305 67652
% increase 424%

51. Building a Digital Skill Set

52. In digital marketing,
if you stop learning,
you die.
Period.

53. Skills You Need
• Writing
• Editing
• Inbound mindset
• Social media
• Data
• Coding
• Design
• Video
• Email
• Web

54. How to Get Them
• HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification
• Hootsuite Social Media Certification
• Google Analytics Certification
• Codecademy HTML/CSS
• Mailchimp email marketing course
• Facebook Blueprint course

55. Digital Skill Set
• Visionary
• Project Manager
• Storyteller
• Editor
• Creative
• Technical Director
• Analyst

56. Social Tools I Use
• Hootsuite (social listening, scheduling)
• Bitly (link shortening)
• Native analytics (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)
• Pixlr (photo editing)
• Google Calendar (editorial calendar)
• Google Analytics (measurement)
• Google Docs, DropBox (file editing/sharing)
• feedly (daily reading aggregator)
• SoundCloud/Spotify (sanity)

57. Recommended Reading
• HubSpot Blog
• Contently
• Jay Baer
• Seth Godin
• Buffer Blog
• Content Marketing Institute
• Hootsuite Blog
• Think With Google
• #SportsDaily

58. A Word About Sports
We work when other
people don’t.

59. Contact Me
lerrington@uslacrosse.org
@Lane_Errington
linkedin.com/in/laneerrington