Some ideas about making Content Marketing more actionable and easy. Takeaways from SearchLove Conference.

1. HOWTO DO
CONTENT MARKETING
SO IT WORKS
(by Laure Parsons @laurex)

3. 3 MAJORTAKEAWAYS
• Narrow your audience; use data
• Go big: infrequent but amazing content over lots
of mediocre content
• Distribution: add paid to amplify

4. THE AUDIENCE,
THE CUSTOMER

5. THE JOURNEY MAP
Map out the whole customer story,
beyond just the product/website
• Consider the channels in the
journey, not just in the website
• Define triggers & score (new vs
repeat visitors, for example)
• <40 too low engagement
• 40-80 might complete action
• 80+ will complete action, not
churn, etc

6. STUFFYOU NEEDTO KNOW
• Age
• Gender
• Where do they live
• What are their interests
• Who do they spend time with
• Their digital capability
• How social are they

7. HOWTO GET CUSTOMER
DATA
Using Facebook to get social data
• Find favourite interests of people who like your company
• Games they like
• Movies they watch
• Restaurants they visit (with location)

9. Using Facebook Ads, click on Page Likes
• Go to Audience section
• Note how many people are on there
• Go to interests and see how many people like each
interests
• Then go to shared reach and note the numbers

11. MORE WAYSTO DETERMINE
CUSTOMERS WITH DATA
•ID user paths and flows within website and outside website in other
measurable channels
•IDTriggers: time between visits, # of page views, clicks, referral channel,
user type, time on site, user path, form submission, anything that can be
measured
•Append data to your users:Towerdata and Fullcontact APIs, other APIs with
EXCEL-REST, use Postman browser plugin to test out APIs to see if they
are useful
•Orange - visual data analysis tool
•K-Means clustering analysis (data must be normalized- try using Open
Refine)
•Tribalytics: cluster by twitter followers

12. OR. KEEP IT SIMPLE.
• Scott Edwards @scottedwards was the first marketer at
the startup bank Simple. He didn’t have a ton of
resources or people who could collect data and analyze
it. So he started with a tweet.
• “If you could ask one question about financial data what
would it be?”
• He took the responses and wrote a highly researched
article about tipping in America, comparing regional data
about tipping to help people answer a question they
really wanted an answer to: how much should I be
tipping.
• This article got huge coverage and exposure. Scott didn’t
write another blog post for over a month, and didn’t do
another big content piece for 2-3 months. But that piece
got so much continued exposure that it was a huge win
for the bank. A little over a year later, the Simple
marketing team has grown to 11, with positions waiting
to be filled, and they are still focused on the big content
approach.

13. BE AMBITIOUS.
Not that often.

14. TEXT<VISUALS<VIDEO<INTERACTIVE
It’s better to create a few very valuable,
very sharable pieces of content than a
ton of small, irrelevant content.
• Text>1500 words (and well-
researched and valuable) is much
better than shorter articles
• Add multimedia: images, videos,
diagrams reduce bounce rate and
increase time on site
• Rich content is more likely to get
shares
• Even old stories, when they are good,
are useful for getting found

15. FOR B2B
For b2b, create content that isn’t about the product but is interesting to the
audience. It should also be interesting to you, not what you “think people
will be interested in.” For example, in-depth articles about tech startups and
their roads to success could be a good topic.

16. CONTENT NEEDS
•simple
•unexpected
•concrete
•credible
•emotional
•story

17. TELLTHE STORY
1. What is the conflict?
2. Draw theVenn diagram of your product, the customer
need
3. Who is the hero? (Hint: Not the brand/product, it’s the
customer)
4. Explain the outcome (happy) in the story first
5. Why are you in business?
6.What do you stand for? (Let’s try: Have a mission
statement or list of our commitments that we use
frequently)

18. WHAT AREYOUR CUSTOMERS
LOOKING FOR?
1. Solve problems (big content)
2. Address concerns or objections
3.Talk about price
4. Shed light on your community
5. Let customers tell the story

19. DISTRIBUTION
let’s give ‘em something to talk about

20. OWNED
• Make sure all your marketing is integrated, website, pitches to journalists, social
• Split test headlines
• Email links:Where are they going? Is the page mobile optimized? If the customer is
supposed to sign up for something, make it very easy to do on mobile as well as web
• 43% avg of email opens are on mobile
• 80.3% of mobile users delete when the email looks bad
• 30.2% unsubscribe
• Split test landing pages
• Use tools like usabilityhub, litmus.com/scope (scrape html of good emails)
• Make it easy to share, make sure sharing is on both top and bottom of articles/content,
and possibly in body or use a hover
• Optimize what type of social channel buttons show up based on the users
• Install Open Graph Meta Protocol- optimize what image gets shared
• Use Facebook Connect
• Set up retargeting cookies - you can also use for email retargeting , you can see what
the user looks at and send them email based on that

21. PAID
• Good for early stage content programs
• Types: PPC, Social, Influencer partnerships, Native
• Thomas Smith’s guide to Successful Advertising from 1885
• Prepare for ongoing management- you can’t just set it up and let it run
• Leverage engagement ads - users have to hover for 2 seconds
• promote G+ pages
• Use retargeting
• Use tools like Resonance
• Tool: Unruly: social video marketing
• Kaggle = 99designs of data science
• In LinkedIn ads you can choose by job title to share content
• Send people links to content related or community right after purchase, i.e. you just bought our product,
now you can join the Facebook group or (when we have it) contribute to our community gallery
• Create lookalike audiences based on users who visited content
• Twitter cards
• Click to buy on Facebook and twitter- not as B2B
• Run ads on competitors channels (youtube)
• Influencer partnerships- pay bloggers- very successful
• Think beyond website coverage- such as blogger’s email newsletters
• Set up retargeting cookies on the blogger’s site

22. EARNED
• Social Crawlytics - find the top content, pull the author data, find their social channels
and find the ones that are most influential
• Find bloggers that follow you a competitor, or a topic relevant, use Followerwonk
tool
• Try to get company on any top 10s or that type of thing in your industry
• Manufacture serendipity: i.e find a way to have great coincidences with key journalists.
No one posts things they are *told* to, could be by paid media to make earned
media to make it work.Try to become someone journalists want to follow
• Monitor journalists on Quora, Facebook (need a personal email probably) and
medium
• Stalk journalists, twitterland, buzzsumo, look and see who they talk to the most, make
content tailored to them. Use allmytweets lay in wait until they are ready, horo look
to see which journalists talked the most about a topic
• Blogger/journalist relationships - studies show familiarity itself makes you more
attractive

23. ROCKTHIS.