In Content Strategy, L.E.S.S. is More

Editor's Notes

• #2 Too often did we focus on dumping whatever we could create out into the world without planning or managing it’s very existence. We’d simply put out a piece, and it would disappear into the aether. We know more content at the sake of quality, instead of great, researched, planned content, is not the way to go, and yet we’ve been living that way for too long. Tl;dr: quality over quantity in 2017, but that doesnt me less content, it means more content that’s smarter and can replicate into new content areas.
• #3 We are inundated with fake news, top 10 lists, articles about a single tweet. And if you’re familiar with my facebook, everything Donald Trump has ever said or done. When it comes to content, we need to focus on creating a quantity and quality. That doesn’t mean parroting every new trend or thought leader out there. There’s thought leaders and thought repeaters. We don't just think forward. We crave it. Let’s band together to create what’s next. Doing so will take a team effort. All of us will need to get behind it, as a team. It takes shared language and shared understanding to do something like that long-term. Don’t worry, long form text isn’t the only thing that’s “content”.
• #4 We’ve known for a long time that content is king. It’s how most of us learn new things, discover new products, and inform our own narratives. The same is true for our prospective clients, our users, and our peers.
• #5 In our information-saturated world, valuable content is in high demand but low supply. LESS means making content that users love. Great Content can transform one-time users into habitual visitors and habitual visitors into customers. LESS means not trying to cheat the system with an abundance of content It means making more content that people LOVE It means infusing intention and heart into content that truly engages people and their lives It means making content people want to consume and maybe even share.
• #6 The best content is designed around how humans actually interact with the web It leverages a combination of language, experience, storytelling, and search (L.E.S.S.) With that we can speak to people in a whole new way LESS a new approach to how we plan & execute content for DS and our clients The L.E.S.S. philosophy is human. It means considering our audience and their intent from the beginning and sticking to it until the end. L.E.S.S. is often the difference between success and failure. LESS will help us create material that speaks to our users intentions, or helps them achieve their goals To be clear, this is not about creating LESS content. Its about creating MORE content that content consumers actually want.
• #7 The things people actually say, write, share. Shared language binds people. It breathes relevance and life into a piece of content that content consumers gravitate towards.
• #8 By understanding our users language, we can understand their intent and shape the purpose of our content to fill their needs. Are they trying to learn? are they looking to be entertained? are they trying to buy? What is their intent? What are the topics they’re trying to learn about or be entertained by? Language helps us understand these things. Understanding the language our content consumers will use to search for content like ours helps us serve them the right content, in the right context, at the right time.
• #9 Machines are getting really proficient at language too. Emerging bots don’t require us to speak like computers, but instead are evolving to understand how we speak as people. Alexa, Siri, Google Now.
• #10 Understand your audience. Create personas (even if they’re rudimentary). Who wants this content? Why? What is their intent? What topics might they search for? If you build content around the topics, words, phrases, and questions that your customers use, you’ll produce content that will not only rank higher in search, but satisfy the needs of whoever is consuming your content.
• #11 Great user experience. Make the content they want & expect. Experience is how we relate to content as well as interacting with it. Experience is all about making sure that you create a smooth journey for your user from when they first enter the funnel until they've converted into a customer. Make it valuable. Reward their click by giving them exactly what they want and expect. Nobody wins when your audience feels baited.
• #12 Lets say I'm searching for snow tires. I don’t want to learn about snow tire technology, my intent is to buy snow tires — right now.
• #13 clicking on the first result might take me to a page like this. Not a bad page to land on, but clicking on either of these buttons is going to take me through a process that might be just long and cumbersome enough to frustrate me. They also might not have my car listed. Boy, that’d be frustrating to get sucked into a website that doesn’t even sell snow tires that will fit my car.
• #14 this is a more personal and more specific search. My intent is the same, but I'm using more specific language because I know exactly what I want so that’s what I'm searching for.
• #15 Clicking on the first result again — I expected and received exactly what i was looking for. This example combines technology with proper SEO to deliver the desired result. It doesn’t have to be this sophisticated. How many times have you searched for a resource and clicked on a blog article whose title tag seemed to match your problem, but whose content isn’t relevant to your search at all? It happens more than it should. It’s important to not be those guys.
• #16 Think about the problem we’re trying to solve, and make sure that our content clearly helps our user achieve that goal. Keyword research, market research. Make sure your meta titles and content are related Make sure your content is quality and provides value to the user Consider intent and deliver incredible content that helps your audience extract value!
• #17 It’s how people find our content. We need to know what they search for and how, and tailor our content to be high demand, low supply. Finding white spaces and filling a need. its how you detect high-demand low supply. We need to be more aware of search behaviors and intent and how people are using the internet to discover the kinds of content we create.
• #18 Conducting keyword research, identifying topics that people are searching for, understanding and obsessing over the problem leads to solutions that match our actual user’s pain points. What is their goal? What are they searching for to accomplish that goal? Is there quality content in the results? How much quality? Where can we add value?
• #19 a good example of high demand, low supply is the article that I wrote about Red Bull Esports. https://www.digitalsurgeons.com/thoughts/strategy/getting-it-what-brands-can-learn-from-red-bull-about-marketing-in-esports/ Esports is a space that a lot of brands, marketers, and enthusiasts were interested in. A lot of demand for articles and content about how to do it right, who was finding success, and more importantly how and why. There was virtually NO content around the how and why when I wrote it. Case studies, even unofficial ones, were pretty much non-existent. This article eased a lot of pains that marketers and brands were having, and was very successful because of that. I applied the LESS philosophy to this article, without even realizing it.
• #20 If we know our audience, the language that they’re using, and when/why they’re looking for this kind of content — making your content discoverable through search gets way easier. Do keyword research and conduct some searches yourself before you create your content to understand what people are looking for…. what is in high demand? What information or tools are crucial for these people to have that there isn’t really much of right now. If you don’t know how to do keyword research, we’ll be doing lightning talks about it. I also have made a how-to video that is pretty good if you want to get a head start! After you’ve identified the white spaces and start to create your content, do even more keyword research with more specificity so that you know the words terms and phrases people actually use. Go back and tweak what you’ve created, swapping out your words for the words your audience uses. Search Optimization is all about using shared language, testing, optimizing, always.
• #21 Stories connect audiences and elicit an emotion, a response, an engagement. Storytelling is a way to engage emotionally, and Only Emotion Endures in the long run. What is storytelling. Its how ideas stick. Its been around since humanity began. Its how complex ideas are relayed in memorable ways. Great Books for this are: MADE TO STICK CONTAGIOUS
• #22 Storytelling is something we’ve all experienced since we were kids. Stories help us make sense of information. It makes delivering a message easier by providing context, and helps us pace our information delivery to reduce cognitive load. It’s a survival mechanism.
• #24 we’ve seen this graphic before. Jason Rose loves this thing, and for good reason. Kurt Vonnegut’s shape of stories help guide how we frame and deliver complex ideas. Its a little hard to wrap your head around just by looking at it, but when you really dive into it and break down some of the better articles and books you read with these shapes in mind, it really helps you to understand how it works and how to apply it to your own content. These shapes aren’t just applicable to the written word. You can tell these stories visually through design to guide and persuading your user, through engineering and animation. Solving technical problems your peers encounter when searching for issues your plugin solves, etc. NANCY DUARTE’S book RESONATE is great!
• #26 Oftentimes brands and agencies will write blogs here and there but its often an afterthought. We have to fight the uphill battle for hours to research and write and oftentimes the content misses the mark because we havent been approaching content with LESS in mind. We’ve got to fix that. Its gotta become part of your company culture.
• #27 Awesome inbound marketing it’s about building exceptional content for humans. What is the user trying to accomplish? How does your content help them accomplish that? Where are they in the funnel? Does our content help them? The aggregate of these parts is content that will attract users and up your visibility. how do we get them coming back?
• #28 Almost everything we make and share is content. Whether you’re a designer, developer, writer… whatever you do. It has value.
• #30 everyone in this room can create at least one of these things everything is content. lets tie them together, lets rally together. creating an app? grab a designer to design an infographic about the problem it solves grab a writer to write about it.
• #31 Matt Pringle’s Sketch Article: https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/5-reasons-why-i-left-photoshop-for-sketch-8e33c071f96f#.wz1bg61gn It is a view into our process, and eternal desire to improve. It is true thought leadership. One Love: http://onelove.io Incredible team effort by Digital Surgeons that is innovative as it gets Took risks technologically. Did something totally new that expressed our values Rallied a team behind this amazing idea and sent it out to the world AudioCrawl: http://audiocrawl.co Adam Chambers is a WebAudio god. Had a great idea, incubated it himself rallied his team around it once he had a clear vision John Adie’s Codepens: http://codepen.io/Jadie/ Shows Digital Surgeons’ flexibility and curiosity as a team It’s thought leadership. Dribbble Shots: https://dribbble.com/prings Shows our work and what we’re capable of Lightning Talks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpecJsK8z8LfcNSLFay0jdw We record them and put them out on YouTube Demonstrates our culture but also our thought leadership Craig Keller’s Red Bull Article: https://www.digitalsurgeons.com/thoughts/strategy/getting-it-what-brands-can-learn-from-red-bull-about-marketing-in-esports/ High Demand, Low Supply. There was a lot of talk about esports, but little in the way of case studies Shows that we can break down a campaign and understand what makes it tick Demonstrated deep knowledge of esports, an in-demand, emerging channel WebVR? VR is super hot right now. Brands are interested in how this applies to them
• #32 Too often we would have an idea, execute it, and then start asking questions. Got a blog idea, but who is it targeting and why? How will we support it? Do we have a header? Do we have a plan for social? Probably not. If you have a lunch & learn, record it, take photos, create a slideshare, turn the transcript into a blog post. What outputs can we generate from a single input? When you are planning your idea, also think about ways we can drive attention to it. Social media posts only do so much.
• #33 Entertain. Educate. Persuade. Convert. Pick Two.
• #34 Understand the need for professionalism when creating content. No troll content or apps. Not creating endless pages of useless content that are being ignored. Articles and videos that simply end up being indexed by robots are useless. When we’re delivering quality over quantity, respect the value of our content and your role in making it polished and professional.
• #35 Shared knowledge is good, but once we build it internally, how do we make sure we are demonstrating it to the world and utilizing it. Well, we have one idea we think will be fun.
• #36 It’s called “Learn inside, share outside” and here’s how it works It starts with a skill, lets use “Keyword Research” that one of us has that everyone should probably have too. Well, learn inside share outside means that the knowledge holder shares that skill with the team somehow. a lightning talk lunch & learn a workshop the team now has that knowledge they’re empowered by it. They use it. maybe they use it to build a landing page maybe they write an article about it, or create an infographic about its power they then share that knowledge with the world. when they do, they’re helping themselves understand the skill better and how to apply it but they’re also showing the world that we have skills and knowledge that is in high-demand but also in low supply. Every time we do this we’re creating a new opportunity to showcase our abilities and thinking to the world. Chances are that someone out there is looking for a group of good looking people who have these skills to help them solve problems, so they hire us. The content we create helps them find us. The culture of content is about opening up doors to new opportunities for kick ass work to come in the door so we can all afford mega-yachts one day.
• #37 Got Questions? Let’s Talk! http://www.digitalsurgeons.com/contact