Content Marketing

Content Marketing Fundamentals

We have all heard of blogs, and most people think it’s quite simple, you write a blog post and publish it on your website. There is a very large distinction between doing content marketing and doing content marketing well. Creating engaging content is key, and without it, you’ll just be adding to the noise and won’t be seen.

Understanding The Funnel

Really you need to be thinking about it with this diagram in mind.

So the funnel; it’s an interesting kind of concept at the top, you have people who are just sort of starting off in the customer journey as they head towards you to become customers. In the middle people who are interested in this stuff, thinking maybe they should learn more and then they start to generate a desire and at the bottom of the funnel, you got people who desire what you have. They are really heading closer and closer to taking action.

So it’s classic marketing, (AIDA) Awareness, interest, desire and action from the top to bottom of the funnel. Now the way we map the funnels is that we think about the different personas of people that you’re trying to reach in terms of marketing. So for example in this diagram we are talking about Persona A and persona B, but it’s worth thinking about your particular market, understanding your potential customers and then mapping that out and saying well OK. In this example let’s talk about somebody who’s in the business of selling drones. So in terms of drones right, now we’re going to have persona A right, somebody who is a hobbyist, somebody who’s sort of into Reddick profile but they are used to doing it on quite a low cost, a couple hundred dollars for a nice little plank (a type of drone). D.I.Y. bits and bobs for motors and servos and so on and they built it themselves, usually with a bias of a sort of little kid.

Now that persona A is going to used to be spending two hundred five dollars for something to get flying and then another persona who would be somebody (we’re going to call audi guy) who has all the gadgets, who loves Apple and all those brands and so they likely have quite a high income and you can probably say that they’re the kind person who would quietly go out and spend decent money.

So what are we going to do? We have to look through the funnel, the top, the middle, the bottom and we start thinking about the keywords that people are using to search. So the keywords at the top are going to be less intent on buying or transacting with you. So at the top they are really just going to be information keywords, so really thinking about stuff like “how to fly a drone”, that will be a good one that corresponds to the hobbyist because they may already be used to flying planes and stuff or helicopters but what you want to do is use content that maybe even compares flying helicopters and planes with flying drones and how you get your skills and how you get that coordination together to become a real profession drone flyer or a drone pilot.

The keyword “how to fly a drone”, that sits at the top of the funnel and then what are the “best low-cost drones”, “best starters drones”. Those kind of keywords, those would be for the hobbyist looking for something to get started and really looking to get started into that part of their hobby. Then when they found the kind of drone that they want to buy, they’ve done a bit of time and effort researching, reading articles, understanding a bit more about what they want and when they actually want it. They will likely be very specific in their next search and they would say buy Drone X online”, “best price Drone X”. So that’s pretty on the bottom of the funnel, so the guys that are interested in gadgets, a keyword like “the best looking drones” would be something that would get them starting to think about the buying process. Comparing some of the high-end brands and have a look at some of the high-end models, comparing those, that would be more like in the middle of the funnel and then down in the bottom of the funnel, you would think more about buying the must-have drone of the season.

Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

From the above information you can start coming up with some content keyword ideas like “The Maverick Air, Should I get the pro-pilot version”, “Is the extra money worth it for the extra batteries, the extra gears” and so on. Then just evaluate the audience and what it is they want to see, what you’re doing is you bringing people into the website and you’re attracting them through content marketing. So you write a blog post, decent pages that may be persistent, you can opt to go for something more trendy or a content piece for the long term. It would be what we call evergreen, so you can think about it in those terms that the content is there to almost be like a spinnaker on a yacht,  the thing is there, you have a good website already, have some good pages but you realise that you can capture more traffic , more visitors by writing about what people are already looking for as they think about the thing that you’ve got to sell.

So you’re effectively putting this great big sale on the front which captures more attention and in this case gets you more traffic onto your website. So content marketing in that regard is like a spinnaker, but it’s even more powerful because if you’re writing great stuff on a blog, you can share it where these people are. So if we go back to these personas and say, whereabouts are they, where do they consume their content? The Hobbyist we might do some research and find that they will be in some hobby groups on Facebook. They may also be looking at YouTube channels that are talking about where they control planes, build them and have tutorials on how to wire up motors and that kind of stuff. So now you have a few options:

1. You can sponsor YouTubers by collaborating with them, this is often referred to as influencer marketing.
2. You could advertise on certain YouTube channels.
3. You can find blogs that they would be frequenting and use Google Ads’ display network to reach them and advertise to them.
4. You can sponsor or advertise on Facebook as well as YouTube.
5. Use Google search targeting specific keywords that are relevant.

You could do generic Google search ads but I wouldn’t and in general what you’re doing is just profiling and getting a list of people that you can use on platforms like Facebook. Using demographics because you know, for example, they’re more likely to be sort of thirty to fifty, thirty to sixty. Then saying well OK these people we want to target through advertising on Facebook and if you already have a list of potential customers or existing customers even better, you can give that list to Facebook and you can use it as a look-alike list.

Facebook advertising is a separate topic but effectively a Content Marketing strategy is never just going to be “hey we’re gonna blog”. It should go in conjunction with some other powerful techniques including remarketing/retargeting, advertising and becoming a part of a wide marketing strategy. This allows us to capture people early in their buying cycle and getting them to think about what you’re doing.

Analysing The Data

Once you’ve mapped out the three levels in the funnel, top, middle, bottom and you’ve got the personas, don’t invest too much time into mapping out all the information. This will block you from actually actioning anything useful. Getting content out sooner rather than later is always a good idea, then you can work out over time which ones actually get you a decent amount of traffic. From that, you can see which content is getting you the most exposure and the types of content that will convert into enquiries and sales. Once you’ve worked that out, you can create new content around that and create fresh content targeting the right target market.

You can write a really good piece of content that may be suitable for both the top and middle that would cover a vast array of keywords. That one piece of content may well address stuff that both the hobby and Audi guy would like. That’s OK, you can do that but let’s do it consciously knowing that this is our model, this is how we map out our content. Focus efforts on making sure to tick all of these boxes and then we can go back later on to Google analytics and see which one is bringing us traffic and getting us rankings for the keywords we were focusing.

But over time, with that data from Google Analytics you can then feed back into what you’re doing, do more of what works, less of what doesn’t. So ultimately having a decent pace of blogging is one thing but getting the strategy right and mapping it all in the first place that’s really important. So getting it organised, sitting down with the client that’s part of our process. So how it works with us if you express an interest in this, we set up an initial chat to get an idea of your goals and then what we like to do is give you a proposal. We’ll then talk to you about what kind of campaign you’re interested in and propose a budget which begins a strategy session. The strategy session kicks off the whole campaign and what we do is work with you to set up a content marketing strategy based on what you give us. In the kick-off meeting, we will ask you lots and lots and lots of questions about the customer journey people take before they become a customer and after they’ve been a customer such as:

1. What about the lifetime value of the customer?
2. What about the urgency?
3. What about issues behind what they come to you for?
4. Are there products and services that you offer that nobody ever buys unless they’ve already bought something else?

Asking tonnes of questions like this is incredibly important for us because we need to know everything about your business, your customers and your goals. As an example, those gateway customers, where they buy one product/service then end up buying another product/service later on. We want to know everything about it because those can be urgent sales and low value but they can be the kind of thing that really appeal and work through content marketing. So yes we’re going to ask a lot of questions, identify those things and see what we can do about generating leads and enquiries out of that but also to get people thinking about you. So that we can get them into the funnel and bring them down the funnel through, the tactics we’ve suggested above.

Diving Deeper Into Personas

Now we need to think about where your personas are, that’s part of the kick-off meeting as well, so who are they, what are the demographics what are the psychographics?

1. What are the things they’re interested in?
2. What are the things that they already like on Facebook?
3. What are they likely to express as being something they’re interested in and what might they keep to themselves?
4. What are they like?

If you have a look-alike, if you have a list of customers on e-mail, we who would like to use that and even if you’re not going to do an advertising campaign on Facebook it would still be worth investigating what list would look like. A really small budget on that can really give us some information and help us drive some traffic to the first version of the blog post, just so that we can get information about the level of engagement on the blog post because what we really want to do is write stuff that really strikes an interest to them. Measuring data about people staying, people leaving you might find that the number of people to click on a blog post and then leave very quickly is very high. What you want to do is try and work out what it is that is making them leave, is there something we can do to improve it? There are a bunch of tools and techniques we can use during the campaign to do that.

In terms of the budget, this is set on a monthly basis, this is pretty standard and we’d have to work out together what percentage of the budget goes towards content marketing. Well often it’s a balance between what’s the core of a Content Marketing, let’s say two four six eight blog posts a month. You might be better off doing two blog posts a month and really thinking about having some other Digital Marketing aspects going on such as retargeting or Facebook curation. At Matter Solutions we will tell you what we think will work best for you and your business. Some of our clients have people in-house that run social media for them, in which case we’ll work with them to make sure that they’re sharing on social media. That’s totally fine but our approach is to really do things that matter.

Content Marketing For SEO

There is a little bit more to content marketing, SEO is a special kind of aspect because we’ve talked about the funnel, we’ve talked about personas but how does it tie together? It’s all very well for us to think about them and try and write a blog post for the personas but SEO is all about trying to acquire citations and links and get people to signal to Google that your website is such a great place to be.

Now that they visit and have a good time, that’s a good thing if we improve the branding. In terms of writing content and doing content marketing for a SEO, it’s bit different, what we have to do is ask ourselves in these personas, who of them has a website? Now you know, in most cases I would say, the vast majority of cases, your customers do not have websites and then we have to consider how we are going to get links to the page. Each time we are creating content we have to decide if we are creating a piece of content for SEO only or for customers only. Creating content for customers is everything we’ve discussed thus far, but targeting for SEO is sometimes more important. If we are writing content for SEO then we need to target somebody who’s going to generate links, that person has to have a website. Now you are thinking about who has a website, who can link to me that I can appeal to. So you have to create interesting and valuable content and tick those boxes but it has to be shareable, it needs to be something special that people want to share with their audiences.

Now some shareable content ideas are things like, calculators, tools and valuable components. For example, a page that lets people calculate the perfect amount of luggage to take on holiday, something simple like that. This little useful tool can be linked to all sorts of people in the travel sector and many website owners would be interested in sharing it with their audiences. Now putting time into building something like this, that’s having web developers do work like that, it seems like a very strange way approaching SEO but content marketing and building assets for link acquisition is becoming more important in large SEO campaigns.

Bringing It All Together

There we go, in a nutshell, that’s how content marketing works here at Matter Solutions. Content marketing is a very powerful way of making your website a very white hat link worthy place on the Internet. If you have a chance to ask, we’ll help you work out what’s right for you and what allied services will align and go with what you’re trying to achieve in terms of your digital strategy.