Even though you might be sick of hearing it, nobody in the online industry doubts that content is king. Adam and Chad have elaborated on content marketing in the past, but they wanted to expand the discussion when it comes to content and taking your content marketing to the next level. Watch this Daily Brown Bag to learn more insights about content creation, how to juice up your content marketing strategy, and practical content marketing tips that can take your small business marketing to the next level.
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TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello and welcome to the Daily Brown Bag. Today we're going to be talking about taking your content marketing to the next level. I'm Chad Hill and I'm joined by Adam Stetzer.
Good afternoon, Chad. Welcome to the Brown Bag. We're talking about content marketing. How to take it to the next level. We'll try to juice this up Chad because we talk about content creation all the time and really nobody in the industry doubts that content is king, right? It's been said so many times, you're probably sick of hearing it but content marketing is really a necessary component of any online marketing strategy.
You're just going to fail today with where Google is and where the Internet is. And your content needs to be very well tied and integrated to all of your online marketing activities. It touches so many different parts around SEO, PPC, social, your email marketing, your video production, the things we're even doing right how. So we all know we need to do this. We also know there's a lot of content on the web already, and so I guess that's what we mean by taking this to the next level. How do you juice up your content marketing strategy and really get a return on this. We've talked about this before Chad, we did a Brown Bag before. This concept of information overload and content shock and how to not fall into producing low quality content, particularly as we've covered the Google updates and their signals seem to be marching more and more towards trying to understand what is highly engaging content. And so we're talking today to our resellers and our community at large about building the strategy that has the right content that's going to reach the right people at the right time.
Sometimes people talk about the context that they're marketing into and then the content they use to market towards that context and I think at a broad level, Chad, and I might ask you to get more specific. It's about understanding your leads that are coming into your sales funnel. It's about understanding your customers. It's ultimately about understanding that broader audience that may not be your customers but is going to get you engagement and help you rise to the top of the search and the social so you can convert more customers. And this means you've got to kind of get personal. You need to focus on building relationships with end audiences. You need to know what industries they're in, what questions they're asking. All these things that will help you understand what they're searching for, and therefore what you need to put in front of them. Understanding, again, the context within which they're searching and the content you might need to create to really catch that traffic. But those are pretty general strategic terms, Chad. When you think about a small business trying to interpret this content is king - I know I need to do it. What can we tell them in a very practical level that will help them?
Adam, I do think this is a tricky topic. I do think it's where the industry's going. And it's where, in some ways, the internet and things like AdWords did for small business was to put them on equal footing with big brands. I mean that was really an amazing opportunity that search engine optimization and AdWords has brought us, is that basically the ad that I was showing as my little business and what Amazon or a big business was showing were very similar. But here we have this sort of inequality in a way where the big, big companies with big budgets can really get in and mine this information and really get into this context because it's pretty complicated.
There's people that are running some serious analytical models with big, big sample sizes figuring out what's the right thing for the right person on the right device at the right time. But I do think if you take a step back and just say well what are some simple tips that small business can use. We've got a couple for you today. I mean the first one is really just having a better handle on researching and looking at the data you already are collecting. Google Analytics is a great example. There's just a wealth of information in Google Analytics about what people are doing on your website. What content they're engaging with, how long they stay on certain parts of your website versus other parts of your website.
I think what you want to start doing is looking at that and start trying to understand. If you have more people reading a certain blog post on your website, that probably tells you that the content in that blog post is something that your user base is interested in. And if there's a way for you to start to segment your leads and be able to identify which users are engaging with different kinds of content, then that means that all the other things that you can do, for example, your email marketing, what kinds of webinars you program and who you invite to those webinars, you can actually start to become more personalized. And that's really I think what context. There was a big trend early in the internet with the whole idea of personalization which kind of petered out. That's back. It's now being called context. It's being called marketing automation. These tools out there are really trying to do this personalization that's very, very tricky for people to do.
Analytics start there. Again I mentioned once you have a good idea of where people are going on your website, think about targeted email campaigns. Segment your groups even, for example, you put people into the prospect vs. current customer. Even if you start there, that's a way to start to send better more targeted emails that are more contextually relevant to the person.
Again I think the main thing is you have to not be afraid to go down these paths of investing in more targeted content. It's definitely not as easy as creating one size fits all content. A lot more work a lot more thinking that goes into it. The dirty secret here is that once you create all this content, somebody has to maintain it. So there are maintenance costs to it as well. But the way to get started is to start thinking about that. And I think the final one is we're talking very general and I think that's where small businesses should start. But again the big guys out there are starting to think about different kinds of content based on where you are. A mobile device might have a different kind of content than if you are engaging in Twitter or on the website. I'd probably reserve that and not start there for a small business and start with some of the other things we've talked about. If you're you're already advanced, that's certainly another direction to go.
Excellent. Awesome. Very practical tips for how to take your small business marketing to the next level. We appreciate you joining us for the Brown Bag today. Please drop us a comment. We'd like to know if these were helpful. And if we missed something you think's important please share it. We'd love to hear from you. And as always we ask you to subscribe to our video series so we can see you back here real soon.
