We only ever hear about successful content strategies, but sometimes it takes a lot of bumps and heartache to reach the top. Adria will share real content strategy projects that failed and provide tips for not following in the same steps.
45. @adriasaracino | #LavaCon
30-second rounds writing as
many answers as possible to
a single question
9. Stimulate brainstorming
source | image credit
• What do [X] care about?
• What do homeowners
struggle with?
61. @adriasaracino | #LavaCon
WEEKLY BRAINSTORM
(best on Fridays; vet on the spot)
START OF WEEK 1
ASSIGN / WRITE, BRIEF, &
SCHEDULE
(1 week turnaround; shoot for 5 a week)
BRIEF & BEGIN DESIGN
(create or curate creative assets while
content is being written)
EDITING ROUNDS
START OF WEEK 2
(ideally limit to 2 max, 2-3 day turnaround)
END OF WEEK 2
CONFIRM LAUNCH DATE
(if possible, schedule it for auto publish)
REVIEW DESIGN
(ideally limit to 2 max)
FINALIZE DESIGN
(if possible, complete in 2 weeks)
PUBLISH & PROMOTE
(social, PR, email, & paid advertising)
16. Create a clear process
68. @adriasaracino | #LavaCon
theaters
PPC
publishers
review sites
website
emails
social media
word of mouth
books
TV
billboards
blogs
in-store displays
69. @adriasaracino | #LavaCon
theaters
PPC
publishers
review sites
website
emails
social media
word of mouth
books
TV
billboards
blogs
in-store displays
70. EARNED
publishers
OWNED
MEDIA
MEDIA
PAID
MEDIA
@adriasaracino | #LavaCon
theaters
PPC
review sites
website
emails
social media
word of mouth
books
TV
billboards
blogs
in-store displays
120. THANK YOU!
Adria Saracino
Head of Content Strategy, Distilled
@adriasaracino | #LavaCon
Hinweis der Redaktion
All of this has afforded my team at Distilled and me a lot of successes with content.
THAT’S THE POINT OF MY PRESENTATION, I’M GOING TO GIVE YOU 50 WAYS TO MAKE YOUR PROGRAM SUCCESSFUL
To keep this organized, I’m going to go through the process of content marketing and give you stories and advice for each step.
There’s a lot of “truths” in marketing, but really they are assumptions. Take this…
Rand gave this great presentation on why marketers need to be better skeptics. We make a lot of assumptions, but they aren’t always right – and what works for one company won’t work for another. We made that fatal mistake with our uniforms piece. But if we’d had done customer research, we would have found a different story.
But in reality we may know some about our customers, but not fully
I am going to assume you know how to create personas and likely have created them before
But in most personas I see done by clients, they miss some crucial elements, that is understanding their more tangential interests and where they can be reached online
Use kaggle to find data scientists to do the number crunching for you
YOU CAN FIND THE CROSS SECTION OF DOMAINS THEY ALL FOLLOW
Or you can try putting their tweets or bios into a word cloud generator to find themes of topics
We focus on persona research, but sometimes skimp on the competitor research & brand positioning research. Explain what an effective content strategy really is (finding the gaps)
Tstory of simply business being an insurance carrier. Talk about how many B2B businesses hide behind their product & industry, sometimes complaining it’s “boring”
21 marketing how-to guides as part of a wider brand strategy of “the small business champion”.
Talk about how client in the home security industry wanted to create a piece that “blew up the internet”, but they insisted it be about securing your home. Oh and they wanted it to get conversions too.
Tell story that we struggled with ideating for this client, we’d get into a room & be like this
That is, until we started playing with brainwriting
Yet, you want to make sure you have a clear path to success
TALK ABOUT HOW WE WOULD PITCH IDEAS BEFORE DOING FEASIBILITY CHECK, ONLY TO FIND OUT LATER IT WASN’T POSSIBLE.
It didn’t work because there were flaws in the creative execution here. Mark our VP of Creative did an excellent presentation on this.
Without annotations people didn’t now what this was, and I bet you didn’t until I explained it.
Also, if we’d done user testing, we might have found out that people didn’t get it much earlier
Also, if we’d had asked the team in charge of promoting it (aka, that was me at the time), they would have known I didn’t think it was credible for this client to be talking about this
Remember this piece that didn’t do so hot?
Paint narrative of how someone might hear about a brand
The goal is to diversify your distribution strategy to incorporate earned, paid, and owned channels
If you have a smaller budget make your remarketing list super targeted, by only including users who performed a specific action on your For example, pages/visit, times visited site, or those who scrolled down a certain portion of the page (need separate event tracking setup).
Connect custom lists, such as your email list, create a lookalike audience of customers, or better yet, a lookalike audience of people who visiting your content
When you do make a successful partnership, whether paid or not, work with the blogger to get a retargeting pixel on the content they put up featuring your brand. You can use this to hit their visitors with ads off their site, such as the products a blogger reviewed.
Or is it?
Reference that I have more in my presentation, but one idea is to target editors on LinkedIn by job title and publication, as you can get really granular with the company, title, & seniority level
Remember, when distributing your content
Talk about client attribute the success to it being interactive, but it was successful because we’d done research to know journos talk about acquisitions to death but there’s no aggregate data source
Content marketing is a long-term game. Rand Fishkin did a presentation that explains this really, really well
Content marketing is a long-term game. Rand Fishkin did a presentation that explains this really, really well
AKA SHARING MY SCREW UPS AND ADVICE FOR HOW TO NOT REPEAT THEM