Members of Galvanize's marketing team explain the tactics they used to drive more traffic, conduct audience research, and write content that doesn't suck.

1. How To Write Killer Copy
& Connect With Customers

2. Today You’ll Learn How to
Conduct effective audience research
Write content that actually resonates with people (and generates traffic)
Prioritize your content backlog
Distribute your content effectively
Re-purpose content in different formats to get more bang for your buck

3. Mark Saldaña
Marketing Manager
Dynelle Abeyta
Content Producer
Jared Polivka
Evangelist
Bo Moore
Storyteller
Meet the Team

4. Mark Saldaña
• Works on Galvanize PR to help Galvanize members
(founders and students) share success stories with press
• Collaborates with Galvanize outcomes team to
understand how we’re doing (student placement) and
what cool stuff students are working on
• Tries to get “big picture” of what’s happening at
Galvanize so we can promote it like crazy
• Previously worked at Box and 500 Startups

5. Dynelle Abeyta
• Builds content that drives traffic
• Dabbles a bit in all areas of marketing: Social Media, PR,
Advertising, etc.
• Writer for Galvanize Blog: covers topics in Galvanize
news, data science, programming, startups and more
• Self-described Python kween
• Previously worked for the Greater Pueblo Chamber of
Commerce as their Communications Assistant

6. Jared Polivka
• Believes that content should be as useful as possible.
• Works with Galvanize faculty, students and content
team to shepard technical posts
• Serves as Evangelist at Galvanize; essentially a technical
project manager with an emphasis on community
building.
• Formerly worked as a Product Manager at Kapost and as
a Marketing Manager at Uber.

7. Bo Moore
• Galvanize's in-house journalist
• Interviews Galvanize faculty and members to tell their
stories in interesting, informative ways
• Breaks down technical topics into digestible content
• Former Wired journalist
• Karaoke enthusiast

8. Unique Challenges
Highly Diverse Audience
Highly Technical Concepts
Lots of Competition
(i.e., there’s already a ton of great stuff out
there on programming, data science, and
startups)
Unique Advantages
Have experts in various fields on
our instructional team
Have awesome students who are
excited to share their work
Experienced content team
with a diverse skill set
(video, journalism, PR, SEO, etc.)

9. Not Everything You Do is Interesting
Try not to drink too much of the company Kool Aid.
Ask yourself: “Would I care about this if I didn’t work here?”

10. Let’s go over content that probably won't drive repeat traffic.
Also, this kind of stuff is generally just boring and
not very fun to read or write.

11. Announcements
New features
Your newest round of funding
A new company partnership
(even if it’s with a big company)
An awesome new hire

12. This kind of content is still valuable (and necessary at times), but don’t
count on it to drive repeat traffic. Put it in a press release and get reporters
to cover it. No one goes to a company blog to read press releases.

13. Anything that’s selling your
company way too hard
3 tips for using our NEW FEATURE
3 reasons why you should use our product
A thought leadership piece by your CEO
that’s basically an advertisement

14. This kind of content is just plain lazy and ill-informed.
The goal is to write stuff people want to read and share – not hit people
over the head with your company’s product.

15. So how do you figure out how out what to write?

16. Come up with a Content Hypothesis
Before You Write Anything

17. Just like you wouldn’t build a feature without doing customer research
first, you shouldn’t write anything without doing audience research first.

18. e
Places to do Audience Research
• Quora (top questions)
Caveat, beware of tunnel vision
• Market Research
What else is already out there? See what
competitors or others in your space are
doing. Can you do it better or put a unique
spin on it?
• Google Trends
See what’s hot right now and think about
how you can capitalize on a trend (more on
this later)
• Is this useful and does it solve a pain
point?
See concept of Utility by Jay Baer
• Poll Your Target Audience
(meetups, in-person interviews, etc. Steve
Blank’s concept of “getting out of the
building”)
• What do you want to be the expert on?
Those are the areas you need to build
credibility in

19. Fill in the blank
This post will help learn how to _____________
and should result in ____________ page views.

20. Example: This post will help data scientists learn how
to approach data privacy and should result in 2,000
page views in the first week.

21. Results: 1,820 view in one week
(not bad, but below expectations)

22. Know how to Prioritize Your
Content Calendar

23. e
Important Things to Consider
• Is this timely?
What’s coming up that we could tie this
topic into?
• Hypothesized traffic
Based on audience pain / utility and
influencers who can cross promote
• T-shirt size the content
x-small (a day), small (couple of days),
medium (week), large (several weeks), XL
(month or more)
• Your overall editorial Calendar
What other pieces of content are coming up?
• Focus on Quality over Quantity
(and remember that the opposite of quality is
not “quantity,” it’s “shit” -- iterate on your
content as you learn more about your
audience and you can increase how often
you’re publishing once you have a strategy
that works.)
• STOP WRITING BLOG POSTS BECAUSE
IT’S “NATIONAL BRING YOUR UNCLE’S
DOG TO WORK DAY”

24. Now You’ve Decided What to Write.
Let’s Cover the How

25. e
The Basics
• Write a ton headlines for each post
(Upworthy suggests 25). Find the one
that would make you stop looking at
pictures of your ex in newsfeed and
read an article instead.
• DON’T GET IN THE WAY OF THE
CONTENT. Don’t make this about you.
People probably don’t care.
• Synthesize expert opinions and
technical information for a lay audience
so it’s more broadly accessible.
• Decide on the format: Listicle, interview,
top 10, X, Y, and Z (matter of preference)
• Have a style guide and follow it. You
won't waste time trying to figure out
how to word something.
• Finish strong. Have a conclusion and
helpful (and logical) CTA.

26. Don’t Expect Readers to
Come to You

27. “If I write it, they will come”
“It’ll go viral.”
“People will care.”
“I’ll get my friend with 1,000 followers to tweet it
and it will bring us traffic!”

28. Expectation…

29. Reality…

30. e
Distribution Tips and Tactics
• SEO
• Mailing Lists / Newsletters
• Twitter chats
• Forums and niche sites
(r/datascience, r/machinelearning, datatau,
hacker news, mattermark daily, etc.)
• Reporters/press
only if it’s helpful to them in some way
• Influencers
(friends who will promote and influencers /
companies mentioned in article)
• Friends, family, and co-worker shares
• Other companies, orgs, foundations,
etc. involved in the topic
(e.g. like our data science post from earlier to
Dato)
• Repurpose for other channels
(SlideShare, YouTube, etc.)

31. e
Various Tips and Tricks
• Always think about trends. Capitalize
on what people are already talking
about.
• Being a beginner in a topic can be an
asset. Use your learnings to create
great content.
• Put your journalist hat on. Talk to
experts and turn their knowledge into
something interesting for a broad
audience.
• Talk to people who interact with your
customers every day. What do they care
about? What do they want to learn how
to do? What content would help them
achieve their goals?

32. Audience Assignment
(15 minutes)

33. e
Audience Assignment
• Come up with 3 headlines or concepts. Is there any way to make it timely or tie it
into a trend?
• Who cares about it and why?
• Write a short (2 or 3 sentence) description of the content
• Describe what resources you need
(expert interview, doing your own research, going to a conference, etc.)
• Where will you promote it? (other than just twitter/FB)
• How can you easily put it in a different format to get more mileage from the
content?

34. Question Time

35. Thank you!
A writeup of this panel and all slides are available at
galvanize.com/blog. Give us some pageviews!