Saturday, 30 June 2018

Weekend Favs June 30

Weekend Favs June 30 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

  • Parse.ly – Parse.ly aims to provide clear audience insights to the web’s best publishers through an intuitive analytics platform.
  • Grow By Facebook – Grow by Facebook’s ambition is to help business leaders keep ahead by creating and curating insightful content and experiences.
  • Javelin – All-in-one lean startup and customer development software.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape



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Friday, 29 June 2018

The Difference Between Wide and Deep Content Explained

Content marketing has become a vital component of online marketing, and there are several things to consider while producing content:

  • What is the conversion-goal related to the particular piece of content?
  • Who is your target audience?
  • What type of topic will push readers to your call-to-action?
  • What content format will be well received?
  • Should you create wide or deep content?

That last point is one that many overlook when planning their content strategy. Let’s first briefly explain what each one is.

Wide Content: This type of content will usually touch on a broad topic, something similar to this article on how to create influencer marketing relationships, which features a lot of tips related to establishing mutually beneficial influencer relationships. It is a piece of content that has the potential to appeal to a very wide range of readers.

Deep Content: When content focuses on one subject and gets very specific about the details of that topic it’s referred to as deep content. An example would be this article on what happens after a DUI arrest in Los Angeles. It is very detailed and focused on a single topic, thus appealing to a much smaller audience.

There are benefits of both wide and deep content. Let’s break those down now so you understand how each can benefit your content marketing strategy.

Benefits of Wide Content

Much easier to create content (or outsource): Since the topics are of a much broader nature, less research is typically needed. You can produce wide content at a faster rate in-house, and for those who outsource, it's much easier to find writers who can create adequate pieces of wide content.

Unlimited topic availability: There are virtually unlimited topic options for every niche and industry, giving you the ability to always publish fresh topics and give your readers a wide variety of topic choices to consume.

Appeals to a very large audience: Wide content allows you to cast a very large net and pull in readers that have a wide variety of interests and objectives. While not everyone will necessarily be interested in what your business offers, it's a great way to get more eyes on your brand.

Benefits of Deep Content

Builds authority: When you create very detailed pieces of content around a specific topic it can become an authoritative content asset that other websites link to when referencing said topic. This is a great way to earn links, which can drastically improve your SEO. This is a great example of how content marketing is designed to work.

Attracts high-quality targeted traffic: Deep content is very topic-specific, so the content titles and article bodies will typically feature several search terms and phrases that will trigger it to show up in Google's organic search results when someone makes a search query related to the content. When you start to publish a large volume of content you can see your traffic number snowball, even if each piece of content is just attracting a handful of visitors month-after-month.

Converts more website traffic into customers and buyers: Since deep content topics are very specific, traffic that hits your website via organic search is going to be highly targeted. Conversion rates are always much higher when you have targeted traffic, rather than broad traffic that wasn't actively seeking what it is that you offer. Deep content should have a very specific call-to-action built in, as these readers have a high probability of converting.

Final Thoughts

While both formats of content serve a different role, most businesses will find that they need a mix of both deep and wide content to satisfy their content needs. Over time, you will need to dive deep into your analytics and conversion data to see what pieces of content your readers respond the best to and adjust your content marketing accordingly. Content marketing isn’t any different from other forms of online marketing – constant testing and optimization will be required to be successful.

Want more? Download The 7½ Deadly Sins of Content Marketing (And How to Avoid Them).

Deadly Sins of Content Marketing ebook



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Digital Marketing News: Facebook’s Subscription Groups & Brand Collabs Manager, New URL Tools at Google, & Employee Advocacy Study

Facebook Brand Collabs Manager, Image by Facebook

Facebook tests ‘subscription Groups’ that charge for exclusive content
Facebook has begun testing subscription-based Groups among a select array of users, which now allow Group managers to charge monthly for exclusive content, and which will open up new possibilities to digital marketers when rolled out to all users. TechCrunch

Google Search Console URL Inspector Tool Is Still Rolling Out
Google has added several features to its beta Search Console that offer greater insight into indexed URLs, including new more detailed crawl, index, and page-serving information, the Internet giant announced this week. SEO Roundtable

Report: Employee advocacy trumps influencer marketing
Employee advocacy has gotten recommendations that are seen as more trustworthy than those of traditional influencers, while the accurate measurement of return-on-investment (ROI) remains a top challenge for social media marketers, according to interesting recent Sprout Social report data. PR Daily

Advertisers will soon have AdWords tools to test & measure creative elements of YouTube video ads
YouTube advertisers will gain a slew of new testing and measurement utilities in Google AdWords (now known simply as Google Ads), when Google rolls out its Video Experiments, Video Creative Analytics, YouTube Director Mix, and Video Ad Sequencing tools, all currently in beta testing but now being made available to an expanded group of digital marketers. Marketing Land

Influencer Marketing Is Going Mainstream With Facebook’s Upcoming Tool, Brand Collabs Manager
With Facebook Brand Collabs Manager, the social media juggernaut has gone all-in with the increasingly important influencer marketing aspect of digital advertising, providing a slate of tools to easily match audience demographics with suitable influencers. AdWeek

Report: Marketing leaders aren’t keeping up with the speed of data
Leveraging customer data and employee empowerment are sizable challenges among marketing leaders, according to new survey data from Forbes Insights and Treasure Data, with just one in four companies reporting that they can adequately leverage their available data. MarTech Today

June 29, 2018 Sprout Social Statistic Image

Facebook opens up Watch to creators & adds video features to take on YouTube
With new additions to Facebook Watch, the world’s biggest social media service goes head-to-head with YouTube, expanding video options to include Facebook Pages, and the ability to monetize videos with an updated Ad Breaks component. Marketing Land

Performance Card In Google My Business
Google has given companies with a My Business account new ways to measure engagement and reach, with its recently-released Performance Cards for Google Maps feature — a move that offers digital marketers expanded analytics capabilities. Search Engine Roundtable

Facebook now running autoplay video ads in Messenger
Facebook has added auto-play inbox video ads to Messenger, which can be hidden but not entirely turned off, offering digital marketers a greater reach potential, the company announced recently. AdAge

Snapchat experiments with sharing ad revenue with creators
Snapchat’s new ad revenue-sharing program has given Snap digital creators a potential monetary boost similar to the benefits offered by YouTube, the platform announced recently. DigiDay

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

Marketoonist Social Media Policy Cartoon

A lighthearted look at social media policy, by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist

NES Classic Edition makes its long-awaited return to retail on June 29 — Venture Beat

Google Earth’s new measuring tool is a fun toy for geography nerds — The Next Web

U.S. reclaims top spot for world’s fastest supercomputer — Venture Beat

TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:

  • Lee Odden — How can you leverage data to transform social strategy? TopRank CEO Lee Odden spoke with Rival IQ’s Seth Bridges on The Data-Driven Marketer — Rival IQ
  • Lee Odden — Are your influencers buying their followers? — Onalytica (client)
  • Lee Odden — Influencers and Media Partners: How to amplify the reach of content — SEMrush
  • Lee Odden — 18 Expert Tips for Running Your First Influencer Marketing Campaign — Databox
  • Lee Odden — Internet Marketing Influencers with the Widest Social Reach [INFOGRAPHIC] — TechWyse

What are your most important content marketing news stories this week?

Thanks for joining us, and please return next week for another array of the latest digital marketing news, and in the meantime you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news. Also, don’t miss the full video summary on our TopRank Marketing TV YouTube Channel.


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Thursday, 28 June 2018

A Guide to Content Strategy and Brand Storytelling

A Guide to Content Strategy and Brand Storytelling written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Kyle Gray
Podcast Transcript

Kyle Gray

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Kyle Gray, founder of The Story Engine. He and I discuss insights from his book, The Story Engine: A Busy Entrepreneur’s Guide to Content Strategy and Brand Storytelling Without Spending All Day Writing.

Gray has helped dozens of startups and small businesses succeed in content marketing. He writes content that educates entrepreneurs on how to grow their businesses with content marketing, manage remote teams and scale up their businesses.

Gray got his start as the content manager for WP Curve and helped grow the blog from a single contributor to a multi-person team of guest writers with documented systems and strategies. He helped the startup grow to nearly 1 million in annual recurring revenue.

Questions I ask Kyle Gray:

  • How has your personal story influenced your approach to storytelling?
  • How important is visual storytelling?
  • What role does your audience play in your story?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

  • Why storytelling is a central part of marketing today
  • What people misunderstand about storytelling
  • How to do storytelling well

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Kyle Gray:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!



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Wednesday, 27 June 2018

Keys to Business Growth for Professional Services

Keys to Business Growth for Professional Services written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Sure, people in professional services need to be good at what they do, but their audience hopes that’s a given. Sometimes even the best of the best have a hard time growing their business because they are so focused on the services they provide, they just don’t dedicate time to the growth of their company (or simply don’t know where to start to do that).

Whether you’re in accounting, law, tech consulting, or provide and other professional service, the advice below still applies if you want to separate yourself from the competition and grow your business.

Common traits I hear from my professional service-based clients include:

  • Business to-date is primarily from referrals and word of mouth
  • They’re successful to an extent but could be more successful with the right strategy in place
  • Scaling is intimidating and it’s unclear how to do it effectively

To take control of your growth efforts, take some of my advice below.

Identify your ideal client

This notion goes above and beyond simply identifying and understanding your target audience. While that’s important, it’s equally important to understand the types of clients you want to work with. This will make both your life and your client’s life easier. Ask yourself the following:

  • Who needs the services you provide?
  • Who can you deliver the greatest value to?
  • Who do you enjoy working with?

Think about your best clients today and what makes them ideal for you so that you can apply it to attracting new clients moving forward. Take the following into consideration when developing these ideal clients:

  • What are the must-haves to be a client (this will help you narrow down your list)?
  • What attributes are you looking for in a client (not required, but preferred)?
  • What makes them ideal?
  • What behaviors signal that they are the right fit for you?

Once you can answer these questions, put the list together and keep it nearby to help qualify prospects moving forward. This will help to ensure you don’t waste time spinning your wheels on the wrong candidates.

Develop a promise

Once you have your ideal client in mind, it’s important that you create a clear promise for them that can help you articulate you understand their wants and needs and that you are the right business to help them.

What’s tough about professional services is that they’re intangible, which is what makes your promise (and that you live up to your promise) so important. The promise needs to reinforce that you can help them reach their goals.

In addition to your promise, make your distinct point of view and point of differentiation from your competitors clear. This will help to separate you from the rest of the crowd.

I have a friend that owns an SEO firm and he basically says, “All you need to know about SEO is that we make the phone ring.” He doesn’t dive into how his business works, or SEO jargon, he gets to the root of what his clients care about and how he’ll help to get them what they want. See how that works?

Focus on problems, not solutions

What I’m essentially saying here, is focus on what your ideal clients are experiencing, not your services. People don’t really care about what you sell. All they care about are that their problems are solved and that you can help them solve them.

How to figure out your client’s problems

It’s important that you solve these problems early on in the customer journey. You need to get very good at understanding your ideal client’s intent because that’s where the data is that you’re looking for. To do this:

  • Master keyword research
  • Use online tools (like Answer the Public)
  • Look at your reviews
  • Read past emails
  • Ask your team who interacts with your clients what problems they’ve picked up on through conversations

You can even reach out to current clients to get the information you’re looking for. Here’s a list of questions that may be useful to ask them:

  • What are their goals and dreams?
  • How do they gather information to solve their problems?
  • What are some things that are important to them?
  • Do you know what the biggest unmet need is in your marketplace?
  • What is the biggest pain point your customer experiences?
  • How hard have you worked to try to solve their problems in the past?
  • Why is the problem so hard for them to solve?
  • Who else is trying to solve the problem and how are they approaching it?
  • What does success look like to them?
  • What might hold them back from buying a product or service?
  • How do they come to a purchase decision?

Solving the problem

Once you have all the information mentioned above, you can actually start to solve their problems.

  • Start by refocusing your messaging and match your message to your ideal client so that it resonates with them quickly.
  • Take some time and break down every solution you sell, every benefit you attribute to what you do, and map it back to a handful of “trigger phrases.”
  • Develop an attention-grabbing headline to put on your website (think back to your promise with this one).
  • Through content, show them that you are experts in the field that will help to make their pain points go away. Providing actionable advice can go a long way.
  • Be responsive to comments, emails, and social media in an effort to build trust and establish a connection.

Provide an excellent customer experience

So many people are focused on the changes in marketing and all the new things we have to master and pay attention to.

The fact is the most significant driver of change today isn’t the way marketing is changing, it’s the way buying is changing.

With clients now in charge of their buying journey, the most important marketing element still left in our control is the customer experience.

While they are in charge of their journey, it’s your job to influence it, and in my opinion, this starts with your website.

Your website today is the jumping in point of the customer journey. Its job is to lead and guide prospects into a journey of awareness, trust, knowledge, insight, and conversion. All your ideal client wants is is a frictionless path to the information or action they’ve gone there to find. Website design should be renamed customer experience design.

Additionally, when it comes to the customer experience, the most tenuous point of the relationship is the beginning. Once a person becomes a client, you must look at their first 90 days as a trial period where your entire goal is to construct the type of experience that can only turn them into a raving fan (and great referral source down the road!).

At the end of the day, businesses that deliver the best customer experience do so because they care about helping the people they serve.

There are many other important factors that lead to a successful business, but nailing the points mentioned above is a great start. What have you found to be helpful in growing your business?



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Transcript of A Guide to Content Strategy and Brand Storytelling

Transcript of A Guide to Content Strategy and Brand Storytelling written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jansen. My guest today is Kyle Gray. He is the founder of The Story Engine. That’s thestoryengine.co. He’s also the author of the book by the same name, The Story Engine, an entrepreneur’s guide to content strategy and brand story telling without spending all day writing and it just came out in audio book. And so, Kyle, thanks for joining us.

Kyle Gray: Thank you so much for having me, John. I’m really excited to be here.

John Jantsch: So, we have been, I have been personally at least and I know other marketers have been talking about story as a way to connect. I will tell you a little anecdote. I remember telling business owners that 20 years ago and having them kind of bristle at that idea. Nobody wants to hear my story. They just want to know what our product does and it’s funny how it’s kind of become a central part of marketing today, hasn’t it?

Kyle Gray: Definitely. Yeah, if you were 20 years ago. I still think it’s as essential as it’s always been. It’s nothing new. It’s the most ancient form of communication. It’s how we are wired to understand the world around us, how we relate to other people and how we build trust really, so yeah. Some people might have said you were ahead of your time, but I think that this is the most ancient and practical of tool sets for anyone. Whether you’re growing a business or whether you’re just trying to relate to anybody you’re working with, friends, and family.

John Jantsch: Yeah and it’s funny though because I think there definitely were people that were doing it and they were doing it well, but it was still sort of seen as a fringe thing. Business was business and especially if you were trying to bring in a personal story and in fact, you and I were talking kind of off the air before we got started. Not only have you been doing this and teaching people this, but you’ve really found it as a way to express your personal story. Do you want to share that?

Kyle Gray: Absolutely, so one of the things I want to say right out the bat and maybe to a point of what you were saying is I think a lot of people have this impression of story telling as kind of this “woo woo” kind of thing and don’t see it as a practical or powerful tool and it’s really just the opposite. What I love about story telling is it’s the fastest way, if done well, to really create a connection with your audience, to create a human connection. There’s a big shortage out there of trust and of respect out there. Everybody can claim to be whatever they want online and through your story and being able to create something through who you are, why you’re doing it, and how you do it differently than anyone else can be one of the best ways to really connect with people who are ready to buy your product and need your help. And so, I’ll explain how I came across this myself.

It wasn’t just a couple years back where I discovered I had an auto immune disease called Hashimoto’s and for me, that’s a thyroid disease and what that meant is I would be fatigued a lot during the day. I would find myself in these kind of like negative mental loops over and over again and no matter how many Tony Robin’s books I read, I couldn’t get out of these negative mind states and also, I love being outdoors. I’m a big rock climber. I love to ski. I love to hike in the mountains and a couple years back, I couldn’t hike more than a quarter mile without serious knee pain just taking me down and this wasn’t quite the basic just getting older kind of stuff. And so, I started doing a lot of research on how to figure this out for myself and meanwhile, I was trying to do my best work I could.

I was working for a start up called WP Curve, helping them grow to about seven figures in annual recurring revenue through content marketing, through telling their story and just creating useful, helpful content on their website, which was their main and pretty much only engine for growth, but I was still kind of in a dark part of my own story trying to figure out all this health and I was reading all the books. What is this disease? How do people feel when they have it? How do you manage it? What do you do? And I was starting to study a lot and also, working on building out my skills for my business.

Until a twist of fate actually found me at a lunch table across the person and she introduced herself, “Hey, my name is Dr. Grace. I overcome auto immune diseases through the gut.” And when she said this, my eyes widened and like parts of my story telling and copyrighting and marketing brain all of a sudden were starting to connect with all these things with health and I was like, “Oh, really? So your patients must feel like this, experience that. They feel like they have this problem, but it’s really that.” And then, her eyes started getting as wide as mine. She’s like, “You need to come work for me. We need to work together.” And so, we worked out a deal where I would do copyrighting and help her share her story online and sell more of her products to reach more of her patients in exchange for her walking me through this Hashimoto’s protocol.

And so, within a few months, I had never felt better. I had never felt stronger in my life. She worked a lot with probiotics and nutritional health, as well as to kind of restore my health via my gut and a lot of these kind of negative mindset things. The stress I would feel when I woke up in the morning, which for a long time, I was telling myself a story of like, “Oh well, you’re just not a very good entrepreneur. You’re not going to make it.” That’s why I thought I was stressed in the morning, but it turns out that my biology wasn’t quite right. And so, once I figured that out, I could change my own story and see the world a little bit differently. And so, she gave me that power to really change my life and also, through that process and through having and struggling with this sickness for a long time.

I immediately understood her value and so, I still work with different start ups and entrepreneurs and high end coaches, but I find that I make the best impact around health and wellness coaches and doctors who are working a little bit outside of kind of the normal fields of medicine. And so, that’s kind of how I discovered my own unique value through my own journey and through that I came up with just a process that I think makes marketing really scalable, really powerful, and really simple for everyone.

John Jantsch: Yeah, so that story and imagine the health and wellness practitioner or coach. Obviously that story is not only a key part about who you are, but it also helps, I believe at least, it helps illustrate the value that you would bring to them. And so, that kind of shows you the power of what was a personal struggle for you, but then turned into really a value driver for them.

Kyle Gray: Exactly right and so, what that really means is it combined a couple of different elements that your audience, your listeners can use, so there’s three different elements that happened within that story that we can break down. One is I communicated that I was ordinary. I was somebody that like many people, I had a problem and I was suffering from it. I didn’t know what to do, but it also communicated that you’re extraordinary, that you’re different, that you are an authority for a reason and not only am I a marketer, but I’ve gone down this journey of health and I know that their specific value very precisely because I’ve experienced it. So I can tell their story better than the average Joe funnel builder out there and then, it showed my reason why because I have suffered from this.

I have seen this and I’ve had a couple of friends who have suffered from similar issues, where I’m seeing a lot of health problems crop up these days that aren’t necessarily very obvious and straight forward, but it’s a bunch of disparate problems and I really care about solving these things because I think I’ve seen the pain and distraction and value that it can reduce from my own life personally and I want to help other people get these solutions faster and easier because I’ve seen what it’s like when you don’t know where to go next and you’re just stuck being frustrated, trying to look through blog post after blog post. A lot of which are misleading or just heightened marketing trying to prey on desperate people who want to fix themselves.

John Jantsch: So one of the things that I think people struggle with a little bit is that in some ways that’s your core story in a big sense, but a lot of business owners. Maybe they have that core story of why they do what they do, but they need what I would call the little stories too that sort of help connect and make points and simplify things and build trust, so how do you go about kind of combining those two things? Because not everybody has personal tragedy or some big aha moment that becomes their story, so how do you develop a story that is going to serve your why as you said, but then realize that there’s power in stories on helping people understand your products and services as well?

Kyle Gray: Absolutely and you don’t need to have a story of personal tragedy. It can be a story that’s as simple as hanging out with your father when you were a kid and maybe a funny thing happened. That can be equally, as powerful if they’re applied in the right way. And so, what you really want to understand when figuring out your story is actually you’ve got to think about your audience first. You’ve got to imagine them as the hero in the story because even if you’re telling your own story, your listeners are going to experience it through your shoes, so you want to guide them down a path that is the path that they need to hear to solve their problem. So a lot of people when doing kind of audience research, customer research, they’re going to come up with like core demographic things like they live in San Diego, California. They make $80,000 a year. They have one kid and two dogs and they read these magazines, which are great. That all makes sense and that’s all very necessary, but most of us just feel like, “Okay. Good. We’ve got our demographics down.”

And stop there, but what a lot of people miss is where are they in the buyers journey or what mindset are they in. For example, if we call it back to my own journey, there was a time where I didn’t know anything about my health. And so, I was like, “I’m fine. I’m good. I can eat whatever food I want. I can do whatever I need because I’m okay.” But really, I was suffering, but I didn’t realize it. So is your audience in that state or are they in the state where a few years later where I was like, “I’ve tried everything. I’ve sunk thousands and thousands of dollars into different people and I feel like I’ve gotten ripped off every time. How can I trust one more person?”

Which is a very different level of knowledge, which I need to hear a very different message than to the person who maybe I am right now. Where I say, “Okay. Well, I’m well sophisticated and educated in this kind of stuff and I know what I’m looking for and I know the language. And so, I can shop a little bit better.” So you need to understand where your audience is at each of those points and create messages and stories that will specifically relate to those. And so, I’m a big fan. I’ve developed an infographic on my site that I call The Crossroads Method, which actually takes the buyers journey and aligns it with the hero’s journey. Kind of a classic story telling framework, so it takes every little section of the hero’s journey and then, aligns it with a key question that your buyer is asking and needs to be answered. That’s something that can help you come up with those little micro stories to string together and always have just the right story for every kind of mindset or state of being that your audience or potential customers are in.

John Jantsch: So I know you mentioned infographic and I see more and more great examples of people using visual story telling or at least visual branding around stories. How important do you think that aspect is when it comes to trying to make a point?

Kyle Gray: I think it’s crucial. A lot of what I’ve done, I’ve been a writer for a long time, but a lot of the content on my site, I’ve always striven to have. I just have a laptop, but I have a rule when we’re publishing where I want to be scrolling and I never want to see just text in the column. I always want to see visual support because it just helps you process things so much faster. I know it’s a cliché, but a picture really is worth a thousand words if you position it right. It can add subtle emotions.

They can usually explain a concept a lot better and they just break up, whether you’re using a lot of text or whether you’re on social media or whether you’re using video, I just think visual content can help drive your point home a lot faster and it can drive it home on a different level, then just written content. It processes differently and activates more areas of the brain. And so, I think visual content, whether you’re a writer, whether you’re a podcaster, and especially I mean, obviously if you’re doing video, you need to incorporate good visuals to tell your story.

John Jantsch: Yeah and I think it’s a challenge because a lot of times people will listen to something like this or they’ll read an article and everybody is saying, “Oh, no. Visual, visual. Everybody just scans. Nobody reads.” And I think you can get caught in the trap of believing that, but I think that you also need to appreciate that a lot of what people scan is because they won’t give you the time until they trust you or they don’t think, “Oh, this is going to be valuable for me to sit down and read these 3,000 words.”

But I think you need both because once you do build that trust, you can go so much deeper and you can put so much more emotion into a book. I mean, I love reading a great 500 page book, but I won’t commit that kind of time unless I really like the author or I really like the book and I think that that’s true about a lot of the writing that we do on the web today. I think a lot of people underestimate that people will still read, if you give them a reason to trust you and give them a great experience when they do read.

Kyle Gray: Absolutely. I think that’s enough. Your visuals, like you were just saying to your point, buy the trust. Especially when you’re thinking of the featured image for your article, if you’ve written an article. That what’s going to be shared on social media and across a lot of places and it will usually be the first thing they see at the top of the page or looking through your archives, so that needs to be compelling and emotive and bring them in or capture their attention enough so that they do trust your text because yeah. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, but it’s also true. I think when you do have their trust, when you do have their attention and a captive audience that they will read your content and I think the trends I’m seeing for written content are actually go longer and more detailed and more powerful. That’s what Google is looking for and Google is just trying to be as human as possible. They’re just trying to give people what they really want, so whatever they’re doing, they’re just trying to create better human experiences, so that’s what people want.

John Jantsch: Well, I know in analyzing my content, which there are lots of tools to do this now, that by far and away I mean, like not even close. My most shared content is typically over 3,000 words.

Kyle Gray: Absolutely, easily. Yeah. Yeah. I think these days, your post has to be at least 2,000 words and maybe I’m just in habit from doing it for so long, but I just feel like I can’t even get out a proper thought in less than that amount. At least as far as like a good blog post of course, if we’re trying to do a sales page. It depends on the different purposes of your content. For example, if you want like a lead magnet, something that’s really short, something that you’re communicating high value. You want to give them a quick whim. I think a lead magnet is not an 80 page ebook of one hour webinar or anything like that. It’s a nice one page pdf that’s laser focused on a problem and then, again, you get them that quick whim, you build up that trust, and they’re going to be more willing to listen to your full interviews or read your full articles.

John Jantsch: So Kyle, where can people find out more about you and The Story Engine?

Kyle Gray: You can check out all of my content, what I’m up to at thestoryengine.co. We’ve got a lot of great stuff. I’ll make sure to share the link to the cross roads infographic I mentioned on this page. You can also check out my book on Amazon. It’s available in Kindle paperback and brand new on audio book and I narrate it myself, so if you enjoy my radio voice here, you’ll enjoy that there, but yeah. I’ve got lots of different articles on story telling and yeah. I’m excited to see and hear from anybody who is interested there.

John Jantsch: Yeah and of course, we’ll have the links in the show notes at Duct Tape Marketing, as well, so Kyle, thanks for joining us and hopefully we’ll see you out there on the road.

Kyle Gray: Thanks, John.



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CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved

In her introduction to The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Content Marketing, Content Marketing Institute’s Cathy McPhillips draws several commonalities between content marketing and video games: the interactivity, the trial-and-error learnings, the camradery.

But, while many marketers have their own personal “cheat codes” that help them gain an edge, there are no true hacks in content. Certain video games allow you to tap in a series of commands and gain invincibility, or jump ahead to the next level. Content marketers, however, cannot magically produce an audience or monetization out of thin air.

As the Content Director for Capterra, and also an avowed lover of gaming, J.P. Medved understands this reality. His company’s industry-specific blogs have grown to 1 million monthly readers, and it wasn’t because of any secret elixir.

Instead, Capterra’s success owes to a proven, adoptable strategy tethered to the fundamentals of organization, goals, promotion, and experimentation. Medved will explain this formula in-depth during his Content Marketing World session, Better Than Hacks and Schemes: A Proven Approach to Building Your Audience, and was also kind enough to share some insights with us ahead of the September event.    

Medved has a reputation for being sharply honest and entertaining, and those traits definitely came through during our interview with him. Keep reading to find his thoughts on silent content, scalability, documenting strategies, and content marketing lessons learned from his experience writing fiction.

 

What does your role as Content Marketing Director at Capterra entail? What are your main areas of focus and key priorities?

My day-to-day as a Content Director involves a lot of email and meetings, at this point. We’ve grown to a team of nine writers, six of whom I manage directly, so a lot of my time is devoted to supporting them. I join monthly topic planning meetings with all of them, as well as frequent check-ins with the editors and the marketing folks that support the content we produce. I also now spend a fair amount of time in our analytics and various content management systems just checking in and tracking things.

As we’ve grown—and I suspect this is common in most roles—I’ve transitioned away from being a content producer, to being a content manager. I no longer write content myself, and we centralized editing early last year so I no longer edit individual pieces either. Instead I spend more time coordinating long-term content plans and calendars with other teams in the business, managing content experiments or helping new projects get off the ground, and working with the folks on my team to help advance their career goals.

 

Why should content marketers beware of “hacks” and shortcuts when it comes to growing their audience and impact?

The content marketing world, and the digital marketing space more generally, loves the idea of the Cinderella story. That blog that hits everything just right and experiences exponential, “hockey stick” growth and also there’s a royal wedding involved somehow. But our experience, and that of the vast majority of successful content marketing operations I’m aware of, is actually a lot more boring.

Jimmy Daley of the great animalz.co blog calls it “silent content;” that company that has just been plugging away and producing and refining great content for years, and grown a consistent, large audience and strong search position.  

With Capterra’s content, we’ve grown to a million readers a month, writing in an ostensibly boring, B2B software space, and we never had a breakout “viral” hit, or flashy media coverage, or exponential traffic growth (it’s all been linear). We’ve just been working away at it since 2013, publishing consistently and getting a little bit better each month.

I think if you waste all your time and energy chasing new “hacks” and shortcuts sold to you by whatever case study is making the rounds on YouMoz that week, you never get really good at the fundamentals of content marketing; the block-and-tackle of creating and promoting really great, helpful—if unassuming—content. As a result your growth, though it may experience the occasional spike, will actually slow and it’ll take you more time to build a sustainable traffic base in the long-run.


If you waste all your time and energy chasing new “hacks” & shortcuts, you never get really good at the fundamentals of content marketing. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld
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What are the most pivotal roles in developing an effective and scalable content strategy?

Scalability is still something we struggle with, having grown the team 6X in the last four years. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is actually to bring on/promote other managers earlier than you think you need it. Assuming an average writer production schedule of two, 1,500 word articles a week, a full-time manager can effectively manage and edit 3-4 writers. If they’re not editing (you bring in a centralized editing team, or use a round-robin method, or delegate to senior writers), that number goes up to 6-7.  

But you should have someone in place to help you well before you hit that number, not only to give them time to ramp-up and learn management skills, but also to allow you to plan effectively for new hires and content coverage growth.


The biggest lesson content I’ve learned is actually to bring on/promote other managers earlier than you think you need it. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld
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Why is experimentation so critical in the content creation process?

Most of our content fails. Like, over 90% of it. And that’s not at all uncommon in the content marketing world. If everyone knew the exact ingredients to a “viral” content piece, that’s all anyone would produce. But we don’t know. Pieces I think will do really well, more-often-than-not sink without a trace, and pieces that seem like throwaways can take off because they’ve tapped into some pent-up need in the marketplace of ideas.

So we try to test a lot. 50% or more of our content is trying out new topics or channels or formats, and the other 50% is either updating successful past content, or scaling up a content type that our previous testing has discovered works.

I differ here from the current received-wisdom in the content marketing industry. Right now it’s hip to say content marketers need to produce fewer pieces of longer, higher quality content. But I actually argue you should produce a higher volume of content (at least early on) to discover what “hits” with your particular audience, so you can scale that later.

Brian Dean of Backlinko is often the poster-child of the “publish less, publish higher-quality” model, and I love his content and he’s obviously been very successful. But might he have been more successful publishing weekly instead of monthly? Could he have sacrificed a little bit of length to experiment with a broader range of topic ideas earlier on before scaling the ones that worked? I think it’s possible.


You should produce a higher volume of content (at least early on) to discover what “hits” with your particular audience, so you can scale that later. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld
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What are the most common mistakes you see individuals and companies make when developing and launching a blog?

The biggest one is not taking content marketing seriously. That manifests itself in two major tactical mistakes: not hiring someone to do content full-time, and trying to squeeze direct revenue out of content in the first year.

If no one’s doing content full-time, then content just becomes a side project for someone at your company who may-or-may-not get to it once they finish their “real work” for the day. We tried this model for years and never got any traction with our content until someone owned it full-time and could devote themselves to thinking about it strategically and producing content consistently.

And you should not try to monetize your content in the first year. It will distort your writing, even if you think you can guard against it, and result in lower-quality, less helpful, more salesy content. Focus on creating content that is genuinely helpful for your audience first, and you will build reader trust for any kind of monetization scheme you want to implement later down the road.


If no one’s doing content full-time, then content just becomes a side project for someone at your company who may-or-may-not get to it once they finish their real work for the day. @rizzleJPizzle #CMWorld
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Why is it important for businesses to have a documented content strategy, as opposed to an intangible framework?

I think people get intimidated when you say, “You need to have a documented content strategy” because they envision this 30-page document written in corporate buzzwords that will take a month to create. But we literally started with nothing more than a two-page Word doc with some bullet points listing our short and long-term goals/metrics, the type of content we wanted to create, and who was responsible for what aspects.

The benefits to us of even something that basic have been huge. Actually writing it down forced us to think through the specifics and showed us where the gaps in our plan were, having agreed-upon goals and timelines upfront made for easier team and executive buy-in, and it gave us something to refer back to when we had questions about whether a new content idea fit our overall goals.

 

What have you learned in your ‘side hustle’ as a fiction novelist that applies to your day job as a content marketer?

For writing fiction I spent a lot of time studying story structure, and plot architecture, and all the elements that make a story really “flow” and feel effortless to people reading it. What struck me is how many of the same principles apply to a content piece.

You want to start off with a strong “hook” that introduces an element of mystery and makes the reader want to know more, your “climax” needs to deliver a memorable experience or information, and the dénouement has to be satisfying. A novel that doesn’t tie up loose ends in the last few chapters is as unsatisfying as a blog post that doesn’t include a concrete next step or call to action in the last few paragraphs.

 

Which speaker presentations are you looking forward to most at Content Marketing World 2018?

I love video games, so I’m excited to hear Jane Weedon of Twitch give her talk. I’ve also always been fascinated by the science behind online behavior, so Brian Massey’s talk on Behavioral Science for Content Marketers is high on my list as well.

Find Your Path to Content Marketing Greatness

Consistency, experimentation, and getting better each month: They might not be the stuff of Cinderella stories, but in the real world these techniques work and Medved’s team serves as living proof.

He is one of many CMWorld speakers who contributed to The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Content Marketing, so as we look forward to seeing them on stage in Cleveland, make sure to soak in all their awesome advice by clicking through the slides below:


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Tuesday, 26 June 2018

Oracle Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Email Marketing Service Providers, Q2 2018

“Email Marketing: Old salt of your toolkit, and still the most cost-effective promotional channel.” So begins the preamble to this year’s Forrester Wave for Email Marketing Solutions, Q218. Other channels and buzzy topics tend to grab the headlines. The industry press seems to annually predict the death of email. Yet, email persists as the work horse of most digital marketing organizations. Why? Well, it’s the highest ROI channel for most organizations. It’s the preferred commercial channel for most consumers. And, email has been able to adapt to changing consumer tastes—becoming more mobile, more interactive, and more intelligent.

While Oracle has done a lot (more than any other vendor in our opinion) to provide marketing organizations with a true cross-channel marketing platform—we’ve never lost sight of where we came from, or how important email is to our customers. That’s why we are the only vendor who has earned the Leader designation in every Forrester Email Wave for the last thirteen years!

What does it take to lead a category for over 13 years?

Well, for one it takes focus. I trust that few readers have actually reviewed all seven Forrester Waves for Email Marketing since 2005. However, the few of us who have can tell you that one trait that is threaded consistently across all nine report is: volatility.  Email Marketing is a highly competitive space filled with optimistic venture-backed entrants, competitive technology powerhouses, and opportunistic private equity firms. A Leader one year can quickly lose ground to other vendors, if they take their eye off the ball. In fact, every vendor (or their acquired assets) on this year’s report has been a Leader at some point in the past, except Adobe and IBM.

Thankfully, we have been able to avoid these fluctuations by staying focused on unrivaled customer success and market leading technology.

Not Just Technology

From bringing the first Orchestration Canvas to market in 2009, to introducing email marketers to the first productized Multivariate Testing and Send Time Optimization capabilities in more recent years, Oracle takes pride in being an email technology innovator. However, our many collective years in the email space have taught us that excellent technology is simply not enough to guarantee customer success.

True expertise, proactive customer management, and roadmap guided by marketer needs vs. the latest buzzword feature, are just as, if not more, important than the core technology we provide. After all, marketers and their customers sit in the center of our universe, not the IT department. With this in mind, we thought it appropriate to wrap up with a quote from one of our customers that made it into this report, “The Oracle Platform is more robust [than competitors]. But its creative side is the key to its success.”

If you are a digital marketer looking for a consistent, strategic, and creative leader in Email or Cross Channel Marketing – let us know. We’d be happy to talk to you about all we have to offer.

Oh and also, read the report.



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