Danny Blackburn is from Stickyeyes.
Today he is talking about content, and how to engage and drive traffic through content.
Content is pretty fundamental. If you ask Google, it’ll tell you that content is key, he says.
What does high quality content look like?
Danny speaks about someone who had asked ‘what is content’ in his Linkedin feed, and there was such a different range of answers. He googled it. He said it’s something that doesn’t ‘directly sell something’. But what about content on-page, this counts as well right?
Everyone has a different understanding on content, and this gets messy. This all comes at a time when consumers are more dynamic than ever. People quite rightly expect to brands to be able to join up this experience.
Brands have got to start becoming as dynamic as their customers are
What do people want and need from you?
You have got to start spotting patterns in what people want, and create content around that. How do we do that?
We start with insight.
- Brand
- Audience
- Performance
We need to understand your brand, the audience and how these interact. Finally, understanding performance insights; how the brand performs holistically. These insights begin to form a strategy for content.
Content doesn’t work unless it’s consumed
Content distribution and content discovery are the only two ways you can do this. This is passive and active. What works for one is unlikely to work for another. As an example of this, he mentions a video on Twitter that was advertising life insurance whilst he watching football. Apparently, weeks ago he had been actively searching online for life insurance, so the content was being consumed by him passively that he had previously actively searched for. This highlights how content should be very different for content discovery and content distribution.
This give us this axis, which looks like this:
This gives us four types of complete indirect content. Functional, informational, engaging and advertising content.
Where’s the proof?
Informational content.
Danny explains his work with GHD, whereby they optimised the CRO aspects of the GHD site to include a rich pool of informational content.
Engaging content.
They came up with ‘The Ultimate US Roadtrip tool for Hertz, creating something valuable and engaging for the auidnece, gaining high authority backlinks.
Final points
These four different areas are fundamental in creating content, he claims and leaves us with the framework for holistic content.
There is a full e-book on this available on the Stickyeyes site on this, he mentions.
