Chelsea Blacker is the co-founder and managing director of Blueglass, a content marketing agency, and gave a useful talk on content marketing. She spread her and her agency’s way in how they create and outreach content marketing pieces and gave an insight into how to measure the results too!
She breaks down the process of content marketing into three areas:
1. The SEO work and planning and execution of the content
2. The outreach and digital PR of the piece
3. The measurement of the results and delivering this back to the clients.
Check out Chelsea’s full slide deck.
SEO and execution of piece of content
1/ Understand the marketplace – who’s winning and why?
Content marketing for the web by Christina
2/ Find out what keywords people are searching for
Answer the public is a great tool to use for this and great to present to clients
3/ Make sure you’re targeting the right keywords – the ones that drive £
Only use ‘cheap’ etc. if it is completely relevant
4/ Target personas with content at every step of the journey
Classic purchase funnel: awareness, consideration, conversion
5/ Answer your customer’s pain-points and challenges
What are the pain-points and how to we create content that matches that? I.e. sell mortgages – for a younger demographic we create sexy, mobile-friendly content, not an ebook
6/ Create content to make you stand out from the crowd
Data is what ends up driving press and digital coverage – use resources such as: survey monkey, yougov & Google analytics.
7/ Do you have the best content on the internet for a given search?
Get the basics sorted onsite first before doing off-page campaigns. Check out airbnb neighbourhoods for an example of some really good content/a content hub!
8/ Remember to keep customer’s emotions front of mind – if you think content is about YOU, you’re missing the point
Get people excited in some way about your content by understanding
Digital PR and outreach
- Create content with a data-driven hub
- Focus on specific niche industry sites as well as the national big names
- Push the boundaries with creative content
How to measure content marketing results
Before trying to measure the results of a piece of content it is important to understand and ask the following two questions:
1. What stage are you at with the piece of content?
2. What is the intention of the content?
You can create pieces of content to target an audience at different stages of the consumer experience. Chelsea spoke about two of these in a bit more detail:
- Early stage: where content is created to generate brand awareness so the success of the content will not be measured by conversion metrics for example, but backlinks to the site or an increase in branded search.
- Consideration: this would be content aimed at people who are already interested in your products or website. In order to track success from these types of content marketing pieces call tracking is crucial! This type of content can include white papers or case studies which are good content ideas for people who are already interested in your products or services and is likely to lead to a conversion.
Three takeaways
- Ensure your content matches business goals
- Make sure you’re setting yourself up fairly so you have the right metrics for the campaign
- Make your content so good that people can’t ignore it – creative and authoritative
